I look for meaning
In an instant
As each moment I stand myself up against
The tick-marks on the doorjamb my hand marking head-high
Looking down and up and measuring
In a day
I lay me down to sleep and did I
Advance any skill or craft or goal that will
Keep my soul ‘til tomorrow
That should I not wake would this day serve my final testament
In a week
House at 7:00
Glee at 7:00
Supper at 5:30 so Mom can get to church
Bones at 7:00
No date night this week
Football all day
Don’t go to church
The week a wheel with a busted spoke da bump da bump da bump da bump
In a month
Four and a half rows of seven blocks stacked up
Each block startlingly empty (mostly)
Maybe a meeting here or there maybe one Sunday gig
But mostly blank like next year’s month instead of one just past
Knock them down and start stacking again, mostly empty
In a year
Just last year I protested all years all time keeping
As tyrannical artificial circular medieval reductionist superstitious shallow infantile
Stomping my foot holding my breath protesting
Just one more game I promise a quick one
Before nap time
In a life
Astounded at fifty-one and what have I done
Just to sit and remember each year if I can and
See if I can account for each one’s landmarks and passing
Are they distinct or have they molded together inseparable and confounded
Like different colors of playdough hastily pushed into tubs and forgotten
Maybe I could pry them apart
All dry and crumbly glued
In the future
Will I be remembered in a year or a decade or a century or am I
Truly anonymous except to parents and children and siblings and wife
Who don’t seem to count as much as peers and
Public acclaim being satisfying justifying
One’s rep stepping down the block the kids oohing and ahhing and stepping back
More gratifying more lasting in a moment than lineage or descent
In eternity
That my life should reverberate down all ages and eons
Past all human history when every achievement has eroded
Become sediment and rock and cut to make pavers and bricks for
Alien streets and monuments that erode and crumble and blow dusty on fading solar wind
Even to the last dying spark of starlight when light itself
Becomes absolutely cold and still and dark
And yet my echo whispering in that searing void
No less than this is meaning.
Thank you for reading.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
About Jesus' Birthday
Here’s a surprise: I don’t like Jesus’ birthday any better than my own, but for an equal and opposite reason. On the one hand, I don’t like my birthday because birth and death are enmeshed, but on the other hand, I don’t like most churches’ celebrations of Jesus birthday because they separate his birth from his death.
First, to review, I don’t like my birthday because it dredges up birth/death dread and, purporting to celebrate the day of one’s emergence, as it surely does in one’s early years, while the years mount one’s birthday becomes a grim countdown toward the last one, and no one ever talks about this other side of birthdays though birthday humor – and sometimes humor is a last-gasp honesty – usually points to it: you’re growing old, you’ve got grey hair (my friends sang this to my before I was ten) or numerous birthday cards that remind you of that inverse rule of aging: the more years the fewer functions, especially those functions one most wants to carry undiminished into one’s dotage (cards addressing these, though addressed to a sextuagenarian [say that fast and hear the irony] or septuagenarian, often feature someone young, nubile and half naked). Birthdays seem dishonest with a frosty, sugar coating: yay, another year, may be your last.
Now, to Jesus’ birthday: I see churches celebrating Jesus’ birth with no mention of his death. Good god, the horrors I’ve seen: come worship the Christ child, come kneel at the manger, come welcome the Babe (not the babe on the birthday card). And the pageants, excuses to parade the church’s children around in ridiculous costumes (if you were ever a sheep in one of these you know what I mean) and have them recite a conflation of Matthew and Luke with a little of John’s prologue thrown in (mercifully, Mark has proven particularly resistant to this harmony). The whole season of Advent I find particularly foolish, like Jesus is going to be born again (I love that theological irony) and surely not that Jesus is actually going to return some day ‘cause that would be way too eschatological for the mainlines (churches who look fervently for the Lord’s return usually don’t celebrate Christmas at all, at least in worship). This whole season reminds me of a medieval passion play for illiterates – the people could never understand the Scriptures so we’ll put on little vignettes to help them - and last time I checked most of us church-goers are literate enough to text or email each other though not so much with the Scriptures (so maybe this mess is a good thing after all), cause if we did understand the Scriptures we’d never sit still for so much of this nativity nonsense.
Now, after that rant I hope you’re saying, “Ok, wise guy, you tell me what the Scriptures say!” Oh, I’ve got you now, and I dare – I triple-dog dare you – not to admit even grudgingly when I’m through that I’ve got a point. If you have even a shred of self-respect you’ll concede now.
Ok, to the Scriptures. Jesus’ birth is mentioned just about exclusively in two gospels, Matthew and Luke. I think we can leave the prologue to John’s gospel and the couple of places where the epistles speak of Christ’s pre-existence out of the discussion, though those scriptures, one may easily argue, invariably include Christ’s post-existence, i.e. the descent and ascent of the divine-human figure. Matthew and Luke have explicit stories of Jesus’ birth, on which the churches base their Christmas services. My thesis: Matthew and Luke entwine Jesus’ birth inextricably with his death. Let’s start with Matthew and for ease of reference I’ll quote from the NIV.
Mary is found to be pregnant so Joseph is going to divorce her but sleeps on it and has a dream, one in which an angel visits him, and here’s what the angel says to Joseph and, concurrently, here’s what the narrator says to us readers:
“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
Now, I want you to set aside all your long theological or ecclesiastical training in how Jesus saves us from our sins and stick with Matthew’s gospel. Taking this last clause – “he will save his people from their sins” – how does this birth announcement enmesh Jesus’ birth and death? (You see it already, don’t you?) Note also that, aside from the narrator’s quote from Isaiah (which is actually kind of contradictory to the angel’s message, unless you can tolerate Jesus having two names – Jesus, which means “the Lord saves” and Immanuel, which means “God with us,” the latter name closing the gospel with Jesus telling his disciples “I am with you always,” which actually argues against the divine-man’s descent and return to heaven, since Jesus doesn’t go anyplace but stays here forever, see the problems with harmonizing?), this announcement and a brief sentence (“But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son”) are all we’ve got from Matthew about Jesus’ birth (please don’t get me started on “We Three Kings from Orient Are”). So you may be saying, “Jeff, with so little to go on, how can you argue that Jesus’ birth and death are inextricably entwined?”
I don’t want to go into great detail here, and am confident my short explanation will suffice to make my argument, but I do suggest you spend some time concording the words “save,” “people” and “sin” in Matthew’s gospel. I’m using Schmoller’s “Handkonkordanz zum griechischen Neuen Testament” primarily to intimidate you with German, though it’s way handy and fairly exhaustive as a pocket-sized concordance to the Greek NT. But using a concordance you’ll find these three words – save, people and sins – grouped in Matthew’s unique usage (I’m discounting here those places where Matthew explicitly uses Mark, since the author’s creation is usually more indicative of her intent than her quotes from other sources) in two places. The first, at the last supper, when Jesus describes a blessed cup of wine as “my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” – and, remember, we’re talking a heavily Jewish context so you’ll have to read up on the use of blood in forgiveness of sins in the Hebrew Bible, as well as Passover celebrations, etc. This gets close to Jesus’ saving his people from their sins, though the reference to “many” is not so explicitly a reference to Jesus’ “people,” but you see where I’m going, right: those churches that celebrate the Lord’s Supper on Christmas Eve are heading in the right direction.
But that’s not the best part in Matthew. I encourage you to read up on the narrative use of irony in the first century and in Scripture, because the second, sure, rock-solid tie in between the angel’s telling Joseph how to name Jesus and the entwining of his birth with his death comes in the scene before Pilate. Pilate – a classically ruthless bastard to his subjects and a sycophantic suck-up to his superiors – asks the crowd of Jesus’ people – Pilate’s Jewish subjects – a question impossible to answer: “Which one do you want me to release to you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” Remember now – “Christ” is a pre-Christian term meaning “anointed one” and was used to refer to deliverers or kings, so I imagine Pilate just itching for the crowd to shout for a messiah so he can retaliate, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got your messiah right here!” I also imagine the crowd is way too smart to fall for such an obvious trick. And though the author seems apologetic for Pilate, ironically things are quite different. Think about the redemptive power of blood in Jewish sacrificial theology as you read this:
“When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’ All the people answered, ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’”
You will call his name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. Jesus saves from sins through the covenant (no mention of a “new” covenant in Matthew), in which his blood atones. Pilate says, ironically, tragically, as do all who do not see both our complicity and blessedness in Jesus’ death, “I’m innocent (!) of his blood.” And way more tragically, this redemptive cry, “His blood be on us and our children,” rather than affirming that for its first century the Jesus movement was mostly a Jewish movement, led in later centuries to the Church’s persecution of Jesus’ own people. Call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. And lest you wish to argue that it is Jesus’ resurrection that saves his people and not his bloodshedding death, read this, unique to Matthew, from Jesus’ crucifixion:
“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus’ resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”
You see, at Jesus’ death, the resurrection – the final deliverance from our sins – begins.
Now, I don’t want you to get hung up on whether Jesus actually saved his people in subsequent history. My point is the author of Matthew inextricably links Jesus’ birth with his death, so I don’t think the two should ever be separated (no Christmas without Easter, no Easter without Christmas, though I have serious reservations about the ways we celebrate both Christmas and Easter). And you may not find my argument about Matthew very convincing (remember: this is shorthand for a lot of scholarship that you can address with your own concordance and some basic exegesis). “Jeff, that’s a lot of words, they can mean anything, so what.” Sure, so let’s turn to Luke and address images instead of words.
Ah, Luke. Here’s where we get so much of our Christmas pageants – angels and shepherds and mangers and starry nights and noels. I want to concentrate on these verses from Luke’s birth narrative (I challenge you not to think of Linus as you read these):
“While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” (Ok, Linus was reciting from the King James version and I said I’d stick to the NIV, so the two are different enough that you may not have heard Linus at all).
Now, you and I are probably heavily influenced by Western European culture, especially in so traditional (meaning – straight from the Old Country) a matter as Christmas, so you’ve probably got in your mind a picture of your parents’ crèche from when you were young, which probably looks like a barn of some kind straight out of Germany or Scandinavia: wooded sides, thatched roof with the baby Jesus lying in a wooden feed trough. The author of Luke would never have had that image in mind, because it’ constituent parts would not exist for, I don’t know, a millennium or so. Indeed, if the author is telling the truth in the introduction, she has compared sources and “investigated everything from the beginning,” so she knows something about inns and mangers in Bethlehem of Jesus’ day (and actually for centuries thereafter), and the facts are these: wood was scarce, so was hay and wheat therefore so was thatch. But caves are abundant, especially in Bethlehem, they’re dry and cozy and they’ve made great homes from Jesus’ time to ours. And since we’re not talking housing standards such as we have in the U.S.A., but much smaller and simpler dwellings as humans have used well until very recently, and drawing on good archaeology from Bethlehem, the customary family cave had two main sections, one for people and the other for animals. Contrary to our expectations, the front of the two sections was reserved for people, the back for the animals (usually not very many animals) and, get this, the word usually translated “inn” (bringing to mind hotels and motels and quaint English inns, all anachronisms) means actually “higher room” or “upper room” (both Mark and Luke use this word to refer to the place Jesus ate his last supper!) and actually referred to the room for people (often a step or two higher than the deeper, lower room further back in the cave), so Mary and Joseph and the baby found no room in the people area (too many people in town because of the census) of a local family’s perhaps relative’s cave home and had to go further back in the cave.
So get this image in your mind: a cave with a trough hewn out of rock, Mary wrapping up Jesus with cloths and laying him down in it. The author wants to make sure that we remember this image, because she repeats it three times (“she wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger . . . this will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger . . . so they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger”). Now ask yourself where else in Luke’s gospel do we see a similar scene. Remember Joseph (there’s that name again) of Arimathea:
“Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body. Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock.”
The wondrous sign the shepherds saw – and all signs make us wonder not just about their magnificence but about their meaning – was a baby appearing as one entombed. I imagine that besides being inconvenient, using a manger for a crib would also bring a bit of superstitious creepiness to Jesus’ parents, like our using a baby’s casket for a bassinette. But the author understands – and wants us to understand – that, at least looking back, we cannot understanding Christ or what his life means without keeping both his birth and his death united. In neither Matthew nor Luke are we considering history: the actual events of Jesus’ birth are wrapped so completely in theology that Jesus’ history is unrecoverable. But the mere fact of Jesus’ being born is trivial and ordinary, in spite of those who claim there’s no proof Jesus ever existed. So is the mere fact of his being killed. What is important, ecstatically important, is that his birth and death and all they encompass are immensely meaningful, that Jesus in his life – birth, living, death – did all that was right, was always about God’s business, fulfilled God’s plan and, following the analogy from a prior post, changed the course of human history, including my own.
For one like I, so caught up in wondering if what I do with my time and life will ever mean anything, Scripture reminds me that Jesus’ life has great meaning and that, by joining my life with his even though that means a cross in my future, my life can mean something, too. But Scripture offers this hope through the conviction that from the very get-go Jesus’ death was foreseen and embraced, even in the earliest moments of his life, not as a problem to be overcome or an outcome to be avoided, but as a redemptive conclusion without which his saving life would be incomplete. Our celebrations of Jesus’ birthday are surely incomplete when we forget this. Thank you for reading.
First, to review, I don’t like my birthday because it dredges up birth/death dread and, purporting to celebrate the day of one’s emergence, as it surely does in one’s early years, while the years mount one’s birthday becomes a grim countdown toward the last one, and no one ever talks about this other side of birthdays though birthday humor – and sometimes humor is a last-gasp honesty – usually points to it: you’re growing old, you’ve got grey hair (my friends sang this to my before I was ten) or numerous birthday cards that remind you of that inverse rule of aging: the more years the fewer functions, especially those functions one most wants to carry undiminished into one’s dotage (cards addressing these, though addressed to a sextuagenarian [say that fast and hear the irony] or septuagenarian, often feature someone young, nubile and half naked). Birthdays seem dishonest with a frosty, sugar coating: yay, another year, may be your last.
Now, to Jesus’ birthday: I see churches celebrating Jesus’ birth with no mention of his death. Good god, the horrors I’ve seen: come worship the Christ child, come kneel at the manger, come welcome the Babe (not the babe on the birthday card). And the pageants, excuses to parade the church’s children around in ridiculous costumes (if you were ever a sheep in one of these you know what I mean) and have them recite a conflation of Matthew and Luke with a little of John’s prologue thrown in (mercifully, Mark has proven particularly resistant to this harmony). The whole season of Advent I find particularly foolish, like Jesus is going to be born again (I love that theological irony) and surely not that Jesus is actually going to return some day ‘cause that would be way too eschatological for the mainlines (churches who look fervently for the Lord’s return usually don’t celebrate Christmas at all, at least in worship). This whole season reminds me of a medieval passion play for illiterates – the people could never understand the Scriptures so we’ll put on little vignettes to help them - and last time I checked most of us church-goers are literate enough to text or email each other though not so much with the Scriptures (so maybe this mess is a good thing after all), cause if we did understand the Scriptures we’d never sit still for so much of this nativity nonsense.
Now, after that rant I hope you’re saying, “Ok, wise guy, you tell me what the Scriptures say!” Oh, I’ve got you now, and I dare – I triple-dog dare you – not to admit even grudgingly when I’m through that I’ve got a point. If you have even a shred of self-respect you’ll concede now.
Ok, to the Scriptures. Jesus’ birth is mentioned just about exclusively in two gospels, Matthew and Luke. I think we can leave the prologue to John’s gospel and the couple of places where the epistles speak of Christ’s pre-existence out of the discussion, though those scriptures, one may easily argue, invariably include Christ’s post-existence, i.e. the descent and ascent of the divine-human figure. Matthew and Luke have explicit stories of Jesus’ birth, on which the churches base their Christmas services. My thesis: Matthew and Luke entwine Jesus’ birth inextricably with his death. Let’s start with Matthew and for ease of reference I’ll quote from the NIV.
Mary is found to be pregnant so Joseph is going to divorce her but sleeps on it and has a dream, one in which an angel visits him, and here’s what the angel says to Joseph and, concurrently, here’s what the narrator says to us readers:
“Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”
Now, I want you to set aside all your long theological or ecclesiastical training in how Jesus saves us from our sins and stick with Matthew’s gospel. Taking this last clause – “he will save his people from their sins” – how does this birth announcement enmesh Jesus’ birth and death? (You see it already, don’t you?) Note also that, aside from the narrator’s quote from Isaiah (which is actually kind of contradictory to the angel’s message, unless you can tolerate Jesus having two names – Jesus, which means “the Lord saves” and Immanuel, which means “God with us,” the latter name closing the gospel with Jesus telling his disciples “I am with you always,” which actually argues against the divine-man’s descent and return to heaven, since Jesus doesn’t go anyplace but stays here forever, see the problems with harmonizing?), this announcement and a brief sentence (“But he had no union with her until she gave birth to a son”) are all we’ve got from Matthew about Jesus’ birth (please don’t get me started on “We Three Kings from Orient Are”). So you may be saying, “Jeff, with so little to go on, how can you argue that Jesus’ birth and death are inextricably entwined?”
I don’t want to go into great detail here, and am confident my short explanation will suffice to make my argument, but I do suggest you spend some time concording the words “save,” “people” and “sin” in Matthew’s gospel. I’m using Schmoller’s “Handkonkordanz zum griechischen Neuen Testament” primarily to intimidate you with German, though it’s way handy and fairly exhaustive as a pocket-sized concordance to the Greek NT. But using a concordance you’ll find these three words – save, people and sins – grouped in Matthew’s unique usage (I’m discounting here those places where Matthew explicitly uses Mark, since the author’s creation is usually more indicative of her intent than her quotes from other sources) in two places. The first, at the last supper, when Jesus describes a blessed cup of wine as “my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” – and, remember, we’re talking a heavily Jewish context so you’ll have to read up on the use of blood in forgiveness of sins in the Hebrew Bible, as well as Passover celebrations, etc. This gets close to Jesus’ saving his people from their sins, though the reference to “many” is not so explicitly a reference to Jesus’ “people,” but you see where I’m going, right: those churches that celebrate the Lord’s Supper on Christmas Eve are heading in the right direction.
But that’s not the best part in Matthew. I encourage you to read up on the narrative use of irony in the first century and in Scripture, because the second, sure, rock-solid tie in between the angel’s telling Joseph how to name Jesus and the entwining of his birth with his death comes in the scene before Pilate. Pilate – a classically ruthless bastard to his subjects and a sycophantic suck-up to his superiors – asks the crowd of Jesus’ people – Pilate’s Jewish subjects – a question impossible to answer: “Which one do you want me to release to you: Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?” Remember now – “Christ” is a pre-Christian term meaning “anointed one” and was used to refer to deliverers or kings, so I imagine Pilate just itching for the crowd to shout for a messiah so he can retaliate, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got your messiah right here!” I also imagine the crowd is way too smart to fall for such an obvious trick. And though the author seems apologetic for Pilate, ironically things are quite different. Think about the redemptive power of blood in Jewish sacrificial theology as you read this:
“When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. ‘I am innocent of this man’s blood,’ he said. ‘It is your responsibility!’ All the people answered, ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children!’”
You will call his name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. Jesus saves from sins through the covenant (no mention of a “new” covenant in Matthew), in which his blood atones. Pilate says, ironically, tragically, as do all who do not see both our complicity and blessedness in Jesus’ death, “I’m innocent (!) of his blood.” And way more tragically, this redemptive cry, “His blood be on us and our children,” rather than affirming that for its first century the Jesus movement was mostly a Jewish movement, led in later centuries to the Church’s persecution of Jesus’ own people. Call him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. And lest you wish to argue that it is Jesus’ resurrection that saves his people and not his bloodshedding death, read this, unique to Matthew, from Jesus’ crucifixion:
“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus’ resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.”
You see, at Jesus’ death, the resurrection – the final deliverance from our sins – begins.
Now, I don’t want you to get hung up on whether Jesus actually saved his people in subsequent history. My point is the author of Matthew inextricably links Jesus’ birth with his death, so I don’t think the two should ever be separated (no Christmas without Easter, no Easter without Christmas, though I have serious reservations about the ways we celebrate both Christmas and Easter). And you may not find my argument about Matthew very convincing (remember: this is shorthand for a lot of scholarship that you can address with your own concordance and some basic exegesis). “Jeff, that’s a lot of words, they can mean anything, so what.” Sure, so let’s turn to Luke and address images instead of words.
Ah, Luke. Here’s where we get so much of our Christmas pageants – angels and shepherds and mangers and starry nights and noels. I want to concentrate on these verses from Luke’s birth narrative (I challenge you not to think of Linus as you read these):
“While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.” (Ok, Linus was reciting from the King James version and I said I’d stick to the NIV, so the two are different enough that you may not have heard Linus at all).
Now, you and I are probably heavily influenced by Western European culture, especially in so traditional (meaning – straight from the Old Country) a matter as Christmas, so you’ve probably got in your mind a picture of your parents’ crèche from when you were young, which probably looks like a barn of some kind straight out of Germany or Scandinavia: wooded sides, thatched roof with the baby Jesus lying in a wooden feed trough. The author of Luke would never have had that image in mind, because it’ constituent parts would not exist for, I don’t know, a millennium or so. Indeed, if the author is telling the truth in the introduction, she has compared sources and “investigated everything from the beginning,” so she knows something about inns and mangers in Bethlehem of Jesus’ day (and actually for centuries thereafter), and the facts are these: wood was scarce, so was hay and wheat therefore so was thatch. But caves are abundant, especially in Bethlehem, they’re dry and cozy and they’ve made great homes from Jesus’ time to ours. And since we’re not talking housing standards such as we have in the U.S.A., but much smaller and simpler dwellings as humans have used well until very recently, and drawing on good archaeology from Bethlehem, the customary family cave had two main sections, one for people and the other for animals. Contrary to our expectations, the front of the two sections was reserved for people, the back for the animals (usually not very many animals) and, get this, the word usually translated “inn” (bringing to mind hotels and motels and quaint English inns, all anachronisms) means actually “higher room” or “upper room” (both Mark and Luke use this word to refer to the place Jesus ate his last supper!) and actually referred to the room for people (often a step or two higher than the deeper, lower room further back in the cave), so Mary and Joseph and the baby found no room in the people area (too many people in town because of the census) of a local family’s perhaps relative’s cave home and had to go further back in the cave.
So get this image in your mind: a cave with a trough hewn out of rock, Mary wrapping up Jesus with cloths and laying him down in it. The author wants to make sure that we remember this image, because she repeats it three times (“she wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger . . . this will be a sign to you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger . . . so they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger”). Now ask yourself where else in Luke’s gospel do we see a similar scene. Remember Joseph (there’s that name again) of Arimathea:
“Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body. Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock.”
The wondrous sign the shepherds saw – and all signs make us wonder not just about their magnificence but about their meaning – was a baby appearing as one entombed. I imagine that besides being inconvenient, using a manger for a crib would also bring a bit of superstitious creepiness to Jesus’ parents, like our using a baby’s casket for a bassinette. But the author understands – and wants us to understand – that, at least looking back, we cannot understanding Christ or what his life means without keeping both his birth and his death united. In neither Matthew nor Luke are we considering history: the actual events of Jesus’ birth are wrapped so completely in theology that Jesus’ history is unrecoverable. But the mere fact of Jesus’ being born is trivial and ordinary, in spite of those who claim there’s no proof Jesus ever existed. So is the mere fact of his being killed. What is important, ecstatically important, is that his birth and death and all they encompass are immensely meaningful, that Jesus in his life – birth, living, death – did all that was right, was always about God’s business, fulfilled God’s plan and, following the analogy from a prior post, changed the course of human history, including my own.
For one like I, so caught up in wondering if what I do with my time and life will ever mean anything, Scripture reminds me that Jesus’ life has great meaning and that, by joining my life with his even though that means a cross in my future, my life can mean something, too. But Scripture offers this hope through the conviction that from the very get-go Jesus’ death was foreseen and embraced, even in the earliest moments of his life, not as a problem to be overcome or an outcome to be avoided, but as a redemptive conclusion without which his saving life would be incomplete. Our celebrations of Jesus’ birthday are surely incomplete when we forget this. Thank you for reading.
Friday, December 24, 2010
About My Fear
“You’re scared and a coward!”
“You mean you’re not scared?”
“Sure I’m scared, I’m not an idiot.”
“Then why am I a coward and you’re not?”
“You’re scared so you run, but I’m scared so I fight!”
I can’t catch my breath, like air has left me but I’m holding my breath, too, I feel my heart thumping and hair on my arms and back and neck standing up goose-pimply, all my attention riveted on something I don’t understand, something dangerous, unknown, trying real hard to identify it but meanwhile wanting to run so bad just get the hell away before something gets me or just that it would show itself so I can stomp the living shit out of it . . . that’s fear. Deep in our heads, down in our brain stems sits an ancient trigger fundamental to life’s long survival, a toggle (on/off) that can override higher brain functions instantly sending us into rage or terror, desperate fight or flight. You know this, you’ve felt it many, many times, perhaps (like me) you’ve studied basic psychology so you get it, like me you’ve lived with fear all your life and do quite well, thank you. So if you’ve read my last post(s) you may have asked yourself, “Why in the world was he afraid of his birthday?” or, if you read to its end, “Why in the world is he afraid of cooperating in celebrating his birthday?”
Look, I’ve always found something creepy about birthdays (creepy being that pre-fear feeling, when skin begins to tighten up and tingle and move, usually away from extremities and toward one’s heart). Perhaps it has something to do with mom or having a mom and asking those questions early “Where did I come from?” so a nervous parent who wants to be honest but not go into anatomical detail answers “From mommy’s tummy” like she spit me up one day and boy do I remember how bad that felt. Or maybe because as a small child I spent so much time anonymous (this was before children were so forefronted) and unremarked until one day suddenly the white spotlight has me blinded and blinking in confusion. But allow that child to grow just a couple of years and suddenly he’s pondering one of life’s fundamental mysteries: I came from nothing (or almost nothing: “The best part of you ran down the crack of your mother’s ass!” and just thinking about mom reading this brings up a whole lot of things Freud talked about), literally didn’t exist, actually was not in every way, how can it be that before my birth (and the nine month’s gestation, since we’ve learned basic anatomy) I didn’t exist at all? Think about that a bit, you’ll find it a scary thought.
Pascal noticed, famously, that just thinking certain thoughts or imagining a scary event can make us feel the fear we would if we were actually experiencing that event. That’d be a trivial psychological factoid except that Pascal built the Enlightenment on it, hoping to supplant the messy lower mental functions with pure, crystalline thought: because I think (and not because I feel) I know I exist. But his method held its own undoing, because that rational ability to think so that one can postulate and induce conclusions is the very same ability that can make one shiver and squirm by simply imagining someone dumping a snake in one’s lap (more with the Freud). And Pascal stayed pretty basic, whereas Schleiermacher went straight and deep to one particular thought and it’s feeling consort, that of absolute dependence. Thinking deeply – which means thinking so that one feels, too – about not existing before conception or about falling into dust after living leads one to feel a certain way, according to Schleiermacher, a way he described as feeling absolutely dependent on something besides myself for my existence, and not dependent in a good way but in a helpless, can’t do anything for myself way. Both Pascal and Schleiermacher recognized that some thoughts seem to open onto an abyss, where we feel not just fear and want to run or fight but where we feel like we’re going to fall, like when you’re standing on a rock bluff or a high building’s observation platform and you look down and feel that yawning void at your feet and imagine a great sucking force that if you let go will pull you over and you’re rushing down faster and faster, some thoughts threaten with falling into . . . confusion, inhumanity, insanity, into being anything but rational, an animal gibbering.
Frank Herbert imagined such a place at each person’s inner core, a place from which the Bene Gesserit recoiled in terror, could not face. That’s a non-cognitive place, one both Pascal and Schleiermacher would recognize, so I think it’s worth our attention, too. Some thoughts by their form or content lead us down to a brain-stem fear response where they grab handfuls of that stuff then swerve back up into our higher cognitive functions coupling fear-response with our imagination and our speculative reason and leaving us feeling – this is a feeling, now, and not a thought - like a huge void has suddenly yawned open, that we really don’t understand exactly what’s going on but that something big is happening and we sense just a tiny bit of it, and that terror threatens to shake us to pieces but we’re survivors so we take that tiny bit that gives us the briefest, slimmest glimpse of how awfully complicated, complex, way beyond us it is and using it we construct a way that we – and I mean the personal, individual first person singular use of “we” meaning “me” – fit into this immense reality, and if the fit is right and feels solid, then we feel not terror but amazement, overwhelming and grateful astonishment. When we feel that, we’ve moved through fear into awe.
Awe respects the abyss beneath certain thoughts, or questions, or assertions. “Respect” is a paltry word here, I wanted to write “reveres” but that feels wrong. We feel awe when we find ourselves a place in abysmal thoughts, and these are thoughts, mind you, awe is a thinking person’s response, even a dervish after twirling twenty hours though deep in ecstasy does not trip over into awe unless she thinks about that ecstasy’s place in the world, how that ecstasy points to another, deeper reality permeating this basal, mundane one, then the abyss opens and she feels fear perhaps terror but when she makes the connection, the personal connection between that abyss and her world she feels not fear nor terror but awe. Paul Tillich called questions that connect us to the abyss “ultimate questions,” dealing with “ultimate concerns,” concerns about our tiny, individual place in a huge, abominably huge and complex universe. Tillich’s ultimate questions are questions of meaning and he postulated a “ground of all being” on which our most terror-filled experiences ultimately rest, a ground in which terror is transformed into awe because no matter how huge the abyss, underneath the abyss is some place where we mean something.
Ultimate questions about birth and death are questions of meaning: what do I mean, what will my life mean in the great river of human history? I’m born into this huge stream of humanity, I die out of it, and what’s left over? I think of Tillich’s “ground of all being” like the bed of a river, a really big river that encompasses all time and space and everything in it. Which is more the river, the bed or the water that flows through it? The bed is relatively stable (floods may change the course of a river suddenly, the regular flow of the river changes its course gradually) and determinative of the river’s contours, even the eddies and swirls reflect river bed topographics. I don’t find Tillich’s ground all that comforting (in terms of transforming terror into awe) because it’s rather impersonal. Imagine me, an individual, as a drop or a bucket or even a bathtub dumped into the Mississippi. What does that one drop or bucket or bathtub of water mean in the scale of the river? Perhaps it’s my arrogance, but if that one additional drop or bucket doesn’t make the river swell so that it changes course (perhaps not dramatically, but at least somewhere along its great length), that it interacts with and changes the river bed and moves even the slightest bit into a new direction (just adding to the flood, just flowing right along seem little more than inertia or gravity), forming a new curve or bend, then in spite of the ground/bed that shapes the river I don’t see how one life can mean very much. And in spite of Tillich’s pastoral concern to comfort us in modern terms, that big ol’ river may be no more than life itself in all its myriad forms and all its long history, and birth and death – that dynamic that terrifies me so much – may be nothing more than a very successful strategy for life to get more life, damn the details. And though life’s long evolution is awesome to conceive, it’s also terrifying in its brute impersonality.
What can one life mean in the three-billion-year history of life (at least on this planet)? That’s the subject of all biography and autobiography and every birthday party you or I have attended. You bet I fear birthdays, not because of cake or singing or presents or the inexorable addition of years, but because of the question that fuels the celebration: what do I mean? What can one life mean? That’s a terrible question, one from which any sane person should recoil. The challenge is to transform it into an awesome question, one resplendent with possibilities, to ask, “Can one drop move that great river” and in spite size and time to say, “Yes!” and here’s how. Thank you for reading.
“You mean you’re not scared?”
“Sure I’m scared, I’m not an idiot.”
“Then why am I a coward and you’re not?”
“You’re scared so you run, but I’m scared so I fight!”
I can’t catch my breath, like air has left me but I’m holding my breath, too, I feel my heart thumping and hair on my arms and back and neck standing up goose-pimply, all my attention riveted on something I don’t understand, something dangerous, unknown, trying real hard to identify it but meanwhile wanting to run so bad just get the hell away before something gets me or just that it would show itself so I can stomp the living shit out of it . . . that’s fear. Deep in our heads, down in our brain stems sits an ancient trigger fundamental to life’s long survival, a toggle (on/off) that can override higher brain functions instantly sending us into rage or terror, desperate fight or flight. You know this, you’ve felt it many, many times, perhaps (like me) you’ve studied basic psychology so you get it, like me you’ve lived with fear all your life and do quite well, thank you. So if you’ve read my last post(s) you may have asked yourself, “Why in the world was he afraid of his birthday?” or, if you read to its end, “Why in the world is he afraid of cooperating in celebrating his birthday?”
Look, I’ve always found something creepy about birthdays (creepy being that pre-fear feeling, when skin begins to tighten up and tingle and move, usually away from extremities and toward one’s heart). Perhaps it has something to do with mom or having a mom and asking those questions early “Where did I come from?” so a nervous parent who wants to be honest but not go into anatomical detail answers “From mommy’s tummy” like she spit me up one day and boy do I remember how bad that felt. Or maybe because as a small child I spent so much time anonymous (this was before children were so forefronted) and unremarked until one day suddenly the white spotlight has me blinded and blinking in confusion. But allow that child to grow just a couple of years and suddenly he’s pondering one of life’s fundamental mysteries: I came from nothing (or almost nothing: “The best part of you ran down the crack of your mother’s ass!” and just thinking about mom reading this brings up a whole lot of things Freud talked about), literally didn’t exist, actually was not in every way, how can it be that before my birth (and the nine month’s gestation, since we’ve learned basic anatomy) I didn’t exist at all? Think about that a bit, you’ll find it a scary thought.
Pascal noticed, famously, that just thinking certain thoughts or imagining a scary event can make us feel the fear we would if we were actually experiencing that event. That’d be a trivial psychological factoid except that Pascal built the Enlightenment on it, hoping to supplant the messy lower mental functions with pure, crystalline thought: because I think (and not because I feel) I know I exist. But his method held its own undoing, because that rational ability to think so that one can postulate and induce conclusions is the very same ability that can make one shiver and squirm by simply imagining someone dumping a snake in one’s lap (more with the Freud). And Pascal stayed pretty basic, whereas Schleiermacher went straight and deep to one particular thought and it’s feeling consort, that of absolute dependence. Thinking deeply – which means thinking so that one feels, too – about not existing before conception or about falling into dust after living leads one to feel a certain way, according to Schleiermacher, a way he described as feeling absolutely dependent on something besides myself for my existence, and not dependent in a good way but in a helpless, can’t do anything for myself way. Both Pascal and Schleiermacher recognized that some thoughts seem to open onto an abyss, where we feel not just fear and want to run or fight but where we feel like we’re going to fall, like when you’re standing on a rock bluff or a high building’s observation platform and you look down and feel that yawning void at your feet and imagine a great sucking force that if you let go will pull you over and you’re rushing down faster and faster, some thoughts threaten with falling into . . . confusion, inhumanity, insanity, into being anything but rational, an animal gibbering.
Frank Herbert imagined such a place at each person’s inner core, a place from which the Bene Gesserit recoiled in terror, could not face. That’s a non-cognitive place, one both Pascal and Schleiermacher would recognize, so I think it’s worth our attention, too. Some thoughts by their form or content lead us down to a brain-stem fear response where they grab handfuls of that stuff then swerve back up into our higher cognitive functions coupling fear-response with our imagination and our speculative reason and leaving us feeling – this is a feeling, now, and not a thought - like a huge void has suddenly yawned open, that we really don’t understand exactly what’s going on but that something big is happening and we sense just a tiny bit of it, and that terror threatens to shake us to pieces but we’re survivors so we take that tiny bit that gives us the briefest, slimmest glimpse of how awfully complicated, complex, way beyond us it is and using it we construct a way that we – and I mean the personal, individual first person singular use of “we” meaning “me” – fit into this immense reality, and if the fit is right and feels solid, then we feel not terror but amazement, overwhelming and grateful astonishment. When we feel that, we’ve moved through fear into awe.
Awe respects the abyss beneath certain thoughts, or questions, or assertions. “Respect” is a paltry word here, I wanted to write “reveres” but that feels wrong. We feel awe when we find ourselves a place in abysmal thoughts, and these are thoughts, mind you, awe is a thinking person’s response, even a dervish after twirling twenty hours though deep in ecstasy does not trip over into awe unless she thinks about that ecstasy’s place in the world, how that ecstasy points to another, deeper reality permeating this basal, mundane one, then the abyss opens and she feels fear perhaps terror but when she makes the connection, the personal connection between that abyss and her world she feels not fear nor terror but awe. Paul Tillich called questions that connect us to the abyss “ultimate questions,” dealing with “ultimate concerns,” concerns about our tiny, individual place in a huge, abominably huge and complex universe. Tillich’s ultimate questions are questions of meaning and he postulated a “ground of all being” on which our most terror-filled experiences ultimately rest, a ground in which terror is transformed into awe because no matter how huge the abyss, underneath the abyss is some place where we mean something.
Ultimate questions about birth and death are questions of meaning: what do I mean, what will my life mean in the great river of human history? I’m born into this huge stream of humanity, I die out of it, and what’s left over? I think of Tillich’s “ground of all being” like the bed of a river, a really big river that encompasses all time and space and everything in it. Which is more the river, the bed or the water that flows through it? The bed is relatively stable (floods may change the course of a river suddenly, the regular flow of the river changes its course gradually) and determinative of the river’s contours, even the eddies and swirls reflect river bed topographics. I don’t find Tillich’s ground all that comforting (in terms of transforming terror into awe) because it’s rather impersonal. Imagine me, an individual, as a drop or a bucket or even a bathtub dumped into the Mississippi. What does that one drop or bucket or bathtub of water mean in the scale of the river? Perhaps it’s my arrogance, but if that one additional drop or bucket doesn’t make the river swell so that it changes course (perhaps not dramatically, but at least somewhere along its great length), that it interacts with and changes the river bed and moves even the slightest bit into a new direction (just adding to the flood, just flowing right along seem little more than inertia or gravity), forming a new curve or bend, then in spite of the ground/bed that shapes the river I don’t see how one life can mean very much. And in spite of Tillich’s pastoral concern to comfort us in modern terms, that big ol’ river may be no more than life itself in all its myriad forms and all its long history, and birth and death – that dynamic that terrifies me so much – may be nothing more than a very successful strategy for life to get more life, damn the details. And though life’s long evolution is awesome to conceive, it’s also terrifying in its brute impersonality.
What can one life mean in the three-billion-year history of life (at least on this planet)? That’s the subject of all biography and autobiography and every birthday party you or I have attended. You bet I fear birthdays, not because of cake or singing or presents or the inexorable addition of years, but because of the question that fuels the celebration: what do I mean? What can one life mean? That’s a terrible question, one from which any sane person should recoil. The challenge is to transform it into an awesome question, one resplendent with possibilities, to ask, “Can one drop move that great river” and in spite size and time to say, “Yes!” and here’s how. Thank you for reading.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
About My Birthday #3
(I can’t help myself my mom for two decades at least has asked each one of us what kind of cake we want for our birthdays which she then bakes except when she doesn’t have time then she picks one up at a local grocery store bakery so never liking to celebrate my birthday I’ve always picked Lady Baltimore cake whose tricky icing always throws my mom)
(this is interesting in a family-dynamical way my older brother and I tried to replace the birthday standard with one derived from the viral badgers song that was going around the ‘net, oh, around 2004, but instead of “badgers, badgers, badgers . . . mushroom, mushroom . . . snake, snake” we’d sing “birthday, birthday, birthday . . . ice cream, ice cream . . . cake, cake, oh, it’s a cake” but that would mean my brother and I would be establishing a birthday tradition, something my mom could never allow so she came up with a different tune “happy happy birthday to you to you to you, hey!” which we’ve sung since oh 2006 though I and perhaps my brother thought ours was way more hip)
(“everybody” means in this memory my mom my grandmother and my older brother and not my father since he and mom divorced when I was a year and a half old so you have to picture four of us in November 1962 or ’63 and if ’63 then JFK had just been assassinated so that adds another layer)
(picture a 1200 square foot post-WWII stick built wooden-shingled 3/1 “ranch” if you can call a cramped drafty greatroom kitchen bed bed bed bath a “ranch” that’s six rooms and the kitchen was separated from the greatroom only by a half-wall so when I say “den” I mean one of the bedrooms though come to think of it if mom had a bedroom and by brother and I shared one and the third was a den then my grandmother must have lived elsewhere)
(I recognize that I’ve the advantage of having a better than most memory since I swear and my grandmother can corroborate that I remember an event from when I was 2 weeks yes that’s 2 weeks old and a year and a half and two years etc. though I may have constructed false memories)
(I’m from Alabama so when and if we’d go to the beach we’d go to PCB though my grandmother’s sister and her family lived in Florala so that was closer to Fort Walton beach so my pier memory may be from FWB instead of PCB which was much sparser in those years – think of the old black and white Cracker Jack commercial and how everything seems sear and empty and hot and dry that’s my memory of FWB)
(my mom was dragging me out you understand because back then even though Dr. Benjamin Spock had already spoken very wise words about childrearing but to my knowledge my mom never read his book so she was dragging me out to help me “get over” my fright though to be fair I didn’t know how to swim and in fact wouldn’t learn until I was thirteen in the pool at the Spyglass Inn in PCB)
(I know you’ve seen pictures like the one I just saw yesterday no lie of a little child sitting on Santa’s knee and wailing absolutely wailing in terror well that was me after waiting in a long line at a department store this is before malls you see and thinking I’d be brave but by the time I’m perched on a stranger’s knee which is way intimate and the stranger is more strange by wearing a fake beard we all knew it was fake and anyway in how many strangers’ laps did you sit when you were that young)
(and how many times do you get to hear your family sing unless you’re one of those from a musical family where everyone plays and instrument and you’ve got all four or five parts covered I imagine some families even have someone on the descant)
(believe me divorce in Alabama in the early sixties though known was extremely rare and carried a lot of shame not just for my mom and my grandmother and my great-grandmother all divorcees but also for my brother and me though of course we didn’t understand shame the way I do now after a lot of socio-anthropological research as biblical hermeneutic)
(in my memory is a picture of Jack Dempsey or I should say in my memory of my mind’s eye at the time I remembered a picture of Jack Dempsey so I adopted his rather classical and stylized boxing stance though my torso was not bare and I was not wearing tights and knee-high boxing boots)
(when I say “maid” I’m mean one of two women from a nearby African-American neighborhood this was the early 1960’s in Alabama so neighborhoods were largely segregated as they are in most places in the United States still to this day to our shame but either Miss Barbara or Mrs. Pearl would “sit” us while my mother was at work because she had to work because there was no man in the house so she could stay home and raise us)
(today we say “assaulted” which is by no means inaccurate)
(one could call the former “fearing fear” which is alliterative and pithy and is also a form of fear too)
(though honestly though mice seem to have a sufficient amount of fear they do seem to be preoccupied a lot of the time and not necessarily vigilant at least from the expressions on their faces when I empty the traps we have to set because we live in the middle of a field so we have field mice taking advantage of the warm and dry house we’ve built but from their expressions they don’t seem to have anticipated the trap’s snapping their skulls or necks or backs in two so I can’t imagine it’d be all that different if a cat were to pounce from the mouse’s perspective out of the blue)
(though children the age she was when she wrote this often come to a painful awareness of death of the fact that we’re all going to die some day for me that realization came oddly enough from watching “The Greatest Show on Earth” at the part where the trapeze artist tries a triple somersault without a net and he or his catcher misses the grab and he falls to the ground and injures his right arm ending his circus career though in Hollywood fashion he eventually gets back the use of his arm and flies again but for some reason I understood right then our mortal frailty explicitly in terms of my mom mind you I knew then that she’d die some day and that there was nothing I could do about it I was six or seven at the time and after that I’d have nightmares about being stranded on the roof of our house with me and mom and my brother surrounded by a rising flood and knowing that I was the one who would have to swim my mom to safety and I’d have to choose her over my brother and at this time I still didn’t know how to swim though ironically both my mom and my brother did so who’s saving whom)
(if I’m honest not even by avoiding my birthday)
(and yes I think having crossed a half a century I can speak about when I was a child and not expect the chortle I got from an English professor in college who read one of my poems that had the line “when I was a child” and thought I had not lived long enough to write about reflecting on my childhood being only twenty-one at the time well she’s dead now and I just turned fifty-one so I think I’ve got some perspective and I mean no disrespect to her by mentioning that she’s dead now and for those of you who were at Maryville the same time or around the same time I was there I’m not talking about Dr. Blair for whom I have the greatest admiration and still a bit of a crush and who died a couple of years ago in a nursing home near Birmingham and I didn’t know she was ill or I would have tried to see her)
(and honestly I’m trying to be honest here)
(too many sloppy tenets for me like when does one get a soul at conception or at birth what makes a soul immortal do animals have one when does it leave a dead body what does it look like what does it weigh etc.)
(by and large though being multi-valent one can find a lot of different things in Scripture and surely one can find references to something that sounds like our modern or post-modern conception of an immortal soul though really we’re talking about the modern conception of soul in that a soul is an immaterial identity and animating force that on the death of the body persists with all our memories and personality whereas the post-modern conception of soul and its persistence after physical death sound more like composting)
(and in those places primarily in Luke and Acts both written by the same author you understand one may argue and many have just ask me for a bibliography since this is my field that the authors of these instances are trying to be accommodating to a Graeco-Roman culture steeped in belief in an immortal soul though the more middle-Eastern convictions of most of those writing Scripture embraced the body as complete and concrete with the soul referring to the combination of the body and the Deity’s animating breath or spirit or wind)
(at least among the cognoscenti in the PC(USA) my own ordaining denomination though if you pressed very few of us Presbyterians would either know or believe my reading of Scripture above though it’s seriously right)
(reading such amateurish profundity in comments to news stories where you can log on and comment with an alias so that no one can actually find you and tell you how if you’d taken at least one religion course in college you’d know how ignorant you are and would keep your ignorance to yourself always makes me both laugh and feel frustrated and please know when I say “you” I’m not accusing you dear reader of this essay but I’m using “you” in that more general second-person universal sense)
(if you’d taken even just that introductory course in college you’d know this)
(and those were in high school where I was a part of a deeply faithful though young so young church youth group and I did believe wholly in my immortal soul and its sure future rest in the arms of God)
(though there have been more times that I haven’t attended church regularly which should be distinguished from “being religious” but to be more precise I would say “I’ve always been firmly pious” because “pious” is a technical term referring to a person’s being committed to living a faithful life and holding faithful tenets about God and the meaning of life)
(my nagging depression low-grade to be sure dates from that period)
(best described in Sartre’s “Nausea” if you’ve read it and if not please do and you’ll hopefully feel existential nausea which is quite different from simply being nauseated)
(believe me, television is a potent soporific against dreading death)
(and that is still a possibility only committed atheists argue otherwise and they have quite a job proving God does not exist the most they can argue is disbelieving in God’s existence is a better alternative to its obverse)
(I certainly did not consider this a probability)
(though one can say quite a bit more about the former, and I may)
(again, “Preacher, where’s your faith?”)
(this is interesting in a family-dynamical way my older brother and I tried to replace the birthday standard with one derived from the viral badgers song that was going around the ‘net, oh, around 2004, but instead of “badgers, badgers, badgers . . . mushroom, mushroom . . . snake, snake” we’d sing “birthday, birthday, birthday . . . ice cream, ice cream . . . cake, cake, oh, it’s a cake” but that would mean my brother and I would be establishing a birthday tradition, something my mom could never allow so she came up with a different tune “happy happy birthday to you to you to you, hey!” which we’ve sung since oh 2006 though I and perhaps my brother thought ours was way more hip)
(“everybody” means in this memory my mom my grandmother and my older brother and not my father since he and mom divorced when I was a year and a half old so you have to picture four of us in November 1962 or ’63 and if ’63 then JFK had just been assassinated so that adds another layer)
(picture a 1200 square foot post-WWII stick built wooden-shingled 3/1 “ranch” if you can call a cramped drafty greatroom kitchen bed bed bed bath a “ranch” that’s six rooms and the kitchen was separated from the greatroom only by a half-wall so when I say “den” I mean one of the bedrooms though come to think of it if mom had a bedroom and by brother and I shared one and the third was a den then my grandmother must have lived elsewhere)
(I recognize that I’ve the advantage of having a better than most memory since I swear and my grandmother can corroborate that I remember an event from when I was 2 weeks yes that’s 2 weeks old and a year and a half and two years etc. though I may have constructed false memories)
(I’m from Alabama so when and if we’d go to the beach we’d go to PCB though my grandmother’s sister and her family lived in Florala so that was closer to Fort Walton beach so my pier memory may be from FWB instead of PCB which was much sparser in those years – think of the old black and white Cracker Jack commercial and how everything seems sear and empty and hot and dry that’s my memory of FWB)
(my mom was dragging me out you understand because back then even though Dr. Benjamin Spock had already spoken very wise words about childrearing but to my knowledge my mom never read his book so she was dragging me out to help me “get over” my fright though to be fair I didn’t know how to swim and in fact wouldn’t learn until I was thirteen in the pool at the Spyglass Inn in PCB)
(I know you’ve seen pictures like the one I just saw yesterday no lie of a little child sitting on Santa’s knee and wailing absolutely wailing in terror well that was me after waiting in a long line at a department store this is before malls you see and thinking I’d be brave but by the time I’m perched on a stranger’s knee which is way intimate and the stranger is more strange by wearing a fake beard we all knew it was fake and anyway in how many strangers’ laps did you sit when you were that young)
(and how many times do you get to hear your family sing unless you’re one of those from a musical family where everyone plays and instrument and you’ve got all four or five parts covered I imagine some families even have someone on the descant)
(believe me divorce in Alabama in the early sixties though known was extremely rare and carried a lot of shame not just for my mom and my grandmother and my great-grandmother all divorcees but also for my brother and me though of course we didn’t understand shame the way I do now after a lot of socio-anthropological research as biblical hermeneutic)
(in my memory is a picture of Jack Dempsey or I should say in my memory of my mind’s eye at the time I remembered a picture of Jack Dempsey so I adopted his rather classical and stylized boxing stance though my torso was not bare and I was not wearing tights and knee-high boxing boots)
(when I say “maid” I’m mean one of two women from a nearby African-American neighborhood this was the early 1960’s in Alabama so neighborhoods were largely segregated as they are in most places in the United States still to this day to our shame but either Miss Barbara or Mrs. Pearl would “sit” us while my mother was at work because she had to work because there was no man in the house so she could stay home and raise us)
(today we say “assaulted” which is by no means inaccurate)
(one could call the former “fearing fear” which is alliterative and pithy and is also a form of fear too)
(though honestly though mice seem to have a sufficient amount of fear they do seem to be preoccupied a lot of the time and not necessarily vigilant at least from the expressions on their faces when I empty the traps we have to set because we live in the middle of a field so we have field mice taking advantage of the warm and dry house we’ve built but from their expressions they don’t seem to have anticipated the trap’s snapping their skulls or necks or backs in two so I can’t imagine it’d be all that different if a cat were to pounce from the mouse’s perspective out of the blue)
(though children the age she was when she wrote this often come to a painful awareness of death of the fact that we’re all going to die some day for me that realization came oddly enough from watching “The Greatest Show on Earth” at the part where the trapeze artist tries a triple somersault without a net and he or his catcher misses the grab and he falls to the ground and injures his right arm ending his circus career though in Hollywood fashion he eventually gets back the use of his arm and flies again but for some reason I understood right then our mortal frailty explicitly in terms of my mom mind you I knew then that she’d die some day and that there was nothing I could do about it I was six or seven at the time and after that I’d have nightmares about being stranded on the roof of our house with me and mom and my brother surrounded by a rising flood and knowing that I was the one who would have to swim my mom to safety and I’d have to choose her over my brother and at this time I still didn’t know how to swim though ironically both my mom and my brother did so who’s saving whom)
(if I’m honest not even by avoiding my birthday)
(and yes I think having crossed a half a century I can speak about when I was a child and not expect the chortle I got from an English professor in college who read one of my poems that had the line “when I was a child” and thought I had not lived long enough to write about reflecting on my childhood being only twenty-one at the time well she’s dead now and I just turned fifty-one so I think I’ve got some perspective and I mean no disrespect to her by mentioning that she’s dead now and for those of you who were at Maryville the same time or around the same time I was there I’m not talking about Dr. Blair for whom I have the greatest admiration and still a bit of a crush and who died a couple of years ago in a nursing home near Birmingham and I didn’t know she was ill or I would have tried to see her)
(and honestly I’m trying to be honest here)
(too many sloppy tenets for me like when does one get a soul at conception or at birth what makes a soul immortal do animals have one when does it leave a dead body what does it look like what does it weigh etc.)
(by and large though being multi-valent one can find a lot of different things in Scripture and surely one can find references to something that sounds like our modern or post-modern conception of an immortal soul though really we’re talking about the modern conception of soul in that a soul is an immaterial identity and animating force that on the death of the body persists with all our memories and personality whereas the post-modern conception of soul and its persistence after physical death sound more like composting)
(and in those places primarily in Luke and Acts both written by the same author you understand one may argue and many have just ask me for a bibliography since this is my field that the authors of these instances are trying to be accommodating to a Graeco-Roman culture steeped in belief in an immortal soul though the more middle-Eastern convictions of most of those writing Scripture embraced the body as complete and concrete with the soul referring to the combination of the body and the Deity’s animating breath or spirit or wind)
(at least among the cognoscenti in the PC(USA) my own ordaining denomination though if you pressed very few of us Presbyterians would either know or believe my reading of Scripture above though it’s seriously right)
(reading such amateurish profundity in comments to news stories where you can log on and comment with an alias so that no one can actually find you and tell you how if you’d taken at least one religion course in college you’d know how ignorant you are and would keep your ignorance to yourself always makes me both laugh and feel frustrated and please know when I say “you” I’m not accusing you dear reader of this essay but I’m using “you” in that more general second-person universal sense)
(if you’d taken even just that introductory course in college you’d know this)
(and those were in high school where I was a part of a deeply faithful though young so young church youth group and I did believe wholly in my immortal soul and its sure future rest in the arms of God)
(though there have been more times that I haven’t attended church regularly which should be distinguished from “being religious” but to be more precise I would say “I’ve always been firmly pious” because “pious” is a technical term referring to a person’s being committed to living a faithful life and holding faithful tenets about God and the meaning of life)
(my nagging depression low-grade to be sure dates from that period)
(best described in Sartre’s “Nausea” if you’ve read it and if not please do and you’ll hopefully feel existential nausea which is quite different from simply being nauseated)
(believe me, television is a potent soporific against dreading death)
(and that is still a possibility only committed atheists argue otherwise and they have quite a job proving God does not exist the most they can argue is disbelieving in God’s existence is a better alternative to its obverse)
(I certainly did not consider this a probability)
(though one can say quite a bit more about the former, and I may)
(again, “Preacher, where’s your faith?”)
About My Birthday #2
When I turned 50 in 2009, I told my immediate family that I didn’t want any presents for my birthday. Having notched half a century, I thought, “Finally, I shall dictate the terms of my birthday!” But my family – strong-willed and pig-headed to a person - ignored me and bought presents, anyway. Around my cake they sang our own, irritating take on “Happy Birthday” and presented me presents, which I opened, tight-lipped and thankless.
Lest you think my curmudgeondry betrays dismay for my advancing age, please know I’ve never enjoyed birthdays. My earliest birthday memory dates from my third or fourth year, and I remember hiding most, running from our kitchen table as everybody began to sing “Happy Birthday.” In our den we kept a three-legged, corner end table that crashed over occasionally, if we were careless. Underneath, I loved to hide, way back in the corner. I hid there then. If my memory is close to accurate, I hid first from embarrassment over my family’s singing to me, but also from no little fear.
You may think it strange that I should fear my family’s celebrating my birthday, but I encourage you to think back to your own young childhood and remember how often you were afraid. In my memories of those early years, I’m often afraid but just as often compelled to do the very thing that frightened me. I was afraid – no, terrified actually – to walk out on the pier at Panama City Beach because I could look down between the boards and see the water growing deeper the further out we walked. I remember making a public spectacle, screaming and crying to go back because I feared falling in and drowning. I feared going to the doctor and getting a shot, often the fear proving the worst of the three. As I was born in late November, my birthday looks forward to Christmas, and I remember also looking forward to fearing Santa Claus. About my birthday, I certainly didn’t fear presents, just the public receiving of presents, my family’s celebrating me alone on this day with singing and the expectation that I would have to sit still for it.
I used to hide from bullies, too. I take the current, public descrying of bullies and bullying sympathetically and seriously. I grew up without a man around the house, so until my mom remarried when I was ten my brother and I were especially susceptible to bullies in your neighborhood: we were easy targets, already marked as socially weak. If we stayed in our yard or on our front porch, we were almost entirely safe. But then no one stayed in their own yards, even at pre-school ages, especially not my brother and I: we were two who had “too much energy,” so we were often away from our “home base.” I remember one instance when three brothers, current and future delinquents all, came around the block and, finding my brother and me around the corner from our house, declared that we would have a boxing match. I was teamed with the youngest, my brother with the oldest, with the third serving as “referee.” When he pantomimed dinging a ringside bell, I adopted a boxing stance, but my opponent leapt up, grabbed both my ears and pulled down, hard. I began to cry, to wail, actually, and the two older boys jumped on my brother and pummeled him. Somehow we got away and made it back to our front porch, both of us crying, our maid rushing out the front door to see what was the matter. And this was by no means an isolated event: our neighbor thugs – young children not even ten years of age but already well along the path to thugdom – stalked us, constantly. We had to stay on our toes, practice constant vigilance, to keep from being punched and ending up on our front porch, crying.
Childhood is, I think, rife with such instances of anticipating the time when one will be afraid and then, when the time arrives, of being afraid. When my daughter was slightly older than I was in the aforementioned events, she wrote a poem that captures feelings about death very similar to those I remember feeling about bullies and compulsory events. In her poem, she described death as a huge, heartless cat and herself as a small, hyper-vigilant mouse. She wrote quite well from the mouse’s perspective describing the mouse’s watchfulness, its terror, and also the inevitability of the cat – silent, stalking, still as a statue – pouncing on the mouse, death pouncing on her eventually. And my daughter, as young as she was, described some of my own, adult dreads about death, dread that you and I go mincing through life, constantly casting worried glances over our shoulders though ultimately becoming too consumed with some life matter, while death implacably stalks us and will pounce some day, perhaps when we become engrossed in life and forget to keep watch. I find myself hoping death will do quickly for me and not toy.
As I grew older I often thought of death in implacable terms: the day of my birth, even the act of my being born, created simultaneously the day of my cessation, of my expiring, and there’s no way humanly possibly that I can avoid that final day. Over the years I’ve thought of death as a debt I owe, a bill that will come due, but those concepts do not capture the feelings that, if I am honest, reverberate with childhood fear both of the bald fact of death and of my fearing anticipating my death. I’ve found myself regretting my own birth because it drags along with it an inseparable, hideous twin. I’ve found myself hating the fact of my birth because, had I not been born, I wouldn’t have to go through dying – nay, so that I wouldn’t even have to anticipate dying, that I wouldn’t have to fear expecting to die. In such times, I’ve imagined it preferable never to have existed at all, rather than to be and know that someday I won’t.
Now, you may say if you know me and my calling, “Preacher, what about your immortal soul?” I don’t believe you or I have an immortal soul and, here’s an interesting bit of trivia, neither does Scripture. Scripture seems intent on reminding us that we are mortal from the tops of our heads to the bottom of our feet and all points in between, that there’s nothing in us that has life in itself that is not dependent on its existence to Someone outside. Except for a very few places, Scripture sees us all as coming from and going back to dust, walking and talking mud briefly animated by God’s own breath. So if there’s any hope at all for any existence beyond death, we have to rely on God for it, that just as God once created everything seen and unseen out of nothing at all, some day God will recreate God’s faithful people even though they’ve fallen completely into dust, even though the world itself may have fallen completely into dust. That’s all orthodox, but to be honest, I don’t really believe all that, either.
Sometimes, I hear people argue that the only reason we have religions is to help people deal with the fact that they’re going to die. Though religion certainly holds comfort in death, that’s hardly the only reason for religion, nor is religion’s comfort a sufficient reason for the phenomenon to be so prevalent in our history and culture, even today. Personally, except for a few brief, intensely evangelical times, I’ve never escaped dreading my death and those of those I love, even though except for a brief period in college I’ve always been firmly religious. During that period in college, I had crushing doubts that any religious conviction – my or anyone’s – was true. And these doubts, more specifically their “crushing” character, were feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, futility and inconsequence.
At the time, such feelings hit me invariably and most forcefully in the backcountry. Perhaps because of the absence of electricity and, consequently, light and television, when my wife and I would backpack I’d feel death dread most acutely. I remember one time, in November of 1982 when Nancy had come to Maryville around my birthday so we could go backpacking, we hiked up above Cades Cove to a campsite we’d visited before. The night was cold and crisp, illuminated only by starlight, and I lay staring at the roof of our tent frantically trying to think some way out of my thoroughgoing, shivering dread of dying. Eventually, somewhere in that night, I thought of the postulate that if God exists God may have a beneficent interest in me. Please know, I considered this a bare and remote possibility, that even should God exist that certainly did not necessitate God’s ensuring I’d live eternally. But somehow, that possibility – the barest hope that if God exists God may condescend to keep my existence – proved enough to dampen my despair, my dread. Over the last quarter-century, I’ve had ample occasion to revisit that dread and, please be assured, my religion has proved no buffer to its despair. I have practiced my religion more because I fear living a faithless life than because I dread dying. I recognize neither of these is a ringing endorsements for the faith.
So I don’t like birthdays. Birthdays remind me that I’m small, powerless, that even two or three of my family are together stronger than I. Birthdays seem to me to be an unappreciated example of blaming the victim, of taking a person and rubbing their noses not just in their birth but in birth’s inseparable consequence and then having the temerity to sing about it. And I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a single gift that would make that sting any less. So I refuse to cooperate. I fear to do otherwise. Thank you for reading.
Lest you think my curmudgeondry betrays dismay for my advancing age, please know I’ve never enjoyed birthdays. My earliest birthday memory dates from my third or fourth year, and I remember hiding most, running from our kitchen table as everybody began to sing “Happy Birthday.” In our den we kept a three-legged, corner end table that crashed over occasionally, if we were careless. Underneath, I loved to hide, way back in the corner. I hid there then. If my memory is close to accurate, I hid first from embarrassment over my family’s singing to me, but also from no little fear.
You may think it strange that I should fear my family’s celebrating my birthday, but I encourage you to think back to your own young childhood and remember how often you were afraid. In my memories of those early years, I’m often afraid but just as often compelled to do the very thing that frightened me. I was afraid – no, terrified actually – to walk out on the pier at Panama City Beach because I could look down between the boards and see the water growing deeper the further out we walked. I remember making a public spectacle, screaming and crying to go back because I feared falling in and drowning. I feared going to the doctor and getting a shot, often the fear proving the worst of the three. As I was born in late November, my birthday looks forward to Christmas, and I remember also looking forward to fearing Santa Claus. About my birthday, I certainly didn’t fear presents, just the public receiving of presents, my family’s celebrating me alone on this day with singing and the expectation that I would have to sit still for it.
I used to hide from bullies, too. I take the current, public descrying of bullies and bullying sympathetically and seriously. I grew up without a man around the house, so until my mom remarried when I was ten my brother and I were especially susceptible to bullies in your neighborhood: we were easy targets, already marked as socially weak. If we stayed in our yard or on our front porch, we were almost entirely safe. But then no one stayed in their own yards, even at pre-school ages, especially not my brother and I: we were two who had “too much energy,” so we were often away from our “home base.” I remember one instance when three brothers, current and future delinquents all, came around the block and, finding my brother and me around the corner from our house, declared that we would have a boxing match. I was teamed with the youngest, my brother with the oldest, with the third serving as “referee.” When he pantomimed dinging a ringside bell, I adopted a boxing stance, but my opponent leapt up, grabbed both my ears and pulled down, hard. I began to cry, to wail, actually, and the two older boys jumped on my brother and pummeled him. Somehow we got away and made it back to our front porch, both of us crying, our maid rushing out the front door to see what was the matter. And this was by no means an isolated event: our neighbor thugs – young children not even ten years of age but already well along the path to thugdom – stalked us, constantly. We had to stay on our toes, practice constant vigilance, to keep from being punched and ending up on our front porch, crying.
Childhood is, I think, rife with such instances of anticipating the time when one will be afraid and then, when the time arrives, of being afraid. When my daughter was slightly older than I was in the aforementioned events, she wrote a poem that captures feelings about death very similar to those I remember feeling about bullies and compulsory events. In her poem, she described death as a huge, heartless cat and herself as a small, hyper-vigilant mouse. She wrote quite well from the mouse’s perspective describing the mouse’s watchfulness, its terror, and also the inevitability of the cat – silent, stalking, still as a statue – pouncing on the mouse, death pouncing on her eventually. And my daughter, as young as she was, described some of my own, adult dreads about death, dread that you and I go mincing through life, constantly casting worried glances over our shoulders though ultimately becoming too consumed with some life matter, while death implacably stalks us and will pounce some day, perhaps when we become engrossed in life and forget to keep watch. I find myself hoping death will do quickly for me and not toy.
As I grew older I often thought of death in implacable terms: the day of my birth, even the act of my being born, created simultaneously the day of my cessation, of my expiring, and there’s no way humanly possibly that I can avoid that final day. Over the years I’ve thought of death as a debt I owe, a bill that will come due, but those concepts do not capture the feelings that, if I am honest, reverberate with childhood fear both of the bald fact of death and of my fearing anticipating my death. I’ve found myself regretting my own birth because it drags along with it an inseparable, hideous twin. I’ve found myself hating the fact of my birth because, had I not been born, I wouldn’t have to go through dying – nay, so that I wouldn’t even have to anticipate dying, that I wouldn’t have to fear expecting to die. In such times, I’ve imagined it preferable never to have existed at all, rather than to be and know that someday I won’t.
Now, you may say if you know me and my calling, “Preacher, what about your immortal soul?” I don’t believe you or I have an immortal soul and, here’s an interesting bit of trivia, neither does Scripture. Scripture seems intent on reminding us that we are mortal from the tops of our heads to the bottom of our feet and all points in between, that there’s nothing in us that has life in itself that is not dependent on its existence to Someone outside. Except for a very few places, Scripture sees us all as coming from and going back to dust, walking and talking mud briefly animated by God’s own breath. So if there’s any hope at all for any existence beyond death, we have to rely on God for it, that just as God once created everything seen and unseen out of nothing at all, some day God will recreate God’s faithful people even though they’ve fallen completely into dust, even though the world itself may have fallen completely into dust. That’s all orthodox, but to be honest, I don’t really believe all that, either.
Sometimes, I hear people argue that the only reason we have religions is to help people deal with the fact that they’re going to die. Though religion certainly holds comfort in death, that’s hardly the only reason for religion, nor is religion’s comfort a sufficient reason for the phenomenon to be so prevalent in our history and culture, even today. Personally, except for a few brief, intensely evangelical times, I’ve never escaped dreading my death and those of those I love, even though except for a brief period in college I’ve always been firmly religious. During that period in college, I had crushing doubts that any religious conviction – my or anyone’s – was true. And these doubts, more specifically their “crushing” character, were feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, futility and inconsequence.
At the time, such feelings hit me invariably and most forcefully in the backcountry. Perhaps because of the absence of electricity and, consequently, light and television, when my wife and I would backpack I’d feel death dread most acutely. I remember one time, in November of 1982 when Nancy had come to Maryville around my birthday so we could go backpacking, we hiked up above Cades Cove to a campsite we’d visited before. The night was cold and crisp, illuminated only by starlight, and I lay staring at the roof of our tent frantically trying to think some way out of my thoroughgoing, shivering dread of dying. Eventually, somewhere in that night, I thought of the postulate that if God exists God may have a beneficent interest in me. Please know, I considered this a bare and remote possibility, that even should God exist that certainly did not necessitate God’s ensuring I’d live eternally. But somehow, that possibility – the barest hope that if God exists God may condescend to keep my existence – proved enough to dampen my despair, my dread. Over the last quarter-century, I’ve had ample occasion to revisit that dread and, please be assured, my religion has proved no buffer to its despair. I have practiced my religion more because I fear living a faithless life than because I dread dying. I recognize neither of these is a ringing endorsements for the faith.
So I don’t like birthdays. Birthdays remind me that I’m small, powerless, that even two or three of my family are together stronger than I. Birthdays seem to me to be an unappreciated example of blaming the victim, of taking a person and rubbing their noses not just in their birth but in birth’s inseparable consequence and then having the temerity to sing about it. And I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a single gift that would make that sting any less. So I refuse to cooperate. I fear to do otherwise. Thank you for reading.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
About My Birthday
When I turned 50 in 2009, I told my immediate family that I didn’t want any presents for my birthday. Having notched half a century, I thought, “Finally, I shall dictate the terms of my birthday!” But my family – strong-willed and pig-headed to a person - ignored me and bought presents, anyway. Around my cake (I can’t help myself: my mom for two decades at least has asked each one of us what kind of cake we want for our birthdays, which she then bakes except when she doesn’t have time then she picks one up at a local grocery store bakery, so, never liking to celebrate my birthday, I’ve always picked Lady Baltimore cake, whose tricky icing always throws my mom) they sang our own, irritating take on “Happy Birthday” (this is interesting, in a family-dynamical way: my older brother and I tried to replace the birthday standard with one derived from the viral badgers song that was going around the ‘net, oh, around 2004, but instead of “badgers, badgers, badgers . . . mushroom, mushroom . . . snake, snake” we’d sing “birthday, birthday, birthday . . . ice cream, ice cream . . . cake, cake, oh, it’s a cake” but that would mean my brother and I would be establishing a birthday tradition, something my mom could never allow, so she came up with a different tune, “happy happy birthday to you to you to you, hey!” which we’ve sung since, oh, 2006, though I and perhaps my brother thought ours was way more hip) and presented me presents, which I opened, tight-lipped and thankless.
Lest you think my curmudgeondry betrays dismay for my advancing age, please know I’ve never enjoyed birthdays. My earliest birthday memory dates from my third or fourth year, and I remember hiding most, running from our kitchen table as everybody (“everybody” means in this memory my mom my grandmother and my older brother and not my father since he and mom divorced when I was a year and a half old so you have to picture four of us in November 1962 or ’63 and if ’63 then JFK had just been assassinated so that adds another layer) began to sing “Happy Birthday.” In our den (picture a 1200 square foot post-WWII stick built wooden-shingled 3/1 “ranch” if you can call a cramped drafty greatroom kitchen bed bed bed bath a “ranch” that’s six rooms and the kitchen was separated from the greatroom only by a half-wall so when I say “den” I mean one of the bedrooms though come to think of it if mom had a bedroom and by brother and I shared one and the third was a den then my grandmother must have lived elsewhere) we kept a three-legged, corner end table that crashed over occasionally, if we were careless. Underneath, I loved to hide, way back in the corner. I hid there then. If my memory is close to accurate, I hid first from embarrassment over my family’s singing to me, but also from no little fear.
You may think it strange that I should fear my family’s celebrating my birthday, but I encourage you to think back to your own young childhood (I recognize that I’ve the advantage of having a better than most memory since I swear and my grandmother can corroborate that I remember an event from when I was 2 weeks yes that’s 2 weeks old and a year and a half and two years etc. though I may have constructed false memories) and remember how often you were afraid. In my memories of those early years, I’m often afraid but just as often compelled to do the very thing that frightened me. I was afraid – no, terrified actually – to walk out on the pier at Panama City Beach (I’m from Alabama so when and if we’d go to the beach we’d go to PCB though my grandmother’s sister and her family lived in Florala so that was closer to Fort Walton beach so my pier memory may be from FWB instead of PCB which was much sparser in those years – think of the old black and white Cracker Jack commercial and how everything seems sear and empty and hot and dry that’s my memory of FWB) because I could look down between the boards and see the water growing deeper the further out we walked. I remember making a public spectacle, screaming and crying to go back because I feared falling in and drowning (my mom was dragging me out you understand because back then even though Dr. Benjamin Spock had already spoken very wise words about childrearing but to my knowledge my mom never read his book so she was dragging me out to help me “get over” my fright though to be fair I didn’t know how to swim and in fact wouldn’t learn until I was thirteen in the pool at the Spyglass Inn in PCB). I feared going to the doctor and getting a shot, often (but by no means always) the fear proving the worst of the three. As I was born in late November, my birthday looks forward to Christmas, and I remember also looking forward to fearing Santa Claus (I know you’ve seen pictures like the one I just saw yesterday no lie of a little child sitting on Santa’s knee and wailing absolutely wailing in terror well that was me after waiting in a long line at a department store this is before malls you see and thinking I’d be brave but by the time I’m perched on a stranger’s knee which is way intimate and the stranger is more strange by wearing a fake beard we all knew it was fake and anyway in how many strangers’ laps did you sit when you were that young). About my birthday, I certainly didn’t fear presents, just the public receiving of presents, my family’s celebrating me alone on this day with singing (and how many times do you get to hear your family sing unless you’re one of those from a musical family where everyone plays and instrument and you’ve got all four or five parts covered I imagine some families even have someone on the descant) and the expectation that I would have to sit still for it.
I used to hide from bullies, too. I take the current, public descrying of bullies and bullying sympathetically and seriously. I grew up without a man around the house, so until my mom remarried when I was ten my brother and I were especially susceptible to bullies in your neighborhood: we were easy targets, already marked as socially weak (believe me divorce in Alabama in the early sixties though known was extremely rare and carried a lot of shame not just for my mom and my grandmother and my great-grandmother all divorcees but also for my brother and me though of course we didn’t understand shame the way I do now after a lot of socio-anthropological research as biblical hermeneutic). If we stayed in our yard or on our front porch, we were almost entirely safe. But then no one stayed in their own yards, even at pre-school ages, especially not my brother and I: we were two who had “too much energy,” so we were often away from our “home base.” I remember one instance when three brothers, current and future delinquents all, came around the block and, finding my brother and me around the corner from our house, declared that we would have a boxing match. I was teamed with the youngest, my brother with the oldest, with the third serving as “referee.” When he pantomimed dinging a ringside bell, I adopted a boxing stance (in my memory is a picture of Jack Dempsey or I should say in my memory of my mind’s eye at the time I remembered a picture of Jack Dempsey so I adopted his rather classical and stylized boxing stance though my torso was not bare and I was not wearing tights and knee-high boxing boots), but my opponent leapt up, grabbed both my ears and pulled down, hard. I began to cry, to wail, actually, and the two older boys jumped on my brother and pummeled him. Somehow we got away and made it back to our front porch, both of us crying, our maid (when I say “maid” I’m mean one of two women from a nearby African-American neighborhood this was the early 1960’s in Alabama so neighborhoods were largely segregated as they are in most places in the United States still to this day to our shame but either Miss Barbara or Mrs. Pearl would “sit” us while my mother was at work because she had to work because there was no man in the house so she could stay home and raise us) rushing out the front door to see what was the matter. And this was by no means an isolated event: our neighbor thugs – young children not even ten years of age but already well along the path to thugdom – stalked us, constantly. We had to stay on our toes, practice constant vigilance, to keep from being punched (today we say “assaulted” which is by no means inaccurate) and ending up on our front porch, crying.
Childhood is, I think, rife with such instances of anticipating the time when one will be afraid and then, when the time arrives, of being afraid (one could call the former “fearing fear” which is alliterative and pithy and is also a form of fear too). When my daughter was slightly older than I was in the aforementioned events, she wrote a poem that captures feelings about death very similar to those I remember feeling about bullies and compulsory events. In her poem, she described death as a huge, heartless cat and herself as a small, hyper-vigilant mouse. She wrote quite well from the mouse’s perspective (though honestly though mice seem to have a sufficient amount of fear they do seem to be preoccupied a lot of the time and not necessarily vigilant at least from the expressions on their faces when I empty the traps we have to set because we live in the middle of a field so we have field mice taking advantage of the warm and dry house we’ve built but from their expressions they don’t seem to have anticipated the trap’s snapping their skulls or necks or backs in two so I can’t imagine it’d be all that different if a cat were to pounce from the mouse’s perspective out of the blue) describing the mouse’s watchfulness, its terror, and also the inevitability of the cat – silent, stalking, still as a statue – pouncing on the mouse, death pouncing on her eventually. And my daughter, as young as she was, described some of my own, adult dreads about death (though children the age she was when she wrote this often come to a painful awareness of death of the fact that we’re all going to die some day for me that realization came oddly enough from watching “The Greatest Show on Earth” at the part where the trapeze artist tries a triple somersault without a net and he or his catcher misses the grab and he falls to the ground and injures his right arm ending his circus career though in Hollywood fashion he eventually gets back the use of his arm and flies again but for some reason I understood right then our mortal frailty explicitly in terms of my mom mind you I knew then that she’d die some day and that there was nothing I could do about it I was six or seven at the time you understand after that I’d have nightmares about being stranded on the roof of our house with me and mom and my brother surrounded by a rising flood and knowing that I was the one who would have to swim my mom to safety and I’d have to choose her over my brother and at this time I still didn’t know how to swim though ironically both my mom and my brother did so who’s saving whom?), dread that you and I go mincing through life, constantly casting worried glances over our shoulders though ultimately becoming too consumed with some life matter, while death implacably stalks us and will pounce some day, perhaps when we become engrossed in life and forget to keep watch. I find myself hoping death will do quickly for me and not toy.
As I grew older I often thought of death in implacable terms: the day of my birth, even the act of my being born, created simultaneously the day of my cessation, of my expiring, and there’s no way humanly possibly that I can avoid that final day (if I’m honest not even by avoiding my birthday). Over the years (and yes I think having crossed a half a century I can speak about when I was a child and not expect the chortle I got from an English professor in college who read one of my poems that had the line “when I was a child” and thought I had not lived long enough to write about reflecting on my childhood being only twenty-one at the time well she’s dead now and I just turned fifty-one so I think I’ve got some perspective and I mean no disrespect to her by mentioning that she’s dead now and for those of you who were at Maryville the same time or around the same time I was there I’m not talking about Dr. Blair for whom I have the greatest admiration and still a bit of a crush and who died a couple of years ago in a nursing home near Birmingham and I didn’t know she was ill or I would have tried to see her) I’ve thought of death as a debt I owe, a bill that will come due, but those concepts do not capture the feelings that, if I am honest (and honestly I’m trying to be honest here), reverberate with childhood fear both of the bald fact of death and of my fearing anticipating my death. I’ve found myself regretting my own birth because it drags along with it an inseparable, hideous twin. I’ve found myself hating the fact of my birth because, had I not been born, I wouldn’t have to go through dying – nay, so that I wouldn’t even have to anticipate dying, that I wouldn’t have to fear expecting to die. In such times, I’ve imagined it preferable never to have existed at all, rather than to be and know that someday I won’t.
Now, you may say if you know me and my calling, “Preacher, what about your immortal soul?” I don’t believe you or I have an immortal soul (too many sloppy tenets for me like when does one get a soul at conception or at birth what makes a soul immortal do animals have one when does it leave a dead body what does it look like what does it weigh etc.) and, here’s an interesting bit of trivia, neither does Scripture (by and large though being multi-valent one can find a lot of different things in Scripture and surely one can find references to something that sounds like our modern or post-modern conception of an immortal soul though really we’re talking about the modern conception of soul in that a soul is an immaterial identity and animating force that on the death of the body persists with all our memories and personality whereas the post-modern conception of soul and its persistence after physical death sounds more like composting). Scripture seems intent on reminding us that were are mortal from the tops of our heads to the bottom of our feet and all points in between, that there’s nothing in us that has life in itself that is not dependent on its existence to Someone outside. Except for a very few places (and in those places primarily in Luke and Acts both written by the same author you understand one may argue and many have just ask me for a bibliography since this is my field that the authors of these instances are trying to be accommodating to a Graeco-Roman culture steeped in belief in an immortal soul though the more middle-Eastern convictions of most of those writing Scripture embraced the body as complete and concrete with the soul referring to the combination of the body and the Deity’s animating breath or spirit or wind), Scripture sees us all as coming from and going back to dust, walking and talking mud briefly animated by God’s own breath. So if there’s any hope at all for any existence beyond death, we have to rely on God for it, that just as God once created everything seen and unseen out of nothing at all, some day God will recreate God’s faithful people even though they’ve fallen completely into dust, even though the world itself may have fallen completely into dust. That’s all orthodox (at least among the cognoscenti in the PC(USA) my own ordaining denomination though if you pressed very few of us Presbyterians would either know or believe my reading of Scripture above though it’s seriously right), but to be honest, I don’t really believe all that, either.
Sometimes, I hear people argue that the only reason we have religions is to help people deal with the fact that they’re going to die (reading such amateurish profundity in comments to news stories where you can log on and comment with an alias so that no one can actually find you and tell you how if you’d taken at least one religion course in college you’d know how ignorant you are and would keep your ignorance to yourself always makes me both laugh and feel frustrated and please know when I say “you” I’m not accusing you dear reader of this essay but I’m using “you” in that more general second-person universal sense). Though religion certainly holds comfort in death, that’s hardly the only reason for religion, nor is religion’s comfort a sufficient reason for the phenomenon to be so prevalent in our history and culture, even today (if you’d taken even just that introductory course in college you’d know this). Personally, except for a few brief, intensely evangelical times (and those were in high school where I was a part of a deeply faithful though young so young church youth group and I did believe wholly in my immortal soul and its sure future rest in the arms of God), I’ve never escaped dreading my death and those of those I love, even though except for a brief period in college I’ve always been firmly religious (though there have been more times that I haven’t attended church regularly which should be distinguished from “being religious” but to be more precise I would say “I’ve always been firmly pious” because “pious” is a technical term referring to a person’s being committed to living a faithful life and holding faithful tenets about God and the meaning of life though very few outside the scholarly study of religion understand this more positive sense of "piety"). During that period in college, I had crushing doubts (my nagging depression low-grade to be sure dates from that period) that any religious conviction – my or anyone’s – was true. And these doubts, more specifically their “crushing” character, were feelings (best described in Sartre’s “Nausea” if you’ve read it and if not please do and you’ll hopefully feel existential nausea which is quite different from simply being nauseated) of hopelessness, worthlessness, futility and inconsequence.
At the time, such feelings hit me invariably and most forcefully in the backcountry. Perhaps because of the absence of electricity and, consequently, light and television (believe me, television is a potent soporific against dreading death), when my wife and I would backpack I’d feel death dread most acutely. I remember one time, in November of 1982 when Nancy had come to Maryville around my birthday so we could go backpacking, we hiked up above Cades Cove to a campsite we’d visited before. The night was cold and crisp, illuminated only by starlight, and I lay staring at the roof of our tent frantically trying to think some way out of my thoroughgoing, shivering dread of dying. Eventually, somewhere in that night, I thought of the postulate that if God exists (and that is still a possibility only committed atheists argue otherwise and they have quite a job proving God does not exist the most they can argue is disbelieving in God’s existence is a better alternative to its obverse) God may have a beneficent interest in me. Please know, I considered this a bare and remote possibility (I certainly did not consider this a probability), that even should God exist that certainly did not necessitate God’s ensuring I’d live eternally. But somehow, that possibility – the barest hope that if God exists God may condescend to keep my existence – proved enough to dampen my despair, my dread. Over the last quarter-century, I’ve had ample occasion to revisit that dread and, please be assured, my religion has proved no buffer to its despair. I have practiced my religion more because I fear living a faithless life than because I dread dying. I recognize neither of these is a ringing endorsements for the faith (though one can say quite a bit more about the former, and I may).
So I don’t like birthdays. Birthdays remind me that I’m small, powerless, that even two or three of my family are together stronger than I. Birthdays seem to me to be an unappreciated example of blaming the victim, of taking a person and rubbing their noses not just in their birth but in birth’s inseparable consequence and then having the temerity to sing about it. And I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a single gift that would make that sting any less (again, “Preacher, where’s your faith?”). So I refuse to cooperate. I fear to do otherwise. Thank you for reading.
Monday, August 30, 2010
The Money's Gone
The money's gone, the money's gone,What we gonna do since the money's gone.
The money's gone, the money's gone,What we gonna do since the money's gone.
The fundamental principal of capitalism (and I'm no economist, so check my work) is, "Wealth accrues to capital." If one has capital (traditionally real estate, manufacturing goods, stocks and bonds, but lately, believe it or not, "credit"), one can simply sit back and watch wealth come to it. A capitalist system relies on industrious individuals to work hard to get capital, then to use the wealth that comes to capital to buy more capital, producing more goods, and use that greater wealth (more capital means more wealth comes to it) to produce more capital, etc. Nothing wrong with this economic system: in fact, one may argue quite successfully that a capitalistic economic system leads to greater wealth per average person quicker than any other.
The problem with capitalism doesn't appear in the early phases, or even in the mature phases. The problem appears in the later phase, such as that in which we here in the United States find ourselves: if left unchecked, the fundamental principal of capitalism will result in fewer and fewer people controlling a larger and larger percentage of the wealth. You can see how this follows from the basic principal, "wealth accrues to capital," assuming that a person pursues more capital with her or his wealth. Eventually, without redistributing the wealth, a country will find itself with less than five percent of the populace controlling more than ninety-five percent of the wealth. In that situation, our situation, states don't have any money, universities don't have any money, a whole lot of people don't have any money, even the federal government doesn't have any money, because all the money is in the hands of that five percent.
I'm not mentioning this to be critical of capitalism, though as a Christian I have to be at least a little critical of an economic system that values things over people and their well-being (though we do recognize "intellectual capital"). And capitalism is basically an economic system that persists on our telling each other over and over that things have value, economic value. And let's be honest: many things should have absolute value - food, shelter, transportation (since we need that for getting food and working), medicines, basically any thing that leads to safe, healthy and secure lives. But there's a really fuzzy line between "any thing that leads to safe, healthy and secure lives" and frivolity, such as diamonds (which admittedly don't have absolute value, though I know of very few who give diamonds no value whatsoever). One can add to the frivolity easily (I'm sure you can think of examples), but most notoriously, in a capitalist economy, is the case when one person has way more than she or he needs while another person - sharing the same economic system and society and commonwealth - doesn't have enough of what she or he needs. When this latter situation becomes extreme - where, for instance, five percent of the populace enjoys a standard of living in which they have waaaay more than they need while ninety-five percent are struggling to get by - then capitalism becomes very unstable. And when those percentage get more lopsided, they can pass a point where capitalism collapses, not least because the participants in that economic system begin to revalue what things are worth.
The classic solution to a capitalistic wealth-imbalance is redistribution of the wealth. I'm sure those of you in the United States remember when then-candidate Senator Obama said to a farmer in the midwest (I think, though I may be wrong) that we need to redistribute the wealth. By saying this, he was simply being honest and aware of the limits of capitalism (just like President Reagan was being sooo honest when he named our economy a "trickle-down economy," because that's exactly how capitalism works: wealth accrues to the top [capo] and drips down to the rest). Without redistributing the wealth, wealth will continue to accrue to the top and eventually the whole system will topple. Now, one would think that a government so capitalistic would be able to recognize when the system begins to totter and do something about it, such as increasing the federal minimum wage (a really small but important step in redistributing the wealth) or taxing the top to fund things like small business tax credits, social services, etc. But an ironic aspect of a mature capitalistic system appears when anyone suggests such pragmatic moves: since ninety-five percent see themselves as not having enough, proposing such governmental programs appears to them as if the government is trying to take even more away from them. So the general public tends to protest a move that would benefit them. And governors, whose primary goal seems to be to remain governors, don't want to alienate their constituents (forgetting, at all levels of our government, that our representatives do not represent parochial but common interests), so they sit on the needed reforms.
Recently in the United States, individual citizens have stepped forward to see if they can accomplish some wealth redistribution without the government's help (capitalism encourages individual rather than governmental initiative). Bill Gates and Warren Buffet - two of the four hundred and sixteen billionaires in our country, have begun to reach out to fellow billionaires and encourage them to donate half their wealth to charities. Please know how much I applaud Mr. Gate's and Mr. Buffet's efforts: indeed, I do so wish my church, the PC(USA) (the richest per capita denomination in this country), would have done this ourselves (and done so by example). I think this is a good first step, but still I have to ask: if one is a billionaire, is giving away half enough? Does one person or family need five hundred million in personal wealth? Still, this is a great move and I wish them much success. I doubt, however, that this move alone will be enough.
Rather than redistributing the wealth, our country emphasizes the ninety-five percent's taking on more debt. I have heard many times that our economy depends on consumers consuming: industry after industry, apparently having no cash reserves (the money's gone), depend on consumers who apparently have no cash reserves (the money's gone) continuing to consume: the housing industry, the automobile industry, etc., are struggling because no one's buying. So our government's response is, "Let's get the credit flowing again!" The eight thousand dollar tax rebate on purchasing a new home looks good on paper (and certainly propped up the housing market the last several years: indeed, Nancy and I sold our house to a first-time home buyer who wanted the rebate), but it actually encourages people to assume more debt. In fact, the "American dream" of owning a house is actually a banker's dream of getting a consumer to mortgage a house for thirty years and, over the life of the loan, pay three times the cost of the house (or, from a consumer's perspective, paying three times what the house is worth). All credit works this same way: relieve the borrower of having to save cash and, subsequently, get her or him to pay more than the item is worth. Any credit works the same way, even student loans. And in a capitalistic system, credit means paying too much for something, encumbering it with debt, and subsequently slowing the process of wealth accruing to capital (even a home, encumbered with debt, is not a surefire way to accrue wealth, as we've found out here over the last several years). Using credit - actually taking on more debt - just accelerates the flow of wealth from the ninety-five percent to the five percent, as I'm sure the five percent well know.
So that's kind of the glaring emergency in our capitalistic system, but I actually wanted to speak about a much narrower issue, though I hope you see how it relates: values. I hear and read so much about values: family values, American values, Christian values, etc. What I don't hear so much is questions about "values" themselves. A "value" is a measure of worth you and I ascribe to something, implicitly ranking it in terms of worth with other values, creating a value economy (some are worth more than others). But values are weak, flighty, fluctuating, much like a credit market. Values have no inherent worth, only the worth we ascribe to them based on various factors such as mood, temperament, scarcity, abundance, etc. In other words, there are no absolute values: by their very definition, values my be devalued to the point where they do not exist.
I hate Christian talk of values: what are our values, what do we value, etc. I want to talk of principles. Principles have this supreme characteristic: they are unaffected by changes in valuation. One may ask what a principle may cost a person, particularly a brave or unpopular principle (such as looking out for the have-nots rather than the haves), but whether or not people value the principal doesn't alter its worthiness. Now, to be honest, what we call "values" are actually principles: a family value, such as "parents, don't fight in front of your children," is actually quite principled. Many of our so-called American values - compassion, patriotism, integrity - are actually and were formerly called "principles." I object to values not because they are actually principles, but because we're calling principles "values," meaning, like everything else in our economy, they're for sale, they depend on market forces, some are up and others are down. We devalue principles by calling them values, which is, I believe, the goal of some who want everything - our nation, our churches, even our faith - to be subsumed into our economic system. And when everything gets a value, and hence gets put on sale, those with the money will be able to buy everything, even our principles.
Here's a principle for you: don't buy on credit, buy with cash. That's a foundational principal for a good capitalist. Don't let anyone convince you that your credit rating has value, especially those who would never buy on credit themselves. Let's stop the money flow, even reverse it. Let's refuse to let anyone attach a value to our principles. Thank you for reading.
The money's gone, the money's gone,What we gonna do since the money's gone.
The fundamental principal of capitalism (and I'm no economist, so check my work) is, "Wealth accrues to capital." If one has capital (traditionally real estate, manufacturing goods, stocks and bonds, but lately, believe it or not, "credit"), one can simply sit back and watch wealth come to it. A capitalist system relies on industrious individuals to work hard to get capital, then to use the wealth that comes to capital to buy more capital, producing more goods, and use that greater wealth (more capital means more wealth comes to it) to produce more capital, etc. Nothing wrong with this economic system: in fact, one may argue quite successfully that a capitalistic economic system leads to greater wealth per average person quicker than any other.
The problem with capitalism doesn't appear in the early phases, or even in the mature phases. The problem appears in the later phase, such as that in which we here in the United States find ourselves: if left unchecked, the fundamental principal of capitalism will result in fewer and fewer people controlling a larger and larger percentage of the wealth. You can see how this follows from the basic principal, "wealth accrues to capital," assuming that a person pursues more capital with her or his wealth. Eventually, without redistributing the wealth, a country will find itself with less than five percent of the populace controlling more than ninety-five percent of the wealth. In that situation, our situation, states don't have any money, universities don't have any money, a whole lot of people don't have any money, even the federal government doesn't have any money, because all the money is in the hands of that five percent.
I'm not mentioning this to be critical of capitalism, though as a Christian I have to be at least a little critical of an economic system that values things over people and their well-being (though we do recognize "intellectual capital"). And capitalism is basically an economic system that persists on our telling each other over and over that things have value, economic value. And let's be honest: many things should have absolute value - food, shelter, transportation (since we need that for getting food and working), medicines, basically any thing that leads to safe, healthy and secure lives. But there's a really fuzzy line between "any thing that leads to safe, healthy and secure lives" and frivolity, such as diamonds (which admittedly don't have absolute value, though I know of very few who give diamonds no value whatsoever). One can add to the frivolity easily (I'm sure you can think of examples), but most notoriously, in a capitalist economy, is the case when one person has way more than she or he needs while another person - sharing the same economic system and society and commonwealth - doesn't have enough of what she or he needs. When this latter situation becomes extreme - where, for instance, five percent of the populace enjoys a standard of living in which they have waaaay more than they need while ninety-five percent are struggling to get by - then capitalism becomes very unstable. And when those percentage get more lopsided, they can pass a point where capitalism collapses, not least because the participants in that economic system begin to revalue what things are worth.
The classic solution to a capitalistic wealth-imbalance is redistribution of the wealth. I'm sure those of you in the United States remember when then-candidate Senator Obama said to a farmer in the midwest (I think, though I may be wrong) that we need to redistribute the wealth. By saying this, he was simply being honest and aware of the limits of capitalism (just like President Reagan was being sooo honest when he named our economy a "trickle-down economy," because that's exactly how capitalism works: wealth accrues to the top [capo] and drips down to the rest). Without redistributing the wealth, wealth will continue to accrue to the top and eventually the whole system will topple. Now, one would think that a government so capitalistic would be able to recognize when the system begins to totter and do something about it, such as increasing the federal minimum wage (a really small but important step in redistributing the wealth) or taxing the top to fund things like small business tax credits, social services, etc. But an ironic aspect of a mature capitalistic system appears when anyone suggests such pragmatic moves: since ninety-five percent see themselves as not having enough, proposing such governmental programs appears to them as if the government is trying to take even more away from them. So the general public tends to protest a move that would benefit them. And governors, whose primary goal seems to be to remain governors, don't want to alienate their constituents (forgetting, at all levels of our government, that our representatives do not represent parochial but common interests), so they sit on the needed reforms.
Recently in the United States, individual citizens have stepped forward to see if they can accomplish some wealth redistribution without the government's help (capitalism encourages individual rather than governmental initiative). Bill Gates and Warren Buffet - two of the four hundred and sixteen billionaires in our country, have begun to reach out to fellow billionaires and encourage them to donate half their wealth to charities. Please know how much I applaud Mr. Gate's and Mr. Buffet's efforts: indeed, I do so wish my church, the PC(USA) (the richest per capita denomination in this country), would have done this ourselves (and done so by example). I think this is a good first step, but still I have to ask: if one is a billionaire, is giving away half enough? Does one person or family need five hundred million in personal wealth? Still, this is a great move and I wish them much success. I doubt, however, that this move alone will be enough.
Rather than redistributing the wealth, our country emphasizes the ninety-five percent's taking on more debt. I have heard many times that our economy depends on consumers consuming: industry after industry, apparently having no cash reserves (the money's gone), depend on consumers who apparently have no cash reserves (the money's gone) continuing to consume: the housing industry, the automobile industry, etc., are struggling because no one's buying. So our government's response is, "Let's get the credit flowing again!" The eight thousand dollar tax rebate on purchasing a new home looks good on paper (and certainly propped up the housing market the last several years: indeed, Nancy and I sold our house to a first-time home buyer who wanted the rebate), but it actually encourages people to assume more debt. In fact, the "American dream" of owning a house is actually a banker's dream of getting a consumer to mortgage a house for thirty years and, over the life of the loan, pay three times the cost of the house (or, from a consumer's perspective, paying three times what the house is worth). All credit works this same way: relieve the borrower of having to save cash and, subsequently, get her or him to pay more than the item is worth. Any credit works the same way, even student loans. And in a capitalistic system, credit means paying too much for something, encumbering it with debt, and subsequently slowing the process of wealth accruing to capital (even a home, encumbered with debt, is not a surefire way to accrue wealth, as we've found out here over the last several years). Using credit - actually taking on more debt - just accelerates the flow of wealth from the ninety-five percent to the five percent, as I'm sure the five percent well know.
So that's kind of the glaring emergency in our capitalistic system, but I actually wanted to speak about a much narrower issue, though I hope you see how it relates: values. I hear and read so much about values: family values, American values, Christian values, etc. What I don't hear so much is questions about "values" themselves. A "value" is a measure of worth you and I ascribe to something, implicitly ranking it in terms of worth with other values, creating a value economy (some are worth more than others). But values are weak, flighty, fluctuating, much like a credit market. Values have no inherent worth, only the worth we ascribe to them based on various factors such as mood, temperament, scarcity, abundance, etc. In other words, there are no absolute values: by their very definition, values my be devalued to the point where they do not exist.
I hate Christian talk of values: what are our values, what do we value, etc. I want to talk of principles. Principles have this supreme characteristic: they are unaffected by changes in valuation. One may ask what a principle may cost a person, particularly a brave or unpopular principle (such as looking out for the have-nots rather than the haves), but whether or not people value the principal doesn't alter its worthiness. Now, to be honest, what we call "values" are actually principles: a family value, such as "parents, don't fight in front of your children," is actually quite principled. Many of our so-called American values - compassion, patriotism, integrity - are actually and were formerly called "principles." I object to values not because they are actually principles, but because we're calling principles "values," meaning, like everything else in our economy, they're for sale, they depend on market forces, some are up and others are down. We devalue principles by calling them values, which is, I believe, the goal of some who want everything - our nation, our churches, even our faith - to be subsumed into our economic system. And when everything gets a value, and hence gets put on sale, those with the money will be able to buy everything, even our principles.
Here's a principle for you: don't buy on credit, buy with cash. That's a foundational principal for a good capitalist. Don't let anyone convince you that your credit rating has value, especially those who would never buy on credit themselves. Let's stop the money flow, even reverse it. Let's refuse to let anyone attach a value to our principles. Thank you for reading.
Trilectic
In previous posts, I've laid out a schema for reading narratives that seeks a way to determine whether the Spirit is actually present. However, though I've often strayed into phenomenology - that is, into analyzing a situation as a divine/human encounter rather than reading the narrative produced from that situation - I want to try to stay at the narrative level. The theory is a tool not just for reading past experiences but for reading experiences as they're happening.
Staying away from phenomenlogy (which is a whole 'nother can of worms), the most we can accomplish in our analysis is (a) determining if the narrator(s) (including ourselves) believe the Spirit is present and (b) determining if the narrative matches traditional and authoritative narratives of the Spirit's presence. Even though the narrative cues match our criteria for identifying the Spirit's presence, still we may be mistaken, but I'm kind of stuck as to getting more precise: ultimately, whether the Spirit is/was present or not becomes a question of belief more than analysis. However, analysis can demonstrate that, if the narrative is way out of whack, the Spirit could not be present and remain the Spirit spoken of in scripture/tradition. In that situation, we're dealing with a (S)pirit or a communal spirit rather than the Spirit.
The term "trialectic" points to the conversation or debate between the community members and God. Persons express in their personas their conviction/personal history about the Spirit's presence. These expressions are negotiated in the group's ethos, some being accepted while others are rejected, so that a group's ethos becomes entrained towards a particular set of expressions that the group holds as Spiritual. From the other end, God's persona - again, I tend to limit this to the Spirit's persona - engages individuals, so that each person (perhaps) brings to the group ethos a persona that bears convictions about Spiritual experiences. Further, God's persona interacts with the group at the ethos level, meaning God's persona engages both individual personas and the group's ethos simultaneously. And in a more distant way, God's persona engages the group's surrounding ethoi, since a group's ethos is simultaneously engaged with God's persona and external ethoi. Again, these are all narratives, constructed in the real process of living and praying and worshipping, etc. As narratives, they are available to us to read, given that we can understand their expressions.
In this trialectic, all three parties - persona, ethos and God's persona - are available for critique and evaluation. A "Spiritual" persona is always open to evaluation whether it is actually "spiritual," "(S)piritual" or "Spiritual," primarily from a particular set of criteria. These criteria, of course, depend a great deal on the persona and ethos of the person(s) evaluating, which leaves a lot of room to consider whether there is something new going on that may indeed be Spiritual in a form we've never seen. However, I do return to scripture as the authoritative and revelatory witness to all things Spiritual: should a group claim an experience to be Spiritual that not just extends the scripture's witness but in some ways goes counter to it, I'm going to be real skeptical whether the Spirit is actually present. But, again, that brings into play my own ethos, especially in terms of scriptural interpretation: I read scripture a certain way, my tradition places its own limits on my reading, I may be stupid, etc. Yet this messy situation is always the case, so there's no way around it.
Further, I'm interested in this process primarily not to evaluate someone else's narratives but to help me judge my own: how can I recognize the Spirit's presence in my own life? Now, you may say that the experience of the Spirit itself will be so clear and distinguishable that I will instantly know, and indeed that tends to be the scripture's witness about the matter: when the Spirit is present, Spiritual things happen (e.g., speaking in tongues, burning heads, visions, dreams). But scripture itself is a narrative, produced not in the moment of Spiritual experience but on reflection: the process of writing scripture has been one of identifying and promoting those experiences that the writers deem Spiritual, so even at the point of experience, to be able to recognize the experience as Spiritual means I do so by reference to such narratives as scripture. Again, the Spirit's presence may make such identifications redundant, but, again, this is phenomenology rather than reading: to read a narrative, even my own, means I have to have some distance to it, even while it's going on. Hence identification, apart from the ecstasy of the experience, is always a reflective matter. And in this reflection, in my opinion, I take myself out of the experience and into the narrative about the experience.
Another way to say this is I move my attention from the personal to the persona. When I ask myself, "Is this the Spirit," I'm actually pointing to my evaluation of a personal persona - who I am vis-a-vis the Spirit - and the Spirit's persona - who the Spirit is when it comes to me. My presumptions about my Spiritual persona include openness, meekness, receptivity, sensitivity, holiness, etc. My presumptions about the Spirit's persona include movement, inspiration, otherness, depth, etc. So I'm checking both my and the Spirit's persona - reading them - to see if they fit quite valid criteria. For instance, I think many of us would be unwilling to call ourselves Spiritually open when we're jealous or envious or proud, etc., though the Spirit may catch us even in those moments. Likewise, I think few of us would point to the Spirit's presence in an event that is cruel, inhumane, miserly, etc. Again, the Spirit can blow where it will, often in new and surprising ways, but the problem is in the reading: I'm trying to validate a Spiritual experience and contrast it with a spiritual or (S)piritual experience, and that entails a critical act of reading, even in the middle of an experience. Conversely, I may actually miss-interpret the Spirit's presence because of the limits to all criteria: the Spirit exceeds our criteria, so using them necessarily limits our reflections on the Spirit.
The same process holds for groups and their ethoi. A group caught up in the Spirit is actually a group caught up in an engagement between their ethos and the Spirit's persona, both of which are narrative constructions. Being constructions, they have a history and life quite independent of the group's current experience. For a group to KNOW it's experiencing the Spirit instead of simply experiencing the Spirit means the group is critically aware of its ethos and the persona of the Spirit it embraces. I'm tempted to argue that even to experience - rather than only to reflectively know - relies on these same narratives, as does a person on her own narratives regarding her and the Spirit's personas, since one needs to recognize an experience to experience it in any real way.
Now, according to scripture (primarily Christian New Testament), the Spirit engages a persona primarily through dreams and visions. The other avenues of the Spirit's engagement - tongues, prophecy, love, compassion, etc. - all happen at the level of ethos rather than persona. Now, one may argue that dreams and visions bypass persona, that they are complete interior matters unmediated by the messy intercourse between personas (human and Spirit). That may be phenomenologically correct and I don't want to discount it. However, simply having a dream or vision is never the end of the matter: at the very least, on returning from the ecstatic state, the person asks, "What did that mean," and by asking the question the person returns to the narrative level. Dreams and visions must be interpreted, it seems to me, and interpretation is a narrative action. Without interpreting, a person (from the outside) seems to be in danger of confusing the Spirit with spirit or (S)pirit. Indeed, I think I'm bold enough to argue that a person, to be faithful, MUST seek to interpret such experiences: this is a should, to me. "The Devil walks in slippery shoes," the old song says. In my terms, I think it is always a danger to confuse a (S)pirit (a spirit is less dangerous, perhaps) with the Spirit. In our culture, for example, we can probably recall instances where divinely-granted wealth (a (S)pirit, perhaps, but at least a spirit) is promoted as a real work of the Spirit (which, even though purported to be in scripture, seems far from the scriptural witness).
The key to experiencing or evaluating God's presence in our lives, it seems to me, is to look at the narrative level, which this trialectic attempts to do. Narratives - stories we tell ourselves and each other - are not simply passive and reflective: narratives are the means by which we form the only world we will ever know. Such hard distinctions as sacred and profane, holy and mundane are actually narrative constructs: one would be hard pressed to demonstrate their reality outside our narratives about them. We tell stories that divide our world this way. Consequently, the way we construct narratives can also construct our world (as Berger so clearly argued, see "Sacred Canopy," older but still brilliant). By emphasizing reading narratives I'm also emphasizing the other side - constructing narratives. You and I bear a world-creating responsibility, especially as God is concerned: we, along with the Spirit, create a world in which the Spirit moves and breathes, for without our side of the deal, even though the Spirit blows where and when it will, our narrative constructions and the world derived from them would be Spiritless. Thank you for reading.
Staying away from phenomenlogy (which is a whole 'nother can of worms), the most we can accomplish in our analysis is (a) determining if the narrator(s) (including ourselves) believe the Spirit is present and (b) determining if the narrative matches traditional and authoritative narratives of the Spirit's presence. Even though the narrative cues match our criteria for identifying the Spirit's presence, still we may be mistaken, but I'm kind of stuck as to getting more precise: ultimately, whether the Spirit is/was present or not becomes a question of belief more than analysis. However, analysis can demonstrate that, if the narrative is way out of whack, the Spirit could not be present and remain the Spirit spoken of in scripture/tradition. In that situation, we're dealing with a (S)pirit or a communal spirit rather than the Spirit.
The term "trialectic" points to the conversation or debate between the community members and God. Persons express in their personas their conviction/personal history about the Spirit's presence. These expressions are negotiated in the group's ethos, some being accepted while others are rejected, so that a group's ethos becomes entrained towards a particular set of expressions that the group holds as Spiritual. From the other end, God's persona - again, I tend to limit this to the Spirit's persona - engages individuals, so that each person (perhaps) brings to the group ethos a persona that bears convictions about Spiritual experiences. Further, God's persona interacts with the group at the ethos level, meaning God's persona engages both individual personas and the group's ethos simultaneously. And in a more distant way, God's persona engages the group's surrounding ethoi, since a group's ethos is simultaneously engaged with God's persona and external ethoi. Again, these are all narratives, constructed in the real process of living and praying and worshipping, etc. As narratives, they are available to us to read, given that we can understand their expressions.
In this trialectic, all three parties - persona, ethos and God's persona - are available for critique and evaluation. A "Spiritual" persona is always open to evaluation whether it is actually "spiritual," "(S)piritual" or "Spiritual," primarily from a particular set of criteria. These criteria, of course, depend a great deal on the persona and ethos of the person(s) evaluating, which leaves a lot of room to consider whether there is something new going on that may indeed be Spiritual in a form we've never seen. However, I do return to scripture as the authoritative and revelatory witness to all things Spiritual: should a group claim an experience to be Spiritual that not just extends the scripture's witness but in some ways goes counter to it, I'm going to be real skeptical whether the Spirit is actually present. But, again, that brings into play my own ethos, especially in terms of scriptural interpretation: I read scripture a certain way, my tradition places its own limits on my reading, I may be stupid, etc. Yet this messy situation is always the case, so there's no way around it.
Further, I'm interested in this process primarily not to evaluate someone else's narratives but to help me judge my own: how can I recognize the Spirit's presence in my own life? Now, you may say that the experience of the Spirit itself will be so clear and distinguishable that I will instantly know, and indeed that tends to be the scripture's witness about the matter: when the Spirit is present, Spiritual things happen (e.g., speaking in tongues, burning heads, visions, dreams). But scripture itself is a narrative, produced not in the moment of Spiritual experience but on reflection: the process of writing scripture has been one of identifying and promoting those experiences that the writers deem Spiritual, so even at the point of experience, to be able to recognize the experience as Spiritual means I do so by reference to such narratives as scripture. Again, the Spirit's presence may make such identifications redundant, but, again, this is phenomenology rather than reading: to read a narrative, even my own, means I have to have some distance to it, even while it's going on. Hence identification, apart from the ecstasy of the experience, is always a reflective matter. And in this reflection, in my opinion, I take myself out of the experience and into the narrative about the experience.
Another way to say this is I move my attention from the personal to the persona. When I ask myself, "Is this the Spirit," I'm actually pointing to my evaluation of a personal persona - who I am vis-a-vis the Spirit - and the Spirit's persona - who the Spirit is when it comes to me. My presumptions about my Spiritual persona include openness, meekness, receptivity, sensitivity, holiness, etc. My presumptions about the Spirit's persona include movement, inspiration, otherness, depth, etc. So I'm checking both my and the Spirit's persona - reading them - to see if they fit quite valid criteria. For instance, I think many of us would be unwilling to call ourselves Spiritually open when we're jealous or envious or proud, etc., though the Spirit may catch us even in those moments. Likewise, I think few of us would point to the Spirit's presence in an event that is cruel, inhumane, miserly, etc. Again, the Spirit can blow where it will, often in new and surprising ways, but the problem is in the reading: I'm trying to validate a Spiritual experience and contrast it with a spiritual or (S)piritual experience, and that entails a critical act of reading, even in the middle of an experience. Conversely, I may actually miss-interpret the Spirit's presence because of the limits to all criteria: the Spirit exceeds our criteria, so using them necessarily limits our reflections on the Spirit.
The same process holds for groups and their ethoi. A group caught up in the Spirit is actually a group caught up in an engagement between their ethos and the Spirit's persona, both of which are narrative constructions. Being constructions, they have a history and life quite independent of the group's current experience. For a group to KNOW it's experiencing the Spirit instead of simply experiencing the Spirit means the group is critically aware of its ethos and the persona of the Spirit it embraces. I'm tempted to argue that even to experience - rather than only to reflectively know - relies on these same narratives, as does a person on her own narratives regarding her and the Spirit's personas, since one needs to recognize an experience to experience it in any real way.
Now, according to scripture (primarily Christian New Testament), the Spirit engages a persona primarily through dreams and visions. The other avenues of the Spirit's engagement - tongues, prophecy, love, compassion, etc. - all happen at the level of ethos rather than persona. Now, one may argue that dreams and visions bypass persona, that they are complete interior matters unmediated by the messy intercourse between personas (human and Spirit). That may be phenomenologically correct and I don't want to discount it. However, simply having a dream or vision is never the end of the matter: at the very least, on returning from the ecstatic state, the person asks, "What did that mean," and by asking the question the person returns to the narrative level. Dreams and visions must be interpreted, it seems to me, and interpretation is a narrative action. Without interpreting, a person (from the outside) seems to be in danger of confusing the Spirit with spirit or (S)pirit. Indeed, I think I'm bold enough to argue that a person, to be faithful, MUST seek to interpret such experiences: this is a should, to me. "The Devil walks in slippery shoes," the old song says. In my terms, I think it is always a danger to confuse a (S)pirit (a spirit is less dangerous, perhaps) with the Spirit. In our culture, for example, we can probably recall instances where divinely-granted wealth (a (S)pirit, perhaps, but at least a spirit) is promoted as a real work of the Spirit (which, even though purported to be in scripture, seems far from the scriptural witness).
The key to experiencing or evaluating God's presence in our lives, it seems to me, is to look at the narrative level, which this trialectic attempts to do. Narratives - stories we tell ourselves and each other - are not simply passive and reflective: narratives are the means by which we form the only world we will ever know. Such hard distinctions as sacred and profane, holy and mundane are actually narrative constructs: one would be hard pressed to demonstrate their reality outside our narratives about them. We tell stories that divide our world this way. Consequently, the way we construct narratives can also construct our world (as Berger so clearly argued, see "Sacred Canopy," older but still brilliant). By emphasizing reading narratives I'm also emphasizing the other side - constructing narratives. You and I bear a world-creating responsibility, especially as God is concerned: we, along with the Spirit, create a world in which the Spirit moves and breathes, for without our side of the deal, even though the Spirit blows where and when it will, our narrative constructions and the world derived from them would be Spiritless. Thank you for reading.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Beyond Tolerance
A very old friend reminded me today that I tend to think and write densely (my word, I think he was being complementary and suggesting I think and write deeply). Reading my own posts makes me want to be clearer, but not less erudite.
I've been reading instances of tolerance lately and thinking about what I've read. Tolerance, not as a political stance (such as that of our Constitution, that "tolerates" all religious faiths and even non-faith) but as a personal matter, begins with pain. In its oldest meaning, "to tolerate" meant to endure pain and discomfort. Though that usage has largely disappeared, it's still used to refer to an organism's ability to survive extremes of heat, dryness, pH, etc. Every once in a while, someone will ask another, "Are you in pain?" And the other will respond, "Yes, but it's tolerable." This usage gets back to the original meaning of "tolerance."
Now, pain is a person matter, a feeling. But we should distinguish between physical and mental pain (though any kind of pain is processed in our brains). If you should stick a knitting needle in your eye, you will undoubtedly feel a great deal of physical pain, especially if you actually rupture your eyeball. That pain is a bunch of electro-chemicals rushing to your brain from your eye, essentially telling you, "Hold on, chief, you've done something real stupid with that knitting needle." We all have the opportunity to feel that kind of pain every day: just let me go without coffee for 24 hours, and I'll tell you all about pain. That's physical pain.
Mental pain is different in its mechanics (perhaps) but just as real if not more real. After you've poked out your eye with that knitting needle, your mind begins to let you have it with both barrels, "You idiot! Look what you've done! Now you're going to go through the rest of your pitiful life with only one eye! Cyclops! How could you do something sooooo stupid?!" Mental pains - grief, regret, sadness, loss - these are just as real as physical pain but derive from mental rather than physical processes (again, I'm being crude: mental processes are also physical processes). They are a matter of interior dialogue, of thought and evaluation, more than body damage or distress. And, depending on their content and origin, they tend to endure longer than instances of physical pain (chronic pain is somewhat a different matter).
"Tolerance" used to refer to the capability to endure pain, both physical and mental. Though not used so much any more to refer to physical pain, tolerance is used quite often to refer to mental pain or, since I like to get my discussions back to my own model, persona pain. When we use "tolerance" today, I think we're referring to a clash of ethoi and, since ethoi are always a matter of personas, persona pain. Let me unpack that a little bit. Our persona(s) are constructed through interacting with other personas in the arena of ethoi. For instance, in my recent trip to Israel I went out one day alone to get lost in the Old City of Jerusalem, purposefully wandering to see how it felt to be lost in a different culture. Intellectually I knew that I was in little danger of being kidnapped, blindfolded, placed on a webcam and having my head cut off to make a political statement. But my persona - white, Western, infidel, Ugly American - is heavily constructed by an ethos that is derived from gruesome web pages, 9/11, anti-American demonstrations, anti-Islam rhetoric, etc. And this ethos is built on personas, constructs about other persons that I happen to engage whether immediately or remotely: images of beheadings, Osama bin Laden, the students who took over the American Embassy in Iran, United States politicians, friends on Facebook, etc.
Now, I was able to tolerate this discomfort, not by making it go away, but by walking and letting these feelings settle, knowing full well that my persona was fabricated in some sense falsely in my own ethos. Further, by opening myself (my persona) to the ethos of the Old City, eventually my discomfort lessened.
One important moment came when, in my purposefully purposeless wandering, I returned to a vendor who the day before had sold me six University of Alabama t-shirts written in Hebrew (a big hit back home, you can be sure). I greeted him and he thanked me for sending some business his way (the t-shirts were also a big hit with other members of my group, who promptly went and found his store and bought t-shirts for themselves). That vendor was not Jewish, was probably Arab and may have been Muslim: I couldn't tell and didn't ask him. But that different ethos - vending - lessened my discomfort: I was a buyer, he was a seller (this is not necessarily an endorsement of commerce, though commerce has brought many ehtoi together peacefully) and we had done business together.
Tolerance should, it seems to me, be a process of recognizing the sources of our discomfort but not letting our discomfort get in the way of engaging "alien" personas and ethoi. However, the way "tolerance" is often used seems to imply that that's all we need to do: tolerate our discomfort, but not engage other personas and ethoi. To move beyond tolerance seems to me to be a matter of recognizing our discomfort and its sources, then through engagement with other personas letting our discomfort settle and dissipate through experiencing or forging a common ethos. When I hear someone say, "I do not accept homosexuality, but I tolerate homosexuals," I think she or he has not moved beyond tolerance. His or her persona, when engaging a gay man's or a lesbian woman's persona, has remained rigid so that the person feels icky, uncomfortable, pain. To step beyond tolerance means creating a common ethos, however briefly, with that gay man or lesbian woman. Sharing an ethos means both personas are affected, are changed and modified, so that the pain and discomfort both feel begins to subside until, hopefully, it disappears.
Moving beyond tolerance, then, is a matter of forming new ethoi, a root characteristic of Christianity (not just love your neighbor - one like you - as yourself, but loving your enemies - even those trying to kill you - as well, so said Jesus). Sticking with the gay and lesbian theme, David Wilcox has a great song, "Fearless Love," about a person attending a protest against homosexuality, holding a condemning sign, and being faced by a gay man with HIV carrying a sign that reads, "There's Nothing Here to Fear." The person flashes back to Jesus encouraging his disciples to "carry that soldier's (Roman's) pack and, after the gay man has been hit in the head with a rock, crosses (!) over and lifts the gay man to his feet. Fear is pain and tolerance is putting up with that pain. Moving beyond tolerance is embracing (Volf's term, from "Exclusion and Embrace") another persona (and perhaps the person as well) and letting our own pesonas be changed in the engagement.
Tolerance alone will not construct new ethoi, hence the need to move beyond tolerance, because in our global, shrinking world, cultural clashes, etc., we need new ethoi not just as an ethical matter, but as a survival matter, an economic matter, an environmental matter, a Christian matter. Though tolerance is better than intolerance, since intolerance aggressively maintains rigid divisions that perhaps should pass away (though some divisions are necessary and good), tolerance, too, can leave rigid divisions in place because the tolerant person is not allowing persona change or the creation of new ethoi: the tolerant person is simply tolerating the pain from recognizing difference in personas and ethoi, not engaging and embracing different personas and ethoi. The pain remains.
What lies beyond tolerance? Simply, relief. The Old French for "relief" was "a raising up" (think of "bas relief" in sculpture), a lifting of burden or distress, or rescuing a town from siege. In terms of persons, by engaging other personas in new ethoi, the pain one formerly tolerated is relieved. In Christian terms, "lifting up" implies resurrection, not just in the future kingdom, but in present terms: no better demonstration is Paul's insistence that Jew and Gentile form one people (a common ethos), even though they had been long estranged, a new ethos that Paul names "a new creation, the Israel of God." Though moving beyond tolerance doesn't do much for physical pain (though shamanistic or faith healing may have something to do say about this), it has much to do with relieving mental or person pain. To end with politics (the matter of negotiating ethoi), if America is to be a "city on a hill" for the world, our shining beaconness lies not in our wealth or might, but in our capacity to embrace multiple ethoi from every corner of the world and - by not just tolerating them but embracing them - forge a commonwealth stronger because of our diversity, not despite it, and one in which healing from many ethoi pains (poor, wretched, huddled masses) is not just promised but accomplished. And to be explicit (and perhaps argumentative): intolerance of Muslims here in our homeland, even tolerance of Muslim Americans here, keeps the pain, but engaging Muslim personas here and abroad and together forging a new ethos relieves us from much pain, even, perhaps, the pain of 9/11. Thank you for reading.
I've been reading instances of tolerance lately and thinking about what I've read. Tolerance, not as a political stance (such as that of our Constitution, that "tolerates" all religious faiths and even non-faith) but as a personal matter, begins with pain. In its oldest meaning, "to tolerate" meant to endure pain and discomfort. Though that usage has largely disappeared, it's still used to refer to an organism's ability to survive extremes of heat, dryness, pH, etc. Every once in a while, someone will ask another, "Are you in pain?" And the other will respond, "Yes, but it's tolerable." This usage gets back to the original meaning of "tolerance."
Now, pain is a person matter, a feeling. But we should distinguish between physical and mental pain (though any kind of pain is processed in our brains). If you should stick a knitting needle in your eye, you will undoubtedly feel a great deal of physical pain, especially if you actually rupture your eyeball. That pain is a bunch of electro-chemicals rushing to your brain from your eye, essentially telling you, "Hold on, chief, you've done something real stupid with that knitting needle." We all have the opportunity to feel that kind of pain every day: just let me go without coffee for 24 hours, and I'll tell you all about pain. That's physical pain.
Mental pain is different in its mechanics (perhaps) but just as real if not more real. After you've poked out your eye with that knitting needle, your mind begins to let you have it with both barrels, "You idiot! Look what you've done! Now you're going to go through the rest of your pitiful life with only one eye! Cyclops! How could you do something sooooo stupid?!" Mental pains - grief, regret, sadness, loss - these are just as real as physical pain but derive from mental rather than physical processes (again, I'm being crude: mental processes are also physical processes). They are a matter of interior dialogue, of thought and evaluation, more than body damage or distress. And, depending on their content and origin, they tend to endure longer than instances of physical pain (chronic pain is somewhat a different matter).
"Tolerance" used to refer to the capability to endure pain, both physical and mental. Though not used so much any more to refer to physical pain, tolerance is used quite often to refer to mental pain or, since I like to get my discussions back to my own model, persona pain. When we use "tolerance" today, I think we're referring to a clash of ethoi and, since ethoi are always a matter of personas, persona pain. Let me unpack that a little bit. Our persona(s) are constructed through interacting with other personas in the arena of ethoi. For instance, in my recent trip to Israel I went out one day alone to get lost in the Old City of Jerusalem, purposefully wandering to see how it felt to be lost in a different culture. Intellectually I knew that I was in little danger of being kidnapped, blindfolded, placed on a webcam and having my head cut off to make a political statement. But my persona - white, Western, infidel, Ugly American - is heavily constructed by an ethos that is derived from gruesome web pages, 9/11, anti-American demonstrations, anti-Islam rhetoric, etc. And this ethos is built on personas, constructs about other persons that I happen to engage whether immediately or remotely: images of beheadings, Osama bin Laden, the students who took over the American Embassy in Iran, United States politicians, friends on Facebook, etc.
Now, I was able to tolerate this discomfort, not by making it go away, but by walking and letting these feelings settle, knowing full well that my persona was fabricated in some sense falsely in my own ethos. Further, by opening myself (my persona) to the ethos of the Old City, eventually my discomfort lessened.
One important moment came when, in my purposefully purposeless wandering, I returned to a vendor who the day before had sold me six University of Alabama t-shirts written in Hebrew (a big hit back home, you can be sure). I greeted him and he thanked me for sending some business his way (the t-shirts were also a big hit with other members of my group, who promptly went and found his store and bought t-shirts for themselves). That vendor was not Jewish, was probably Arab and may have been Muslim: I couldn't tell and didn't ask him. But that different ethos - vending - lessened my discomfort: I was a buyer, he was a seller (this is not necessarily an endorsement of commerce, though commerce has brought many ehtoi together peacefully) and we had done business together.Tolerance should, it seems to me, be a process of recognizing the sources of our discomfort but not letting our discomfort get in the way of engaging "alien" personas and ethoi. However, the way "tolerance" is often used seems to imply that that's all we need to do: tolerate our discomfort, but not engage other personas and ethoi. To move beyond tolerance seems to me to be a matter of recognizing our discomfort and its sources, then through engagement with other personas letting our discomfort settle and dissipate through experiencing or forging a common ethos. When I hear someone say, "I do not accept homosexuality, but I tolerate homosexuals," I think she or he has not moved beyond tolerance. His or her persona, when engaging a gay man's or a lesbian woman's persona, has remained rigid so that the person feels icky, uncomfortable, pain. To step beyond tolerance means creating a common ethos, however briefly, with that gay man or lesbian woman. Sharing an ethos means both personas are affected, are changed and modified, so that the pain and discomfort both feel begins to subside until, hopefully, it disappears.
Moving beyond tolerance, then, is a matter of forming new ethoi, a root characteristic of Christianity (not just love your neighbor - one like you - as yourself, but loving your enemies - even those trying to kill you - as well, so said Jesus). Sticking with the gay and lesbian theme, David Wilcox has a great song, "Fearless Love," about a person attending a protest against homosexuality, holding a condemning sign, and being faced by a gay man with HIV carrying a sign that reads, "There's Nothing Here to Fear." The person flashes back to Jesus encouraging his disciples to "carry that soldier's (Roman's) pack and, after the gay man has been hit in the head with a rock, crosses (!) over and lifts the gay man to his feet. Fear is pain and tolerance is putting up with that pain. Moving beyond tolerance is embracing (Volf's term, from "Exclusion and Embrace") another persona (and perhaps the person as well) and letting our own pesonas be changed in the engagement.
Tolerance alone will not construct new ethoi, hence the need to move beyond tolerance, because in our global, shrinking world, cultural clashes, etc., we need new ethoi not just as an ethical matter, but as a survival matter, an economic matter, an environmental matter, a Christian matter. Though tolerance is better than intolerance, since intolerance aggressively maintains rigid divisions that perhaps should pass away (though some divisions are necessary and good), tolerance, too, can leave rigid divisions in place because the tolerant person is not allowing persona change or the creation of new ethoi: the tolerant person is simply tolerating the pain from recognizing difference in personas and ethoi, not engaging and embracing different personas and ethoi. The pain remains.
What lies beyond tolerance? Simply, relief. The Old French for "relief" was "a raising up" (think of "bas relief" in sculpture), a lifting of burden or distress, or rescuing a town from siege. In terms of persons, by engaging other personas in new ethoi, the pain one formerly tolerated is relieved. In Christian terms, "lifting up" implies resurrection, not just in the future kingdom, but in present terms: no better demonstration is Paul's insistence that Jew and Gentile form one people (a common ethos), even though they had been long estranged, a new ethos that Paul names "a new creation, the Israel of God." Though moving beyond tolerance doesn't do much for physical pain (though shamanistic or faith healing may have something to do say about this), it has much to do with relieving mental or person pain. To end with politics (the matter of negotiating ethoi), if America is to be a "city on a hill" for the world, our shining beaconness lies not in our wealth or might, but in our capacity to embrace multiple ethoi from every corner of the world and - by not just tolerating them but embracing them - forge a commonwealth stronger because of our diversity, not despite it, and one in which healing from many ethoi pains (poor, wretched, huddled masses) is not just promised but accomplished. And to be explicit (and perhaps argumentative): intolerance of Muslims here in our homeland, even tolerance of Muslim Americans here, keeps the pain, but engaging Muslim personas here and abroad and together forging a new ethos relieves us from much pain, even, perhaps, the pain of 9/11. Thank you for reading.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)