Taking Off and Landing

Tonight, I helped facilitate the 3rd annual “Tunnel of Oppression”, an event designed to help shed light on the otherwise normalized discriminations that occur on a daily basis in Waco and around the world. As one who is concerned with social issues in general, and who sees the church as the answer ultimately to these problems, it’s difficult for me to separate out being part of the church and facing these problems resolutely.

The Tunnel is a series of 11 vignettes and skits, each illustrating a form of oppression or discrimiation, ranging from objectification of women to racism to the homeless to AIDS. Neil played the part of a wife-beater, and was eerie in the part. As one of the kindest human beings I know, it was strange to see him slapping a woman, even as part of a concious-raising exercise. It’s a great event, and one I think should be a part of every campus. College is incessantly narcisstic and anything that can be done to help the gaze to be raised above navel level is to be given two thumbs up.

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Bonhoeffer speaks of the church as the communio sactorum, the body of the saints that, far from being a sectarian body detesting worldly engagement, is that body ordained by God to rightly engage the world for the sake of the world. If the church foresakes wrongs done in the world, it ceases to be the church. If it shuts its eyes to places like Uganda with its disappearing children, or south Waco with its rampant poverty, or bellicose nations bent on war, it has forsaken its call to be the Other City, as Augustine calls it–the City of God.

Social concerns and the Gospel are not two unrelated spheres; if the Gospel is the return of life to its original intent, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, then the church, the body of Christ, can do nothing other than enter into those places that death and decay would seek to shadow as their own. To engage things like racism and hate in the name of the One who gave Himself willingly into the hands of Death is to fulfill the call of Christ, not in a way that would overpower Death by force, but in a way that recognizes that those of the church may very well lose their life along the way.

The church, standing in the midst of the world as the reminder of the Other Way, is forever assaulted, forever maligned, forever misunderstood. It is hated, called seditious, unpatriotic, liberal, outdated. And yet, as a visible sign of the world to come, it stands in the midst of chaos.

And is not overcome.

It’s hard to say where the initial impulses of autonomy in the church came from. I suspect that if you poke around the corners of Genesis, you might find something, particularly if you look at how in Genesis 1-11, the whole point is that people divide from one another, but that’s another post altogether.

You could blame it on the Separatists; you could blame it on the early Reformers; you could blame it on democratic impulses towards autonomous gains–regardless of who the culprit is, the throbbing vein of autonomy rages in the church, though not so much in places, I’d argue where democracy hasn’t taken as much of a grasp of the place. You see, in lands where liberal democracy is the economic rule, you effectively have two competing models:

1) Liberal Democracy: everyone starts from the point of having their own ends and goals. Adam Smith wrote that when everyone pursues their own goods, the common good is achieved. What happens, of course, is that the capital necessary for this to happen, as we have seen repeatedly in history, accumulates in the hands of a few. In short, you have people, seeking their own ends, hoping that the common good emerges.

2) Church: everyone starts with nothing, pursuing the same end and goal. This is the model of Augustine and Aquinas, that we are people meant for the same end, and thus, to get there together, we need each other. In short, there’s cooperation and not competition, acknowledging that none of us have all the gifts or abillities or insight necessary to be faithful alone.

Autonomy comes along and poo-poos this idea, saying that coming together on a few key things is fine, but essentially we should be left to the winds of the Spirit, to forge faithfulness in our own communities. The problem with this is that the same Spirit animates all churches, and so it’s not so much a matter of us agreeing upon essentials, as recognizing that we’re already on the same team, and so, we might as well like it.

The REAL problem comes finally when you start throwing things like dogma into the mix, confirming those as a-historical absolutes, things like church structures and positions and hierarchies, refusing the idea that other churches, animated by the Spirit, see these things differently. Then, autonomy laughs, straightens its tie, and moves right in to lead the charge away from the other churches.

One of the main reasons the church is growing like wildfire in places like Africa and Southeast Asia is that they don’t so much have the help of democratic governments. For all the good democracies do in ending types of oppression within their own borders, they do a lousy job of recognizing that the very real and very alternate societies that exist as churches are not reducible to “private things”, but are real communities, not of concrete, but of blood and water. Whereas other forms of government realize that viable churches are alternate ways of economy and life, and thus try to shut them out, democracies see religions as private faith and let them water themselves down.

Autonomy: appreciate the fruitcake, but I’ll be fine this Christmas, thank you.

Having gotten the word out on the table, this post can begin. You see, last night, I went to go see the nefarious….
“Vagina Monologues”.

I was intrigued the first time I heard about them, but they were in far off places, like New York. Guilliani’s wife was in the original, for Pete’s sake. Despite his aspirations for higher offices, Rudy has almost NOTHING to do with me. Except for the fact, that we both like the female gender. When I heard it was coming to WACO of all places, the choice now had to be made: would I see this infamous piece, now that it was in my front yard?

Of course.
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The Vagina Monologues were originally written from the interviews of 200 women and their experiences of being, well, women. After their popular outbreak, it spawned a movement called V-Day, designed to eliminate violence against women and girls. In addition to legal lobbying and organizing rallies, it sponsors productions of…The Vagina Monologues.

The Monologues cover a lot of ground unknown to the male gender, most of it dealing with, well, the vagina. There’s poignant segments, telling the story of a Muslim woman and a woman subjected to shame and scorn for being a woman. There’s more, er, off-color sections, that talk about the more delicate arts and experiences associated with being a sexual being. There’s the kind of discussions that take place between women behind doors, the kind that men never get to hear.

I’d heard rumors and muffled laughter about some of these topics before, but last night, it was that odd mixture of laughter and silence–women of all descriptors guffawing, and all the men trying to figure out whether what they were ultimately the ones being laughed at. All I have to say to sum it up is the title of the last segment before the intermission:

“Angry Vagina”.

If you can sit through this one AND the segment called “Reclaiming the C-word” without cringing, you’re a better man, or woman, than me.

I had never thought about what it must be like to be a woman, specifically a sexual woman. I know the male psyche, the male hormones and urges, and what a male thinks so well that I might call myself an expert on manhood. But I have no idea what it means to be a woman, or to have PMS, or to deal with tampons or gynecologists or foreign anatomy. I have no idea what it means to be told by society what a body should look like, or to be thought of as a sexual object. I have no clue what it means to be on the wrong end of history, to be the largely powerless one.

During the first half, the initial blitz of hearing the word “vagina” over and over again to get me beyond the shock factor. But after you get used to hearing “the word”, you start hearing what the deeper message is, particularly for us brave males who went willingly like sheep to slaughter to the show. I was with a group of mostly the female variety; at admission, I said, “I’m sorry. I’m a man. I can’t help it. I was born that way; it’s kind of a part of me I can’t get rid of. Unless you were Lorena Bobbitt, in which case there’s other problems we need to address.”

The message? That women have their own experiences and lives that men know nothing of. This much, I knew. After interacting with women for 27 years, I know less now than when I started. I don’t buy into the whole programme proposed by V-Day. I think it elevates the feminine as a gender without relation to men, that women are to be understood only as women (which brings all kinds of relational issues I won’t get into here). It proposes sexuality as fundamental to identity, though to be fair, it does so in the context of women’s relation to themselves, and not what men say that relation should be.

It’s bare; it’s bawdy; it made my masculine organs shrivel. But it reinforces one of the things I believe most about human relationships–that sometimes, you have to be bolted down and forced to listen–and then, maybe you will understand, as naked as it makes you feel. I will never, ever, ever underestimate the power of PMS and what Maya Angelou refers to as her “diamonds”.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.–Thomas Merton

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Tonight, I went to a birthday party for Kristen Richardson. I’ve known her and her husband Ryan since moving to Waco. I used to live in an apartment right behind their condo, and if not for the ubiquitous privacy fence, would have been able to see them cooking dinner every day. They’re some of my favorite people in Waco, and in all creation for that matter, and the thought of them leaving town really breaks my heart. Such things are inevitable, I suppose, but I don’t think about it much these days, since things seem for the moment to be pointed towards me staying in Waco for a bit longer. And jealously, I hope the world holds together for a while longer until that day when inevitably, it splinters off slowly to other places, other people, other lives.
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While sitting in the midst of people that I love, celebrating friends and relationships, it occurred to me what Lewis writes about friendship, that it’s such a delicate thing–love, that is. Friendship, above all other loves, is subject to so many little details–time, place, interest–so much so, that if one factor is thrown out of whack, the whole thing never starts. Without a little nudge in the right direction, you’re left an isolated particle free-floating in the direction of another nexus, flightless.

It amazes me, in light of this, how some can thus think of church in this way, the conglomeration of like-minded individuals, gathered for a common purpose, an ideal totally foreign to the Gospel’s way of thinking of “church”, which is because they are inextricably bound up together by the Spirit of God. My own tradition, Baptists, are profoundly infected with this toxin–autonomy–so much so, that not only are people allowed to go their own way, their gatherings are as well, as if we were designed to be individuals, and not persons–beings created for deeper purpose than to serve our own ends, that church is something incidental to the very fiber of our spiritual being.

Augustine reaches down and states that Christ and the body of Christ are indivisible, that in salvation, we are all drawn up together into the same savior, making us part and parcel the same people. In salvation, the terrible myth of autonomy is undone as we recognize that our lives were meant for other ends than competition and listening to the ghost of Adam Smith tell us that each person seeking their own good somehow mystically causes what is good for everyone else.

If we are fundamentally designed to be individuals, then let us do away with all those things that would group us together, be they church, friendships, dinner parties. If, however, we were never meant to be alone–if in Christ, we are inextricably linked to one another, like it or not–then let us put away the foolish talk of being individuals.

And instead, live for one another.