Some Fundamentals: Uncertainty

            It’s about eighty-five degrees outside, ninety-five percent humidity.  The kids are happy to be inside.  We’re in New Orleans on a week long work and educational trip.  Right now an old man is telling us his version of a story we’ll hear again and again throughout the week.  He describes his experience of Katrina.  He talks about leaving, hearing about the catastrophe from afar, returning to death and devastation.  His details are different, but the story is a sliver of that great tale of anguish and appreciation.

            He’s talked for almost an hour now.  The youth minister leading the trip raises her hand and asks about his faith.  How did it help him during the flood and after, when neighbors died and the city lay in ruins?

            “Sometime you’ll get to the point where all you have is your faith.  That’s all you have to lean on,” he says.  The kids nod appreciatively.

RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

            This week, five months later, I listen to a debate between an atheist and a Christian.  They are remarkably polite to one another and that’s more interesting to me than their tepid arguments for and against the existence of God.  It’s their stories and their generosity to one another that catches my attention. 

Then the moderator describes the atheist’s position as not like Christopher Hitchens for whom religion was a virus.  This debater speaks of religion as a placebo for the soul¯.  I think in some way that’s how our guide to Katrina was describing faith.  It can actually help.  It can push back the darkness.  It can make sense in a chaotic world.

            Placebos are amazing in that they do not depend on an outside influence to heal.  They tap into the body’s innate strength.  Placebos depend solely on my ability to believe and my body somehow responding to that belief in order to produce whatever it needs to survive.  But their worth is limited.

            Placebos don’t work against bullets, for example.  The catastrophe of the Ghost Dance demonstrates that¢.  Belief will carry a person a long way, as will determination, drive, will, and fear.  But after that, when I come to the end of myself, I need something more than me.

            I’m somewhat resistant to the notion of faith placebos because I’m all too aware of my own limitations.  If supernatural things depend on my ability to believe, I’m dead in the water.

I think where I sometimes frustrate people is in my unwillingness to say that what I believe about God is synonymous with God.  Caution in speaking for God is a growing area for me.  It seems like the best we can do is to say what seems to be the case, what seems consistent with God’s character, what people in the past have observed about God.

            I’m not even comfortable saying that what the Bible says about God is how God is.  It’s observational, certainly, it is even revelatory, but it isn’t God.  When I say God I mean someone who cannot be understood by the finitude of the human mind.  Any description of God, like my favorite, “God is love”, is limited by our ability to comprehend.  Language can’t contain God any better than temples can.

            That is not to say that there is nothing true.  Some people have determined “absolute truth” to be absolutely important.  I do not think it is, but I am not opposed to the idea that there is such a thing as absolute truth.  In fact, I think that the people who insist on it are really insisting that God is, and that God does not change like we do.  I’m perfectly happy with that idea, even though it seems rather small and less useful than a lot of other ways of speaking of God.  What I am at pains to point out and model is that human beings do not have access on an intellectual level to absolute truth.  At the risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfield: we know only what we know.

            A non-theological example of this is the idea of the atom.  Around the middle of the fifth century BC, Democritus summarized concepts that had been floating around the Greek world and the Indian subcontinent.  He said that all matter was made up of very small parts, atomos, which were irreducible.  Today we are told by scientists that atoms are actually made up of even smaller bits.  And we believe it.  Atoms are no longer imagined to be tiny balls of solid matter, but as whirling energy.  Were Democritus and the early Indians wrong?  Not exactly.

We know only what we know.

The postmodern word is uncertainty.  The religious word is humility.  Both are useful for approaching God.  Both are valuable in reading the scriptures.  Both are indispensable for human interaction. 

Neither is easy.

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¯ Well, actually, I made the for the soul part.  He just says placebo affect.  I like my turn of phrase better, though

¢ Look it up.  It’s a fascinating tale.

Some Fundamentals: Bible, Part 2

The Bible is an essential piece for approaching and appropriating the world.  It helps form the ways we see God and the world.  It gives us language to speak of God; its stories form an endless well from which to draw identity.  Obviously there are nuances upon nuances that I hadn’t considered at eighteen.  Now it seems obvious, in answer to Mark Simone’s assertion about the Bible as the greatest source for information about Jesus, that people learn as much or perhaps more about Jesus from the tradition of their church as from the Bible.  And that makes sense.  The Bible is part of the tradition of the Church, which has existed longer than the Bible, and whose faithfulness to that collection of archaic writings is all that has preserved it for us today.  It is the tradition of the Church, along with its reverence for the Bible, which shapes Christian faith.  It’s the constant turning to the tales woven in Scripture and Laws and the poetry which then shapes the Church.

            I used to teach an adult Sunday School class called “Stories You Wish Weren’t In The Bible.”  We talked about the Bible as though it were written for adults, not a children’s’ bedtime story book.  We read stories like the near-death of Isaac at the hands of Abraham, the rape (or was it a seduction?) of Dinah, the wholesale slaughter of  Israel’s enemies, and Ananias and Saphira and their money, lies, and deaths.  Those are troubling stories for twenty-first century people to wrestle with.  But there they are.  We dealt with them, and in doing so we came closer to understanding our own assumptions about God, the Bible, and life in general.  It was fruitful and challenging, at least for me.  I think that’s true for some class members, as well. 

One story we read dealt with Tamar, whose husbands kept dying on her.  By tradition, her father-in-law, Judah, from whose name comes the land of Judea and the contemporary Jews in all their diversity, was obligated to give her another son.  Then another and another so she could have children.  After a couple of boys dies, Judah decided that Tamar was cursed or worse.  He refused his obligation.

            Then his own wife died.  After a suitable amount of time, he went off to visit a nearby shrine prostitute.  It happens.  Guys get lonely, they get desperate, they get stupid.  Tamar heard all about it and disguised herself as the prostitute and had sex with Judah.  I guess she kept the veil on and didn’t talk much.  When it was over, the old man found himself financially embarrassed.  “No worries,” said the still veiled naked woman, “just leave me your staff (not that one) and your seal.  We’ll settle up later.”

            A few months later, who turns up pregnant?  The errant man-killer Tamar.  Well, we’ll just have to stone her.  After all, why break tradition now?  Two birds and one stone, so to speak.

            “Well . . .,” says the adulterous witch, “we might want to get the man who planted this seed, right?  I’ve got his stuff right inside.”

            The old man, on seeing his own cane and seal, says, “She is more righteous than I am.” 

To which I reply, “No shit.”

            But a woman in the class says, “But, Judah was a good Christian man, wasn’t he?”  And I can’t tell if she’s being funny or what.  No, Judah was nothing like a Christian, living so long B.C.  And his goodness is surely in question in this tale, at least.  That’s the beauty of the Bible.  There are seldom black and white stories, laws, or descriptions.  It’s as complex as the world it describes and the minds whence it sprang.

            We didn’t even start to explore the clear contradictions in places like the Samuel books or Chronicles and Kings, and especially not in the gospel accounts of Jesus life.  We aren’t talking about paradox here, the only real way to understand complex realities, but simple contradictions in detail.

I actually don’t have any trouble saying that the Bible is the word of God.  How that’s true in probably different for every person.  There are people who use the words inerrant and infallible to talk about the Bible.  In fact, those words have come to mean more to some people than the words of scripture themselves.  They say that in the original manuscripts, the writings were inerrant, without fault, perfectly communicating God’s intentions to us.  They would have no room for redaction, editing.  Those manuscripts, alas, are lost to history and history’s thieves – mildew and decay.  So, for all practical intents, the theory of inerrancy says we no longer have the Word of God available to us.  This from people whose only intention was to maintain some reverence for the Bible. 

Inerrancy and infallibility are descriptions too brittle for the real world, let alone a real God.

Another way of thinking about the Bible as the word of God is to say that as it is spoken, read, or pondered, it becomes the Word all over again.  In a sense God snatches the dusty words from a page or from the air and appropriates them to speak to new hearers.  It is in that way that the Bible never gets old.  It’s like a sponge that has soaked up water and is never dry.  Not because of some inherent property in the words themselves, but because God chooses that arcane collection to communicate to new generations in new ways.

In other words, if I took a copy of the Bible, buried it in the back yard, and forgot about it, it would not be the Word of God, nor would it carry the thoughts of God.  It would be fertilizer in no metaphorical sense at all.  If someone dug it up, and if she could read English, then God could speak to her through the wormy pages.  But only then would it ever come close to being God’s word.

In the struggle for the Bible, by and large the fundamentalists have won and even liberals are pretty sure of it.  Consequently they spend a lot of their time trying to look like they don’t take the Bible all that seriously or explaining it away.

The fundamentalists have even won over the nonbelievers.  Whole forests have been felled to convince the public that there are contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible.  Anyone who can read (including the people who edited and collected the Bible) can see that the entire collection is rife with contradictions.  But believers and unbelievers, fundamentalists and liberals, accept the proposition that if parts of it are less than true, none of it can be true.  Again, too brittle.  We need something flexible, alive, organic.  The truth is, it really doesn’t do much to damage the credibility of the Christian faith to point out the problems with the texts if we remember that the texts are part of the tradition of the Church’s tradition.  They’re part of what helps us understand Jesus.

Some Fundamentals: The Bible

            When I was about eighteen I asked Mark Simone, king of all youth ministry, why some people I’d recently met seemed to hold the Bible in such high regard that it became a fourth member or the Trinity (I don’t know what that would be called, off the top of my head – Quadriny, maybe).  His top-of-the-head answer has helped to shape my understanding of the Bible ever since.

            “Yeah, but, you know, it’s a really important book.  Where else do you learn as much about Jesus?”

            He also once told a group of us something like, “You don’t have to believe all of the Bible to believe some of the Bible.”

            I don’t think he worded it so concisely, but that’s pretty deep for a youth minister, even if he is the king of all youth ministry.

            I might add that one need not believe much of the Bible to believe in Jesus and to be known by Jesus.

            I’m still puzzled by people who approach the Bible as though it were the very thoughts of God, captured for time and eternity in inky black (and redÀ).  I thought at eighteen that if a person thought about it and read even the little bit of scripture I had, they’d probably have to let the Trinity remain threef.

            One rainy seminary afternoon about seven years later, a few of us stretched out on couches between classes in the student lounge, drinking coffee and pontificating as seminarians are wont to do.  As our course steered toward the authority of scripture, one person said that just as Jesus was the incarnate Word of God, the Bible is also the incarnate Word of God.  Rich argument ensued.  I think several of us forgot to go to our next class.

            I thought this was an idiosyncratic bent on my classmate’s part, but subsequent reading revealed the same thoughts from lots of evangelicals and fundamentalists.  I was honestly surprised.  While I came to faith among people who loved and valued the Bible, I cannot remember anyone actually saying that Jesus and the scriptures were, in fact, synonymous.  Sure, there were those people I had asked Mark Simone, king of all youth ministry, about in my teens, but I really thought their thoughts were aberrations from orthodox evangelicalism.  The people who helped form my faith were too impressed with Jesus to ever make that mistake.  But, as I read, I found writers like Harold Lindsell, editor for a time of Christianity Today, a flagship evangelical publication, “There are two Words: the Word of God incarnate, Jesus Christ, and the Word of God written, the Bible . . .”  Never mind that the Bible itself doesn’t ever make such claims, nor that it opens doors these folks would never want to openJ, there it is.

            Words are symbols, metaphors to carry the world into our minds.  But the Word of God is different.  The words of God are, in some sense, the things themselves.   God speaks, and there is light.  The Word of God comes out in a still small voice and mountains tremble in the heart of the sea.  The Word of God, indeed, kills and the Word of God, indeed, makes alive; it breaks rocks into pieces«. 

So when we refer to the Bible as the Word of God, this is another thing altogether.  There are plenty of examples on the Bible of prophets saying, “The Word of the Lord came to me . . .” but there are also places where the Apostle Paul says, “It seems to us and to the Holy Spirit . . .”  Both are contained within the cover of the anthology we now call the Bible.   When God speaks, it is action.  When we speak, it is wish and speculation.  Both are found in the Bible.

It’s the anthological nature of the Bible that starts moving us toward the essence of the issue.  The Bible did not fall from the sky, marker ribbons all aflutter.  It was formed, evolved, really, over many hundreds of years.  When I first started contemplating that fact a long time ago, it seemed like that ought to bother me.  I ought to be threatened that the Bible, the Word of God, was really the product of naturalistic processes whose outcome could not be plotted before its completion, but whose trajectory now seems perfectly reasonable in hindsight.  It’s like tracking the domestication of corn from seedy grass to the superfood of continents.

What we have in the Bible is an interconnected (and terribly disconnected) set of stories, myths, poems, civil laws, admonitions, letters and ancient biographies that work together to form a fascinating whole.  It’s a lot like the whole science of emergence, where you have a collection of disparate parts like birds or ants or neurons, all working together to form a whole which is, in the words of the old cliché, greater than the sum of its parts. 

The power of the Bible is not arithmetic, it is exponential.

That means that the strength of the Bible doesn’t rest in surreal origins, nor in some specific authorship, but in the way God uses it to speak to people today.   Parts of the Bible are certainly supernatural in origin (even if they’re not magical) and parts are obviously written by specific people we might all recognize and value.  Believing that God uses the Bible to communicate with us and others liberates the Bible from the straightjacket of magic and lets God work however God wants to work. 

So various books of the Bible can have more than one author, be edited and corrected before they become God’s words for us.  At least, in the way I understand the Bible and its place in the faith.  For others, a particular author (usually the one names at the beginning or in the title imposed by tradition or guess, not by the text itself) along with a very specific set of words that have never changed or been changed is essential to preserve the actual intention of God.  But that simply isn’t the case, and even the witness of scripture bears that out.

           

For instance, when whoever it was who wrote or edited or redacted the gospel of John came to try to place Christ in the grand scheme of God, he or she or they decided that the best route was back to the Word of God, spoken into the world and remaking everything.  The anonymous and mysterious writer of the Letter to the Hebrews said that in the past God spoke through prophets in different ways, but now, in the final days, God spoke through God’s Son.  God has had many things to say, and God’s last Word is Jesus Christ.  Then, apparently using the memories of someone who was an eye witness to at least most of Jesus’ ministry, they constructed a theological piece for their community.

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À Tony Campolo, among others, started referring to himself as a “red letter Christian”, meaning he takes especially seriously the words of Jesus in the four canonical gospels.  I guess this might bother some people, those who would say that Leviticus 6:10 in as important as Matthew 5-7 {yeah, look them up; it’s worth it}.   More about a gospel worldview later in this chapter.

f Or even, God forbid, question the whole use of such language as Trinity as an imposition onto the text.  Just a thought, half-formed at best.

J Doors like: if God can be incarnate in two forms, why not more?  Think about it.  It would make a great comic book.  The second son of God . . . no, the dog of God, or the pencil of God, or the tuna can label of God, wanders the earth, bereft of anything or anyone to save, looking for something, anything to do.  Somewhere else I’ll talk about incarnation, likely in the parts concerning Jesus directly, but let me reiterate myself again for a second time: the incarnation was a divine gamble, a risk so wild that only a wild God could take it.

« Yeah, those are references to scripture.  Google the words and find the places.

Sopme Fundamentals: Cain

AN OLD STORY FROM ANOTHER BLOG.  IT FITS THE THEME OF FUNDAMENTALS

I didn’t think I’d kiss her. It just happened. She left the stage and took off a feathered head piece and I was thjere and I kissed her. I’d thought about it often, but now I'd done it.
Walt saw the whole thing. I didn’t care. He said nothing. My brother stood alone.
Her breath tasted like coffee and tobacco and whiskey and fatigue. But I didn’t care.
Her lips were greasy Oriental silk.
It was a new era of electric lights and motor cars and Edward was king and I was an actor.
So was she.
She had a past: orphan from London, making her way to San Francisco on a steamer, paying her way with skin, not songs.
Her body was an island of experience, clouds and forests of the past, dense with men from every layer of society. I knew it all and I didn't care.
Walt’s eyes burned like the tip of his cigar. I knew he loved her; my brother loved her with flame in his belly that kept him awake at night, a burning spear that ignited fights in bars and on street corners. I could hear his heart beating and I stopped my ears.
Walt was her past, but he was passed. I was here now, and I led her toward her dressing room.
Inside, she was my new country, wrested from savages, tamed by my genteel hand. I felt the heat of her and I thought of my wife, I thought of Walt, I thought of a thousand things, but I pushed them from my mind. The blood in my ears was the surf on the shore of my new, uncharted continent.
I didn’t hear the door, didn’t see the knife until she was falling over me, shuddering: shaken by pain, not passion. I felt the steel and I saw Walt and he was Cain and I was Cain.

Fundamentals: The story of Heaven, Part II

A few years ago I went to a gathering of ministers in Denver.  I didn’t pay the price of admission, and cobbed rooms from a couple of friends.  One friend was the Reverend Doctor Michael Van Horn.  As I was drifting off on the floor, wrapped in an extra blanket, I asked the Rev. what the word spirit signified to him.  He said something like, “Spirit means orientation, toward God or away from God.  That’s your spirit.”

That’s probably the best definition of spirit I’ve heard: orientation.  Not an extra substance, not something separate from our existence as flesh and blood men and women, but where our focus is.  It’s not necessarily a comforting idea, but it seems consistent with both scripture/tradition and with experience.

In the Book of Genesis, God breathes into the nostrils of the clay-man Adam.  The clay man becomes a living thing.  Some people say that’s what sets us apart from animals: the breath of Gods in our lungsÅ.  Christians might say that this is the origin of the soul, the eternal part of the human person.  The breath of God stuck in Adam’s lungs and became our eternal bit.  I think a rabbinical story based on that might say that in each person that breath is constantly longing to return to the creator.  Or perhaps it’s the breath of God that animates our thoughts and desires.  Or maybe it’s the spark of life that then allows our bodies to emanate spirit.

Then, of course, there’s the whole issue of eternal life.  Jesus talked about it, to be sure.  St. John’s gospel is replete with references to eternal life and how to get it.  Immediately we jump from that phrase to our own ideas of something called heaven, a place of . . . well, no one is sure, but there is a lot of talk about knowing things of which we are currently ignorant, getting to do what we love, be it bowling, hunting, having sex, or eating.  And sure, there are definitely some references in the rest of scripture that speak of something beautiful and unimaginable in the future.  But the story of heaven that gets passed around the majority of Christianity sounds more like a Buddhist grasping at detachment than a Jesus story of eternal life.

When John’s version of Jesus talks about eternal life, the other gospels refer to the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heavena.  Kingdom of God is usually followed by a story, a parable about what the realm/reign/reality is like.   Interestingly, this reign or commonwealth or kingdom doesn’t have even the slightest whiff of our common conception of “heaven”.  There is not one word concerning, “after you die”.  Instead, it seems like a turning-on-its-head of the world-as-we-know-it.  Justice is done, the hungry are filled, and the rich go away empty.  Reading the parables Jesus tells of this kingdom, one cannot help noticing that 1) it’s not a fair reign, since everyone is treated well, not only those who have earned it, and 2) it has a very earthy feel to it.

The kingdom of heaven is political.  Before you run to get your bible and find the spot where Jesus himself tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world; otherwise my followers would fight for it,” remember that being “not of this world” is not the same as being ethereal.  “The world” is used in much of the New Testament to indicate the way things are, the systems built on corruption, or systems built ostensibly to fight against corruption. 

In the mid-nineties a group of kids passed through Gunnison, Colorado, where my wife and I were living.  They had just finished a Rainbow Family Gathering and were on their way to Oregon.  They camped for a couple weeks in the National Forest near town, and we got to know some of them.  Most of these kids spoke derisively of the world system – the government, capitalism, communism, everything – as “Babylon”».  They picked that word up from Rastafarianism via reggae music, which in turn gleaned the concept of an empire of oppression from the Bible.  The Bible both describes the historical Babylonian empire (which enslaved its neighbors and reeked havoc in the name of keeping the peace) and the metaphorical Babylonian empire(s) centuries later.  The ending book of the New Testament, in fact, identifies Babylon with Rome and her empire.  It’s a natural step to understand all empires, be they economic like multi-national corporations, political like the United States, or religious, like ____________ (name your favorite).

The kingdom of heaven stands in stark distinction of any empireb because it is not about power over, but power under.  Power over is how all empires operate.  They expand by incorporating their surroundings, absorbing everything, appropriating what works and crushing what doesn’t, always changing, always hungry.  The power under kingdom of heaven constantly gives, taking as its source of energy the weakness of God in Christ, giving itself away to the unworthy, especially the weak, the oppressed, the marginalized, but also to the power-mongers, turning the other cheek, surrendering shirts and going the extra mile. 

The kingdom of heaven is personified in Jesus and is always on the move, never finding a place to sleep, hounded, afraid, but relentless in love.

            Despite their bad press in the pages of the gospels, the Pharisees gave birth to two important children: the Christian movement and the rabbinical tradition.  And despite their divergence from one another and from the source(s) of their inspiration, both movements have a lot to teach one another.  Around the time of the Jesus movement, the rabbis started talking about something they called, in Hebrew, Tikkun Olam, or world repair.  Fixing the world.  Today it means any kind of social justice work, but maybe there’s something lost if it doesn’t include the importance of prayer.

            In the same way, Jesus taught his followers to pray that God’s realm would come on earth as it is in heaven.  In other words, despite the apparent separation of God from creation, the fractured nature of things as we see them, God desires to repair the world and desires our help in doing so.  In fact, says St. Paul, we are to be co-workers with God (or for God, or of God) in Tikkun Olam.  This is the kingdom of heaven, not a gauzy afterlife on a cloud.

            The end of the Book of Revelation is about “the kingdoms of this world now become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ,” of the celestial realm descending and God dwelling with God’s people.  There is definitely a future element to the kingdom of heaven, but waiting it out isn’t part of our present.  Working for it is.

            Hoping for an eternal existence of taking our ease, fat on soul food at the heavenly cafeteria (good and corny as that sounds even as I re-read it) isn’t the goal of any life, and especially not of the Christian life.  The entire story of Jesus, death and resurrection, is a pattern for all of creation, not least of which is humanity.  Jesus was only the first to pass under the mountains and emerge on the other side, glorified and ready to face the sun.  We are also headed that way.  Resurrection is seldom understood in any Christian setting, liberal or conservative.  Instead, the focus is on the symbolism of the resurrection, which for liberals is feeling better about myself and for conservatives is dying and zipping off to heaven.  Maybe resurrection means a little more.  Maybe it signifies the rebirth of the cosmos.  Not just signifies, but anticipates.  Maybe St. Paul’s creation groaning for the appearing of the sons and daughters of God in our resurrection is a real thing and symbolic of the work we’re to be about.  Maybe.

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Å I think it’s the ability to tell stories that make us different.  But some animals, especially chimpanzees, can tell stories.  They can lie.  So, maybe I’ll have to rethink my theory.

a This was out of reverence for God’s name and a reluctance to toss it around too cavalierly.  We might do well to think about that precaution.

» One guy, whose “Family name” was Sasquatch, refused to come to our house and shower, even though his friends begged him to.  He asked me one day as we rode around in his van if there is any evidence of combs in the Bible.  I didn’t know.  A little research showed that ancients were somewhat concerned with hygiene, even though they might be dirty by contemporary American standards.

b Some people have actually used the word “empire” to translate the NT word Baseleia.  That isn’t inaccurate.  In fact, it works as well as kingdom.  One of the problems with much of NT theological work is that it uses words and phrases from the world around the writers.  The writers often do not simply tweak those phrases, but twist, turn, pound, and reshape them to mean nearly the direct opposite.  The emperor was “Son of God” and “Savoiur”.  The Roman Empire brought a kind of peace among those who pleased the Son.  A quick glance at the NT shows how those words were co-opted to very different ends.

Fundamentals: Love Again

This is only a little thing, but it helps me think about the nature of love in the cosmos.  I started by describing the birthplace of stars, the explosive violence at the center and beginning of the universe.  That’s the macro picture of love. 

Now for the micro.  Since about 1959 some biologists have become increasingly aware of horizontal gene transfer, where-in an organism shares genetic material with another which is not its offspring®.  That’s like me giving you a coat if you’re cold, or you bringing me medicine when I’m sick.  I think Jesus had a few things to say about that.  As we become more complex systems of cells, we lose the ability to be altruistic naturally.  It’s no longer part of how we operate.  But it’s still there, peeking out in the most unlikely places: love, whether it’s clashing and roiling, or slipping useful adaptations among cells, or giving hard earned cash to anyone less fortunate than yourself, the love of God, the love who is God, reflected in creation.

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® The other kind of gene transfer is vertical, just to keep our metaphors straight.

Fundamentals: Love Part II

Surely my understanding of love is influenced by my having been raised in a relatively stable household in a time of great prosperity».  I can’t help it: God’s love means something to me that it doesn’t mean to a 12^th century Spanish mystic or a Bronze Age patriarch stumbling out of Ur.  And their sense of love is alien to me, too.  I realize that there are people in this profoundly privileged epoch who don’t see it that way.  In fact, I knew a woman who was reticent to even tell her own children she loved them, lest they grow accustomed to it and take it for granted.  God, for her, felt the same.  God’s love is not ubiquitous; it must be curried like a Dark Age feudal lord’s favor.  Go figure.  Relative to both my past and my reflection, I think that the ubiquity of God’s love forces people to take it for granted.

I cannot help seeing the universe through the lens of love.  When St. John says, “God is love”, he isn’t looking at that God and that love through my privileged twenty first century eyes.  He never read a Hallmark card and didn’t have any memories of those little naked doe-eyed people from the seventies saying things like, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”à He didn’t love chocolate cake, had never made love to a woman·. 

In love making there is a disruption of everything, a disordering and chaotic grinding together.  In the aftermath there is at least the possibility of new arising from the ashes of the old.  Cells collide, combine and divide, splitting and joining. 

            That kind of love, shredding division and clanging union, is powerful. 

            Love is fundamental and paradoxical.  Life is brutish and short.  All organisms are genetically selfish.  That is to say, they do not share useful adaptations with just everyone.  They only pass those along to their offspring.  So a dolphin, for example, isn’t going to give you the genes necessary to hold your breath for a long time.  That wasn’t always the case.  There was a time, scientists speculate, when simple single celled organisms had porous walls and were able to give and take genetic code from one another.  So if you as a cell had some beneficial adaptation, you could give it to me. 

            Clearly those cells don’t behave that way because they’re kind or altruistic, but in a sense love is a mindless giving.  Love is promiscuous.  It doesn’t care who it touches and rubs up against.  It gives to its last breath.  Jesus said that God showers the just and the unjust.

            When I was a gardener, I watered my garden.  I carefully set up the sprinklers to hit only my plants, with a minimum of overspray.  That way I wasn’t wasting water.  Love, on the other hand, is naturally wasteful.  It falls not only on my deserving garden, but on the lawn, the weeds, the trees, the roof, the sidewalk, the street: everywhere in wasteful abundance.

The good news of Jesus is about love.  When Jesus was asked the key to the Law and the Prophets, he said, like any good rabbi, that the commandment to love God with one’s totality is where it’s at.  Actually, the Hebrew tradition in which Jesus was so steeped was too visceral, too bodily, too bloody for as soft a summary as that. 

Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.

You shall love the LORD with all your heart,

with all your soul

with all your mind

and with all your strength¥.

Then, just like any good rabbi, and in keeping with the scriptures of his people, Jesus couldn’t resist adding a second bit to the question of which Law summarized them all.

You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.

Then he told the story of the Samaritan, the dying man, and the innkeeper, to show that neighbors are not just those people who look, think, speak, smell, spend, believe, worship, eat, make love, and keep house like we do or would like to do.  Neighbors can be enemies, as Jesus reminded his hearers in another place.µ 

            At the risk of sounding like those tough guys who have in recent years  taken the men’s movement of the ‘80’s and early ‘90’s and recycled it into a Christian manhood movement with a macho Christ who can hunt, throw a football, and open bottles of light beer bottles with his wedding ring, love is tough.  It’s strong and abrasive and natural.

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» Not that we saw much of that prosperity.  The 1970’s aren’t remembered as times of enormous wealth for Americans.   My family was no different.  Even before Reganomics trickled down and made us fabulously lower middle class we didn’t have much.  But every day of my childhood I ate, lived under a roof, had access to clean water.  We even had toys and a television.  Compared to the rest of the world, and most of history, we lived like kings.    

à Which is, in my thinking, both profound and a tremendous load of crap all at once.  One of the ways I express love is in apology.    On the other hand, I would hope that I could be gracious enough to forgive before I’m asked to do so.

· I assume, based on his time, not his virginity or studliness.  Maybe first century people “made love”, but I’ve never heard it referred to that way.

¥ Look at The Story of Heaven.

µ There are plenty of resources available to tell you how many times Jesus talked about various things, most usually noted are money, love, hell, and homosexuality.  Suffice it to say that Jesus talked a lot about love.

Fundamentals: The Story of Heaven Part I

Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.

You shall love the LORD with all your heart,

with all your soul

with all your mind

and with all your strength

Going to Sunday School in junior high I heard all about how we have a body, which I could see, a mind, which I could on occasion exercise but chose not to, and a soul, which was . . . you know, kind of like . . . your emotions and stuff.  To be honest, there was always a vague and ultimately unsatisfying discussion of “soul”.  Spirit was sometimes in there, with soul taking on the attributes of mind and then spirit used to identify those unclear pieces of emotion and whatnot. 

I guess the whole thing was supposed to reflect the Trinity.  We saw the Trinity and our own trinitarian nature is everything: apples (red skin, white interior, seeds), eggs (shell, white, yolk), water (solid, liquid, gas)V, even the chocolate, caramel, cookie crunch goodness of the Twix bar. 

So leave it to the Bible to contradict the West’s traditional (Greek) theology of the human person as tri-partate: 1) Body, 2) Mind 3) Soul.  Heart + mind + soul + strength = four pieces.  One more reason to love the Bible.

And humanity comes in two genders, and my hands have ten (or eight) fingers, and despite my other symmetry, I have only one heart.  Maybe seeking evidence of the divine Trinity in nature or humanity is just shouting down empty wells. 

Then, to be honest, I’m still not sure what “soul” or “spirit” mean, though I do have an intuitive sense of these words.

For instance, you’ve no doubt experienced a writer’s spirit in her work, or an artist’s soul.  In encountering a piece of art, no matter the medium, I often feel like I’m actually in touch with the best part of the artist.  I imagine it’s the same for a lit of people.  Maybe that best part of a person is their soul or spirite.

But it should also be noted that mind and soul and spirit are emergent properties of bodies.  That is to say that they are physical, or in some sense dependent on physicality, rooted in the flesh and blood material world, even if that physicality is electrical impulses and chemical interactions.  Continuing the vein of art, you realize that the transcendence of art is rooted in the physical.  Without the page or the canvas, the vibrations of air and tiny ear bones, waves of light, optic nerves and brains, the artist is not present to you.  Human beings are physical creatures, not souls locked in these cages of bone and flesh, and we appropriate the world though our physicality.  We have no other means.  There is no such thing as a mind apart from a body.  The same is true of soul, psyche, spirit, essence, or whatever words we can use to describe those immaterial parts of ourselves we wish might live forever.

When I was a young pastor I found a book in the church’s tiny library.  It was mainly about proper doctrine and why it’s important.  It was written from a very conservative fundamentalist/evangelical perspective§.  In the section about “MAN”, I read, “Man was created with an immortal soul.”  Then I threw the book away.  In the trash.  I didn’t tell anyone, either.  I just got rid of it.  The audacity of claiming to possess anything with a shelf life of always is astounding.  We’re naturally finite beings, with a beginning, middle, and an end.

Whenever I have questioned the validity of the immortal soul among Christians, the conversation always comes around to one specific issue.  “But if people don’t have an eternal soul or spirit, what about hell?”  It troubles some to contemplate a universe wherein some poor souls do not suffer forever.  Or, less cynically, maybe it makes it harder to grasp salvation.  What is it Jesus saves us from, if not hell?  And, if there is no threat of eternal damnation, why accept Jesus?  Why seek friendship with God, if no to be rescued from God’s terrific anger?

In talking about the spirit/soul, the science of emergence has a lot to offer.   From a hectic conglomeration of atoms, empty spaces, electrical impulses, an ever changing cast of characters, your body emerges.  Every day, despite the lack of any centralized authority, despite this rotating roster of players, your body remains the same, at least externally.  You remain the same.  That, to me, is an amazing thing.  Coherence comes not from the constituent parts, but from something else: the whole is greater. 

In one sense, it should come as no surprise.  After all, we are physical creatures.  People who have appropriated the Jesus story should especially appreciate this.  The Creed says, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”  In one sense the Creed just says something we already know intuitively, naturally.

Beyond that, the gospel message is that Jesus took on flesh, not as a ghost shrugging on a skin suit, a disguised divinity, but entering into the realm of humanity.  It is in flesh, as flesh, for flesh.  That’s the Incarnation.  The material world is where salvation is worked, not in an ethereal space beyond imagining, but here, where I live, where I can touch it and it can touch me.

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V Did you know that H₂O is the only compound that exists in nature in the three forms of matter?  I’m not sure what that means in the big picture, but it’s pretty interesting in itself.

e The best part as soul or spirit should make ghostly haunting stories difficult for me.  I heard a story a few years ago about a couple who spent three nights in the refurbished barn of an Italian castle, feeling a strange presence.  On the last night they were there, the husband told me later, he saw a man dressed in “old style clothes” standing above him, leaning down.  When he told his wife next day what he’d seen, she said she’d seen the same figure floating near the ceiling when she looked into the room.  They weren’t surprised to learn that a man had hanged himself in the barn, right above where their bed stood.  What my friends had seen, they believe, was the same tableau from different angles.  Is it possible that such a traumatic event might leave a psychic stain like an artist leaves in her poetry?  Is that kind of understanding of hauntings less dissonant with Christian theology than full fledged angry ghosts flitting about the attic?

§ I know, fundamentalist and evangelical are two different points of departure.  Evangelicalism was a form of 19^th century liberalism, working for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth. 

Fundamentals: Love #I

            When my daughter was in fifth grade I chaperoned her class to an over night trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  We spent about five or six hours flitting from one area scientific inquiry to another before racking out in a hallway for a solid four hours of fifth-grade shut eye.  At some point during our museum meanderings we sat in the planetarium and watched a film about what the Big Bang might very well have looked like, if an Imax film crew had been there and if Archimedes had shared his place to stand.  Liam Neeson narrated.  His smooth baritone was both a full frontal assault and a warm blanket.  We watched explosions and flashes of light as Neeson rumbled at us, telling us that it is in chaos that the worlds come into being.  The birth of everything was a great clash, a violence that spins out into the universe and down to this very day.  Material existence, including us carbon based life forms, is violent and terrible.  Maybe especially so for life forms.

            The beauty of the film and Neeson’s authority captivated me, but the narration made little sense.  I started thinking about the little films of cellular division I saw when I was in fifth grade.  There was struggle, to be sure, and a great rending, but after it was over, there were two, then four, then sixteen cells.  I don’t know that violence and chaos is the best language for talking about that microscopic process or for the cosmic events forming and shaping our universe.  I wonder if the overarching theme might not instead be love. 

            There are people who argue that the story that unfolds in the first chapter of Genesis is really not about creation ex nihilo, but is instead a tale of order from chaos.  Read it again, you’ll see that they’re right.  That doesn’t mean that God did not create ex nihilo, but instead that the Genesis story takes place much later, after chaos crept in.  And God, whose breath hovers beautifully and poetically over the face of the waters, speaks order into the elements already swirling about. 

In a sense, that’s what love does.  Love brings order where there was none, not like Mussolini or some other fascist making the trains run on time, but like DNA allowing a tiger to be.  Love might be at the bottom (or top, or side, or around, or through) everything we see and don’t see.  And the reason some things seem wrong is that they’ve slipped the track and are no longer expressing love.

Fundamentals: God, Part III

Lent is probably as obviously a time of humility, albeit usually our own.  We’re humbled by the knowledge and acknowledgement of our own sinfulness.  We begin the season with ashes and lament and end with a vigil commemorating the murder of love himself.  The word kenosis sometimes gets tossed around in those forty days.  Kenosis is Greek for self-emptying.  Christ willingly laid aside power and glory and majesty in order to enter the human scene and sublimated himself to that scene.  The scourging and death of Jesus isn’t just a side note in his story.

Every so often (or too often) I get an email citing statistics on theists and atheists in America.  Here’s the message in part:

"It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore, I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having `In God We Trust' on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why don't we just tell the 14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!!"

Despite my own style, poor grammar annoys me.  Three exclamation points are not only redundant, they’re useless.  We get it.  You think it’s important.  Conventional rules of grammar are adequate to communicate your thoughts, believe me.  Then there’s the historical issue.  “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.  Finally, the very act of pledging one’s allegiance to a piece of cloth ought to remind Christians of burning incense to Caesar’s effigy. 

All that aside, it never fails to astonish me that people who claim Christ could hold such Christless views, let alone send them to all their email contacts.  I always respond.

To claim a connection to Jesus is to claim connection to the oppressed, not to try and oppress others.  To profess allegiance to any form of historic Christianity means humility.  To follow Christ means to shut up oneself, not defend one’s own rights, and demand justice for others before oneself.  It sure as shit does not mean telling other people to shut up.

I certainly haven’t exhausted even my thoughts about God, nor the myriad other ways to talk God.  But it might be nice to move on, n’est pas?

Fundamentals: God, Part II

I lived in South Dakota on 9/11.  I’d like to think I was in shock at the time, but long term ramifications sometimes take a while to seep into my brain, anyway, so the idea of war and retribution, let alone invading a third-party-uninvolved country just because it was possible, etc., never occurred to me that day.  I also never thought about the religious conversations that would soon follow.

            Two days later the people of that little town in South Dakota started talking about Islam.  Their conversations ran between the deep ignorance and bigotry to profound nuances, brimming with the kind of wisdom that percolates through limestone decades of living.  Several times someone asked me if Muslims pray to the same God as “we” do, a simple question that sparked days of debate.  I used to tell people in response to questions like that that it’s important to look not only at the words people use, but how they use them.  If I say “God” and you say “God”, and then we describe that God differently, are we talking about the same God?

            Now I’m not so sure about my own answers.  Does anyone pray to the “right” God? 

            Do Muslims pray to the same God as Christians do?  It’s a different question than “Does the same God hear the prayers of Christians and Muslims (and Hindus, Jews, Animists, Buddhists, atheists, and Pagansd)?”  I suspect that that’s the better question.  “Do they pray to our God?” puts us on the right side and them on the wrong side.  But if the gospel teaches us nothing else, it ought to first teach us that we’re all on the wrong side, that each of us opposes God in our own ways, and that the incarnation is about God crossing over and taking our side, not against our human enemies, but against sin, death, and true evil. 

            My brother Eric recently reminded an email conversation (I know, email!  How late ‘90’s of us) that Jesus doesn’t say in Luke that some people never knew him, but instead, “I never knew you.”  Where does that fit?

            At any rate, I suspect that no two people on the planet conceive of God in the same way, so one might as well ask if any of us pray to the same God.  In a sense, we all paint little pictures in our hearts.  Sometimes those pictures become idols, walls preventing us from glimpsing the true God behind our crude drawings.  But sometimes those weak images become icons, doors and windows and portals and ragged holes through which the true God, the one who is and is, can climb or step or pour or filter or blow or wander or whatever it is the true God, the one who is and is, does.

When my dad used to drag me to AA meetings, I was annoyed by the phrase “the God of my understanding.” 

“What about how God wants to be understood?” I’d think.  It’s still a valid point, but one that very much misses the nuance.  God is.  How I perceive God is vastly different from how you perceive God, but maybe the little God of your understanding might expand the little God of my understanding.

At one of those AA meetings a man told a story about a woman he heard respond to questions about the God of her understanding, “Well, first of all, she’s black . . .”  It’s a beginning.  And it’s only funny and unsettling because no one says but many people feel, “Well, first of all he’s white . . .”  Rather than say those things are untrue (which they are), it might be more helpful to start expanding my own picture of God, allowing those pictures to be icons rather than idols for me.

That’s not to say that everything we can say about God is true.  How could it be?  An ancient way of doing theology (god-conversing) is sometimes called the Via Negativa, the Negative Way, or Apophatic theology.  We describe God in terms of what God is not:

God is not me.

God is not limited.

God is uncreated.

And on and on.  As in, God isn’t good or evil because good and evil are dependent on God, not the other way around; God doesn’t exist or not exist, since, again, existence hangs from God. 

Another way of expressing apophatic theology is through transcendence.  God transcends existence, creation, good and evil, etc.  Like all theologies of transcendence, apophatic theology is helpful for big thoughts, but immanence, nearness, and intimacy must inform the other piece of our thinking.

            At least twice a year I’m struck by the humility of God.  It isn’t popular in many Christian circles to speak of God’s humility, weakness, brokenness, and loss, but here it is, twice a year in the church calendar: once at Christmastide, once during Lent.  God condescends to us in every interaction with humanity.  Condescension is kind of an ugly word for many of us.  It implies arrogance and power plays.  But condescension is about a relinquishment of power, a giving over of oneself to a weaker person for the sake of relationshipÅ.

The mere description in Genesis of the LORD walking in the cool of the day with Ad’am should make me think of walking with my children when they were babies.  I’m crouched over, holding a chubby fist in my own, snail-pacing it across the yard.  And, when patience inhabited me from beyond my ken, I paused every time a leaf or rock or grasshopper distracted those little eyes.  That’s the LORD walking in the cool of the day.  That’s condescension, corny though it be.

Christmas, despite its family friendly schlockiness¶, is about the humility of God.  God in diapers, God nursed to sleep.  We get little glimpses of it in the crèches and the songs, but it’s rarely pointed to so explicitly.  In fact, conservative pundits have coined a phrase so contrary to the concept of Christmas that I’m surprised that can say it with a straight face: The War On Christmas.  Jesus is under attack, and it's up to them to defend him.  In 2010 they said they were winning the war.  They had forced merchants to say “Merry Christmas”.  Christmas is, after all, ultimately about power over.  But the Christmas tale is about power under.  It’s a story whose power runs like a subterranean river under the walls of might, under the armament factories, under the prisons, under the propaganda centers and slowly sinks them.  But, as the New Testament says, this world doesn’t understand that, and tries to use the sleeping baby as a bludgeon against its perceived enemies.

How in God’s Name Does One Win a Christmas War?

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d No, I’m not sure why atheists don’t get capitalized.  They just don’t, alright? 

Å Right, it reminds me of that line from True Romance: “Don’t condescend to me, man.  I’ll fuckin’ kill you, man.”  That’s how most of respond to condescension.

¶ I rather like the pagan elements to the midwinter season; I just wish it weren’t so closely associated with Christmas.  What I really can’t stand is movies about the last minute salvation of Christmas by smart-ass elves.  Not only are they boring, they ruin even the pagan elements of the season.