Taking Off and Landing
Looking Back, Looking Out
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It’s only easy to laugh because it’s so true. I remember being in high school and trying desparately to be cool and Chrsitian at the same time, and looking back, it was such a miserable failure. I grew sideburns down to my mouth and hoped that my Levis 520s looked baggy. I hoped that someone might think I was sullen or whimsical enough to talk to. It was a time of great anarchy in my emotional state, as I suppose it is for most teenagers, whether you grow up with some sense of a Christian culture or not. But I can firmly say, that I never went for these extremes:
There’s a fine line between culturallly appropriate forms of faith and ridiculous ones, and it’s a fine and slippery line before one goes waltzing over into the absurd. On the one hand, by nature, the Gospel is one of condescension: God appears to finite humanity, in a given place and time, constrained by all that is creation and time and frailty. And frankly, that’s the Good News: that God came to us.
The waltz quickly morphs into the anteater dance when we start making the Gospel part of our culture, rather than our lives part of the Gospel. Inevitably, there is no “Gospel culture”. There is no way to recapture being a Jew in 1st century Palestine, and this follows what the early apostles knew: Greek churches, Gentile languge, and unkosher antelope. There is no pure conformity to which people from all generations must adhere to in order to be Christian, but on the other hand, to make Christianity part of one’s existing life is no better than what Peter Berger describes as the canopy of faith: faith and religion for him becomes part of the human experience, socially formed and conditioned, but having no reference to what is beyond the culture.
Here’s to not confusing the anteater with Lion of Judah.
Dysfunction
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Apparently, the reason that my state was hit so hard in the wake of Katrina was, according to former FEMA head, Louisiana is “dysfunctional”. Granted, Louisiana politics are unlike any other in the nation. They truly are a spectator sport. What other state can you get a convicted felon and a former Klan Grand Dragon in a runoff for governor?
But if that’s dysfunction, what do you call the Capitol? How do you people stay in business? Thanks for clearing up what got f-ed up in the South, Mr. Brown. Enjoy retirement, “choice name here”.
Five Amigos
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I’ve been thinking to put this up for months. Over the last year, occasionally my house would all be at the same place and the same time. And we took pictures. Chris left for New Mexico this summer, and there’s a new roomie who may not be down for the dumb pictures, but, for the time being, a few pictures.
And to those concerned, the beard picture is on its way.
The infamous Duke pictures. Watch out for the dude in the bra.
Two summers ago, I shaved my head and we ripped up the carpet.
From left to right at a Rock Star Party: Jimmy Buffett, Toby Mac, Tupac, Willie Nelson, Barry Gibb
Once upon a time, we were relatively clean-shaven and naive.
Then, a year later, we were hairy and a little less innocent.
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There will come a day when we’ll all go our separate ways. But until then, I’ll enjoy it.
One Million Faces
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I’ve been meaning to post a picture of the beard that has been growing unkempt for a while now. My roommate and I are growing our beards until an unforeseen future, for no particular reason. I’ve always wanted to do it, and graduate school seemed like the perfect time to make the move.
And here we go then:
Sorry for the fuzzy quality. The light was bad, and it was early morning. But more seriously, the picture was taken so that we could submit them for Amnesty International’s One Million Faces campaign, a campaign designed to promote awareness of the ridiculously out of control arms proliferation, but to highlight the compromises which take place in foreign policy as a result. For example:
The United States, while remaining the largest foreign military force engaged overseas, was also the number one exporter of arms last year, to the tune of over 1.5 billion dollars last year. To put this in global perspective, this is more money than the next six highest countries combined. Ironically, most of the sales have been to countries such as Columbia, Egypt, Nigeria, Israel, and not surprsingly, Saudi Arabia, countries with deplorable human rights records.
I ask that you consider signing this, not only in protest of a ridiculously hypocritical policy, but because in light of the Gospel of Life, as John Paul II called it, actions which contribute willingly to the destruction of God’s creations, are anathema.
Pro Texana
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Please keep my adopted home state in prayer this weekend. Rita approaches, and the evacuation is already in full force. Waco, 300 miles away, will get 5-10 inches of rain and 60 mph winds this weekend. The coastline will take the brunt of this, and I ask that you pray that this will not be another New Orleans.
All My Lies Are Only Wishes
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There’s a great chicken/ Lebanese restaurant down the street from me that picks up business from me every so often. When it first opened, their Lebanese offerings were limited to a little couscous and the fact that everyone behind the counter was Lebanese, including the cute girl who ran the register who is almost too young for me to think she’s cute. As I launch into this new era of doctoral studies, it dawns on me that from now on, there is a whole category of females who will forever fall under the dictae of “cute, but too young.”
But I digress.
The chicken there is good, but the Lebanese is fantastic. There’s a place in Austin that’s some of the best Middle Eastern food I’ve ever put near my face, but barring a 100 miles one-way trip to Ararat’s, this will have to do. It’s amazing what a well-placed humus plate will do for my attitude. It’s as if with one swipe of the lentil bean, I’m transported to someplace much more diverse and openly cultural than Waco. I love my adopted hometown, but it is, as they say, a little lacking sometimes. When I have to go to the chicken place to get a good Middle Eastern dish, I know that the diversity scale is a little weighted towards Mexican and Anglo meals, or somewhere in between.
The diversity here is a mysterious thing–it runs in waves, in surly little pockets all over town that don’t do well mixing with other pockets of diversity. There is no melting pot, only little congealed lumps of rice or burger or tofu thatare quite content to not create leftovers that look funny. Clifford Geertz once remarked that this was the way of all culture, that our cultures are designed to create self-contained units and stories that defined who we are, by way of insulated stories that give us meaning. And as such, after living as a minority in my zip code, I still feel a little awkward. I’ve never felt in danger; I’ve never felt threatened or uneasy, but I’ve never truly felt a part of what happens around me.
Part of the problem is that, as has been pointed out, I can’t know what it’s like to live as those around me. I have my ways out, and my sojourn in a state of poverty is somewhat self-imposed, and always like Barabara Ehrenreich’s sojourns into poverty, escapable at any time. I could abandon my studies, get a job, and forget this experiment in communal living. I could forgo biking to campus and buy a Tahoe. I live stuck between a world that I can never inhabit, and one that I can never fully leave.
I bike past Dee’s and wish, likethis Lebanese restaurant in the midst of a largely Hispanic neighborhood, that maybe I could blend in a little more, be less noticable. Maybe some day my neighbors will think it normal for someone around here to wear khakis on occasion or carry a bag of books. I’ve given up trimming my beard or hair, in the hopes that maybe soon I can simply hide behind it and quit the hard road of finding a place among my neighbors. It’s easier than having Coach over to watch Monday Night football or letting Calvin wash the car, or not rolling my eyes when Dacia comes over to collect her social security checks we let come to the house. It’s the path of least resistance to hope that by buying neighborhood chicken, I am making a difference.
I want to be able to do more, to be more, to integrate my learning about how the 4th century formed what we know as Christianity into the doing of dishes and the digging of ditches. But I’m not sure where the connect is. Maybe Karl Rahner was right, that in us knowing God as Creator, we also know the Son as Savior, that the Triune God is with us all the time. Maybe Karl Barth was right, that people are estranged from God, and that by the church’s work and witness, the revealed God in Christ is known. Or maybe I should find something else to do, like climb telephone poles or empty trash cans, because making what my heart and mind love and where my feet walk come together is killing me.
My name is Myles, and I am learning how to be a teacher.
Canon-Ball
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From a discussion on how Scripture came about:
” I’m not trying to pit devtion against inspiration, just trying to show that the way the two worked together for the way canon came together is more complicated than “this must be of God”. For example, when the earliest Christian apologists defended Christianity, appealing to Christ’s fulfilling of prophecy, all they were going on was the OT. The NT as we know it was not even a consideration yet. as churches grew and began to consider Christ the center of the worship, the writings of Paul, John, Luke, etc, that testified to Christ were the ones that were used in the canon. It’s not until polemics get involved that the canon closes up. Now, as for Athanasius. His situation: a little complicated.
By 362, he’s back from exile for the second time, and defending one version of Christianity against the predominant version of the empire–note: (THIS IS IMPORTANT)–what Athanasius was defending was the vastly MINORITY position on Jesus, and I might add, a position of salvation that would make most churchgoers today choke. End sidebar…
In Alexandria, in 362 when Athanasius posits the canon, it’s not something he’s coming up with originally, or something people haven’t thought of, but what he percieves to be the common consensus of “books” that testify to the Son and the Father being co-substantial. So, yes, it has to do with the truth about Christ, and yes, it has to do with inspiration, but it has a lot to do with the church catholic was already doing. LIke it or not, that was how it happened. There’s no need to divorce what the church was already doing from how canon came about; if the Spirit was working through the earlier church, then why can’t the two coinside, which they did?
This doesn’t make Scripture into Robert’s Rules of Order or a bedside devotional, but it requires us to believe that the Spirit was working in the churches prior to the existence of the canon, even…without the canon. there were plenty of books, as you note, that were considered orthodox and testified rightly to Christ, but didn’t make the cut, mostly because they weren’t catholic, that is, universal in scope and use.
And that’s the rest of the story.
Sometimes, I wish I just didn’t know. It’s easier to think that the way that Scripture came about was cordial or even peaceful. But when you know that some books didn’t make the cut simply because they didn’t address the key issue at the time, it makes one realize that the work of God is a lot messier and more complicated than we give it credit for being. God worked through a bloody emperor? Certain translations of the Old Testament didn’t make it in because a zealous group of Hebrew translators massacred another group? We really almost had a book in the Bible that talked about Jesus being like a phoenix?
It would be enough to make me lose hope altogether in Scripture…if it weren’t all so fascinating. To think that the Spirit would use such bizarre instances and people to testify to the one singular thing: that God is, and delivers, and does so for no other reason than because He desires to do so. In a way, it’s the most comforting truth of Scripture, that what God does, He chooses to do not only on behalf of humanity, but through humanity as well. It makes the whole thing no less the work of God or the free choice of God, but beautiful in that what was done through Christ was done with all that our guts entail in mind.
Prof Grading
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Note before reading:
At the PhD level, this kind of thing would be career suicide. I do not recommend ANYTHING here, except that I wish I’d had something like this when I was an undergrad.
Barbara’s Back and I’m Going Hungry
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One of my favorite authors today is Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, mostly because she combines incisive commentary with practical immersion in her topic. She doesn’t write about things like poverty or economic impact from her suburban house, but rather immerses herself in that world, knowing that she can get out at any time, but staying in in order to find out what it really means to be, in the case of Nickel, poor. Her new book, coming out this month, which I highly recommend, deals with the middle class and their plight. She has an earlier one on this topic, related to middle class values, and the lean towards conservatism in middle class thinking, and if you can get your hands on a used copy, it’s also excellent.
I am reminded more and more that to understand a people, or a person, one has to ultimately sacrifice one’s own place, and become what the other is. I’ve been plowing through a large chunk of Karl Barth’s Dogmatics’ teaching on the meaning of reconciliation, and what it means that the Son became human, one of the most radical implications being that, simply, because Jesus was human, the condemnation that comes because of sin fell not on one who would not feel it, but one who knows the weight of condemnation as a human being. I nearly lost my breath reading him this weekend.
There’s a discussion thread here that makes me nuts, not because the questions being raised are wrong, but because the whole argument presupposes that one can understand the plight of someone from outside their situation. In essence, it argues that one can effectively do what Jesus did: become fully other than what one is while not compromising onesself. The whole thing turns on an assumption that in order to be able to understand what it means to be poor in New Orleans, one does not have to be poor, logic which absolutely defies the logic of the Gospel, which says that Jesus came not to “see what human life was like”, but because the free choice of being human was part and parcel what was involved to have the right to judge, and save, us in the first place.
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So, here’s what I propose, and spread the challenge if you want. I propose that for one year, before uttering another word on the nature of poverty, that the following be attempted: to live as they do. Take the median poverty standard, which is available here, and try to live faithfully on this. I think we’ll find that a lot of choices that we take for granted aren’t so granted when finances come to bear.
It’s a challenge. I’m trying. I waste money. I buy books and CDs and wasted money this afternoon on Chik-Fil-A. I’ll waste money tonight on coffee, and tomorrow on a beer. I throw money and resources down the toilet hand over fist, and then complain about tight finances. But if I believe that the way of reconciliation is that laid down by Jesus for us to model, then there is no other way than to try to live in the way that those around me do.
Who’s with me?
