Category Archives: random tidbits

Blessed are the uncool

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Facebook friends shared the following link with me: http://rachelheldevans.com/blessed-are-the-uncool

Thanks for this link. Serendipity, I suppose. A (possibly homeless) man walked down the center aisle last Sunday during the service, came right down to the front pew, said something aloud to me, that I couldn’t quite understand.  When he came in, muttering to himself, and then spoke aloud, I got into traffic cop mode, wondering why the ushers hadn’t bounced him from the service, annoyed at the disruption, worried about how visitors or members were reacting. Then he sat down, was quiet for the rest of the service, came to the altar rail and received communion in tears. His presence was a blessing to me, if to no one else.

At our midweek service yesterday, a young man attended who I suspect suffers from cerebral palsy. He had trouble finding pages in the prayerbook and speaking the responses. But we adapted to his pace and welcomed him. He’s visiting from out of town for a couple of weeks, had fallen in love with Episcopal liturgy as a college student and came to worship with us. It was a gift and a joy to have him present in our small congregation and remind us of just what Evans writes about: Blessed are the uncool.

Breaking up with God: I didn’t lose my faith I left it.

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An interview with Sarah Sentilles, author of Breaking up with God: A Love Story.

The title seems to be a takeoff from Lauren Winner’s Girl meets God, but given my recent posts here and here, it probably deserves a mention.

For me, this is the money quote from the interview with Sentilles:

People assume I’m an atheist, but I’m not. I don’t know what I am, but if I had to choose a label I’d choose agnostic. When I say that people usually ask me if I think God exists, and I usually give them the answer that my teacher, Gordon Kaufman, used to give me: The question of God’s existence isn’t the right question because it won’t get you very far. It’s a question human beings can’t answer. If we take God’s mystery seriously, then we can never know. I think there are better questions that we can be answering: What does a particular vision of God do to those who submit to it and to those who won’t submit to it? What difference is my version of God making? Who is it harming? In one of his books, Kaufman writes, “The central question for theology… is a practical question. How are we to live? To what should we devote ourselves? To what causes give ourselves?” He argues that theology that does not contribute significantly to struggles against inhumanity and injustice has lost sight of its point of being.

Full disclosure: Gordon Kaufman was one of my professors, too. He was also a member and sometime pastor of the Mennonite Congregation of Boston, to which I belonged during the 1980s.

That ultimately God is mystery is not a radical or heretical notion. Going back to the early church (at least to the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus) the idea of negative theology, that the only true statements one could make about God were about what God is not, is a perfectly acceptable, if somewhat difficult to understand, methodology. Of course, Sentilles goes further in the interview, making clear that much of her problem is not about the notion of God, but about institutional religion. I am always saddened when people come to that point because for me the Incarnation is all about the messiness of the mystery of God being contained, experienced, and expressed in the ordinary, human, and accessible.

 

What is one’s true self?

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Josh Knobe wrote a piece on the New York Times in which he asked “How is one to know which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?” He begins with the example of Mark Pierpont, a Christian who was deeply involved in the ex-gay movement, even though he had to repress his own sexual desires for men. Eventually, Pierpont came out. Knobe uses his example to ask which was Pierpont’s true self, the one that had gay desires, or the one that sought to live according to the “Christian values” he held dear. Most of us would probably say that one’s deepest desires are a reflection of the authentic self, but Knobe wonders. For philosophers, he says, “what is most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection.” Knobe has put his ideas to test in the emerging field of experimental philosophy.

His essay has received considerable discussion on the web. A thoughtful perspective is offered by Noah Millman that what is important to recognize is that the conflict within the self is real; perhaps, in fact, the authentic self is conflicted.

This week, I was having a beer with a parishioner and our conversation turned to Augustine. Perhaps it was because I had recently read Knobe’s piece, but as we talked, I was put in mind of Augustine in Confessions, as he tries to deal with his divided will in the moments leading up to his conversion:

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it. What causes this monstrosity and why does this happen?

 

My Alma Mater, back in the news

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I am a graduate of Goshen College. It has recently returned to the news. In 2010, the college’s president, James Brenneman, announced that for the first time in the school’s history, the National Anthem (an instrumental version, without words) would be played at athletic events. This decision aroused controversy among students, faculty, alumni, as well as within the Mennonite Church. I blogged about it here and here.

This week I received a communication from Goshen College announcing the results of the lengthy review of that earlier decision. The upshot:

Following months of prayerful consideration, the Board, in consultation with President Brenneman, has asked the President to find an alternative to playing the National Anthem that fits with sports tradition, that honors country and that resonates with Goshen College’s core values and respects the views of diverse constituencies.

The full text of the decision is here: anthem-decision-statement-1.

Apparently, the media is spinning this rather differently: it was banned, it is said, because the lyrics are too violent.

We live in a culture in which patriotism and Christianity are easily conflated, “God bless America” rolls unthinkingly off the lips of politicians, and most people assume that to be a faithful Christian means being a good American, and vice versa. A healthy love of country is no bad thing, but there should always be a tension between one’s love of country and commitment to membership in the Body of Christ.

For Mennonites, whose citizenship was for centuries shaped by their commitment to Jesus’ teachings of non-resistance to evil, love of enemy, and turning the other cheek, flying the American flag or singing the National Anthem was problematic when the memories of those who suffered because of their commitment to follow Jesus Christ came into conflct with their country’s demand that they take up arms in its defense.

The Episcopal Church has not had the same set of conflicts. Traditionally, we were in some sense the nation’s church. Our members served as presidents, beginning with George Washington, and served in the military as well. That includes figures like Leonidas Polk, Bishop of Alabama, who was also a General in the Confederate Army.

Christians of every political persuasion need to remember that one of our great threats to our faithfulness is idolatry, to worship things lesser than God including nation, in place of God. It was one of the great sins of Israel in the Hebrew Bible and has continued to afflict nations throughout history down to the present. Goshen College’s struggle with the National Anthem is a stark reminder of the importance of remaining vigilant against the threat of idolatry.

War and Violence–Random Connections thanks to the Internet

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A couple of days ago, Andrew Sullivan posted this as his “quote for the day:”

Most other creatures engage in violence, and some insects and animals with elaborate social structures reflect those systems in their modes of fighting and aggression. But humans are unique in their creation of an institution of war that is designed to organize violence, define its purposes, declare its onset, ratify its conclusion and establish its rules. War, like literature, is a distinctively human product,” – Drew Gilpin Faust (pdf), from the annual Jefferson Lecture in DC.

Further down in my Google Reader feed was this from The Guardian (written by D. H. Lawrence in 1914).


Stephen Hawking says heaven is a fairy tale–why is anyone surprised?

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Perhaps the only thing more surprising than his rejection of heaven is that it continues to get press. More interesting is why someone who is obviously brilliant lacks the imagination to explore the human quest for meaning and purpose.

Hawking:

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark,”

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield’s response in Huffington Post seems to emphasize that it is impolite for someone to denigrate another’s beliefs; although he also makes the distinction between knowledge and belief.

Mark Vernon reports on a rather more interesting exchange between Rowan Williams and A.C. Grayling. The atheist and the ABC agreed on a great deal in their debate:

  • – that an engagement with life begins with wonder;
  • – that there is a natural law which reveals a minimal amount required for our flourishing;
  • – that happiness is not a feeling but has to do with entering deeply into the relationships that surround us;
  • – that the passions need educating, not least passions like anger;
  • – that the stoic aim of becoming attuned with life is key – even or especially when it demands of us a noble response to suffering.
  • Grayling was even content to use a word that comes naturally to Williams, spirituality, when spirituality has to do with the remarkable sense that we owe something of ourselves to life because of all life has given us.

But there were differences. Apparently someone asked about love:

Williams was at last on territory he would have chosen. Religion is not like obeying a code of conduct that governs the relationships between a high god and subservient human beings, he explained. Rather, it is about coming to see yourself in a radically fresh way, as a result of seeing yourself as made in the image of God. We are all alienated from this truth, but can be brought back to it, he continued, explaining he’d witnessed as much just the other day in a prison, when a man who had committed terrible crimes had come to a moment of repentance and had been surprised at seeing ‘me as me’ for the first time.

Here’s Vernon’s account of Grayling’s response:

Grayling responded that the ancient injunction to know thyself is certainly vital, and that caring for even the most violent of our fellows in prisons is a profoundly hopeful mark of the humanity of our civilisation. Absolutely. But that didn’t quite seem to capture the hope of being drawn by love back to love which came through in Williams’ answer.

Participants or Spectators? Consumers or producers?

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Bishop Miller made his biennial visitation to Grace Church yesterday. In his sermon, he referred to a college course he once took on the history of sport in America. The professor’s thesis was that Americans’ involvement in sports was the movement from participation to being fans. He compared that to the church and proclaimed that Christianity is not a spectator sport.

I found a connection between his sermon and a blog entry that asked whether worshipers are consumers or producers. The author began with music–the difference between consuming (turning on the radio, listening to one’s ipod) and producing, whether as a musician or as a songwriter. She then turns to worship, asking whether we perceive worship leaders (clergy, choir, professionals) as producers, and those who sit in the pew as consumers of worship. She concludes that to some degree the notion of the lay consumer of worship is an accurate representation:

It’s true that we consume the Word which is given to us, something we did not produce ourselves.  But as we chew and swallow and ponder what we freely receive, we do go out to produce, to create, to produce fruit, to create community, to do justice and to love kindness.

One could have deepened the comparison by pointing out that people’s “consumption” of music has changed since the nineteenth century, with the selling of sheet music giving way to the selling of recordings, and the important value that educated, cultured persons could play an instrument, or that popular entertainment for many among the poorer classes, was self-created. In these cases, music also created community.

The problem with the consumer/producer model is not just that tends towards passivity; it also tends towards isolation. I think that’s true of much of worship as well, even in the Anglican tradition.

The Budget Debate and Christianity

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I came across this quotation from Paul Begala in an essay by Robert de Neuville:

The budget is a moral document. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be.

The budget debate continues and Christians of various stripes weigh in. Here’s Jim Wallis.

Andrew Sullivan is also struggling:

I believe the federal budget crisis is real and must be tackled by a radical reform of tax and spending soon. I also find it morally hard to deny vulnerable people healthcare that is available and far more effective than ever before in human history.

After quoting the National Council of Catholic Bishops on the debate, Sullivan observes:

But a humane concern for the poor, sick and elderly is integral to the Gospel message and spirit. And my own gut-unease about withholding available healthcare – perhaps more than any other good – from the needy is rooted, I think, in this Catholic admonition.