I

A dark vow

that married death and life.

The branches of the

Tree of Life intertwined.

A match made on earth

with roots dug deep

in fecund soil,

and arms outstretched 

to Heaven,

before a great cloud of

witnessing stars

in the dark night.

II

We are the bastard children

of an unholy union.

Orphaned in the feud between

a Queen and a Tyrant

yet bound to both - 

destined to repeat

their bloody history.

III

Blood begets blood

death begets death.

The dense soil readied

with generations of

human compost and refuse.

Death cannot be escaped.

Could even God himself

dirty his hands with the earth 

and not succumb?

IV

A tree is more than a tree

when it is cut down and

fashioned into a cross.

Flesh wounds are more than just

when they are on the hands 

of God.

Death is made less than death

when defeated and subjugated.

Man is made truly man

when resurrected.

V

The fruit of the spirit are ripening

on a tree with blood in its veins.

Come sit under the shade of growing leaves

as we stare into the persecuted skies

and dream of our place among the stars.

Death and life are intertwined,

with each other

and with us. 

But the shed blood no longer is our own.

Forum 1

In our society, everything we do is, in one way or another, for someone else.  Think about your job.  Most likely you are providing some sort of service for others.  Teachers serve students.  Politicians serve the public.  Waiters serve eaters.  Factory workers are making products for others.  And what about what you do when you're not working?  Most likely you are supporting workers.  We are told our consumption is good for the economy.  Which means that as we spend we are doing it not only for our own good but for the good of others.  And yet for all we do for others we are still selfish and we lack community.

Community is more than simply providing services or fulfilling needs.  As Christians, our community is the Church - the body of Christ.  This distinction is important because we often fail to remember who's body we are.  The fact that we are Christ's body makes all the difference.  As Christ's body, we follow his lead and our community is held to the standard of the cross - the standard of sacrifice, forgiveness, and redemption - namely love.  Meeting this standard is not something we do on our own - it takes a whole body.  We need each other.  It is our striving together for this standard, the standard of the cross that makes us distinctly Christian, so that the why of meeting needs is as important as the what of the needs we are meeting.  When we get the why right, community flourishes and needs truly get met.

This Is How I Feel

I've begun recently to get a clearer sense of our being aliens as Christians.  More and more I feel out of place.  There is a real sense of existential distress.  Not in a nihilistic way, not like Sartre or Camus, or others like them. But a very real and pervasive questioning of my life, the way I live and the way of life of the world around me.  And I find myself in a black-hole of sorts, in a vacuum between the church and the world.  I find the secular world-view to be vacuous and futile.  Greed, oppression, and violence are the rules of the game.  It's sad, frankly.  And it is death to the soul.  What is worse, the place that I should be able to turn, the church, is playing the same game, and playing by the same rules.  Now to be fair it's not all bad.  There are shafts of light that break through the stormy clouds.  I find myself drawn to those shafts and feel at home in the brilliance of Love that makes the light.  But at the same time, while traveling from shaft to shaft, the path is dark and cold.  And I don't know what to do.  The word of God is supposed to be a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.  But what do you do when that word is being distorted?  When it is being covered and causing the path to be shrouded in darkness all over again?  When those in whose charge it is fail to use it properly or effectively?  These are things I working through.  This is how I'm feeling right now.  I see more and more how much I bleed the half-truths and blatant lies of my culture, secular AND christian.  It's beyond my control, and beyond my ability to do much about it right about now.  That's all.

The Good Dead God: Killing a God With Philip Pullman

We find God, the Ancient of Days, on the limits of tangibility.  He lays in His portable seat like a withering wrinkly old baby.  Angels transport Him from a fortress in the sky, as Metatron, the soon to be Authority, watches a war between the Kingdom of Heaven and those who would initiate the Republic of Heaven.  On his way to safety, God, decrepit and senile, meets the enemy and his seat fall from the sky.  Not long after, rescued by two children who have no idea who he is and who help him sympathetically, even pathetically, God disintegrates into the air.  The end of God, the death of the Authority.  

Philip Pullman has great distaste for this God.  It is evident in his description.  This God is weak.  He is beyond old.  He can not even move himself.  Pullman admits to his hatred of religion.  He is forthright in his purpose in writing the "His Dark Materials" series, the first book of which was recently made into a Hollywood film.  Pullman is a militant atheist, so to him the obliteration of religion from the face of the earth would be a good thing.  To him God is dead, if He ever existed.  All that is true is reason and science.  Consciousness is God.

I see things diametrically to Pullman in so many ways.  But one thing we do have in common.  The God that dies in his series can burn forever in the hell He was born in.  He is a cruel God, even an evil God.  He is a tyrant, He is the Authority.  And we are better off without Him.  

There has been a lot of uproar over "The Golden Compass", the recent book turned movie.  Many christian parents are quite upset.  Pullman is gunning for impressionable children.  He is overstepping his bounds, and so we should boycott the film.  I couldn't agree less.  

Instead, I think that the church should stand up with Pullman and declare the God of the His Dark Materials series dead.  Because He is.  He fell with the modernist movement that created Him.  And like I've said, we are better off without Him.  

Pullman's dead God is not the God of Christianity.  He might think so, but I think he is wrong.  But the God I worship is a God of pure love.  A God who rescues and saves.  A God who gives and forgives.  A God who is unafraid of reason and consciousness, because God is the one who fashioned them, who gave them to us as a gift.  The God I worship is quite different from the dead God of Pullman's books.  The God of Christianity is a God who is alive; God is the author of life and all life is possible only through God.  What Pullman doesn't realize is that if our God is ever killed, then we die with God.  So the God he kills can't be the Christian God, but is a God who needs to die.  A God that too many christians worship, but who is not the God of the Bible.

We should not fear Pullman's books or the message they might send to our children.  Instead we should embrace this good death of a God who is dead.  And use this death to point to the God who lives.

Pacifists, Environmentalists, and Profeminists Oh My!

I tend to veer towards radical thought.  Don't ask me why.  Or do.  It doesn't matter.  Either way I can only say that I don't know.  The truth is just that I do.  I like the label radical.  Holding to beliefs that might make most of the people I know squeal is appealing to me.  While that can lead to all kinds of problems, what I'm finding is that I have good reason to believe what I believe.  Take for instance my being a pacifist, which I will admit is something I refer to almost too often.  My being a pacifist, if it were only for the sake of being a pacifist, would be, frankly, stupid.  But I am a pacifist as an extension of my view of the redemption of human kind by Jesus on the cross.  God's method of choice was non-violent, and I believe that is how She wants us to live.  So I am a pacifist, because I can not reconcile violent means with the call to love my enemies, and to not resist evil by force.  You make disagree with me, but I dare say you can't say I don't at least have a valid, thought out reason.  The same can be said about the fact that I have decided to become a vegetarian, on theological grounds no less.  (I'm still working through these beliefs)  Or my being profeminist (an area of theology that I am especially interested in reading more about at the moment).  

However.  At the same time, I have to admit that what attracts me to these beliefs is the fact that for each of them, I can, and have to, say and believe things that will make people around me uncomfortable and maybe angry.  For instance, you might have squirmed when earlier in this blog I referred to God as She.  I don't apologize for that.  For me it is at the least a way of balancing and baptizing the patriarchal elements of my context:  as a white male, and as a westerner/American.  But I also know that I want to refer to God as She because it will make people upset.  And if they are upset, then they might have to think about their own beliefs a bit.  That is important to me.  I grew up in a denomination that cares not too much for thinking.  It is a constant struggle to combat the conditioning that occurred during the many many hours I sat hearing preaching, and was taught to see the world in a way that I can not accept any longer.  I think that my tendency toward radicalism is an extension of my struggle with my past.  But at the same time, I also think it's a load of fun.  I can only ask God that She will help me to be mature about it, and to use my words and life for Her glory.

The Writer Takes a Guess

If some day I write a novel, or more than one, I think that what I write will be something similar to the writing of Flannery O'Connor.  As a non-violent, I am intrigued with writing that contains violent elements.  How better to show the evils of violence than to let them play themselves out in your writing?  Besides O'Connor I am also intrigued by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club and the recent Rant.  I don't agree with his ideology, which is, as far as I can tell, a mix of existential post-modern angst, littered with bits of Freud and Sartre.  On some level I do see eye-to-eye with Palahniuk.  I believe that he sees himself as a realist, and in a way I will grant him that.  What is important is that we acknowledge the presupposition that he brings to his work:  there is no God, or if there is, He might hate us.  It's a sort of immature anarchism, which I will admit is what originally drew me to him (how many years ago was it that I first read him).  This is not what will drive my writing.  Instead it will be a different presupposition.  What will inform my writing will be a world-view that sees the cross as a statement of how we are to live.  In seeing God as the Lord of history, I believe that through the cross he showed the futility of methods of violence which seek to create their own solutions for the problem of history.  My writing will play with the dance of violence and non-violence.  At least as far as I can guess.  What is important to me is the implications of a live that is lived non-violently.  For instance, I consider myself a pacifist.  But what good is pacifism for pacifism's sake.  In that case it is little more than a political ideology that can be seen to shy away from the real problem of violence in the world.  You could say that it is convenient to be a pacifist in time of war.  It makes you a voice that stands out.  Instead of considering myself foremost a pacifist, it is important for me to say that I am a pacifist because I believe in living non-violently, and not the other way around.  Otherwise, my pacifist beliefs hold no theological weight, but are just a lofty idea that sets myself over and against the violent war-mongering culture that I live in.  So again, the implications of what it means to be non-violent are important to me.  And I can imagine that my creative writing will delve into the issues that arise from my beliefs.  I can't see how my writing would be very honest otherwise.  

This Pilgrim's Progress

God carries us.  Any "god" we can carry is . . . an idol.  That which we can carry is subject to our control. . . . But in trying to carry the living God of Mount Sinai, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, we insult him and we destroy ourselves. 

- Kosuke Koyama

I fear at times that my skepticism will keep me from really experiencing God, from really growing in relationship with Him.  I'm reading an old Russian tale called "The Way of the Pilgrim" (thanks John), a story about a pilgrim who is concerned with learning to pray without ceasing.  He is torn because he cannot figure out how to do it, yet he believes that the Bible tells him he is supposed to.  An elder, a priest in the church gives him the Philokalia, a book that teaches him how to pray like he believes he is supposed to.  While traveling around several "miraculous" things happen; moments of divine providence if you will.  As I was reading I realized how skeptical I am of "spiritualizing", of seeing God in the things that happen to us.  I am like a clerk he meets.  "You hypocrites always see miracles!" he says when the pilgrim tells him a story.  He would rather see events as simply natural, which is so much like me.  Part of my skepticism, of course, comes from wanting to be careful.  It is easy to see things that are not there.  To bleed spiritualism into everything.  While that is not how I want to live, I do want to be sensitive to God's work in the moments of my life.

Too often in my life I try to carry God.  I've been reading a lot of theology texts lately and I fear that a very real reason for this is that I want to grasp God.  It's not that I simply want to learn about Him, or experience Him.  I want to get a hold of him, so that I can say that I have acquired God, that I have come to an understanding and that I KNOW God.  Who He is, what he does, how he works.  All of the above.  I want to read and read until I have picked God up and put Him on my shoulders so that I can carry Him.  No longer would I need faith.  No longer would I have doubt or fear of the mystery of God.  I would have Him under my control.  

Tonight I finished a survey on classical theology, "The Doctrine of God" by Veli-Matti Karkkainen.  The last several chapters of the book deal with non-Western theological perspecives.  Asian, African, and Latin American theologies are discussed.  What really struck me was the contextualization of our theologies.  Everything about our lives informs our beliefs.  We are slaves to our presuppositions, whether they are natural or learned.  I am a white male, and so what that means for me is telling in my theology.  Who you are is telling of your beliefs.  I don't mean this in a deterministic sense, where we have no choices in our beliefs.  But really we tend to move in the direction of the streams of life in which we swim.  It's hard to do otherwise without revelation of some sort.  Impossible?  I don't know.  The point is that I realized while reading about theological perspectives that were different from my Western perspective, that my beliefs are as contextualized as theirs.  It was easy for me to be immediately skeptical of their treatment of theology.  But I learned a lesson about humility.  I learned that I don't know all that much.  I also came to the conclusion that I want to be carried rather than try to carry God.  If I am going to be any kind of theologian (not professional, please God!) I don't want to make an idol of my beliefs.  I don't want to insult God, whether by thinking I can carry Him or by being skeptical of ways he can work in my life.  On this journey, I want to be a pilgrim, and I want to be an individual that is not so wrapped up in himself, that all he believes comes to mean nothing, as it is but an idol and not the real living Trinity, the God who carries.