The Tree of Life

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I saw Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life this afternoon. I can’t remember the last time I was moved so much by a film. It is cinema that demands our attention and the attention of our mind and heart as well as our ears and eyes. There isn’t much plot; it’s more an evocation of 1950s childhood, with all of its nostalgia from carefree play and boys flirting with disaster, alongside the pain–the drowning death of friend in a pool, a stern, bordering on abusive father, the realities of racism.

Interspersed with that story is another one, beginning with the film’s epigraph from Job 38–the beginning of God’s answer to Job’s carefully laid out case against God–“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” and a voice-over from the ethereal Jessica Chastain (who plays the mother in the family with three rambunctious boys), highlighting the difference between nature and grace. Malick asks the question of the meaning of existence and suffering, and answers it with a spectacular depiction of creation that ends with the birth of one of those boys in Waco, and his father grasping his newborn son’s tiny foot.

We encounter one of those sons now middle-aged himself, living in antiseptic, modern apartments and working in office towers. Perhaps the sequences of childhood are a flashback, or an unconsciously selected memory of the past. We hear the boy wishing his father’s death. We also hear him lash out at his father, “How do you expect me to be good, when you aren’t good?”

There’s a heaven sequence and it seems to take place on a beach (Contact, anyone?) and there are some overwrought or odd sequences, but overall, at the end of the film I felt I had encountered something profound, or at least someone grasping beyond themselves and their craft, seeking to make sense of the world, for himself and for us.

As the credits rolled, a piano played Arthur Sullivan’s tune to the ancient Christian Easter hymn, “Welcome Happy Morning.” The English translation of the first verse reads:

“Welcome, happy morning!” age to age shall say:
“Hell today is vanquished, Heav’n is won today!”
Lo! the dead is living, God forevermore!
Him, their true Creator, all His works adore!

Others worth reading on the film:

James Martin, SJ on America Magazine’s In All Things blog: http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?entry_id=4282

Also from America:John Anderson’s review.

Geoffrey O’Brien in the New York Review of Books:

And Roger Ebert’s review.

But while I would not rush to read a verbal summation by Malick of his philosophical views, I would burn with irresistible curiosity to see the film of any text he might care to adapt, whether it were Spinoza’s Ethics or the phone book. He does his thinking by means of cinema in its full range of possibilities, and that is at any time a rare spectacle.

 

My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant

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This story, by Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist is gripping and should be read by everyone. He came to the US from the Philippines on a fake passport as a twelve-year old; discovered his status when he tried to get a driver’s license at age 16. He’s been living a double life ever since. He’s also gay, and came out as gay long before he came out as illegal; but being gay, the easiest avenue to legal status, marriage, wasn’t a possibility.  Jose’s website is here: http://defineamerican.com/

Here’s the take from the right–David Foster.

Here’s pushback on Foster’s arguments.

On the question whether Vargas will be deported.

Ezra Klein comments.

And a whiny blogpost from one of his employers. Pathetic.

The Southern Baptist Convention published a statement about illegal immigration last week. It’s received considerable criticism. Here’s a reasonable op-ed piece in support.

The nature of a worshiping community

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Giles Fraser, who is Canon Chancellor of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London has some interesting things to say about the nature of community when 85% of those in attendance at services are visitors from around the world. We certainly have nothing like that percentage of visitors on a Sunday, but I continue to be surprised by how many we do have. Certainly most Sundays it’s probably over 10% and a goodly number of those are out-of-town visitors. Another substantial segment are people who attend from time to time, with no real interest in joining.Just in the last month, we’ve had visitors from Burkina Faso, Uganda, and Germany, as well as several people who grew up at Grace and left Madison decades ago. We’ve also had people who have attended once on a whim or a quest, and have returned Sunday by Sunday, week after week.

Even at our midweek service, where average attendance is less than 10, we’ll often have a visitor or two. More likely than not, that visitor is a young adult. Sometimes they will attend regularly for a few weeks or months, and we’ll never see them again. Others will drop in semi-regularly.

I wonder about these attendance patterns. I’m familiar with the church shopper, and will occasionally ask a visitor point-blank whether that’s what they’re doing, not to put them on the spot, but to put them at ease. People come to services for all sorts of reasons, often with no intention of making a deeper commitment to our parish. Sometimes they are checking us out; more often, I suspect, they are simply reaching out to fill a momentary need. All this runs against everything that I know about congregational development, and all of my past experience as a churchgoer, scholar, and priest. We are constantly told that the goal is to get visitors fully involved and hooked in. I’m no longer convinced that should be our primary goal. Rather, we should take seriously the implications of one of those mottoes that some churches like to use “You are welcome, wherever you are on your spiritual journey.” Our hospitality should extend as deeply to someone we may never see again, as it would to a young family we are hoping to attract into active membership.

Such attendance patterns put even more pressure on my commitment to excellence in worship and preaching. If we’ve only got one chance to reach them, we’d better pull out all of the stops (quite literally). But of course one never knows how the Spirit works. Even if things aren’t perfect, it’s quite possible that visitors and regular attenders alike are spiritually nourished.

Telling War Stories: The Civil War and the Meaning of Life

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Drew Gilpin Faust, President of Harvard University and eminent Civil War historian, has written a profound essay reflecting on our continuing fascination with the Civil War. She begins with the centennial commemoration, juxtaposing a reenactment of the First Battle of the Bull Run with MLK’s March on Washington, then she briefly outlines the intervening 50 years of historical reinterpretation of the war. But her real interest is with humanity’s fascination with war in general:

How is it that the human has become so entangled with the inhumane, and humanity’s highest creative aspirations of literature and imagination have been all but inseparable from its most terrible invention—the scourge of war? Most other creatures engage in violence, and some insects and animals with elaborate social structures reflect those systems in their modes of association 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.

Among her conjectures:

The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the divine. Its fascination lies in its ability at once to allure and to repel, in the paradox that thrives at its heart.

She discusses the “impossibility and necessity” of communicating war’s truths, for foot soldiers writing letters home, as well as for historians or novelists. Most importantly, she links war and narrative: “To rename violence as war is to give it teleology,” using the example of the invasion of Iraq to prove her point. The “war on terror” implies that “terrorism could be defeated, eliminated, that it need not be a permanent condition of modern life. We expect wars to come with endings.”

It’s well worth reading and pondering.

Food and Faith: Some links

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Scott Korb in Latham’s, on the moral ambiguity of eating, especially the question of meat-eating v. vegetarianism:

After spending time on a Virginia hog farm with Edna Lewis, it seems clear that deep and proper participation with plants and animals means raising them well and then living well by eating them. Plants and animals need us as much as we need plants and animals. Indeed, in this world dominated by industrial agriculture, the lives and needs of animals could not be more desperate.

Walter Brueggeman on the “food fight” in Scripture: A battle between “aggressive accumulation” exemplified by Pharaoh’s stockpiling in advance of famine and “grateful abundance” that includes the concepts of creation, doxology, and Sabbath.

An essay from The Other Journal on the church potluck:

That’s why I groan, finally, over the church potluck. If anyone is going to feed me, I want Jesus to do it. I want him to be my host. I want to be his guest. In the meantime, I have the casserole queen and the pot­providence elder and the brownie-mouthed children, all of us desperate for the same thing. We are doing, each of us, what we can to host each other and to be each other’s guests. At the church potluck, all distinc­tions between guest and host are gone. We are neither. We are both. We need more than we can say, more than we can give.

The Other Journal issue on “Food and Flourishing” begins with an interview with Norman Wirzba on his recent book Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating:

At the end of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan has this party scene where he, along with his friends, puts together a meal where everything has been either hunted or gathered. They’ve spent a lot of time preparing this big feast, and as they’re sitting around the table, he says that he was longing for a language that wasn’t at his disposal. It was the kind of language that he would call a religious sort of language, the sacred. And I think Pollan’s right in suggesting that this is the direction that you have to go if you’re going to talk about food in its real depth. I respect and have learned a lot from Pollan—I think he’s got a lot of very important things to teach us—but I think you have to go further, you have to go in the direction of theology, because you have to be able to deal with the fact that eating is a matter of life and death.

Believing Bullsh**

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Philosopher Stephen Law wrote the above-titled book. Its subtitle is: “How not to get sucked into an intellectual blackhole.” In an interview, he explains some of his ideas.

Here’s part of it:

What else should we watch out for?
You should be suspicious when people pile up anecdotes in favour of their pet theory, or when they practise the art of pseudo-profundity – uttering seemingly profound statements which are in fact trite or nonsensical. They often mix in references to scientific theory to sound authoritative.

Why does it matter if we believe absurd things?
It can cause no great harm. But the dangers are obvious when people join extreme cults or use alternative medicines to treat serious diseases. I am particularly concerned by psychological manipulation. For charlatans, the difficulty with using reason to persuade is that it’s a double-edged sword: your opponent may show you are the one who is mistaken. That’s a risk many so-called “educators” aren’t prepared to take. If you try using reason to persuade adults the Earth’s core is made of cheese, you will struggle. But take a group of kids, apply isolation, control, repetition, emotional manipulation – the tools of brainwashing – and there’s a good chance many will eventually accept what you say.

He has this to say about the appeal to “mystery.” It’s often used as an out when science can’t (yet) answer a question. Often the response is something like such a question is beyond the ability of science to decide. But the problem is “the more we rely on mystery to get us out of intellectual trouble, or the more we use it as a carpet under which to sweep inconvenient facts, the more vulnerable we are to deceit, by others and by ourselves.”

Mark Vernon uses Law’s ideas to reflect on the importance of discernment in spiritual matters and to reflect on the limits of reason. He appeals to the importance of apophatic theology (the idea that the only true statements one can make about God are negations–i.e., statements about what God is not.

But he goes further and talks about another way in which reason is limited. For Vernon, there is something pre-rational that is necessary before reason comes into play, experience for example, that it is from experience, intution, hunches, perhaps the way we approach the world, that we use reason to put that experience into context, and make it palatable both to ourselves, and perhaps to others.

 

What is Progressive Christianity

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Patheos, which has developed into a great site on matters religious, recently opened its “Progressive Christianity Portal.” They are hosting a symposium on “What is Progressive Christianity?” that includes input from Brian McLaren, Diana Butler Bass, Phyllis Tickle and other notables. Given the recent controversy over whether Jim Wallis and Sojourners belonged within the big tent of Progressive Christianity, it’s an important question.

I’ve never been comfortable with the label, any more than I was comfortable with the label “liberal.” Perhaps my dis-ease comes from the Eight Points of Progressive Christianity posted by progressivechristianity.org. There is, among these eight items, no reference to God, let alone the Trinity. Instead, appeal is made to the Sacred and Oneness of Life.

To be sure, many of those writing about “What is Progressive Christianity?” would have no problem with using Trinitarian or Christocentric language. Still, I agree with Fred Schmidt’s observation that:

Classically, for Christianity, sacred or divine mystery has been a term applied to the limits of what can be known about the ways of God as understood in the Christian tradition. But, true to the leading lights of Progressive Christianity, Ms. Astle describes the identity of God itself as the mystery.

We shall see how the conversation develops.

Update on the Anglican Covenant

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Well. Things seem to be getting interesting (if only behind the scenes in the Episcopal Church) ENS reports that Executive Council received a report from its Anglican Covenant Task Force. Among other things, it was said that they would not publicizea paper from the Standing Commission on Constitution and Canons detailing the necessary changes to the Constitution and Canons in order to comply with the Covenant. This has raised more than a few eyebrows. The Episcopal Lead’s take is here. The ENS report is here.

Unlike our leadership, our friends to the north have released both their full document and an executive summary.

The Episcopal Church of Scotland has also begun its discussion of the Covenant. Thinking Anglicans reports. In his introduction to the conversation, the Primus of that Church, said:

What matters is whether we in this church – the heirs to those who consecrated Seabury – feel that the Anglican Covenant is a reasonable and proper step to safeguard and enrich the life of an ever more diverse Communion – or whether we feel that it makes less likely the very quality of Communion life which we seek.

Mark Harris has this to say.

Lionel Deimel comments on the developments in Canada and in our own Executive Council here. He also muses here and comments extensively on sections 1 and 2 here and here. No Anglican Covenant keeps track of developments and resources.

Like others, I find it worrisome that the report about the necessary constitutional and canonical changes has not been released. That suggests to me that adoption of the Anglican Covenant would require significant restructuring of the Episcopal Church. To make such changes is not simply a matter of organization, it gets to the heart of what we understand our Church to be, how we attempt to incarnate the Body of Christ as the Episcopal Church. It goes to the heart of our theology, faith and life together.