Taking Off and Landing

This past Saturday, I went with some friends down to the New Braunfels area, about three hours south of Waco, to float the Guadalupe River. If you’ve never been floating on the river, here’s a crash course for the culturally inclined:

1) Rent an inner tube. We’re not talking the floaties from Wal-Mart. We’re talking leftover guts from a tractor wheel. Anything with a logo is straight out.

2) Buy cheap beer. I offer as my example this and this. Nothing more expensive, please. You’ll ruin the atmosphere.

3) Buy sunscreen. If you’re going to the Guadalupe, follow my example and get at least 30. Do not follow my example and get burned in symmetrical banana-shaped patches on your upper arms and pecs.

4) Float. The goal is to get there, eventually, albeit not that quickly. The current will get you there when you get there. All in all, it’s a good way to spend a few hours with some friends.
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You’ll meet an interesting lot on the river, and by intersting, I mean, a group of people that won’t have spent a lot of time mulling over the finer points of the Republic. We pulled into the parking lot, and our neighbor offers us one of his tubes, pulls out his bottle of Boone County, and says, “They don’t give you stuff like this in the county jail.” These are the hardcore ones. Season passes. Designer floats built specifically to hold a case of Natural Light. Cutoff jean shorts and handlebar moustaches. They are NOT messing around when it comes to this event, and any attempts to make the event into something more purposeful will not be tolerated.

An hour into the trip, I hear laughter from the next floaters, one of whom says, “I’ll ask this guy”, turning to one of our group, and asks, “So, do you like *****?” I’ll let you fill in the blanks at this point with something overtly graphic to shelter virgin eyes. Needless to say, he wasn’t asking about needlepoint. My friend looked flustered and said, “Well, I’ve never had that”, to which our neighbor said, “You’re kidding! It’s okay; you’re with other people, you don’t have to answer…are you serious? You’ve never had *****?”

Note to self: if ever in need for an icebreaker question….

There was a time when two things could be assumed: 1) there was a degree of cultural coherency upon which transmission of the Gospel could rely and 2) there was a metaphysical concern for questions that the Gospel brings up. In an age when neither of those conditions exist, of fractured culture and lack of concern for the underpinnings of how theology has been articulated, how does it move forth? How do we speak a Gospel into a world that a) does not understand the language and b) is not concerned with the questions the Gospel asks?

In other words, what does Plato have to do with Pabts? Where do the Guadalupe and getting out of county meet together? My growing sense as I approach school in less than three weeks is that if theology in some way does not have its feet in the grounds of human experience, what good is it? If what we do is not in some way reflective of the real life of God, where do we go? If me driving to Dallas and back has no connection to the divine life other than the vague sentiment to “glorify God”, what have we left? I have some proposed answers, but another time. For now, I want to toss this one to the wolves.

With regard to the corruption of the flesh, I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes. I’ve been sleeping pretty bad the last four nights with what the doctor has described to me as a “muscular-skeletal strain”, which basically means that it’s nothing that Celebrex won’t help me limp through for the next few days.

As such, my nights have been troubled.

Last night, I woke up in the throes of terrible dreams, dreams that I was lost in a wash of behavior that comes in moments of temptations, but with voices in my mind saying that this was permanent, that there was no way out of this one. Last week in Kansas City, I had some interesting talks with Kevin about the demonic and the angelic, and frankly, I don’t know where I come down on all of it. I don’t know if Frank Perretti is right, or if truly angels and demons are all part of our way of talking about the powerful exertion of old habits and tendencies to do things we wouldn’t dream of in our darkest hours.

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My life song is “Cautious Man” by Springsteen. It’s often felt so apropos, it’s eerie. The lyrics are stunning and descriptive of the way I feel about my tentative walk of discipleship. Last night, verse five came to life, as I woke, and with both hands in the air, I cried out like Peter, “Lord, deliver me”, and fell back on my pillow in the humid night, waiting for sleep again. And again, I wondered how much of my struggle to be faithful has to do with things beyond me.

Chemicals? Inherited traits? Angelic hierarchy? Communal practices that I embody? Environment? Original sin? In any number of ways, Christians have talked about the walk between the life we should and the live we do, and if there a way between, or if there is only life or death. Joy reminded me in her most recent post that there is an X and a Y, and the struggle to live a life more in line with what we believe to be true. Lying on the doctor’s table today, waiting for the test to come back, I ran my mind over the possible outcomes of this mysterious pain in my side:

Kidney failure? Cancer? Kidney stones? Demon of back spasms? An undiagnosable muscular deterioration? But I’ve not written that book, and not told that person that I love them more than my life, or seen Paris or Taipei! And I’ve wasted a whole hell of a lot of time with things that don’t amount to dust. And Vacation Bible School is this week, too.

And it dawned on me that the worst part of sin is not the loss of one’s eternal soul, for that is a pain that none can forecast or know about until after the fact. Too often, our analysis of sin is too simple; we assume that people die from wanting something they have no understanding of. The worst part of sin is that it destroys the one life we have. By inches. It creeps up in our daily dealings, our habits, our sins, and wastes a lifetime.

And so, as for the angels and demons, I don’t know. Scripture speaks of them, and so, they will do as they will. But this I know: the sin, the fear and past regrets and future faithlessness, the corruption of the body and soul that haunts me, does more damage to my living than my future dying. Life is a long adventure, continuing after death, as one has begun it here.
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If the preceding has been a downer, no apologies, but you can go here for something a little lighter. Three words: “Holy. Ghost. Enema.”

Ask people what they think about, say, the price of concrete and its relation to national security, and you won’t get much response. Ask people if they think terrorists should be given the same dignity as any other person, and you can almost visibly see blood pressure rising. And with that, I say welcome to the first ever Waco chapter of Amnesty International.

Amnesty International was founded in the late 1960s by a British lawyer, appalled that two Portugese students had been arrested for toasting to freedom in Spain. Letter writing campaigns were started, and the students were freed. And to this day, Amnesty is the largest grass-roots organization of its kind, writing letters and lobbying governments and organizations for the release of prisoners of conscience, the end of torture and the death penalty, and speedy and fair trials for all. If you read at all the testimony of the prisoner in Guantanamo, there’s more and more reason why these kinds of organizations are needed. And if you’re in Waco, there’s no reason to not look us up. Email me for more info.
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When the issue of “human rights” is brought up, these days my ears perk up, mostly because it’s really impossible to talk about human rights, which rely upon a notion of universal reason, which is not a given, but learned. In the same way that we don’t know what a stop light does without having someone tell us, so we don’t know what things like justice and hope are without having someone explain them to us. Thus, it becomes interesting when the U.S. starts lecturing China on human rights, considering that the two of them are two of five countries in the world that still execute their prisoners.

The idea of “rights” is one that is first embodied in local bodies, that local people first take up, and in engagement with other bodies, expand. For example, to demand democracy in Iraq makes no sense unless there exists an understanding among the people that speaking one’s mind is a good thing. The implication here is that if you want to have a “universal right”, it has to come by the engagement of smaller bodies that have some conception of “rights”. On a philosophical level, this is why I think it’s so great that Amnesty is in 40 countries and not exclusively Western: in China, Chinese look at the system and start the process. Or India. Or Burma. Or Senegal. Scripturally, you never see reference to “humanity”, but to “nations”, “families”, “peoples”.

Should people be imprisoned indefinitely? Should all people be given dignity in their treatment? Should people be imprisoned for being black, white, gay, Communist, dissidents? If people should be imprisoned for dissenting against common practice, I often wonder why in the world the church in this country is not vacant because of imprisonment. As Christians, it is deplorable that we support things like the death penalty which impose a finality of judgment on sins, dividing our mercy between body and soul. Amnesty is involved in part of what the church should be prophetically doing, and thus, I’m glad to be a part of the Waco chapter, which right now consists of mostly former seminarians. It’s beautiful.