Last night, I had all manner of dreams, of past events, and mostly of past failures, of getaways and ones that got away.
Of presents, and pasts, and hopes and aspirations and deep slumbers.
And in that moment of waking, they gathered and showed themselves like shorelines to hungry captains.
I woke, in a moment of ache, and prayed,
“Lord, my past is rising from the dead. But so have you.”
**
Faulkner once said, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past”, meaning by that that those things we try to relegate to ‘history’ refuse to stay in the great beyond, outside the scope of the ‘present’, that in day-to-day living that which happened three years ago and that which is happening today are often contemporaries. One read of “A Rose for Emily” will tell you that, that when we sleep with our past today, we are sleeping not with ghosts, but with real corpses.
The easy answer would be this: that the past is dead and buried, gone forever. But it is the past which has laid the path for the present, choices of three years ago upon which the choices and thoughts of today are predicated. I cannot undo what is behind, for to undo it would be to undo myself. I am not the sum total of my past decisions, but the past decisions in some way limit the scope of what today can look like: if I robbed a bank four years ago, I cannot run for President today.
So, when we say that Christ brings us up from the dead, when we cling to the resurrection of the dead, that there is life born out of death, are we saying that the past is gone? Again, to destroy the past is to destroy ourselves, and to leave us rootless and floating, disemboweled parts in a blank universe, without past, without future, eternally and agonizingly present.
For Christ to raise our lives from the dead is for Christ to bring the past that never was into a future that can yet be. The wisdom that we did not heed years ago still speaks, often as a judge, but in Christ, this past is resurrected as a sage. Opportunities squandered that damn us as regret can be born again in new flesh as new standards for the future. Old wounds that still seep find new life in the future as compassion for others blundering down the same roads.
In Christ, the resurrection means in part that the past we silenced can yet speak, and guide us into a future we thought lost and gone forever.
1) I am banned for life from the Video One store chain.
2) I love eggplant, especially grilled.
3) My first alcohol was while working at a Christian camp.
4) I really don’t care about New York City at all.
5) I nearly died climbing the mountain in Ireland.
6) I made a living for two years as a photographer.
7) Skirts are not made for three people to wear.
8 ) Life goal: to ump summer league baseball.
9) Life goal: to go to all the major league ball parks. 3M Park doesn’t count.
10) For my 28th birthday, we did dinner and snuck a bottle of wine into Borat.
11) There exist pictures of myself in a Speedo.
12) I’ve been skinny-dipping in three states.
13) I lived on an organic farm one summer.
14) I was a camp counselor for five autistic children.
15) Ideal locale: North Carolina—snow, mountains, beach, forests in one state.
16) My favorite colors are blue and grey.
17) Mom still sends me holiday gifts: St. Patrick’s Day, Valentine’s Day…
18) Hot dogs with relish rule.
19) I gravitate towards sweet beers.
20) I’d love to vacation in Montana.
21) I don’t understand the allure of Swedish pop music, except maybe Aha.
22) A good evening is tea, Miles Davis, and a book.
23) I have run a marathon.
24) I never had allergies before moving to Texas.
25) One of my favorite smells is photograph fix.
26) I live between Catholic theology and Mennonite practice.
27) I would love to go to Australia.
28) I’ve never been to Canada before, and will go twice this summer.
29) I hate Dallas. May the apocalypse strike it first.
30) Heavy metal makes great driving music.
31) Nicholas Cage’s only good movie is Raising Arizona.
32) I am John Cusack. Or would like to be circa 1987 John Cusack.
33) Three books that changed me: Brothers K, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Cost of Discipleship
34) Since turning 25, my B.O. has really ramped up.
35) I rarely floss, and feel guilty about it.
36) My taxi broke down in Mexico.
37) I have performed a wedding and screwed up the wedding license.
38) I’d like to go back to Nona’s in Springfield and see if the chicken parm is as good as I remember it.
39) I don’t really believe there’s such a thing as “public reason”.
40) I still pull out my Christian punk albums on occasion.
41) I like one of the three dogs at our house.
42) I call Waco home.
43) Jesus came to me in a dream once on a Ferris Wheel.
44) The only movie I’ve ever walked out on was Toys (Robin Williams). Not funny.
45) I like live theatre more than movies.
46) Love the cranberry juice, don’t understand grapefruit juice.
47) I get nervous about failure and success.
48) I sweat a lot. I mean, like buckets. In the winter.
49) My favorite baseball player growing up was Mike Schmidt.
50) Neil Golemo has a great cackle.
I’ll be in College Station for the next two days hanging out with Hammy. If you’re in the neighborhood, bring coffee, backgammon, or beer, and a book. It’s Spring Break, and we’re doing what grad students do during Spring Break: study.
If it’s McCain versus Hillary, I’m not voting. I was hopeful for Obama, if only because he hasn’t been part of Washington DC for the last two decades. But this is more of the same. The thought of voting for either one makes me nauseous: Hillary because she’s a broken record, and McCain because he’s crazy.
Bob, it can’t be quietism when the only options for speaking are shouting or ranting.
For starters, I’m about 87% sure that I’m voting for Obama, should he get the nomination. I like his nuancing of health care; I like that he’s been a community organizer and pro-bono lawyer; I like that he’s a confessed churchman for the last twenty years; I like that his family, until recently, has relatively been out of the spotlight. I even like that he’s not polished: he’s a great speechmaker, but he gets tired and shows it.
But I’m not voting in the primaries, for a few reasons:
**
First, it’s raining, and I have five chapters of Augustine to outline this morning. Priorities. Then lunch with Garcia. Priorities. And then, more reading followed by more reading. Priorities.
Secondly, I’m not convinced that a change in the president will really make much difference. If I believed that superstructures really generated that much on the local level in this country, then sure, but everyone knows that the states retain a great deal of authority apart from federal income taxes and the like. I will say this: I hope that whoever gets elected has the good sense to repeal No Child Left Behind, and initiate some sort of withdrawal from Iraq, but either Barack or Hillary will do that, so I’m not that worried. But the major decisions of human life: love, death, sex, eating–these are made in localities, not in municipalities.
Third, I don’t really trust democracy that much. By that I mean the kind of reasoning that excludes religious reasoning a priori from political decisions. On the local level, again, when people really make decisions, it’s a joke to say that they bracket off their specifically religious concerns. If I’m a Christian, then to say that I’m advocating for a homeless shelter because I think it’s “morally the right thing to do” is a joke: I’m advocating for it because I believe that Jesus wants us to care for the poor. Sure, it makes long-term fiscal sense to get people off the streets, but that’s not why I argue for it.
All this to say, vote your conscience: may we submit our reasoning to the Spirit, and follow the movement of God, which is always for the reconciliation of the world with itself and with God, which is always for the return of the children to the Father, and always for the fulfilling of the commandments. I’ll enjoy leftovers and coffee: tell me how it goes out there.
