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Palms up.
From Brueggemann’s 19 Theses:
“7. It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us [note: see prior posts]. That is, to o (sic) enable persons to relinquish a world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.”
Given that “naming” is such a core gift, for good and ill, it should not surprise us that the world is about “scripting”. The schizophrenia of the Modern and Postmodern ages is that there are just too many scripts in competition.
The depiction of the world as a stage and we as actors (Pascal, Shakespeare, William Law and others) who enter and then fall one by one is fairly straight-forward as are the simple ways in which inculturation takes place if not like a riot then at least often like organized chaos.
The problematic part is the illusion of real clothing our various social fabrics bring. Naming and human language used creatively in so many ways is also our greatest way of evading and co-opting God and the spiritual. In fact, when people say we have “created God in our image” this is exactly the point and why real rationale behind Nietzsche’s famous edict that “God is Dead.” Few know the next line…”and we have killed him.”
The scripting then is to create a world and gods in our own image rather than allowing that we are created in God’s image and need de-scripting and then to be immersed in the alternative script rooted in the Old and New Testament texts.
As I have “Johnny-one-noted” before, the these texts are inherently “sub-versive”. They are the true “verses” that are like the “stone levels” that William Everson says lay beneath the “blind surf of events.”
Events interpreted by a “world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.”
For the world’s texts are an utter fiction and madness. As Ernest Becker points out, this madness is “agreed madness, shared madness…but madness all the same.”
So while living in the world we are not to become of it. In the past, this has often been interpreted in shallow fashion in a modern “Christianized” Epicurean/Stoic dialectic, both of which miss the point every bit as much as their ancient predecessors did.
In other words, not being “of the world” is not an invitation to become either a money-grubbing televangelist or Amish, In both vases “mammon” is the primary concern with God ’s self-revelation as secondary.
Sheesh.
To be “of the world” is simply to reject all other scripts as secondary at best when presented with the Living Christ and his subversive ways and words.
So, to end with an example, the word “ministry” is packed with all manner of pork-barrel add-ons, diversions and expectations. It simple means “service”. The biblical role of minster is one who equips others to do the actual work…not a professional who is hired to do it for others.
Imagine if part of our ministry was to first de-script the “ministry” as belonging largely to “a world that does not exist and never did exist”. Then what if we allow ourselves to be re-scripted by the alternative script via the Word.
It would be a nice start.
T-Bone Burnett has a fun album called The Talking Animals which is us.
“Naming” is one great gift given humanity by their Creator. In the Old Testament Creation myth the animals were brought to Adam and he named them. Even God went by the names given (or at least publically). Whether you take this myth as historical or not (myths can be either), the fact remains that naming is our core gift.
Even our “imaging” is an attempt to name.
It looked for awhile as if new media would simply drown us in image. I suppose that is the source of the bumper stickers that use to say “Shoot your television”. In either event, the “Humiliation of the Word” (Ellul) seemed inevitable in the eye-glazing blitz that is modern imaging.
Many lecturers (my myself included) marked how we had, culturally, moved from a word-based epistemology (way of knowing) to an image-based one.
Thank God for two things. One, I am not going to now rattle on about all the implications or examples of this (drive into any business section or turn on your tv and the point is made); and two, the Internet has reversed the tide back towards Word, while not vilifying Image.
You see, we recently added typing and near-immediate personal correspondence with others around the world to our specially-packed resume. In my book, it is one of the best moves we have made since deciding to add “Green” as a category…but then you see we did that first via Word.
Of course I have more to type on this, but for now please keep typing and hit “send” often. You might just be reclaiming a core gift that will help save the planet.
I am not kidding.
Seminary stacks.
After finishing a long burst of necessary tasks and under considerable pressure and little sleep I thought to take refuge today, early this afternoon in the stacks at the old seminary here. It will never cease to amaze how tall, stately and beautiful are the structures here which are so often deserted in the middle of term. On a campus that one would expect to be teaming with life and the bustle of important work you can number the bluejays more quickly than people.
I come here because, as cold and dead as it feels, it reminds me of my own roots in scholarship and how I found it an adventure no less tantalizing as a lad of 20 than if I were one of the children in that story walking through the Wardrobe into a fantastic new world.
I suppose after such early exploits, and now some thirty years later, you can understand why I would be drawn to a place that might, at any moment, open more deeply into Him.
I lay my laptop down and chuckled a bit. Reminded me (not seriously) of Luke Skywalker before he goes into the dark forest grabbing for his gear for security. The exchange with his mentor were appropriate: (video)
Yoda: “you will not need that.”
Luke: “What’s in there?”
Yoda: “Only what you take with you.”
Rows upon rows of doctoral dissertations in their black covers…books bound in extremely limited editions and signed by various authorities for the candidates, but probably never read by anyone else.
Cave-like I found some areas very dark and cold. Lifeless recountings of controversies now so obviously irrelevant. I suppose, in some respect, not much different than a few of my decades. So much energy and toil to play to others or work out one’s own stuff under the guise of “ministry”. So much energy and time arguing over how a society should be and how hundreds or thousands of important issues should shake out when we have avoided the largest and most core issues that define and inform any and all questions.
To be sure, issues of the nation and of gender are important. But is it wise to argue these outward forms alone without any first and sustained consideration that the nations themselves are “but a drop in the bucket” and that “In Christ there is neither male nor female” (or at the very least that all those misogynist Christian men are, ecclesiologically* speaking, the “Bride of Christ” and therefore must show up to the Grand Wedding in “drag”)?
Rows upon rows of journals, now hard bound in sets consisting mostly of just a few scholars arguing minute esoterica while the real questions are not even asked. Or worse, every seventeenth book or so a good-sized paperback starting with the title “Towards a Preliminary Approach to…” some such new question that no one will ever care about, including the author a year later.
Note this about good authors. They don’t dwell on the same work long. True, they may become known for a certain area, but never be surprised when you see them at top form on some other needed matter that seems, at first blush, unlikely.
In that regard, I found a few old friends. Kierkegaard was first.
They can never quite put him away from them because, well frankly, they don’t understand him most of the time. I don’t either. I just admit it. A towering intellect who could create with such ferocity and brilliance I really see him as the Van Gogh of theology and philosophy.
It is more than a good theological joke that Kierkegaard wrote some of his books in an obscure matter on purpose and for his own deliberate reasons. I say this because most books about Kierkegaard are written just as obscurely…just not on purpose or for any good reason.
I like Kierkegaard because he loved the Church and so was merciless in calling her a whore on all counts. I also love him for his Journals and prayers where a deeply sweet and passionate heart for God are found. And a deep distrust about himself which is some sort of “red pill” (video) that should be given to all students of theology and biblical literature on their first day.
But Kierkegaard rightly saw himself as a corrective. It was an awful burden that ultimately killed him early.
Next, and a little lower, I saw some C.S. Lewis. His mixture of scholarship and playfulness is much needed about now, as it was just sixty years ago. He would have quickly seen the landscape changing from Modernity into a protest against it and addressed it in new ways. Fortunate for us, his works, for the most part, speak equally well to both Moderns and Postmoderns as well.
Then I saw a stack of Buechner books. I opened one of the small books of essays to the one on Easter and disagreed with his conclusion to the effect that “if the tomb is empty there is nothing to talk about. If the body is still there there is nothing to talk about.”
Let me say, I agree with the latter half, and I suppose I see what he is trying to get at in the first. My only suggestion is that, showstopper that resurrection may be, there s a great deal to be talked about after the empty tomb…starting with “He is not here. why do you seek the living among the dead?”
But I love Buechner and wish I was half the writer he is. Friends hope someday I will actually be a quarter of the writer he is.
The last friend was embedded deep in the Catholic section: Merton.
I have wondered often how Merton is so able to speak to everyone and yet be so overt about Christ.
To oversimplify two words come to mind: charity and depth. These two are encased in a certain fearlessness and lack of personal agenda (other than truth-telling).
I believe Merton is my favorite and when I need solace from a Modern writer, it is always Merton. Often it is from his journals, which have an uncanny way of being about him and his own life and struggles, yet always seem to point beyond in a spiritual nakedness that is utterly disarming.
There is a also the fact that Merton is so “unCatholic” (in a sense) as to be truly more deeply Catholic in every sense of that term.
And Catholics can get away with that (like Walker Percy, Brennan Manning, Bruce Springsteen, or half of Bono as a few examples).
For the most part, as I said, the stacks of that old library are cold with a certain lostness. In some darker parts (away from the likes of S.K., Merton, Lewis and others), I heard those same words quietly inside: “He is not here. Why do you seek the Living among the dead?”
Then there was the one great neglected area….the commentaries. This is the one treasured place of an old library where good scholarship can be a Wardrobe into another world, a world far more real than this one. Through the study of Scripture the mind can be opened and the heart turned and warmed to Him.
If you go in there, in that area, leave your laptop behind. Save that for later in the cafe down in town.
No…take only yourself in .
Mac over Seattle, circa 1999.
The Incarnation grounds us in the love of God. “God with us.” The Cross is the core of that love and Paul says it is central to everything Gospel. If you reinterpret, sidestep or attempt to co-opt the Crucified God your theology, no matter how well-intentioned, is worthless and void.
Mine too.
As Bono sings “Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall….but You go on.”
So in some ways we are right to fixate on the cross. If you are on a sinking ship and there is one lifeboat left to get to safety that is pretty much the only important thing. What you do after, how you will rebuild, if you will marry, have kids etc…is all dependent on being rescued.
But here is the part we are not so very good at. I am not. In fact I am a disaster. It’s like I understood on that lifeboat what the real questions of life are and now that I am on dry land I have no idea how to translate any of it.
So it is with the empty tomb. What do we do with such expanse? He is not here. But He is here…Now.
That’s a little open-ended, no?
As I flew in 1999 into Seattle en route to Redmond I was pondering Jacques Ellul’s notion of the “City” as “man’s replacement for God” (The Meaning of the City) it was doubly ironic as I was arriving over a city that connections millions, if not billions, of replacement parts of the whole artifice, and was doing so as the head of a major Internet Gaming Portal (“re-creation” for the rest of the time when we are not replacing God in earnest).
This is what we do with our freedom. And we wonder why we feel more empty than a tomb.
Maybe, just maybe, it is because we have no idea what to do with the open-ended freedom of Easter. An empty tomb, a Living Lord who wants us today with Him, and a yawning existence with millions of competing voices. We shrink back at its immensity and seek diversion, not as they did in Pascal’s time as a clear-faced alternative to the seriousness of Truth, but rather now like hiding in the bomb shelters of London.
If Good Friday and Easter morning can begin to deal with our paralyzing fear of death, it is on Easter afternoon we realize we have another great fear: the fear of life.
And what is His answer today? To make it all “alright”?
No.
He never lied as people do. He said then as He says today. He says simply “I will be with you”.
And if you want to hear Him you must do a simple thing. Listen quietly because the world screams, but God whispers.
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