Posts filed under 'Christianity'
April 12th, 2008
The Imam is tall, slender, academic but in a wholly engaging way. The Pastor has a boxer’s build and is as fiery and passionate as a Pentecostal can be. The Imam’s eyes light up with experience and intelligence as he speaks of his Islamic faith. The pastor, reflecting on Christianity’s teaching on peace, radiates an urgent and hard won love. The Imam looks at the pastor with the tenderness of a mother and says he likes him even though he’s a Christian. The pastor returns the gaze and then looking back at the camera, says, “I love him because my faith teaches me to love my brothers. He is my brother, we are husband and wife, for the sake of ourselves and of our children we must stay together, we must not separate.”
This exchange of humanity goes on even as they speak of the teachings of their diverse faiths. A diversity says the pastor–without any note of paradox–that allows them to live together. And they have been living and traveling together for the past 12 years.
This dialogue and human exchange is rare enough. Now consider that the contextual experience, the immediate history of each man is one of having personal and community property burned and looted, and as having lost family members to a raging violence endorsed and perpetrated by each of these men upon the other and upon their perspective religious communities.
I had the opportunity to view this remarkable documentary the other evening at All Saints. It’s a film of reconciliation–of how perpetrators of violence become instigators of peace–and it should be required viewing in mosques and churches across the country.
When you consider the pressure upon these men to take revenge, to keep the cycle of reciprocal violence going, when you consider the slender thread of trust that had to hold all the these opposites and the oppositions together, that had to overcome the welling up of unbidden hate…as for example–in the early stages of their relationship, the very real temptation the pastor had to smother the sleeping Imam with his own pillow–you understand you are in the presence of something like a modern miracle.
You understand that in some deeper sense both are Imams, and both are pastors. They have become brothers. Not because either has given up their faith. In fact, we come to see that it’s precisely a closely practised faith that allows each man a connecting point beyond their situations.
April 9th, 2008
In Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and Glory, the priest, known only as the “whiskey priest,” does not find his salvation…at least not in any way that would be recognized by his church. He is, as he himself says, a bad priest, given to drink, slipshod at his clerical tasks, and somewhere along the way he fathered a child.
There had been a time he was considered a good priest. A time when he believed it himself. And if not quite believing it, believing he could aspire to such as long as stayed within the structures of the church with his piety out front and hardened around him. 
But it’s when he’s on the out, living within the givenness of his “sin,” that God meets him. And it’s in a soiled and stinking and overcrowded prison cell, where he finds beauty and his own humanity. Here in the company of his own, the weakest kind of flesh, his heart swells with the compassion of Christ. Swells even for the immensely pious woman who counts herself far above the fornicators, thieves, drunkards and beggars that share the cell.
This, then, was the “whiskey priest’s” revelation: “When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity…that was a quality God’s image carried with it…when you saw the lines at the corner of the eyes, the shape of the mouth and how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
- The prison scene is not only one of the great pieces of English literature, it is a scene of profound theological depth.
- Greene published this book in 1940. In 1954 a ban was placed upon the book by the Vatican.
April 3rd, 2008
Soren Kierkegaard is hands down my favourite philosopher, not that I know that many philosophers. I’m a picker and chooser–a collector that doesn’t always understand what he collects, but is compelled to collect just the same–as I think I’ve mentioned someplace before. The reason I choose Soren is because he too is skinny and likes walking.
Witness: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” SK
Kierkegaard perambulated himself into some truly insightful ideas. Yesterday, I stumbled upon one of his thoughts that explained why atheism doesn’t stand a chance in hell of becoming pervasively accepted. At least until someone even more brilliant than Stephen Hawkings forever takes the meta out metaphysics, and is able to communicate it to the unwashed lot of us.
Here’s Kierkegaard (anticipating Rene Girard’s mimetic desire theory): Please forgive Soren’s gender biased language–it was 1850.
For from “the others,” naturally, one properly only learns to know what the others are–it is in this way the world would beguile a man from being himself. “The others,” in turn do not know at all what they themselves are, but only what the others are. There is only One who knows what He Himself is, that is God; and He knows also what every man in himself is, for it is precisely by being before God that every man is. The man who is not before God is not himself, for this a man can be only by being before Him who is in and for Himself. If one is oneself by being in Him who is in and for Himself, one can be in others or before others, but one cannot by being merely before others be oneself. (Christian Discourses)
The double bind of being human is that we seek to become ourselves by consciously and subconsciously imitating each other. But without a model beyond our collective selves we never find a self. And so, as Charles Bellinger (whose essay comparing Girard and Kierkegaard I’m completely indebted to here) points out, the only context in which we gain coherence, stability, and purpose is found in the transcendent relationship between us and God our Creator.
So wouldn’t it be the case that even if there were no God, our existential lack, that small niggling, sometimes overwhelming sense of incompleteness, would never allow us to be content with a closed, nobody-here-but-us-chickens universe?
March 29th, 2008
Here's a link to my article in today's Edmonton Journal. The article is a reflection of my (attempted) Easter poem.
Icon of the crucifixion of Christ; of unknown origen.
March 26th, 2008
I finally had the sense to pick up Father Joe. The book had been in my “to read” pile for more than a year. Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul is a memoir of sorts. It’s a story about a seemingly unlikely relationship between the author Tony Hendra and a religious.
The book begins with the fourteen-year-old Tony who finds himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. When the husband, a sincere-to-a-fault Catholic, discovers the tryst, he whisks the boy off to get straightened out by a priest. The priest he meets is a gentle, stammering, quirky, and wise Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow. The monk is nothing like what he imagined and a bond develops between them.
So taken is Hendra with Father Joe that upon graduating from high school he is intent on joining the Benedictine community. However, Father Joe’s deeper wisdom is that he wait. Then in one of the more fascinating moments in the book, Hendra describes losing his faith, as if over night. The remainder of the book is a description of an alternately sinking and surfacing life. Hendra slides into substance abuse, goes through a ruined marriage, but the one anchor in his life is the non-judgemental Father Joe. It’s this relationship that, in the most practical sense, saves the author.
At every level it’s a wonderful story, but it might also be worth mentioning that 
Tony Hendra, while attending Cambridge, performed frequently with his friends and Monty Pythons-to-be, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. He was editor in chief of Spy magazine, and the original editor of National Lampoon. He also played Ian Faith in the movie, This Is Spinal Tap, and was the co-creator of Spitting Image. He has written frequently for New York, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, among other magazines.
–
The bad news: Just after I wrote this little review I learned that the “delinquency” of Hendra may have gone far deeper than the memoir divulged. When the book was published, Jesscia Henda, 39 at the time, “unable to bear the hypocrisy,” wrote that she had been sexually molested by her father when she was seven and that it happen two more times after that. The charges are denied by Hendra but the New York Times article, to my mind, seems credible.
So what do you do with a non-fiction memoir you profoundly enjoyed only to find that the author may have committed one of the most grievous and damaging of crimes?
What saves the book is that while it’s ostensibly about Tony Hendra, it is more properly about Father Joe, the joyful, generous, wise monk, who had the kind of presence that could save one from religious cynicism. In fact at the end of the book we learn of the immense impact this humble Benedictine monk had on hundreds of people, including Rowan Williams, currently the archbishop of Canterbury, and Princess Diana.
March 24th, 2008
It’s the kind of spring morning that confuses itself with early fall. Hardly knowing its place or mode of presentation…it asks, “Should I be about receding or resurrecting?” And I with it, ask, what’s my place in this brown-grass-beside-cracked-sidewalk day?
Out of habit I’ve pointed myself to a door and a desk, but eight blocks is a long way on a morning such as this, and I’m disoriented. Where to find direction? The sky is closed for reading, its entrails sealed behind a splotchy blue grey hide. The cards falling from my sleeve are all jokers. And no tea leaves have escaped their perforated cells to rest on the bottom of cups. Where are the signs, my signs?
Yesterday I saw them and knew my place. Yesterday I felt somehow adjusted–kneeling beside a man bulky from folds of clothes, who smelled street-sour, and whose fingers were black from removing tobacco from butts. He came in half way through the Easter liturgy, sat down and rolled a cigarette, joining the six of us for the early service. When it was time, he was first at the eucharist rail and I steered toward him, lowering myself beside his already kneeling frame. He had the face of a pugilist…a George Chuvalo with long thick grey hair, stiff from dust.
The lot of us–an older man in a suit, a smartly-dressed business woman, an elderly woman with a broach, a middle-aged woman in flowered blouse, and a younger man in blue jeans who knew his way around the Book of Common Prayer– lined up like robins, mouths open, waiting for a wafer, some wine and over our heads, the sign. When Eucharist was done the man got up and not waiting for any closing hymns or prayers, walked out of the sanctuary, presumably through the front doors to light up his cigarette. Maureen, the presiding priest, thanked me for coming and I walked out, my way marked for me by a small wooden table covered with flowers in bloom.
Today the only things blooming are indoor daffodils on a counter beside a cash register. And the only thing holding them up is hairspray. They will have to do.
March 23rd, 2008
The following poem was written in response to a friend's far more clever poem. (See Holy Hangover comments.) In the likely event that my poem fails, an upcoming article will hopefully give it some crutches.
Osiris, Isis, Horus
shrouded in sacred awe
and swollen footed Oedipus
bearing our hidden flaw
You god's of death and life
phantasmic transformation
upon the canvass of strife
once goats, now exaltation
Yet flung among antiquity
is Jesus' low-brow myth
while crude and poor symbolically
are victims revealed herewith
O Adonis, child eternal
shield us from place and time
since before myth was ritual
but first came our crime
March 21st, 2008
The conjunction of Good Friday and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is appropriate. Racism, like discrimination of all kinds, is a symptom of the soul-sickness that was finally and forever uncovered by Good Friday. This “original sin,” our primal brokenness, has to do with our distorted desire (Girard) and our deeply sensed existential lack (Kierkegaard). A lack we attempt to slake through acquisition and self-elevation (twisted desire). That’s the abstract.
Here’s the personal: Good Friday is not about a vicarious substitution that saves me from a wrathful God. (The only wrath going on in the Easter story is ours.) It’s about a shot to the heart that cracks open my habit of trying to fill my “lack of peace,” my lack of self, by stepping on someone else. And concordantly, it’s about my willingness to be co-opted by any movement, club, church, campaign, crowd, that defines itself on the basis of being not like some other group, and so lifts me, by virtue of my belonging to it, to a status above the fray and field. A status that I cling to through violence, if necessary. Violence of any form that I’ll always have a way of justifying, “redeeming.”
This day, designated by the UN to focus on the problem of racism, I just discovered, marks a horrendous event that took place on March 21, 1960 in Sharpeville, South Africa, where 69 peaceful demonstrators were killed during a protest against apartheid.
Here was a case where societal disintegration–the fomentation inherent in apartheid–was resolved through the identification and killing of a chosen victim, (the group of peaceful protesters). Beyond instilling fear through a show of force it was hoped that the killing would reinforce and re-form the social unanimity and cohesion of the National Party and the white populace. In fact it was the beginning of the end of apartheid.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, the reason this kind of scapegoating no longer works is because of the Easter event. The redemptive violence on Good Friday is of the same order as that of racism. But because of Easter the justifications for racism and discrimination of any form fail. The “victim” is now visible.
And if the victim can no longer be hidden through justification we are without excuse if we refuse to do nothing. And so Good Friday also exposes our refusal to grow, or our acquiescence to immaturity within the shelter of a non-growing group–the same group that also shields us from the knowledge of our immaturity.
Good Friday invites us to grow. The Easter event asks us discard our notion that creation is a completed event in the distant past and instead see creation as an ongoing event in the present where we are continually being called into a great forgiving and creative love.
March 19th, 2008
It’s holy week. Here are some of the holy hangovers many of us used to live with:
That God is not concerned with our happiness…only desires our holiness. But how is a desire for joy and happiness opposed to holiness? Maybe…God wants our happiness more than our holiness. Somehow I’d sooner want my kids to be happy than holy. Maybe happiness is holiness. Maybe the dichotomy is false.
That holiness has a certain face. But I know some ordinary and some rather ribald people who have an inner light I’d call holy. I’ve met them and they are all generous. Some live on the street, some work in office towers. Some publish heavy equipment magazines. Many of them are mothers. Yes, some preach but you couldn’t call it that.
That holiness is being set apart for God’s purpose. Or as one Christian apologist has said, “Holiness is itself a drawing of a boundary around that which is uniquely associated with God.” Oh, now here’s a dangerous one! A kind of hyper-sacred-profane-dualism with the inference that God’s purposes are obvious. The unholy thing here is the idea that some created things are holy, uniquely having to do with God, and the rest is refuse…outside of God’s sphere. How many people-divisions has this spawned?
It’s holy eon, please enjoy everything, but pick up after yourself.
March 17th, 2008
We gathered in the anteroom and were given palm fronds to hold. After a prayer of blessing we formed a line and entered the sanctuary, palm leaves in hand. Once around the sanctuary while singing “Ride on, Ride on in Majesty,” and then to our seats.
In the mean time Jesus had found a place at the front. Judas was in the back and Peter off to one side. Caiaphas and a few chief priests and elders were above us, up in the balcony. And Pilot was up there as well, standing off on his own.
Thus began the narration with the readers adopting their roles…and as well, a part for us, the crowd. We made our way through Matthew’s description of Judas’s sellout to Caiaphas, Jesus’ anguish in the garden, the betrayal of Peter, and the desertion of the disciples.
As a crowd, we found our voices during the trial. In response to Pilate’s question about who to release we said, “Barabbas.” And in reply to Pilate’s, “Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” We all said, “Let him be crucified!”
Of course there was no resemblance to the dusty, sweaty, bloody, event. No one was dressed for the part. And while we tried, “the crowd” was lacking conviction…and yet, in that cavernous sanctuary there was this second, one meteoric moment where I was placed in the swirling fomenting mood of the bloodthirsty crowd, calling, with everybody else, “Crucify him!”
Liturgy, this liturgy, was an iconic entrance into an event where symbol confronted me with the actual.
Previous Posts
The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
