February 28, 2003
So There!
Ha! You thought I couldn’t finish it—don’t try to prevaricate, I know you doubted me. But I just dropped it in the email to my editor, so I have one fewer obligation hanging over my head. (A couple of overdue book reviews, an essay that's not due till, I don’t remember, December or something, and, ahem, three complete book manuscripts of which I’ve started two.)
Now, on to Rochester for the weekend. Got to remember to run my aggregator before I leave, so I can catch up on the web while we ride the train. . . .
The Full Sermon
The [London] Times Online has published the full text of Rowan Williams’s sermon from yesterday’s enthronement ceremony, of hwich I posted patches yesterday. I can’t sufficiently express my thanks that so thoughtful and articulate a theologian and preacher has accepted this call to serve the church.
More later, if I finish the hermeneutics article in time.
Tick. . . Tick. . . Tick. . . .
No, I haven’t finished the hermeneutics article. Yes, I have to finish it by late afternoon today. Yes, really, because I’m going to Rochester by train tonight to visit our son Nate at Eastman School of Music (for the daylight hours of Saturday and Sunday), where I’ll be getting together with Liz Lawley (we disreputable unrepentant academics have to support one another). Plus I’m saying morning mass, then meeting Kate Wallace to talk over our writing assignments for entering students next fall.
Oh, and “oulipo.”
February 27, 2003
ABC
I’m taking a blog break to reproduce some portions from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sermon this morning, a sermon that almost suggests that he’s been squandering precious archepiscopal moments reading the blogthread about spirituality and devotion that Tom, Kurt, Steve, Dave and I have been hashing out.
(Parenthetically, the first Disseminary online seminar will be on “Spirituality and Technology.” We’ve recruited Prof. Wes Avram of Yale Divinity School to conduct it for us. This’ll be a great opportunity to work on these issues, and Trevor and I will be receiving requests to participate from anyone who’s willing to read the assignments and take part in the seminar-blog.)
The Most Reverend Rowan Williams said:
Once we recognise God's great secret, that we are all made to be God's sons and daughters, we can't avoid the call to see one another differently.(Quoted from ic.Wales.co.uk)
No one can be written off; no group, no nation, no minority can just be a scapegoat to resolve our fears and uncertainties," he said.
And this is what unsettles our loyalties, conservative or liberal, right wing or left, national and international.
We have to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others, the ones whose company we don't greatly like, whom we didn't choose, because Jesus is drawing us together into his place, his company. . . .The Christian will engage with passion in the world of our society and politics - out of a real hunger and thirst to see God's image, the destiny of human beings to become God's sons and daughters come to light - and, it must be said, out of a real grief and fear of what the human future will be if this does not come to light.
The Church has to warn and to lament as well as comfort. . . .When Christians grieve or protest about war, about debt and poverty, about prejudice, about the humiliations of unemployment or the vacuous cruelty of sexual greed and unfaithfulness, about the abuse of children or the neglect of the helpless elderly, it is because of the fear we rightly feel when insult and violence blot out the divine image in our human relations, the reflection to one another of the promise of Jesus in one another.
And anything that begins to make us casual about this is one more contribution to obscuring the original image of God in us, another layer of dust and grime over the bright face of Christ. . . .
Does there come a point where we can't recognise the same Jesus, the same secret?
"The Anglican Church is often accused of having no way of answering this. I don't believe it.
"We read the same Bible and practise the same sacraments and say the same creeds," he said.
"But I do believe that we have the very best of reasons for hesitating to identify such a point too quickly or easily - because we believe in a Jesus who is truly Lord and God, not the prisoner of my current thoughts or experiences.
"And it is this that gives us the freedom and the obligation to challenge what our various cultures may say about humanity," he said.
If all we have to offer is a Jesus who makes sense to me and people like me, we have no saving truth to give. . . .
The most significant question I can ask myself in your presence about the work ahead is ‘What do I pray for in the Church of the future?’
Confidence, courage, an imagination set on fire by the vision of God the Holy Trinity, thankfulness.
The Church of the future, I believe, will do both its prophetic and its pastoral work effectively only if it is concerned first with gratitude and joy.
Orthodoxy flows from this, not the other way around, and we don't solve our deepest problems just by better discipline but by better discipleship, a fuller entry into the intimate joy of Jesus's life. . . .
About 12 years ago, I was visiting an Orthodox monastery, and was taken to see one of the smaller and older chapels," he said.
It was a place intensely full of the memory and reality of prayer.
The monk showing me around pulled the curtain from in front of the sanctuary, and inside was a plain altar and one simple picture of Jesus, darkened and rather undistinguished.
But for some reason at that moment it was as if the veil of the temple was torn in two: I saw as I had never seen the simple fact of Jesus at the heart of all our words and worship, behind the curtain of our anxieties and our theories, our struggles and our suspicion.
Simply there. Nothing anyone can do about it, there he is as he has promised to be till the world's end.
Nothing of value happens in the Church that does not start from seeing him simply there in our midst, suffering and transforming our human disaster.
February 26, 2003
Beep Beep Beep
I’m not just being introverted — though by now, I (like most other people on the Web, evidently) have been outed as an introvert — but I really am working on the hermeneutics article in the few waking minutes left to me tonight. The whole day today was swallowed up by a monster faculty meeting, so I only have tomorrow and a little bit of Friday to get the article done.
I’ not avoiding talking with, for instance, Kurt and Dave (Time’s Shadow) (in Kurt’s comments) about creeds. Just resisting until after I keep other promises.
Go to Manfred Klein’s place and check out this week’s type designs (I doubt I’ll use any of them, but LuziFer is intriguing). go to Nick Curtis’s place, where his new site design is up, and he’s offering two new typefaces, Bulwark and Tropicana. And Diane DiPiazza has offered Laura, a script typeface.
But really, go read Gary Turner. I really must emphaticize that point. If you don’t, I’ll be forced to ask you again. Really.
February 25, 2003
Light Perpetual
Last fall, I heard that a friend had been given only a short time left to live. I preached a sermon on that news and on what he means to me, what the unwelcome news of his extreme illness meant, and some of you responded generously and sympathetically.
Sunday afternoon, Don Juel — a scholar, a friend, but above all an ardent and entirely-committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth — relinquished mortal life. He was at home with his wife, and had spoken with his children recently on the phone.
Don and Lynda were true to us at a difficult point in our lives, when it was coming clear that we would not be able to stay in Princeton, that I was not going to be elevated to tenurable stature there. Don was a great teacher, particularly to our semi-foster daughter Jennifer. We cherish the memory of our Princeton friends’ sticking with us, and especially of Don’s unprepossessing candor about the whole business. It broke our hearts to leave Princeton, and leaving Don and Lynda made it that much harder.
We will pray for Don and for Lynda, and we ask that those of you who pray join us in giving thanks for all that Don meant to all the countless people whose lives he touched.
Rest eternal grant to him, O Lord;
And let light perpetual shine upon him.
Hmmmmm
Well, if I write about the war and religion, people follow up and challenge me, which is part of the point of blogging, but it interferes with finishing the hermeneutics essay.
Jonathon the more-than-full-witted yesterday (or two days ago, in Australia; I don’t understand how that works) asked me to explain how I interpret the story of Jesus’ encounter with the centurion (Luke 7:1-10, but also Matthew 8:5-13 and, in a different version, John 4:46-53). This is meat and drink to me, but I have to resist the temptation to write a miniature treatise on the subject.
I think Matthew (my personal favorite gospel, the one on which I’m slowly working up a book manuscript) construes the story mostly as an amazing healing story. It serves Matthew’s interests that the story concerns a Gentile soldier; one of Matthew’ characteristic emphases involves highlighting the way that Gentiles (who would think it?) are capable of faith that overshadows the faith of Matthew’ main rivals, the Pharisees. The Pharisees were remarkable for their piety and devotion to the Holy One of Israel; Matthew’s Jesus demands that his followers show even greater devotion, and Matthew illustrates this with the story of the centurion whose faith exceeds even what Jesus has encountered in Israel. The soldier’s identity as a Roman officer heightens the improbability of Jesus’ healing his slaveboy, but doesn’t register with Matthew (I think) as a commentary on the value of the man’s profession. If anything, Matthew tacitly supports the view that the man’s being a centurion was presumptively problematic for anyone who identified with Jesus. And although Jesus doesn’t condemn the man’s profession, the Matthean Jesus specifically commands non-violence, non-resistance to evildoers, and compliance with the demands that the hostile military make upon you, and he was crucified with the collaboration of Roman authorities and their military officers — so I suspect that Matthew’s version of Jesus would have had no room for participation in prosecuting a military campaign.
Luke is a different story, and I’m not as well-versed in Luken theology as in Matthean. Luke seems to present Gentile identity as more “normal” than Matthew does, and in his Gospel John the Baptist (mildly) instructs soldiers to forswear violent extortion, but not to hang up their swords. Luke also shows us Jesus advising his disciples to arm themselves (“Let anyone who doesn’t have a sword sell a cloak and buy one,” 22:36) and acknowledging that the two swords they bring out are enough (the interpretation of this very ellpitical expression is highly controverted, but one can quite plausibly construe this as Jesus’ approval of sword ownership). Still, with all that said, the Lukan Jesus is also an advocate of non-violence, still a victim of Roman injustice, still silent on anything like permission to use coercive violence (when the disciples try to fend off the arresting officers in Gethesemane, Jesus tells them to stop).
And the Johannine version of the story suggests that it’s possible to narrate the occasion as a miraculous healing without any explicit attention to the man’s military profession.
All that inclines me to think that Jesus’ example obliges us to extend the same loving, healing ministry to soldiers that we show to anyone else; Jesus shows no self-righteous stand-offishness relative to this man (quite the opposite of the way he treats the Gentile woman whose daughter needed healing). By the same token, though, Jesus’ ministry and teaching suggest no room for disciples to justify acts of military violence against others. Again, the dominant Christian position on this permits military violence under highly restrictive conditions (conditions that the Bush administration seems neither to understand nor even to wish to understand) — but that permission falls clearly under the category of “things it’s wrong to do, although we understand why you’re doing it, and we interpret this not as deliberate refractory self-indulgent blood lust, but as the actions of a disciple whose life is fundamentally non-violent, whose conscience obliges him or her to cooperate with the theologically-grounded wisdom of the head of state.” A soldier may be forgiven for participation in a “just” war, but that still leaves military service in the same category of as a heap of other transgressions — not as a positive good.
February 24, 2003
Keeping My Word
It’s cold, it’s late (for me), and now I owe the gang a few words on their thoughtful engagement with my response to Steve’s “devotion” blog.
To oversimplify to an extreme, I suppose my point was that devotion (as best I understand it) is always utterly particular, and has as part of its structure a dimension of accountability that didn’t seem obvious in what Steve said. A devotion without either an object-of-devotion or a community-that-shares-in-one’s-devotion just sounds fishy to me.
This does connect, honest it does, with Dave and Kurt’s conversation about Buddhism. I have no interest in dissuading people from Buddhist belief and practice; although I don’t believe it to be true in a final sense (or else I would be a Buddhist), I don’ imagine that I’m in a position to give a laundry list of reasons Christianity is superior to Buddhism. Mercy’s sake, I’m not even sure I think Christianity is superior. I just find it to be right. But the important element of this discussion for the purposes of illuminating Steve’s and my differences has to do with the extent to which non-practitioners of a Way are in a position to size up the strengths and weaknesses of that Way. I share some of Kurt and Dave’reservations about the cultural presence of Buddhism in the industrial West, and I share some of their admiration for specific teachings —but I’ made cautious by (for instance) the exercise of evaluating the extent to which Buddhism is “really” a religion or a philosophy. How much does that question matter to people whose lives are defined by the Buddha’s insight into the true nature of reality? Though both Kurt and Dave are courteous and careful, the risk of condescension certainly seems high; indeed, it sounds from what Kurt and Dave say that the author to whom both they advert (John Horgan, writing in Slate in an article I haven’t read) may have crossed the line into condescending dismissal. But here, my ignorance quotient is red-lining, so I’ll back away quietly and change direction back. . . .
Even more, my discomfort with Steve’s gentle, non-specific devotion involves dimensions on which Tom touches. I already touched on how that would be; Tom addresses the kinds of community life he associates with Catholic and Protestant Christianity. I won’t split the hairs about “catholic” and “protestant”; Tom’s undeniably onto something here, and that’s what I have to follow through.
Tom suggests that the very catholicity of Catholicism — its identity as a church for everyone (whether everyone likes it or not) — effects a significantly different kind of ethos from Protestant congregations which are informed (and deformed) by their historically antithetical origins. Tom pushes me to be more specific about how my usage of “community” plays out, when the term seems to function so differently in these two different versions of Christianity (and we could show more different varieties of “community” by looking at Orthodox and non-denominational, independent congregations).
The point I was aiming at involves the [different] ways that community life itself makes possible the individual’s devotion. So when Tom asks to what the devotion is oriented, I answer quite vigorously, “To God, as God has been revealed in and to the lives of a body of people big enough to damp out individual idiosyncrasies.” That may issue in some traditions as a direct inner experience of the inner flame — but I’d insist that that’s not because somehow Tradition A has discovered the One Spiritual High Road, whereas Tradition B is stuck in muddy ruts of misguided ritualism. Rather, in each case the community’s mediation makes possible a mode of devotion that bespeaks and, pardon the barbarism, be-hears the God toward whom the community shares its devotion.
And then, back round to Steve Himmer (who may by now wish he’d just never brought the topic up in the first place), my unease with the sort of devotion described in “Afternoon Vespers” derives from my uncertainty about what community is mediating, tempering, cultivating the sort of devotion Steve describes (and what its relation might be to an ordered religious community, something of an antithesis of unspecific devotion).
Steve Yost comes into the picture byciting Gary Snyder, whose take on Beat Religiosity strikes several interesting and relevant notes. Snyder, not surprisingly, commends the sort of path that he took, and notes drawbacks to other paths, but charitably observes that even a partial, haphazard beat “may get pretty far out, and that's probably better than moping around classrooms or writing books on Buddhism and Happiness for the masses, as the squares (who will shortly have succeeded in putting us all down) do.”
Now, my eyelids tremble, and I begin to grow in confidence that I’ve written more than the usual arrant nonsense, so I’ll call it a night.
Except to say, you gotta love David Weinberger.
February 23, 2003
On My List
Tom, Dave, Steve, and Kurt are on my to-blog list for tomorrow. And, of course, finishing up the hermeneutics article. Yeah, right.
Luther, [Just] War, and Preaching
An afterthought on Friday’s sermon: I spoke there not to beat up on soldiers, who may be nobly self-sacrificing, altruistic, and deeply patriotic individuals. It’s pivotal, though, that Christian leaders insist on some distinctions, wherever they come down relative to the impending steamrollering of Iraq.
First, war is never right. There is a prevailing school of Christian ethical reflection—one from which I dissent—that teaches that disciples of Jesus may participate in warfare in defense of a just cause, on behalf of innocents, when every other means of bringing about the desired end has failed; such a situation makes participation in a war “just,” though it does not make the war itself a positive option. (My own Anglican tradition affirms in its Articles of Religion that “It is lawful for Christian men at the commandment of the Magistrate to wear weapons and serve in the wars,” though the Latin version of that article stipulates “et iusta bella administrare.”)
There may be no room for pride in war, only penitence; there may be no room for pre-emption in war, only response. (A righteous combatant will not strike a first blow, because she or he doesn’t know that the adversary actually is a combatant until the adversary starts the fight.) The Bush administration’s actions in North Korea illustrate that there are indeed other ways of addressing unstable tyrants who possess weapons of mass destruction. When Bush singles out Hussein and Iraq as “deserving” a pre-emptive war that will surely affect non-combatants disproportionately (perhaps even deliberately so), his selectivity falsifies any claim that this could be a “just” war.
Second, while soldiers may be humble, altruistic, and noble, theirs is emphatically not the greatest sacrifice one can make. There’s a tremendous difference between risking one’s life in warfare, armed with automatic weapons, missiles, grenades, bombs, and so on (on one hand) and risking one’s life in service to others unarmed, from the conviction that helping those in need is one’s fundamental obligation (on the other hand).
Soldiers do make the incalculably grave sacrifice of their unwillingness to take another human life. That’s much, much bigger than fast-talking neocon pundits seem to understand, and greater even than the risk of their lives (what does it profit a soldier to win a war, and lose the meaning for which the war was fought?) I will honor the sacrifice of any soldiers, living or dead, who feel (or “felt”) the weight of responsibility that comes from renouncing their obligation to not kill any other human being. I will grieve the loss of any soldiers, living or dead, who can’t face the magnitude of that decision and so must make themselves out to be immune to moral responsibility.
Third, the church could only being to imagine itself making these sorts of distinctions when had lost its first self-understanding, that of stateless witnesses to a peace and glory that admit of no coercion or violence. Once a church begins to think of itself as intrinsically related to state functions, the state’s problems become that church’s problems. That need not be the case; Christians can still find their truest identities as those whose citizenship belongs to no earthly domain, and some still do. They are not retreating from some primary allegiance to the state, but respecting a primary allegiance to statelessness.
Miles, Christ, and Biblical Criticism
Steve Yost’s pointer to Jack Miles’s overview of biblical scholarship includes an invitation to put in my ha’penny’s-worth on Miles’s assessment of biblical scholarship. (Steve wonders whether this would be a good context in which to read my book on postmodernism; I would say that it’s always a good time to read that book, but in this context the strong of heart may find more especially relevant a different book of mine, oriented particularly toward the way criteria function in biblical interpretation. But that one’s also longer and more expensive and less commonly available in libraries, so you have permission to skip it in favor of the cheaper, shorter, more easily accessible one.)
Miles’s survey seems largely to hit the mark; I’d quibble with him on a number of points, but on the whole he seems to have sized up my colleagues in this field pretty accurately. I would probably treat “literary criticism” somewhat differently—his version of lit-crit seems a little too gloriously heroic by my lights—but Miles wisely notes the importance of Hans Frei (and Margaret would quickly add the even greater importance of Henri de Lubac) and the biblical guild’s successful construction of a veil of misprision that insulates the guild from edifying contact with the broader world of critical thinking. I’d be tempted to say simply that graduate study in the Bible trains people to be bad readers—readers whose sense of what’s important about a text derives from extremely narrow and self-justifying premises.
A test case arises in most introductory classes in Scripture. Seminarians typically need to be taught that the modern methods of analyzing Scripture are not risible, but are the exclusively sound and truthful ways of reading an ancient text. They “need” this, that is, because it’s very far from being evident to them. I would say they have good reason to be skeptical about modern biblical scholarship, but that they ought not infer that modern scholarship is a load of dingo’s kidneys. They should instead learn how to distinguish dingo’s kidneys from wholesome, nourishing close reading. Unfortunately, the cultural prominence of modern presuppositions in biblical interpretation makes it hard to say anything more nuanced than Aye or Nay.
Getting back, then, to Miles: the best thing one can do is to learn to read the Bible with sensitivity to theme and character, to what is said, what isn't said, and what may deliberately have been un-said, to the human capacities of amateur authors (even if they be gifted amateurs) and the divine subtlety that brings diverse authorial voices into a collection where they may provide the basis for a harmonious, profound theological testimony—or the discordant jibberish of antithetical yammering, or the monotonous drone of carefully-rehearsed Officially-Approved Interpretive Statements.
I don’t know as my interpretations of the New Testament will align with Jack Miles’s more than incidentally, but that will involve our different purposes, different tastes, different lines of accountability. It will not involve one of the two of us being anti-intellectual, or heedless of historical judgment.
February 22, 2003
Disseminary Siglum
Well, Trevor and I worked hard on it this afternoon, and came up with a compromise: the Wheel-within-wheel symbol would be a sort of main Disseminary logo, and the Hoopoe would be a more informal, affectionate emblem.
I know you all were holding your breath for that one.
Meanwhile, interesting responses to Steve Himmer’s reflections on monasticism abound, and Halley invoked my prayers, and Steve Yost is tangling me up with the brother of my Seabury neighbor, Catherine Wallace. Oh, his name is Jack Miles. (I have to talk to Kate about getting herself a web page.)
I will have much to answer you all about tomorrow, and I have promised my editor that I’ll finish off that old “Integral and Differential Hermeneutics” essay by the end of the week, which will be a trick because Seabury has its exciting twice-a-term Faculty conference this week, and we have a meeting with Garrett Seminary from across the street, and I get together with the very same Kate Wallace on Friday to plan the writing curriculum for entering students for next fall.
But I won’t forget you.
February 21, 2003
Friday Sermon
Today I preached in chapel. We were observing the feast day of Martin Luther, which wasn’t the most obvious day for our liturgics professor to invite me to say mass.
Anyway, I don’t feel blogheavy tonight, so I figured I’d put the sermon up. . . .
Isaiah 55:6-13/Psalm 46/John 15:1-11 February 21, 2003
Our professor of liturgics sturdily denies any deliberate intent in assigning preachers to particular feast days, so she will probably affirm that no wry humor played a part in allotting the arch-reformer to this stalwartly catholic presider. I myself just give thanks that it wasn’t Calvin or Zwingli, but instead that I was called to preach on the feast of Brother Martin, hearty Augustinian monk and apostle of grace.
If we had more than just five minutes, I might ask you for some testimonies, sisters and brothers, some witnessing about where your path to discipleship began, what first recognizable steps led you to this most unlikely way-station. If we had more than just five minutes, we could listen one another into truth, and hear how God’s ways vastly surpass our ways, how God?s thoughts transcend our thoughts.
But we don’t have that much time, friends, we must hurry or we’ll be late for lunch, and so I will elbow past all the enchanting, endearing stories of late-night conversions, of dear and trusted companions, of grannies and nannies, of hitting the bottom and slingshotting to the heavens, I’ll skip over all that and cut to the bottom line: discipleship begins in grace.
Our way with God begins in grace, that?s the only way it can begin, because our good ideas don’t save us, our lofty intentions sure don’t save us, our intelligence and fine looks and beautiful music and even the Book of Common Prayer and
By grace and grace alone all good things come to be; grace is our only fortress, our only rock, our stronghold and our only sure defense. And undeserved grace forbids our thinking that we bring about peace among nations, that our strength protects the innocent, that our wisdom adjudicates which nations deserve the full impact of US military destruction, and which tyrants must be supported and encouraged in the name of “national security.” Grace stands up and plainly names the lies and blasphemy that crassly identify God’s justice and God’s saving power with the ambitions of careerist politicians.
Grace falls silent when we manipulate, coerce, force enemies to submit to our will. Grace testifies for us and with us and in us, when all our ways in all our lives sprout flourishing myrtle and cypress, not withered, dry thorns and briars; grace grows in our discipleship when we reject the lies of brutal power, and follow the gentle, peaceable way of Jesus’ command to abide together in his love.
In the presence of grace, five minutes stretches to encompass all our hearts’ testimonies of praise, of thanksgiving and intercession in an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. In the of grace, “cutting off” is all that we can expect.
Amen
Welcome Back
Steve Himmer is back and (evidently) feeling better and vying for the title of “the U.S.’s answer to Gary Turner as funniest guy around.”
Evidently I wasn’t as clear as desirable when I first responded to Steve; I should revisit that, tomorrow perhaps. Or later.
Wanted: Web Host
Now that Trevor and I have the money to contract with a web hosting service, we’re looking for a host to, uh, host us. We saw Mark Pilgrim’s endorsement of CornerHost, and Mark’s word carries us a long way. Still, we’d like to have considered an alternative or two before we sign on the line.
We’re also looking for an emblem (currently in the running: a hoopoe, or a wheel-within-a-wheel, as in Ezekiel’s vision). We’re thinking about the design of the front page (impressed by a recent spate of handsomely-designed pages with a banner/logo at top, and a three-column layout, of which the left column is usually empty. Megnut’s subway motif is a great idea; Dooce or Textism’s layout appeals greatly.
All suggestions welcome.
February 20, 2003
Catchphrase Copyright
In congratulating Tom Shugart for his blogiversary this evening, I referred to these days after the media have caught the scent of what Blogaria’s up to, after the big Blogger/Google merger, after the bloggers claimed credit for Trent Lott’s hide and perhaps for keeping Korea in the foreign policy discussions, when Michael and Tom and Jeneane are agitating to arm Iraqi bloggers with cameras so we can see through bloggers’ eyes what the US military machine does Over There—I referred to these days as “the Blog Rush of ’03.” It sounded catchy, and so I’m tossing it out there as a perhaps-apt catchphrase for the blogging boom. . . .
February 19, 2003
In Passing
Not much to say today, except that Manfred Klein released a batch of new free typefaces earlier this week. A couple were picture collections, one is an interesting experimental typeface (including only the upper or lower half of each letter), a ransom-note assortment of glyphs in which no two characters are formed on the same design, an eccentric sans serif face, and a strong blackletter typeface.
And today, the grant check for the Disseminary arrived, so Trevor and I can begin making stuff happen (in our copious free time).
February 18, 2003
Steve and Faith
Let it never be said that Steve Himmer is anything but a class act. Or, go ahead and say it, but you’d better not mean it.
I say this first with reference to Steve’s gentle, thoughtful observations about his latent atheistic monastic streak. Steve ventures to reflect thoughtfully on how it might be that someone such as he, who knows in the full depth of his being, the of any divine phantasms, nonetheless finds himself drawn to a life of contemplative devotion.
Then, after I indicated my appreciation for the care he exercised in not disparaging others’ faith, but my inability to find a way to address his remarks within the frame that his narrative constructed for the conversation, Steve even more graciously disassembled the frame. So although I’d rather ask how his camera got broken, or trade flu stories, I find myself obliged by Steve’s generosity to comment on faith and devotion.
Conversations about faith suffer from the turbulence induced by cultural knowledge, the kind of thing everyone knows about religion—premises that may not actually be true or applicable or well-constructed when brought to bear on particular (alleged) instances of the category. Some of what the predominant public discourses of religion just take for granted falsifies what particular people, or (better) communities do and say and think. It’s tough to dislodge that cultural knowledge, though, since it gets picked up and underscored and repeated and endorsed by people who are presented to us as authorities (maybe I can use this as a springboard back to the “authority” topic in a day or so).
For instance: cultural knowledge holds that ritual is empty, meaningless and separate from a true personal encounter with God; that only from theological vanity might one believe one’s own faith to be true, in contradistinction to different ways of life; that the true goal of authentic faith is a spirituality distinguishable from “outward forms” or “the institutional church”; the individual’s soul is the paramount matter of religious importance; and a bunch of others I’ll probably tack on as I keep nattering.
None of these premises is simply, neutrally, given; some of them are demonstrably polemical claims which have become so successful that their hostile origins no longer appear on the surface, even to those against whom the claim may once have been directed (who thus reproduce the problematic assumptions within the camp the assumption was designed to undermine). None is groundless, either, so that conversation partners can always cite situations and quotations that back the premises. I don’t know what Steve thinks about any of these; he’s a very wise man, except perhaps about snow shovelling, so I expect that he has a nuanced appreciation for the complexities swirling around these a/theological points. (If I try to talk about “orthodoxy” or “authority” or “pacifism” sometime later, I’ll run into similar problems again.)
But if I’m to speak out in public about Steve’ essay in which he ponders the possibility that God not be a necessary component of a life of devotion on the Christian monastic model, I need to answer not only Steve, but also all the cultural overhead that many readers will (inasmuch as there are many readers to this node in the networked digital imagination of the world) bring to bear on my response.
So, first, Steve allows that he may have picked up the stick by the wrong end by concentrating on the devoted individual, rather than on that to which the individual is devoted. That’s a tremendous insight, and touches on one of those bits of cultural knowledge to which I object. I’d go even further, though, and say that some dimensions of the faith that expresses itself in Christian monasticism (and from here on, I’ll use less cumbersome sepcifications, though I risk missing my step in so doing because at the end all my reservations have to do with specificity and particularity) understand the individual’s own devotion not be that important. One way of thinking about devotion involves doing something with one’s individuality that isn’ simply pointing it in a dogmatically “correct” direction and praying, or feeling a warmish glow when one says an appropriate prayer. This way of imagining devotion sets as a more fitting goal the harmonization of an individual’s sense of self-importance with a vastly greater, deeper, wiser, longer-enduring, suffering, persisting, rejoicing communion of one’s sisters and brothers to whose shared devotion one commits oneself, whatever one’s private, individual feelings, preferences, or beliefs.
On this premise, one would draw the wrong conclusion if one deduced from a devout person’s non-specific (or misdefined) faith that the end of faith or its precise contours don’t matter. Rather, one may observe how profoundly appropriate it is for religious communities to welcome people with uncertain, irregular faith (or none at all), since it’s by the community’s embracing any who aspire to that life of devotion that all who partake in the life find the fullness of the sharing that crosses time, location, doctrinal precision, and all the other variables that distinguish believers and non-believers of our various flavors. This “welcoming” doesn’t mean the community reshapes itself in the welcomed-one’s reflected (distorted) image, though. The community welcomes people by speaking and practicing the truth it has received, by making as clear and convincing as possible the Way that justifies the community’s common life.
So—to restrict myself (for reasons of preservation of limited energies) to Steve’ attraction to monastic devotion, I would append the utterly vital aspect of allying oneself to a community, to a tradition, to which one makes oneself accountable. In that sense, God is not a necessary aspect of one’s own life of devotion, as God is not on pins and needles waiting to observe the outcome of a theological plebescite (sort of Bill Clinton with wings and a harp) but the life of devotion to which Steve feels attracted would be something radically different if it were not directed toward God, if such a life continued to exist at all.
(Explicit reservation: Steve was talking about Christian monasticism, at least in all his specific references. Stepping away from my area of first-hand knowledge and the specifically Christian context, one might argue that non-belief in God constitutes a requisite ingredient of some monasticism. I’m not one to assess such claims in public, though—imply to report that I’m not unaware of them.)
(As I conclude these remarks, iTunes supplies a tremendously a propos conjunction of theologically-determined favorites: “Bread and Circuses” by Billy Bragg and Natalie Merchant, and immediately afterward “Alleluia,” by Dar Williams.)
That’s too much for now.
February 17, 2003
At Least. . .
So, I slept moderately well, and woke up early enough to think I might go to the office for the morning and come home after midday mass for a restful afternoon. Got up, took a shower, dressed, went downstairs, and stepped in a puddle in the front hall.
Was Bea, fierce warrior puppy, responsible? No, this puddle was bigger than that. And, now that I stopped to listen, I heard water dripping in the basement.
(I pause to stipulate that I really do feel noticeably better today; my flu Crud Factor is down to 1 or 2, and the single biggest residual affliction of the Adam Influenza Massacre of 2003 is general weariness.)
I had anticipated tackling today head-on, relishing the full use of my limited capacities. Instead, I hollered for Josiah, hunky hero-youth of the family, and we began mopping and bailing. I’d hoped that we could square things away without disturbing Margaret, but she responded to my summons for Si. As it turned out, the toilet in the front hall had overflowed, which surprised us all because no one had used it since late last night. We mopped up and dried the floors, set pails to catch the drips in the basement, and started back to our respective days—but the toilet then overflowed again. Okay, got that, mopped, dried, now we’re stabilized. I ran out to Morning Prayer, and as soon as I got home I found Margaret mopping the front hall again, at which point we summoned Wolf Waldert, Seabury’s mystically-powerful Maintenance Supervisor, and the full complement of Seabury’s maintenance crew (Wolf and Ricardo) and a guest expert plumber spent their mornings prying the drywall off our basement wall, opening up our pipes, and extracting some inert organic matter from deep therein. From the vent outside our house, you could hear their drilling and sucking and pumping (all in a strictly hydro-circulatory sense) making extremely odd noises.
I was not feeling nearly as good by midday as I had been at the beginning of the day. I therefore welcomed the extraordinary gift offered to Seabury at midday mass: a visiting choir, “Thula Sizwe,” (named for a Zulu freedom song, “Be silent, nation”) from outside Pretoria (yes, that’s the Pretoria in Golby’s geographic neighborhood) sang an anthem for us at communion, and then a remix (as it were) of “Amazing Grace” after the service. They burned golden grace in a weary gray chapel.
February 16, 2003
Signs Are Good
We're still sick with the flu, to varying degrees (as predicted, Si went to church today), but trends are at least slightly favorable.
Dishmatique Liberation Movement
My Tutor aims to liberate aficiandi of the premier kitchen hygiene implement, the Dishmatique, from the stifling restraints of Harvard Blog censorship. Freedom of commercial speech, even in the digital domain of crimson ivy!
Except, I didn’t think that I “shamelessly flogged” the Dishmatique (I’d state that I didn’t flog it at all except that I ’never presume to correct the Tutor when it comes to flogging). I have rhapsodized, endorsed, lauded, displayed, and acclaimed this paragon of washbasin cleanliness. But that seems defensible under the “encourged to review products” clause of the rule. (And one can hardly imagine Dave Winer submitting to constraints on his liberty to speak his mind about commercial products!)
And much as I may disagree with Jonathon Delacour about the politics and ethics of warfare, I cannot stand silently by when he’s accused of being a half-wit! If that epithet be fairly applied to him, then I should emphatically insist that “Half a wit is better than one.”
Now, would someone at the Dishmatique’s manufacturer Easy-Do please pick up the clue phone and take steps to remedy that dreadfully appalling webpage design?
February 15, 2003
Triage Report
The best news is that Si has spent the day a veritable social—well, he’s no butterfly, but “June bug” isn’t fair to him, so let’s just say, “big, friendly, gentle bug”—a social bug, with his Crud Factor down in the negligible range. He’ maybe a 1.5. I started out the day feverish and achey, but the fever has subsided, and my aches hadn’t seemed so bad till I just developed a whopper of a muscle pain (probably unrelated, but it aggravates my CF; call me a 5. Pip and Margaret, long-suffering souls, have bounced back up into the 6 or 7 range. While I was feeling less and less haunted by the flu, it struck back ferociously at the women-folk. One thing we’ve learned from this flu is that it shows a heartbreaking pattern of abating, then intensifying, in waves. So tomorrow morning, I’ll probably be miserable, and Margaret and Pip feeling better. But none of the three of us is going to church tomorrow. We’ll ask Si to pray extra hard. (I was scheduled for a healing service in Winnetka; while I have no inclination to set limits for the power of the Spirit, the irony of an flu-ridden priest laying on hands to heal seemed beyond anything for which I could make myself responsible.)
Mercedes Update
The news has been released: Doc’s laptop is back, and the outpouring of Blogarian charity, once turned loose on Doc’s behalf, now flows over to other worthy causes. And the Mercedes S600 is back, too, in my imagination, where it belonged all along.
February 14, 2003
Friday Update
♥ First I did not escape the family flu outbreak, and last night peaked at Crud Factor 8 or 9. This afternoon I’m down around 7, Margaret is at CF 6 (and weary and achey), Pip at CF 3 or 4 (low grade fever and cough), Si at CF 2 or 3 (the DareDevil factor: he wants to go to the movies this afternoon, so he’s sure he feels better). I bailed out on midday mass and lunch with Jordon, as I wasn’t sure I could sit through them both and I really didn’t want to spread this accursed flu more widely. It’s frustrating; I had wanted to hear Jordon talk with the students at lunchtime, and to just sit around and talk through some Disseminary stuff with him—but really, no one wants me out of bed today.
♥ Jordon was terrific last night. He very helpfully sketched out the rationale for organizations such as churches moving directly into engagement with digital culture, and the reasons that inhibit churches from so doing. This was just what I’d hoped for; I think that our students who’ve talked with Jordon should have a strong sense of the value of digital technology for church functions.
♥ Some of Trevor’s and my students have shown what can happen when vivid theological imagination intersect with weblogs and professorial frivolity. . . .
♥ A flock of typefaces from DincType: Scout, Broken Doll, Satori (which looks like a very familiar brush script), placemats, Pati, Lonely Frog, and a letters-inside-hearts typeface, Funny Valentine. Japanese fontmakers Maniackers released an alphabetic design, Crayon, with the admonition, “Please Maniackers Design Font Read Me Down Load..” The FontDiner has two new designs also, Luvable and Huggable (they’re all labelled “new,” but some of these designs have been there for ages).
I’m to blog any more, so I’ll just curl up in a fetal position and sweat and cough and blow my nose. Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone (especially my heart’s beloved, Margaret!).
February 13, 2003
More On Education
Liz Lawley points to a provocative reflection by Flemming Funch on education, conformity, and accomplishment. She cites a juicy paragraph on how highly-trained computer science students typically make weak programmers; I was impressed by the scorching paragraph about how well practitioners can actually do things:
The problem is that in the real world, if you have the job of building something that actually works, as a computer programmer or as an engineer, or you need to do something very precise and important, like surgery, you can’t get away with anything much less than 100% right. You might get away with 99.99% right, and the last 0.01% will still haunt you. But if you’re several percent off, the bridge will fall down, the patient will die, and your software just won't run. You can’t almost save an account record and still call it an accounting program. It doesn’t matter if you made a good effort and that your notes look good if you amputated the wrong leg.What would these sentences look like if we applied them to ministry?
I understand that ministry isn’t only about knowing a bunch of dates and doctrines, that it’s not just for highly-educated elite highfalutin’ clergy. At the same time, though, seminary education frequently concentrates so hard on helping students feel good about themselves and their capacities that we don’t push Funch’s “percentage” up from 80% to closer to 99 or 100%.
In ministry, the percentage doesn’t correlate with good grades and lots of education—just as Funch’s computer science students were less reliable as programmers than were the less-educated hackers he hired. But even a hacker needs to know the language, know the APIs, know the point of the program he or she’s coding. Somewhere in the knots of the conundrum to which Funch points, there’s an important lesson and warning sign for theological education.
Jordon Cooper Report, Part 1
Eminent pastoral technologian Jordon Cooper has landed safely in Chicago and gotten to Seabury, where we have ensconced him in one of our guest suites, and are now eagerly awaiting his presentation on “Discontinuous Change and the Church: The Impact of Technology and teh Creative Class on Ministry Today.” I showed Jordon everything about Seabury (small building, about fifteen minutes) and left him in his room so that I could come home and check in on our influenza sick ward. The scoreboard presently reads, Si = crud factor 2 and dropping, Pip = CF 6 and wavering, Margaret = CF 9 and stable. I'm mostly just exhausted from not sleeping well with everyone coughing through the night, and fighting off a flimsy imitation of the real flu that they have. I’ll go back to Seabury to greet Jordon before evening worship, where tonight we’ll celebrate teh feast day of Absalom Jones, the first African-American ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church. Then dinner, then Jordon’s talk, to which a number of us are very much looking forward. I’ll report in later.
I Know It’s Around Here Somewhere
Well, it happens to the best of us, so I can’t complain if it happens to me. There I was, wandering out in front of our house, when it became clear that somehow I had mislaid our brand new