I have to confess (I guess it’s pretty obvious) that I’ve lost a lot of my momentum in blogging over the last several months.
When I first started this blog back in late 2004, it was one of two blogs, simultaneous with one called “WorldSpeak,” where I wrote about encounters with Christianity’s various manifestations in popular and often secular culture. By 2008, I found I couldn’t maintain two blogs at once, so I let WorldSpeak die and focused on EmergingChristian. In 2010 I hit 500 posts, which was a big feat after a fairly slow start.
But life happens: seminary and full time work and… perhaps disappointment: in years past I encountered too many “would-be mentors” who seemed to care about not only my development as a writer and provocateur, but as a disciple of Christ and as a young friend open to guidance. But instead, time after time, when I couldn’t jump through the hoops to meet their professional or ministry needs, they seemed to fade quickly away. Maybe it’s selfish to expect mentorship to be about my own development, and I’ve got no qualms about hard work, but it’s disappointing to encounter too many people who seemed interested in me, who were perhaps more focused on fulfilling their own endeavors through me. But maybe I’m just a narcissist. I don’t think I feel upset about it anymore, although it’s taken me several years to work out… but I have a nagging sense of disappointment, and a lot more cynicism than I started with. I have some great friends in the industry now who remain huge encouragements, and who continue to help me find opportunities to get my writing out there, but real genuine mentorship? Is it out there? I don’t know. Maybe that’s just an inhumanly tall order…
The other difficult aspect of continuing a long-term blog is finding fresh material. Perhaps it’s simply chronic writer’s block, but I can’t help feeling like my last few dozen posts have rehashed the same ideas, or the same rants, or the same political/social observations.
The reality is, I don’t want a new kind of Christianity. A few months ago I joined the United Church of Christ, and I love the combination of mainline liturgy and old-school liberalism. I don’t want the church to be more “hip.” Worrying about being “hip” is what got us into all this attractional, pop-Evangelical trouble in the first place. If winning people over is our modus operandi, instead of doing what we’re deeply convicted is true and right, we’re bound to sell out again and again.
What’s all this mean for this website?
I’m not giving up on the blog — I’m not going to stop blogging. But there are so many reasons why my priorities are changing, and my passions for “transforming the church” have hit a different kind of wall. I still feel passionate, but I’m not so arrogant as to think I’m smart enough to “re-dream” a brand new way of “being the church.” I just want us to be a better old kind of church.
All over our U.S. the porches were dying.
The porch swing and the rocking chair moved to the village dump.
The floorboards trembled, and the steps creaked.
For a couple of decades a new light burned in the parlor,
the family sitting there silent in front of the box,
voices and music squawking mysteriously from far places
into the dim-lit room. Conversation was hushed.
In the next two decades, a window in the box
flashed unbelievable pictures into the room.
Strangers guffawed and howled with laughter.
Shots rang out, people died in front of our eyes.
We learned not to care, drinking Coca-Cola from bottles,
spilling popcorn into the sofa.
A highway came past the house with its deserted porch
and no one noticed. The children wandered off to rob houses
a few blocks away, not out of need, but simple boredom.
No more family games or read-alouds.
Grandparents sometimes pulled their chairs outside
hoping neighbors would stop in.
They might even drag out an extra chair or two;
Still no one came, not even to borrow something.
But it was hard to talk with the TV at their backs,
the traffic screeching by in front, the rest of the neighborhood
on relief, or in rest homes and reformatories.
The old porch is removed, and the grandparents with it.
So long, friends, neighbors, passersby.
Last week I visited the Occupy Portland camp. After donating money online, I wanted to see firsthand what was actually happening up there…
I was kind of amazed at the organization that seemed to be there, as I walked through the camps – two city blocks separated by a street between them. A sidewalk dissected each block and created a main pathway between all the tents. As I walked through with a friend, what we first noticed was that nearly every tent along the path had a sign on it, signaling some specific purpose: free counseling, free medical clinic… there were several tents with whiteboards outside, listing workshop schedules: “5:00pm, The History of Nonviolent Protest. 7:00pm, Capitalism and Corporate Greed.” There was a tent with signs outside promoting a lecture on white privilege, with literature explaining what white privilege actually meant. There was a community garden, an artists square with workshop and display area… this was impressive.
There was a man pacing back and forth between people as they passed, yelling: “If you NEED a CIGARETTE, I HAVE a CIGARETTE! …If you HAVE a CIGARETTE, I NEED a CIGARETTE!” He had a can with cigarettes in it, and he was simultaneously passing them out, and taking “donations.”
I came across this quotation in the midst of all the Occupy dialogue:
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
- Gandhi
A wonderful commentary on Wall Street and the Right’s overreaction to the Occupy movement:
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry barons went wild over very mild criticism from President Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”
In case you didn’t catch it when it aired yesterday, it’s worth a watch. It’s not a perfect plan (as presented) but it’s enough to feel inspired in ways I haven’t in some time. People need help, and the voice of the corporate plutocracy has drowned out the lower and middle classes – the unemployed and under employed – the poor and least of these – for too long…
A great (HUGELY informative!) article from Becky Garrison highlights the difficulties and disparities faced by trans people today:
The findings of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey Report paints a bleak picture of the how this fear of the other translates into victimizing trans people:
The 6,450 US-based transgender and gender non-conforming participants who took part in the study were nearly four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000 a year compared to the general population. So much for the myth advanced by progressive evangelicals like Jim Wallis, Brian McLaren, and Shane Claiborne that one can advocate for anti-poverty measures while ignoring LGBT rights.
A staggering 41% of respondents reported attempting suicide compared to 1.6% of the general population.
Discrimination was pervasive throughout the entire sample, yet the combination of anti-transgender bias and persistent, structural racism was especially devastating.
My first niece was born yesterday, to my little sister. I had no personal experience to draw on to prepare me for what to expect. Looking down at that little face I saw… my eyes. My sister’s eyes, really, but they are mine, too. Puffy little circles and dark lines underneath them, like she’d just had a good cry. Both my sister and I had those eyes as infants and as children. I remember myself growing up – crying much too often. It is, perhaps, narcissistic to talk about oneself in one’s niece – she’s not mine – but seeing a small piece of myself in this baby took my breath away.
I wonder: we read that some people have children out of a need for companionship – for someone who will love them unconditionally. And I’m sure that’s too often true.
But maybe sometimes the vehemence with which we love our children has to do with compensating for the care know we deserved — we want to comfort and wipe away all the tears in this child — to compensate for all the loneliness in this child –because she doesn’t deserve the pain we recognize from firsthand memory. I ache over the puffy tears in her tiny eyes, because hers are mine. I remember.
I still get Fr. Rohr’s daily meditations, though I find him increasingly difficult to relate to. Recently, he wrote:
It is easiest to begin “conservative,” if I can use the word. Most conservatives are not yet skillful in taking risks, using their imagination, or understanding freedom for anybody else; but at least they do develop some respect and basic impulse control, which is necessary to get started and to be at all teachable. You have to know the rules before you can break the rules properly and to understand why the rules were created in the first place. A lot of “liberals” don’t develop the first-half-of-life qualities, or understand why the rules were there in the first place.
It is rather difficult and even dangerous to begin life with an entirely open field, because the isolated ego takes over as the “decider.” So the “Ten Commandments” are ideal first-half-of-life statements, and necessary for basic civilization and impulse control. Yet isn’t it interesting that people always want the “Ten Commandments” on American courthouse lawns but never the “Eight Beatitudes”? The “beatitudes” of Jesus are second-half-of-life statements, and frankly ridiculous and naive to first-half-of-life people. They make Jesus sound like a soft, war-protesting, tree-hugging, bleeding heart liberal.
I agree that being conservative is easier… it’s safer. It’s where I came from, and it’s a worldview carrying an inherent comfort in its certitude.
In the second paragraph, Fr. Rohr deteriorates into the sort of provisos and requirements that systematically render Jesus’ words meaningless and even impotent (I am cognizant of that word’s misogynistic overtones). Of course Jesus is naive, ridiculous, soft, tree-hugging, and a bleeding heart liberal. This is “foolishness to men…” A New Testament Christianity would be disastrous to our economies, suicidal to our militaries, and would mean political annihilation to its idealistic adherents. Kierkegaard saw this clearly.
The wisdom of humanity is foolishness in the economy of Christ (God) so why do we (in this case, Rohr) spend so much time trying to reconcile the two? Why are we so bent on pragmatism? Because we don’t want to lose. We want to use words and concepts and systems of Christendom, but we don’t want to suffer the inevitable loss and humiliation that comes with the cross of Jesus of Nazareth.
We Christians love to talk about what wretched sinners we are or were before conversion, and what wretched sinners we would be if not for the grace of God. And that may be true. I’m pretty wretched despite God’s grace. But I’m often left wondering: how bad would I actually be without God? I mean… I’m not the world’s greatest guy. I suffer from a touch of narcissism (it comes in waves) and I can have a temper now and then, and I can certainly be selfish, reactionary, whatever else… but I’m also not such a bad guy either. Christians don’t like saying that. Especially those from Reformed camps. Martin Luther taught us “Amazing Grace… that saved a wretch like me.” True ‘wormliness.’ And maybe it’s just more narcissism, or perhaps spiritual deception, but I have to say: I don’t think I’m all that terrible of a guy. And so that leads me to wonder, am I not all that terrible of a guy because of Christ in me, or because this is the personality I was born with, and my parents raised me with certain expectations for social propriety?
In Christianity, we love a good conversion testimony, but I don’t have one. I grew up in this. I can’t tell you that it’s God who made me more or less good. Only that I am pretty sure God loves me, and that’s reassuring.
What worries me (about the lifeblood and future of the church) is how many people I have known in my life who are not religious (certainly not Christian) who are much kinder, much more gracious, and even at times much more joyful than Christian folks. It sort of undermines the 2+2=Jesus equation so many of us were spoon-fed.
Are you good or bad? Are you sure? Is it you, or God? Are you sure?
I’m an M.Div student and a contributing writer in Spencer Burke’s Out of theOOZE (NavPress), Leonard Sweet’s Church of the Perfect Storm (Abingdon Press) and Christian Piatt’s Banned Questions About Jesus (Chalice Press).
I’m a liberal, an egalitarian, a deconstructionist, an Outlaw Preacher, and a loudmouth. I want to be your friend...
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