Category: Uncategorized

Calculating rightly

Do you ever have stretches of time where life as life exerts itself on you as a force that pulls, strains or simply weighs down?  There are no immediate pressures in life that are causing the pressure, rather it seems to come as a whole.  I ask this seriously because while I see others express similar experiences I don’t assume that it is so for many people.  Sometimes I think this is a condition of privilege; that I have a certain leisure to sit with and entertain such thoughts and feelings.  Sometimes I think this is a condition of arrogance; that I can account for the variables of life and attempt to create and navigate a true course and understanding.  So in no ways do I assume this is a healthy experience or one that can be characterized as indicating some profound nature (though in saying this I of course am tempted to view it as such).  This was simply the best way that I could characterize much of last week.  I was absentminded and removed though in some ways more attuned to what was going on around me.  I looked out and saw meaningless, well, maybe not quite.  I saw arbitrary meaning.  I could not discern and adjudicate the possible meanings.  They swirled, arose, and died again around me.  They taunted me asking which meaning I would choose.  Is this a false option?  Is this an incorrect framing of the question and circumstances?

Towards the end of Kierkegaard’s final published writings he speaks at length about the Instant or Moment (depending on translation).  Kierkegaard believes that humans are a synthesis of the finite and infinite and therefore can never exist as settled.  To do so is to collapse (as if that were possible) or at least tune out the dialectic.  The Instant is the in-breaking of the eternal.  It is a qualitatively difference expression then what all the resources of the finite are able to muster.  But our applied resources are just that.  We cannot speak, think, or act beyond the finite.  So Kierkegaard speaks of the ‘leap’, though from what I can remember he does not use this expression (to leap) in his writings on the Instant.  Rather he says this,

The Instant is when the man [sic] is there, the right man, the man of the Istant.

This is a secret which eternally will remain hidden from all worldly shrewdness, from everything which is only to a certain degree.

Worldly shrewdness stares and stares and stares at events, at circumstances, it reckons and reckons, thinking that it might be able to distill the Instant out of the circumstances, and so become itself a power by the aid of the Instant, this breaking through of the eternal, hoping that itself might be rejuvenated, as it so greatly needs to be, by means of the new.

But in vain.  Shrewdness does not succeed and never will to all eternity succeed by means of this surrogate.

No, only when the man is there, and when he ventures as one must venture (which is precisely what worldly shrewdness and mediocrity want to avoid), then is the Instant – and the circumstances then obey the man of the Instant.

. . .

For the Instant is precisely that which does not lie in the circumstances, it is the new thing, the woof of eternity – but that same second it masters the circumstances to such a degree that (adroitly calculated to fool worldly shrewdness and mediocrity) it looks as if the Instant proceeded from the circumstances.

There is nothing worldly shrewdness so broods over and so hankers after as the Instant.  What would it not give to be able to calculate rightly!

– The Instant  no. 10

In some ways that comes close to framing my experience last week.  There is always this grasping.  But the nature of the grasping does not seem to understand what it is grasping at.  I continue to read and reflect on accounts that I admit to complexity but implicitly or explicitly render formulas for personal or social change.  Can I believe that circumstances will obey the person of the Instant?

To what extent is this experience also an internal condition to a particular strand of the Christian tradition, that is existential angst?  Is it helpful to even speak of a human condition on these matters?  Sure I could retire into the refrain of the Preacher of Ecclesiastes but how satisfying is that and how much does it reveal that I need to be satisfied in this process?  Is this simply by definition a transitional experience that happens prior to another stasis, or just a rhythm of a larger pattern?

Reflection on a brief occupation

I visited Occupy Winnipeg today.  With nights already dipping below freezing I had one initial question on my mind.  The answer is yes.  They are preparing for winter.  I only spent about hour at the site chatting with a few individuals.  After biking away, alone now with my impressions, I came to the confession that it is and would be quite easy to mock this local expression.  My conversations were peppered with grasping sentiments about being connected to something larger, vague allusions to support from people with power, comments about getting good press, politically correct placating, bitching against the Man, and some straight-up bullshit.

I would not be surprised if the greatest immediate need this expression fulfills is to have egos rubbed both for people who are valiantly braving the cold in support of justice and also for others who can bring a pot of hot chili and bag of sweaters to feel good about supporting the cause.  Why do I say this?  Do I say this to discredit them or the expression?  I call this a confession simply because it is being honest with my perception and experience. I do not want to create from nothing hopes and notions that do not relate to reality.

And this initial step of confession is important, for myself in any event.  It is important because of the presence of another element I encountered.  What troubled me reflecting on the ‘spirit’ of the people there were the resources  being drawn upon for hope.  One person talked about being connected to something epic another sensed the significance of what was happening, others appealed to the power of vague traditions.  Some dropped ambiguous allusions to the ‘lawyers and doctors’ connected to their cause.  One even said the provincial government ‘supported them’.  In fairness, there was also clear acknowledgement that this is, at the local level, starting from scratch.  They are not even beginning.  They are trying to figure out how to begin.  At this point they are gathering.  And it is a diverse and motivated gathering.  And this I support.

I have struggled with the banner of ‘We are the 99%’.  Perhaps it really is the best possible rallying cry to bring these diverse groups together.  But I struggle with it because of those who do not even factor into the equation.  I am thinking of two experiences I had in the last two days.  One was witnessing a person steal three boxes of diapers (no small accomplishment and no doubt accompanied by no small amount of nerve or desperation).  The other was seeing a neighbourhood kid I have gotten to know riding around on the sidewalk with a bike that had a flat tire and no seat.  Both events stirred that experience of not knowing whether I would laugh or cry if I were to express my emotions.  It is almost comedic in its tragedy and definitely tragic in its comedy.  It is the refuse and rejection of our society.  For me it was encountering the ones that do not have a place holder in the calculation of percentages.  In both instances the people involved were First Nations females.

If there was to be some hope that I took from visiting Occupy Winnipeg it was that there were a number a First Nations women present (a relatively high proportion in a small overall number).  As I stood there not really instigating any conversation one of them simply poured out her life dramatic fashion.  I have experienced enough to call this a dramatic telling not to question whether or not it is factual but to recognize that tragedy  has become one of a limited number of modes of communicating that some people seem capable of engaging in.  But it appears at this site the unrepresented and uncounted are finding some sort of representation.  And that is a good thing.  When my church gathers to occupy our sanctuary I have not encountered the drawing out of the unrepresented.  This is not such a good thing.

Book Review – Unsettling Arguments

The following is a review submitted to Canadian Mennonite.  It is my attempt at short, concise review coming in just over 500 words.  I would welcome any comments on the book or the review format itself.

Pinches, Charles R., Kelly S. Johnson, and Charles M Collier. (2010) Unsettling Arguments: A Festschrift on the Occasion of Stanley Hauerwas’s 70th Birthday. Cascade Books.

Unsettling Arguments is a collection of essays honouring the life and work Stanley Hauerwas on the occasion of his 70th birthday.  A potential reader might assume that some familiarity with Hauerwas would be in order to appreciate these contributions.  However, I found that working through the book not only served as an overview to Hauerwas’s thinking but read almost like a primer in theological ethics considering the breadth of work spanning his career.  The range of topics sprawled from medical ethics, to political theory, to hermeneutics, and beyond.  Indeed, there is even a chapter on a topic that Hauerwas has not written extensively on (racism) asking whether his silence in fact tells us something.

What held these chapters together is that Hauerwas is a person of practice.  Things cannot be known (particularly in ethics) apart from their embodied practices and the relationship those practices are set within.  The church cannot speak to the dignity of the human body without also walking alongside those cast off as undignified.  Theologians cannot speak for the church unless it is somehow reflected through their practices in the church.  Each chapter explored how Hauerwas has and at times has not pushed the church to reconsider her practices.

As the title suggests this collection is not simply a chorus of praise for Hauerwas.  Well, perhaps it is, in that Hauerwas is known for introducing provocative, controversial and critical elements into any given exchange.  And so in each chapter we find authors reading against the grain of Hauerwas’s contribution to a particular field of study looking for gaps, inconsistencies or counter-arguments.  If there is a failing to this approach it is that the chapters become formulaic so the reader finds that often where there is a perceived gap Hauwerwas actually makes up for it another, unexpected, area.  For instance, Jana Marguerite Bennett agrees that feminists have a legitimate criticism against Hauerwas’s work but only to the extent that they ignore his work on the disabled.

Chapter 4 by J. Alexander Sider on the question of personal happiness in Hauerwas’s social ethics may stand as the best approach to this critical engagement.  Hauerwas, influenced heavily by John Howard Yoder, consistently downplays the role of personal happiness subjecting it to the life and activity of the church in which true love and fulfillment are understood and entered into.  In one of the most personally poignant chapter Sider observes that in this area Hauerwas does not always preach what he practices revealing Hauerwas, the person, who does indeed care deeply about individual health and happiness.  The chapter ends with a standing challenge for Hauerwas to further integrate his practice and theory.

Hauerwas is not only one of the most influential public theologians writing in English but, through his significant relationship with John Howard Yoder, is also a person who has accomplished as much any to put Anabaptist thought and practice on a larger stage.  For better or worse we in the Mennonite Church are associated with Hauerwas and we would do well to continue to learn from him so that we could effectively read for and against him and continue the conversation on what it means to practice being the church faithfully.

Forced corruption

Remember. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt.

This line is a quote from Slavoj Zizek’s speech at Occupy Wall Street.  I will not try and wade into the larger conversation about this movement (see here for frequent updates).  I want simply to focus on this line.  For me this line is a stumbling block; and I believe stumbling block is precisely the correct term.  I continue to believe in autonomous morality.  I continue to believe that it is possible for each individual to make a morally valid decision in real life circumstances.  I believe this despite the fact that I know it is not true.  And so I come to a stumbling block, an offense.

I sat with this line as I visited a man from my neighbourhood.  Our church is not exactly a hot spot for those seeking material support though we get our share of traffic.  The process is almost always the same.  There is prefacing story which sets the person both in morally acceptable or pitiable conditions.  This often includes acknowledging some religious conviction, some desire to work, and some immediate pressing need.  I will then wait for the second half of the conversation in which the person will move inevitably towards his (almost exclusively a male) best shot at getting something out of the exchange.

And there I sit, Solomon on his throne, judging how best to suggest sawing his child in half to reveal true motivations.  I stand as the face and gate-keeper of what should be the symbol of consuming charity.  Now to be sure charity is not paternalism but why does paternalism exist in the context of giving charitably?  Still one must learn to be responsible, correct?  To the extent that responsiblity lies in the realm of economics I will continue to be corrupt in my engagement with those in need.  To the extent that responsbility is integrated into a relational fabric there may be a chance to level out life experiences.  Current capitalist economics demands a responsibility based on severed points of accountability.  It demands I take care of my house.  And this is where existentialism remains important in conversations about social systems.  One must ultimately be converted into a larger house; a house that still has rooms and boundaries but a house that also has a larger and expanding commons.  The church in North America, by and large, cannot offer a commons to those who seek it.  And until then I may be forced to remain corrupt.

The essential genius

I wasn’t pleasantly surprised by Kierkegaard’s short piece entitled The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress.  This piece explores what it means for a public performer to move the masses (my phrasing).  Kierkegaard wants to get beyond any external advantages an actor or actress might have (ie, youth, vigor, good looks, etc.).  What is it that would sustain the presence of someone.  Kierkegaard speaks of a metamorphasis of something internal that is externalized.  Here are some of the qualities of someone in possession of this ability.  First there is a copious restlessness.

Restlessness, in the sense of the hubbub of finitude, soon palls; but restlessness in the pregnant sense, the restlessness of infinity, the joyous, robust originality that, rejuvenating, invigorating, healing, stirs the water is a great rarity, and it is in this sense that she is restlessness (309).

This is the first ‘fieriness of an essential genius’.  Kierkegaard then goes on to speak of the comedy.  The initial task of the comedian is not to incite or stir the crowd but rather to calm them.

While we laugh and laugh and privately revel in the exuberance of the caprice, we continually feel calmed, indescribably persuaded, and lulled, as it were, by the complete safeguard, because his caprice gives the impression that this can go on for any length of time.  On the other hand, if a spontaneous comedian does not calm first and foremost, if there remains just a little bit of anxiety in the spectator as to how far his caprice will extend, the enjoyment is virtually lost.  Ordinarily it is said that a comedian must be able to make spectators laugh; perhaps it would be more correct to say he must first and foremost be able to calm completely, and then the laughter will come by itself, because genuine laughter, this laughter right from the bottom of the heart, does not break forth because of a stimulation but because of a calming. (311)

I like this contrast but I wonder how it plays out in the contemporary need for awkwardness in so many comedies.  It is more simple in the Tom Green and Kickass style shows which will eventually run on empty because the whole point is to push farther.  Thoughts?

Christian Discourses, Helplessness Blues, and the mechanics of liturgy

[This started as a simple update on my Kierkegaard reading then turned into something I wanted to edit and develop but I doubt that will happen any time soon so I thought I would throw it up in its disjointedness.]

As I mentioned in my last post, the first half of Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses was firmly okay.  It was gently pastoral in tone while attempting to stir and provoke in content.  The second half entitled “Thoughts that wound from behind” promised to be more engaging.  The preface of the second half read,

The essentially Christian needs no defense, is not served by any defense – it is the attacker, to defend it is of all perversions the most indefensible, the most inverted, and the most dangerous – it is  unconsciously cunning treason.  Christianity is the attacker – in Christendom, of course, it attacks from behind. (162)

The final line is of course of utmost importance for what follows because Kierkegaard’s attack is against the notion that Christendom can implicitly produce Christians.  Kierkegaard begins by noting the role of circumstance in the power of a message how “the sickbed and the nighttime hour preach more powerfully than all the orators [because they] know this secret of speaking to you in such a way that you come to perceive that it is you who is being addressed, you in particular (164).  Kierkegaard relates this to his understanding of the ‘Lord’s house’ and how it is to be a place more terrifying than terror (for awakening that is) though pastors take it to be a place to preach for tranquilization.  The Lord’s house is by definition the space that a human encounters the truth, that is, encounters God.  This is a horror becuase it is an encounter with sin.

Here in God’s house there is essentially discourse about a horror that has never occurred either before or after, in comparison with which the most horrible thing that can happen to the most unfortunate of all people is a triviality: the horror that the human race crucified God. (172)

This discourse of terror is the first discourse and it is necessary.  The Christian is to use this discourse to win people – “but woe to you if you win them in such a way that you leave out the terror” (175).  So use this discourse to terrify people but “woe to you if you do not use it essentially to win them for the truth” (175).

While these discourses began with a pointed and promising account of attack or ‘awakening’ they settled into what (from a contemporary perspective) is a now familiar account of the need to ‘break from the herd’ in how you understand your own subjectivity and how it is formed.  I do not doubt the ongoing validity of this message it is only that the ‘herd mentality’ is now precisely in being unique and original.

How then does one break from the demand of uniqueness and become formed as an individual?

There is the already well commented on lines from Fleet Foxes recent single Helplessness Blues in which they harmonize on being some cog in a greater machine.

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes, unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking, I’d say I’d rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me

In that instance the strength of individuality is in its submission to something  beyond the scope of a single subjectivity.  I think this is a fair response.  The problem of course is that there is no such static machine in which humans function as the cogs and pulleys.  The response in HB is a sort of almost naive localism.

If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m raw
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
And you would wait tables and soon run the store

I say almost because of the final lines of the piece.

Gold hair in the sunlight, my light in the dawn
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m sore
Someday I’ll be like the man on the screen

They recognize that this too, this honest labour, is the production of the entertainment industry.  It is the production of flat subjectivity that will not truly intervene in the existing order.  For Kierkegaard subjectivity is based around the primary human dialectic of being a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal.

It is the final section of Christian Discourses that offers some help in understanding how the Christian can engage in the practices of faith while attending to the internal dialectic of subjectivity.  This final section is a collection of discourses to be read at Friday Communion services.  As such they offer a rare glimpse into Kierkegaard’s direct and public communication on church liturgy.  There is no strength in the basic repetition of Communion as an act that builds an alternate imagination.  This would be to function as a cog some great machinery.  Rather one does indeed approach the Communion table and share in the elements but when you leave it is as if the Communion table followed you (273).  It is only possible to speak of real presence because there is continuity with the table and with Christ.  “Where he is, there is the Communion table” (273).  The Communion table becomes present not necessarily at the religious site but at the site of reconciliation that is called for prior to sacrifice (Matt 5:23-24).  “The task is to remain at the Communion table when you leave the Communion table” (274).  A sermon should ‘bear witness to him. . . . At the Communion table, however, it is his voice you are to hear” (271).  The point here is simple.  There must be continuity and congruence.  And the perhaps the solution for the church is just as simple, that is, to call individuals to both leave and remain at the Table.

Somebody’s crying

My son is entering a steep learning curve in his language development.  He is just over two and is started to string together 3 and 4 word sentences together.  But more than that I recently noticed the transition he is making in understanding the value of clear communication.  Salem never went through anything I would call colic and even teething was not too bad.  But he would still cry as a form of communication and mostly communication as protest.  For instance in learning how to settle himself down to go to sleep there would be periods of crying.  After awhile though he seemed to realize that naps are not so bad and so stopped crying.  I think he is now starting to transition out of nap time (Lord help my wife) and so he is again starting to cry when we leave the room for his naps.  The crying now is different.  It is no longer a passionate plea but a more measured action.  As such it appears that he is thinking about why he is crying.  And so after crying (somewhat halfheartedly) he will stop, there will be a pause of silence, and then he will begin saying crying, crying periodically.  It is as though he now understands that verbalization should be a more direct and effective form of communication.  Just in case you were not clear mom and dad I am crying . . . crying as you should know means something is not right and I would like your help in rectifying it.

Part of the power

I think part of the power that an infant has in public spaces, part of the reason a child can draw such uninhibited joy from complete strangers is the way a child, a young child, can simply stare at you.  There is nothing of the layered power of a knowledgeable gaze that becomes so loaded later in life.  We long for that line of sight and we relish in it when it occurs.