The Redemptive Angle

White House Irony Caught Unawares

2013-05-12T03:56:37Z

The noted irony of The White House tweet- left- is courtesy of Matthew Schmitz over at First Things.

Naturally- in the truest sense of the word- there is no institution of motherhood without the lack of birth control. Rather, tomorrow, I'm going to be celebrating the fact that my mother didn't use birth control. I'm also going to be celebrating the fact that I have two children to a great wife, by not using birth control. The last thing I'd ever think to celebrate about, or give thanks to, is birth control.

I could probably wax philosophical on the sanctimonious philsophy that is revealed by such a tweet, but it probably does better to note that I'll actually be celebrating my mom tomorrow, instead of a radical allegiance to a selfish individualism.

[Note: I'm not saying, like in Roman Catholicism, that birth control is inherently wrong. But I am saying it's ridiculous to give thanks to the Affordable Care Act for free birth control. On Mother's Day.]

The Virtue and Vice of the "Common Man"

2013-05-07T00:40:19Z

Is it a vice to be common? Certainly many aspects of our contemporary living recoil against being ordinary. The advent of Facebook lends itself to a perpetual posturing of personality. Twitter lends itself to the self-centered notion that people will actually read what I write (as does the irony of this blog post). Certainly, we're inundated with our fair share of mainstream media articles on the self-defined uniqueness of the millenial generation. I'm even told by a counseling friend of mine that the newest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is needing to change its definition of narcissism to be more extreme, because the old definition of narcissism is too common to have explanatory value.

It's an edict of our age that we all like being special. When filling out a resume, when arguing with our boss in our heads, when applying for any kind of loan, when filling out scholarship applications, we all want to be special, and probably think we are more special than we actually are. Perhaps we should find solace in being common?

To that point, two of my heroes certainly did champion the "common man," the man of common sense with an ordinary life and an ordinary job. One is Gilbert Keith Chesterton and the other is Charles Dickens. Chesterton in his biography of Dickens extols the virtues of Dickens, precisely for being common:

Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted... Hence there was this vital point in his popularism, that there was no condescension in it.

Dickens wanted what the people wanted. The virtue in this is that his popularity was incredibly widespread, and yet he still discussed meaningful matters. By any standard, Dickens produced works of art. The common man still voraciously read 800 pages of Bleak House and David Copperfield because Dickens was so good. Does anybody read 800-page books anymore?

And that's where the rub is, isn't it? Part of being common now is different from what was common then. The common man now watches an excessive amount of television and hardly reads at all. The common man now is in financial debt. The common man now spends a lot of time on Facebook trying not to be common. This raises an important question: is there still wisdom in being common, in being ordinary?

There certainly is, but it means we need a definition of the idea of the "common." It's virtuous to be common in a difficult, seemingly meaningless job. It's virtuous to be common in one's awareness of the news: not too much and not too little. It's virtuous to have a common love of one's family and one's actual neighbors. It's virtuous to do ordinary, common things in a simple, faithful way. Chesterton and Dickens have much to admire about people such as this, as do I.

To talk about such ordinary, common lifestyles is to note, in fact, how rare such common action is. The tricky admission, in a narcissistic age such as ours, is that we can only strive for such virtuous commonality with limited effect. That is, unless we had an ordinary carpenter for a savior.

The Resurrection of Jesus

2013-03-31T20:39:56Z

I posted this last year after Easter and am re-posting it this Easter day.

Abstraction is easier than earthiness. Religious principles command little, but a God become man is difficult indeed. A God who dies and comes back to life in real space-time human history might be the most difficult reality of all. Notice I didn't say "truth" for that word is so easily abstracted.

It's much safer to have religious values. It's much more demanding to deal with a God who passed through death and back to life again; and there's reasonable enough evidence to the fact.

In response to a world of theologians that neuter every Christian symbol and abstract every Christ-event into a vague principle for living, David Bentley Hart proclaims:

If then a theology of beauty stands with the concrete and the particular, in defiance of any species of thought that places its faith in abstractions or generalities, it militates of necessity against practices that simply sort narratives into discrete categories of story and metaphysics, myth and meaning, symbol and reality, and then rest content...If indeed Christianity embraces "the aesthetic principle" par excellence," then abstraction is the thing most contrary and deadening to the truth it offers...God's glory, though, is neither ethereal nor remote, but is beauty, quantity, abundance, kabod: it has weight, density, and presence...In the end, that within Christianity which draws persons to itself is a concrete and particular beauty, because concrete and particular beauty is its deepest truth.

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 2003

I couldn't help but think, on a week we celebrate the Resurrection in Christendom (except for the Orthodox community which celebrates next week), how counter-cultural the truth of history really is. We live in an America that craves principles for life, that likes to abstract God to generic religious values, and the raw fact of Jesus coming back to life stands opposed to such abstractions.

A related idea is prominent in Time's cover story this week: Rethinking Heaven, by Jon Meachem. Meachem's basic thesis is that too many Christians view heaven as a bodyless existence in some pie-in-the-sky afterlife. Meachem challenges that notion, appealing to a new heavens and new earth and abodily resurrection and afterlife.

Of course, if you know anything about Christianity, Meachem is absolutely correct, which makes his title rather presumptuous. Meachem, nor the theologians he cites, are rethinking anything. One need not go back to the Bible to point out that Christians, even since the second century, have believed in the resurrection of the body, as opposed to the mere immortality of the soul. Christians have been professing this truth by way of the Apostle's creed for 20 centuries.

But Meachem's still on to something. Far from challenging Christian stereotypes, he's really challenging the common American clinginess to abstraction and ease. Much easier to believe in a bodyless heavenly paradise, than for the fact that God the Father will redeem, through the risen Jesus Christ, this world and unite it to his new heavens.

In sum, Jesus' Resurrection shames our sense of existential viability, needing to feel certain things or perform certain religious tasks to have a fake or weak experience of the divine. No, in Christianity, as Hart notes, the particular beauty, the raw fact, of Christ's Resurrection is the deepest truth, my feelings be damned.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Web Silence, Busyness, and Idolatry

2013-03-04T02:17:04Z

It has been quite a few months since my most recent blog post. A lot has certain happened since that November night when I wrote about the religious implications of our habit-forming practices: Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and the out-of-townness that resulted, going out of the country to India for two weeks, and taking over for parts of a colleague's job who took a different job. In short, it's been a busy time, a unique time, and the longest silence this blog platform has yet known.

So, what have I learned?

First, I've learned that I don't really have much to say. When I don't write for a longer period of time, and I spend the rest of my leisure time reading, I come to realize more and more that I have very few original ideas to think and to write. So, even though I have had a few spare moments to think about blogging, I have been at a loss for much to say in the first place. Web silence has taught me humility.

Second, busyness can create good choice-making. When one is busy, one has to decide many times between good things and bad things. Often, though, it also means deciding between doing good things and best things. Busyness has forced me to spend more time working on things that matter, and then simply being available to my family, and then doing little else. I have not been disappointed in this busy life thus far.

And yet, and thirdly, busyness does not necessarily mean these good decisions will result. Often times, in busyness, many (myself included) seek to find the de-stressors of the world where we find our medicinal religiousity. What do I mean? I mean we seek ultimate happiness in transitory de-stressors: alcohol, drugs, other people ("used" wrongly), and most of all media. Television and internet are insidious drugs indeed. I admit to the allure of the de-stressor in my own ways, and since stress attends busyness I have become more aware of my typical false medicines.

In Christian cirlces, we often speak of anything that demands our allegiance besides God as an idol, even good things that can become ultimate things in our heart of hearts. Technically speaking, idols are religious artifacts that, because we can see them, are things that demand our ultimate worship. Most often, we are mixing the worship of the One, True God with other idols. But our American idols aren't Baal or Ashteroth or some other wooden carving, but the medicines listed above.

My web silence hasn't been, then, just from blog-writing but also from much online content, reading or otherwise. That's usually quite a draw for me, and the blessing is that busyness has prevented it largely. But I have to remember that a little busyness is neither good, nor bad, really (exceptions for extremes of sloth and workaholism, naturally). It's just that busyness has made me more aware of its benefits and retractions.

Even still, I remain wary of the false gods. They promise much, and deliver so precious little. It's just that I haven't had a lot of time to think about them.

Spiritual, but not Religious, Driving

2012-11-01T18:01:13Z

It's a common meme in our age to claim to be spiritual but not religious. When one thinks of this idea at first, it's quite acceptable. Most people recognize a longing, a desire to experience deep meaning, which they know secularism cannot fulfill. And yet, it's so much easier to pine for such meaning without the need for institutions or groups of other fellow believers, whatever that belief may be. In other words, I'd much rather like to feel warm on the inside, and not have to deal with the difficulty of other people. The pervasive popularity of Chicken Soup for the Soul provides such evidence of this idea. Even Christians, and not just the New Age folks, are susceptible to this kind of thinking. The attraction is palpable, and draws in our need to make gods in our own image.

The danger with such thinking is that it dares not think about the deeply religious implications of everyday routines. A "religious" word for routines, often used in church worship services, is liturgy. But liturgy doesn't just have to be confined to church settings. Indeed, we engage habits and routines, just like the church's "liturgy", in our everyday lives. Many of those routines, in a sense, are religious. James K.A. Smith points to such religious significance as he defines what all liturgy really is in his book Desiring the Kingdom:

[Liturgies are] rituals of ultimate concern: rituals that are formative for identity, that inculcate particular visions of the good life, and do so in a way that means to trump other ritual formations (pg. 86).

If that is true, then there's a great many routines in our life that beg for our ultimate allegiance, and promise fulfillment over other gods. James K.A. Smith, in his book, looks at a few of those examples such as American football and the mall. For me, though, I confess that where I have seen this play out is on my daily commute. The route I take to work is a "liturgy." Stick with me for a minute.

The routine is designed to get me to work in the fastest manner possible. What's the ultimate good? It's timeliness, ease, comfort, and quickness...the quintessential Americanized religion. I pass by commuter-only lanes. I'm on the interstate for a little bit to speed up the process. I break the speed limit because I know now how traffic lights are synchronized and I know I can beat that certain speed limit at the appropriate miles per hour and get through the yellow light. I even know where to look for the cops; their favorite hideouts are routine too and thus easy to spot. I even know the best back ways in case of an accident. And even still, in rush hour I loathe the competition with the other cars because I'd like my drive to be spiritual, but not religious. They, after all, are after the same gods of ease and comfort, and only few can make it through the narrow gate to America's eternal comfort, if any at all.

What's the result of this religious liturgy upon me? I've become more angry, more impatient, and I fight others in my head more. I didn't start this routine wanting to be angry and impatient. I wanted to get to work and be productive, and then I wanted to get home and be with my family. And I wanted the time in-between to go quickly. In fact, I didn't start this liturgy this angry. I was less angry and impatient two years ago, when I lived in a different place in the city. But, alas, the commute really is a liturgy, and it really has had a spiritual effect upon me.

Dana Gioia, former Chairmen of the National Endowment of the Arts and now living in southern California, gets to the heart of my point in his poem, "The Freeways Considered as Earth Gods." Some excerpts:

The gods do not condescend to our frailty
They cleave our cities, push aside our homes,
Provide no place to walk or rest or gather...

We do not fail to worship them. Each morning
Millions creep in slow procession on our pilgrimages...

And they demand blood sacrifice...

The poem is found in his new collection of poems, Pity the Beautiful, and truly, many of the poems in there point to the ultimate meaning we give to very human, earthly patterns of behavior.

Beware your routines. They may be shaping you more than you know. Because they're religious.

Authority Is Unavoidable

2012-10-18T23:33:14Z

Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people...It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that they are forbidden; there is no pretense, there can be no pretense, that the boy would think so. The average boy's impression certainly would be simply this: 'If your father is a Methodist you must not play with soliders on Sunday. If your father is a Socialist you must not play with them even on week days.' All educationists are utterly dogmatic and authoritarian...There are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated; only most people are educated wrong.

G.K. Chesterton in What's Wrong with the World, 1910.

Maybe I just attract the interesting wedding conversational fodder (see this post or this post for more evidence)?

This time, I was talking with a lively ex-Catholic at a rehearsal dinner. This person, who despite going to a Catholic high school and college, was surprisingly ignorant of basic Christian doctrine. Yet without traversing down an oft-traveled- and fun- path about Catholic theology, our conversation was more about the nature of how we raise our children in faith.

As is typical of ex-Catholics, this person held disdain for her parents for raising her Catholic, without giving her a choice. As if she was reading too much Christopher Hitchens, she insinuated that raising children in church, or any religious persuasion, was akin to child abuse. Aside from being a ridiculous claim, if you have ever been to children's Sunday school, the charge obviously came from a very personal place.

My response was simply that her charge against religious upbringing was unavoidable, and that she would perpetrate the same abuse on her children.

"Not so. I won't raise my child with any religious options, and then they'll get to choose when their older what they want," she retorted. [Aside: don't independent, self-functioning, and free adults always get to decide what they want when they are older? This argument works both ways, as we will see.]

I responded: "But that is, in fact, an authoritative way to raise your child. You are teaching your child that religion is an option among many others, and that it's fairly inconsequential. You are teaching something to your future child, even tacitly. You are teaching the religion of pluralism and secularism."

Besides the fact that I'm not very persuasive, and most people keep their strongly held religious views more strongly in opposition, I think my argument at least made sense to her.

G.K. Chesterton makes the same point in the quotation above. Essentially, his argument is that we always interrupt the human nature of children by educating them. If left alone, they wouldn't learn how to read and write, they'd be completely selfish, and they'd have a whole host of societal deficiencies. This fact alone is corroborated by isolated and abused children.

So, what's left? A competition as to who gets to be the one who educates. Even a life on the street is an education, as poor Oliver Twist can attest to. Let's not denigrate religious education, then, as oppressive. Let's simply try to make our claims about why one form of education is better than another.

G.K. Chesterton sums it up nicely:

A modern London school ought not merely to be clearer, kindlier, more clever and more rapid than ignorance and darkness. It must also be clearer than a picture postcard, cleverer than a Limerick competition, quicker than the tram, and kindlier than the tavern.

I'd like to think that a religious education built by and for the only person in the world to fully atone for his followers' imperfections and estrangments is probably the most supreme form of learning, then.

What I Do

2012-10-11T20:44:31Z

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.

From Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I could have never put my finger on the nature of my work were it not for this book. There's a whole host of meaning associated with pastoring people. You want people to see behind the veil of life, to see the work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit weaving throughout this life and the life of the gathered church for worship. And yet, Robinson, from a totally different angle, captures so much of my experience. I know what a pastor does, but this statement above answers a totally different question: what does a pastor experience from others?

There's a real gravitas, a real earthiness, about life that makes the intersection between the divine Trinitarian mystery and us marred people that is often best captured in a pub. It is, after all, a place where people's problems and spirits are joined. And I like to go and be amidst the people, because people don't mind getting into real conversations at these places of dark wood and rich ale. It is here where the pastoral experience makes sense.

"So what do you do?" I'm often questioned.

"I'm a pastor at one of the churches down the street."

And here we have reached the crossroads. Folks either clam up and apologize for their rough language, or folks ask for prayer. Robinson is perhaps more right than she knew.

And yet, truly, the pub is no different than the people of God gathered for worship, still marred, still looking for hope in something tangible, a transcendent God who can be felt: perhaps in communion instead of the other spirits. People will put on all manner of decorum on Sunday, which in Colorado could be just about anything, but must assuredly include the invisible mask.

There's lots of ways people will execute their mask. They might show their ambivalence towards me and others. Many simply ignore the pastor. Some will gripe. Even a few will blame me for many wrongdoings. Or just as often for not doing enough.

And then they'll come by my office, because if other people knew who they really were they'd be ashamed. But that person knows, just truly knows, that I won't judge them, and that it's a safe place.

And, hopefully, in a way perhaps not as powerful as God meeting his corporately gathered people, but potentially just as poignant, they will know that heaven can meet earth in the sterile place that is my office, with another marred human being sitting across the desk from them.

The King is Coming

2012-10-01T20:41:31Z

I have a unique relationship with this President's motorcade.

The first instance was my desire to experience the hullaballoo that was the Democratic National Convention in Denver back in 2008. Now, mind you, my political opinions certainly differ from the President's, but I welcomed the idea of such a unique experience.

Because Denver was in a sort of crazed traffic all that week, I took the light rail down to experience the festivities of that final day of the convention. I recall being compactly seated across from a reporter from the famous French paper, Le Monde. We had an interesting chat about the significance of American politics on the world; and the reporter definitely wanted my opinion on Obama fandom. I think the reporter was surprised to actually meet an evangelical Christian, but I don't think I confounded any expectations.

Later that day, I was walking down some downtown sidestreets, where I was the only visible person walking on either side of the street. As I was halfway down the block, a torrent of police cars, black SUVs, ambulances, and black limosines raced by. Yes. This was the candidate's motorcade.

Flash forward to this past spring, my wife and I were in Boulder, CO to meet up with some of my relatives from out of town. They treated us to a nice dinner down on Pearl St., which is usually crowded but wasn't that night because the President was in town. He was speaking to college students about the interest rate on federal student loans. Riveting stuff, I know.

As my wife and I hopped back into the car, almost every street in Boulder was now closed because of the President's visit. To avoid those roads, and then the resulting roads where all the traffic would be, we took some side streets through off-the-beaten track Boulder neighborhoods (alas, the directions on the old iPhone do have redeeming value). As we neared a stop sign, with all but 2-3 other cars on the road in sight, a huge stream of police cars, black SUVs, ambulances, and black limosines raced by.

Perhaps he's really really after my vote this time?

And now, on this upcoming Wednesday, I'm going to have to be on the road, as my schedule would have it, while much of the Interstate is closed, because the Presidential debate is 10 minutes from my house and right in the heart of my commute. Could I strike gold a third time? Perhaps or perhaps not.

But the motorcade got me thinking, once I realized I'd be inconvenienced this Wednesday. The President is undoubtedly one of the most influential people on this planet, and we must prepare and ready his advance. His safety does matter to me, as does the fact that we make sure he doesn't get caught up in traffic.

And yet I'm bothered by this idea that a greater King is coming. I have been reading too much in the book of Isaiah recently, and there's a lot of language about preparing for a coming King in those books after all. Lower the mountains, raise the valleys, prepare a highway in the desert! Oh, and be sure to make it straight. A King is coming. We must prepare.

And, by the way, we're not sure when, or how, but it must be prepared nonetheless. But how should one prepare? Closing the interstate just won't do on this one.

Christians believe the most potent way to level those highways is to practice it every week, with other Christians, as they sing and pray and listen to the Bible preached faithfully. We call it corporate worship, and its significance lies in the fact that we will be doing the same acts of worship forever. Currently, we consider it a type of firstfruit, a pronouncement now that will be only greater and fully realized in the world to come.

And if you think about it, it's quite subversive to the current powers, whatever party they reside in. We sing and prepare for a Cosmic King together, every week, until we die or until he comes again.

There's no more subversive rebuke to power than ignoring them and declaring a higher allegiance together. That, and avoiding traffic to go to the mountains, all the while ignoring the debate.

The Inside is Bigger than the Outside

2012-08-13T16:14:50Z

This pastor never seems to tire of wedding chatter directed at me in a psuedo-philosophical manner (see a few posts ago for an example).

So, at a recent wedding, I had a lovely chat with an agnostic person- proud and presumptive of the fact that he was smarter than anyone who believed in God- that was cordial, if not a study in missing the point. He was certainly intelligent, but had obviously never engaged any serious Christian theology or philosophy, which is a pretty important point of contention if you are going to reject Christian theology and philosophy out of hand.

Needless to say, though the conversation was admittedly lively and enjoyable, one of his major objections to Christianity was the bore that would be heaven. He said he'd rather die and enjoy the pleasures and bounty of this life without getting tired of them for eternity. I found this a quaintly American objection. After all, when one consumes at such a voracious rate as the typical American, its easy to see how one grows weary of new pleasures.

And even still, if I'm honest, it's a concern that I and many other Christians have had. How could heaven possibly go on forever? Our thoughts can hardly sustain it.

My particular answer to him was at a more existential level: "ever had a song that you loved so much upon first hearing it that you had to share it with others? And then, you just had to listen to it over and over again? And upon each hearing with a new person, the song actually got better instead of worse?" Though the opposite of the ingrained cultural pattern of the law of diminishing return, he had to admit that indeed this had happened to him. I told him it was the eternity within him craving ever increasing resolution.

But as so often happens in my life of limited knowledge, I've since found two people that explain it better. The first is from theologian David Bentley Hart (an oft-quoted man on this blog recently). Hart discusses the nature of the infinite God, and how the finite- read, humans- cannot traverse an infinite. In other words, God is not a being as we are beings, capable of being defined. An "infinite" is not a substance like a "finite" person is. His very nature is that He's infinite, without limit or without a starting place. The great divine mystery is that as we partake in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), though we could never become infinite as contigent beings upon God, we can always become more infinite throughout eternity.

This is the only possible Christian narrative of the "self": that the inmost interiority proves, at the last, to be simply the most capacious openness before time and eternity.

We aren't infinite, and we could never become infinite, but we could always be becoming more infinite. In other words, we have the possibility of always growing and expanding into God forever. Less theologically but no less seriously, another-C.S. Lewis- says this same truth more simply.

In his final book of the Narnia series, The Last Battle, the children embark upon a renewed and remade Narnian land, which was more real and more alive than the previous Narnia. Having started on the outskirts of the new Narnian land, they are exhorted to continue going further in and further up. Upon entry into each new successive piece of land, it actually exists as larger than what it appeared on the outside. It's inside was, in fact, bigger than it's outside (Harry Potter utilizes this idea as well); this is a common refrain toward the end of the book. Somehow, the more real it got, the better it keeps on getting. And then the book ends this way:

And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forvever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

I wish I had told my wedding friend about this instead. Who, upon hearing this, does not desire it? And if one does so desire it, is that not proof of it's existence? Something more is to be had: God himself and the eternal land set before us.

Secularism is a Religion

2012-08-10T04:46:10Z

Peter Leithart, in a brilliant piece of simultaneous satire and book review, offers an interesting take on secularism as religion, and the myth that "religion" is inherently violent. Truly, it is secularism that is the inherently violent ideology. But let Leithart tell you instead of me:

In the beginning was religion, and only religion.

Now religion was irrational, absolutist, and divisive, and so chaos was on the face of the earth. Religion drove kings mad. Because of religion, because religion was all, Catholics killed Protestants, Protestants killed Catholics, and both Protestants and Catholics killed pagans across the seas. And darkness covered the face of the earth.

And from the darkness, far in the West, came the Liberal State, and the Liberal State said, Let there be light. And there was light. And the darkness was afraid.

And in the Liberal State there was no religion. And the Liberal State called itself Secular. And it was so.

And the Liberal State said, Let us divide religion from life, and, lest the darkness return, let us place between religion and life a firmament that cannot be crossed. Let us bury religion deep in the heart of man, where it can do some small good but no harm. And let us make religion innocuous and rational.

And the magicians and sorcerers and court prophets shouted and said, All you have commanded, so shall we do.

And it was so. And the Liberal State saw that it was good.

And peace dripped like honey from the rock and flowed like wine from the mountains. Lions supped with lambs. All nations rejoiced in the Liberal State, for its mercy endures forever.

And still the darkness grew strong. It wept and called itself Beck. It raged and grew a beard and called itself bin Laden.

And the Liberal State said, The darkness has grown strong and will soon be as one of Us. We must grow stronger, for we are light and light must triumph over darkness.

And the Liberal State said, Eternal vigilance is the price of secularity.

And all the peoples said, Amen, and Amen. Most of them, anyway.

Tis only the beginning: read the whole thing.