The Real

We finally got around to watching Lars and the Real Girl. This is one of those movies about which one probably shouldn't hazard a synopsis. But it's about a guy named Lars and the life sized mail order doll named Bianca who becomes his girlfriend.

Lars, I probably don't need to tell you, is delusional. But the movie is a cinematic wondering about whether a delusion might be a community matter more than one person's pathology. Lars's community decides to accept his delusion, holding out the possibility that Bianca is a symptom of something collective, something amiss, awry, or at least something at work in the life of a family, a church, a town.

But I think the movie is also about how we're made real. It's something of a Velveteen Rabbit without the miracles. In The Velveteen Rabbit, you may remember, toys are made real by the love of a child. And 'real' means that they live and breathe and hop off into the forest under their own volition. But as Lars's community pretends that Bianca is real (eventually they elect her to the school board) we sense that none of us may begin real. Perhaps we're made real by others.

Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." And we (in the West, at least) haven't looked back. We've taken his statement as a self evident truth that reality is an individual matter.

But theologian John Zizoulas once wrote that "one person is no person". In fact, in Being as Communion, Zizoulas lays out the mysterious Christian doctrine of the Trinity as an acknowledgment that God is one, but God is not an individual. There is community within God's very self.

This is heavy stuff. But it's heavy stuff that matters, I think. It mattered to the little Minnesota town where Lars lived. In making Bianca real, everyone was made a little more real.

After Bianca's burial Lars asks Margo to go for a walk. She's been in love with Lars all along. But even though its Lars who no longer feels human touch as pain, even though it's Lars who no longer lives alone in the garage, even though it's Lars who let's go of his mail order girl, it's not just Lars who gets real. Lars is as involved in making people real as he is in becoming real.

What if being really is communion, not just for God, but for us? What would change in our families and churches and towns if we believed that we're only and always made real in communion?

Believing such a thing would mean that the real "real girl" in a movie might well be harder to spot (is it Bianca or Margo?). But believing such a thing might radically change the way we conceive our politics, our families, and ultimately our selves.

What if my only truly inalienable, self evident right is to be in communion? What if?

An Easter Sermon

The folks in our house are not fast food fans. Maybe it was the viewing of Supersize Me that we inflicted on our kids in their formative years that did it. But a couple of weeks ago we were trying to get out of town for a camping trip, and we found coupons for a free Jamocha shake with the purchase of any sandwich. So, adventurous souls that we are, we risked a stop at the Arby’s drive through window.

Maybe it’s that relative lack of recent experience with this food that made the encounter so surprising and unsettling for me. But along with the first unappetizing bite of my Market Fresh turkey sandwich came this curious hypothesis: I think that the people who name fast food sandwiches are the same people who name housing subdivisions.

Here’s what I mean. It was obvious that nothing in my Market Fresh sandwich was either purchased at any kind of market or fresh by any reasonable standard. Even the pepper seemed to leave a sort of antiseptic aftertaste. No, the sandwich’s name seemed to have nothing to do with the sandwich itself. It was named to appeal to people who like words like “market” and “fresh”. People who think these words sound nice. People who like these words might just buy a sandwich called “market fresh”. They do, and I did.

Wouldn’t you agree that this must be the work of the subdivision namers? You might live in a pleasant place called something like Timber Cove, even though the trees were all bulldozed and replaced with a few sad little saplings when the first road was cut. And the fact that your neighborhood is named something “Cove” or “Valley” or “Ridge” may or may not have anything at all to do with actual geographic features of the land.

This is the brave new postmodern world we were warned about. A world in which our language is emptied of real meaning. A world in which words might mean anything and are chosen more to make us feel some way rather than to point us toward something real, something sturdy, something true.

The stakes aren’t so high when we’re talking about sandwiches and subdivisions. But what if we’re talking about words like “Christian”. What if we’re talking about a word like “Jesus”? What are we to do if we wake up one day and the reality we thought our religious language pointed us toward is gone?

This sounds like a modern dilemma. But it’s at least as old as Easter. Because by Sunday morning, for Mary Magdalene even the name Jesus must have felt kind of hollow; it must have sounded a little foreign perhaps. All the hopes and expectations it had once been filled with were gone, emptied out completely on Good Friday. Maybe the word itself went suddenly strange. As though she’d read it for the first time that morning on a billboard, or a license plate, or the belt buckle of an odd stranger in the park.

You know the feeling, don’t you? Especially after the death of someone we love, the most familiar sights and sounds go a little strange. Everything hangs in a sort of obscuring fog that makes us wonder how we ever felt safe and at home in this world and makes us wonder how we ever thought names and words would mean something sure forever.

And countless people across time have had a similar experience with regard to their faith. Mary’s not the only one for whom the Jesus we thought we knew dies or disappears or just becomes strange. We thought Jesus answered all our prayers just so, watched out for our loved ones, pricked our consciences in reliable ways. Then one day that Jesus is gone. The people on television or on the bestseller lists or in the pulpit keep using his name, but the person they describe has less and less to do with any God we’ve actually encountered or any savior we’ve honestly longed for in a long, long time.

Once upon a time we believed. Once upon a time Christianity held meaning, and Jesus was the name of someone familiar and comprehensible. Once upon a time…

Sometimes in such moments of doubt we might push back a little. We might appropriate the methods of the sandwich and subdivision namers for a higher purpose. We might try to fill the vacant old religious words with the meaning we want them to hold and try to imagine a Jesus we might actually hope for into being. But the approach doesn’t work for long, because we sense that imagining a Jesus we want into existence, no matter how appealing he might be, is just another fraud, a short postponement of more disillusion.

Mary, at least, grieved honestly. Early on the first Easter morning she had begun imagining her way toward a future without Jesus, and she didn’t hope for much. She saw the empty tomb, but even with two angels in white framing the emptiness where the body had been, Mary thought it must have been stolen, and she begged only for the chance to treat that precious corpse with the dignity it deserved. But it was gone. And what other explanation, what other future could there be? It’s not the outcome she had hoped for, but how else could she make sense of it all?

All Mary knew to do that morning was visit the tomb. But Mary also lingered there for a while. And she lingered there long enough to hear her name. She didn’t solve the riddle, read the signs, comprehend the prophecy. The meaning of Jesus has been so completely lost that when Mary meets the risen Christ in the garden, she doesn’t know him. Which is one way the gospel writer tells us that Mary didn’t get the Jesus she was looking for. But when Mary hears her name, her eyes are opened.

For some of us, the Christian faith is a lot like lingering at a tomb. We’re not quite sure what else to do, so maybe we keep on using the old Christian words long after they’ve ceased to hold much meaning. Maybe we even keep coming to church. But for some of us, it’s only after we’ve stopped expecting to encounter the old Jesus at all that the risen Christ appears and calls to us. It’s only when we’ve let go of everything we think we’re supposed to do or think or believe to be properly religious that we encounter the living God who actually knows us and calls us by name. For us, as for Mary, faith is a gift.

The problem, of course, is that Mary wasn’t in control, which suggests that we may not be in control of this encounter either. Mary didn’t summon Jesus or figure out how to entice him. He just showed up. But after his questions, Jesus does offer Mary one simple instruction. He demands just one action. Almost as soon as Jesus speaks Mary’s name, he says, “Do not hold on to me.” The only thing he tells her to do is “Don’t cling.”

Could it be that for us as for Mary, the impulse to cling to the Jesus we think we know—no matter how bereft of meaning that Jesus has become—could it be that this impulse to cling is what keeps us from seeing the risen Christ who is actually among us? Who may actually be calling to us by name? Clinging to Christianity as we assume it must be—whether we cling in order to dismiss it or to fill it with our own made up meaning—clinging to Christianity as we assume it must be, might be what keeps us from a living faith that can actually fill our empty lives and direct them toward a future with God.

“Do not hold on to me,” said Jesus. And we should remember that he was telling Mary not to cling even to the risen Christ. Even after the resurrection, clinging too desperately to the Christ of that day might keep Mary from following the Christ who was calling her into the next. Even on Easter morning, he said, “Mary, don’t hold on.”

Might Jesus’ instructions be relevant to us and to our Christian tradition today? The great gift of our Anglican heritage is surely our generous but grounded understanding of worship and the sacraments. Because if we approach these holy mysteries without clinging to our notions and assumptions about what God must surely mean by them or what we think God will surely do to us through them, when we approach these holy mysteries open to a new experience of the loving God who creates and redeems and sustains us, we open ourselves to transformation.

And maybe when we learn to live this way as a church, we will stop clinging to the hollow shell of the Jesus we think we know or the fleeting Jesus we have wished into being for a time—whether he was liberal or conservative or orthodox or radical—maybe we will stop clinging, and linger honestly at the tomb and see just who it is that calls our name today.

For maybe it’s precisely when the language of faith goes a little strange, when the sights and sounds are a little less familiar, when the meaning of Jesus is no longer so settled and obvious, that resurrection is close at hand. Amen.

The Way of the Cross

Here's a story told by Wendell Berry in an essay called, "The Burden of the Gospels":

"In 1569 in Holland, a Mennonite named Dirk Willems, under capital sentence as a heretic, was fleeing from arrest, pursued by a ‘thief-catcher.’ As they ran across a frozen body of water, the thief-catcher broke through the ice. Without help, he would have drowned.

What did Dirk Willems do then? Was the thief-catcher an enemy merely to be hated, or was he a neighbor to be loved as one loves oneself. Was he an enemy whom one must love in order to be a child of God? Was he ‘one of the least of these my brethren’? What Dirk Willems did was turn back, put out his hands to his pursuer and save his life. The thief-catcher, who then of course wanted to let his rescuer go, was forced to arrest him. Dirk Willems was brought to trial, sentenced, and burned to death by a ‘lingering fire.’

I, and I suppose you, would like to be a child of God even at the cost of so much pain. But would we, in similar circumstances, turn back to offer the charity of Christ to an enemy?"

What's stunning about Holy Week isn't just that it happened, but that it happens again and again in this world. And the question is, just as it is for the pacifist witness of Dirk Willems, "does it work?"

From our perspective, Willem's charity didn't work out for him. But our definition of a life's working out well is probably closer to Spock's than Jesus's. "Live long and prosper" we get. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you," ...not so much.

Like Wendell Berry, I can't say that I would respond like Dirk Willems. I can't even manage to forgive the enemy who simply slanders or mistreats my ego in the mildest of ways. And I can easily construct a situation in my mind in which the pacifist witness would look less noble, or at least more complicated. But the truth is that Jesus' silence this week before his accusers is not some literary flourish to this story.

Jesus refused to return evil for evil, violence for violence, even when it meant his crucifixion. He taught us to do the same. Yet radical peaceableness toward enemies was explained away so long ago by most Christians that we rarely let the notion cramp even our emotional state. The righteous hatred and embrace of retributive justice by Christians are taken as matters of fact, by the world and by us Christians ourselves.

All I ask is that we listen honestly to the story that will unfold this Triduum, these three sobering days. And ask the question, "This way of Jesus, this way of the cross, did it work? Does it work?"

The answer probably comes down to whether I will let Jesus' way go to work on me.

Ignorance and Bliss

"Since we're billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable, why not go with our long suit and have an ignorance-based worldview?"

- Wes Jackson in The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge

Did you know about the Google calculator? If you type in a math problem into Google, you'll get the answer above the several million search results. This doesn't sound very impressive, since your old Texas Instruments calculator did the same thing back in 1980. But if you Google "answer to life, the universe, and everything" the Google calculator will answer "42". Try it.

Douglas Adams fans will appreciate this playful little quirk in the great search engine, as the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything does, in fact, turn out to be 42 in Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

Google's California headquarters is named the "Googleplex", a nod to the "Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?" (again, see The Hithhiker's Guide to the Universe).

It's heartening to me that the folks at Google have a sense of humor. Because in the age of Google, it may be more important than ever to remember that the calculable answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything might just be something like 42. Put another way, we're increasingly amazed at how much we know and how accurate our knowledge is becoming. But we don't always stop to ask whether we can still find meaning in all that data.

Wes Jackson is a farmer and agricultural scientist. And the quote at the top of this page contrasts pretty sharply with googlization. It suggests that we might not be any closer to the truth about our selves and our world if we had a real Googleplex Star Thinker. And Jackson suggests that a respect for all we don't know is as crucial as the accumulation of information.

The book of Proverbs puts it this way:

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own insight.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.
Do not be wise in your own eyes;
fear the Lord, and turn away from evil."

That sounds like quaint, out of date wisdom from an age of inadequate information. Human insight has gotten us mighty close to the Googleplex that was science fiction humor a few decades ago.

But the stuff of tragedy is the same as it was in Homer's time and before. Hubris is ever the enemy. The prideful certainty that we can know enough is still our downfall. We are oh so wise in our own eyes, but are we happy? Are we whole? Can we still make a mess of things?

Trusting in God and acknowledging God are ways that we humans have embraced our ignorance. While we Christians believe that God has disclosed God's very self to us, God is not a problem to be solved by the Googleplex. God is a mystery that grows thicker, richer, deeper with every encounter. And, ironically, it's only in our acknowledgment of the realm and the One we know almost nothing of, that what we do know takes on meaning.

Without the reclamation of an ignorance-based world view we may never learn to use the information we've Googled well.

A Bottle o' Mystery

"God did not become a movement, a concept, an ideal, or even a committee, but a man of flesh and bone with a parentage, friends, a language, a coutry, a home. He inhabited not just a time but places, streets, rooms, countrysides, and by his presence in the flesh he changed them all."

- Aidan Kavanagh, Elements of Rite

I heard on the radio this morning that a woman recently auctioned a glass bottle containing two ghosts for $2000. This is a great mystery.

The mystery, however, isn't about the contents of the bottle. The woman's the mystery. And I don't mean she's a mystery because she's crazy enough to believe in bottling ghosts. It's just that a thing (a person being some-thing rather than no-thing) is a far greater mystery than a concept. That's why wondering about whether ghosts exist is nothing like wondering at the mystery of a real person who gets out of bed on a particular morning in March and decides to sell her bottled ghosts on Ebay.

Today is Gregory of Nyssa's feast day. And in the fourth century, he wrote, "Concepts create idols; only wonder grasps anything."

Gregory of Nyssa and Aidan Kavanagh (the fellow quoted above) share a suspicion of our preoccupation with concepts, with disembodied ideas. And they both believed that God changed and changes us less through notions than with bodies. The incarnation isn't a concept. It's "a man of flesh and bone with a parentage, friends, a language, a coutry, a home."

Christian theology often seems to be about carrying around proper concepts about God in our heads. I love the struggles and arguments that these concepts have stirred up over the centuries. But the concepts are the ghosts in our bottles. They have a lot to do with who we are, but we're what's real, and it's us that God's at work in and on and through.

This is why Aidan Kavanagh cared so passionately about liturgy. Liturgy is a way of doing theology. Liturgy isn't a concept. Liturgy is always embodied. Liturgy is always about bodies and buildings and furniture, things seen and smelled and heard. Liturgy is never less than real voices singing and speaking among living people and sturdy things in a real moment in earthly time. Liturgy can be done well or poorly, but liturgy can't be done at all in our heads.

So I wish you a wonder-ful Lent. But a Lent less concerned with wondering about concepts than wondering at things. Ultimately wondering at the God who inhabited "places, streets, rooms, countrysides, and by his presence in the flesh he changed them all."

Sarcophagi, Shiny Things, and the Great Right Here

To my mind, pharaohs and Egyptians were the Old Testament equivalent of Darth Vader and stormtroopers, the sorts of folks whose drowning gets celebrated in poems and happy songs.

Then, on Saturday, I saw a little model granary sent along with the Egyptian dead to ensure the provision of food in the next life. And those ancient villains and I became friends of a sort.

Our friendship is an unlikely one. Besides their bad guy reputation in my religious tradition, Egyptians were just wrong. Right? There's nothing in the Christian faith about the need for building models to make sure we get fed in the sweet by and by. Why, I'm pretty sure there's a kitchen somewhere in that mansion on a hillside I'll inhabit one day. Unless it turns out that resources got scarce after the gold street paving project, leaving the mansions more meagerly furnished.

Then the tetradrachm (that's the ancient Egyptian coin I just googled) dropped.

We're not so different, those ancient Egyptians and us. We all imagine ourselves into the mystery that lies on the other side of death with the best images from this life we can muster. And when we're at our best, the stories we pass around about heaven are less a means of escape than a celebration of the best of this life.

Loaves of bread and shiny golden things. Rivers and houses and walls set with precious gems. All these lovely images may serve us best when they point us not only to a wonderful reality beyond this life, but to something (or even some One) that lies beneath this life, to the source of beauty and goodness itself.

For in the end, a better question than "Will things really shimmer like gold in heaven?" may be "Why do we love things that shimmer at all?" Because "Will things really shimmer?" is a fair enough question. "Why do we love them?" might be the beginning of prayer.

An Accidental Lent

Flaubert has just shown us Emma at the piano with Charles watching her. He says, "She struck the notes with aplomb and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad, bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand."

The more you look at a sentence like that, the more you can learn from it... It's always necessary to remember that the fiction writer is much less immediately concerned with grand ideas and bristling emotions than he is with putting list slippers on clerks.

- Flannery O'Connor in Mystery and Manners

On my bookshelf sits a fine paddleball game, painted in bright colors and the words "Rainbows from Heaven". It was a gift from the leaders of a young adults retreat called Vocare that Ardelle and I spoke to a few months ago.

I keep the thing around because I don't know what it's for.

Paddleball sort of has a purpose, I guess: trying to make contact with the bouncy little ball that's been affixed to the paddle by a length of rubber band. But the decoration of the paddle with a grinning sun, three colored rainbow, and requisite dove makes the thing harder to make sense of. Reconciling the campy happiness of its message with the violent, percussive nature of the game is a little odd. So I don't bother. I just do it.

Lent is often a purposeful time. We deny ourselves chocolate, hoping we'll lose weight, or coffee, hoping our jittery hands will calm. Or we take up something like serving at a soup kitchen or reading the Bible, hoping we'll become more compassionate, or more faithful, or more something.

But it also might be helpful to be unsure of what Lent is for. Flannery O'Connor believed that the worst writing has long been produced by writers who think they know what they're doing, especially writers who have a moral or an agenda they'd like to embed in a story. As she puts it, the worst writers are more concerned with "grand ideas and bristling emotions" than they are with "putting list slippers on clerks".

The plot of Madam Bovary didn't hang on the sort of slippers worn by that clerk. But the story is enduring only because Flaubert created a believable world, and cared as much about its unnecessary particulars as he did about any lesson or theme to which his novel might be reduced.

Similarly, I'm deciding not to decide about the purpose or outcome of Lent this year. Without pretending to know what they're for, I'm going to relish Lent's spare details, the litany, the noonday prayers, my coffeeless mornings and Tuesday blogs... I'm going to relish these details without asking them to mean or do anything too soon.

Leaving them a little bit free, perhaps, to mean or do things that I can't quite imagine.

Paddleball anyone?