Two days in a row. This is a new record.
Living in a college town is great for any number of reasons. I’ll do a full-blown meditation on that at some point, but for the moment, I celebrate the greatness that is the occasional rock-star academic coming through town. So, last night, I had a beer with Charles Marsh. Just me and Chuck, drinking a brewski.
I’ve written before about Marsh here, and so for a while he’s been on my dream top-5 list that everyone has: the five people you’d like to just sit and chat with. I have a couple of those lists, one academic and one real-people lists, and Charles made that list after I read his accounts of the Civil Rights movment and the theological negotiations that went on there, the way that various people understood their involvement, or lack of involvement, as directly related to God. Beloved Community is fantastic and well-worth your time, but if you want a wild ride, go read God’s Long Summer and read the chapter about the KKK Grand Dragon and his theological rationale for his work. It will knock your socks off.
So, last night, Charles did a lecture on campus, and using my sway as an editor at Baylor University Press, I brought him a few books and chatted for a few minutes before his talk–the usual small talk of times and places and affirmations, concluding with “I’d love to hear what you’re working on these days”, to which he responded, “Sure. Is there a place to get a beer around here?”
Over beer and chips and salsa, we talked for a few minutes about books, partly about how he was tied up with a mammoth new Bonhoeffer biography for the next few years and partly about those books that formed us as people, our agreements about Bonhoeffer, our disagreements. But what I noticed more than anything was that Charles Marsh is a genuinely nice human being. With most academics, the conversation falters when you get beyond what they’re working on, but with Charles, the conversation glided from basketball to rock music to the connection between co-operations between the church and secular movements and violence. Charles, if you’re reading this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that question: didn’t mean to stump you in the midst of your wine, but I think it’s the million-dollar question:
There’s an interesting pattern that emerges in both of the worlds that Charles writes about. In the life of Bonhoeffer, Bonhoeffer goes from being an avowed advocate for non-violence to participating in a plot to assassinate Hitler; in the life of the Civil Rights movement, movements which are non-violent in nature eventually are co-opted to involve more radical and less pacifist solutions. The connection? As I see it, both cases involve a shift away from working with specifically confessing organizations, and into pragmatic partnerships with like-minded individuals: SNCC gets tired of waiting and draws in urban radicals; Bonhoeffer joins up with secularists and humanists to save Germany; both cases involve a shift from peaceableness to the acceptance of violence as a means.
The problem with this is that the church and anarchists mean very different things materially with regards to peace. For the Christian, peace is wholeness, patience, joy, love and the rest. For an anarchists, peace is the absence of oppression; for the the Christian peace is the means and the end, for the way home is the goal we are looking for, namely Christ. For the secular, means and ends do not have this intimate connection. Jeff Stout and Rom Coles have written some interesting stuff with regards to democratic process that try to link up ends and means, but on the whole in the secular, the ends of collaboration are facilitated not by collaboration, but power and coersion and money.
This is not to say that the church fails miserably in its calling to have the same means as it does ends. But it remains our calling none the less.
Last night, I heard a friend read a portion from Annie Dillard’s American Childhood. First of all, if you’ve never read any Annie Dillard, might I suggest her classic Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek? Maybe Teaching a Stone to Talk? She has the combination of powers of mystic and journalist that just kills me. Hearing her words is like taking a warm shower when you’ve pulled your back. First, the words soothe with a silver cadence that is reserved for those that have steeped their lives in poetry. If you’ve heard good poetry, ever wondered how Billy Collins came to be or lost yourself in the Four Quartets, you know what I mean. But that’s not where her words stop. After being seduced by their cadence, their lull and repeat, their ebb and flow like the evening tide, they get inside you. The shower becomes less a massage than a baptism, and your throat becomes full and your eyes become full and the follicles of your scalp alive with water everywhere.
You become part of the water. The water ceases to simply soothe, and you begin to yearn for your own body to up it’s percentages, break past 70%, 80%, 90%, and to liquify down the drain, that you too might be part of the water.
That’s reading Annie Dillard. She makes me want to catch a bus to Virginia and live in a cabin.
**
Hearing her last night reminded me of how much I love meditations and good writing. And so, claiming neither of those of my own writing, I’m back to writing what I started this blog nearly five years ago to do: write. Haikus have been a good entry point, to get me thinking about writing, but it’s time to start building. Partly because I’m spending all day reading bad writing for the most part, and partly because good writing often has bad objects in mind (Tom Perotta’s Little Children is the first example to come to mind: don’t waste your time), but there’s catharsis in putting good writing down: there’s prayer in it. And I need prayer. And so, I need writing. I need to get back in the water, hopefully, to start shedding skin cells, drinking it in in little sips, and hopefully, to shut my eyes under it.
The haikus will come back time and time again, as needed, or as Sean and Kevin demand them. Or Riley. But I need to write again, mostly because I need to pray.
(sniff) I ran this morn,
But that smells like pure skid mark.
Is my coffee bad?
