Category: Uncategorized

All men aspire to excellence. The very crimes against the human race are derived from the “dream” of establishing an orderly existence.

War itself is the “dream” of eliminating bad men and bad societies.

All energy is the corruption of an aspiration to excellence.

Gold is exhausted radium and lead is exhausted gold.

It is the basic condition of the human mind to wish to be free. The desire is noble and wreaks a large part of the harm in public and private life.

What does man do with his despair, his rage, his frustration? There is a wide variety of things he does with it…

-Thornton Wilder, via Mockingbird NYC

Sitting in a coffee shop in Spokane, I had to shrug off repeated attempts from a wild-haired man at the next table to discuss how the world was going to hell.

He repeatedly ranted about Obama, gun control, Obama, immigration, and more Obama. He had a large study bible that he was marking up with a set of 5 neon highlighters. He also had a copy of some newsletter that was explaining how Obama was an agent of the devil and that the star of the U.S. military is actually a modified Satanic pentagram.

I mentioned that I was from Idaho and he seemed relieved. “Oh good. You guys have lots of militias there, so maybe you’ll be safe.” I admitted that I didn’t know anybody in a militia, but that, yes that is a bit more of what the U.S. founders had in mind when they thought of national defense. I bought up that as much as I was dismayed by Obama’s socialism, America couldn’t last forever and I couldn’t be too upset. Rome only lasted 500 years – far longer than anyone else. We’re not even halfway there. His response of course was to start explaining how history doesn’t matter – we were living in the end times and this would be the last hurrah before the end of the world. He warned me that I would likely lose my job soon. I asked him what he did. He’s a pastor of course.

It seems you can’t brush off eschatology. It ends up driving so many beliefs and choices. It has far reaching implications. I’ve tried most of my life to sweep it under the rug in the name of Christian unity. But alas, what you believe about the future colors everything.

It’s easy to brush off this man, sitting here, but am I that much different from him? Here I am with 5 neon highlighted bookmarks taking notes on Thomas Merton and Rene Girard.

Do I get up off my seat and walk out the door listening just a little harder for the Holy Spirit’s voice? Am I just a bit more apt to embrace my fellow man and not push him away? I hope so.

I went to see Jennifer Knapp and Derek Webb perform last night.

Just a few scribbled thoughts:

It was a good show! Jennifer especially can project some serious emotional energy at the drop of a hat.

Recurring theme in just about every other song: Don’t be afraid.

Derek Webb is incredibly short.

I love percussion, but have really found drum-sets distracting the past few years (especially in church). It was refreshing that the entire show was solo voice + guitar. They did a few harmony numbers at the very end.

From Webb’s “Wedding Dress”

i am a whore i do confess
but i put you on just like a wedding dress
and i run down the aisle
i’m a prodigal with no way home
but i put you on just like a ring of gold
and i run down the aisle to you

From “New Law”

don’t teach me about moderation and liberty
i prefer a shot of grape juice

don’t teach me about loving my enemies

i don’t wanna know if the answers aren’t easy
so just bring it down from the mountain to me

i want a new law
i want a new law
gimme that new law

I’d post the lyrics to Jennifer’s song “Want for Nothing”, but it’s on the album that isn’t out yet. Can’t find ’em on the web.

Photo credit (from a show a few nights earlier)

OK. So these notes are just to help me remember a few things. They need a lot of context.

Here, “mediator” is used to mean the one whose desires we are imitating. They are the model. We want to be like our father or mother. We want to be like that guitar-shredding rock star. We want to be beautiful like so-and-so. We want to be holy like that saint or that role-model. For better or worse, they are the gate-keeper of our desire once we’ve made them our model.

At a certain depth there is no difference between our own secret and the secret of Others. Everything is revealed to the novelist when he penetrates this Self, a truer Self than that which each of us displays. This Self imitates constantly, on its knees before the mediator. This profound Self is also a universal Self, for everyone imitates constantly, everyone is on his knees before the mediator.

-Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, p.297

EVERYONE IMITATES, everyone is just the same: compared to the deep, dark secret unearthed by Freud’s Oedipus, the fearsome secret of patricide and incest, this secret seems disappointingly tame.
There is something seductive in Freud’s notion that the king’s “destiny moves us only because it might have been ours – because the oracle laid the same curse upon us” Freud allows each of us to play the hero’s part in our own private drama. Girard, by contrasts, casts us in a decidedly unheroic posture, kneeling before the model whose desire we copy. It would be hard to imagine anything more humiliating than that. While incestuous and patricidal impulses are no doubt shameful, they also appear gratifyingly spontaneous, powerful, and extreme. In a world that places a premium on originality and authenticity, the most shameful thing for the Self may be to admit that it “imitates constantly, on it’s knees before the mediator.”

-Mark R. Anspach, Imitating Oedipus, p. xxxvi

Ouch. “imitates constantly, on it’s knees before the mediator”. This idea is SOOOO strongly resisted amongst artists. Imagine a young composer writing a piece of music. He wants to “find is own voice”. But what is he doing? It’s painfully obvious that he is imitating those who came before him at every freakin’ turn.

(That’s OK though! Let’s be honest.)

In commenting on the rigid rules of monastic orders, Erikson comments:

We fail to understand that the indoctrinated individual of another era or country may feel quite at peace and quite free and productive in his ideological captivity, while we being stimulus-slaves, ensnared at all times by a million freely chosen impressions and opportunities, may somehow feel unfree.

-Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther, p.135

“Only a slave can be truly free” Michael Card says when trying to sing about discipleship. Despite being free from sin, we continue to keep up with the Joneses, which is bondage. Speaking for myself here, I think I could stand to hear more admonishment to embrace certain restrains, not just individual moral ones. Learn to love the restraint of marriage or children, not despise it. Just like we can learn to love the restraint of serving Christ.

I’m reading the Ball and the Cross by Chesterton for the first time for a book club my friend is hosting. I’ve only ever read his nonfiction in the past.

Lots of funny stuff in there:

A great light like dawn came into Mr. Turnbull’s face… He bounded to his feet like a boy; he saw a new youth opening before him And as not infrequently happens to middle-aged gentlemen when they see a new youth opening before them, he found himself in the presence of the police. (Ch.2)

Ha!

Alison’s passage here on prayer is really interesting, though his “symptom” language is a bit confusing:

It is not true that we pray so as to move God. It is truer that in our praying God is moving us. It is truer that we are prayed-in than that we pray. This I take to be absolutely in line with Paul’s teaching in Romans:

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26)

It is also, surely, the point of our Lord’s insistence:

“And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows that you need before you ask him.” (Matthew 6:7-8)

If it is true that our ‘self’ is a symptom, then prayer is God’s way of getting into the symptom from within and transforming it. This picture of the self does indeed presuppose that we don’t really know what we want, a discovery which may be one of the most important things about learning to pray. And this means not that we can’t make our mind up about this desire or that desire, but that our mind is made up of, constituted by, contradictory desires such that we can’t desire in a healthy way at all. The reason why our Lord insists on prayer is not so as to turn us all into mystics who levitate and float off walls, though that would be fun too, but because it is by agreeing to get in touch with, and not mind sitting with and in the contradictory, somewhat ‘smelly’ desires which move us that we are able to allow our desire to be strengthened, directed, ordered, so that we actually become someone. This is the promise of prayer: don’t be content with to little, dare to be given to become someone. And the promise is realized as a resting in and trusting in one who ‘knows what you need before you ask him’ which means, who is the active subject whose ‘symptom’ you are.

-James Alison, On Being Liked, p.142

Sure, we bring our petitions to God, but I find that during most of our deepest times of prayer, we don’t really know what we are asking. We don’t know what we want, what we expect. But we are still praying. It transforms us. It opens the door for him to transform some part of us. This is good.

Alison is not a fan of authoritarian church government. Though I think he takes it a bit far in the other direction, he has some good points.

It is difficult to think of any subject which has been more used and abused than ecclesiastical language about sheep and shepherds – to such an extent that the very language of the Good Shepherd seems coated in kitsch, and, in the light of recent events in the United States and elsewhere, tinged wit a sad, and sometimes appalling, irony.

-James Alison, On Being Liked, p. 114

So what do you do when you don’t agree with your pastor? Church split!? Maybe not.

It means that if we disagree with something, then what we are doing is – disagreeing! Which is what adults do, helpfully, within a project for which they share responsibility. This is not dissenting, which is what subordinates do within a project where the responsibility is always with the higher-ups. And there are as we know, but rarely remember, no subordinates in the shepherding:

But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. -Matthew 23:8

-p.129

If we are consumers or just worker bees, then when trouble arises (and it always will, we’re all human), then “fixing” things often involves some form of “stickin’ it to the man”. But if we share responsibility, love the church, then we will always minimize damage. Even if there is a functional church split, we won’t give parting blows on the way out or start up hate-blogs afterwards. Geesh.

Here, Alison describes a period in his life were he felt absolutely horrible, worthless, useless, and despaired. During this this whole time though, he was still serving as a priest with the Dominicans. He writes this about a surprising aspect:

As a priest I was able, of course, to offer them sacraments and the other gifts of priestly ministry, and I remember even then being struck by how they were able to receive a power and transforming grace from the sacraments, a power and grace which had absolutely nothing to do with my subjectivity, whose eyes were scarcely daring to look at what I was doing. It was if in fact the sign was working quite independently of its minister, who was a sort of Baalam’s ass of ex opere operatio grace.

-James Alison, On Being Liked, p.67

The liturgy and the centrality of the sacraments in worship is a strong glue that can hold together really screwed up people. What a far cry from a setting where the pastor is the center of attention up on the stage. If he doesn’t have all his ducks in a row and bring a smile every day, the magic cannot be worked. If he’s feeling down, his only option is to fake it. And when you’re burned out or having trouble with your (kids, marriage, money, all the usual stuff), you practice getting really good at faking the smile. You are the model for your congregation and they get the message. Fake the smile or it will all fall apart. Our faith is built on the solid rock, but the life of the church community centers around something that is really, really fragile.

This is one of the main reason’s I’m diggin’ on liturgy lately.

Reading the Tall Skinny Kiwi is always interesting:

Where are we right now? We have been in Africa for most of the year, in an area where the MAJORITY of believers connect together in simple, non-hierarchical churches that exhibit emergent behavior. In USA, we might call them emerging churches but over here, and also in Asia, they are just the kind of churches that make sense in countries where resources are low and governments are suspicious and locals have less contact with complicated, expensive, non-sustainable Western models of church. And its a good thing.

I confess, I really have no idea what this looks like. I’ve never been outside of the U.S. (not counting Canada) and never been outside of American evangelicism (not counting the RC). I’d love to travel.