Category: who do i think i am?

West End Lamentations

Moreover, our eyes failed,
looking in vain for help;
from our towers we watched
for a nation that could not save us.

People stalked us at every step,
so we could not walk in our streets.
Our end was near, our days were numbered,
for our end had come.

. . .

The Lord’s anointed, our very life breath,
was caught in their traps.
We thought that under his shadow
we would live among the nations.
– Lamentations 4:17, 18, 20

I have determined to do this city harm and not good, declares the Lord.
– Jeremiah 21:10

This winter I gave up on biking and decided to walk to work.  Biking, particularly in winter, was a very focused and often stressful practice requiring constant focus and attention.  Walking has opened up time and attention regularly to other things.  It has allowed me to give small acts of attention both to my neighbourhood as well as to listening and exploring new music as I walk.  This has turned, unintentionally, into a sort of spiritual discipline or daily devotion (to use the old language).

This, in turn, has led me into spaces of lament (though bitterness and despair are likely more accurate words).  Last week there was a double shooting outside my house.  This brought to a point both the vulnerability of many in my neighbourhood as well as the mobility and privilege I have in how I want to deal with it.  This morning I walked past a still snow covered community garden and saw a pile of Lysol cans and by the end of the street I was greeted with a sign announcing the ‘grand opening’ of a new pawn shop.  This is a community suffering trauma.  A community medicating itself.  A community desperate to find access to the resources consistently denied to it.  A community too easily abandoned.

To be sure this is a beautiful community.  There are many reasons why we simply love living here.  But beauty is not armor, punch it enough and it bruises, breaks, and bleeds.  These are my devotions.  And I have tried to accompany them with the appropriate Psalms,

Dear Lord, have mercy
On the ones that go through life like it’s a game
We love
I won’t be forced to shut up when I don’t feel the same
Cause people gonna lie
Some people gonna steal
You gotta be careful not to shit where you live
Them people might try to have you killed
Lord have mercy, life is such a battlefield
For real
– Killer Mike and Scar

So it seems our people starve from lack of understanding
Cos all we seem to give them is some balling and some dancing
And some talking about our car and imaginary mansions
We should be indicted for bullshit we inciting
Hand the children death and pretend that its exciting
We are advertisements for agony and pain
– Killer Mike

The last vocation of the white male . . .

I am, I guess, a bit of a careerist.  It is not so much wealth that I am pursuing but attention through passion.  How can I engage what I am passionate about and also achieve recognition through it?  But I am aware, a la Levinas, that I will always be occupying a place in the sun and, as such, potentially casting a shadow over or taking the place of another or many others.  I still have thoughts of academic ladder climbing.  I contemplate a shift towards more direct political or social action.  I think about how to better position myself in church ministry.  And in all these things I am keenly aware that there are other people more deserving, equipped, and needed in these areas.  Perhaps a bit self-deprecating (or patronizing), but by and large I need to consider John the Baptist’s vocation of becoming less.

By and large I am still quite comfortable in pastoral ministry because, to be honest, I am less hopeful of those coming up the ranks in this profession.  In any event, reflecting on what responsible path I could take the true calling of the white male finally came to me.  The white male of virtue is to become a poet.  What better path of downward mobility?  What better path of losing respect and social status?  What better missionary field than the dilettantes and literary snobs?   If we would answer this calling what better way to lose our marketable skills and sabotage our resume so that entry level jobs would be all that would continue to pay the bills.  Ahh, we would become true working men!!  What better fodder for the poet?!

What hope lies here!  If language is to have power for the white male then let it come from the infinitely dense crucible of poetry.  We have inhabited the halls of logocentric power for millenia.  Let’s discard those privileged forms and consider our words as atoms, letters and phonemes sub-atomic, chase the linguistic Higgs Boson.  See if there is power in splitting.  Then sit in despair over words’s inadequacies, lament your poor shepherding skills as lines scramble or balloon in an unwieldy and cliched form but don’t be tempted infuse them with your capital.  Let your words stand or fall, let them be mocked for what they are not.

So get into training.  Have your ass served to you at a poetry slam.  Hit the dives where local rap authorities still preserve the canons of rhyme.  Unleash your inner high school melancholia!

So this season, Good Christian (white) men rejoice!  Our God, the Word, can still be made flesh.  May we be found naked and trembling in a barn, at the mercy of your mother, at the mercy of the elements, at the mercy of the animals, fugitive from authority.  And if something emerges, one simple parable in a lifetime, or one lifetime as a simple parable then good.

And if nothing comes, perhaps it is all the better.

More than meaning

Rene Girard’s basic thesis is well known; human culture arose out of the resolution of mimetic desire. By nature we desire what is desired by others, this leads to conflict and ultimately murder. Institutions and rituals arise out of this act. Girard sees the Gospel texts of the New Testament as a revolutionary exposing of this basic mechanism. However, the church has continued to offer a sacrificial reading of the Gospel which undermines its revelatory potential.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is an excellent and accessible overview of his thought. What I found interesting was his conclusion. At the end of the book Girard suggests we suffer most basically from a lack of meaning. I find this to be a bit dissonant from much of his work. Perhaps he is was still too heavily influenced by the existential angst that seemed to exist in the middle of the twentieth century but I expected him to move in a much more ‘material’ direction in his conclusion. Here are some of his parting lines,

“What is important above all is to realize that there are no recipes; there is no pharmakon anymore, not even a Marxist or a psychoanalytic one. Recipes are not what we need, nor do we need to be reassured – our need is to escape from meaninglessness.
. . .
I hold that truth is not an empty word, or a mere ‘effect’ as people say nowadays. I hold that everything capable of diverting us from madness and death, from now on, is inextricably linked with this truth. But I do not know how to speak about these matters. I can only approach texts and institutions, and relating them to one another seems to me to throw light in every direction.
. . .
Present-day thought is leading us in the direction of the valley of death, and it is cataloguing the bones one by one. All of us are in this valley but it is up to us to resuscitate meaning by relating all the [Judeo-Christian] texts to one another without exception, rather than stopping at just a few of them. All the issues of ‘psychological health’ seem to me to take second place to a much greater issue – that of meaning which is being lost or threatened on all sides but simply awaits the breath of the Spirit to be reborn.”

At which point Girard concludes by quoting Ezekiel 37’s vision of the valley of dry bones.

To be clear, I find this conclusion hugely attractive.  I am sucker meaning, as in meaning of life meaning, but when hearing something so well developed as with Girard I can’t help that the truth which fends off ‘madness and death’ is something other than ‘meaning’.  And here I have to default to a confessional position and introduce some notion of worship.  For all his religious language and even examination of idolatry Girard does not really address the a non-sacrificial sense of worship.  In this way I take him to be broadly in line with the death-of-God thinkers who believe we must go far enough to situate the presence and Spirit of God in and only in and only as the life-giving community.  Here again, I am deeply attracted.  But for the life of me I just don’t know who these people are that believe ‘in the power of humanity’.  I don’t see it in myself or much around me.  I don’t mean this in a self-deprecating sense but more in a I-have-been-banging-my-head-against-a-wall-for-over-a-decade-trying-to-understand-life-giving-personal-and-social-change way.  I just don’t see it to be honest.  So we offer works of worship that at our end must be purged of idolatries (here Girard, and Zizek for that matter, are right) but beyond that, hell if I know.

If you want to go the route of ‘meaning’ don’t look to Girard, the Coen brothers do it much better.

Keep it to yourself

A number of blogs that I follow push back (most recently here) pretty hard against a type of personal activism that ends up creating a structure a moral evaluation with no sense that effective change is produced or even possible.  What do I mean by this?  I mean simply that personal activism can be a therapeutic response to the guilty conscious of privilege.  There is nothing new in that statement and many of the blogs that I follow outline and develop this a more thorough manner.  However, I though it might be helpful to outline a few simple guidelines for how to discern this reality.

  1. If you believe your action has direct connection to effective change, then outline the network of relationships that demonstrates this, so as to help enable others to participate.  So the personal practices of reducing and recycling are good but I personally do not know of the statistics that relate the basic difference between the personal recycling of material goods and the inherent production of corporate waste in producing our goods and services.  Therefore, in our current structure I do not actually know if increased recycling will actually make a dent in the realities of environmental damage.  So reduce, reuse, and recycle but unless you can articulate a well-informed understanding of how that effects change in the environment in relationship to all the other variables then just do as a base-line practice and nothing more.  The same is true for alternative or ‘guerrilla’ gardening.  These practices can be fun and meaningful but can they address global issues of starvation?  Should they function as anything more than a ‘good habit’?
  2. Be honest that ‘fair-trade’ products represent a sort of premium or ‘luxury’ brand.  They are not bad.  They are simply out of reach for many people to consistently have access to.  The result of creating a morally elevated status for such products is that those who are the most vulnerable in our society will actually have guilt heaped on them (in addition to the prevalent social stigma of being poor).
  3. ‘Symbolic’ gestures are only powerful if they register or gain traction in the face of those in power.  In my Mennonite culture there is an emphasis on ‘simple’ or humble lifestyles.  This basically means that people are not supposed to be ‘flashy’ with their money.  So a family can have a cabin, an RV, snowmobiles, a boat, etc. but if another family occasionally goes out to a fancy restaurant or purchases a piece of ‘abstract’ art they are deemed frivolous or ‘materialistic’.  Simple living is fine, not having flashy things is fine, but there should be no moral scale here.  The only time a particular way of living has symbolic power is if it is actually taken note of by those in power and disrupts the flow of power.  Otherwise, go ahead and do it but drop the implicit or explicit pretense of righteousness.

The result of not following some of these guidelines is, I believe, the very real possibility of insulating ourselves from the possibility of actual change because we are already the change we want to see in the world.  So, again, to repeat there are all manner of good and relatively equivalent (I did not say neutral) ways of living (because in many instances we do not actually know the good or harm we do).  This is not a critique of particular practices as such, rather I am concerned about the moral structure that gets developed around these practices that serve to sanctify and pacify our privileged guilt while condemning those in our midst outside the privileged ability to attain this sort of personal social-piety.  Sure we will condescend to acquit the poor from such guilt but it will be done not from solidarity but from ‘on high’.  And to be clear it is not only those without material means who struggle to attain this sort of personal social-piety but the reality is that it is a lot of work to be consistent in this area.  Many people with mental illness or with children with disabilities or with other significant stress in their life will find it hard attain this piety and will only have more guilt/shame added to their lives as they already have difficulty achieving the other salvation narrative of the ‘American dream’.

So is this another expression that functions to insulate my own position?  I am sure there are elements of self-protection here.  But I do want to offer this as a sort of confession.  For most of my adult life I have lived in the ‘less-desirable’ areas of Canada.  I have, for the most part, quite enjoyed this experience.  I have, however, also held it up as a sort of implicit model of ‘faithfulness’.  And for the most part the practice has been selfish as it has kept me in touch with certain social realities that we tend to ignore.  But functionally there has been no more method in this approach than the baseline hope of being a ‘good neighbour’.  Being a good neighbour will look differently in my neighbourhood than it will in other neighbourhoods but it is also no more righteous (and I am not convinced I have lived up to this in my context in any event).  While I need to take down my lifestyle as a model of personal piety this is different than articulating the manner in which neighbourhoods are formed and maintained (which I have articulated here and here).  This articulation can be a framework in which possibilities for effective or symbolic action can be developed.  This becomes a participatory and collaborative expression rather than a personal posture of living in the ‘hood is more righteous than living in the ‘burbs.  My point in all this is simple.  There are many good things to do in the world but for the most part keep it to yourself.  If it is an effective or truly symbolic act then it will speak for itself.

So what am I missing in my thinking or on my list?

A skeptical rant

A while back I started to occasionally cruise the local atheist/skeptic sites from around Winnipeg.  It was an interesting cultural experience.  It made me think of what some non-religious folks might (possibly) experience when they encounter  particular church cultures.  What I am thinking of primarily is the seemingly unconscious maintenance of a certain in-house mindset that helps support and perpetuate a larger view of the world that is not held by popular culture.  This was strikingly impressed on me in a recent post at Winnipeg Skeptics entitled, Top Ten Reasons Why Being a Skeptic is Fulfilling.  Now there really is nothing to criticize here as the post is about a subjective experience, that is, being fulfilled.  However, the experienced fulfillment strike me as either unhealthy or simply generic and so confusing in terms of its being unique to skepticism (though I did admit the author did not claim uniqueness for many of the reasons).

First is the prescriptive nature of the post.  Here are a few excerpts,
As a skeptic you love science
Through your skeptical endeavors you have found your social conscience, a sense of camaraderie and have made friends for a lifetime.
I feel bad for the poor skeptic who remains unconvinced of the current employment of science as an effective means to address human well-being and in so doing finds him or herself ostracized from this fraternity for such contrarian views.

More than this defining of what a skeptic loves and will experience is the nature of the claims.  So take the full sentence of the first reason skepticism is fulfilling,
As a skeptic you love science and know that the scientific method is the best method mankind has ever invented to understand who we are, how we got here, and how we can improve our lot in this universe.
Okay I will grant the how we got here but who we are and how to improve our lot, really?  I’ll leave a comment over at that post and wait for some elaboration because I don’t even know where to start on that claim.  But more to the point.  This post is about fulfillment.  Skepticism is fulfilling because it is the best.  How is it the best?  It is the best not because of demonstrable realities but because it is fulfilling for this individual.  It provides a subjective condition which the author enjoys.  Shouldn’t there be reasons to be skeptical about that?

Here is number two,
You know that reality is a puzzle and that it will take a lot of effort to understand it. At times truth goes against what seems to be common sense. You have discovered that the struggle to understand reality reveals truths that are, at times, deeply profound. That knowledge will keep you searching the for the truth for the rest of your life.
That may well be true of skepticism but I am going to go ahead and say that is true of anyone who is semi-conscious or attentive to life.

The author goes on in number three,
You possess a willingness to learn accompanied by a willingness to change, that’s why your skepticism makes you a better person.
How does a willingness to change make anyone better?  There is simply no relationship here.

Number four,
I have only ever met one group of people who cheer when they have been proven wrong. Skeptics. Especially those who employ scientific skepticism. You may be bold when you ask those annoyingly tough questions, but underneath it all you are humble enough to know when you have discovered the truth. After all, evidence is evidence and that’s good enough for you.
This is about as laughable as the Christian radio station that claims to only use ‘safe’ language. Hmmm, agreed upon in-house rules are cheered upon when followed by one another?  Strange.  I am still waiting for evidence of things like, say, the above claim about how science is the best mode of ‘improving out lot in life’.

Bizarrely perhaps this post reminds me of certain strands of pentecostalism.  The nature of these claims reminds me of the pentecostals who tried to show me the fulfilling nature of speaking in tongues.  They just wanted me to try it and if I opened myself to it I would see its value.  I tried.  I did not see.  I have the same feeling about these models of skepticism/atheism.  They continue to strike me as so profoundly lacking as an overall approach to life.  It is almost as though the author knows this and instead simply tries to amp up the volume to create a kind of Prosperity Gospel for skepticism.
Do this and you will end up fulfilled, isn’t it wonderful.
Sure, the author of this post is someone who apparently was an Anglican Minister and now an enlightened skeptic so I guess I should forgive him the zeal of conversion but these expressions strike as so terminally unfulfilling that I can’t even begin to wrap my head around them.  I want to be clear that author does admit that “You understand that being skeptical on it’s own just doesn’t cut it.”  But this is followed quickly about an apparent openness to letting others ‘prove themselves’.  I think most people with any familiarity to this discussion knows how this goes.  Two sides with differing foundational logics attempt to ‘prove’ something and surprisingly no one is convinced.

As I reflect on this post, which I was originally going to scrap, what remains most impressing is this notion of hope.  Why should there be hope in this?  I am guessing there is hope because of this author’s experience.  This all strikes me as somehow strange.

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?

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.

Wedding homily 2.0

New opening line . . .

Dearly beloved our gathering creates an alternative coding that will not impact the substance of your present or future relationship.  However, the codes may be just strong enough to create a space that can offer itself as a non-destructive social narcotic.  And this, this is not a bad thing.

Yes, I just got back from my cousin’s wedding.  The chicken was juicy.  The bar was free.  And the speeches were actually quite funny.  And all kidding(?) aside I look forward to getting to know the new addition.