Taking Off and Landing
For the Beauty of the Earth
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So, the summer’s shaping up like such:
July–work for Baylor Press, and slave over German for graduate students.
August–go back to classes, sleep as much as possible before hand, work through a few things that will make next Fall infinitely easier.
But wait Myles…that leaves May and June out…what are you doing then?
So glad you asked. May is most likely going to be travel month. I’ll be done with papers by May 1, at which time I’m hoping to skip out for a week or two and do some driving. All over creation: Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, the Carolinas, to see friends, visit this place, see this person get ordained, etc. In the meantime, I hope to just have a lot of time in the car during which I’ll listen to music, pray, and just breathe and hope the car makes it back to Texas in one piece.
In June, and possibly in May, I’ll be at World Hunger Relief, Inc., just north of town, living off the land.
I’ve had several friends who have lived here over the years, all of whom have had nothing but great things to say about it. The farm was started in the 1970s as a place to train international relief workers how to do agriculture in sustainable ways, without the benefit of big farm equipment or things that folks in the two-thirds world won’t have access to. In other words, how to grow food without cheating. They house anywhere from twenty to forty folks at a time, and the best part is if you volunteer twenty hours a week, you get free room and board.
I walked into the common dorm where the rotating cast of volunteers live, and immediately was on my grandparents farm in Montgomery, Louisiana. Growing up, I would spend a week in the summers there, helping them pick okra or tomatoes, fishing, and doing whatever you do in the country. As a kid from the city, about two days was enough. After that, I really started jonesing for something to do other than read a book or go swim at my aunt’s pool. But as an adult, I crave that quiet and silence. I crave hard work and rest as its own reward.
The days there run from early morning, before the coffee’s ready until the heat of the day. I’ll be digging and working with sweat and blood. I can’t wait. Walking around out there, even on a ridiculously murky day, I knew that participating in what this group is about is part of what Nietzsche refers to as the “master morality”. Mark, when I come back, I promise an entire post on how this is part of the Christian life. I swear. Working in something like this is a constructive response to things like consumerism and violence. Rather than standing on a street corner playing the game on the terms of the oppressor or asking for the world to stop so I can get a handle on its violence, places like the farm are working to do part of what the Gospel asks: that we help our neighbor, without demanding that the ones ignoring the neighbor pay attention.
Wendell Berry writes that technology is an excuse for us to not get to know one another. And while I can’t say that things like electricity and blogs and gasoline are terrible in and of themselves, I can say that life is full of dispensible material and delicious clutter. For one month, I’m going to try to do without. My reasons have almost nothing to do with some radical call to discipleship, a little more to do with free board, a little more than that to do with the exotic nature of the place, and a whole lot to do with the need to reconnect to that which God has already given us: the fruits of the earth and the sweat on our forehead.
***
FYI–I’m out til Tuesday visiting friends in the Carolinas. The calm before the storm that is the final push for the semester. A much-needed trip to see people where their lives are lived.
Dropping Dope Rhymes
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I went to bed at 10:30 last night. My body hated me for giving it more than the customary six hours. I think it’s just spoiled, frankly.
With my Nietzsche paper under wraps for the most part, my attention for the semester is going to decidedly turn towards the other crap on the table. I’ve got the one on Bonhoeffer, the one on Frei, and the critical review on Caird left to do for the semester, and they’ll be my babies for the next month or so. I frankly am really going to hate leaving Nietzsche behind so to speak: he’s been a great conversation partner. To be honest, he’s been more convincing than a lot of other voices.
One of his most vaunted opinions has to do with what he terms “slave morality”, that morality which begins with what one considers “bad”, and from that constructing what is “good”. For example: a vulture is in the sky; the lamb is on the field. The lamb looks up at the bird, knowing that the vulture wants nothing more than mutton for lunch, and calls the vulture bad. Nietzsche notes here that it’s ridiculous to call the vulture bad, because it’s responding to its nature. It can do no other than to eat the lamb. It doesn’t waste time calling the lamb “bad”, because, in truth, it really likes the lamb. What the vulture does is preferable to what the lamb does because the vulture’s way of looking at the world doesn’t spin off of what the lamb is, but what the vulture knows it must do.
To extend this further: one’s opinions, when constructed on the basis, positively or negatively, of what someone else wants, is slave morality. When I decide that not killing my roommate who is in the shower is bad because it might really upset my roommate, that’s slave morality. Call it courtesy if you want; really, I’m a slave to the desires of another person. Same thing goes for religion: if you call “good” what God has called good, your creation of morals is predicated on what another person has set before you as bad. For example–the tree of good and evil? To even be able to distinguish between the two is predicated on our saying that one is not the other, that good is “not evil”.
It’s a very compelling argument that how we construct what is good is simply a negative response to what we decide is evil. We decide the Simpsons are bad, so we read. We decide meat is bad, so we then become vegetarians. We decide Wal-Mart is bad, and so we spend our time badmouthing capitalism. For Nietzshce, these are all subtle forms of being a slave: we have let something we describe as negative be the means by which we function in goodness. Rather than living in such a way which rather just ignores the opposite, we spend our energy opposing it.
The lesson for the church is to take this modified lesson, not that we should reject calling some things, like genocide or child molestation, bad all the way down, but that we should remember the subtle temptation of basing our actions on reaction, that we should love God because we have been called by God into love, that we should love others not based on what they have done to us, that we should call all that has been made good because it has been made by God, and that we should be okay with liking Def Leppard even if the really uncool station in town does play them.
Because, holy crap, Photograph is just a great song.
We have but one master, and that makes us all the best kind of slaves.
Without Hope or Agenda, Pt. 2
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I’ve already blogged my thoughts on this film once before, and after finally breaking down and buying a copy, I watched it tonight and was reminded why it’s such an amazing piece of work. Aside from the hopeless romantic in me that loves the fact that I was that ten-year-old kid once running through the airport…well, I was the eight-year-old boy who kissed the girl next to me at the lunch table. Not quite an airport, not quite as dramatic, but the statement was made.
And then she got up and tattled to Mrs. Harris.
Snitch.
**
What happened to that kid? Where’d he go? Did he get lost on the way to puberty? Somewhere along the line, you just learn that putting your neck on the block isn’t the smartest way to go, nor is it way to a long and productive life. It’s the way to a good movie ending, but not the way to assure yourself that things really do end up right. If you want that assurance, don’t ever put your neck on the block, and you’ll be able to go along just fine, assured that if indeed you did stretch out, you’d get a reprieve at the last minute. For the truth is that love is not safe, nor is it without great cost, nor is it without the total risk of getting the ever-loving shit kicked out of you. Love is costly, fine, rare, and hardly ever disease-free.
It’s also awfully boring, steady, relentless, snot-filled, runny-nosed, creaky-boned, and faithful. It’s a lot of really un-dramatic moments, filled with steam and forgiveness and hard sentences.
It’s filled with cotton, tied up in knots, raised from the dead, and terminal.
It’s a fire in the bones, a leaky faucet, a steady stream.
A furnace.
A locksmith at midnight.
Oxygen.
What happened to the guy who had the cajones to send his middle school crush flowers on Valentine’s Day? What happened to the guy who drove into the boonies with a box of waffles in his hand to pronounce his feelings? What happened to the guy who, when faced with the prospect of his high school crush dating someone else, told her what was what?
Did he get busy? Is he hiding? Is he reading too much or finding new life? Is he ripe fruit, falling from the tree?
Tell him I miss him if you see him.
Farewell, Bannerman
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I just found out, apparently three years late, that Steve Taylor has given up music. That’s right: he’s gone into the world of crappy film-making.
In case you forgot, or never knew, Steve Taylor was one of the shining lights of the CCM industry during my high school years. He’s one of the few that I would still listen to if I could find any of his CDs in my collection. They’re there somewhere, I’m sure, next to the Genesis and Newsboys.
So, do yourself a favor and track down a copy of his Chagall Guevara album. It’s just clever.
Closing Ranks
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“You screened them, you examined their denominational loyalty, their faith, their church background and commitment, their affirmation of the ‘Baptist Faith and Message.’ And our [staff] regional leaders are in touch with them, monitoring them. If there were any problems of doctrinal aberrations, of charismatic influences or practices, or even tolerance, or anyone not [properly] practicing baptism, or contributing in any way to ecumenical-type practices, we would know about it and deal with it.”
–Jerry Rankin, head of the International Mission Board, SBC
One has to wonder if the propogation here is of the church, mysterious and God’s. This is not to lsingle out the SBC against other groups, by any means, but to say that when the internal organizing of a body supercedes the openness that is neccesary as a church, the end is near.
This openness is not the reception of any old thing as Christian, but the anticipation of every new thing at the hand of God. As Christians, we believe that what is present is not the sum total of existence, but the world in part. What is to come, comes as a gift of God, unpredictable and new. And thus, any attempt to hold the interior logic of a church as final and unchangeable ignores the world to come, which will make all things new, new beyond our wildest dream, a world which even now is breaking in.
In Market We Trust
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I love that Yahoo and Google are desperate to do business with a country that still tortures its own religious dissidents.
What are we to do?
(HT: Lauro)
Careful Where Thou Treads
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Last night, I went with a couple of friends to a church we’ll call First Hand-Raiser. Having gone to a charismatic church as a kid by night, seeing a converted cafetorium with a couple hundred people in it, raising their hands to really loud up-tempo music doesn’t really faze me. My church now is kinda of an odd one by Baptist standards, in that in some ways, it feels nearly Catholic. We celebrate the church calendar; we do Communion multiple times a month; we have times of prayer for repentance. It calls to the part of me that desperately believes that part of what is so deeply right about church is the way that it reorders the world in ways that resist the tendency to make things so short or so small.
In other words, light years away from hand-raising.
But this story is not about Calvary Baptist.
This is about another body.
This particular congregation is famous in Waco for a number of things: energy, relentlessly annoying students, missions, and phrases like “I just feel X”. Lots of Jesus-is-my-boyfriend songs. So, last night, I sat in the back with a couple of curious friends and listened to testimony after testimony about a recent missions trip to Mexico. Nearly every other story had to do with physical healings or mass conversions, dramatic experiences of the Spirit, visions, signs and wonders.
As one who has studied religion, I believe what I heard largely because I’ve seen it, touched it, handled it. I’ve seen people speaking in tongues, emboldened to speak by the Spirit in ways that defy logic, felt moved to do things which made no sense at the moment, but in retrospect were prompted by a deeper movement than mere logic. Having known many people that have come through this church, I know there’s more than meets the eye, and that it falls prey to what happens in Pentecostal churches with regards to asking questions. I’m aware that people call it a cult, the way it uses catch phrases…the way I use catch phrases…, the way it simplifies mysteries. On and on and on.
I know the critiques. But I can’t say that what happens in the Spirit there is not true, nor not signs of the coming of the Kingdom of God. I understand and have experienced the Spirit in ways that are wild and in ways that drop my hands to my face in awe. And while I tend towards believing that the Spirit orders and empowers our lives in ways that constructively defy the logic of death itself, I can’t not believe that there are ways of the Spirit which make me really nervous and which I can’t explain.
***
I haven’t considered myself Southern Baptist, well, ever. Not really. It was a borrowed shirt for a while, but like all borrowed clothes, you either chalk it up as good will or give it back. I gave mine back. But every time I find this kind of statement, I still cringe. In essence, the SBC made policy that you can’t speak in tongues as part of prayer. Let me go on record as saying that I LOVE IT when the church attempts to be so Biblical that it discounts the miraculous.
This one takes second place as the most assinine thing I’ve read this year. But only by a little. Cut to the chase: only SBC baptisms are recognized by the SBC. Only those works that we recognize and which sound like ours, taste like ours, feel like ours can be, well, ours. And by that, I’ll venture to say that when they are fully ours, we are testing the waters implicitly to say that they are not fully God’s.
I sit in the back of a room and listen to stories of people being healed, and I have no way to account for this other than to say, “Thanks be to God.” Walk WIDELY around parameters of the Spirit, and be careful when you call something of the church crap. Be careful when saying that something is not of God, or that the Creator of the world must work in a specific way or in ways which the four corners of the Earth can hold. As Bill Cosby said to his youngest son, “I brought you into this world. I can take you out of it.”
The Blasphemy in My Old Jangly Walk
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Saturday night, Nickel Creek played the community college in town, and was no disappointment. Again, I say, if you get a chance to see them, do it: the on-stage banter alone is worth the price of admission. There’s nothing like three musical prodigy home-schooled kids melting your face with bluegrass renditions of Radiohead and Randy Newman.
Lent thus far has been, shall we say, illuminating. Chief of the abstainences is the beer, and as the weeks go on, it becomes more and more apparent to me the number of places I go where beer is part of the background noise. Whether it’s a local hole with some friends on Tuesdays or at a dinner gettogether on Friday night, the hops find their way in the front door and into my heart. But with Lent in full effect, I’ve put them aside and as a result, I find myself more and more aware of how often they knock on the door.
Now granted, they don’t knock more than once a week usually, and I’m inclined to let them in for a spell whenever they come around, but have you ever noticed that when you’re not doing something, it’s all that shows up? For example, Saturday night, Nickel Creek. I have a standing policy that if I’m at a really great show, and it’s not outrageous, a Shiner goes well with face-melting tunes. And this Saturday was no exception. Sitting next to a friend in some illictly acquired front-section seats, I enjoyed a cold, crisp Shiner Boch with bluegrass.
And rejoiced.
The point of Lent, after all, is not what you are denying yourself, to prove that you can, or that you should. The point of giving up is that you might put in something of better worth: Scripture, prayer, meditation. I’ll say that I’ve done a pretty dung job of the latter, while managing to do the letter of Lent pretty well, as if driving out seven strong men was going to keep them from coming back and f-ing up the place worse on the rebound.
During Lent, I have lied.
During Lent, I have lusted.
During Lent, I have been two-faced and unclean.
During Lent, I have revelled in my bustedness and habits.
But I almost kept from drinking beer.
**
One of Nietzshce’s sharpest criticisms of Christianity, aside from it being slave morality, is that it lacks life and vibrancy, that it takes life-denial and makes a fine art out of it. And while I’ve said before that part of denial is so that we might receive the thing back in the right way, there’s something to Nietzsche’s bark. When Christian practices of giving up become ends unto themselves, we’ve lost our way to Jericho, and gotten the crap kicked out of us by bandits and robbers. When denial is for the sake of denial, and not so that we may rejoice more greatly in the presence of God, we’ve stuck around moaning about the cross and forgotten that all we see now is the resurrection.
Eat. Drink. Be merry.
Tommorrow, you die. Tommorrow, your denial of life will be final as dust fills up your lungs. Tommorrow, you will enter into life unknown.
And God forbid you be unprepared with how to rightly celebrate.
More Ostentatious Musical Recommendations
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Both my papers I needed to crank out this week are in the bag, barring the necessary revisions. If you really want to read them, I’ll be glad to let you peek, but I’m not promising too much. In the meantime, while Kevin hangs out in the Dominican Republic, and Celina hits South by Southwest in Austin, and Jennifer hits the West coast, I’ll be hanging out with this book, and listening to some fine tunes as I draft my fantasy baseball team tonight:
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones–The Hidden Land. The new album from the master of the jazz/bluegrass combo. It’s really nice stuff. In fact, you should do yourself a favor and pick this one up too. It’s too much goodness to take in all at once.
Queen–Greatest Hits, Vol. 2. It’s true: Freddie Mercury was one of the greatest frontmen of all time. Charismatic, boisterious, and completely on fire. And the music’s really great stuff.
Josh Rouse–Nashville–one of my current favorite singer/songwriter types. He’s pop, but in the best way possible. Catchy. Dance in your room kinda-catchy.
In the coming months, this, this, and this are going to put me into a music coma. What have I done to inherit ears which behold such glory?
But in the meantime, there are more papers to crank through. Somewhere, a meatgrinder is smiling.
