Posts filed under 'Religion'
June 20th, 2008
Now on magazine stands near you…GEEZ…30 sermons you’d never hear in church.
Whether playful, mischievous, or serious, there’s a foyer full of artful, imaginative, and compelling sermons here; and as promised, nary a one will you hear in church. (Also between these covers…my own “detoxification sermon.”)
An excerpt: Genuine worship is a detoxification process. It’s about releasing our fascination with who’s in and who’s out. It’s about letting go of our obsessive competitiveness that reduces us to shadows of each other. It’s about escaping the grip of this acquisitive fascination with one another in order to truly encounter and be open to one another.
While I’m always gratified to be published and thankful for being given a voice, I have to immediately add that this “sermon” owes its life to the thought of James Alison. (See below for the full detox.)
The Detoxification Sermon (GEEZ Summer 2008)
“Worship is the high and holy art of spiritual architecture…” -Dr. Leonard Sweet,
Now I’m sure, asked again about worship, Dr. Sweet would expand and qualify. My point with this quote is simply to point out that in practice contemporary Christian worship is understood to be about producing an atmosphere of high anticipation, a sweep of holy enthusiasm, a spirit of godly unity. And here, while it is theologically acknowledged that the One worshiped is already and always present, what is rehearsed is producing a mood that encourages God to show up. Worship, it appears, needs orchestration, needs an architect.
We are scarcely aware of how, and how often, we are caught up in the “architecture of worship.” From the carefully crafted emotional pitches for products that ensure us a correct lifestyle, to the religiously charged political rally, we engage in worship. It’s a high and unholy industry. And we are all susceptible to being duped by this ersatz worship and its blanketing effect of mimetic fascination. And under this blanket we are scarcely aware of how worship can become a form of exclusion and a prelude to violence.
I remember the irresistible pull of belonging to the right group of Christians. I remember how much I thought I needed this. And with distance I can now remember moving with a certain self-righteous priggishness that knows itself to be on the inside—countenanced of course by a veneer of humility. It happens.
That’s why distinguishing genuine worship from worship makes all the difference in the world. There is nothing inherently wrong with contemporary styles of Christian worship. Nothing wrong with emotional and spirited celebration of God. But when there exists, or when there is encouraged a sense of moral distinction within the worshiping group, “spirited” worship can produce a lie. It can produce an abstraction, a reduction of particularities, a spirit of sameness as opposed to real unity, an enclave instead of an unfolding congregation.
When Christian worship subtlety links itself to patriotism, or leans into pietism and moralism, worshipers can soon identify themselves not simply as believers, but as “true believers.” And the category “true believers” is only sustainable as being over and against what isn’t “true.” That is, over Muslims, Jews, gays and lesbians, atheists, communists, Catholics, Protestants, and so on. And as Christian history shows, this is tinder for rivalry and violence. Of course worship, as in group-defining architecture, works for any assembly and in any direction.
But in real Christian worship no high or holy architecture is needed. There is nothing to produce. Everything has been concluded. Worshiping Christians are nothing more than witnesses to something done and transpired. Witnesses to the “forgiving victim.” The victim who has absorbed our exclusion and victimizing violence and in return, forgives. And in this forgiveness our ever again needing to secure ourselves by being part of an “us against them” is undone.
Genuine Worship is a detoxification process. It’s about releasing our fascination with who’s in and who’s out. It’s about letting go of our obsessive competitiveness that reduces us to shadows of each other. It’s about escaping the grip of this acquisitive fascination with one another in order to truly encounter and be open to one another.
True Worship, as theologian James Alison contends, “…leads to a slow, patient discovery of being able to like people in their bizarre particularities, and see the beauty in those things, not abstract from them.” The test of true worship then is finding yourself beginning to receive others specifically within their peccadillo’s and annoyances and not as “loving the brotherhood,” as abstracted beyond persons with personalities through a grand unifying purpose, Christian or otherwise.
What this means is that real Christian worship is relaxing, and in some sense entirely unremarkable. It is ascetical. It is the long discipline of removing whatever distracts us from inhabiting the hidden, unassuming presence of Jesus who is “simply here.” It is about becoming unexcited, un-aroused, un-fascinated, so as to grow attentive to what and who is around us. And in this restful attentiveness flourishes true hospitality and peace. And this is always contemporary.
Here’s a little litmus test: If you’ve been attending worship for years and still find yourself duking it out at church business meetings, still find yourself wishing not altogether pleasant things upon the irascible Mrs. Smith, then stop “going to worship” already, and begin worshiping.
Stephen T. Berg
June 11th, 2008
Dear Prime Minister Harper, In light of the apology you will offer our First Nations people today, I thought it might be fitting for you to say these words:
Thank you to Wendy Morton, for sending me this picture/poem, and for permission to post it. (click on the picture to open)
This is one of 20 evocative poems that Wendy wrote, now on exhibit at the Alberni Valley Museum in B.C. She was given journals and archival photos to help her write the poems, many, like this one, where put onto the archival photos.
June 8th, 2008
Sacrifice and offering you do not desire,
but you have given me an open ear. (from Psalm 40)
So how did this Hebrew poet come to make this conclusion, steeped as he or she was in the cult of ritual sacrifice and burnt offering as something required by God? (Okay, this isn’t a universal question…but it is my question, for a Sunday such as this.)
The Sits im Leben of the Psalmist, as a member of tribe-Israel, would have been all about seasonal rounds of sacrifice, usually animal, commemorating any number of events where God supposedly brought or restored peace and safety through an act of God-endorsed mitigated violence.
It’s like this: at a time where a contagion of violence (see: well, randomly open any historical book of the Old Testament) threatens to collapse the entire people-tribe…a culprit(s) is arbitrarily identified and put to death, upon which, “miraculously,” peace is restored. The “peace,” so intense because of the prior imminence of wide-scale violence, feels like a Divine rush of relief and is identified as such and subsequently coded as the “Law.” And through the Law, with its rites and taboo’s and purification systems, “revealed” through the circumstances of the violent event(s), and with its ritual sacrifices–safe representatives of the bloodier events–the people-group cohere and live off of the diminishing power of sacrificial ritual. So what this amounts to is a criminal act that results in curbing what could have been horrendous bloodshed. A bad/good thing. Yup, the world of scapegoating is just that wondrous.
Except that, back then, it was understood as all-good. But slowly, in the arch of time, cracks start to show. And pretty soon some self-reflective-culture-critiquing-prophetic-Cohenesque poet says that God doesn’t like sacrifice, didn’t ever want it, and throws the whole system into question. Because, if God is not the one requiring sacrifice…who then…?
Well, pretty soon the Psalmist’s friends start to think that maybe the whole sorry enterprise is just plain bad. Not just bad-to-get-to-the-good, but entirely bad because anything that requires scapegoating violence is already, well, sin by definition.
But back to our poet: song writers, Psalm writers are sticky about stuff like truth in motives. Any artist knows that a work without the ring of truth has no shelf-life and so she always works toward the discovery of truth. I think our Song-40 poet had a moment of conversion: the “open ear” was that moment he or she understood the lie of the sacred, along with his/her own complicity. The moment the voice of the victim rose above the self-desire of the poet, ears were opened, and the whole state of the sacrificial mechanism was exposed. And from that kind of conversion, there’s no turning back…only risky publication.
May 11th, 2008
If a meditation/polemic on Mother God interests you, here’s a link to an article I had published in yesterday’s Edmonton Journal.
(Photo: Cover art for Lost in Wonder -Esther DeWall)
And Happy Mother’s Day!
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.
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 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.
Previous Posts
We are scarcely aware of how, and how often, we are caught up in the “architecture of worship.” From the carefully crafted emotional pitches for products that ensure us a correct lifestyle, to the religiously charged political rally, we engage in worship. It’s a high and unholy industry. And we are all susceptible to being duped by this ersatz worship and its blanketing effect of mimetic fascination. And under this blanket we are scarcely aware of how worship can become a form of exclusion and a prelude to violence.
The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
