I posted every day for the first two years of this blog, but rarely since. Nevertheless, I hereby mark this, my one-thousandth post, with words from Rainer Maria Rilke (thanks to Beth for the reintroduction). This is what I am again learning, and always learning:
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
I am glad to see this encouraging development announced by Mike King. Courses in ‘Biblical’ parenting have long been a profitable industry, however untethered from reputable research or theology. Christianity Today has a new article that sounds to me like a hopeful new thoughtfulness about Christian parenting might be growing up in our midst. Read The Myth of the Perfect Parent here. It takes some shots at the latent behaviorist underpinnings of some of the popular parenting courses available.
I like how Mike says it: “While I believe that we parents have a crucial role in the Christian formation of our kids we have taken on too much responsibility with the idea that ‘we are the ones that transform them’ and overlook the role we have of nurturing the environments where God’s Spirit transforms them.”
This reminds me of Edwin Friedman’s book (which I commend to every parent), A Failure of Nerve: “I am convinced that to the extent leaders of any family or institution are willing to make a lifetime commitment to their own continual self-regulated growth, they can make any leadership theory or technique look brilliant.”
“Fear is almost always behind hate. Sometimes it looks like taking necessary control, but control freaks are usually afraid of losing something. It is almost always fear that justifies hatred, but a fear that is hardly ever recognized as such.
“For fear to survive, it must look like reason, prudence, common sense, justice, or even religion. It always works. What better way to veil vengeance than to call it justice? What better way to cover greed than to call it responsible stewardship? What better way to cover arrogance than call it Biblical obedience?”
-Richard Rohr
Paul is right on by posting this at Tangence:
This letter is very “Screwtape-ish” for you Lewis readers. It reminds us that our speculations about the causes of tragedy whether they be 911, Katrina or the Haitian earthquake (or the one in Lisbon) are, at absolute best, guesses. Sometimes informed but more often speculative reactions to our own anxieties and our inability to live in space “in-between”.
The following comes from the NPR newsblog. Definitely worth a read:
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune published a letter from Satan to evangelist Pat Robertson, responding to his comment that Haiti’s persistent troubles, including the earthquake, are due to a pact the nation made with Mephistopheles.
Actually, it wasn’t Satan who wrote the letter but Lilly Coyle of Minneapolis writing in the persona of the hellish one.
I think she got it down pretty well. What say you?
Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action.
But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.
Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?
If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.
You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.
Best, Satan
LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS
Blessing is part of our weekly gathering at Vox. We end our gathering in blessing. When children come forward during the communion service, the servers speak a blessing to them: “The blessing of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit be with you now and forever. Amen.” But it’s not always that formal. I encourage our servers to “say good things” to those who come for blessing – God loves you. Your smile is beautiful. You are such a special part of our community.
Blessing is about speaking a good word over someone, to call out what is best and truest about them. Church, if nothing else, must be a space where we see and speak the truth about the beauty inside of one another. The shopping mall doesn’t bless us. Social networking doesn’t call out the truth of who we are. So much of bad art (from films to video games) is not honest about the human experience. How else will our world become beautiful if we cannot learn to recognize and call out one another’s particular and specific goodness, truth and beauty?
“To bless means to say good things. We have to bless one another constantly. Parents need to bless their children, children their parents, husbands their wives, wives their husbands, friends their friends. In our society, so full of curses, we must fill each place we enter with our blessings. We forget so quickly that we are God’s beloved children and allow the many curses of our world to darken our hearts. Therefore we have to be reminded of our belovedness and remind others of theirs. Whether the blessing is given in words or with gestures, in a solemn or an informal way, our lives need to be blessed lives.”
–Henri Nouwen
“I have two basic definitions of spiritual direction. One is you show up and then you shut up. It’s important that people have a place they can come to and know that you’re going to be there with and for them. The other is that spiritual direction largely involves what you do when you don’t think you’re doing anything. In other words, you’re not trying to solve a problem. You’re not answering a question and it doesn’t seem like you’re doing anything. It takes a lot of restraint and discipline for a pastor not to say anything, not to do anything. But the pastoral life is an ideal school for learning how to do it.”
-Eugene Peterson, …On Pastoral Ministry
“Every point of view is a view from a point” is a touché of postmodernism. It is an acknowledgment of the Apostle Paul’s own admission, that “we know in part” or that “we see as through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13).
I think of this often when flipping between the 24-hour cable news channels, which admittedly get too much of my attention. “Fair and balanced.” “We report, you decide.” “The most trusted name in news.” But seriously. I am all for trust, and fairness. The shortsightedness that needs to be exposed in these claims is that they rarely succeed at real balance. Everyone can name the most ‘left’ network and the most ‘right’ network. With reasonable frequency, how one votes and which network one prefers correspond.
Now I’m not a conspiracy person. (On a serious note: please stop forwarding me emails about….well anything. Thanks.) I don’t believe that anyone at high levels of large organizations, including news channels or governments, are organized enough, evil enough, or effective enough to do what some claim they try to do. It’s just too hard in big organizations to get anything to happen, let alone succeed at wholly ruining or truly fixing anything – at least for very long. (We always do some good, some bad – but most of what’s wrong with the world happens inside me in the Wal-mart parking lot during the holidays, not in the secret chambers of some nation’s government.)
The reason cable news can’t really be balanced is that there is no such thing as balanced viewpoints. There are only balancing viewpoints.
No one, by himself, can sit at an anchor’s desk and tell the whole truth. He can only tell it as he sees it. He will do his best to name what he sees accurately, but it will still only ever be what he sees. It will be a view from a point. That’s all it can be. It will be true so far as he is skilled in articulating it. But it will never be the whole truth. It will not be a balanced viewpoint, only a balancing viewpoint. And it can only be a balancing viewpoint when it is balanced by other balancing viewpoints.
I’m entertained just like anyone by charismatic, passionate, interesting people with microphones and airtime. But without real dialogue (which includes conversation where the host of the show is not always vindicated by being in control of the show), I may trust what I hear to be true – but I don’t trust it to be truth. I may trust it to be a balancing viewpoint, but never a balanced viewpoint.
Vox Dei Community is hosting a fair trade bazaar over the next three Sundays, beginning November 15. Here’s the basic idea of fair trade:
This belongs in ‘dialog’ with the last post – a vision from NP about a better way to be human: listening.
- Discussion comes from a fixed position. Dialog suspends its position.
- Discussion exchanges opinions. Dialog discovers new ideas.
- Discussion is in favor of its own view. Dialog is open to the view of the other.
- Discussion attempts to convert the other. Dialog listens to the other.
- Discussion produces agreement, compromise or division. Dialog creates a new place.
- Discussion can become more rigid. Dialog softens and opens.
- Discussion can become confrontational. Dialog is sympathetic.
- Discussion has non-negotiables. For dialog, everything is negotiable.
- Discussion will not produce deep change. Dialog invites it.
- Discussion does not require a spirit of goodwill. Dialog assumes unity.
Cable news thinking…amplifies the worst elements of emotional reaction:
- Focus on the urgent instead of the important.
- Vivid emotions and the visuals that go with them as a selector for what’s important.
- Emphasis on noise over thoughtful analysis.
- Unwillingness to reverse course and change one’s mind.
- Xenophobic and jingoistic reactions (fear of outsiders).
- Defense of the status quo encouraged by an audience self-selected to be uniform.
- Things become important merely because others have decided they are important.
- Top down messaging encourages an echo chamber (agree with this edict or change the channel).
- Ill-informed about history and this particular issue.
- Confusing opinion with the truth.
- Revising facts to fit a point of view.
- Unwillingness to review past mistakes in light of history and use those to do better next time.
“Whenever the Church is in trouble, it does three things. It fiddles with the structure. It raises new moneys, and it changes the liturgy. It gives the impression of being very busy when in truth, it is not. The church in Germany during the 1930s did all three, looking very busy. In truth, it should have been busy opposing the rise of anti-Semitism.”
- The Rev. Dr. Gerhard Krodel, Dean of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg
One of my favorite moments in the Vox Dei Community was an event we hosted in August called “An Evening of Story.” It was meant to be a space in which we could see from different perspectives and disciplines the power and essential role of narrative in the human experience. Only it was so much better than that or any other description.
Ben Jeffrey, who contributed to that evening, got married Sunday and I was so happy to be able to share in the ceremony. I told a story.
Kelly Foster was one of our very special guests for that evening as well. She is a writer. (I laugh as I write that, realizing that everything I’ve said in this post so far is a blatant understatement.) Kelly’s latest entry in her regular contribution to The Image Journal is further reflection on the power of narrative and our evening in August.
Here it is. Enjoy.
I love the gray facemasks and black shoes. I’ve been lobbying for these…my whole life. Now just get that silly-looking ink-blot off the helmet and put the arrowhead back on and you’ve got yourselves some Super Bowl uniforms.
One thing at a time.
From nakedpastor:
The one piece about being a pastor of a church that I just don’t think I’ll ever be cut out for is seeing people I love go away. I mean when good people come along, resonate with what we do, are welcomed and loved by the community, but then just never connect in a way that is substantive enough for them to grow into a collaborative member of the church-community.
Disclaimer: Now I am a mix of motives I am certain. I want to make things happen. I want people to like me. I want people to like the people I like. I want to feel ’successful’. I’m in touch with some of this in myself, and I’m quite sure there is more of it than even I know (or would admit if I knew). I’m impatient and frustrated as a result. I’m not happy about that or dismissive of it. That’s real and ugly confessional material – and much easier to condemn in others than recognize in myself.
But I also find in myself better motives, like genuinely wanting what is good for people. I’ve even helped some move on from our church because I could see it would be better for them (even when it was sad for me). And even though most who interact with our church have experienced it as a generous place to connect with God and others, not everyone has. And that remains a painful mystery for me.
I don’t mean to sound like I think everyone would love how we ‘do church’ – not at all. Vox isn’t even that entertaining. We’re traditional in all the uncool ways, and casual rather than polished. We’re low-maintenance and probably a bit unusual. People that resonate deeply with Vox are typically either recovering from hyper-church or trying church for the first time as adults. I’m quite sure we get a lot of things wrong, do some things poorly, and miss a lot of opportunities to do better. But we are intentional, thoughtful, generous, and genuinely ourselves as much as we know how to be. And you couldn’t find better human beings in any gathering anywhere, let alone in a church.
We do go to great lengths to be open and accessible without being intrusive or coercive. We overtly ask people to be accountable for their experience with our community – to take initiative, to assume they are ‘insiders’ if they want to be and then behave accordingly, going about having opinions, starting things, serving wherever they see a need, and responding to whatever they see God doing. It’s honestly really hard (from my point of view) to believe that anyone would find our church-community inaccessible.
And yet here we are. Too catholic for the Baptists, too baptist for the catholics, too fundie for the progressives, too progressive for the fundies. And that’s just by quoting Jesus a lot.
I jest, but on this reflective Tuesday, I wish it were different. I wish I was more of a dynamic people-drawer. I wish I could do a better job at managing expectations, or at helping people be aware of their assumptions, or at getting in touch with the source of their frustrations with their experiences of church (which is almost always a problem they brought with them and then take with them as they go: the problems ‘out there’ are almost always reflective of the problems ‘in here’).
I wish I could rescue everything. But I can’t and I know it well. People ultimately have to find their own way, their own connection, their own experience of Christ and his Body the church – just like you and just like me. I can’t learn anything without getting bloodied by it. Why should I assume anyone else would be different? Leave it to Richard Rohr:
To give people answers to questions they have not yet struggled with or suffered for makes those very answers more a wall than a window.
So I press ahead, hopefully creating more windows than walls, blessing people as they come and go, hoping to at least do no harm while they are in our company.
But God help those who ask and are denied, who search and don’t find, who knock and find the door unopened. Amen.
