AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Best wishes to Suw and Chris! They’re both wonderful, but together who knows what the possibilities are!

As I play with the words of the readings, I’m inclined to preach on the verse from Psalm 43 that reads, “Send out your light and your truth, that they may lead me, and bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling. . . .”

Now, the figure of God’s light leading one to the Temple is clear enough; but what does it mean that God should send out the truth to guide us? The Psalmist seems to envision Truth as a sort of homing signal; but whereas most of us are equipped with eyes that function well as light detectors, experience suggests that fewer of us (and who knows just who they are?) have the use of reliable truth detectors. What good does it do us to ask God to send out Truth to guide us homeward, if we can’t know just when we’ve encountered that beacon?

I’ll have to wait and see how, or even whether, this connects to the occasion of Todd’s ordination (It wouldn’t be the first time that I prepared a full sermon, only to decide that it wasn’t just right for preaching that day — I think the sermon I finally preached at Leigh Waggoner’s ordination was the third one I prepared for that service). But that plea for an invisible, elusive signal piques my homiletical interest.

I think that in relatively short order — when Pedro is on the disabled list, while shrewd Theo Epstein has more than $30 million to spend on other players — Red Sox fans will see the Mets’ signing Pedro Martinez as a great deal for the Sox. I hate to see him go, even though the Red Sox are a rival of my own favorite Orioles, but I doubt that any team should be offering Martinez a guaranteed four-year contract at a time when both his quality statistics and his durability have been steadily declining. It’s hard to say good-bye, but the Sox get the better of this transaction.

You might think that just because classes ended last Friday, I have my feet up in my Barcalounger, and I’m puffing a cigar, thinking about all the poor working stiffs whose work doesn’t crash to a halt two weeks before Christmas. You might think so, but — even apart from my lack of a Barcalounger — you’d be wrong.

I spent the morning talking with Kyle about his long-distance directed readings course on emergent/emerging church polity. Kyle’s put a lot of time and effort into connecting with me for this course, so I felt the least I could do was really monologue the living daylights out of him when he comes by to visit. He escaped with his sanity (more or less) intact after a long discussion of his studies, his visit to Geoff’s place Sunday morning, his visit to Willow Creek in the afternoon, and the conclusions he’s reaching on the basis of it all. It’s been a pleasure to talk through his explorations with him.

Among our topics this morning was a metaphor I threw out, that Kyle suggested I use before he stole it — so in deference to his wishes, I’m blogging it tonight. We were discussing the impetus (impetuses? impeti? impetuousities?) for emergent churches, and I compared the situation to the gradual congestion, silting up and log-jamming, of clear waterways. The water that would ordinarily flow through the mainb channels doesn’t just magically go away; it begins showing up in unexpected places (flowing down streets, cutting new channels, flooding your basement). So, when the established churches (here using “established” not restrictedly about “granted privileged status by the state,” but broadly as “constituted as enduring corporate entities”) impede the flow of the Spirit, we should look for the Spirit to make itself known in surprising places.

We also noted that emerging/emergent churches aren’t formally distinct from various modern church-start models. To the extent that emerging/emergent congregations differentiate themselves from precedent, they do so by the way they live out a distinct self-understanding. Kyle’s using “participation” as one of the key-concepts of his account of emerging/emergent polity; I wondered whether that might conceal the extent to which established churches encourage “participation” too, in ways formally quite similar to emerging congregations. These patterns clearly differ — but they differ not at the level of bare “participation,” but at the level of what that participation means to the congregation’s identity.

When Kyle finally made his way to the door, I turned my attention back to church history papers, handled some phone calls and emails, a couple of student visits, began working on the sermon for Todd’s ordination, and tackled more grading. I have an all-day faculty meeting tomorrow, and an errand with Margaret Wednesday morning. If things break well, Margaret and I may have the evening out as a treat Wednesday night — by which time it would be great to have my papers finished and be on my way ahead to the sermon.

The readings for Saturday will be Num 11:16-17, 24-5 (omitting the baffling concluding phrase), Psalm 43, 1 Peter 5:1-4, and Matthew 9:35-38. So far I have a strong intuition of where I want the sermon to get, but no clear idea of its itinerary in getting there. I’ll keep in touch as notions develop (don’t worry Ref, I’ll dig something up).

There’s a stack of papers at my left hand, and the house is a mess — but I’m diligently making snowflakes with the online snowflake maker that Margaret and Pippa discovered. I should be grading papers or cleaning up, but instead I’m tackling another urgent, absorbing, fascinating task.

The rest of us serve mainly as props for Pippa as she moves through a life that closely resembles a fluid, on-going performance art installation. She devotes a large proportion of her time and energies to just this sort of work — installations, constructions, depictions, contraptions, elaborations. She approaches the world as one version of a reality on which she might improve with a different, more off-center, more interesting re-presentation. She doesn’t displace, disfigure, or over-write the world, so much as she remixes it with idiosyncratic rhythm and color.

For instance, last night Margaret and I went to a pot luck for Seabury faculty and staff, after which we had considered sneaking upstairs to watch a DVD, cozy in bed. Whilwe were away, our daughter made our bed, prepared sumptuous snacks for each of us which she left on the lap desk that we use to hold up the TiBook (itself currently on leave in Indiana, helping Jane finish her coursework), and then added models of Margaret and me, dressed in our nightwear, with cut-out faces. Walking into your bedroom, flicking on the light, and seeing yourself already in your bed (albeit a flatter, black-and-white yourself) casts a markedly peculiar perspective on personal identity.

She’s master of a small conceptual-art repertory company, in which I’m honored to be a player.

That reminded me that Seabury has now, firmly (I believe), scheduled the Winslow Lectures for April 20-22, 2005. The series will be entitled “State of a Theological Art: Four Scholars in Search of a Hermeneutic,” unless we come up with something snappier before then. My long-time friend Steve Fowl will give one of the lectures; my more recent friend Francis Watson will fly in from Scotland to give another; my friend and neighbor to the west, Kevin Vanhoozer will give a third; and I’ll give one, as my inaugural lecture as a professor at Seabury. We have a tentative arrangement to publish print versions of them (with responses), and I’ll see about webcasting/archiving the lectures themselves.

For anyone with an interest in the theological appropriation of the Bible, the series should be pretty exciting (I realize that I cut the possible compass of the apodosis severely by so restrictive a protasis, but honesty obliges me. . .). Steve and I tend to view questions of theological interpretation in one way; Kevin and Francis a different way; and we all like to wrestle hard with ideas. Mark your calendars and, if possible, find your way out to Evanston for a few days. We’ll be holding the lectures in conjunction with the installation of our new dean, so it’ll be a feast of ideas and rituals.

I positively delight in fortuity. I’ve done some of my best, most productive research by wandering aimlessly around library stacks, gazing absently at book covers, pulling down peculiar titles or examining works that produce improbable combinations of authors and topics. I miss the liberty to stroll, to meander intellectually, more than almost any other cost of my furious busy-ness.

So it came as a stupendous delight to me that, at the recent SBL meeting, I had the chance to browse through a recent number of New Blackfriars, a journal to which I subscribed back in the days when it was a simply-produced, desktop-published bimonthly without the backing of any corporate megapublishers. Nowadays, under the umbrella of Blackwell, it has more professional production values, and I’m sure it costs more, but they still publish articles that tickle my theological synapses, and I relish each opportunity to read it.

At the meeting, I read along in the sample issue until I hit an article that captivated me: “Some Liturgical Implications of the Thought of David Jones,&#8221 by Christopher C. Knight (New Blackfriars  85 (998), 444-453). The title sounds pedestrian enough, but what knocked me out were the following paragraphs:

When some of [his essays] were collected together, in a volume entitled Epoch and Artist, its editor, Harman Grisewood, chose to put on the title page an unattributed quotation: “He placed himself in the order of signs.” It was an entirely appropriate quotation, for this was precisely what Jones had done throughout his adult life, both as artist-poet and as Christian. In Jones’ view, it was the sign-making nature of the human condition that made possible both human creativity and the sacramental understanding that was central to his faith.

The quotation chosen by Grisewood was not, however, one that had originally referred to any artist or poet in the usual sense. It was in fact from the work of the theologian, Maurice de la Taille, and it referred to Christ himself. What de la Taille had meant when he talked about “the order of signs” — in relation to the intrinsic link between the last supper, the cross, and the anamnesis of the eucharist— became a central aspect of Jones’ understanding. For, as Jones noted in his essay, Art and Sacrament, de la Taille’s thinking had “shed a sort of reflected radiance on the sign world in general.”

Oh, baby! “He placed himself in the order of signs.” How cool is that? It immediately became a vital point of reference for the lecture I’m working on for next spring.

Better yet, when I got home to Seabury and investigated our holdings of Jones’s works, I found that Seabury owns one of a scant 350 copies of Jones’s essay, “Use & Sign” (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1975; ours is hand-numbered copy 342). The short essay hits several points I will surely cite later, but it pleases me especially because its style reminds me of one of my favorite authors.

When Mary Maudlin fractured the alabaster of nard over the feet of the hero of the Christian cult, Sir Mordred at the dinner party asked: ‘To what purpose is this waste?’ But the cult-hero himself said: ‘Let her alone. What she does is for a presignification of my death, and wherever my saga is sung in the whole universal world, this sign-making of hers shall be sung also, for a memorial of her.’ A totally inutile act, but a two-fold anamnesis (that is, a double and effectual re-telling). First of the hero Himself and then of the mistress of all contemplatives and the tutelary figure of all that belongs to poiesis. The woman from Magdala in her golden hair, wasting her own time and the party funds: an embarrassment if not a scandal; but an act which is of the very essence of all poetry and, by the same token, of any religion worth consideration.

The notes of that rhetorical melody remind me of Tom’s writing, and the rhythms and harmonies of the Tutor’s gilded lash. As I draw on Jones in preparing my lecture, I’ll be hearing my friends — which will make my preparations all the more satisfying, and which can only strengthen, enrich the result.

I forgot that I owe Jason, a Seabury alum and former student of mine, a link to his blog. I almost typed, “his new blog,” which would have been true when he politely asked me to link to him, but now is no longer true since I took so long to get around to acceding to his request. His most recent entry continues a six-part transcript of his interview with Tom Wright, of which the first part appears here. And I’ll add you to my blogroll, too, Jason.

I owe Frank an answer to the question, “Why do I blog?”

That’s complicated, but the best answer would be that I started blogging as a lark, out of a clear blue sky. I continued blogging because I fell into such lovely conversations with friends such as David, Halley, Tom, Shelley, Chris, Jeneane, Doc, Steve, Gary (and, of course, Frank) among others. Those conversations have died down in some ways — we don’t run into multi-day, multi-blog hash-it-outs as much as we did a couple of years ago — but these friends are still around and blogging strong.

I keep blogging because it’s become part of what I do: part of how I learn, part of how I write, part of how I teach, part of how I think, part of how I keep up with technology.

Oh, and I owe both Joi and Frank observations on current creationist controversies. That’s tricky, because I enjoy watching disputes between evolutionists and creationists as an ongoing drama in intellectual history. I won’t simply align myself with either party; that would take much of the fun out of watching. I remain especially intrigued by the problems evolution hasn’t solved, I am unconvinced by the ways that some “evolutionary” discourses overplay the strength of their theory and data, and I hesitate to endorse whole-heartedly the “evolution” ideological complex that has borne along some awfully unsavory fellow-travelers. At the same time, most of “creation science” is flat-out not science, the arguments in behalf of “intelligent design” (ingenious circumventions of previous fallacies though they be) miss vital points on their own, and the underlying premise — that the Bible must provide a kind of oracular anticipation of scientific knowledge — strikes me as a monumental category mistake. So I’m no creationist, so sirree, but I’m not a card-carrying “shocked, shocked!” evolutionist. (We used to get into stressful situations when other home-schooling families assumed that we held our kids out of school to avoid the “E”-word.) I relish the puzzles and complexities more than either of the proposed answers.

And I owe my Early Church History class a final exam. No, I won’t forget.

I owe David notice for his terrific response to Dinesh D’Souza on authenticity.

I owe the Tutor a similar notice for his observations on family values and the state of the culture.

All that doesn’t begin to catch me up on obligations — but it helps correct the perilous spiral of behindness I had slipped into.

Did I mention that I’m picking Margaret up at O’Hare tomorrow morning? And that she’ll be home for a whole month?

The jury reached a decision this afternoon after deliberating for an hour and a half, or so. I have a lot to say about the experience, but would rather touch on salient points at unpredictable intervals, or drone on over coffee or beer, than compile a long-winded narrative of the trial that has been fulfilled among us.

One short retrospective comment, though: Evidence of injury is not the same as evidence of negligence. That’s the premise that enabled the jury to reach a relatively direct conclusion.

DRMA: Time for Peace by Digital Underground, Paris, Sway & King Tech; A Room At The Heartbreak Hotel by U2; If Love is a Red Dress by Maria McKee.