Category: who do i think i am?

And finally

I think what bugs me most about the last two posts is that I was not really saying what I wanted to.  I think I wanted say it but it ended up coming out in a sort of ‘flowery’ language that a few helpful and honest individuals in the recent past have brought to my attention.  I think it is a sort of default expression when I don’t really know what I am talking about.  I was more than a little horrified when I realized how deep this sort of language went in how I expressed things about life.  Hopefully some helpful rooting going on here.

On not talking about the change

I can’t say that I am happy with my last post.  For a while now I have been trying to figure how to express what has changed in the last couple of months.  Every time I write about it or talk to someone about it comes off sounding quite lame.  I am beginning to wonder if this is implicit to the change.  Talking about is largely insufficient or least how I have been talking about it.  The change is an orientation that affects how I talk and act with regards to other things.  But when I try to explain the change itself it seems to be annulled in its apparent insignificance.  And so, this post will also feel a little lame to me (and likely to you if you care to read it).  After I finished the last post I felt some anxiety.  Is there a change?  Don’t I need an exteriority to witness to the change?  Thinking again of Kierkegaard the question is not about whether truth will manifest externally but whether the external offers the essential materials for expressing truth.  Kierkegaard rejects this because in trying to orient truth and subjectivity in this manner is to go beyond what is possible for humans.  We are not capable of wielding the external variables in a manner that would make truth evident.  I think this is an underrepresented element in his thought.  In many ways it is safer to go beyond because in going beyond one sheds the engagement with actuality and so hides in piety or in ‘radical’ theory.  Again, this is not about rejecting a social critique or structural engagement only about failing to form subjectively.  Also, I think Kierkegaard would easily admit that positive social change can happen through ‘subjectively impoverished’ individuals, this also is not the question.  How Kierkegaard informs me is in the necessary continuity and ongoing-ness of life that always draws on something.  I suspect I should start pushing his thinking further but I have been patient particularly knowing that CUP is the culmination of his ‘first authorship’ and some of the volumes to come become much more ‘directly’ engaged.  For now he continues to offer a valuable way of interpreting my own subjectivity.

Organic theology . . . no, wait, don’t click to another site!

The term ‘organic’ seems to be moving quickly into disfavor among many philosophers and theologians.  The impression I get is that the term is most often evoked with a sense of nostalgia and naivete with respect to how we can best understand and respond to situations (and the co-option of the term for less than desirable purposes cannot help).  Whether this reaction comes from the pushback against ‘localism’ over at AUFS or the apocalyptic theology of Doerge, Kerr, Siggelkow et. al. it seems that ‘organic’ is not the right mode of engagement.  This is a reductionistic preface but a preface that should indicate our ongoing desire to find the next and better mode of inquiry.  That is fine and I am not looking to go back.  I am just setting this up for one simple observation.

I was given a plant.  It is in my office.  This plant seems at once to be both dying and regenerating itself.  At times it has beamed with robust health and at other times it teetered and I have not known what will come of it (though I know what should come of a plant).  More often than not I do not know what to do.  At one point branches were snapping.  The giant leaves seemed too heavy or was it that the branch was too weak or was it that they had simply grown to completion.  I would grow anxious.  Too much or not enough of any number of things can spell the end.  I rushed to the Sunday School supply room and came back with pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks trying to create splints to see if they could heal.  But I had to let them go.  Out of the three only one sprouted a new leaf.

This all reminded me of my childhood on the farm.  I could not farm.  In my bones I despised farming because I would work an already too wet field and see dark clouds roll in from the West miles away on the prairies bringing more rain.  It made me ill.  So I left the farm unconsciously thinking there were places where I could have more control.

And I found these places in regular paychecks and relatively clear job expectations.  But now several times a day I look over at that plant and I do not know its fate.  Again, I am trying to be very conscious of nostalgia or paternalistic tendencies in my thinking.  I suppose the only point I am trying to make is that if someone wishes to move beyond the organic metaphor they should have made sure they sat long enough with it in all its precariousness and anxiety . . . and beauty.

But its a dry cold . . .

I lived in southern Ontario for a short five years.  In that time I came to believe in something called a wet cold.  As you can suspect this is the inverse of the saying about heat, in that a wet temperature is always a worse experience than a dry one.  In any event, I came to believe it.  Yes the the temperature was not nearly so low as it was back home in Manitoba but the dampness got into your bones.  Well we are in the last weekend of February here in Winnipeg and the next two nights are slated for overnight lows of around -30 C (I will not get into windchill factor).  So to all you in Ontario with your poor wet snow . . . I call bullshit.

Oh yes and happy Festival du Voyageur!

2011

1976

A Faithful Life?

I notice a tension between a substantive conception or articulation of a faithful life on the one hand and its entirely contextual and unexpressable nature on the other.  The notion of the substantial reality of faith is most often employed as a negative presence.  This is why my life is not faithful.  The most common refrain being that I live in the midst of and am embedded in powers and principalities that benefit the few at the cost of the many.  In Yoderian language I cannot say that I live independently of these powers.  Therefore my life is not faithful. But I can look to the ungraspable notion of grace and hope in apocalyptic action (of which I seek and participate).  So maybe my life is not faithful but God is faithful.  I am internally in contradiction.  I live in tension.  I would argue, though, that this tension is not a creative dialectic but a binding and entangling cord.  It is only a negativity.  Perhaps a negativity that will serve a purpose or has a place but it is a negativity nonetheless.

I think of a family I know.  She works and receives an increasingly rare middle-class salary.  They have bought a modest house in a ‘bad’ but developing neighbourhood.  He suffers from mental illness and requires stability but is still unable to work.  They have a young girl who he cares for.  This is not a dramatic home (well I cannot attest for everything that goes on there) but also not an easy life.  They discuss and strive for faithful choices in daily life.  I would characterize this house as faithful in the sense that Jean Vanier speaks of when he refers to enough stability for healing and growth and enough chaos and uncertainty to keep life open.

My life is not much different.  But I struggle some days even to conceive of their life as faithful never mind my own.  Negativity can always appeal to a lower (or higher) denominator.  This is binding, indebting and imprisoning.  It is not Gospel.  But I don’t know another way forward.  Is this process I am in necessary . . . is it helpful?  What would freedom mean?  Can I enact that freedom (who will rescue me from this body of death . . . )

Am I stuck in morality?  Do I need to move beyond good and evil as they say?  There is not enough nuance in the world to account for its complexity, at least in terms of possibility.  Who then is the righteous fool?  Who is the faithful one?

2011 – A Year of Living Existentially

Seeing some prospective plans for 2011 and more impressively seeing some accomplished plans from 2010 (I’ll let you identify the theme) I thought I would set out my own grand vision for 2011 . . . a year of living existentially.  Kierkegaard in a year.  I will be following the trajectory of Princeton’s edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings.  I do not have all volumes on hand so it is difficult to set a ‘pace’ but hell I thought I would throw this up in a fit of passion and triumph victorious by 2012 or let me good blogging name be sullied in the process.  Here is the list;

May God have mercy on my soul.

Preaching Existentially?

I am noting a consistent trend in my preaching.  I am targeting the individual.  This comes in part from my own experience and formation in existentialism but also in my experience of the Mennonite church in which it is easy for individuals to point to our good works in social supports and non-violent initiatives.  And then when the individual is called to account it is typically with some moral leveraging around what else we could be doing.

The approach I am taking seeks a type of honesty that is divorced from being identified as a criteria of truth.  I am not sure where I equated honesty with truth . . . is that a cultural thing?  But, rather, I am seeking honesty as an attempt at congruence and liberation.  I am trying to push my congruence to simply acknowledge the way things are.  This is not a statement about access to some neutral body of truth but of observations.  Observations could include things like money and economic security as constituting our primary mode of personal decision making.  Observations like acknowledging the power of status and conformity within the church.  There are many observations that need to be made as such.  Subsequent qualifications can follow but I believe many of them can initially stand.  Secondly, I am trying to divorce this from the typical and almost immediate shift to guilt and/or shame.  The reason for this is not because we are not guilty of things or that certain expressions could not be considered shameful.  Rather, I want to move away from them because they are debilitating.  I want us to get a sense that we are in many ways already ‘living a lie’ so why don’t we name it as such.  In this I want the pursuit of congruence to lead towards a liberating experience and liberating expressions.

As part of being honest with myself in this process I must admit that with respect to liberation I hold to some view of ‘enlightenment’.  This does not refer to an isolated inner-journey but again of a sort of honesty that manifests itself in congruence with action, experience and belief.  This is partially informing my conception of faith in which anchors to various modes of knowledge and decision are exposed.  While I hold a high view of material liberation as it is being expressed in many contemporary theologies I cannot shake the notion that there is a prior act and experience of liberation.  I would consider the Gospel insufficient if it cannot offer liberation to those suffering under material bondage.  That is, I believe there is liberation without immediate material liberation.  This does not mean that the two are not divorced.  Rather it takes Jesus as an example in the liberating independence he exhibits despite the fact that his life arcs towards material bondage.  So while full liberation is always to be engaged and on the table this does not deny that individuals cannot already enter into forms of liberation.  For those with material forms of power at their disposal congruence will mean acting in accord with liberation; which means oppression as incongruent with liberation.

All of this is to say that I believe in a personally engaged form of faith that works intimately with if not perhaps prior to structural changes.  So I will continue to support those working on a structural level (and hope to add my own contributions) but given my primary influence in preaching this remains a fundamental orientation.  I hope to continue to push my own ‘honesty’ in this expression.  Currently I am actively monitoring the extent to which my sermon preparation reflects a safety with respect to my own economic stability.  I believe that this influence is waning but I would also admit that it is still probably the strongest external influence.  I could interpret this as a structural flaw (that is churches that can dictate whether or not they want to keep a pastor) but I am not interested in engaging it on that level (presently).  It would seem that it would be helpful situation for a church to have to reject and even fire a pastor on the basis of his or her preaching.  In any event I am working on liberating myself from economic security in my preaching.

Thoughts or criticisms of this homiletic theology?