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.
Primaries, Pt. 2
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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.
Beer and Bonhoeffer
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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.
House, and Home
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“And all you see is where else you could be when you’re at home
And out on the street are so many possibilities to not be alone.”
**
A friend long ago compared Hell to a shoppping mall, the endless pursuit of choices, without ever buying a thing. After a semester spent reading Dante’s Comedy, I’m sure there’s something to it. The afterlife of Dante is populated with a thousand stories of people who spent lifetimes chasing after the Good, to greater or lesser degrees. Some allowed that chase to turn totally inwards, to chase themselves, and by that chase, to eat themselves alive. The depth of Hell, where Satan, Brutus, Cassius, and Judas lie, is for those that have abused the most outward of relationships: that of loved ones.
The saddest image in all of the Comedy lies at the very beginning, though, in the ante-circle of Hell, what is often referred to as Limbo, for there remain the people whose lives warranted neither Heaven nor Hell. In their lives, they lived so little that for eternity, they will remain strapped between something and nothing. The worst part of it all is that doing nothing gets one the outermost rim of Hell, but a part of Hell so remote and innocuous that it’s barely worth mentioning. To have spent a life not even worth punishing: this is the saddest picture of the entire corpus, that one might have been so little alive that one could not even be dead.
I don’t know why I’m connecting this image with Election Day, except that with the Democrats winning the House, and at the time of this writing, possibly the Senate, and so little will change. I could hope for a massive overhaul of social policy, but truthfully, the political process as it stands–so horribly broken and static–is much like ante-Hell: moving incrementally, in a 6th-grade slow dance, swaying in place.
So many choices, so little to show for the multiplicity of options. What good does it do us to have sixty-five cereals if we still starve ourselves to death; what good is done by having a democratic process when the process fissures between opposites who really have so little to offer by way of difference?
And so, I voted Democrat, partly because I feel like they represent where the body of Christ needs to go at the moment, and partly out of boredom: maybe this year will be better than the last.
Group Project
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I truly have ambivalent feelings about the military. But I won’t get into that here.
In case you thought that the Iraq event was truly a coalition effort, click here. Then, unclick the box labeled “U.S.”. You’ll see what I mean.
Buy One Scandal, Get One Free
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I think that our president may need to ditch Methodism and go voodoo. He’s going to need to conjour up the ghost of Nixon for some help here.
Foxes Have Nests
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For a long time before moving to Waco, I was involved in various homeless ministries in high school and undergrad. Upon moving to Waco, various things, like school, made being a consistent voice or presence in those things nigh unto impossible. It’s something I struggle with, because it’s part of me that I always feel goes unfulfilled, minus my living situation. Our house, once upon a time, was a place where people came by for food or a sandwich. But as the flavor of the house has changed, that too has changed. Occasionally, someone will drop by and come in, but as we get burned more and more, those times get fewer and further between.
Case in point: for a couple of years, we helped a man named Glen. You can read the story here about what happened one day with regards to our help. Things really haven’t been the same since then. But still I live here, and hope that one day, these kinds of opportunities will return. Or maybe I should quit holding my breath.
In Dallas, former SBC offices are slated to be turned into low-income housing, in the effort to combat homelessness in Texas’ largest city. Expect there to be a little more than a fight over this one. Remember, this is the city which just ruled that it’s illegal to give away food to the homeless if you’re not in a shelter. While the city is to be commended for its initiative to end homelessness by 2014, I can’t help but think that you can’t slap a man with one hand and hold his hand with another. Either a life is committed towards a thing, or it is not. I am a believer in the mystery of the invisible, that there are realities of the world that are not yet, but can it be said that there are no things which can be made manifest? Can it be that the realities cannot be seen, that good feelings cannot be made good works? More and more, I’m done with waiting for good intentions to be made good realities. More and more, I’m tired of my own life being a work in progress, hoping for things that never show up, and waiting for goods that never materialize. And I’m sick to death of governments saying one thing and doing another, heaping failures onto “timing”. Shame on you, Dallas: I never liked I-75 anyway.
Not liking a problem is not the same as legislating against it; if you have any shame left, Dallas, you will let the building come to pass, and embrace the homeless in the middle of your city, and not force them into the dumps again.
Politics and Piety
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“The opportunity that is offered to fulfill this duty is simply the one that lies nearest to hand: the preaching of the whole gospel of God’s grace, which as such is the whole justification of the whole people–including politics. This gospel which proclaims the King and the Kingdom that is now hidden but will one day be revealed, is political from the very outset, and if it is preached to real (Christian and non-Christian) people on the basis of a right interpretation of the Scriptures, it will be necessarily political…And if it were not political, how would it show that it is the salt and light of the world? The Christian church that is aware of its political responsibility will demand political preaching; and it will interpet it politically even if it contains no direct reference to politics.”
–Karl Barth, “The Christian Community and the Civil Community”
Peace On Earth
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I don’t know how much you keep up with events in the Middle East. Adam most likely will have something to say soon, having spent a summer in Palestine, but I can’t help but see the events that have unfolded as deterimental to the Sharonian peace process which was inaugurated less than year ago. In recent democratically held elections in Palestine, Hamas won nearly sixty percent of the seats in the Palestinian parliament.
Hamas, the party which in the past has openly called for the destruction of Israel and claimed responsibility for numerous civilian attacks in Israel, finds itself in a driver’s seat of sorts, having a political vehicle from which to operate now. This is what I have long feared with regards to Iraq’s elections: when you bark about the process by which candidates are elected, you can’t complain when the outcome is the opposite from which you hoped for. When the process is one that America agrees with, I fear that it will be hard to say that the results aren’t legit just because you hate the outcome.
Just the same, Condaleeza Rice’s statement today underscores that despite a political process of democracy, America will not condone working with a government whose primary party demands the abolition of its neighboring nation. Issues of irony aside, how this will unfold in coming months will be worth keeping track of. Since 1948, the legitmacy of Israel is one that America has firmly thrown its lot in with and one which American religion in particular has taken up. I need only reference Pat Robertson’s remarks on Sharon to highlight that point again.
My fear is that with Palestinian becoming more legitimated in its political process with the prominence of a party so eager to destroy its neighbor that American churches will lose their sympathy for the real losers in this: the people of both Israel and Palestine, who are overshadowed by their government. In their zeal to preserve Israel, the American church will take a hard right turn away from Palestine, including her people, and forget the important rule that governments, while generated from among the people, are ultimately not the people. Governments are one expression by which people live, but when substituted in our thinking for the people themselves, allow us to ultimately demonize not faceless institutions, but women and children.
Mark my words: in six months…
**You will find more pro-Israeli rhetoric in American churches
**You will find, in the speaking of Palestine, not the speaking of Palestinian people, but governmental Palestine, as if the two were one and the same.
**The efforts towards Palestinian relief will slow down significantly.
**More and more strongly, the identification between Palestine and Islam will lead to a new wave of Israeli nationalist sentiment in the American churches.
I only remind us that it was this kind of nationalist thinking that got Israel in trouble in the first place. The people of God were meant from the beginning to live as those powerless, called to be witnesses of grace and not strength, empowered to suffer and not to overpower. And so, if the church stands with Israel, let it stand with it only to the extent that it might live as the people of God. And if the church stand with Palestine, let it stand not blushing over the violence and anger, but in witness to a God who desires that all would know the glory and weakness of the Gospel. Let the church stand with the people who will suffer in this, on both sides, and rejoice that our Lord knew no other way than to suffer.
For in Christ, there is no Jew.
And no Gentile.
Beating A Dead Israeli Horse
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I’ve been avoiding this one for months, ever since the comments in August about how the United States should assassinate Hugo Chavez. I’ve even avoided giving commentary when he did it again in October and told the town of Dover, Pennsylvania to not seek God when disaster befalls their town for kicking out intelligent design as an option for teaching science in the classroom. But my feelings on intelligent design and political assassinations are not where this is going.
Behold, the man. As most kids in the 1980s growing up the throes of fungelacalism, the 700 Club was a viable alternative to Castle Grayskull.
***
In case you missed, Pat Robertson is at it again, this time citing God’s displeasure at giving the Palestinians part of their land back in order to bring peace to the region as the reason behind Sharon’s recent stroke. I confess from the start that the issue of Middle East peace is larger than any person can grasp. For a great starter kit, go see Munich and then come talk about this. But once again, Pat Robertson has made himself the mouth of God with regards to current events, probing the mind of God for firm answers to unspeakable questions.
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