I am hoping to eventually post more thoroughly on my current reading of Marion's God Without Being but for now I have impressions. The resurrected Christ has been given all. And in turn all has been given to the church,
"so that the church may return it to the Word. . . . In theology it is not a question, any more than elsewhere, of working to a completion yet to come: completion, for the Church, is accomplished definitively at Easter, hence at the origin. Accomplishment occurs at the origin and moreover alone renders it possible, fertile, pregnant with a future. . . . Theology cannot aim at any other progress than its own conversion to the Word."
What came to my mind with regards to 'all' and origins was the notion of conversion. A few months ago I had one of my rare spurts of inspiration around writing fiction. I have been keeping loose journals from around the end of high school. The beginning of my journal writing corresponds exactly with my conversion experience (not to be read in the aorist). I thought that I could use some of those entries as fodder for a character that was a little naive and misguided. So I began to read my entries. They were short, pointed, lacking in style or in poor style but as I read them I began to be moved by a person who I no longer was. A sense of wanting to be converted by him emerged within me. I don't think this is nostalgia and I have no interest in going back but there is something operative in those writings that speaks of an all. I would not become that person if I did convert but perhaps there is a returning to that site or a navigating that site for understanding how the 'all' embraced the particular and remained particular in relation to the 'all'. Are there conceptions of conversion that avoid a static evanglicalism or a banal 'journeying'. Can we understand our conversion as orientation to the One who now orients us? You have abandoned your first love . . . repent and do the things you did at first. (Rev 2:4-5). Marion looks to the Eucharistic site (as so many of the theologians I have been reading do) but I do not find it there yet . . . I am not sure I ever will. Perhaps I will eventually be found there but something is missing.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
All at Origin
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Plan A and Plan B and a Whole Lot of Drama
The plan (A) once was to find work in an area that I found stimulating, meaningful and rewarding. The plan (B) is becoming about how I can responsibly support my family while remaining faithful to our beliefs and sense of calling. I see these as drastically different plans.
Plan A sought to accommodate to the requirements of particular institutions so that I could fit within them. This has been true about my work in the church. Attaining the relevant education was not a serious issue. I pursued this primarily in a selfish manner (understood in the most faithful way). I even got a chance to do a little teaching. This was also a great experience. By and large I did not feel a great deal of pressure placed on me to mould and be moulded in a particular manner (though all my teaching was as an adjunct or assistant). I tried working in community service for a short time. I have some fond memories but at almost every turn I was confronted with an internal frustration that I still cannot quite articulate. I worked in an environment which, as a whole, wanted me to do something that I either did not understand or did not feel capable of doing. This feeling has been translated in the church. I have worked full time as a pastor for about three years now. There are probably only two aspects of this work that I have really connected with. One, not surprisingly, has been preaching. The church affords me significant prep time and are fairly receptive to my style (although there is some murmuring about it leaning a little to close to lecturing . . . which I think is an accurate criticism at times). The other area, a little more surprising, is in the church's rites of passage particularly funerals and child dedications (weddings not so much). I appreciate these because for the most part I sense that these times are actually meaningful to those who participate. The people involved have their lives intersecting something beyond their usual rhythms. This has happened in other jobs but it appears to occur largely outside the actual stated goals and parameters of the position I am filling. A good part of my time ends up in trying to figure just how I can find the resources to do something that does not make a great deal of sense to me. I pursued pastoring because I loved studying and discussing the Bible and I loved the hope that came when we could vulnerably care and pray for one another. I am hoping in my remaining months at my church that I will reconnect with those things in some way.
So I am fortunate enough to be coming an anticipated shift in my life. I am leaving a job and physically moving to another area. This is a great opportunity. I count it also a slightly more severe fortune that I have not been able to secure any work in Manitoba after my move. I turned down one opportunity and I was passed by on some others.
Two motivations are primarily driving this line of thinking right now. One is an increased sensitivity towards the sort of doxological end that my life is taken up into. We are created as worshiping creatures so I need to be aware of where my knee is bending. Second, I am trying to figure out to what extent to need to 'suck things up' and be happy that I have a job on the one hand or attentively listen to what I might be 'called to' on the other. I feel at times like I am being terribly immature about all this neglecting the great opportunities and work environments that are afforded to me (all this may well boil down to just that). However, I am becoming increasingly aware that not all work is created equal. I have worked some shitty factory-type jobs in which I was more meaningfully connected to my co-workers and I have worked some jobs in which I felt the need to create meaning for a audience that wanted to receive at low cost (if not free . . . well they do have to pay my salary). I need to emphasize that I am not discarding as meaningless everything happening within a given church. But that cannot keep me from clearly articulating, as best I can, the interface of biblical reflection, critical thought, and prayerful posture over top of my ongoing experience. What emerges from this complex? What emerges is a desire to either radically re-configure plan A so that I no longer seek to 'fit' into a professional role. Or it is to follow Plan B which is simply to express that which sustains my spirit and call and allow the so-called necessities of living to become secondary or derivative.
I have heard that someone facing great temptation about how they were to live their life once said a human cannot live by material food alone but rather life is nourished with feeding on every word that comes from God. There are stories of another who cried out,
Come!
All you who are thirsty,
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread?
Should I listen? I don't even know where that voice is coming from. But something feels near. The voice anticipates and says shortly after,
Seek the LORD while he may be found.
I am really not hoping to be dismissed as suffering from hyperbole or melodrama but it doesn't matter. Marion says that the difference between being and non-being is the difference between a world that can found and fund its own being and the one who is called from non-being into being. I find increasingly a lack of resources (not a lack of looking for them) to found and fund my being and so I do hope in being called forth. I am drawnto plan B but terrified that I may follow it and I am terrified that I may not follow it. I believe that perhaps in this time the LORD may be found. I don't know. What I do know is the impending and persistent approach of slumber that seems to come at times when above all one should be keeping watch.
Saturday, May 01, 2010
One Year Later . . .
It has been just over a year since I last posted here. For about a month I have been drawn back into the theo-philosophical blogosphere. I rediscovered old friends and came across some new and interesting sites. I have also taken the time to ask myself why I have made this return. Before answering that question here is an update. I am now the proud father of a beautiful nine month old boy (Salem Christopher Immanuel). I have taken a parental leave from my pastoral position so that I can help out at home as well as work on a degree in spiritual care and counselling where I am focusing on the potential therapeutic insights and practices found in Soren Kierkegaard. I have given my notice at my church and so in four months time I will be unemployed and moving back to Manitoba where both our families live. As of yet I have no job lined up back in the motherland. But perhaps more than anything this past year has laid on me a deepening call to live faithfully (too much Kierkegaard perhaps). It has been a wonderful gift to be away from the church and away from any career pressures in general. It has been a wonderful gift to be in the presence of new life and all that may or may not lie ahead for him. I have been given the space to ask the simple and basic questions of life. The why and the what's the point. Why am I pastoring? Why do I continue to seek academic achievement? To what end is all my striving? And why again is it that I am striving?
So I have come to what I think is the basic Christian response to life. My life is meant to be an act of worship. There is nothing more and there is nothing greater. I also believe that if this reality is understood and accepted then it is lived as freedom. Freedom from (impoverished claims on my time and energy) and freedom to (celebrate, pray, act, be still). I believe that I have tasted some of this truth and it looks to set my free. So why oh why would I return to the blogosphere after being nudged towards such a spiritual reawakening? Am I risking a return to slumber? Am I trying to carve out my own little corner of status and recognition? Am I in effect regressing? Maybe. While I do not believe that online relationships and communities are neutral I have found over the years that this is a place where I can connect on some level with people and thoughts and actions that inspire me. I no longer have the time and commitment for long term education or the qualifications to work in the academy (which has been my historical home for inspiration). I struggle to find inspiration and challenge in the local church and community (though I need to continue to look and nurture and receive). So I find myself drawn time and again to pockets and narrow corridors of the internet where others feel compelled, called, drawn, obsessed to express their own journey and similar passions and to learn from others in whatever limited manner this medium offers. It is one place and it is a limited and flawed place but it is a place. So I am returning to IndieFaith as the same person and as a new person. Something has changed and is changing. I hope that this can be one place in my life where meaning can thrive. I hope I can post here in honest acts of worship which means to confess, to proclaim, to challenge, to be challenged and perhaps to learn, or better yet, to be given a song to sing.
Its good to be back.
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Politics and Faith
The AP has drawn attention to a document called "The Evangelical Manifesto" that was signed in Washington by over 80 prominent evangelicals. The document will be released on Wednesday.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
I Bid You Badiou - Chapter 7; Paul Against the Law . . . Again
Previously,
Badiou's Saint Paul Chapter 1
Badiou's Saint Paul Chapter 2
Badiou's Saint Paul - Chapters 3-4
Badiou's Saint Paul - Chapter 5
Badiou's Saint Paul - Chapter 6
In chapter 7 of Saint Paul Badiou attempts to slain the giant by approaching the theological quicksand of Paul's understanding of faith vs. works / grace vs. law. There is such enormity of thought and history connected to this discussion that I was not sure much room could be spared for additions.
And after reading over the chapter again I am not sure that much was added. The question initially was why law should be placed on the side of death. The answer is simply is that law 'objectifies' salvation disallowing the unity of thought and action. Not only is law always relegated to the particular and so cannot be part of the universal it also determines the subject in a cycle of the 'automatic repetition' of sin. Here Badiou deals extensively with Romans 7.
The law is what gives life to desire. But in so doing, it constrains the subject so that he wants to follow only the path of death.
What is sin exactly? It is not desire as such, for if it were one would not understand its link to the law and death. Sin is the life of desire as autonomy, as automatism. The law is required in order to unleash the automatic life of desire, the automatism of repetition. For only the law fixes the object of desire, binding desire to it regardless of the subject's 'will.' It is this objectal automatism of desire, inconceivable without the law, that assigns the subject to the carnal path of death.
Clearly, what is at issue here is nothing less that the problem of the unconscious (Paul calls it the involuntary, what I do not want). The life of desire fixed and unleashed by the law is that which, de-centered from the subject, accomplishes itself as unconscious automatism, with respect to which the involuntary subject is capable only of inventing death.
The law is what, designating its object, delivers desire to its repetitive autonomy.
This emergence of sin is, in keeping with his thinking, a subjective disposition. But as a sinful subjectification it is de-centers the subject dividing thought from action (what I want to do I do not do). In light of this Badiou states that salvation is possibility of thought being unseparated from power and action. Thought, in itself, cannot overcome this division. What is required is a grace that exceeds the order of thought. Grace flows from the event of the resurrection which declares that life need not be bound by death.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Proust On Belief
Tis a season for rejoicing. I finally finished Swann's Way. It was not that it is a particularly difficult read but most of my more literary friends have begun and not finished it. In fact the local bookseller had a standing $25 gift certificate for anyone who could prove they read it. The book certainly lends itself to being dropped. It is not a page turner and it does not have what I would call 'flow'. The movement rather is like a type of emerging or organic still frame. The image developing in your mind becomes more nuanced, more unpredictable. And in the end the book is simply beautiful.
The book is an exercise of and a commentary on memory. In returning to a place that held rich and meaningful memories the young boy, nearing the end of the story, becomes disorientated by the present reality.
And seeing all these new elements of the spectacle, I had no longer the faith which, applied to them, would have given them consistency, unity, life; they passed in a scattered sequence before me, at random, without reality, containing in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have endeavoured, as in the old days, to extract from them and to compose in a picture. They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief vanishes, there survives it - more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomenon - an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause - the death of the gods.
This appears at least on the surface to indicate a loss of youthful imagination in the possibilities of reality. What it offers more profoundly is a commentary in the work it takes to experience reality. Reality is not a given in its basic thereness. Rather the present reality must be joined with belief and belief is the medium for the imagination required. And if we loose that belief we will suffer the increasing idolatrous attachment to the past which we will attribute divine presence (rather than our present bodies). The book concludes with the young boy's reflection on memory.
How paradoxical it is to seek in reality the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. . . . The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are fugitive, alas, as the years.
The book ends, in my mind, in a type of liminal space where belief is the hardest and most necessary of tasks. Belief of the past can be recalled in memory but cannot engage the present. And without belief reality moves about pixalated without any form emerging and in this account the emergence of form signals the emergence of meaning.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Ministers of Death
A couple of significant events this past week.
First was being able to have this terrible picture taken of myself and Mr. David Bazan (formerly of Pedro the Lion). Does it look like I let on that I am a fan? :)
I have been listening to his music for some ten years now. Bazan's music has always represented a brave and engaged criticism of Christian religion. What sets his approach apart from more reactionary criticism is how honest he remains in his own sense of hopefulness to the spirit of faith. After the show I talked with him and asked if he kept any personal ties to the church. He said that his wife and daughter attend church but that he had 'made his exit' (adding a comment of it being a hopeful exit; I think is how he put it). Having grown up as a pastor's kid he has tried to distance himself from the institution with an attempt to suspend his received assumptions. What remains is still a sense of God's existence, which in his words has created a strong dissonance to where he thought he was going. He admits that this could simply be the result of such an entrenched world view that he received growing up. I would have liked to talk longer.
David Bazan remains for me as a type of minister of death. A minister in the truest sense (though prophet may be a more appropriate term) that his engagement with the social implications of faith and religion remain significant in his work. The role of death remains prominent in much of his lyrics whether it is physical death, the death of a relationship or the death certain beliefs. To those in the church who will listen this ministry of death injects needed perspective and the possibility of change and movement. I am hoping to invite David to read this post and offer further comment. I would love an opportunity for further engagement on his journey. In transition to the second significant event of the week here are his lyrics to "Priest and Paramedics" (see IndieVision to the right).
Paramedics brave and strong
Up before the break of dawn
Putting poker faces on
Broken bodies all day long
The neighbors heard a fight
Someone had a knife
It must have have been the wife
Husband's lost a lot of blood
He wakes up screaming, "Oh my God
Am I going to die?
Am I going to die?"
As they strapped his arms down to his sides
At times like these they'd been taught to lie
"Buddy, just calm down, you'll be all right"
Several friends came to his grave
His children were so well-behaved
As the priest got up to speak
The assembly craved relief
But he himself had given up
So instead he offered them this bitter cup
"You're going to die
We're all going to die
Could be twenty years, could be tonight
Lately I have been wondering why
We go to so much trouble
To postpone the unavoidable
And prolong the pain of being alive"
I performed my second funeral yesterday and the first on my own. I had never met the man who passed away. He was 48 and died of a heart attack in his sleep with no warning (a husband and father of two). As a minister of death who works firmly within the institutional church my work stands in some contrast to David Bazan's. I hope to make death a little more palatable that its hemorrhaging force move through the system with less resistance. I remember the words at the close of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Marlow is trying to recount the words of judgment at Kurtz's death to Kurtz's wife. He fails in transmitting this message of death instead he says that Kurtz uttered her name at his death. Marlow says this in response to his action,
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall on my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he only wanted justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark - too dark altogether . . .
David Bazan appears liberated to speak some of the dark words, but what is his community that needs to hear the dark words of faith if he remains largely unheard outside the church walls? My speech is modified within these walls and not all for bad. Some things are too crushing and need mediating, but the right mediator is crucial. I wrestle between the ministries of death. I hope to continue in both, in some way.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Music as a Life
In some attempt at being creative I decided that instead of just "sharing my story" to the Sunday School class at church I tried to figure out what the soundtrack to my life would be and explore how these songs reflected the various stages of my life.
(all links have videos from the artists)
Junior High
The first time I had any real investment in music was in Junior high when my best friend introduced me to Led Zeppelin. I bought all the albums, had t-shirts, biographies, even watched their horrendous movie "The Song Remains the Same." Looking back now I can't see how their lyrics would have drawn in a barely pubescent teenager. They certainly were good musicians and some of their lyrics quite poetic, however, I imagine the greatest impact Led Zeppelin had on me was to forge a special friendship between me and Greg. Music provided identity and a medium for our early time together.
High School
Its pretty difficult to pick one song for high school in the soundtrack of your life. For some reason Beck Loser (wow is he young there) came to mind. First, it was/is dang catchy. Then I realized that at that age there are probably not to many people doing two things. One admitting they are not perfect (I don't know of too many teachers or adults who display that trait well to teenagers) and the other taking ownership of being a "loser" and thereby taking the power away from anyone who might try to call you that.
Post-High School Pre-Adulthood
I came up with two bands here, Zao and Deliriou5. This time of life for me and perhaps many others reflects passionate pursuit. Finding something you believe and wanting to be uncompromising in your commitment to it. This was the time when my faith was really beginning to take root in how I understood myself. Though a little different on the surface I find both these acts draw in that type of response. Another commonality is the emphasis that experience plays in their live acts. There is a feeling that you can, at least in part, be living your commitment just by participating in the show.
The College Years
Here I entered the reflective melancholy phase of music where Damien Jurado became a big influence. His music let uncomfortable realities linger to be absorbed and reflected on. However, his music and message always had a redemptive presence either in his lyrics or passion. This music allowed me to accept that all is not always well and that the roof will not come crashing in if we acknowledge this. And if the roof does come falling in then there is hope to rebuild.
Today
Today I am exploring music again. Music that is still rigorous in self-awareness but much of it also explores expressions that I am not as familiar. Artists like Boards of Canada, The Decemberists, and The Postal Service are right up there these days. This is also why I have added "MySpace of the Moment" which is to inspire me to keep checking out new stuff.
Faith and Music?
Isaiah 42 (as well as several Psalms) ask us to sing to the Lord a new song. In Isaiah this is in the context of God delivering the people. But God's deliverance does not look like what the people expect. I see "the song" as possibly introducing the people to a new movement of God and that if they recognize and take seriously the song they may also recognize the movement.
Any reflections of your own . . . ?
PS the video to the right is for you rudy!!
