The Complex Christ

Off to Greenbelt | Heretic's Guide to Eternity

I'm off towards Greenbelt tomorrow, via a stop with some friends in Devon, so probably won't be blogging. Before I go, I promised to post a review of Spencer Burke and Barry Taylor's book 'A Heretic's Guide to Eternity'.

First, an apparent paradox in the book, which I think helps unlock its position quite well. Spencer begins with a well written polemic about the state of religion: immovable, unchanging, unresponsive. Religion no longer works for him, but he remains hopeful that "faith can be practiced without the baggage of religion." Yet a chapter or two later, Spencer writes that "in religion, nothing ever stays the same. Our religions are practiced within our cultural horizons, not outside of them."

So which is right? Is religion over, or is it still evolving? Is Spencer leaving religion behind, or practicing it in a new way? The book appears to affirm that it's both/and. And this is the unique place of the heretic: one who stands both within and without, who "pushes past and beyond the conventional wisdom of the dominant group and pulls us across sacred fences that hold us back... Heretics either burn in flames, or light the way for a new generation."

In other words, this is heretic as Trickster. And for that alone, the book deserves to be read. It will challenge and frustrate and stir up and question. And we absolutely need that to happen. In a great section on the prodigal son, Spencer asks us to reflect on ourselves not as the tragic/heroic younger son who gets so marvelously saved, but on the hard, cold, elder son who equally needs saving. Perhaps the younger son's heresy will save them both, for what the story tells us is that grace is something they both needed.

So what's the central heresy here? For Spencer, this grace is an 'opt out' issue, not an 'opt in' one, and this sails him mighty close to Universalism. In fact, he calls it 'Universalism with hell attached' - hell being the place where people who consciously opt out go. Personally, I think there needs to be a lot more careful thinking here. In fact, my reading of the prodigal son story is precisely that grace is an opt-in issue: the elder son hadn't 'opted out' - he'd hung around and done his duty - but neither had he yet opted in, which the younger son did do.

Either way, one of the other key undertones of the book is the centrality of gift - and it is this line of thought about the nature of the 'transaction' of grace that I would have liked to see pursued more rigorously to push beyond the simplicity of opting in or out. But in a sense, that's the beauty of the work: like a good heretic or trickster should, it demands a response from the reader. What is important now is for those theologians who vigorously deny their ivory tower status to come and get their hands dirty with some of this stuff.

Spencer explores a variety of meanings of the word religion, but doesn't mention the latin verb 'religare' - 'to bind'. He is fighting those bindings, and wrestling to be free of them. But we never will be. We are bound and obligated to live inside some plausibility structure: atheistic, Islamic, hedonistic, universalist, Christian. And bound by culture and place within them. The answer is not that these double binds don't exist, but how we negotiate these boundaries and learn from each other about 'the other'. What is perhaps unique about Christ is this: here was a God prepared to be bound, become human and nailed down. And, accepting these limits, forged a freedom for us.

Technorati Tags: Grace, Spencer Burke, Religion, Salvation, TheOoze

The 3rd Economy: Gift, Market and Plunder [1] | Christian Leadership and the Leisure Class

As some of you may know, I've been working on a novel for the past few months, playing with themes, among others, of the links between identity and consumption. One of the books I've picked up to feed the furnace has been Thorstein Veblen's 1899 satire Conspicuous Consumption (an excerpt from his longer work The Theory of the Leisure Class, available as part of the lovely Penguin 'Great Ideas' series), and I'm glad I did, as it's nudged me to re-thinking some of the ideas on gift within The Complex Christ. These are unrefined thoughts, but I wanted to set out a few posts on what I've mulled over.

Firstly, an outline of Veblen's ideas.

His thesis begins with an examination of what he calls the 'leisure class' which 'is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture; as, for instance, in feudal Europe or Japan. This leisure class is basically what we might now call the aristocracy, but his labeling is quite deliberate and, I think, rather contemporary. What obviously separates them - and Veblen gets us to think about this in more ancient cultures, rather than just in terms of stately homes etc. - is their employment:

'The upper (leisure) classes are by custom exempt from industrial occupations, and are reserved for certain employments to which a certain degree of honour attaches. Chief among the honourable employments in any feudal community is warfare; and priestly service is commonly second to warfare.'

Actually, Veblen continues to list four main lines of activity for the leisure class: government, warfare, religious observance and sports. And, as World Cup fever truly grips (perhaps for only 4 more hours as England face Ecuador at 1600) it is interesting to note our continued fascination with the leisure class - we might call them celebrities now I suppose - who play for £120000 a week.

I want to explore the links Veblen identifies between warfare, consumption and leisure in another post. What interests me briefly here is whether Christian leadership is still seen as part of the 'leisure class' -  a get out from real work, an escape of some sort.

Perhaps I'll do no more than present the question; what I would like to add is this fascinating quote from a letter a great friend and critic of Thomas Merton wrote to him. It talks of 'the monastic', but made me think on the insularity of some full-time Christian work:

"The point of being a Christian in the city is to try to humanize modern technology and modern society, and you [Merton] are trying to escape this. Let us admit that at the outset I am radically out of sympathy with the monastic project. […] All monasticism rests on a mistaken confusion of creation with this world, and so they suppose that by withdrawing in some symbolic fashion from creation they are leaving the world. But creation is precisely not the world, but its antithesis, and so what they do is essentially the opposite of salvation. They withdraw from creation into the desert taking ‘this world’ with them and then they dwell apart from creation, but in a newly erected kingdom of the prince of this world. You have not withdrawn from this world into heaven, you have withdrawn from creation into hell."

Rosemary Ruether writing to Merton. In Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong, p 287

Technorati Tags: Books, Consumption, Leisure, Merton, Ministry, Ordination, Religion, Veblen, Work

Surface Tension | Lost Worlds

"One of the great losses of the Information Age is texture. Consider the pre-computer desk: a litter of papers, large and small, handwritten, printed and typed, course and fine; letters in varying hands, envelopes of various sizes bearing stamps from all over the world. Here are books, annotated and bookmarked; here is a typewriter with its ribbon and its heavy steel frame. Here are photographs and drawings, coins and banknotes, documents bearing seals and counter-signatures, pristine originals and faded carbon copies... Papers lie in piles, navigable vertically according to what has been most recently consulted; some are turned sideways-on to mark the stack.

"Now consider today's equivalent. All is stored on the network and accessed via mouse-clicks on a clean glowing screen. Everything is the same: an image seen through glass. We touch nothing, mark nothing, smell nothing. In the new world of I.T., it is not just the desktop that is a metaphor: everything is a metaphor, where nothing yellows with age and everything is clean and new. We are become creatures of sight alone, our whole attention focused on a hundred and fifty square inches of expensive glass.

"We have lost something in the process. Not just texture. Something more. The computer makes everything retrievable; but it doesn't retrieve everything. Only the surface. Scratch the surface and - look! - more surface. The rest is lost."

From Michael Bywater's excellent Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost, & Where Did it Go?

Technorati Tags: Books, Lost Worlds, Technology, Work

Contemplative Youth Ministry | Being Present to 'The Other'

I volunteered to be part of the 'grid blog' flagging up Mark Yaconelli's book 'Contemplative Youth Ministry', and duly received a copy to read from the publisher.

It's very good. We were traveling up to Iona with some friends, one of whom was also reading it, and she was also very positive.

A quote I'd like to pull out is on page 101, where Mark is reflecting on the practice of contemplative prayer with young adults, as opposed to a 'doing' style:

"Sadly for many of us there are few precious moments among our many human interactions when we feel someone is fully present to us... If you look back over your life, you may find that the moments that had the greatest impact on you were moments when you were in the presence of someone who was fully present to you."

This is the true essence of contemplation - not that we find ourselves, but that we engage with 'the other'; not that we become centred, but that we find space for 'the other' within our centre, and thus become fully present to them.

And if we can help people to begin this journey when they're young - then all the better.

//

Previous post on the grid-blog [ here ]
Next post due tomorrow [ here ]

Technorati Tags: Contemplative Youth Ministry Grid Blog, Youth Ministry

Coal | Does Urban Development Require Exploitation?

I've been reading 'Coal - A Human History' recently. It's a fascinating look at the profound impact coal has - and is still going to have - on our history. Used as a soft jewelry stone by the romans, it was only later taken up as fuel in London because of the rapidly retreating forests which were being decimated for fuel. The accounts of the horrendous air quality that this uncontrolled coal burning caused are incredible: everything was covered in soot, and the death records suggest that lung problems were the main killer of the time. Things weren't helped by the mad science that suggested that coal fumes cleansed the air of the miasmas that caused the plague.

When the Industrial Revolution exploded in Manchester in the early 1800's, coal was literally the driving force. James Watt's coal-powered steam engine allowed both the efficient draining of mines to allow greater depths to be mined, and huge factories to be mechanised too. What has shocked me about the book are the accounts of the conditions in which the first generation of the 'working class' lived. Having only recently left their fields, where they had no clocks or time-schedules to keep, they were plunged into 24-hour shift work in the most appalling conditions. Children were sent to work in the factories or mines as soon as they were able. One account tells of an 8 year old girl whose job it was to open and shut the traps in the mines to prevent the build-up of dangerous gases. She did this for 13 hours at a stretch in pitch black, alone for the vast majority of it, saying she was too scared to sing to herself for comfort. One commission on the problem described things thus:

"Chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet, and more than half-naked - crawling on their hands and feet, dragging their heavy loads behind them - they present an appearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural"

Unsurprisingly, life expectancy was very low. The smoke from the innumerable chimneys meant that the sun rarely penetrated into the ranks of slum-terraces built to house the workers. Well over half of children born did not survive beyond 5, a figure half that of those left in rural labour. When the coal-boom hit the US years later, things were not that much different, and miners were treated extremely badly.

The question this has left me with is this: do cities have to go through a period of exploitation in order to develop? As we look on in horror at child labour practices in other developing countries, and recoil in shock at the horrific conditions in which children have to live and work - whether it be in mining or sweat-shops or on dumps - we perhaps forget that we were doing exactly the same only 150 years ago. Can we expect them to do any different, or is this impulse to exploit innate?

Technorati Tags: Coal, Exploitation, Power, Child Labour, Sustainable Growth, Technology, Work

A Message From My Publishers

Save the SPCK!

So say's Dave at CartoonChurch. Their shops are threatened apparently. So don't buy Pete's book online. Get down your local SPCK and make the men in sandals happy.

Emerging Leadership Day | Churchless Faith Follow-up Book

Two quick links:

Firstly, I am looking forward to sharing some thoughts on leadership in emerging organizations at the blah... learning day.

I'll be joined by Maggi Dawn, who will reflect on trying to re-imagine leadership in the ancient structures of the Anglican church and Ana Draper of L8R, who has recently completed her MSc in psychoanalysis, guiding us in some thoughts about leadership from a psychoanalytical/theological perspective.

It's on 29th April at Moot Towers, St. Matthew's  London SW1P 2BU

To find out more and to book a place visit blah leadership learning day.

Secondly I'm really excited to hear that the follow-up to Alan Jamieson's groundbreaking book 'A Churchless Faith' is set for release very soon.

“This follow-up to A Churchless Faith is both fascinating and disquieting – fascinating because it shows that people rarely stand still in their journey of faith, whether or not they attend church. And disquieting because it underscores once again just how irrelevant or unhelpful the institutional church has become for so many reflective and intelligent believers today. This book provides further valuable insights into the growing phenomenon of church leavers, whose protest the church ignores at its own peril” - So says Dr Chris Marshall (St. John’s Senior Lecturer in Christian Theology, Victoria University, Wellington)

Stay posted by visiting Prodigal Kiwis often - the excellent blog by Alan Jamieson and Paul Fromont. Good people. Fine thinkers.

Technorati Tags: London, Theology

The Last Post...

...is due. According to the Financial Times.

"...which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere - tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn't leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium"

"For Marx and Engels, journalism was trivial - an impediment to serious, memorable and above all influential work. “Mere potboiling,” wrote Engels of the more than 500 articles he and Marx wrote for The New York Daily Tribune, “It doesn’t matter if they are never read again.”

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news."

[Thanks to JR for the link. He so needs a blog it hurts.]

Clearly the writer hasn't read (sic) ;-) or my post on the subject [here] where I paraphrase Ed Murrow in Goodnight and Goodluck:

"Given that blogs are so popular a medium (ok, this one excepted ;-) we need to make sure that they are more than 'merely wires and lights in a box.' 'If they are right, and this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate, then the tube is flickering now and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost.' 'Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.'"

Technorati Tags: Blogging

Solition | Endings | Merton

Just spent the weekend with Si and Gareth over in Northern Ireland. Good to see Pete Rollins too (his book is going to go ballistic). They also had the guys over from The Bridge in Ventura for a few days, and it was excellent to spend time hanging out, doing some Guinness, and doing the Celtic Solition day on the Saturday. It was a great time, but hung with sadness as we heard of the death of someone from The Bridge. It's been a painful year for them.

Some of the conversations turned to why we had stopped Vaux, and it's still something I/we think about a lot. I might do some posts of reflections about this over the next few weeks, but talking got me thinking, and my thoughts turned to this passage from Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation.

"All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered.... I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am objectified in them. When they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake."

I think in a funny way we at Vaux had grown worried about the false self that we were projecting. We'd wound a lot of bandages, and it was time for a bit of naked truth. This is, for Merton, the essence of contemplation. To put down the fantasy self and "pass through the centre of our own nothingness [...] and awake as our true selves." "We become contemplatives when God discovers Godself in us."

I'm glad we left the building. The stones were heavy. Perhaps you'll find us in a tent somewhere, someday.

Technorati Tags: Fantasy, Merton, Religion, Spirituality

Release Your Inner Mr Man/Little Miss

Make your own Mr Man or Little Miss here. Resistance is futile. You know you're going to have to. The Mr Emergent™ competition starts here.

Technorati Tags: Cartoons