Blogging is a bizarre phenomenon. We carve out a little niche in cyberspace and bare our souls in the hope that a few friends and family will use it to keep up with us. I refer to my blog entries as editorial catharsis; blowing off steam while sharing a little about what's going on in my life. I'm catharted (not a word, I know) out. I'm weary of being affected. So I think I might just bare my soul and leave the bitching to the professionals. Okay, well maybe a little bitching...

The past few weeks have been weird, to say the least.

Downside: I am observing Great Lent, although not in the strictest degree, and it involves sacrificing the foods that comfort me.

Upside: The Young's are becoming Orthodox (Heather's blog deals with that journey and she treats it with much more grace and depth than I).

Downside: I found out that none of the three grad schools I applied to are interested in me.

Upside: I get to spend another year in Oregon.

Downside: A stellar opportunity to catalogue Howard University's Ethiopian Manuscript collection in May fell through and we are not going to be able to go.

Upside: I have been working frequently on the Ethiopian Manuscript Imaging Project with a former professor and it is really stretching me academically.

I swing back and forth between moments of excitement and depression. I tell people that things are going well but it's not really true. My only goal right now is to finish my schooling and get set in a teaching career. To stall out after an arduous five years of school is demoralizing. I was given the impression by professors, friends and colleagues that I am a natural for an academic career, but the doors that were supposed to open are not budging. I wonder if I am a "natural" because I'm not great at anything else. I don't like to wallow in pity but I'm hovering and I want to be moving forward.

Don't worry, I still love my family and I know that being a good husband and father is my primary vocation. But I can't help but feel dejected. To play down my depression by talking about how wonderful my family is only diminishes their value to me and they become little more than an equivocation of the fact that I am depressed and not comfortable telling people about it.

All said, I am far from rock bottom. And hey, I have a long Oregon Spring to enjoy. Isn't Spring supposed to be a time of renewal and growth?

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Another Blog

I have been neglecting this blog a bit recently in lieu of another blog that deals specifically with my struggle to understand and embrace black power and black theology. Check it!

http://unforgivablewhiteness.blogspot.com

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W.E.B. DuBois gave the keynote address May 13, 1952 at a meeting sponsored by the American Labor Party held in Madison Square Garden. 17,000 people were in attendance. This is an excerpt from that address:

“What is wrong with the United States? We are an intelligent, rich and powerful nation. Yet today we are confused and frightened. We fear poverty, unemployment and jail.
We are suspicious not only of enemies but especially of friends. We shrink before the world and are ready to make war on everybody. General Eisenhower has assured us that “we can lick the world” and we are preparing to spend billions of dollars to do it even when we do not know whom to fight or why or how.
Of the thirty-five civilized nations of the world, we and Japan are the only ones which have refused to sign the International Treaty promising not to resort to germ warfare; and it is widely charged that we are now using bacteria in China.”

One may read this and find it to be prophetic. But sadly, what it indicates about the United States is that in the past 50 years, we have learned nothing. If these words were simply oracular we could praise the foresight and wisdom of W.E.B. Dubois. Alas, we are left to shake our heads at our own stupidity and failure to learn from our past.

DuBois was a prophet. He recognized that what foolishness we abide today becomes our legacy. I can only imagine how disappointed DuBois might be if he were alive to see his indictment go unanswered.

There are 191 member states in the U.N. the vast majority of which could be classified as civilized nations. Could DuBois, only 50 years ago, have imagined a world so progressive yet so depraved? The USA is still in the business of being the BMOC and exerting its influence presumably to the inurement of the "little guy". Yet we sit and watch the genocide in Darfur and insist that we have "work" to do in Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran. We are like a mechanic who pours sugar in his neighbor's gas tank and shows up to render his services to help fix the problem. DuBois was a first-person witness to the abolition of slavery. He has seen the depths of depravity that humanity is capable of attaining. Will we continue to disregard our prophets? Are we even capable of learning from our mistakes?

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Sun Valley Indian School

It was my first mission trip and I was in high school. I don't remember if it was '86 or '87 but I was probably a sophomore or junior. We rode on a bus for 16 hours to what was then called Twin Wells Indian School. It is situated near Holbrook, AZ about halfway between Gallup, NM and Flagstaff, AZ somewhere near I-40. I had never driven anywhere west of Dallas, TX, where my family lived at the time. I remember seeing my first tumbleweed rolling through a vast expanse of rolling nothingness. That was so cool. I thought that tumbleweeds only existed in old western movies but I saw a real live one. Later in the trip myself and friend saw one blowing through the school campus and thought we would catch it. We stood in front of it and it knocked us over like bowling pins. When we dusted ourselves off we had to visit the school nurse to get bandaged up from the superficial scratches and deep gouges from the branches of the tumbleweed. Note to self: let rolling tumbleweeds roll.

Twin Wells school is owned by the Church of the Nazarene and is nothing more than a settlement of 15 or so simple buildings planted in the middle of a Navajo Rez. I don't recall a lot of details about the work we did with the exception of the demolition and roofing we did on a classroom building. This trip was in the middle of summer and I had never experienced anything like the heat in the Arizona desert. I recall someone saying the temperature on the roof we were repairing being in the ballpark of 140 degrees. I am an EXTREMELY white guy from the midwest who gets burned if I sit too close to the TV. I think I had SPF 300 sunblock or something and still got horribly sunburned. Physical discomfort aside, the environment was so alien and so full of mystery. It was like being on another planet. We visited Canyon de Chelly, Painted Desert/Petrified Forest, and the Grand Canyon on day trips. But the most impactful experience of the trip was going to a Nazarene Church on the Navajo Rez. They did the singing in Navajo and the sermon in English and Navajo. I had never been in a church that did things SO differently from what I was used to. We knew they were Nazarenes, however, because they had a potluck dinner for us after the service. Potluck is the third sacrament in the Church of the Naz. I remember lots of meat and corn but it was all very tasty. Funny how I remember the food and not the details of the sermon...

I discovered the website for Sun Valley Indian School today and little has changed. What a blessing that in a world enamored of change and evolution that they are still doing what they set out to do. I would ask anyone who is reading this to visit the site and say a prayer for this school and, more importantly, for the Navajo people.

www.indianschool.org

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From Belonging to Belief

From belonging to belief

Evangelism of the 20th century is on life support. And as the guardians of the results-oriented evangelism of the last 100+ years we can do nothing more merciful than to issue a do-not-resuscitate order. We must let it go. This antiquated evangelism stressed the move from belief to belonging. In other words, one must be convinced that Jesus is Lord before one was allowed to enjoy fully the life of the Church. The time has come for Christians in a global culture to change the paradigm, as it were, to see belonging as the first step and allowing belief to germinate and develop through belonging.

Why can we not operate on the assumption that we have something to learn from the non-believer? In his work, History of the Christian Church, Philip Schaff writes of early church practice:

“The catechumens or hearers were regarded not as unbelievers, but as half-Christians, and were accordingly allowed to attend all the exercises of worship, except the celebration of the sacraments. They embraced people of all ranks, ages, and grades of culture, even philosophers, statesmen, and rhetoricians… The duration of this catechetical instruction was fixed sometimes at two years sometimes at three, but might be shortened according to circumstances.” [vol. II; pp 256-7]

Maybe the choice must be made preemptively by Christians to affirm the humanity of every individual, regardless of their choice to affirm the Christian faith. In our global society we are confronted by unprecedented cultural diversity. If we expect to be considered participants in this society then we must participate fully in the life of the world around us. We want others to choose to belong to our faith communities but we don’t want to belong to the world of non-believers. By virtue of our humanity, we do belong to that world of non-believers. A hard fact is that non-believers are no longer the outsiders. The Church has become the outsider and the global community sits in judgment of it. May the world be more merciful to the Church than the Church has been to the world.

Winds of Change

From Constantine’s Edict of Toleration in 313 to the Cartesian declaration, “Cogito ergo sum” in 1641, the “civilized” (and I use that term loosely) world was ruled by the Christian faith. For over 1300 years the Christian faith was free to enrich and pervert society in what ways it saw fit. It saw its manifest destiny as one of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. Enlightenment rationalism didn’t precisely reject God but it did categorize God as the “first thing” and not “every thing”. American Christians have a poor memory. We forget that approximately 100 years ago churches across the United States were openly complicit in the oppression of blacks and defense of slavery as an institution. To this day, churches reject the role of women as leaders in the church. In the discipline of social justice the church in the United States is in grave danger of getting a big, fat “F”. Whether or not the Church in the United States chooses to accept it, the fact remains that if it wants to become anything other than an alternative to the Rotary Club it must allow itself to be formed, deformed and transformed by the world. The Church in the U.S. must humble itself before mankind and serve society. Humanity is not made up of cogs to be used in driving the Christian Machine. Christianity consists (or rather, should consist) of servants. Not servants of the institution of the Church but of servants to all of creation. That means that in following the example of our professed leader we must wash humanity’s feet instead of stepping all over them. It means that we must touch the untouchable instead of looking through them. We must love those who hate us instead of killing them. And we must do it with all humility!

Reflecting theologically, then, must begin not with an inductive reading of scripture rather it should start with a deductive examination of ourselves and what it is that makes us human. We must value what makes us human not what makes us right. Forming doctrines that exclude entire people groups based on a handful of scriptures is exactly the thing that we must cease doing. Whether we are marginalizing souls based on gender, sexuality, age, marital status, socio-economic status, or ethnicity, we are nothing more than Pharisees.

Maybe Christians should value the deplorable over the desirable; the plebeian over the polished; the immoral over the immaculate. Maybe we should stop protecting ourselves so well. Hedges protect but so do ramparts. When hedges are allowed to grow unattended, they become impenetrable dissections between adjacent real estate. Are Christians being good neighbors? Are we keeping our hedges in order? God help us if we fail to be diligent in our landscape maintenance…

Theology... What's the point?

In his book Black Theology and Black Power, James H. Cone levels the following criticism directly at the practice of theology:

"It is much easier to deal with the textual problems associated with some biblical book or to deal "objectively" with a religious phenomenon than it is to ask about the task of theology in the current disintegration of society... It is time for theology to leave its ivory tower and join the real issues, which deal with the dehumanization of blacks in America. It is time for theologians to relate their work to life-and-death issues, and in so doing to execute its function of bringing the Church to a recognition of its task in the world."

This challenges me as a theologian and as a member of the Church in America. He's right. It is easier to deal with textual criticism and respond to esoteric religious phenomenon than it is to settle on a hard and fast response to real problems. So far in my theological studies, the most anyone will offer in response to our greatest social issues is either, "It's all very complicated" or, "The solution for this was settled by Augustine". There is much territory in between these two positions but I find few theologians who want to draw a line in the sand anywhere in that minefield. We have the James Cones and Dietrich Bonhoeffers of the world who see evil and address it head-on. But those of us who reflect theologically on these issues understand that history will be the judge of our veracity and that is a risk we DARE not take.

But it remains that the Church has work to do. We have our tasks and woe to us who are remiss in carrying them out. God calls each of us to a level of service according to our gifts. We hold seminars and retreats for our congregations to discover what exactly it is that God has gifted us to do. But the Church has a job to do in the world. It is up to the theologians to determine how we respond to the task at hand.

I am embarrassed that I have not been more confident in what I know to be the need and the appropriate response to that need. I have been complicit in the Church's abrogation of its responsibility to reveal Christ to the world. Stay tuned...

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Peace of God

"May the Peace of God be with you."

"And with your spirit."

Such was the call and response at Holy Liturgy this morning. I don't know what the Peace of God is. I don't know what it looks like. It's such a nice thing to wish for someone though. It's sure better than saying, "Have a nice day." The Peace of God is this nebulous "other" floating out there somewhere and every once in a while we catch a glimpse of it. The glimpse never affords us enough time to study the nature of the Peace of God. It's not unlike driving around Portland and seeing Mt. Hood looming majestically in the distance. You catch a glimpse and it takes your breath away because, with all the clouds hanging around, you seldom see it and even forget it's there. But your breath is taken and you think to yourself, "Good God! I forgot how close it is to us." Such is the Peace of God. It looms out there, obscured by the shade of darkness and every once in a while we catch a glimpse of it and we are stunned at how near it really is.

St. Nicholas, in all of it's foreign ritual, reaches out to my sense of the nearness of God. I am encouraged by their community not because it is idyllic and serene. To the contrary, the small community is wrought with conflict between young and old, rich and poor, and the dueling traditions of the varied ethnicities represented. Little of the conflict is hidden and swept under the rug. They are a family, with all the light and heat that define families. And I believe that it is within this storm of conflict that the Peace of God can be glimpsed. And it is this honest life together that draws me in.

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A New Year

Not sure why we become so reflective at the end of a new year. I certainly am given to mindful reflection upon the events of the past year. Janus, the Roman god of doorways, has two faces. His faces are not representative of conflicting loyalties. Rather, one face sees forward to the future and the other looks back to the past. He stands at places of transition, hence the weird doorway affiliation. In fact, the month January derives from the name Janus. It becomes apparent that the importance of this transition from one year to the next is not lost on humanity, regardless of the century in which you live. Every year I look so hopefully into the future as if it will manifest as I have conceived of it in my mind's eye. And every year I envision the same transformations happening. I hope for the usual things; better paying job, good health, weight loss, etc. The future is so intriguing, isn't it? It is something that has not come to pass, good or bad. It is full of hope. But why do I look back on last year's future with such disappointment? What would have made it better? I'm thinking about that right now...