Dear Lord, at our feet lie dead Iraqis, dead Kuwaitis, dead Kurds, dead Croats, dead Slavs, dead Salvadorans, dead Americans, dead Palestinians, dead Israelis, dead Jews, dead children, dead Christians--dead, dead, dead. We ask your mercy on these war-dead sisters and brothers. We ask for the same mercy for ourselves, for our failure to be your peace, to be the end of war. Save us from the powers that capture our imagination so that we think our only alternative is war. We know we cannot will our way to peace, for when we try we end up fighting wars for peace. So compel us with your love that we might be your peace, thus bringing life to this deadly world. Amen.
- from Prayers Plainly Spoken
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Mercy for the War Dead
On this Memorial Day after, I commend Stanley Hauerwas's prayer "Mercy for the War-Dead", adding nothing but my own amen.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
A LUV is all we need
I was 16 years old and wanted a vehicle of my own in the most desperate way. And the best evidence of that desperation's intensity was the thrill that attended my uncle's call from his lumber yard one day. A customer's 1975 Chevy LUV pickup truck had broken down. And so had the customer. He'd had it with the truck and was ready to sell.
Being in retail, my uncle Stewart knew when the time was ripe make a deal. So he called me. "You need to come down and make an offer. He's talking like you might get the thing for $50." That's right. Fifty dollars. American currency.
Well, by the time I'd made it to the Lumbermart Building Supply parking lot, the price had reached $200. But not even that great and climbing sum could keep me from my first set of wheels. We closed the deal then and there.
The truck was the saddest shade of pea green and its eight years of life had been hard ones. The texture of the steel across the driver's side bore a striking resemblance to the cheeks of Keith Richards. Pitted, lumpy surfaces that also suggest travel along some pretty rough roads and more than a few trips right off into the ditch.
Lester, the lumber yard foreman, would become the lead mechanic on my project. And we set ourselves to the task of replacing the broken timing chain that had wreaked a good deal of havoc under the hood in its breaking. Eventually we found ourselves pulling the whole engine with the help of the Lumbermart forklift. And my crude training in the automechanical mysteries was underway.
This dismantling experience came to mind as I spent an evening with the EfM (Education for Ministry) group here at Christ Church last night. The EfM curriculum includes a little dismantling of the Bible and the Christian tradition. For instance, we read from the book of Deuteronomy at the eucharist service, and the EfMers would have studied the theory that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses (one clue is that he seems to narrate his own death at the end of Deuteronomy).
The process can be unsettling. What seemed like a glistening, perfect whole can suddenly rest in disarray at one's feet. It's exposed as a jumbled collection from varied sources with varied agendas and experiences that all inform how the stories were told. We might say that the book we thought of as a dignified old Bentley suddenly looks more like a 1975 Chevy LUV whose engine is dangling from a logging chain that's been looped around the tines of a forklift.
But somehow, as the illusion of the Bible as a staid, tame book fades, it becomes only more enticing and compelling to some of us. Far from seeming undone and lifeless, it looks a lot more like the unpredictable, shabby, glorious reality we all actually inhabit in this world.
The Chevy LUV sits hidden behind its own privacy fence in my parents back yard as it goes the way of the things of the earth. But my own 13 year old son is now the LUV infected one. And, yes, it seems like something almost hormonal is going on.
He's thrilled at the possibility of getting the old beast running again. He and his grandpa spent a few days this spring pulling off the valve cover, spraying WD-40 into the cylindars, loosening and lubricating the seized and rusted parts in the hope that they might move once again. And I'm convinced that these two dreamers are closer to the deep magic of the automobile than any Ferrari driver or polisher of Bugattis.
The stories of the Bible are sometimes beautiful and beautifully told. But they endure because they weren't told in order to be beautiful. The endure and continue to charge and change our lives because they come from the deepest realms of human experience, the parts of ourselves where meaning is made out of and amid the glorious mess that is life. It's a place of vibrant, enticing potential and possibility. It's the place where we're still thrilled, not in spite of, but because of the dents and dings and rust and corrosion that are signs of stories untold, barely hinted at, calling us towards their discovery.
Being in retail, my uncle Stewart knew when the time was ripe make a deal. So he called me. "You need to come down and make an offer. He's talking like you might get the thing for $50." That's right. Fifty dollars. American currency.Well, by the time I'd made it to the Lumbermart Building Supply parking lot, the price had reached $200. But not even that great and climbing sum could keep me from my first set of wheels. We closed the deal then and there.
The truck was the saddest shade of pea green and its eight years of life had been hard ones. The texture of the steel across the driver's side bore a striking resemblance to the cheeks of Keith Richards. Pitted, lumpy surfaces that also suggest travel along some pretty rough roads and more than a few trips right off into the ditch.
Lester, the lumber yard foreman, would become the lead mechanic on my project. And we set ourselves to the task of replacing the broken timing chain that had wreaked a good deal of havoc under the hood in its breaking. Eventually we found ourselves pulling the whole engine with the help of the Lumbermart forklift. And my crude training in the automechanical mysteries was underway.
This dismantling experience came to mind as I spent an evening with the EfM (Education for Ministry) group here at Christ Church last night. The EfM curriculum includes a little dismantling of the Bible and the Christian tradition. For instance, we read from the book of Deuteronomy at the eucharist service, and the EfMers would have studied the theory that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses (one clue is that he seems to narrate his own death at the end of Deuteronomy).
The process can be unsettling. What seemed like a glistening, perfect whole can suddenly rest in disarray at one's feet. It's exposed as a jumbled collection from varied sources with varied agendas and experiences that all inform how the stories were told. We might say that the book we thought of as a dignified old Bentley suddenly looks more like a 1975 Chevy LUV whose engine is dangling from a logging chain that's been looped around the tines of a forklift.
But somehow, as the illusion of the Bible as a staid, tame book fades, it becomes only more enticing and compelling to some of us. Far from seeming undone and lifeless, it looks a lot more like the unpredictable, shabby, glorious reality we all actually inhabit in this world.
The Chevy LUV sits hidden behind its own privacy fence in my parents back yard as it goes the way of the things of the earth. But my own 13 year old son is now the LUV infected one. And, yes, it seems like something almost hormonal is going on.
He's thrilled at the possibility of getting the old beast running again. He and his grandpa spent a few days this spring pulling off the valve cover, spraying WD-40 into the cylindars, loosening and lubricating the seized and rusted parts in the hope that they might move once again. And I'm convinced that these two dreamers are closer to the deep magic of the automobile than any Ferrari driver or polisher of Bugattis.
The stories of the Bible are sometimes beautiful and beautifully told. But they endure because they weren't told in order to be beautiful. The endure and continue to charge and change our lives because they come from the deepest realms of human experience, the parts of ourselves where meaning is made out of and amid the glorious mess that is life. It's a place of vibrant, enticing potential and possibility. It's the place where we're still thrilled, not in spite of, but because of the dents and dings and rust and corrosion that are signs of stories untold, barely hinted at, calling us towards their discovery.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Wikipedia Mundi
I'm wondering about Wikipedian faith. Not Wiccan faith. Wikipedian faith. Here's the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia:
I know what you're thinking. This will be another well deserved potshot at the silliness that is Wikipedia. And since this blog usually considers things religious, it will dismiss the contemporary religious world as similarly shallow and misinformed.
But I think Wikipedia is cool. Go ahead. Go to the Wikipedia page on some topic you fancy yourself an expert about. Admit it. It's a decent encyclopedia page.
We've long heard about the increasing suspicion of old authority structures. It's a trend that's been bewailed and bemoaned ad nauseam. Civilization will unravel. Religious and moral life will disintegrate. Chaos will reign.
But maybe something else is going on. The fear that has been drummed up about this age is that when the old authorities (Popes and Presidents and Bibles and Grandparents) lose their grip on us, we're left to our own individual opinions about what is right and wrong, about what is true. But maybe that's not quite right.
Maybe there is a collective wisdom at work. A Wikipedia Mundi, you might say.
Now this sounds like a fairly unchristian notion--that truth happens in us. But it's not. The early fights in the Christian tradition were waged against gnosticism. And one of the main problems the church had with gnostics was with the idea that truth comes in individual portions, packaged in heaven and delivered directly from God into the minds of the enlightened few.
But there was an early instinct in Christianity towards revelation in community. Jesus said he'd keep showing up where two or three are gathered in his name. Paul helped the earliest Christians start imagining themselves as members of a body--the body of Christ, no less. Hands, Feet, eyes, ears... parts that don't make much sense or do much good without their other compliments. Parts that are foolish if they think they're the whole.
We're told that this is a godless time. That people are now their own religious authorities and organized religion is dying. But what if this is just a time in which a new kind of organization is emerging? A wikipedian organization. And what if the Christian faith, in fact, has a rich vocabulary for the notion that God, truth, meaning and the likes come to us in our collective life.
What's shifting is that the magic is no longer believed to be in the hands of the priest or the literal text of the Bible. It's in us. Not in each of us. But in all of us. And maybe this isn't a time for denominations and dioceses to disappear, but rather for them to redefine themselves, or maybe to remember what they were supposed to have been all along. Structures for collective wisdom more than individual authority.
I've heard that a commedian mocked Wikipedia early on by inserting some foolishness in a page and watching it change. But the rest of the story (off camera) was that in a matter of moments "we" had corrected the post. Something larger was at work, and that larger something pushed in the direction of truth.
Could this be like that spirit that blows where it will, but insists on blowing through us?
Critics of Wikipedia accuse it of systemic bias and inconsistencies, and target its policy of favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.
Wikipedia is a free, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning 'quick') and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 12 million articles (2.8 million in the English Wikipedia) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, it is currently the most popular general reference work on the Internet.
I know what you're thinking. This will be another well deserved potshot at the silliness that is Wikipedia. And since this blog usually considers things religious, it will dismiss the contemporary religious world as similarly shallow and misinformed.
But I think Wikipedia is cool. Go ahead. Go to the Wikipedia page on some topic you fancy yourself an expert about. Admit it. It's a decent encyclopedia page.
We've long heard about the increasing suspicion of old authority structures. It's a trend that's been bewailed and bemoaned ad nauseam. Civilization will unravel. Religious and moral life will disintegrate. Chaos will reign.
But maybe something else is going on. The fear that has been drummed up about this age is that when the old authorities (Popes and Presidents and Bibles and Grandparents) lose their grip on us, we're left to our own individual opinions about what is right and wrong, about what is true. But maybe that's not quite right.
Maybe there is a collective wisdom at work. A Wikipedia Mundi, you might say.
Now this sounds like a fairly unchristian notion--that truth happens in us. But it's not. The early fights in the Christian tradition were waged against gnosticism. And one of the main problems the church had with gnostics was with the idea that truth comes in individual portions, packaged in heaven and delivered directly from God into the minds of the enlightened few.
But there was an early instinct in Christianity towards revelation in community. Jesus said he'd keep showing up where two or three are gathered in his name. Paul helped the earliest Christians start imagining themselves as members of a body--the body of Christ, no less. Hands, Feet, eyes, ears... parts that don't make much sense or do much good without their other compliments. Parts that are foolish if they think they're the whole.
We're told that this is a godless time. That people are now their own religious authorities and organized religion is dying. But what if this is just a time in which a new kind of organization is emerging? A wikipedian organization. And what if the Christian faith, in fact, has a rich vocabulary for the notion that God, truth, meaning and the likes come to us in our collective life.
What's shifting is that the magic is no longer believed to be in the hands of the priest or the literal text of the Bible. It's in us. Not in each of us. But in all of us. And maybe this isn't a time for denominations and dioceses to disappear, but rather for them to redefine themselves, or maybe to remember what they were supposed to have been all along. Structures for collective wisdom more than individual authority.
I've heard that a commedian mocked Wikipedia early on by inserting some foolishness in a page and watching it change. But the rest of the story (off camera) was that in a matter of moments "we" had corrected the post. Something larger was at work, and that larger something pushed in the direction of truth.
Could this be like that spirit that blows where it will, but insists on blowing through us?
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