Resurrection Day
Let us go forth in the power of the resurrection.
Not in the basket or the empty canteen.
Forsaken by proverbs unheard and unseen.
Neither by river nor rising to hills.
But in the open palms that we hope to be filled.
Fill them with the sands that we find within view.
The driftwood discovered that’s not lost its hue.
A grain shaped and drawn out to pull my eyes from what was to what’s new.
Christós Anésti.
So It Goes
Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.
- Thomas Merton, From New Seeds of Contemplation
Sharing hand-rolled cigarettes, Daniel and I considered the path of those who’ve walked from the realms of contemporary church culture like a salty insect shell they would find somewhat discomforting in making any attempt to return to their shoulders. Our stories include us in this demographic, and we consider the heavy weight of this world left behind, but not as though shoulders were made only for burdons or for looking back over. It is the gift of a contemplative soul to shed the conventional in its falsehoods but its burdon to recognize that the only homes to be found are those that embrace the broken. Contemplation that considers the honest shape of the shell shed and the new home will recognize the cracks and scrapes and holes of any home but will continue the mendings. Like a cigarette that just won’t stay lit, only a bit of fire will bring new life, and with it, new impending death. In such a repetition, I can hear Vonnegut‘s chorus: “So it goes..”
The Future of Christianity – Kind Of
Between all the conversations and other events that have been happening this weekend, I’ve been trying to reflect on the conversations I shared on Saturday. I was invited a few weeks ago to participate in a small gathering and discussion within walking distance of my home (gotta love Portland) that was called “The Future of Christianity”. In reality the title didn’t seem to fit the discussion but I believe the title was taken from a short video we watched to spawn discussion points. The video is a discussion primarily between two philosopher/theologians who I’m actually somewhat familiar with, though have had little more time in the past than to skim a book or two. The men in the video were Ken Wilbur and Thomas Keating, both very brilliant in their individual, yet complimentary ways.
The video talked much about Wilbur’s integral theory of consciousness, which is basically a way of describing paradigms in relation to spirituality and culture. There’s a certain incremental spectrum he uses for illustration which is rather inconsequential to my thoughts here other than to say the idea raises eyebrows (among the company in attendance) over its linear nature. In other words, it suggest a linear progression of what we commonly might think of as enlightenment, and doesn’t seem to offer room for the particular values in the categorizations it places at its lower levels. Some of these devalued categories include things like mysticism and ethnocentrism. Its true that these exhibit negative qualities in many contexts but to place them linearly as inferior values seems arrogant and rash.
Anyway, my point is not to explain the theories. (Which by the way really are rather interesting and aptly named by Wilbur in one of his books, A Theory Of Everything. Quite the title huh?) What struck me most about the day was the connections shared between participants, which in a community like this, seems to be as intentional as the discussion itself. Not only was I able to attend with two close friends, but upon arrival, I discovered that the event was something much different from the emergent church exercise I had the impression it would be. Not only did the age range have a great span but so did the particular positions held within the faiths. Not only were there representatives from many Christian denominations but there were also present (intentionally included) people from the Jewish and Islamic faiths.
Bringing together people of many faiths offers differing perspectives which is invaluable in itself and turns the imagined world of different people into a real one. At its core, the purpose of the discussion was simply discussion and to find familiarity and common ground between a diversity of cultures. At the discussion it often carried the name, the commonality of virtue. There was no problem to fix or solution to compromise on. It was simply to understand and share mutual existence. That is something most of us are good at talking about but not so good at finding in reality. In reflecting on the experience with my friend Joel, we realized that really, this was a unique moment in time, and a surreal and blessed one at that.
I’m still processing the experience even now, even beyond the great conversations we shared among beautiful souls during the day. I posted a series of quotables to my twitter throughout the event, which spawned a bit of conversation on my facebook in particular. I’d like to expand some more on some of those thoughts, particularly ones by Thomas Keating as well as the event organizer, Chuck Cooper, but will save those for a later post.
Spite and Absurdity
The truth and absurdity behind the world of the spiritual and of organized religion, to me, can not be stated plainly. It is no less, absurd. Only in Buechner have I found a weaving of words close enough to bring me to tears (a requisite for truth).
And as for the king of the kingdom himself, whoever would recognize him? He has no form or comeliness. His clothes are what he picked up at a rummage sale. He hasn’t shaved for weeks. He smells of mortality. We have romanticized his raggedness so long that we can catch echoes only of the way it must have scandalized his time in the horrified question of the Baptist’s disciples, “Are you he who is come?”; in Pilate’s “Are you the king of the Jews?” You with the pants that don’t fit and a split lip; in the black comedy of the sign they nailed over his head where the joke was written out in three languages so nobody would miss the laugh.
But the whole point of the [Gospel as fairy tale] is, of course, that he is the king in spite of everything.- from Telling The Truth
Not only was it scandalous then, it is scandalous now. To find truth, I must turn expectation upside down.
Silence, Love, Frederick Buechner.
Mr. Frederick Buechner is a recent discovery for me, though so beautiful and somehow familiar, has already found his way to the top of both my heart and my reading list. These are two of his most touching passages I’ve recently come upon.
The first is a passage I had the fortunate coincidence to read on an early morning commute through the Cascade Mountains and the Columbia River Gorge to work as I listened to the magic of Sigur Ros. It was one of those moments where it seems Time had cleverly lined moments up to coincide, leaving me in almost bewildered sensual amazement, if I were to for the moment include that unnameable embrace of ones heart by a bit of poetic writing as a member of the senses. Read this passage noting that his full explanation of silence is one that would require considerably more quotation but in a short, inadequate nutshell, his idea of silence seems to me to have much to do with the remarkably personal and indescribable nature of the matter and the general tragedy of human existence.
Before the gospel is a word, it is a silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we see it not for what at various times we call it — meaninglessness or meaningful, absurd, beautiful — but for what it truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery. The silence of Jesus in answer to Pilate’s question about truth seems such a presenting as does also in a way the silence of the television news with the sound turned off — the real news is what we see and feel, not what Walter Cronkite tells us — or the silence the Psalmist means when he says, “Be silent and know that I am God.” In each case it is a silence that demands to be heard because it is a presented silence, and [one] must somehow himself present this silence and mystery of truth by speaking what he feels, not what he ought to say, by speaking forth not only the light and hope of it but the darkness as well, all of it, because the Gospel has to do with all of these.
»» From Telling The Truth
This second is one as read to me by a certain beautiful soul from Atlanta. Not only does it sail the four seas of love in its vastness in four short lines, but it reveals just as quickly Buechner’s genius both in poetic brevity and in Christian thought.
The love for equals is a human thing—of friend for friend, brother for brother. It is to love what is loving and lovely. The world smiles.
The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing—the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely. This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.
The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing—to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man. The world is always bewildered by its saints.
And then there is the love for the enemy—love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain. The tortured’s love for the torturer. This is God’s love. It conquers the world.
»» From The Magnificent Defeat
Pax, my friends, and thank you, universe, for giving us Mr. Buechner.
More Like Pharisees
..how is it that Jesus was a magnet for prostitutes and tax collectors – the two most despised classes of sinners in Jesus’ day – while the Church repels these types of people, just as the Pharisees did? The answer, I submit, is as inescapable as it is challenging. The Church, as a whole, is simply more like the Pharisees than it is like Jesus.
- Greg Boyd (via)
Also, this and this and this is a great rundown of Greg Boyd’s philosophy and book, The Myth Of A Christian Nation, if you’re interested. I’m a fan. The essay is a long read, but quite good.
I’ve conversed quite a bit recently, mostly internally, on the idea of church in general. Much of it references the distinction between the church and the Church, between the general idea of those who follow Christ’s teaching and the Pharisaic institution that the organized religion became long ago. I’m appreciative of all those who’ve offered their insight and stories on the matter, and have been willing to examine the issue with me.
Greg Boyd’s essay, The Religionless Church Of The Future, from which the quote above comes, offers an accurate illustration of the same religiosity that frustrates me. In much of my sorting out the pieces and remembering that Love applies as much to religiously ignorant people as it does to anyone, the only peace I continue to find is not the divorce of a system included in “the world” but willing marginalization.
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More:
- Posts about the Church as an institution (1, 2)
- More on this blog about Greg Boyd
- A quote by Wendell Berry
- More on the Journey To Love
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More On The Church
I feel my last article about the Church, which began with a lengthy (and dense) quote from Tolstoy, ended on a bad note. Or perhaps not completely bad, just incomplete. I’ve been holding a small discussion with some of my closest conversationalists on the issue, and attempting to iron out more precisely for myself where I believe the proper place is for a non-church-attender to stand on the issue. Or more precisely, what form my tone should take on the issue. I hope to be posting some of the highlights of that discussion in the near future, particularly after I’ve allowed my own thoughts on the matter to become more clear.
All this to say that it is incomplete, though my friend Stephen posted this link on Twitter earlier today, and I found it quite honest, calm, and relatable, more or less what the shape of my tone should, perhaps, be in love.
The article isn’t dead-on with how I feel, but I believe we share many honest sentiments.
Here’s a few lines I pulled from the article:
Periodically on this journey we may go through times when we can’t seem to find any other believers who share our hunger. That’s especially true for those who find that conforming to the expectations of the religious institutions around them diminishes their relationship with Jesus.
Scripture does encourage us to be devoted to one another not committed to an institution.
I make no secret of the fact that I am deeply troubled by the state of organized Christianity. Most of what we call ‘church’ today are nothing more than well-planned performances with little actual connection between believers. Believers are encouraged toward a growing dependency on the system or its leadership rather than on Jesus himself.
Most of us on the journey are accused of being divisive because freedom can be threatening to those who find their security in a religious system.
The Holy Infallible Church
A rather lengthy, but worthwhile passage from Leo Tolstoy‘s The Kindgdom Of God Is Within You in his third chapter, entitled “Christianity Misunderstood By Believers“:
In the times of Constantine the whole interpretation of the doctrine had been already reduced to a RÉSUMÉ–supported by the temporal authority– of the disputes that had taken place in the Council–to a creed which reckoned off–I believe in so and so, and so and so, and so and so to the end–to one holy, Apostolic Church, which means the infallibility of those persons who call themselves the Church. So that it all amounts to a man no longer believing in God nor Christ, as they are revealed to him, but believing in what the Church orders him to believe in.
But the Church is holy; the Church was founded by Christ. God could not leave men to interpret his teaching at random–therefore he founded the Church. All those statements are so utterly untrue and unfounded that one is ashamed to refute them. Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what Churchmen understand by the Church. In the Gospels there is a warning against the Church, as it is an external authority, a warning most clear and obvious in the passage where it is said that Christ’s followers should “call no man master.” But nowhere is anything said of the foundation of what Churchmen call the Church.
The word church is used twice in the Gospels–once in the sense of an assembly of men to decide a dispute, the other time in connection with the obscure utterance about a stone–Peter, and the gates of hell. From these two passages in which the word church is used, in the signification merely of an assembly, has been deduced all that we now understand by the Church.
But Christ could not have founded the Church, that is, what we now understand by that word. For nothing like the idea of the Church as we know it now, with its sacraments, miracles, and above all its claim to infallibility, is to be found either in Christ’s words or in the ideas of the men of that time.
The fact that men called what was formed afterward by the same word as Christ used for something totally different, does not give them the right to assert that Christ founded the one, true Church.
Read more of this passage here.
I’m anxious to an open discussion on this topic. I fully expect Tolstoy’s words to be offensive to some (even those without directly vested interest in the structure or hierarchy of the Church, but rather, those who find its cultural contribution to be unreplaceable), as they would have been to me at some point in my past. I also fully expect his words to be taken as a direct assault on Christianity itself, though I hope in our discussion we can further highlight the differences between true Christian doctrine and what our culture has done with it. Afterall, that is the purpose of Tolstoy’s words.
There are those of us who in some way, whether foolish or wise, are attempting to bypass the cultural prism through which we see Christ. For some, that prism is understood as the Church, and for fewer, that prism is understood as such while its effects on our perceptions are attempted to be neutralized. I cannot and should not say that I will never return to Church life or some gathering of what we commonly call church, for if I see the Church as flawed, then I must see it as a part of this world, deserving of love, even if it deceives itself of its own righteousness.
A friend of mine who regularly still attends the most recent church I attended has noted on multiple occasions to me that she cannot stop attending despite her disappointment in both the message and self-righteous focus of the church in particular. Her reason is her love for the people, who are in fact people, deserving of the Love that we are directed to extend. It is just that perhaps these members (and I will not dis-include myself in many regards) that accurately fit the descriptor that is Tolstoy’s chapter title, “Christianity Misunderstood By Believers”. In all my rhetoric I cannot help but be humbled by the fact that we are all fallen and lost, and the choice to love is the hardest and most vital step away from this state.
What’s more, it was just this week that I conversed with a friend who finds himself employed in what we, who are disgusted by consumerism and globalism, consider the depths of hell, Starbucks. Ok, perhaps it serves best as an emblem of said -isms, not taking on as they say, vexillum solus, or the solo banner. The common view is its representation of affluent suburban life but what we rarely imagine is the true nature of poverty. If poverty is defined not by money, but by spiritual and emotional state, those in suburban American affluence would not be disincluded, regardless of their own awareness of their state of poverty. I think Christ defined The Least also as those who are trampled by society, which would leave out those I have just mentioned, but it is also not as though we are to love those in only one level of whatever hierarchy of life “the least” refers to.
This latté-serving friend of mine finds himself just needing the money and being unable to otherwise, for the time being, escape the neighborhood his parents live in, which is mentioned as one of the most wealthy in the nation. As a cynic I find it easy to talk of such places the way one Paris Hilton would talk of a Motel6, but I am put in my place by the voice inside me that has found at least a hint of what honest objective love looks like. I am once again humbled by the lives and love of my friends, in this case, one who chooses daily to connect with those through the humble realization that we are all fallen and lost, all deserving of love, even the affluent.
There are those of us who, especially through Paul’s teaching, are fully in love with the theological implications and poetic nature of the marriage of Christ to the church. Notice the lowercase ‘c’, there, not the capital. As a body of believers (who according to Tolstoy, misunderstand our own religion) we are defined as the church not by the system of human politics and hierarchy that is falsely built in Christ’s name but by, at its simplest level, believing in the name and sharing this commonality with our brothers and sisters.
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For related reading:
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Ellul, From The Subversion Of Christianity
If we grant that what the New Testament means by Christianity and being a Christian merely conforms to human ideas and pleases and flatters us as though it were all our own invention and teaching springing up from within ourselves, then there is no problem. There is, however, a ‘but,’ a difficulty, for what the New Testament really means by being a Christian is the very opposite of what is natural to us. It is thus a scandal. We have either to revolt against it or at all costs to find cunning ways of avoiding the problem, such as by the trickery of calling Christianity what is in fact its exact antithesis, and then giving thanks to God for the great favor of being Christians. As Kierkegaard says, nothing displeases or revolts us more than New Testament Christianity when it is properly proclaimed. It can neither win millions of Christians nor bring revenues and earthly profits. Confusion results. If people are to agree, what is proclaimed to them them must be to their taste and must seduce them. Here is the difficulty: it is not at all that of showing that official Christianity is not the Christianity of the New Testament, but that of showing that New Testament Christianity and what it implies to be a Christian are profoundly disagreeable to us (”Instant,” p. 167). Never–no more today than in the year 30–can Christian revelation please us: in the depths of our hearts Christianity has always been a mortal enemy. History bears witness that in generation after generation there has been a highly respected social class (that of priests) whose task it is to make of Christianity the very opposite of what it really is (p. 240).
(ht)
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