Taking Off and Landing
On Voting or Not
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The national fervor over voting (which I participated in) has become a national diet supplement for actual political involvement. In being so excited about voting about those who will vote and deciding about those who will decide, America has said two things: 1) the epitome of being political is to abandon one’s ability to be political, and 2) “America” is a legislative idea, not an actual one. Let me explain:
1) By being so excited about voting for the voters and deciding for the deciders, what we have effectively said is that being political is an agency which not only has to be channelled through certain filters (bureaucracies, legislative houses, etc.), but that these legislative bodies are the eptiome of being political. In other words, what you or I might do on a local level is less-than-political. In being so excited about electing electors, we have forgotten that people are meant to be political, i.e. self-organizing. There are better or worse ways of doing this, but the point is that by being so excited about having someone who will decide things for us, we have said that to be TRULY political, one has to give up one’s own ability and hand it to another. In other words, we should wait on the government to fix schools, or on the government to help people get jobs, or on the government to do X.
Seriously? Tutoring a kid or taking someone to a job interview is a political act! It’s acknowledging that the federal level is ultimately unable to live up to its claim to take care of things on a broad level, and doing the work anyway. To look to the act of electing as the height of political involvement is to abandon any sense of change that doesn’t happen outside the bounds of legislative act.
2) By being so excited about voting and electing, “America” has become a legislative ideal, not an actual one. “America” now means a body of laws and lawmakers, not the people themselves. Forgetting that the laws are ultimately things we’ve put on over against ourselves, we treat the law as the thing we cannot live up to, and the thing which ultimately defines what Americans are. People are more than their laws, and more than their legislators (hopefully). They are pluriform and multitude, uncontainable by legislation. Legislation helps provide some bounds, but if these are so necessary, why do they keep shifting in response to the people? Because the people are the ones running the show.
All this is to say that when we vote today, let us realize that what we’re doing is ONE MORE WAY of being political, not the ultimate way. Voting is us speaking our minds on a national level, but does NOT take the place of BEING political. Don’t wait on elected officials to do the work that people are always meant to do: feed one another, teach one another, and take care of each other. Tutor a child, cook a meal for your neighbor, help a teenage mom beat the tax system.
Yes, I voted; you can if you want, but I’ll say that it’s ONE way among others of living out the political life.
Best of Both Worlds
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Tonight, as I watched the All-Star game, a moment was taken after the 4th inning to honor one of the game’s best: Roberto Clemente. I’ve never been much of a Pirates fan; growing up, for reasons unbeknownst to only God, I was a Giants fan. But as a child, I was a lover of baseball history. I had big, thick books documenting baseball lore, with great stories of Ty Cobb, Roger Hornsby, Juan Marichal, Bob Gibson. I remember reading about Bob Feller and the 1948 Cleveland Indians, about the ‘69 Mets, about Lou Brock. Growing up, these were my heroes.
Roberto Clemente, however, stands apart as one of the rare breed of baseball players who was an amazing human being. Aside from winning 13 Gold Gloves, collecting 3,000 hits, and being a 12-time All-Star, he was a family man and never forgot what was important. Thus, at the age of 38, he was escorting a plane of supplies to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua, when the plane went down. His body was never found.
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Reflecting upon my time at the farm, more and more I find myself drawn to those theologians whose work makes an intimate connection between the events of history and the task of theology. If theology has nothing to say to the farmer, then I have to question the value of speaking of it at all. If the language of theology, as has been argued, is really just a matter of psychology, or economics, or physics, then why bother learning this new language of causality, of sin and redemption, of contingency and grace?
Charles Marsh teaches theology at the University of Virginia, and is fast becoming one of my theological heroes. In November, I’ll hopefully be able to shake his hand and tell him thanks for being an example of those that pull together the world of suffering and the world of philosophical theology in a way that, for me, makes sense.
His books on civil rights and religion are matched only by his one on Bonhoeffer, another one of my loves. But here’s the best part: he directs a center at UVA called The Project on Lived Theology, which connects theological reflection with real social action. Unlike a lot of social action projects which never get their hands dirty, Marsh’s project is explicitly involved with getting people involved in thinking theologically and getting their hands in the air. I love it; it’s one of my pipe dreams to find a way to sneak in the back door there.
So, on this day of baseball, here’s to those that do practice their craft and do it with the right ends in mind: that gifts are for giving away, and that our art is for healing. Thank you Charles and Roberto for reminding me that there are those who do what they do, and not for themselves.
Go National League.
The Revenge of the Angry Vagina
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Last night, I went to the annual performance of the Vagina Monologues, in support of V-Day, a national movement to shed light on and stop violence against women and girls. A few nights ago at the Amnesty meeting, the guest speaker from the Women’s Abuse Center in town told us horrific stories of the relative silence there is on the issue, of cops who wouldn’t arrest, of husbands who cyclically beat their wives. I left the meeting at once dejected and questioning the utter futility of my degree.
I mean, really…if I wanted to do something about the half a million instances of spousal abuse that happen in Texas each year, I’d go back for a social work degree, right? I have a lot of friends in the department; switching wouldn’t be that painful; there’s not much being offered in the Fall in Theology. More than once, the thought has crossed my mind, and frankly, some days, as I slug through hundreds of pages of ancient theology on the origin of being and the hierarchy of angels, I want to scream out, “I’m not even sure if I believe in angels, but I do believe in justice!”
And it’s true.
I have my doubts about some aspects of theology, of its utility, of its orientation. Part of my frustration with academic theology is that too often it sees itself as a self-encased conch shell, nurturing further outgrowths of its own housing, forgetting that it is part of a much larger ocean. It forgets the legacy of Augustine, Aquinas, Bonhoeffer, and Barth, who were brilliant thinkers and who at the same time were pastors, oriented towards God and towards the world. To forget the second part of this is to forget, as Augustine pointed out, that some things are to be enjoyed, and some things are to be used. Theology, in my estimation, in the academy, has fallen tragicallyinto that former category, when it was always meant to be used in our enjoyment of God.
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Last night, after the show, a friend asked me, “So when you’re watching this, what are you really thinking?” I had just heard monologues of women’s experiences of being woman, of first loves, of sexual excitement, letting all those private conversations out into the public arena, and making me blush all over again. And frankly, when I hear them, I have no idea what I’m thinking. I’m not a woman; I don’t know what it’s like to have your first period, or to be repressed under the Taliban, or to face the threat of genital mutilation in Africa. When the Angry Vagina monologue burst on the stage, I found myself wanting to belly laugh, but afraid, because frankly, I had no first hand experience with any of the humor. It’s like watching the Kings of Comedy and wanting to laugh, but not sure if it’s okay. It’s an awkward and exhilerating experience, because as you watch hundreds of women crying with laughter, you realize:
“This must be true.”
All the illusions about women’s experiences start to fall off. You start to hear things that women think, but don’t say. As a guy, I start to think about things like hair and romance in ways I never had before. You realize that speaking the truth about a situation has a power that essays can never have, and that is that the speakers stand before you, look you in the eye, hold your hand, and tell what you never even thought about before.
If theology is to regain its’ footing, it must remember that it has feet, that the work of theology is not only in the sitting down, but in the standing up and raising one’s hands. It must remember that it is not an ivory tower, nor a gated castle, but a ribald experiment in making a total jackass out of itself. It must remember that it is not respected, nor exalted, but dirty, extravagant, lively, engaging, disruptive, and a whole lot of fun. In short, it must remember that it has stories to tell which upset the way other stories want to keep quiet, and that the process of telling that story is a great ride.
Exercise Your Democracy and Validate My Life!
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For the last several months, I’ve been contributing to this website, a place for junkie religion grad students and profs to kick stuff around. Anyway, we’ve been nominated for an award here. So, if you read this and love me—and believe me, your love for me is directly tied to into this—vote for our site.
Get Your TV Guide
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If you watched Extreme Home Makeover this week, you saw a little camp for special needs camp in southwest Missouri being transformed. I worked at that place six years ago, and my life since has been a large sense a response to that summer, turned in response to seeing the church working in the midst of less than ideal circumstances.
This week, TV Guide is donating 10% of the proceeds to Camp Barnabas in conjunction with the show. So, go support a slice of grace. It’s too much to explain, other than to say that when you have worked with kids whose lives are radically different than yours from birth, many of the existential questions we ask about life are truly immaterial. The Gospel slips past words and into the realm of the mysterious.
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.
Hitting the Road
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Two weeks ago, I began to mull over the consequences of living within ten minutes of campus, and putting more miles on my car in the last two years than my friend who works at child protective services. Was I really needing to make as many trips as I was? Could there be a possible better way to do all of this? Is there possibly a way to avoid paying $2.50 a gallon for gas?
The possibilites:
1) Reject use of gasoline altogether. Grow my own veggies. Farm. Abandon the use of technological achievement and stake out my own homestead in the middle of Waco. Grow my beard out beyond its very full length, dial up the Farmer’s Market, and scrap all hope of having a date go in my car. Provided that, first, I get a date.
2) Rampantly promote the use of force to secure necessary fuels for the global economy to not change the current arrangement, provide me with cheap bananas, and reduce the use of walking to a bare minimum. After all, two blocks completely justifies the use of an gas-burning engine, I believe.
3) Buy a bike. Start biking to campus. Minimize trips on the basis of wasted fuel, and lose belly fat in the process.
Enter option #3 and my new K2 bike. Thank you, Sports Authority for your reasonable prices, and your 25% off sale this weekend. This is the second incarnation of a bike that I’ve owned, the first having been stolen out of a backyard shed, despite having been chained to a floor lamp. I envision the thief lugging the lamp down the street in the attempt to sell a cheap bike for more–it’s a combo deal after all–and wish him well in his endeavor.
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With my parents in town this weekend for my deacon ordination tomorrow, I took them out to Homestead Heritage, a Mennonite community west of town, to show them a simpler way. Mom grew up in a rural community, and was able to identify with the traditional crafts: the quilting, the sewing, the fresh-baked goods that oozed out of the grist mill. Dad’s gotten into woodworking and metal-casting as of late, and was in awe that someone can take a log and turn it into a rocking chair in as little as a week.
The whole time, I am reminded that the world does not function as a result of a gas economy, nor does the world revolve on preservatives. In creation, the resources are abundantly available for full and creaturely life, without resorting to limited goods that would create in us rationless fears and blanket numbness to the goodness that is woven into the world.
And so, the biking life begins. It will require compromises: forethought as to what books are really needed in a day, and what tools are really necessary for labor, and what can be left behind. It means that I’ll have to think ahead as far as what I wear, and what is impractical. I’ll have to admit that some days, I’ll have to drive, and sometimes, I’ll have to leave the bike out of deference to a crapload of books that have to go back to the library.
In other words, this will be work. This is no perfect rebellion against the tyranny of oil, but a small step towards saying that the way things are is not the way they have to be. But since when has greasing the wheels of sustainability ever been easy?
Green Clean
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There’s always time for stories, but first, a word for another worthy cause….
In an age of assumption that oil has to be the way of life, there are always alternatives. Green Mountain Energy, for you in a few select states, presents itself as a way out, to fuel electricity while using minimal non-renewable resources. If you’re sick of knowing that a limited supply of fuels is being used to run your air-conditioner, then check out this. It’s as cost-effective as the fossil-fuel run places, and is powered by almost exclusively renewable resources.
It’s easy to assume that there isn’t a way out of oil dependency, that there can’t be a shift to a more sustainable way of life without a cataclysmic event. This may not be the whole answer, but it’s a start.
Connections
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I’m up in Grapevine, TX for a couple of days. Grapevine is one of the flourishing burbs of the Dallas metroplex, and for the record, I hate Dallas. I hate driving in Dallas; I hate the concrete jungle; I would rip out my eyeballs if I had to commute this every day. Fortunately, the conference I’m at, the CBF Assembly (Cooperative Baptist Fellowship) is at the same place that I’m staying. I’m bumming a bed off one of my roommates, and skimping on food to make this as cheap a trip as possible. It’s been amazing running into people that I haven’t seen in years, either from my seminary days, or who have travelled the tortuous road of Baptist life and found themselves in a similar place. It’s basically two more days of eating, worshipping with friends…oh, and finding time to study for my French final that I’ll take Saturday.
In an unrelated note, DIE SPAMMERS DIE! I had to delete EIGHT spam messages this morning off the site. Ridiculous. Is nothing sacred?
