lights go out

When I have had to go into the woods alone, especially at night, it has usually been difficult. The Army prides itself on building mental toughness, but sometimes just walking down that darkened hallway is hard enough for me. I have forsworn taking the garbage out at night, since the dumpster area reminds me of a scene from a horror movie. I let my husband brave the zombies. My fear of the "I know not what" in the woods, my "Pan-ic," (a great etymology from the mythical Greek god Pan, that whimsically dangerous forest-dweller) gets the better of me more often than I would like. Is it a function of loneliness--the feeling of vulnerability that comes of not having anyone in your corner? This might explain how hard I had to work to control my fear when the Army would send me into the night woods to navigate my way to various points during training. I would do anything--typically bribe a small dog on the premises with food, or mumble aloud to myself--to keep from remembering how alone I was in the woods. I tried to ennoble it by calling it an exercise in solitude: just me, my compass, my map, and the stars... I may have been deluding myself. After all, it didn't really help: I now will do anything to avoid walking the trash out at night! Or is it a kind of socialized laziness--the settled comfort of knowing I can send my husband out in the dark, allowing me to keep the luxury of my most vivid fears, rather than face them? I don't seem to be any less jumpy when it's just the two of us camping. The only time this night paranoia seems to take a back seat is when I am with a large group of people.

When I walk through the woods with my children at night, to help them find a place to pee or to show them the constellations, will they sense my shallow breathing and darting eyes, and wonder how on earth I used to be a Soldier? Or, will they think I am their Amazon protectress, and wonder why they themselves don't feel braver in the world? I hope they do neither. I often wish I were not so afraid of my own imagination.

jack the ripper houdini

Today I'm in awe of my fish. An African lemon cichlid, he is such a beautifully colored, inquisitive little predator. We can't agree on a name for him, so he is alternately Jack and Houdini: the latter because when he was smaller, he once got stuck in the neck of a green soda bottle in his tank, and went in and out of panic mode for almost an hour while figuring out how to escape. But any sympathy for him is short-lived when you consider that he has repeatedly attacked and finally eaten two other blue cichlids of a sister species, as well as a plecostomus. In every case, we were on vacation, and he truly "left no trace." We finally have a pleco who's bigger than he is, so I hope he'll be safe when we leave for the holidays. And then there is Buddha, a small, polka-dotted pleco who's been with him since the beginning, but who is always given over to a kind of trans-existential meditation. I think Jack thinks Buddha so strange and un-fishly that he leaves him alone. Buddha has been known to immerse himself in profound studies of otherness--transforming himself into a hermit crab, and then a barnacle for weeks on end. I can't put any more shells in the tank, or we'll never see him again: when I finally got him out of the barnacle last year, his face was kind of smashed and he didn't look right for a few days. We were hoping the other pleco would teach him how to be one, but no dice. He sometimes rummages around the back of the tank along the ground, but mostly stays totally still, having given up all worldly pursuits in favor of enlightenment. All the while his buddha-belly gets rounder and rounder. Maybe he has a tumor. I don't know, but I feel responsible for them--for their little world, which I in a sense created. I am their sustainer for all practical purposes, and I hate it when there is hunger and death and toxic chemicals and bouts of uneighborliness. I know that I anthropomorphize Jack, especially. He is so yellow and so stuck on himself, he's hard to ignore. He's been swimming up and down all day today, exploring the new dimensions of the tank after I gave back an inch and a half of water that had evaporated. There is a water lily I put in there that just won't grow beyond a few sprigs, because he constantly eats at its roots. Far from paradise, but oh, to be just a fish sometimes. Things are quieter by virtue of being louder, underwater.

bean counting

Just came back from a long bullshit session with a fellow lieutenant and my commander after work. It started out pleasantly enough, but by the end I was drained, and sorry I had stayed after work to enjoy the boots-on-the-table camaraderie. The subject of debate, which started with politics and moved to the deficiencies of the public school system, turned into both of them trying to convince me that math, as the "universal language," is the most important subject of all. If civilization ended tomorrow, they postulated, we could do without Shakespeare, but the Pythagorean Theorem would be indispensable. I responded that since mathematical concepts are usually predicated upon the use of characters whose meanings are derived from language, I considered both language and math to be equally important. Guffaws ensued, as apparently nothing could be allowed to share the stage with math. This particularly pissed me off, because from what I gather of our conversations about undergraduate study, I was the most balanced student of the three of us, consistently applying myself, excelling in and appreciating all of my classes--in high school, I can honestly say that trigonometry and statistics were a joy, even if they came a little less easily than English and Spanish, the subjects I later majored in in college. I suggested that they try to communicate one single mathematical concept, such as addition, without using speech. Neither even attempted to do it, but somehow I walked away as the one "without a clue." My husband, normally a bastion of literary and l'arte pour l'arte soapboxes, is off getting in touch with his bean-counting* side during Army Reserve training this weekend, and I couldn't find any like minds online. I just had to sigh and immerse myself in internet surfing. Ughh. I don't belong here! (By which I mean, I don't belong here longterm, of course...)

*"Bean-counting" is a phrase (I don't remember if I ever heard it outside the Army) that refers to painstaking accountability of people, equipment, training, and other resources. I would say that 90% of what I do all day, every day, is associated with some slide where we have to brief exactly (which is an art and science) what we have, how much we still need to meet the standard (by regulation or a higher headquarters' articulated standard), and exactly how we are going to make up the difference. For example, the silliest thing happened one month, when a tiny, antiquated piece of equipment almost became the subject of hot debate. It had been identified as missing several months prior, and was probably being phased out, as the Army decided to take our authorizations for it from a large number (say, 50) down to 0 very suddenly. Yet the equipment was still listed as required for our mission. Unless you read our MTOE (Modified Table of Organization and Equipment) very carefully, you would wonder why the numbers were suddenly showing us as less ready than we were the previous month to go to war. We had to scrub that thing inside and out before we figured it out. The issue ended up being that this tiny piece of equipment, which we had suspected for months as missing, had finally been updated in our property book to show the shortage. My commander and I scratched our heads, trying to figure out how to brief this, neither wanting to draw attention to the missing piece of equipment, which had already been paid for out of pocket, as per regulation. In the end, we decided (and this is the artful piece) not to even bring up the change, which was staring our commander in the face on the slide, unless asked. It worked--he was so preoccupied that he didn't even notice, which gives us time to try and order a replacement and work through other channels to get our readiness rating back to perfect. That, in sum, is bean-counting. I have to believe that it is a valuable skill, and I don't underestimate the human component to it: logistics are everywhere, and the ability to manage resources is something I've come to appreciate because of my worldview. I see people as stewards or managers of the world, responsible for its care, and when it comes to securing resources for my family, classroom, or school district, I think it will probably come in handy. It does force you to appreciate and dignify people around you whose work touches logistics --from the bus driver, to the chief custodian, to the maintenance guy... it is a beautifully complex world we live in. My only frustration with last night's dialogue at work was that I bend over backwards to access my mathematical, right-brain, and masculine sides every day at work. I just wish sometimes it were more reciprocated by my colleagues who seem at times to live in those hemispheres almost exclusively.

tension is to be loved

My husband and I went on Columbus Day weekend to Dallas, visiting with my college roommate, her husband, and family, as well as my dad who happened to be visiting his girlfriend. We heard Anne Graham Lotz speak on Sunday morning--a simple message from a complex passage surrounding the vision of the prophet Ezekiel. Anne drew from the supernatural beings of Ezekiel's vision--who are a composite of mythical creatures and who seem to defy description by their occupance of time, space, color--a picture of the characteristics of God. The appearance of winged man, lion, ox, and eagle are already well established christological symbols, corresponding to the nuanced portrayals of Christ in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. On many a church facade the writers of the four gospels are often depicted as these figures, so close was the correlation between Ezekiel's vision, these four pictures of God, and the accounts of Christ in the gospels in the mind of church tradition. A complete rundown of the allegory can be found at the following link:
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/reference/four-evangelists.htm

Suffice it to say that Anne conveyed, with a distinct blend of Eastern Seaboard and Southern Bible Belt sensibilities, a simple message from the passage: when we are at our most disillusioned, Christ comes in royal strength and power, offering himself as our intermediary, as one who has shared in our suffering humanity, as the one who is still sovereign, soaring over all of our circumstances, and toward whose purposes all of life still tends. What struck me in her exegetical approach was that, even though she was standing on rock solid ground when it came to church interpretive tradition of the text, she did not mention it once. I appreciated the connection between her interpretation and art that I had seen in Europe, along with the minutia imparted to me in my college Christian theology class, silently. The effect was that I was quickened, riveted--such aesthetic connections bring me satisfaction and pleasure in a way that I can actually feel physically, as if I had just had the first bite of a pie just taken from my own oven, or been given a kite to fly. The excitement these connections generate for me can only be properly called part of my worship experience.

Whether Anne also relished that connection is unclear to me; she can't have been totally unaware of it, with her education and exposure to the world. Though her father Billy always deferred to her as the better preacher of the two, I saw his influence in her decision not to make a show of erudition or "dropping names," so to speak, by making this longstanding connection in church tradition between the four heavenly creatures. Perhaps it is the American evangelical way to avoid "vain knowledge that puffeth up," or the need to distance oneself from all liturgical impulses within the church. I would have liked to hear her mention it, since the ability to recognize such patterns in old buildings, stained glass, illuminated manuscripts, poetry and prose, remind me that American evangelicals are not the first to try to bring the tenets of the faith and the person of Christ to the people--to make them come alive in allegory and color, making known the hidden knowledge of God. The effect her omission of this detail seemed to have on her message, however, was to add freshness and relevance that drew the whole hour toward a single insight: the presence of Christ on his throne. Anne's catchphrase and book title "Just Give Me Jesus" rang appropriately with the preeminence of the divine relationship and presence, even if I would have preferred to revel in the mystery of the otherworldy messengers, their movement, the rushing of wings, and the expanse "like ice" above their heads. I could get bogged down alternately in the symbolism of each description, or in creating a pictorial image of each. As I sit here I think I subconsciously must want to write a paper connecting this vision to Christ in each of the gospels, characteristic by characteristic. But what Anne did stylistically was to draw attention to her real theme: the consolation of a God who is enthroned, yet comes to speak into our despondency:

Then there came a voice from above the expanse over their heads as they stood with lowered wings. Above the expanse over their heads was what looked like a throne of sapphire,and high above on the throne was a figure like that of a man. I saw that from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire, and that from there down he looked like fire; and brilliant light surrounded him. Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. When I saw it, I fell facedown, and I heard the voice of one speaking.

It is this speaking that most captivates me about the passage now, though it took me too long to pay attention to it. Wading through the images to get to the words:

He said to me, "Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you." As he spoke, the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet, and I heard him speaking to me.

And later in the passage:

"The people to whom I am sending you are obstinate and stubborn. Say to them, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says.' And whether they listen or fail to listen—for they are a rebellious house—they will know that a prophet has been among them. And you, son of man, do not be afraid of them or their words. Do not be afraid, though briers and thorns are all around you and you live among scorpions... You must speak my words to them, whether they listen or fail to listen, for they are rebellious. But you, son of man, listen to what I say to you. Do not rebel like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you."

As intimidating as it is to have God put words in your mouth that must be spoken to others, regardless of their receptivity, I love especially that God uses disillusionment here as a catalyst for his cause. Into the vacuous space of disappointment and even resentment, God can speak his solution, his Being into the not-being of our unrealized hopes. I find this so comforting, because in my nascent professional life of nearly three years, I have never been so easily frustrated, embittered, or disillusioned. These moments for me rarely possess that epic quality of unrest portrayed by the protagonists in the movies, where sorrow comes only for a few scenes, and joy comes bursting through--just in time for the overcoming chords of a triumphant musical score--to resolve all the pain and trials before the credits roll. My frustrations are of a more persistent and thereby corrosive nature: the longer I spend with them, the less I feel like an overcomer, and quotidian pressures often keep me from rising above my own disillusionment in a way that feels resolved or accomplished. Nevertheless, I have found that God visits and speaks, if not with flashing and sapphire, between the dishes and the dust of the morning commute. If we take what he puts into our mouths during such visits, chew and digest them, and speak them out to the intended audience, we in those moments become co-creators with God, co-intercessors, co-heirs, and co-restorers of the broken world. Hearing Anne speak reminded me of this reality, once very natural to me, but now more awkward with age and the knowledge that often, the intended audience will not receive the word that God has given you for them. That is the risk, I suppose, of joining in any divine venture this side of heaven.

The primary cause of our trek to Dallas--the U2 concert itself--was also well worth it. I felt as if I hadn't missed out on decades of listening to them, because they played some of the old stuff and some of the new. Bono, as is his wont, got preachy about fighting injustice and hunger, and Rev. Desmond Tutu addressed the audience in a video presentation...it was all meaningful. I about lost it--no, wait, I did loose it, thinking of my mom and grandma, and the throbbing sea of humanity around me--when they played Where the Streets Have No Name. I knew it wasn't quite church, or heaven on earth, that we were experiencing, but there were shadows and glimpses of it enough. It was a very good concert, in the sense that you couldn't really say that it was all a vanity. They were realizing their vocation as spiritual creatures--artists, at that--by making the most exquisite music. Bono remind me of David dancing before the ark, a comparison made by my husband's college roommate that has stuck with us.

And then, afterwards, ears throbbing, the onset of a headache coming on, I was lost in a dreamworld, like Mary, treasuring what I had seen and heard in my heart. I was reaching for my husband's hand (he was a zombie, too), and walking past some floor-level boxes when a row of middle-aged, wealthy-looking men, leaning over their box rail said something to me and started laughing and whistling. I didn't register it at first, but my husband Z later confirmed that they had, with the drunken camaraderie of nostalgic fraternity brothers, offered me $20 to see my "titties." I had not even worn a shirt with a low neckline, as I wanted to be comfortable, and I burned with anger for hours after hearing him repeat what I thought I'd heard them say. Z got mad, too, and had either of us not been so distantly preoccupied with nobler, more heavenly things, we both probably would have cussed them up and down and caused a scene. But it was like that space between a dream and waking up where you fight to stay asleep--we couldn't rouse ourselves enough to be angry or even make eye contact in the moment, and just kept walking. So, as I was rudely reminded, it was not church--not even close. But if that concert was like heaven, then they were like the fool who, having been invited after the first string of guests refused to come, came to the wedding feast in the wrong clothes, and for being so out of tune, was thrown out "where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 8).

suits, salaries and the second grade

Of the handful of perplexing childhood experiences I can recall, I will recount one that still has emotional resonance for me as an adult. It was a restless afternoon, and my second grade classroom could not contain me. I had been dutiful all day, completing my assignments on time. Now, faced with another bluish ink-on-white ditto, I was coming quietly unglued. It was the equivalent of someone telling you to run until you reached the horizon, and spending all day in pursuit of it, the “Aha!” moment comes too late: there is no line to be reached at the edge of the world! I had, of course, hoped my teacher might run out of work to give us. If I finished everything well ahead of many of my peers, I bargained with myself, I might be afforded some time to daydream… This would not be the last time I was devastated by the reality that in life, one never runs out of work—there is always more than can be thought up by whoever is running the show.

Staring at my blank, crisp ditto worksheet, I became aware of my curious, love-hate relationship with it. Worksheets, after all, can give you a great sense of accomplishment upon completion. There, on one page, are contained all the fruits of your labor for the last hour. Turning in the finished product is gratifying, and a tremendous relief if it was a requirement to move on to something else. On the other hand, worksheets represent all things painfully necessary, quotidian, and compartmental. Worksheets are wickets that must be negotiated along a course set out by someone else for you to complete. By what authority do they establish these wickets? Who can say, when a bright, balmy Charleston afternoon is busy convincing you to forget the arbitrary requirements of the classroom and wander outside to discover only what you will, when you will. I wanted to be skating around the cul-de-sac at home, jarring bugs with my sister on the brush trails behind our fence—anything but sitting at a futile desk with the scent of dirt and stale sweat still on my skin from recess (hours ago), staring at the lines on that ditto copy. The purply, blurred edges of the words and shapes on it reminded me of the autumn sunset we would have to be dragged indoors from later that evening. Staring out the window, I forgot my worksheet, leaving it half done.

When I was dragged, unwillingly, back to an awareness of the classroom activities, I scrambled to complete it, realizing that I had slipped behind the others in my work. I recall a small bell ringing from the teacher’s desk, and a shuffling in the row next to ours. Suddenly, I noticed that my desk-neighbors in front and behind were taking their seats. I had not noticed them get up, and swung my head around to follow the stream of feet to the teacher’s desk at the back of the classroom. Mrs. C, our teacher, was intent upon collecting all the completed worksheets as each student passed her desk. She was pleasant, but not smiling as much as usual.

I liked Mrs. C, and often felt very conspiratorial with her because her husband was my piano teacher, and she would send messages about lunch dates and groceries to him by me when I was dismissed from class to attend my lessons in the music department. As I watched her at her desk, I detected that she was also passing something out to students from a bucket as she received their assignments. I turned and looked at the others in my row, busy unwrapping things and popping them into their mouths, and immediately joined the queue since I had apparently missed my chance to turn in my worksheet and receive one of whatever good thing was in that bucket. As I straggled up to her desk, full of expectation, I handed her my work and was panicked to see that the bucket was nowhere in sight. I asked her about it, and explained that I had missed the bell for my row and was just now coming to turn in my worksheet. “That’s fine, H.,” she said, “but you were late. Please pay better attention next time.” She rose to return to the front of the class. I started to point out her oversight, and to inquire about my access to the bucket, but she stopped me and instructed me to return to my desk. I had missed my opportunity, and ought to have been more vigilant.

I returned to my desk out of sorts, my face on fire. I did not cry, but something caught in my throat. I did not understand how my infraction—arriving with another row because I had missed the bell—deserved this deprivation. The candy was still there, wasn’t it? She could take it back out as quickly as she’d put it away, no harm done, and I’d have promised to pay better attention and come when called. The girl in front of me had turned around just in time to see me returning empty-handed, and to save face, I whispered, “I didn’t even want one of those things anyway.” Mrs. C called my name from the front of the class and instructed me to take a place in the back corner facing the wall, until she released me. I had never been sent to the corner in all my life, and this was public humiliation. My face was hot, my hands clammy as I stared at the blank corner until she admonished me not to talk out of turn anymore and to return to my seat. I was still reeling from perceived incongruities and injustices suffered at her hand, but relieved at being allowed to return to my seat to serve the rest of my penance under knowing looks from my peers and the relentless, dragging minute hand on the clock that would release me for the day.

That memories still have the power to recreate the physiological effects of shame, anger, and frustration when recalled years later speaks to the persistence of unresolved experiences. I still blush when I think about this encounter. As crises go, it was a small one with no real trauma associated. But what was the point of it? I was one of Mrs. C’s most consistent high-performers, and I knew this from her comments on my report cards which my mom read with us when they were mailed home. What was the purpose of denying me access to the bucket of goodies she had so industriously meted out to the rest of the class, one by one? Was she trying to teach me a classic lesson, “You snooze, you lose?” Did she think that it would be merciful to teach me early in life not to try and get by on my merits—that I must pay attention like everyone else to deadlines and windows of opportunity that elapse and slam shut without respecting persons? Perhaps she was simply tired that day, and felt the minutes crawling too slowly by until she could escape home to do what she willed, when she willed it. Perhaps she brushed aside my neediness in the aftermath of a mistake, in order to recollect herself in the front of the classroom and to focus on the final tasks of the day. Whatever it was, it still irks me.

It irks me because as an adult I have been on the other side of that desk, at work, and chosen to accept the late product from a subordinate or co-worker, to endure my sense of the five o’clock blues in order to see the relief wash over their faces. I rarely send someone away for arriving even a half-hour late if I can help it. It doesn’t usually serve the purpose of mission accomplishment in my line of work to do so: everyone is on a tight timeline, and chances are they had to wait on someone else who made them late, and will be running late to the next place, too. I might as well help them.

On the other hand, in college and in the Army I have been penalized for missing a deadline, or simply missing out on something that could only be offered for a finite amount of time. Cajoling and eliciting sympathy by arriving out of breath, papers and cell phones fluttering about you will only get you so far. Sometimes the window is just closed, the clock cannot be turned back, and thing proceeds with or without you, no matter how outstanding your performance record is or how well-liked you are. To provide me, perhaps inadvertently, with an early illustration of this in a rather arbitrary fashion does not make Mrs. C a poor teacher, merely a human one. Knowing how and when to respond to students when they err, how to make object lessons intentional and transparent rather than utterly bewildering and confusing is riddled with obstacles. Accurate transmission of a well-guided teaching point is the goal, but there may be many different ways to reach that goal, and none that work every time for every learner. If I were to use an object lesson to enforce a principle (like timeliness) with the aim of developing punctuality in a student, I would keep this event in mind. Even with the best of intentions from an educator, it is just as likely that the student will be so hurt, puzzled, or confused about the consequences that they will either miss the lesson entirely, or feel justified in foisting their own arbitrariness upon future children, students, or employees. Weighing the pros and cons of the candy bucket lesson, I’m not sure that the means truly supported the end, or that the end was achieved: I continue to be a perennial idealist, inclined to think that if people like me and like my work, they will cut me some slack—within reason—when I fail, and I in turn will do the same for them.

This brings me back to reflect on the original purpose of the ditto worksheet. As a drill or rehearsal, the worksheet can be viewed as preparation for what is arguably the most joyless aspect of adult life: paperwork. The more I think about that ditto sheet, its insipid disguise as a stepping stool into the tedium of sundry request forms, staff estimates, periodic reports, memoranda, and proposals, the more frustrating the scenario replays in my mind. What is the point of a worksheet, but to beat people down at an early age, to teach them the necessary evil of a paper trail to show that they actually exist, that they have a seat in the room, that they actually know something, that they can contribute, learn, or make progress? Of course, life, work and education as we know them would be impossible without documentation and deadlines. The challenge, then, is to teach students how to observe and employ them without becoming cogs in a machine of well-documented work. If one can teach a child, or an adult, how to do this while still regarding the person as more than a representative slip of paper, or a late customer, I would judge that person to be a successful teacher.

lone star

When you occupy a piece of ground early in the day, and watch it shift from afternoon into twilight, you experience an unexpected intimacy with the landscape. When evening comes, and the lengthening shadows constrict your easy movement around roots, holes, and sylvan debris, your senses are quickened but you still feel at home in that space. Not so when thrust into a place where night has already come before you. There are other eyes that watch you comfortably, alert, having spent the day where darkness has fallen. You are the one who doesn't belong--you have not become a part of the landscape and your clumsiness in the night gives your near-panic away.

I saw so many shooting stars this week, out in the field with my Soldiers. Each night we were in a different location, but whether in the slick, humid woods or out in the open grass we could see the stars. Do stars shoot through the sky all the time, and we just can't see it because of all the light pollution around us? There may have been an extraordinary amount of meteoric activity lately, but I didn't waste a single shooting star. I wished I was home, I wished I were a better wife, I wished my mother were still alive. Wild horses checked our perimeter, and I wished I could coax one into letting me ride.

I asked my platoon sergeant, who also noticed the extraordinary stellar activity, if he ever felt overwhelmed by a feeling that he married someone so wonderful that it was hard to believe they ever fought, or did anything but stay very, very close to each other for hours on end. He said that this feeling snuck up on him often while he was away from her. He and his wife have children and are decades ahead of me in life, but I was contented to hear him say this. It does keep growing, the needing and loving and wanting not to be apart. It made me feel less childish that I was really, deeply, missing my husband while on a short training event less than an hour away. Sometimes I wonder what we will do if/when either of us deploys. How did my parents do it? I have no answers, only the vague apprehension that it is virtually uncharted territory, and the only existing maps are lopsided and contain warnings that "Beyond Here There Be Monsters." It is one thing to miss your dad for six months every year, as I did growing up. This will be another thing entirely.

wedding dress

My dad's girlfriend recently emailed me an interesting quote, attributed most often to Rev. Sam Pascoe (the former priest of Grace Anglican Church who was defrocked for having an inappropriate relationship with a parishioner, was repentant, rehabilitated, and later reinstated under the bishop of Uganda):

Christianity started in Palestine as a fellowship;
it moved to Greece and became a philosophy;
it moved to Italy and became an institution;
it moved to Europe and became a culture;
it came to America and became an enterprise.

(It might be added that, where it has gone from the West to the East, from developed countries into developing ones, Christianity has manifested itself in many combinations and extensions of all five of these.) While the quote itself is insightful, I was more impressed by a particular response to the quote, recounted by David Ryser, founder of RawReligion.com, which "seeks to explore topics surrounding nontraditional expressions of Christianity, commonly referred to as 'organic church' or 'simple church.'" The site generates "content that looks at the implications of life outside the four walls of the institutional church," including book reviews and website introduction. The site heralds what it terms an “ecclesiastical revolution” that is "far-reaching and has the momentum to change the expression of Christianity in a single generation... [the revolution] draws on the principles and concepts of the early church, and may rightly be called instead a 'returning'":

It is not about building a new structure or marketing edge. It is about returning to the natural, simple, and organic expression of the Body of Christ. The book of Acts and Paul’s epistles display timeless principles about the spiritual DNA of the ekklesia (or “Church”).

Back to the quote, when Ryser shared this simplified version of how Christianity has progressed from fellowship to enterprise, he paused for dramatic effect, and then reminded his class that an enterprise is essentially a business. He was stunned by the insightful response of a student in his class:

She asked such a simple question: "A business? But isn't it supposed to be a body?" I could not envision where this line of questioning was going, and the only response I could think of was, "Yes." She continued, "But when a body becomes a business, isn't that a prostitute?

This is precisely the sentiment expressed by songwriter Derek Webb in "Wedding Dress":

If you could love me as a wife
and for my wedding gift, your life
Should that be all I'd ever need
or is there more I'm looking for

and should I read between the lines
and look for blessings in disguise
To make me handsome, rich, and wise
Is that really what you want

I am a whore I do confess
But I put you on just like a wedding dress
and I run down the aisle
and I run down the aisle
I?m a prodigal with no way home
but I put you on just like a ring of gold
and I run down the aisle to you

So could you love this bastard child
Though I don't trust you to provide
With one hand in a pot of gold
and with the other in your side

I am so easily satisfied
by the call of lovers so less wild
That I would take a little cash
Over your very flesh and blood

Because money cannot buy
a husband's jealous eye
When you have knowingly deceived his wife

What concerns me is that Martha and Derek are both quite right--many facets of the American church exhibit a shameless kind of advertising and overall seductive behavior. I don't ever get the feeling in Scripture that Jesus was schmaltzing people like a used car salesman--if anything, he warned fully of the liabilities involved in following his teachings. Yet so many Christians seem to be trying to sell you something when they evangelize. I have even been in the awkward position where I felt that I, too, had to propagandize others in order to be faithful to the mandate of sharing the Gospel. But in the end, sharing the gospel without sharing life with people, getting to know them as fellow human beings, brothers and sisters, is like stripping down and having sex with a total stranger. Even the Sinner's Prayer with which some quickie evangelists like to "seal the deal" feels purely transactional and not relational at all. It is like the money or the awkward words exchanged after making a purchase: "Thank you, come again!" While some groups of believers make a whore out of the Church by this dubious "selling" of the message of Christ, others (as I have tried to discuss in other posts here) exhibit a haggardness--the resignation of a lazy housewife who is selling herself short. Neither the prostitute nor the mumu-clad matron are aiming for the total vitality, virtue, and radiance befitting a bride of Christ. So when we go to church on Sunday in many American churches, we either go to be seduced by their hustle act, or to be spiritually complacent, chubby, and tired. Those of us who can endure neither of these options are tempted to avoid church. These two choices are, of course, a false dilemma: living out our faith in the context of Christian community is still a worthy endeavor, even if it seems elusive. The third option, and what that might look like, is the question of the day.

premonition of grief

I was watching " Seven Pounds" with my husband several weeks ago. The scene is irrelevant, but at one point during the movie, something washed over me that is barely accountable in words. The kind of desperate sobs I emitted are by now not strange to my husband; he tightened the circle his arms made around me and pressed his head closer to mine, as if to better hear and interpret my reverberations and gurglings. I felt, with a surety that clenched my whole ribcage and sucked the air from my lungs, how unbearable it will be to lose him to death. Beyond that, I have run out of words. To account for how long and how deeply this feeling racked me, this glimpse of a particular, eventual bereavement, I have to borrow words from Stuart Townend's hymn "How Great the Father's Love for Us":

How great the pain of searing loss...

Perhaps it is my conviction that very few of us actually have one single "soul mate" to find in the world, but rather a handful of people with whom we could find love and happiness. Perhaps it is my utter lack of certainty in nearly all worthy endeavors prior to making that leap of commitment, and taking the first steps that, gaining momentum, convince me that this was my path all along. Perhaps it is the happy contradiction that my husband defies the model of compatibility I would have chosen when we first became friends, and when I was looking elsewhere for love--that our friendship, and then our romance, have been a pleasurable experiment across culture, affiliation, lifestyles and temperament. Each of these things precludes for me the kind of immutable "in love" experience where we are both deadsure that "we are meant to be together." I deal in endless possibility, and so am able to hypothesize what life would have been like if we had chosen different people, different paths. But in the aftermath of losing my mother and grandmother--two women who I could not have chosen but who rather chose me--I have encountered a new kind of certainty about the people I am committed to. It would be morbid to base everything on this, but allowing the possibility of someone's absence to sneak up on me, to imagine for a moment life after their departure, is quite helpful in determining how much they mean to me, how intertwined our lives have become. The strength of my grief parallels the strength of my love for my husband: I know only that without him, life would be shabby, so many shades of grey, that my howling would go on for months--even years--upon discovering his absence. It is proof of the thing's existence by the vacuum, the shockwaves felt in its absence--about as close as I can get to being deadsure of anything.

...
The stone was semiprecious
We were barely conscious
Two souls too smart to be
In the realm of certainty
Even on our wedding day
We lit ourselves on fire
Oh, God not deny her
It's not if I believe in love
but if love believes in me
Oh, believe in me
...

U2 "Moment of Surrender" from 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon

whose arm doth reach the ocean floor

Growing up the daughter of a submariner, I was always fascinated by the raw beauty and power of the sea. Its proximity was partly to blame; until I went off to college, I had never lived in a land-locked place. The other reality that inspired my awe, however, was that the ocean was my father’s livelihood. Even as he knew how to navigate and operate within it, he lived constantly at its mercy.

As a little girl when I spoke of my father as being “at sea,” I really had no notion of the dangers he faced—he had helped teach my sisters and I how to swim, and for all I knew that’s what they did out “at sea,” diving off the deck and swimming with dolphins. The water, as I knew it then, was all glee and shimmer and launching off of his shoulders in the deep end. It was not until later that I began to appreciate the grisly possibilities associated with his seafaring deployments.

At a navy base chapel we attended when I was in 4th grade, I learned to sing the lines of a hymn which hung, cross-stitched by one of my mother’s friends, in the hallways of various homes we lived in:

Lord God, our power evermore

Whose arm doth reach the ocean floor

Dive with our men beneath the sea

Traverse the depths protectively

Lord, hear us when we pray and keep

Them safe from peril in the deep.

Its hauntingly beautiful melody gave me my first inkling of the risks involved in sea service. The second was when Dad began taking us to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I remember being speechless after viewing the new exhibit, “Planet of the Jellies,” where it first occurred to me that there were places in the ocean so dark that the creatures living there possessed their own bioluminescence as a substitute for sunlight. There was a theater where a mysterious woman narrated our odyssey into “The Deep Water,” and we learned that there were many strange creatures in the deepest, uncharted parts of the ocean where no human had ever been. When my father brought me home a compressed Styrofoam cup which had been subjected to the pressures of deep water, I began to see the ocean in the same way that I saw the moon: and I saw my dad as an astronaut. Even when his deployments waned to occasional crew drill assessments that lasted only weeks, I saw him as braving the elements, brandishing his grit and skill against the entropic forces of nature and human error.

When in high school, I attended the dedication ceremony for a local submarine veterans park commemorating all U.S. submarine crews ever lost, and I was struck by how many of them had fallen during peacetime due to fires, accidents and the relentless, unpredictable sea. It became clear to me that the fragility of my connection with my father during periods of sea duty was something I had not fully appreciated for much of the time he was gone. As I reconstruct my childhood deployment memories with this in mind, it strikes me that there were a few habits my father kept which made our relationship deceptively easy, and fostered an intimacy which I took for granted.

My father’s being frequently underway became so passé to me at an early age, that in a casual tea party with my grandfather at the age of three or four I commented, pinkie deftly poised in the air after a sip of air from my cup, “So anyways, my husband’s going to sea.” Clearly, I had heard my mother say something with her friends and was, customarily, mimicking her. I took all my cues from her regarding this otherwise strange arrangement whereby Dad disappeared for half of the year. I wore his t-shirts to bed at her suggestion, anticipated his rare phone calls when the boat had pulled into port, and planned all the things we would do when he got home. I recall my mother joking with other wives about the short, sound-bite messages called “family grams” periodically wired to the ship’s crew. There were running jokes of family grams that didn’t make sense or had been cut off and left with absurdly scant details, with unwitting double-entendres and accidental homophones. You eventually ran out of room for all the things you wanted to say, and had to make the most horrific cuts to squeeze a coherent message into those lines.

I also heard her talk about “mail drops,” which I envisioned as happening through some great tube lowered to the submarine through which the mail was shot or sucked into the great, central hatch I had often capered down on visits to the dock. (It was not until I had seen a helicopter perform a real mail drop on the Discovery Channel that it occurred to me the sub would have to come to the surface periodically.) What I always knew was that the preparation for a mail drop was very intentional, and required at least a day. There would be cards, pictures, and tapes of my sisters and me. These all required Mom’s patient arbitration between competing speakers, all eager to recite the newest rhyme and sing the newest song from school or church. My mother was a master at managing mood swings and petty squabbles to get each one of us to shine for our moment of expression on the stage she had created between the A and B sides of the cassette.

I recently heard a Father’s Day special on NPR’s This American Life entitled “Ask Your Father,” in which a grown man shared a collection of his tapes, which he had made for his father who was frequently at sea with the merchant marine. The recordings, ranging from 1^st to 7^th grade, quiver with a palpable yearning that his father would eventually use the B side of the tape (which he always left blank) to send him back a message. His father never did. When, as an adult, he asked his dad why, there was no good answer, only deep regret. Of course, he had listened to the tapes—he just never took into account that his son was really devastated that he did not reach back to him across the long distances.

I simply can’t imagine what having such a disengaged father would be like. If my mother bent over backwards to make deployments seem normal, my father more than met her halfway. I still have many of his postcards in my possession, which used to arrive monthly while he was away, even though the submarine did not have mail drops or pull into port as frequently. Some of them are postmarked from the exotic places whose pictures they bear; others of them are not postmarked at all. Rain or shine, birthday cards and flowers appeared, all bright and thoughtful. The best card I’ve ever received came on my birthday in Charleston, South Carolina and reads: “I’m proud of the kind of person you’re growing up to be… Love you, Dad.” I thought it was extremely serious a thing to say on a single-digit birthday—almost the kind of compliment you hear adults give each other with a slap on the back and a toast. It made me feel grown-up, and I saved it as much for that message as the shiny, embossed butterfly on the front. I later learned that my father would write many of these messages to each of us prior to deploying, so that they could be dispensed regularly even when he was out of contact. He also made friends with the local florist, who he customarily visited prior to each deployment to hand-write the cards that would appear in the bouquets that would automatically appear for each family member’s special day throughout his absence.

When my dad finally did come home each year, these same special occasions, missed once or twice before were doubly celebrated. He made us his priority when he was onshore—soccer games, dance classes, piano recitals—he was there. Math homework was suddenly not so intimidating, except for his periodic reminder that there was “no crying in math.” He seemed remarkably equipped to return from long absences and reestablish immediacy in his relationships with us, to affirm us, to amuse us, to hold us accountable and to talk us down from ledges. Perhaps his intuitive, highly verbal way of relating to us was thrust upon him, being surrounded with daughters. Maybe it was the hallmark of being his mother’s son—she had always been a highly expressive, passionate model of womanhood from the first. Whatever the source of my father’s knack for good communication, even from long distances and depths, I have found it to be a rare gift. It is noteworthy that this man who was absent for almost half of my childhood, has remained one of my closest friends in adulthood.

This friendship has been possible because my parents raised us on a rigorous policy of candor, in which there was little room for pouting or sidestepping when faced with the truth. I have learned to appreciate this, because you always know where you stand, and valuable information is never withheld, if you will dare to ask the question. This was never more comically obvious than when, at the mature age of six, I asked to know where babies came from. I knew that the bedroom played a part, but I thought that perhaps the event could occur while husband and wife held hands—their arm-skin forming a sort of semi-permeable membrane through which the baby-making materials could pass. My father quickly banished all such sci-fi renditions from my mind: we would have a meeting about it after the younger girls were in bed. That night, pulling the H encyclopedia from the shelf, he showed my sister S. and I its transparent layouts of the human body, complete with cardiovascular, muscular, digestive, and reproductive systems. That was how we got the birds and the bees talk—straight up, no chaser. These night conferences occurred whenever we had serious business to transact (a very similar one had taken place just a year before, when after my persistent nagging, my parents had prayed the sinner’s prayer with me one stormy Guam night in our living room). When invited to these powwows, we felt as if we had been initiated into some privileged world of mature responsibility—partly because we helped my parents convince my sisters we were still in bed, and also because we were treated as if we had a right to understand and discuss whatever was being presented there.

Predictably, my father has not always been a perfect communicator. There were times where the “honeymoon” period after his homecoming was followed by an abrupt adjustment for everyone. After being in the highly regulated world of a deployment, he could not fathom why the recycling wasn’t sorted properly, why everything wasn’t ship-shape. My mother jokingly referred to him as “Captain von Trapp” on such occasions. There have also been times, as each of us came of age and went off to college and the wide world beyond, where communication with Dad became strained, confusing, and full of power struggles. He has become famous for anchoring his perspective in a sea of hormones and emotions with such gems as “This offends my common sense!” and, “Can we all stop emoting here and just be rational?” (In recent years I have begun to deprive him even of those classics, rebutting him with recent neuroscience findings that the female brain is more highly adept at processing emotion, and therefore it is possible to be both emotional and rational at once. His point is well taken, however, that men and women view and solve problems quite differently, and that they ought to learn from one another constantly to avoid crippling extremes.) His attempts to remain himself while struggling against a swirling tide of changing, independent young women are admirable—a lesser man might have jumped ship long ago, settling for mediocre conversations and emotional distance.

Every god-fearing dad in some way strives to image our Heavenly Father, and I believe mine has done so most notably in his use of words—both spoken and written—that reach to us even from a long way off and remind us of who we are…who we are becoming. Even as I have struggled not to lose my faith in recent years, I carry a persistent image of God as an affirming and affectionate parent who does not shy away from the tough conversations, but confronts them with dignity and compassion. When I cannot hear God clearly or when it seems He has deployed His Spirit elsewhere and left me—de profundis clamo (“out of the depths I cry”), and I have fair certainty because he is my Father, that what is hidden will be made known in good time, that there is a postcard coming soon in the mail, that there is a late-night conversation that will elucidate things, and that our relationship will be continually made new.

the great satchmo

I spent the weekend in New Orleans with my husband and friends. The last time I visited the Mardi Gras Museum in Jackson Square, I recall being absorbed all day after with just a handful of photos and captions displayed there. They pertained to the Zulu tradition within Mardi Gras, and when I went back this week to discover a whole exhibit on the subject, it was automatic that I should go. I have compared this compulsive interest to my affinity for flamenco music, which strikes me as having a similar role in Spanish culture as that of jazz in America. Arising from the marginalized, vilified classes of Moors, gyspies, and Jews, flamenco became part of a rich oral tradition that preserved their answer to the persecution of the Spanish Inquisition. Flamenco is achingly beautiful in a way that is kindred to the blues in my ear, and I linked the two almost from the first time I heard it, while in Spain. Growing up, my music teachers taught us the haunting antebellum spirituals, "Follow the Drinking Gourd" and "Wade in the Water," right along with the Americana of "Git Along Little Doggies," "Shenandoah," and "Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal." My husband, who is far more attuned to the latter collection, as he is to the plight of Bob Dylan's "poor white man," to the State's Rights argument of the Civil War, and to the dignity of all things Southern, obliged me and went along. We had very different but complimentary reactions, as I might have predicted. The photo above is one of three that I cannot shake from my mind, but which disturbed my husband in a way he would rather dismiss as counterproductive.

The photo is of “King Louie” Armstrong, honored with the title of Zulu King during the 1949 Mardi Gras festivities. The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club was born out of a dark, bitter parody of black stereotypes held by whites, as displayed in blackface shows. Black revellers known as the Tramps began painting their faces in the fashion of one famous vaudeville sketch, titled "There Never Was and Never Will Be a King Like Me." Mimicking its portrayal of the African Zulu tribe, the Tramps at once embraced and turned upside-down white fears of blacks as overly sensuous, violent, less civilized. They even began choosing and parading their own parody of Rex, the white king of Carnival, calling him King Zulu and giving him a lard-can crown and a banana-stalk scepter. When the group was officially founded, Zulu served as a social/civic club and Mardi Gras krewe for blacks. Because of its connection with the owners of Geddes and Moss Funeral Home, who were donors and members, the club also ensured that duespaying club members would receive a decent burial. The krewe's parade for many years was confined to the "black streets" of New Orleans. For a time after the Civil Rights movement it was boycotted by many blacks as a demeaning, backwards tradition too evocative of years under slavery and Jim Crow, and full of farcical customs that might reinforce white stereotypes of blacks. Nevertheless, the krewe was and has remained a beloved tradition and social network for many African-Americans whose love of their city, neighborhood, and traditions has weathered each uncertain decade of oppression, sociopolitical turmoil, or disaster with the spirit of laissez les bons temps rouler intact. This clip from TIME magazine on Feb. 21 of ‘49 sums up the glee on the face of the beloved “Satchmo” during his reign as Zulu king: “The brown-skinned man with the golden horn pursed his scarred lips, blew a short stream of incredibly high, shining notes and then carefully laid the trumpet down. "There's a thing I've dreamed of all my life," he graveled, "and I'll be damned if it don't look like it's about to come true--to be, King of the Zulus' Parade. After that, I'll be ready to die.“

(For the uninitiated, it is thought that Louie Armstrong's nickname, "Satchmo" is short for “Satchelmouth,” which, suggestively derogatory, actually evokes his ample cheeks and broad smile.) I think it appropriate to note here that the classic "King of the Jungle" jazz tribute by Disney in "The Jungle Book" is akin to the mixed bag of feelings we will get if we understand the significance of Louie Armstrong returning to his childhood neighborhood to become the Zulu King. Listen as an adult to the lyrics:

Oh, I'm the king of the swingers oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
and that's what's botherin' me--
I wanna be a man, mancub
and stroll right into town
and be just like the other men,
I'm a-tired of a-monkeyin' around!

These lines painfully remind of the racial epithets used to refer to blacks, to include "zoo ape," "gorilla," and "porch/ghetto monkey." Growing up in different times and places, it might be difficult to believe these words were used in this way, but a quick trip to the Racial Slur Database at www.rsdb.org may prove enlightening. Tell me you can hear your old favorite lines sung as a kid the same way in this light: "...I wanna be like you-ooh-ooh / I wanna walk like you choo / talk like you choo-choo-oo-oo / an ape like me-ee..." Like all things early Disney, this number is woven from the good, the bad, and the ugly of American culture and history, and sterilized-for-children. It draws from a set of stories not incompatible with a framework like Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. The proverbial apple has fallen very near indeed, as many of the same intercultural and economic realities resident, latent, and subconscious in Kipling's portrayals of the British Empire have played out on the American continent.

While the photo above is full of unabated glee and revelry, King Louie's face suggests something else, too--a deep hurt, a sadness and a melancholy under wraps that may become ready, eventually, to burst into the streets with new rage and vengeance that would be entirely justified. Maybe it's the paint. Maybe it's the face under the paint. Whatever it is, it goes beyond the hurt of black entertainers who were often forbidden to patronize the same white clubs where they performed, and whose renowned talents were treated as "acceptions to the rule" of black inferiority. Beyond the resentment of black workers whose socioeconomic impoverishment first at the hands of slavery, then under the Jim Crow South, then in the "wage slavery" of industrial northern cities, this hurt is part hot tears of frustration, part laugh-out-loud disbelief. It is the desire to fulfill all the negative prophecies put on one man by another, in hopes that the absurdity of this act will shock the other into remorse. It is also the desire, in case this self-abasing parody of stereotypes should fail to communicate, to kick up one's heels in temporary, reckless abandon. This face seems to say, "If you're gonna put me in a box I can't crawl out of, I might as well enjoy it for a day."

till we have faces

I would like to post here a re-worked version of a conversation held recently after reading and posting on "Letters from the Earth" with attention to the modern (American-Protestant, in particular) church model. What came to my attention is that we don't all agree that developing a sense Christian aesthetics is as important as evangelism, discipleship, acts of compassion, etc. I submit that it is essential to all of these functions that we do aim to image the beauty of heaven and of God himself even as we feed the hungry, worship in song, speak of heaven and hell, and baptize disciples. In his reworking of the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche, "Till We Have Faces," C.S. Lewis choses the traditional narrator for the tale, Psyche's unnattractive sister, Orual. The title references a quotation in the book from Orual: "How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?" In the work, Lewis posits that a person must become real before he/she can expect to receive [I would also add "before he/she can expect to transmit"] any message from superhuman beings; "that is, it must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask, veil, or persona." When we do not strive for our very best in speech, in music, in art, and in presention, or when we imitate someone else's best without having their skill or seeking to add to what they have already revealed, we chose to wear a mask. I would call much of the put-on shoddiness, the kitschy definitions of what is "excellent or praiseworthy," and the lack of esthetic vision and discipline in many churches a mask we present to the world--not the true face of Christ, nor of his bride.

In the same vein as Twain's criticisms in "Letters from the Earth," I find it impossibly distracting that people should talk about heaven, for example, which figures so prominently into our motives and bylines for evangelism, while neglecting to make the place of worship, and the music and message offered therein, beautiful. To neglect the form in favor of the substance is tending dangerously toward a disembodied, gnostic rejection of the five senses. How are we to convince people that the resurrection of the body, for example, is anything exciting at all, if we are not continually striving to give them a taste of what a new heaven and a new earth would smell/taste/feel/sound/look like? (This is NOT to be confused with a Thomas Kinkaid-like attempt to paint the world "without the fall": saccharine, idealizing a bygone era of a more predominant cultural Christianity. Art, music, and speech can be redemptive without being cast in so many pastel shades of innocence.)

If anyone thinks that this endeavor will inevitably lead to idolatry, to a focus on the form and not the substance of the body of Christ and the gospel itself, then they have too high an estimation of their earthly talents. If we are to truly pursue the divine image in corporate worship, in form as well as in substance, we will never be able to feel as if we have arrived, as if we have wholly succeeded in reflecting Beauty himself. Beyond this, if anyone thinks that this endeavor will lead to artificiality in worship as believers strive to pursue a particular convention in music, speech, etc., then they have missed the fundamental process by which beauty is revealed in the world. Sometimes effortless, sometimes quite involved, beauty is constantly being perfected, reevaluated, discovered in unexpected corners: excellent artists are relentless, not satisfied with mere imitation of a thing but always striving to capture the essence of the thing as they see it. If a flower, a melody, or a phrase can elicit this kind of commitment from the artist, shouldn't the goal of becoming the body of Christ spur on the community of Christ-followers toward the essence of bearing his image in all things?

In addition to thinking of ourselves as the body of Christ, we are told to think of the Church as the Bride of Christ. Think for a moment about the aesthetic component of romantic love. Participating in church is like marriage, in that you shouldn't abandon the endeavor once you're in it, and you have to continue to find redeeming things about the Other even when you become disenchanted. Using the marriage metaphor, it would be like a wife who, having secured the marriage vow of love and faithfulness from her husband, got lazy and let herself go. Her husband would still love her, but why settle for good when you can aim for the best? This, far from being a Barbie-like, impossible and untruthful ideal, would involve what many self-respecting women strive for: a healthy, balanced body that is still kept attractive for their enjoyment and their husbands'. It is not an either/or proposition: either he loves me for who I am or he loves my body. Clearly, as the Song of Solomon and many other god-fearing texts on erotic love would indicate, he loves her for both. Many husbands whose eyes wander and lead them to be unfaithful would still say that they love their wives, who are good to them in so many other ways. Let's not even introduce the idea of porn here, but talk about men who just go and lust after other, real women in their workplace, neighborhood, or local strip joints. The wife who has let herself gain that 50 pounds and quit caring about her hair and skin being healthy, and who refuses to present her best to herself and to her husband deludes herself that this is not an integral part of showing her love for him, and is in for a rude awakening. She has settled for less than her best, thinking her good intentions will carry her the rest of the way in her husband's heart. And it might work, but this is not a method we would ever recommend or encourage someone we love to pursue. It is a fallback. We wouldn't, at the end of the day, want to imitate her treatment of her marriage. We would find it gratifying if her husband is faithful anyway, or if he was somehow able to see her through the lens he did when she was young and beautiful. But we would always rather emulate the woman who retained both her good intentions and her ability to age gracefully by caring for her body as an act of self-love and devotion to her husband, who loves her all the more because she is both good and beautiful. So the church must strive to be both good and beautiful for the coming of Christ.

Yet what of the imperfections we each possess in one degree or another--our lack of natural talent, beauty, underdeveloped esthetic sense, lack of resources or education--do these disqualify our offerings before God? Christ's love of the poor, marginalized, and broken people he touched in his ministry is an emphatic "No!" Poorly wrought words, melodies, and buildings can considered beautiful, if they are clearly examples of someone's best work at a particular juncture, the first steps in a journey, an earnest plea for restoration, or the promise of a grand undertaking to cultivate a specific talent in the Lord's service. We would not say that they are compelling at all if we knew that the speaker/artist had decided that that was the best he/she could do, and that now there was no need to try for anything more. We would call it mediocre, and say that that person had settled, as it would seem that Cain did when making his offering to God, for less than our best. This is important, because Christ himself was not content to pass by brokenness without bringing restoration, healing, and beauty back into the lives of lame, leperous, blind, and oppressed people. He only did so where he was welcomed to, however. Does he perhaps extend the same to us: "You not receive because you do not ask"? While the Living Christ may not always employ miracles in every situation, does his Spirit not close and open doors before us, leading us in the way we should walk? If God were leading me to step down from a position of musical leadership, for example, because I am not really gifted in that area, or perhaps to cultivate another gift for the good of his people, would I listen? If God created an opportunity for me to participate in a artistic, philanthropic, scientific, or civic venture with non-believers which might grow me in my understanding of his Truth in a particular field, would I embrace it, or find myself too busy, too afraid, or too lazy to do it? If another believer brought to my attention that our Sunday school curriculum, decor, choice of music, or anything else about my church were somehow out of tune with what that person took to be the image of God, would I engage the criticism in a manner honoring to God? Or would I take offense, entrench, coopt others to reinforce my modus operandi, boycott that person's endeavors, transfer churches, step down in a huff from my position as if to say "Can you do a better job? Let's see it!" I believe to do so is to operate without full use of another part of the body: to put a blindfold on, to ignore pain or nausea, to favor one foot over the other. Anyone who's ever incurred a serious injury by ignoring small symptoms knows how foolish this approach is. Who in their best state of mind would override the very sensations that tell us something is wrong and demands our attention?

What many in the church do is just this. We reason with ourselves that there is no need for change if we overlook these "small" disturbances. We settle, before even struggling much to work through, by discipline and training, the cacophany, the shoddy workmanship, and poor communication that naturally result from not putting much effort into things. That premature resignation is what I cannot stand, and what repulses people who pay attention to such things: we wonder, if this preacher/layperson/worship leader feels that they have no further progress to make towards a better offering to God and his people, than why should I follow/go along with him/her in the pursuit of Perfection Himself? It is already human nature to stop trying once people have recognized some measure of success in your work, to rest on one's laurels and squeeze by without continued efforts toward even further inspiration and skill. It's the "good enough" mentality which people perpetuate in church because they have the false idea that because we are sinners and cannot be perfect this side of eternity, that we are absolved from aiming at perfection with the help of the Spirit. There is nothing transformative about this mindset, yet we are to be the body of Christ, continually made new by his Spirit, committed in love to presenting a blameless Bride at Christ's return.

What seem to be secondary questions of "mere" aesthetics, seen in this light, are not secondary at all. We do the body and bride of Christ no favors if we let ourselves and the Church off the hook for so often accepting such poor musical, verbal, or structural renderings. As long as there are non-believers who can paint better, sing better, build better, and speak better, it is an example of even the stones crying out. We may think we are communicating all we need to about the gospel. We are not reaching, however, a great many people who are sensitive to the bruised beauty of the world around us. We must suggest more often and more convincingly that this world God created bears his image and seal of approval ("It is good"), which in its fallen state it is only a shadow of the real, incarnate splendor of the world to come. It may seem counter-intuitive that paying close attention to this world should draw our minds and hearts into anticipation for the next, but that happens to be my view, an orthodox one, of the incarnation and the resurrection of the body.

PAIN has an element of blank

I was recently astonished to find that my mother's life had been recorded in eight, brief lines. At least, I found what many of us close to her took to be the central struggle of her life. I knew this when I first marked it sometime last year in my Emily Dickinson anthology, and I thought of it today. Whether speaking of psychic or physical pain, this poem captures the reality of those who suffer chronically. Scripture calls Jesus "a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief." Johnny Cash decided that his own personal scars were so deep that he needed to wear them on his sleeve and become the "Man in Black." He made his own troubled past into a new cause, as he championed the "poor and beaten down / livin' on the hungry side of town... the sick and lonely old / the wreckless ones whose bad trip left them cold..." Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, while a creative genius, became a recluse with strange, whimsical habits, a deep melancholy, and an acute, almost morbid sense of mortality after suffering the deaths of many close family and friends in her early life. She was also faced with her mother's chronic illness as an adult, which kept her home as primary caregiver, and in her last years her own decline due to what was probably chronic nephritis. I've heard it said of her that no one writes more authentic consolation poetry. I'm never sure where that line is between normal, healthy pain--the so-called "anxiety of becoming," the fallout of living in a fallen world--and the kind of pain that warps you for good.

PAIN has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

a handful of juicy ones

Allow me to ennumerate, as if to dangle my can full worms one by one in front of your face, some of the things that most turn me off about the defunct church model my friend addressed in the previous post.

1. Why are most churches so ugly? The expense of the building has nothing to do with it. They often smell dank and moldy, or too new. There are ways to make florescent bulbs look nice--am I the only one who knows this? A church can be quite plain or elaborately ornamented, but the question is whether it is beautiful in an enduring way, that draws the mind heavenward toward Beauty Himself. Kitschy decorations and theologically simplistic banners do the opposite, in the same way that a stained glass window meant to glorify some wealthy church patron would have distracted a worshipper centuries ago.

2. Why does the vast majority of Christian music leave you feeling like you've been hustled? One friend in college who sought refuge in the old hymns described contemporary worship music as spiritual masturbation. The silliest variation of this that I've ever heard, was a name-it-claim-it preacher who got in our faces one Sunday morning about the spiritual disciplines. Naturally, he made his own practice of them the focal point, and kept admonishing us to follow his example of Saturday nights in worship at home with his "intimate cds." He could not have known, in light of my friend's comment, how crass and self-absorbed that sounded to me. Whatever happened to "He is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few"? Theologically bereft mantras of "Yes, Yes Lord" leave me with serious doubts about our commitment to "whatever your hand finds to do, do it heartily as unto the Lord." To present God and his church with a better offering we should trouble ourselves more consistently to do our best. Many of these songs focus on the self, and plop their verses, riffs, and bridges like so many piles of excrement along an otherwise delightful path. Singing is delightful, though often awkward in a corporate setting. But this is made worse by worship leaders who fancy themselves the next David Crowder, blasting their team over speakers in sanctuaries whose acoustics may or may not cooperate, as if to drown out the tone-deaf faithful. With few exceptions, these musicians can not compete in the marketplace of sounds or ideas, yet they sell us their cds as if they do. We imitate these substandard performers and songwriters in our services, as if a catchy electric baseline can makeup for the fact that our church is half empty--half irrelevant.

3. Why do many pastors who are so clearly not gifted at public speaking feel compelled to preach, out of their star, a standard 45 minute sermon each week? Far be it from me to limit the Holy Spirit's voice at any time of day, but usually I am a fan of the 15-20 minute homily administered in most liturgical churches. It is easier to ensure that your message is well thought out, fully subjected to the leadings of the Spirit, and far more digestible (personally, I don't think many people pay attention much longer than that, anyway). I have been sitting in church since the second Sunday of my life, and by now I am an astute rhetorical troubleshooter. I find myself having to hush the voice that automatically says, "Well, that was a blanket statment/mixed metaphor/straw man/false dilemma/exegetical misfire, but I know what he meant." Yes, there is a temptation for devotees of Sunday morning church to adopt a spirit of criticism rather than of worship. But without that voice to help me sift through so much disappointment and bullshit, I probably would have left the church a long time ago.

4. Why do so many corporate experiences of the Holy Spirit seem to be just textbook manifestations of social psychology? Dietrich Bonhoeffer says it best when he describes our "psychic," human desire for community, in which we constantly seek to remake others in our own image:

"It is the deep night that hovers over all human action, even over all noble and devout impulses. ...In human community of spirit there rules, along with the Word, the man who is furnished with exceptional powers, experience, and magical, suggestive capacities. ...here spheres of power and influence of a personal nature are sought and cultivated. It is true, in so far as these are devout men, that they do this with the intention of serving the highest and the best, but in actuality the result is to dethrone the Holy Spirit, to relegate him to remote unreality. In the spiritual realm, the Spirit governs; in human community, psychological techniques and methods...the searching, calculating analysis of a stranger. ...[the] desire of the human soul seeks a complete fusion of I and Thou, whether this occur in the union of love or, what is after all the same thing, in the forcing of another person into one's sphere of power and influence. ...Here human ties, suggestions, and bonds are everything, and in the immediate community of souls we have reflected the distorted image of everything that is originally and solely peculiar to community mediated through Christ. Thus there is such a thing as human absorption. It appears in all forms of conversion wherever the superior power of one person is consciously or unconsciously misused to influence profoundly and draw into his spell another individual or a whole community. Here one soul operates directly upon another soul. The weak have been overcome by the strong, the resistance of the weak has broken down under the influence of another person. He has been overpowered, but not won over by the thing itself." Life Together: a discussion of Christian Fellowship pp. 30-33

To quote the pop artist JEM in the song "They":
...
And it's ironic too
'cause what we tend to do
is act on what they say
and then it is that way

I'm sorry, so sorry
I'm sorry it's like this
I'm sorry, so sorry
Why do we live like this? ...

Since eighth grade, I have had a bad taste in my mouth about public displays of Holy-Ghost power. First, a youth pastor at a junior high retreat tried to "slay me in the Spirit" by surrounding me with older, cooler teenagers who coaxed me to "let go and let God," while he applied enough sudden pressure to catch me off guard, pushing me over. I wasn't in a position to call his bluff: I earnestly wanted the experience he was so enthusiastically proposing. I remember spending minutes on the floor in a daze, debating whether my epiphany or nap time would come first. In college, a close friend became embroiled in a strangely Salem, Massachusetts-like covey of Christian dorm mates that specialized in late night prayer sessions where they would engage in rigorous spiritual warfare to the exclusion of their studies. I knew something was up when this friend uncharacteristically checked a book out of the library: "Can a Christian Have a Demon?" Most recently I suffered through a particularly distracting, let-it-all-hang-out-at-the-top-of-our-lungs-everyone-praying-over-each-other experience I had in church, praying silently on my knees in the pew "Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy." Now there is a mantra that could decimate the fluffy "Yes, Yes Lord" faster than a fat kid on a cupcake.

5. Why do church leaders spew about abortion and gay marriage with such zeal, yet fumble so badly when it comes to other pressing social and political issues of our time? Most are either too afraid to broach these subjects, conveniently sterilizing those passages in the bible that clearly indict such socially pervasive sins as economic injustice, poor environmental stewardship, gluttony, and the love of money. Others spew their opinions as gospel, eager to proselytize the uninformed, blissfully unaware that their bastions of common sense are really products of their socioeconomic upbringing (and therefore neither infallible nor objective). A perfect example: those people who are always railing against how corrupt and immoral our country has become (nevermind how much so it was when the founding fathers were in their heyday) and then are incised that other nations resent or hate our influence in the world. You have to remind them that some of those countries are currently more pious than we have ever been (not always in a good way, granted) and that they see us as the new Babylon, exporting our avarice, licentiousness, deceit, and hubris everywhere we go. Newsflash: there is nothing new under the sun. People have always been corrupt, and for that very reason every social and political issue that faces us is complex, full of minefields and therefore not easily answered or put right. For once, I would like to hear a preacher engage that reality without shrinking from it on the one hand, or being cavalier on the other. I know it can be done in conversation--why not from the pulpit?

I think that is enough for now, though I have not even touched the bottom of this can of worms. It is just possible that I agree with my friend: our model for church is broken. All of the things I have listed wouldn't be nearly so pernicious if they hadn't bred in that custom of waking up early on Sunday to go expectantly to that steepled building. The expectation that it will be transformative in any real sense of the word is perhaps misplaced, and unrealistic.

stirring the can of worms

The can of worms I about to dive into has already been opened--by a close friend of mine. Of course, she is not the first to do so, but her angle on the conversation is rather unique, and well-grounded. She did not arrive at anything she is thinking right now by taking shortcuts. Nor is she an aimless wanderer: she would agree with C.S. Lewis that "questions were made for answers." I have to admire that, because sometimes I'd just as soon not find the answers. I might not like them.

My friend is a missionary in a third world country. She grew up in the church in small town America, and while she is beloved by many in her hometown, she never really seemed to me to fit there. She is about as qualified as anyone to open this can of worms. I'll let her speak for herself, then stir the can a bit myself:

I grew up in the church. My parents and their parents were Christians. The small mostly Christian town that I grew up in was, and sometimes still is, fairly conservative. I have learned to think outside of my own world, and box. While I've attended church my whole life, I am serious when I say I did not learn about Christ's love and how deep it is for us in church, but rather through my family and through Emmaus, a parachurch organization. While I've learned much about God and his teachings in church over the years I've mainly come to know God in a real way outside of church, with friends family, on my own, and in my educational studies. I have experienced the love of God and seen his disciples in the local church, however, that is not something I find regularly in most organized churches. And like many who have worked in the church closely, I've been extremely hurt by the local church. While there are some true, whole hearted followers of Jesus in most churches, what I've observed after being in, attending, and visiting NUMEROUS churches, not to mention making ministry my full-time job and having worked in churches in the past, I've come to the conclusion that most churches and their current structures are broken!!!!! Their focus is on themselves: bigger better buildings, more services and programs that are not really accomplishing anything. In the 21st century, in a postmodern world, the current model is NOT functioning. Churches are filled with shallow "Christians" who don't really know God nor want to know him more. We are wasting resources and giving Christians a bad name worldwide with our broken models and broken Christians. I'm not saying God can't and doesn't use churches for good even in their current condition, but that in general they are counterproductive and causing problems and disbelief among non-believers as well as reproducing shallow Christians.

After talking to various friends of mine whom are not Christians, I realized that the church the way it is stands today is not functioning. Non-believers think that church is boring, counterproductive, and doesn't offer them anything that will make a difference in their lives. (Correct me if I'm wrong). And from what I've seen in most churches, I'd have to agree! There is good news. I'm excited that many Christians, especially in my generation, are starting to "get it." Get the point of living, learning, growing, seeking, and transforming our communities in community! Going against the current model is cross-cultural and not common, but maybe it could become the norm? A sad reality is that right now for many of us there is no church or group of Christians with which we can feel at home, discuss the Bible, love one another without being overly judgmental, and live a new kind of Christian life. So many of us find ourselves discouraged and disillusioned with the typical way of doing church, and for good reason. I know many who don't even attend anywhere regularly even though they are strong Christians. But, when you live in community with others, do away with the programs and money spent on ourselves, when you focus on the Bible and learning from one another, life is different. God becomes alive and so do our lives! And there is power in a community of believers and seekers.
From what I've studies read, and seen in my life, I have decided that we cannot wait any longer! The pastors and people are drowning in mediocre Christianity and poor models. It doesn't matter in what country, I'm speaking on a global scale. At this time I'm not going to go into our ideas or models at this time, but I will soon.

People are hungry, hungry for truth, hungry for change! We must ask ourselves "Are our lives valuable? Is what we are doing working? Do we experience the real love of Christ in church? And are we producing transformed people and leaders? Are we really making a difference on a big scale in our neighborhoods, jobs, and communities? Are we reaching the poor?" If not shouldn't we take a hard look at what we are doing and change?
We need new kinds of churches, new kinds of Christians. I think if Christ came today he be saddened by what he saw in the Church. It saddens me and it saddens many. So, what are we going to do? God has slowly been placing the possibility on our hearts of possibly starting a new kind of church one day and to teach pastors a new kind of model. We want that to be part of our job description because it is a burden we carry.

I plan to make my next post a hearty "Amen" to much of what she's said here. But let me close by saying that it is a sad day when believers raised in the church, who know the intrinsic value of its propositions and the dire necessity by which it must succeed, are driven from the church in droves, while the ones who stick it out are tempted to leave at every turn, as if they know they have hunkered down in a sinking ship. I never expected that attending a Christian college would be unsafe for my faith as I knew it. I have never wanted to leave the church so badly in my life that I almost lost faith permanently. It turns out that my college experience was a catalyst for many things I needed to address. I began saying that I wanted to get to the kind of "simple faith that lies on the other side of complexity," and my professors and peers--some thoughtful and insightful, some unwitting--helped me to begin that process. I thought it pointless in high school to cloister myself in a Christian college, reasoning that the "salt of the earth" ought to spread out from its saltshaker. What I did not know is that there are few things as pernicious as the dark underbelly of human desire for relationship when it crawls into the kind of hopeful, unsuspicious community that strives to collectively imitate Christ.