I don’t claim to be the poster child for the connected world (the web 2.0 world). I have a couple of blogs. I have multiple e-mail accounts. I have a Facebook page – though today I read another article on the “graying of Facebook.” Seniors are the fastest growing group using this social media. I am not yet a “senior” and I am not so much graying as balding. However, I guess the “graying of Facebook” sounds better than the “balding of Facebook.” Anyway, though I have posted on this blog for three and a half years now, I am still discovering features of this blog site.
I just discovered that if you go to your profile page you can click on the underlined items in your profile, such as “favorite music,” and you get a list of every other blogger who also has this listed as a favorite. 532,000 people list Bob Dylan as among their favorite music. That’s a lot of people, but it is nothing compared to The Beatles – 3,090,000. So I thought I would see if at least some of my choices were rarer. Lucinda Williams counts 20,300 blogspot bloggers who list her in favorite music, smaller, but still quite a few. One of my favorite bands of summer 2010, The Hold Steady, clocks in at 5,100. Then I decided to see if anyone else listed “On the Transmigration of Souls” in the favorite music category. I guessed it would be smaller than even The Hold Steady.
“On the Transmigration of Souls” is a classical piece composed by American composer John Adams. It was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to honor the victims of the 9/11 attacks and to honor those who reached out with a heroic and caring hand that day. It is a haunting and beautiful piece of music. In the booklet that accompanies the CD there is this description: “It superimposes pre-recorded street sounds and the reading of victim’s names by friends and family members, also pre-recorded, on live performances by a children’s chorus, an adult chorus, and a large orchestra.” I remember first listening to it while driving. If I wasn’t on a schedule, I would have pulled over just to hear it all without thinking about driving. I listened to it again that same evening, and then a few more times. I found this music profoundly moving, and I continue to be moved whenever I hear it. Not everyone has the same reaction. I remember wanting to play it for a small group of clergy colleagues, and they did not hear it in the same way I did. I admit to being disappointed, but I am sure I have disappointed others in not sharing their enthusiasm for something or other.
I realize that there may be some bloggers who list John Adams in their favorite music list. I simply have this one piece by name. So I clicked on “On the Transmigration of Souls” in my blogger profile. The list of bloggers who identify this as a favorite piece of music is small. “David Bard.”
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Anne Rice
I am not a fan of Anne Rice novels. It is not that I have read them and don’t like them. It is that in the scheme of things, with more books to read than I have time to, I have chosen not to read vampire literature. I know it is on a long-term come back, but this is one wave I am not going to ride. I didn’t ride it years ago, either – anyone remember Dark Shadows?
I guess that I am not an Anne Rice fan is o.k., because she is probably not my fan either. Last week, Anne posted a statement saying that she was quitting Christianity, giving up on it because it is “quarrelsome, hostile and disputatious.” My sense of what I viewed of an interview with her was that what she was giving up was “organized Christianity.” As a clergy person, I certainly am a part of organized Christianity, and so assume that Anne Rice would not be a fan.
You might expect me to rush in to defend organized Christianity. I think it is defensible, at least in part, yet it is only so when we admit the truth of Anne Rice’s statements. The history of Christianity is littered with and marred by incidents of Christianity being quarrelsome and disputatious. The problem, in my mind, is not that Christians disagree. The Bible is a complex document. Disagreement about its meaning is to be expected. We are trying to grapple with deep mysteries of life and the reality of God. Our intellectual categories can come up short. Christians will disagree – with one another and with non-Christians. Healthy disagreement can energize and sharpen our thinking. Disagreement is not the problem, hostility is. The smallness of some of the issues we become exercised about is.
Despite our shortcomings, there remains something valuable and important about organized Christianity. The teachings of Jesus, his intriguing presence and the stories told about him are still part of organized Christianity, and they would not have made it this far without some organization that sought to carry them forward. That the teachings and spirit of Jesus have been distorted by the same people who carry them forward is tragic, but those same teachings and that same spirit provide a corrective.
Hopefully we who name the name of Jesus will learn to be less hostile and quarrelsome. Hopefully we can assert our viewpoints with gentleness, humility and love. That would be more in keeping with the teachings and spirit of our founder.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
I guess that I am not an Anne Rice fan is o.k., because she is probably not my fan either. Last week, Anne posted a statement saying that she was quitting Christianity, giving up on it because it is “quarrelsome, hostile and disputatious.” My sense of what I viewed of an interview with her was that what she was giving up was “organized Christianity.” As a clergy person, I certainly am a part of organized Christianity, and so assume that Anne Rice would not be a fan.
You might expect me to rush in to defend organized Christianity. I think it is defensible, at least in part, yet it is only so when we admit the truth of Anne Rice’s statements. The history of Christianity is littered with and marred by incidents of Christianity being quarrelsome and disputatious. The problem, in my mind, is not that Christians disagree. The Bible is a complex document. Disagreement about its meaning is to be expected. We are trying to grapple with deep mysteries of life and the reality of God. Our intellectual categories can come up short. Christians will disagree – with one another and with non-Christians. Healthy disagreement can energize and sharpen our thinking. Disagreement is not the problem, hostility is. The smallness of some of the issues we become exercised about is.
Despite our shortcomings, there remains something valuable and important about organized Christianity. The teachings of Jesus, his intriguing presence and the stories told about him are still part of organized Christianity, and they would not have made it this far without some organization that sought to carry them forward. That the teachings and spirit of Jesus have been distorted by the same people who carry them forward is tragic, but those same teachings and that same spirit provide a corrective.
Hopefully we who name the name of Jesus will learn to be less hostile and quarrelsome. Hopefully we can assert our viewpoints with gentleness, humility and love. That would be more in keeping with the teachings and spirit of our founder.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Monday, August 16, 2010
Returning from vacation, to the hustle and bustle and noise and busyness of life, I would like to remember these words:
Until we go into silence, we have nothing to say except what we hear around us, nothing to think except what has already been thought by somebody else. Until we go into silence, we may know really very little about ourselves.
Joan Chittister, Living Well
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Until we go into silence, we have nothing to say except what we hear around us, nothing to think except what has already been thought by somebody else. Until we go into silence, we may know really very little about ourselves.
Joan Chittister, Living Well
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Friday, August 6, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Jesus in New York and Berkeley
With so many words over so long a time, perhaps passersby can still hear tones inaudible to the more passionate participants. Somebody seems to have hoped so, once.
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
Jesus fascinates. That this is so in a culture where “Jesus” has been used for everything
from selling hats and t-shirts to justifying white supremacy is a miracle of no small proportion. Jesus fascinates because of his on-going influence, because of the good that has also been done in his name despite the harmful and the tacky, and because of the literature in which the story of Jesus is told. Beyond that, the literature on the literature is something of a cottage industry. “The appetite for historical study of the New Testament remains a publishing constant and a popular craze” (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 24, 2010).
Two authors, Gopnik and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, have both penned thoughtful and engaging articles about Jesus and the Jesus literature this summer. The articles appeared not in arcane theological publications, but in journals of culture. Gopnik’s piece, a review of a wide range of material on Jesus and the gospels appeared in The New Yorker. Phillips work, a review of Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief in which the writer also engages in deeper religious analysis, was published in the summer edition of The Threepenny Review (published in Berkeley). I am fascinated by their fascination with Jesus, and engaged by their engaging thoughtfulness. While neither author tips their own religious hand explicitly, the impression given by both is that these are articles written by “outsiders,” passersby if you will.
Gopnik is an able judge of current scholarly literature on the historical Jesus. “The current scholarly tone is… realist but pessimistic,” that is to say, the scholars think there are historical materials in the gospels, but getting to the bottom of them is complex. Gopnik thinks this affects faith, or perhaps argues that it should have an impact on faith. “The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith.” Among the things that reasonably could be said about Jesus, Gopnik includes the following: He’s verbally spry and even a little bit shifty. He likes defiant, enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, perhaps by design…. Jesus’ morality has a brash, sidewise indifference to conventional ideas of goodness. His pet style blends the epigrammatic with the enigmatic…. There is a wild gaiety about Jesus’ moral teachings that still leaps off the page. Gopnik writes about Jesus’ “social radicalism” – the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table. Yet he also acknowledges another dimension to Jesus. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet… and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living. There is a “twoness” about Jesus, including a twoness between what Gopnik calls “Paul’s divine Christ” and “Jesus the wise rabbi.”
Here Gopnik offers additional reflections of his own, distinguishing between “storytelling truths” and “statement making truths.” The twoness in the Christian story is a part of its dynamism, Gopnik thinks. From the very beginning there is ambiguity and symbolism. The sublime symbolic turn – or the retreat to metaphor… begins with the first words of the faith…. The argument is the reality, and the absence of certainty the certainty. Jesus fascinates Gopnik because he continues to offer the possibility for this kind of deep conversation. Somehow in asking about Jesus, we dig more deeply into life.
Adam Phillips offers more than a book review, as already noted. He characterizes Elaine Pagels’ work as “trying to find, within the multiple faiths called Christianity, a version of Christianity that she can morally afford to believe in.” Like Gopnik, Phillips sees within Christianity a certain multiplicity. Phillips argues that Pagels is trying to find a Christian faith that does not demonize the enemy “even if the enemy is what you still need to call them.” Pagels search for such a Christianity has centered in gaining deeper understanding of and insight into the earlier years of the Christian faith. She has studied the writings of the Gnostics, and Beyond Belief focuses on the non-canonical “Gospel of Thomas.” She offers a sympathetic view of the rise of orthodoxy and canonicity. This act of choice… leads us back to the problem that orthodoxy was invented to solve: how can we tell truth from lies. What is genuine and thus connects us with one another and with reality, and what is shallow, self-serving, or evil? Anyone who has seen foolishness, sentimentality, delusion, and murderous rage disguised as God’s truth knows there is no easy answer to the problem that the ancients called discernment of spirits. Phillips then offers his reflections on this passage from Pagels. For Pagels, it is to our (defining) credit that there is no easy answer to the problem of discernment of spirits, and she suggests that our hardest and best task is to keep the problem alive. Orthodoxy robs us of our doubts, and it is only self-doubt that keeps us from demonizing our enemies. He believes that Pagels finds in The Gospel of Thomas a Jesus “who is on the side of the seekers rather than the finders… who prefers being sympathetic to being right.” Phillips wraps up his reflections on Pagels, Christian faith and Jesus with these words: For Christians like Pagels… Jesus invites us to reinvent Christianity, not establish it. He is the visionary who calls for revision. Like a contemporary pragmatist, he doesn’t want to be followed, he wants to be redescribed…. There are as many Jesuses as there are gospels – as there are Christians. All Pagel’s Christians have in common is a quest in which they must try and find what they are looking for.
Agreeing completely with either Gopnik or Phillips is not the point. I am fascinated by their fascination with Jesus, and fascinated by the Jesus they find fascinating. This Jesus, with his fondness for enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, with his invitation to a belief that also includes doubts and questions, casts a certain spell (the root of the word “fascination” is in a Latin word that means casting a spell). I am charmed. Parker Palmer writes, “truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.” Perhaps at the heart of Christianity is an eternal conversation about the meaning of Jesus conducted with passion and discipline. If so, Gopnik and Phillips sound tones, sometimes inaudible to some who have been engaged in the conversation a long time, that nevertheless need to be heard. Fascinating.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
Jesus fascinates. That this is so in a culture where “Jesus” has been used for everything
from selling hats and t-shirts to justifying white supremacy is a miracle of no small proportion. Jesus fascinates because of his on-going influence, because of the good that has also been done in his name despite the harmful and the tacky, and because of the literature in which the story of Jesus is told. Beyond that, the literature on the literature is something of a cottage industry. “The appetite for historical study of the New Testament remains a publishing constant and a popular craze” (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 24, 2010).
Two authors, Gopnik and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, have both penned thoughtful and engaging articles about Jesus and the Jesus literature this summer. The articles appeared not in arcane theological publications, but in journals of culture. Gopnik’s piece, a review of a wide range of material on Jesus and the gospels appeared in The New Yorker. Phillips work, a review of Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief in which the writer also engages in deeper religious analysis, was published in the summer edition of The Threepenny Review (published in Berkeley). I am fascinated by their fascination with Jesus, and engaged by their engaging thoughtfulness. While neither author tips their own religious hand explicitly, the impression given by both is that these are articles written by “outsiders,” passersby if you will.
Gopnik is an able judge of current scholarly literature on the historical Jesus. “The current scholarly tone is… realist but pessimistic,” that is to say, the scholars think there are historical materials in the gospels, but getting to the bottom of them is complex. Gopnik thinks this affects faith, or perhaps argues that it should have an impact on faith. “The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith.” Among the things that reasonably could be said about Jesus, Gopnik includes the following: He’s verbally spry and even a little bit shifty. He likes defiant, enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, perhaps by design…. Jesus’ morality has a brash, sidewise indifference to conventional ideas of goodness. His pet style blends the epigrammatic with the enigmatic…. There is a wild gaiety about Jesus’ moral teachings that still leaps off the page. Gopnik writes about Jesus’ “social radicalism” – the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table. Yet he also acknowledges another dimension to Jesus. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet… and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living. There is a “twoness” about Jesus, including a twoness between what Gopnik calls “Paul’s divine Christ” and “Jesus the wise rabbi.”
Here Gopnik offers additional reflections of his own, distinguishing between “storytelling truths” and “statement making truths.” The twoness in the Christian story is a part of its dynamism, Gopnik thinks. From the very beginning there is ambiguity and symbolism. The sublime symbolic turn – or the retreat to metaphor… begins with the first words of the faith…. The argument is the reality, and the absence of certainty the certainty. Jesus fascinates Gopnik because he continues to offer the possibility for this kind of deep conversation. Somehow in asking about Jesus, we dig more deeply into life.
Adam Phillips offers more than a book review, as already noted. He characterizes Elaine Pagels’ work as “trying to find, within the multiple faiths called Christianity, a version of Christianity that she can morally afford to believe in.” Like Gopnik, Phillips sees within Christianity a certain multiplicity. Phillips argues that Pagels is trying to find a Christian faith that does not demonize the enemy “even if the enemy is what you still need to call them.” Pagels search for such a Christianity has centered in gaining deeper understanding of and insight into the earlier years of the Christian faith. She has studied the writings of the Gnostics, and Beyond Belief focuses on the non-canonical “Gospel of Thomas.” She offers a sympathetic view of the rise of orthodoxy and canonicity. This act of choice… leads us back to the problem that orthodoxy was invented to solve: how can we tell truth from lies. What is genuine and thus connects us with one another and with reality, and what is shallow, self-serving, or evil? Anyone who has seen foolishness, sentimentality, delusion, and murderous rage disguised as God’s truth knows there is no easy answer to the problem that the ancients called discernment of spirits. Phillips then offers his reflections on this passage from Pagels. For Pagels, it is to our (defining) credit that there is no easy answer to the problem of discernment of spirits, and she suggests that our hardest and best task is to keep the problem alive. Orthodoxy robs us of our doubts, and it is only self-doubt that keeps us from demonizing our enemies. He believes that Pagels finds in The Gospel of Thomas a Jesus “who is on the side of the seekers rather than the finders… who prefers being sympathetic to being right.” Phillips wraps up his reflections on Pagels, Christian faith and Jesus with these words: For Christians like Pagels… Jesus invites us to reinvent Christianity, not establish it. He is the visionary who calls for revision. Like a contemporary pragmatist, he doesn’t want to be followed, he wants to be redescribed…. There are as many Jesuses as there are gospels – as there are Christians. All Pagel’s Christians have in common is a quest in which they must try and find what they are looking for.
Agreeing completely with either Gopnik or Phillips is not the point. I am fascinated by their fascination with Jesus, and fascinated by the Jesus they find fascinating. This Jesus, with his fondness for enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, with his invitation to a belief that also includes doubts and questions, casts a certain spell (the root of the word “fascination” is in a Latin word that means casting a spell). I am charmed. Parker Palmer writes, “truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter, conducted with passion and discipline.” Perhaps at the heart of Christianity is an eternal conversation about the meaning of Jesus conducted with passion and discipline. If so, Gopnik and Phillips sound tones, sometimes inaudible to some who have been engaged in the conversation a long time, that nevertheless need to be heard. Fascinating.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
A Prayer Rediscovered
I had not thought about this prayer for awhile, but today in an e-mail box someone responded to it. This prayer is something I posted on a liturgy web site almost three years ago. I had forgotten it since, but was pleased to be reminded of it. It is a prayer inspired by the well-known “Serenity Prayer” composed by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
God - whose love envelopes each of us, whose passion for justice and kindness challenges us, whose care for all life inspires us - give us grace. May your Spirit dance delightfully through our lives. In grace, give us peace in the face of things that cannot be changed - our genetic make-up, our genealogy, past hurts and mistakes. In grace, give us courage to change what should be changed - our unloving attitudes, our narrow perspectives, our cynical hearts, injustice, our too easy resort to violence. In grace, give us wisdom so that we can distinguish between those things that cannot be changed and those that can and should be so that we don't spend needless energy in the wrong direction. In Christ, who changes lives. Amen.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
God - whose love envelopes each of us, whose passion for justice and kindness challenges us, whose care for all life inspires us - give us grace. May your Spirit dance delightfully through our lives. In grace, give us peace in the face of things that cannot be changed - our genetic make-up, our genealogy, past hurts and mistakes. In grace, give us courage to change what should be changed - our unloving attitudes, our narrow perspectives, our cynical hearts, injustice, our too easy resort to violence. In grace, give us wisdom so that we can distinguish between those things that cannot be changed and those that can and should be so that we don't spend needless energy in the wrong direction. In Christ, who changes lives. Amen.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Gifts
I turned 51 last week (Thursday). The day itself might be among my least memorable birthdays. I was in the Chicago area for a meeting of the United Methodist Church’s University Senate, for which I serve on the Commission on Theological Education. We met in the morning, and that was just fine. I enjoy the people I have come to know in this work. We even got done a little early, so I was at O’Hare early for my flight. When I arrived, the check in screen told me that my flight was overbooked and to see the agent if I might be willing to change my plans. Well, there were three other flights to Minneapolis scheduled to leave O’Hare before mine, so I thought I would graciously volunteer to get on an earlier flight. No such luck. The airport was crowded and busy as the day before weather led to flight delays and cancellations. I would have to wait until my scheduled flight left – so on my birthday I spent six hours in a crowded airport. I enjoyed the reading time, but otherwise not a terribly memorable birthday.
The next day, however, I was greeted on Facebook by a number of good wishes for my birthday. I am deeply appreciative of each one, and find myself pledging to do better at checking for others’ birthdays on the site. Each greeting was a gift.
I got to thinking a bit about gifts, and about all the gifts in my life. It seems to me that the essence of a gift is that it is something received for which the language of “deserve” does not apply, or doesn’t apply easily or well. I am the grateful recipient of many gifts in life:
Love – God’s love. The essence of God’s gracious love is that it is not about “deserving.”
A good marriage. Yes, there is work to be done in creating a good marriage, and I hope I have done some of that work, but there is also a quality of gift about being in such a relationship.
Children who are doing well. Again, one hopes they contributes to the well-being of their children. Again, I hope I have given something positive to my children which has helped make them who they are. And again, there is a quality of gift when your children are healthy and relatively happy and you have a good relationship with them.
Friends.
Small joys: a good book, a baseball game, music (and this summer seems particularly rich with some good new music – The New Pornographers, The Court Yard Hounds, The Hold Steady – all previously mentioned; and more recently Teenage Fanclub’s new cd and Bruce Springsteen’s concert dvd), a walk.
With all these good gifts of life, who can complain about a day at the airport.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
The next day, however, I was greeted on Facebook by a number of good wishes for my birthday. I am deeply appreciative of each one, and find myself pledging to do better at checking for others’ birthdays on the site. Each greeting was a gift.
I got to thinking a bit about gifts, and about all the gifts in my life. It seems to me that the essence of a gift is that it is something received for which the language of “deserve” does not apply, or doesn’t apply easily or well. I am the grateful recipient of many gifts in life:
Love – God’s love. The essence of God’s gracious love is that it is not about “deserving.”
A good marriage. Yes, there is work to be done in creating a good marriage, and I hope I have done some of that work, but there is also a quality of gift about being in such a relationship.
Children who are doing well. Again, one hopes they contributes to the well-being of their children. Again, I hope I have given something positive to my children which has helped make them who they are. And again, there is a quality of gift when your children are healthy and relatively happy and you have a good relationship with them.
Friends.
Small joys: a good book, a baseball game, music (and this summer seems particularly rich with some good new music – The New Pornographers, The Court Yard Hounds, The Hold Steady – all previously mentioned; and more recently Teenage Fanclub’s new cd and Bruce Springsteen’s concert dvd), a walk.
With all these good gifts of life, who can complain about a day at the airport.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
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