I Think I Want To Be Unchristian.
These are delicate words. Probably easy to be misconstrued. I expect they might be. Part of me wishes they will be.
I think I’d like to be unChristian. (more…)
Frustration: The Agonizingly Slow Pace of Transformation.
Whether you embrace change, or change is thrust upon you without warning – the process of transformation is long and hard. I have long been a lover of Henri Nouwen’s journal of letters to himself, “The Inner Voice of Love”. If I was to minister to myself; this is what I would remind myself of.
“You need to recognize the difference between change and transformation. You keep expecting that these external circumstances that reflect change around you, will mirror or gauge the change within you. But you don’t change, people can only transform. One thing must become another. You can’t tear out your heart and simply replace it with a new one, much as one relationship cannot be exchanged for another. We must transform. So these external changes you are processing, can transform you internally, if you choose. But you must choose this: it will not simply happen by osmosis. It is too easy to adopt new behaviours and claim newness, when really all you are doing is maintaining a facade. (more…)
The Fringe.
Christian culture is near obsessed with the center. Words like mainstream and crossover drip off the tongues of A&R guys like diamonds. Influence is king. The idea of bands, writers, speakers, actors being part of the Christian community and the ‘influence’ they’ll wield on mainstream culture is like an elusive Holy Grail.
All of it is about the center. This idea that if we move enough of ‘our people’ to the center, that things will change. That people will convert quicker. But I don’t want conversions. I want believers. I want to see people on a journey of faith. So scratch that argument. Let’s just say, that if we can get enough of our people to the center, then we’ll be in the midst of the biggest crowd.That’s how crowds work. Cities have their dense population of buildings and allotments in the center, slowly spiraling and spreading outwards.
So Christendom gets continually caught in the pull towards the center. And anyone in the center, who seems remotely accessible, we love to hijack. We confuse country artists with gospel singers because they sing the themes of colloquial spirituality we’ve grown up with.
Still, I believe, that it’s a futile pursuit if we really want influence. The fastest way to the center is to go to the fringe. The biggest area of influence is the circumference of the circle, not the center of it.
The artists, the writers, the thinkers – and really, it’s the thinkers that are key to influencing the thoughts and ideas that are expressed at the fringe. I know I’ve written about this before, this idea that shuffles through the way I write and express. But it has a grip on me.
Re-thinking, re-inventing, imagination and discovery can’t be found at the center of the circle. In order to be stretching out on horizons, you simply must be at the fringe. In the eclectic community of people that live there. They are a bit transient. They move on rapidly and with fluidity. They hold ideas loosely and let themselves be shaped.
It’s a marvellous gift to be at the fringe, because there’s both the luxuriating, intoxicating ability to observe the center from the external, whilst still being connected to it. And when the center every so often takes one of the fringe thinkers, writers, artists, poets, songwriters into the core… to be lifted up high for a moment.. it’s pointing the way towards what the fringe has already discovered.
I write again, “the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls”. What sets Lady Gaga apart from Miley Cyrus? Gaga is prophesying a shift and change in our expression of sexuality and sensuality, of power between men and women, the importance and assignment of gender. What the gossip columnists write about is simply the popular mythology around the questions she stirs in us… but by the time the center catches up, she’ll have moved on to some other idea.
Think Madonna and her expressive sexuality of the 80s and 90s. Think Dylan and the political songs of the 60s and 70s. Think Elvis and gyration.. the idea that a man’s sexuality and power could be proven by his dancing..
Think Kate Shepard, DH Lawrence, Walt Whitman, ee cummings and all the ideas they played with and changed.. now long dead as the center is still discovering and embracing fluid punctuation, punctuation you can play with. Now expressed in TXT language.
So it’s the fringe and always the fringe. Now that indie pop and alternative folk songs are cool.. something new must emerge. Slowly what happens at the fringe is carried through to the center. That’s why the best writers and thinkers go out to the edges of truth and what is, to imagine the what could be. They lift it up in the light, examine it and capture something that can speak to the whole.
The height of creativity is to go to that playground at the edge of imagination, spirituality, culture and sociology and to experiment with something entirely new.
Write something on the subway walls. Create something new and unheard of. Take it to the fringe. Make a home for yourself on a journey not a destination… choose to travel outwards and outwards and outwards.
Like A Gardener.
Yesterday I was having coffee with my frievnd James. He asked if I had ever been employed by a church and whether or not I enjoyed it. I was watching documentary show on TVNZ6 last night, called My God. It was an interview with a Catholic nun, so long in His service she had retired, some sixty years of life following her vows.
At the beginning these things might have been unrelated, but slowly the threads emerge.
The answer to James’ question is Yes, and sometimes. It got me thinking as I watched the story of this nun unfolding..
1.
In our obsession with youth, we ought to listen more the stories of the truly old. I mean no disrespect but age is the best term. It seems those older, quieter voices.. the returned missionaries, retired nuns.. those who have witnessed so closely the suffering of humanity and experienced a present God seem to have grasped something in choosing to accept the paradox. They are fully reconciled to God, knowable and unknowable as he is.
She had such delightfully liberal praxis in regard to the reality of human and faithful life. She decried and mourned the tragedies of sexual abuse in Christian institutions but also expressed empathy and concern for the priests who had struggled to maintain vows of celibacy. She advocates choice… and then said “Of course, the Church doesn’t agree yet, but sometimes we go out in front a little way ahead, and we are allowed to.” She recognizes that the authority and power of her faith comes from outside the institution.
2.
She talked about her garden. When she retired from active service, if you will, she was asked what she would like to do. Gardening and taking care of the outside grounds was her choice. She talked about building hedges to protect from the southerlies. Then we saw pictures of a community garden. Her philosophy was simple.. though she started it, she doesn’t run it. She pays her $10 fee and pays special attention to the compost, because she’s ‘mad about compost’.
Her theology of gardening was simple and beautiful. We, who began in a garden, can find something uniquely spiritual in the act of tending a garden, growing and nurturing food. Our hands, down deep in the soil, could transcend human experience to touching something of the Creator in each of us. Transcending denominations, institutional religion or no religion at all, the act of gardening is one of the oldest tasks we know. As she alluded, there’s something in that for everyone. It’s the Imago Dei she’s talking about of course, that part of us that is the Creator sensing the Creator in the earth around us.
3.
When I thought about my seasons working for churches and church organizations, one of the recurring themes is soil. That the times I loved it most and thrived, were the times I had permission to nurture and tend the soil. Where there was opportunity to grow something, to create something.
Most plants are small. They are seasonal. They have colour and flavour. Some are just for the fragrance they give to the garden. Each are distinct. Some keep the bugs away, some attract the bugs. Everything nurtures and enriches the experience of the garden. Even the shit and decay brings richer nutrients into the soil.
So, I desire to minister more like a gardener. Prune a little, shape a litte, plant a little, take a little. Stopping and smelling the roses.
E hara taku toa, I te toa takitahi ēngari he toa taku tini
(My strength is not from myself but from the strength of the group)
Please follow Anne, Lars, Marko, Adam, Ian and the rest of the YMATH team for their on the ground stories, videos, messages and reflections on being in Haiti.
Tomorrow morning at 9am EST they are hoping to help get aid to a tent city of some 5000 Haitians as yet unaided since the earthquake a month ago.
If you don’t do anything else, please at least pray for them and the fingerprints of God.
Forgive Thy Brother.
Forgive Thy Brother – by Scott Erickson of The Transpire Project
tonight with the moon full and low in the sky, blue
finally to write about you, to talk about you, with love
the way i used to, with hope and promise and joy
finally i am sick of ache, weighted arrows in my shoulder
harnessing my force, good or bad, from reaching you
forced I am, into stepping close enough again
fallen into embrace, to rest the weight of it upon you
done. … with just space enough
for continuing despite what we have … chosen to forget
i’m still learning what love is, learning who i am…
…. the moon demands all of my attention to this task, to love you
brother.
Strictly Personal.
I stumbled upon this painting by Scott and was stopped in my tracks. Here was an image that seemed to capture the wrestle in my mind for the last few months.
Getting to America, to this place, these people – this movement, was meant to be a definitive stepping stone. A brilliant release from a scarred and troubling chapter in my life – where things ceased to be true as I had known them to be. It was a scar of my own doing, and yet not. I doubly owned it with the other partakers, yet carried it so heavily. Struggling not to be a victim, to forgive, to move on.
But it takes time, and this place is like a sharp lens, a focusing ring pulled tightly towards my body.
My desire to genuinely forgive and be a better person as result of my mistakes, my justification and my grief is like a taste in my mouth. Yet I doubt my ability to do it.
But maybe the desire to forgive, to carry on, to grow beyond my borders is enough. Maybe that’s all there is. Maybe this kind of confession and forgiveness offers nothing else but… desire. Actually achieving some palpable, tangible feeling would be too noble, too gracious for someone as incomplete as what I am.
That being said, I am moving closer towards what I want to think and feel in regards to forgiving, than I used to be. Good news, huh?