Morte Christe

During the Good Friday service today, we had a reading that incorporated the text from “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”. Those words aggressively threw me against the wall of nostalgia, since I had sung the song “Morte Christe” with that text in Men’s Glee Club. For the half an hour drive home from church, my car leaked at the seams with old Glee Club repertoire as I relived standing on those creaky risers and hitting those low D’s.

I talked with some friends these last few days, others like me who curse and spit at the mere thought of remembering second semester senior year for their own reasons, those who would have agreed with Eliot that “this is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a whimper.” An ugly stain upon our hearts and minds, we still graduated and moved forward, strewn across the country, chasing our dreams to move on, and moving on to chase our dreams, all the while hoping to forget the unforgettable.

Where are we?

Perhaps my emotions were primed by the Stations of the Cross. I mean, thinking about Jesus dying is a bit of debby downer. I wanted desperately for Sunday to be right now. Right after the line in the bulletin that read, “The service ends in silence,” I wanted the lift, the resolution, the fix. I wanted to know that everything was ok and to bask in the glow of that empty tomb in a garden, with an angel shining like a Thomas Kinkade painting.

But that’s not how it goes. Today, we sit with the reality of death. We will go to bed with it tonight, and wake up with it heavy on our chests, even if the sun sneaks through our shutters. And we will walk with it, make it our own, let it weary our souls until God lifts us up, as he does Jesus on Sunday. But for now, we are Saturday. Neither here nor there, but moving forward like time inevitable.

Release

When it is a prayer we speak to
grant reprieve, we are instead
granted sleep to ease the pull,
a constant stress upon the cords holding
what is
and what is not yet.
Grant instead
a distaste for opiates, cheapness, and
the quiet waiting that walks what is
toward the glaring silence of
what is not yet.

A Penny For Your Thoughts: Everything Must Change

I have just finished the book “Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope” by Brian McLaren. I wish to hear thoughts from those of you who have read the book, but mostly challenges and critiques. However, before I do that, I want to state as honestly as I can the assumptions and biases from which I speak.

I do not function from a position of a socially conservative Evangelical. I fully affirm the ancient creeds about the Trinity, the work of Christ, and hold Scripture to be the word of God. However, I am unapologetically affected by post-modernity and its critiques of old dominating meta-narratives and its recognition of modernist arrogance. In the same vein, I hold loosely the exclusivity and absolutism of the specific strain of Protestantism of which I am a part. I want to recognize the development of theology and thinking in light of a given historical context. As cultural creations, I do not believe that people can view truth objectively, even though Truth exists in the person of Jesus Christ. We look through a glass darkly and await the day we will see clearly, face to face. Given such assumptions, I desire to view my own tradition with humility, knowing that it was not shaped in a vacuum nor bestowed in a pure untainted form from on high. In the same breath, I seek to listen to the voices of those from other Christian traditions with the belief that God is not a tribal God. I am inclined to give a hearing to women and non-Western traditions, because God is not a white Protestant male. I desire to listen to the voices of the poor and oppressed, to see how the Gospel manifests itself among those who do not have money and power behind their words, because these are people God favors. I believe that left unchecked, our cultural waters have and will continue to inform our understanding of our faith more than our faith will change us. I believe in listening to those of different faiths or non-faiths, because God can use whomever he chooses to give a clearer perspective of his realities.

With that said, “Everything Must Change” is built upon the work of post-modernity’s understanding of dominating meta-narratives, a la Foucault. McLaren first establishes and names the narratives that our culture lives by, and then proceeds to discuss why such narratives are fundamentally dysfunctional, referring to people as disparate as Rene Padilla, Jim Wallis, Philip Jenkins, Wendell Berry, Cornel West and our own Dr. Bruce Benson. He then appeals to the scholarship of people like N.T. Wright and Dominic Crossan in the understanding of a Historical Jesus and how the historical Jesus spoke to the dominant (and equally corrupt) narratives of his day. McLaren draws a parallel between what Jesus said and did in the 1st century and what we he says to our global context today. He uses people like MLK, Pope John Paul II, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela to illustrate the true power of what happens when Christians undermine faulty narratives with the [reconstructed] Christian one. He doesn’t hesitate to critique the religious structures in their perpetuation of the fallen narratives, and challenges the church to reform itself according to Jesus’ narrative, one that truly subverts the massive powers and principalities at work in the world.

I appreciate McLaren’s willingness to listen to many different voices. Undoubtedly, his association with liberation theologians, left-leaning Evangelicals, economists critical of globalization, Christian pacifists/tree hugging poets and the simple mention of "post-modernity" will turn off a more conservative reader. However, as I’ve stated from the outset, such things do not count against him in my eyes.

I ask for a critique because I am predisposed to accepting what McLaren says. This book was referred to me by a man I respect, its contents contain authors, theologians and philosophers that I tend to agree with, and even the book’s specific contents aren’t so much an exposure to new ideas as it is a clarification, connection, or reframing of certain ideas I’m already open to. I appreciate a good deconstruction and am interested to hear if anyone has other thoughts.

Remember

[In the act of writing, I hope to bring about that which I lack. In transcribing my thoughts from jumbled electrochemical activity to the English language, I want to give animation and memory to the realities which do not yet exist, and in some way, usher it in.]

Faith, hope, and love.

We are not patient, our eyes are dim, our minds are slow, and our imaginations dull. We can build only so many stairs to climb in our search for leverage over the landscape of our experiences. God knew that our statures are short, our memories vapid and adulterous, prone to wander and in league with the Accuser. We distort our realities and squeeze our pasts through the mold of our ever-vacillating emotions. When set under pressure and fire, our self-serving versions of faithfulness evaporate to leave the ugly stains of bitterness and blame.

"Remember. Remember. Remember my faithfulness, even if you do not feel it now. Remember my healing, my goodness, my presence and my love, even in the midst of darkness and loneliness. Remember, not your uncertainties and selective memories, interpretations or assumptions, but remember me, my Kingdom and my righteousness."

Hope. A biblical hope in the person of God and His character. When all our attempts to usher in the New lay futile and hollow under the spotlight of silence, there can be but one virtue that holds the weight of being. Hope becomes the quintessential anchor of our hearts, especially when our most sincere efforts at love and faithfulness are not enough.

Realists Anonymous

Those who seek justice from the powers that be, those who do not have an off switch in their minds for questions and analysis, those who attempt to hear the voices silenced by oppression, those who are not satisfied in perpetuating the status quo and are not afraid to speak words to bring it down, those who feel the wounds of the abused as deeply as they feel their own… what will become of us if we cannot find a hope that’s more tangible than every problem we draw out, every sin we condemn, both in ourselves and in the world? The frailty and fragility of a person cannot possibly accumulate the burden of both personal scars and the wounds of others. With buckled knees and hunched backs, our eyes, which have already tended to gaze at the dirt, will be drilled closer to the ground, and soon we will lose the ability to stand straight again. Our heads will no longer fight gravity, and our eyes will see nothing but darkness, whether or not it is actually there. Whatever gifts we have used will become like trying to do surgery by swinging a machete by the blade; altogether useless and rather painful.

Cynicism is not and cannot be the end point under which we are crushed. For those of us who are self-described realists, when we fail to acknowledge and revel in the beauty and goodness that is found intertwined with the brokenness we spend so much time pointing out, we have failed to live up to our name, for beauty, love, and hope are more enduring and immediate realities than the brokenness we see. Not only do we become as blind as those who ignore suffering, but we forfeit a potent method by which we are encouraged, energized and blessed by the one who has already borne these burdens... the one who, by His resurrection, has inaugurated a new reality.

His Kingdom is His, not mine. And if I am part of His Kingdom, then I am entirely His as well, as are these scars, both the ones I have given myself and the ones I have taken on. If He has indeed risen, as I professed today during Eucharist, then my burdens and the cries of this world are not my own to shoulder, for His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

NT Wright Smacked Me and I Asked For More

A friend shared an experience with me once. He was staying in a home of a Christian couple, and had just finished a can of soda. Upon asking for the recycling bin, the couple’s response was, “As Christians, we don’t recycle. Jesus is coming soon anyways.” When all attempts at detecting some sort of sick humor failed to turn up any results, my friend stood speechless and dumbfounded at such a remark. Their comment sounds absurd, but is a safe conclusion if many Christians take their beliefs of the afterlife to the logical end. Why bother with the environment or social issues if it's all going to hell anyways? Why not just spend our time saving souls for heaven instead? Didn't we have enough of those mainline liberals and their Social Gospel in the past? The question of why sweep the deck of a sinking ship is often a response to the way we understand the progression of history into the "End Times." (Cue thunder cracks and dramatic orchestral music.)

I haven’t really written a book review in a while, and don’t intend to do so here, but there are many books and experiences that push me towards the river, and a few books that have been the Rubicons of my faith. I give credit to Lee Strobel (Case for Faith/Christ) in my early days, Mark Noll (Scandal of the Evangelical Mind) and Philip Jenkins (The Next Christendom) during my college years, and now, NT Wright for his work “Surprised by Hope.”

His work for me, was the pulling together of the Gospel that I’ve been trying to understand these last four years. Drawing together history, theology, ontology, spirituality, and a plethora of other related things ending in ‘y’, he synthesizes why the mainstream Christian understanding of the afterlife is wrong at worst, or misplaced at best, and how a corrected understanding of the crucial doctrine of resurrection is key in how we are to reorder our lives around the Kingdom and why it brings us hope. In it, he explores why the common held notions of dualism (separation between soul and body or spiritual and material) are weak in light of Christ’s resurrection and the greater picture of redemption, and why sentiments shared by the Christian couple above are completely misguided. It beautifully exposes the shoddy Biblical foundations of many mainstream versions of the end times (*cough* Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins), and how damaging such theology is to the witness of the Church.

Basically, it’s frickin awesome.

It’s not a difficult read, though the concepts are heavy and mind-blowing, especially to those who have grown up in a Western dualistic Christian culture. I hear it’s an abridged and compiled version of a few of his other works. Any way it happens, READ IT. If you understand the points he tries to make, it will change things from the way you read Scripture to the way you understand yourself and God’s interaction with world.

Orthodoxy: Coming to a Church Near You!

As much as I love critique and deconstructionism, and have an inherent distrust of the powers that be, I have to remember love and hope in a world that desperately needs it. It might be true that there are lots of legitimate things to criticize about western mainstream Evangelical Christianity. We’re so busy pointing fingers at other people, at post modernism, at evolution, at those baby killers, liberals and homosexuals that I’ve felt the need to point the fingers back at ourselves for all the things we do wrong according to our own standards. I get excited when I hear someone thoughtfully articulate, attempt to explain, and critique our own actions and beliefs in a theological and historical context without abjuring the possibility that we could actually be wrong, as opposed to simply propping up platitudes to legitimize what exists. I shake my head and agree with the “enemies” when their observations about us are keener than our own. I hear stories of our churches, our sanctuaries and lighthouses, and am hardly surprised when people don’t want anything to do with us. It’s a much needed in-house sweep and challenge when an entire guard of thoughtful, prayerful and contemplative brothers and sisters are standing up to say that all is not right within the family.

And perhaps it is true; certain things must be torn down before they can be replaced or rebuilt. How do we preach a gospel we ourselves fail to grasp? How can we be transformed holistically when dualism, individualism, and anti-intellectualism are the lenses through which we view the world?

But the difficulty, for me at least, is how one does the critiquing not only in a way that is humble, but is done in faith, filled with love and gives hope. For me, there is an arrogance that I pray will be removed with intentionality and age. There is an inexperience that presents my convictions as untested and hollow, and a naivety that forgets the inevitable suffering of prophets. However, beneath it all is a desire to see God’s kingdom lived out as it should, in my own life, in the life of His saints, and in all of creation.

Orthodoxy (correct belief), I think, is a prerequisite for orthopraxy (correct practice). I wonder if it is possible to have all the faith, hope, and love in the world and be useless, even doing damage, without orthodoxy. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s possible, as I believe much has done as a fervent church with stray beliefs (it always amazes me at how God redeems things). But what I do know is that orthodoxy that does not manifest itself in faith, hope and love is no orthodoxy at all. As I strive to see the world as God sees it and desire to see the Gospel alive in today’s world and context, orthodoxy needs to be inseparably wed with faith, hope and love, as inseparable as our “souls” are to our bodies, even as inseparable as Christ is with His church.

The Road that Leads to Hope

Walter Brueggemann, in a recent sermon, says that hope cannot come unless first there is mourning. Mourning, in this world of ours, is the prerequisite, the pockmarked and tear stained path that leads us to hope.

The Biblical definition of hope is grounded in the certainty of what is to come. The hope that we have, for ourselves and for the world, is rooted in the promised future just as much as it is rooted in the experienced and historical past.

When we think of who we are, we often frame ourselves in reference to our past experiences, perhaps naming key events or situations that have had a formative influence on our development. But how often do we let the promised future be a defining factor in our lives? In Philippians, when Paul speaks of “forgetting what is behind and pressing on towards what is ahead,” he models the practice of allowing his future reality (full redemption in Christ) to infuse his here and now. He is defined not by the kingdom and accolades he left behind, but by the full lordship of Christ that is yet to come.

In speaking about hurt and suffering, Nouwen says that we must let our own personal experience of pain transcend the individual and unique experiences that gave birth to it. Our pain is not to be relegated to the realm of particulars, lest we play mind games with “if only’s”, but eventually generalized and removed from specifics so that we are better able to empathize in the suffering of others. For as long as we bury our hearts in the specifics of a situation, our mourning is of limited fruitfulness to those we are called to minister to. But when we view our own cups as sharing in the greater suffering of those around us, that same hope we obtain from being sojourners on the road of mourning can then also reverberate with the mourning experienced by the world. The same staff that comforts us in our troubles will also then comfort others. And as we learn to hope in what is not yet here, so too will we be agents in bringing hope to a creation groaning in the pains of childbirth for its consummation.

This is the act of turning our eyes outwards to a hurting world even when we ourselves are licking our wounds. As the world lies broken, so we mourn as if for ourselves. As we look forward to the hope of transformation, restoration and renewal, so we take our hope and lavish it as freely to the world as love was lavished freely upon us.

And so we mourn, knowing that we mourn not only for ourselves, but for those who have much more reason to weep. And as we slowly traverse the steep paths of mourning, we somehow find ourselves walking next to others, with faith, afraid but undaunted, towards a hope that reveals itself just enough say that when all is said and done, these three remain: Faith, Hope, and Love.

"Let's come back as better people."

[For the full sensory experience, this is to be read while listening to “Homecoming,” by Kanye West :)]



I’m under the impression that transitional periods of life, artificial time markers and cultural rites of passages are wonderful excuses to reflect, refocus, and redirect. (Perhaps to reduce, reuse and recycle as well?)

A quote was given to us upon receiving our HNGR certificates:

"Remember your Creator during your youth when all possibilities lie open before you and you can offer all your strength intact for his service. The time to remember is not after you become senile and paralyzed! Then it is not too late for your salvation, but too late for you to serve as the presence of God in the midst of the world and creation. You must take sides earlier - when you can actually make choices, when you have many paths opening at your feet, before the weight of necessity overwhelms you." -Jacques Ellul, from "Reason for Being: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes"

As I crossed over the bridge to Jersey, it felt as gangster and skank as ever. My home felt countless hours of silence and thoughts away, scattered with the ones who shared the bread and wine of my brokenness with me. A flurry of hasty packing, subdued looks, and a few unvoiced grievances later, I drove across lines that were more than just state borders.

[Now, how can I pretend to be an adult?]

All I have figured out is this: Grow where you are planted.

I could ramble on about chasing dreams and being true, about being thankful and living with no regrets, but you have pop-psychologists and crappy Christian authors to parrot those truisms for you. Instead I will ask myself to fight the lies of individualism (in community) while resisting thoughtless acts of conformity (apart from the world). I will remind myself that life is a process and that we are omni-nothing. Faithfulness is valued above whatever shackles the world calls success, and that people, whom we are called to minister to, loved and breathed in God’s image, are found in every corner of life. We are placed where we are for a reason. There are no shortcuts here. We might as well learn to thrive.

Trust, amidst the uncertainties and paradox, because there are many.

“I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full.”

When I jumped out of an airplane with a piece of fabric to save my life, I realized that I wasn’t afraid of death. Death is easy. It’s quite passive. What I’m afraid of is a passive life that is more disheartening than death. Living life to the full is what’s hard. Remember the Beatitudes, the upside-down Kingdom, and the beauty of loving Jesus more than you love your husband or wife, your job, your children… “For your heavenly Father knows that you need them… Seek first His Kingdom…”

“Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, ‘I find no pleasure in them.’”

Maybe all of this is like a photo with the light flooding in, where the sun is brighter than it should be, and where the details and difficulties are bleached out in a glowing brilliance. Maybe. You can accuse me of forgetting about making ends meet, of glossing over moribund 9-5’s and of coming home without the strength to hope. I could be guilty of baseless idealism. But this is my point exactly… the Gospel was always counter-intuitively brilliant to me, absurd and unrealistic in this cold world, yet I believe it because of its inexplicable contrast against hopelessness and death.

If we are not light and salt, hands and feet, if we are not the hope we profess or the love that dies to give life, if cynics like me can’t look beyond our naval and hold onto something other than our stark existentialism, well… I would be lost.

Friend, don’t you dare wake up one morning and not know how you got there. And if you ever considered me a friend, don’t let me slide obliviously down that path either.

Faith, hope, and love. Always love.

["Now everybody got the game figured out all wrong. I guess you never know what you got til it's gone.... Do you think about me now and then?..."]

Remember?

If I slide your picture underneath a frame,
I can grasp within my two hands
the moment we chose to leave our regrets
like muddy shoes at the door,
and let the whites of our teeth,
the creases at the corner of our eyes
select the memories I choose to recall.

Forget
In that moment, anything
but the lilacs lingering on a breeze
that never seems to leave this windy city
Unlike us, who,
with our patchwork hearts,
begin to drive, fly, walk,
RUN.
away from all that we chose not to frame.

If I slide your picture underneath a frame,
We will fossilize our smiles,
reignite our conversations with,
“Remember that time in Chicago...
That night... on spring break...
... Remember?”
We will dance around the demons slain by the Holy Ghost,
and will toast to the amnesia outside the frame.

Sur le fil et Comptine D'un Autre Ete-L'Apre

At 3 in the morning when the really early birds are already singing and night owl friends are hardly sleeping, the word "hope" sounds strangely bright, anachronistic and misplaced amidst an emotional landscape that feels and smells like a monochrome portrait of New Orleans after Katrina.

We do not hope in ourselves, because one cannot hope in the death within, but must hope in life from without. We cannot hope in our contortions of dreams because they lack the substance to support reality. We cannot hope in the past because hope yearns forward by definition. We do not even hope in hope itself, because unless the object of hope cannot disappoint, we will be left again with our empty hands trying to cover our naked hearts.

And though we dirty our knees with our nose in the dirt and eyes out of focus, rolling the Kyrie off our tongue like the tears that follow gravity down interesting lines of our face, we cling, like the bleeding woman for what seems like 12 broken years, to the frayed edges of Hope hoping... hoping against hope that if we don't let go, He will say, "Child, your faith has healed you."

In whom shall I trust? In whom shall I hope?

"On my knees, empty..."

Sometimes, no, oftentimes, I wish life was not the way that it was.

It's an acquired skill to appreciate and be thankful for the small beauties that keep our heads up, but it's sad that we need to resort to that. It implies that those beautiful things are the exceptions to the rule, and that most of our days are a struggle.

One day.

1/18/08

It’s always about relinquishing. It’s always about opened hands and broken hearts, and admitting that God knows better, because that’s our only option to accept. Such an admission comes from a place of desperation and dependence. It is forced by cold shoulders of realities that we wished were only bad dreams at best, night-terrors at worst. But just because my state is a product of being forced into concession doesn’t make it wrong.

It’s always about relinquishing. It’s about making plans and thinking ideas… it’s about wanting things our way only to have God ask us to give it up. Not because He’s a bully (or so I would like to hope in His defense), but because supposedly, He has something different and better in store. And hope…. Hope is the chain, sometimes the only chain, that ties my motivation and sanity to this earth. If one day I lose hope in what is promised to me, if I lose hope that no matter what happens, there is a God who has assured me of a resurrection and vindication, that will be the day I cease seeing purpose in suffering and pain.

Relinquishing. Relinquishing the dreams that we hold to, the form manifested by our desire for completion and wholeness… it is not the hope for completion that is relinquished, but our conceptualization of it… the idol we have fashioned out of what was deemed, “Very good.” It’s always about relinquishing.

I walked slowly today, in the face of the wind and snow and decided to feel every cold prick sweeping across my exposed skin. Our God is a strange God, one who allows things to break before they are reconstructed, calls us to relinquish every part of our lives, especially the deepest parts, if we are to keep it. What a difficult teaching indeed.

How long, O Lord, do we need to have faith in an ideal before we taste its actualization? And even when we are given it, ironic that I still have to remember, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. May the name of the Lord be praised.”