Monday, November 30th, 2009
Owen Barfield was a friend of C.S. Lewis. He advocated an approach to reality he called "saving the appearances." The test of a theory was whether it allowed the data to be pretty raw and not fudged. This is very empirical, but very different from a realism which says that our descriptions, as theories, predict other reality well. (Ok. Bad account. Not my point. Read on.)
One thing I got out of this was less scientific. It was more akin to what I've heard of described as a verbal culture's value. You know what you are supposed to be able to say. Christianity is more of a verbal culture than a typographic, scientific, theoretical culture.
One of the first place I probably applied this was to Christianity and war. There are certain things I want to be able to say, which lie on opposite sides of the spectrum from each other. Before I was Lutheran, I heard another Lutheran talking to the Lutheran Chaplain at UCI something like, "So I left the military." "Why did you leave the military?" asked the chaplain. "Because I didn't think Jesus wanted to go up into an F-16 to bomb people." The chaplain, otherwise a staunch Republican, said, "YEAH!!!" If he didn't high-five him, he was close to doing so. But on the other hand you have another Lutheran friend, who after some disappointing movie scene where some poor soldier or potential crime victim decides to be merciful to the wrong enemy says, "In that case you need to go BAP! BAP! BAP! BAP! BAP! BAP! Click Click Click Click Click Click to make sure he's dead!" This usually also has to do with the fact that other people are counting on you and you haven't just left yourself vulnerable but all the others, too. I think both these kinds of statements have to be left where they are and not harmonized in a way that clips either.
I don't find too many traditions that allow this. You have some peace traditions. Many of us admire them to a degree. But who doesn't like the scene in Witness when Harrison Ford gets to knock the bullies silly? (Yes. There are people. I had a roommate in seminary who didn't even like the part in Bunyan where Christian cut off the head of Giant Despair. Yikes! This is allegory! You don't even want an abstraction to suffer?) There are other military traditions, but many of those shade into some form of "My country, right or wrong." Even the traditions that try to moderate seem to disallow some beautiful instances of radical peacemaker or loyal soldier which seem like they should both exist. My own mental world would be the poorer without both Patton and Gandhi.
If I'm to go a bit more moderate on this, my moderating positions will go towards those of Charlie Anderson in the movie Shenandoah. I just saw this again with my friend Vicar Mark Pierson and our mutual friend Jasmine. (No, not a stripper. She's a yellow lab who loves The Searchers, Network, Shenandoah, and, according to Mark, Old Yeller.) I adore Shenandoah. It's up with The Quiet Man as my favorite non Epic. Some of my sentiments are found in this exchange (regarding the South) between Charlie (played by Jimmy Stewart) and his son Henry: "Suppose you had a friend that owned slaves and suppose somebody was going to come and take them away from him. Would you help him—fight to help him keep them?" [good interruptions by Nathan, then back to Henry] "Well, no sir, I wouldn't." "Why not?" "I don't see any reason to fight for something I don't believe is right and I don't think a real friend would ask me to." And (to a Northern soldier running a train of captured Southern soldiers): "You run a sad kind of a train, mister. You take people away when they don't want to go and won't bring them back when they're ready." (Check here for the best string of movie lines ever. I even like his bitter unbelieving prayer, as it is followed at the end of the movie with his singing the Doxology and meaning it.) Great stuff.
My favorite Christians are probably the people on either extreme of the spectrum who make room for those on the far opposite extreme. And a few—maybe more than a few—in the middle, too, if they make room for the extremes. (Charlie Anderson does not disown his Southern warrior son-in-law.) So long as they, like Charlie Anderson, are passionate and not just drifting into the middle as a safe position. Otherwise decent people might find themselves elsewhere than these positions. I understand that. I just don't admire it. Or myself if I end up there.
9:27 pm Pacific Standard Time
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Sunday, November 29th, 2009
I love the liturgy and the church year. At Reformation Lutheran Church I have helped get an Easter Vigil service going the last two years. It's kind of been "my baby." In researching, I have studied a couple books which were recommended highly. One book told about the difference between Holy Week celebrations in the first few centuries compared to the fourth and after. In the early centuries, while the worship was ceremonial, the ceremonies were almost "touristy." The commemorations were looking at places. The various parts of Holy Week were not really separated out, but were a continuous whole. Later, the parts became separated into thematic elements. Good Friday was dark and Easter light.
This puzzled me a bit until I was invited to participate in a Lenten drama in which I was the shroud around Jesus when he was buried. Now I'm not always into this kind of thing, but the script for one before mine had a surprising amount of depth to it. I imagined the shallow direction I thought it would go and then found it to be more profound than I anticipated. So I said "Yes."
When asking how to handle some lines, the woman who oversaw the drama suggested to discover it as I went. This didn't make sense reading through the script in the pastor's office. It did when I was up front. I lived through what I was reading. The script went from the early life of the shroud as flax through the Resurrection. I had also asked what to do with the shroud afterwards. Same sort of answer. "Do what seems appropriate to you at the time. You'll know." Now this is actually quite funny, because she was both right and wrong. I felt at the end like it was minutes after the Resurrection. Who would celebrate Good Friday a few minutes after the Resurrection? The cross is a few feet away, and I realized that surveying the wondrous cross "one which the Prince of Glory died" made no sense. I still didn't know just what to do with it. But some sense of the time was very clear in a way that had not been clear before reading through the drama in the congregation.
The funny thing here is that in some sense, this was a very Presbyterian attitude I had grown up with. The cross is empty. "He is not here." Jesus is always The Risen Lord. The contemplative sense of knowing only Christ and Him crucified, which is clearly Biblical, was something I learned as a Lutheran. But now, as a Lutheran, I could see that there were times in which it would not have made sense.
I have to wonder how much this insight might tell us about other things we do in the church. I'm not sure whether earliest practice is always appropriate, even where it was the best practice for its time. Our own distance from the events has a curious relationship to how we see them. In some ways, being so many centuries removed, we have almost the relationship to them that we do when an elderly relative dies. Instead of just their present state, we find ourselves suddenly facing each of the moments we had with them almost equally close. When my grandmother died at age one hundred, she suddenly snapped back to being about eighty in my imagination. I have to wonder about the early Christians. While Paul was alive, how much easier for some to think of Paul than Jesus? For some time in the early church, there had to have been a very living sense of being much closer to the last events of the New Testament than to events even a decade or so previous to them. That flattens out only later. We can be locked into the present when the past should be our focus. Or vice-versa, as were many in Jesus' time when He was present with them. Time is a huge factor in how we perceive events.
When we think of Advent, we try to take in both the first and second comings of Christ. (Or if you are a 70AD preterist, the first, second, and third comings of Christ.) This perspective is intriguing since it helps us read our expectancy with that of the generations before Christ. But it's so hard to enter that. We tend towards a fourth century way of doing things, which I am convinced is fully Biblical. I also wonder if there is a first through third century way to see Advent. Time will tell?
11:57 am Pacific Standard Time
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Monday, November 16th, 2009
Something yesterday reminded me of a conversation with a coworker many years ago. I was newly graduated and fell in with an Eastern European man who worked as a consultant. I had the sense that events of the Holocaust may have impinged upon his broader family, at least to the extent that certain subjects were hot button issues for him. He respected religion quite deeply, though some things he said made me think at least part of his life had been spent in agnosticism. In any case, his opinions generally came out of broad life wisdom, but were often surprising as one would not always appear to line up with another in a predictable way.
One time Robert Schuller's name came up. My coworker said in his accent, "That man is no Christian!" I was a little surprised. I knew very conservative Protestants who might say such a thing, but was not used to such sharp opinions from someone outside the camp. He followed it up. "Anyone who says 'God loves you and so do I' does not deserve to live!"
Now, given that in another conversation this man was unhappy with a Roman Catholic priest who bonked a member of ACT UP over the head with the chalice when the man disrupted mass, I was sure he was not advocating anyone doing anything to Schuller. I also knew my coworker was given to speaking in hyperbole. But this did make me ponder what he meant.
This was a very strong statement that we need to keep a sharp distinction between what God does and what people do. Having a man come up with a slogan which runs his own disposition into that of God was to put two things together that all worship is (or used to be) geared towards keeping separate. Even when we do something in the name of God, this distinction is implied—perhaps even heightened. I don't much care whether the pastor forgives me if God doesn't.
Whether or not there is an argument to be made on the other side, I thought the point worth pondering. I wonder how else this can be violated. Or how we could foster the distinction in our time.
8:41 am Pacific Standard Time
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Thursday, November 5th, 2009
I found a link at kottke.org to a new videoblog about dressing like a grownup. Oddly, the first episode was about denim.
http://putthison.com/post/231001982/episode-1-denim
The information was helpful. But I find the juxtaposition of jeans with being grown up odd after an interchange I once saw where Marshall McLuhan was chiding a young adult about what he was expressing by wearing jeans.
9:51 am Pacific Standard Time
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