March 25, 2008 by djackson.

I ended up reading a little mysticism yesterday. It was serendipitous - had nothing to do with my slated tasks for the day. In sifting through the accumulated layers of back-logged paper on my desk (I call this administrative archaeology) I discovered a couple of documents I’d seen but set aside to enjoy later. The first was an article by Dallas Willard on preaching. The second was the prospectus for a course in prayer at the Lebh Shomea retreat center.

Willard took the position that good preaching rests, not on deep knowledge about God, but on deep experience with God. Consequently he advises, “Experience the fullness of God, think about the good things God has done for you, and realize he has done well by you. . . .We have to stop trying too hard.”

Father Kelly of Lebh Shomea said much the same thing though his phrasing leaves the page redolent of the monasteries of Spanish mystics in the sixteenth century:

In its deepest sense, to pray is to remain in loving receptivity to being loved by one’s Beloved. To pray is to be lured into intimate loving communion with and by God, the soul letting itself be drawn consciously and freely. Only God can pray someone and thereby cause that person to pray in return.

“Loving receptivity to being loved,” “Realize that God has done well by you” - both, more or less, encouragements to what mystical theologians call apophatic spirituality, the pilgrimage of knowing God by unknowing everything else. God, the argument runs, is wholly other from us and our experience. We can therefore speak of God only by analogy, and analogies, even when accurate, are always more false than true. (God truly reveals himself as my heavenly Father, but the point of similarity to my fatherhood to my two sons is so narrow as to be almost invisible.) So before we can know God we must refrag the hard drive, wipe the disc clean of all files and leave plenty of ram for the Spirit to enter true data.

But there’s a problem here. If all ways of knowing God are largely inaccurate, then isn’t one way of knowing God just as good as another? And if unknowing is the way to know God, does it matter which system we unlearn? In other words, is mysticism the ultimate stem cell religion from which all specific belief-systems are manufactured?

Evelyn Underhill, in her magisterial work on mysticism, says yes. “Attempts to limit mystical truth - the direct apprehension of the Divine Substance - by the formulae of any one religion, are as futile as the attempt to identify a precious metal with the die which converts it into current coin.” C. S. Lewis summarizes this position in the following from Letters to Malcolm:

Mystics (it is said) starting from the most diverse religious premises all find the same things. These things have singularly little to do with the professed doctrines of any particular religion. Therefore, mysticism is, by empirical evidence, the only real contact man has ever had with the unseen. It is therefore the one true religion. And what we call “religions” are either mere delusion or, at best, so many porches through whch an entrance into transcendent reality can be effected.

So must I throw away my copies of St. John of the Cross and Thomas Merton? If mysticism does indeed tend to universalism it is simply heresy and, however attractive to me personally, simply and completely sinful. Lewis responds with a helpful analogy. The base experience of mysticism is indeed the apophatic, the emptying, the leaving behind of a known way. In the same way, the first thing experienced by people on a ship as it sets out on its voyage is the disappearance of the land, the home port, the known coastline and village. This does not mean, however, that each vessel sets out with the same crew, passengers, cargo, destination or intent. Pirates and missionaries, slave traders and educators - they all leave in the same way but that does not mean they make the same voyage. Joseph Conrad captures something of the same idea in the opening of his Heart of Darkness as the anonymous narrator meditates on the Thames river:

It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith– the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ‘Change; captains, admirals, the dark “interlopers” of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned “generals” of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

But is Lewis right? William Johnston, former professor of religious studies and director of the Institute of Oriental Religions of Sophia University, a Jesuit outfit in Tokyo, has had occasion to observe the similarities and differences of “mystic silence” as practiced by Christians and by members of other faiths. Mulling over an experiment in Assisi in 1985, where members of various faiths bowed together in silence before dispersing to various parts of the city to read the Bible or Koran or Sutras or whatever their specific devotional literature might be, Father Johnston asks, “Can we finally say, I wondered, that there is one religion with many expressions?”

Johnston pushed his researches to the point of interviewing non-Christian contemplatives about what their silence and emptiness were like. In the end, he decided that “the silence or nothingness was in fact penetrated by whatever faith the participant embraced,” and that “in the silence of Zen there is an underlying something that is different from what underlies Christianity.”

I think Lewis and Johnston are onto something. The Christian finds that even nothingness is Triune, that even his silence pulses with the interplay of Father, Son, and Spirit. As Ralph Wood, professor of theology and literature at Baylor University writes,

There is no God-beyond-God, no far-off Father who relativizes all religions, no pre-Trinitarian issuer of the terrible decrees. There is only - but also finally and fully - the God whose life becomes ours when we are baptized in the reality-creating name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

So mysticism, it seems to me, is not a way, though not a safe way, to know God. But then there’s nothing so very unique about that. Doctrine is a way to know God, but also not a safe way as the long history of heresy demonstrates. But my point here is to free myself (and anyone else who’s buying into this and cares to come along) “to remain in loving receptivity to being loved by my Beloved.” And I like Father Kelly’s language - “Only God can pray someone.” I am not a flute gasping for breath in a desperate effort to make music; I am a flute through whom breathes the master musician. I may not always like the tune he plays, but that is his affair.

Posted in General | 4 Comments »

March 17, 2008 by djackson.

Philips Brooks has famously posited that preaching is truth through personality. Barack Obama caught considerable flack last week when it appeared to some that his former pastor, the Reverend James Wright, percolated pulpit truth through a personality so pronounced as to leave the resulting brew distinctly unpalatable.

Wright, pastor for 36 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, evidently drew parallels between the terrorist attack of 9/11 and America’s sponsorship of regime change in other countries. He apparently claimed that the federal government unleashed the AIDS virus on the African-American community and even suggested a colorful rewrite of the lyrics to “God Bless America.” And then he got mad.

Now, I don’t claim to know whom we should elect president come fall. I would presume even less to possess any real understanding of what it means to be black in America. But I do pretend (some of my students would say that is indeed the correct verb) to know something about homiletics and the dynamics of preaching. From that standpoint, I’d like to see if I can speak to the current uproar.

First of all, it interests me that while Pastor Wright cannot say anything in his preaching about politics, politics certainly has free reign to say something about his preaching. The media seem content for the wall of separation between church and state to remain as porous as the fences along our southern border so long as the traffic is all one way. My point basically is this: a sermon is not public property. It is not a speech by a statesman to the general populace but a word from a prophet to a select segment of the body of Christ. You can broadcast it, podcast it, fly-cast or diecast it, you can upload it, download it, frontload or backload it but the sermon as a sermon belongs to the relationship between the one who speaks and those who hear in the moment of proclamation. This truth rests, not on some Masonic code of secrecy which excludes outsiders from the internecine plots of the initiatives, nor from a spiritual snobbery that snubs the unsaved but upon the very nature of the case. Sermons may be printed on paper and shouted in sound waves but they exist in the ethos of a common set of beliefs and traditions shared within a community of faith.

Reporters, I think, sit in someone else’s church like the bewildered new boyfriend at a family Thanksgiving feast, able to make nothing of the inside jokes, lifelong traditions, even the barely hidden - or brazenly open - hostilities that seem to threaten an outright riot but somehow only reinforce the fellowship. If he sticks around, marries the girl, endures this kind of thing on a regular basis as part of the bargain he has struck, he may eventually come to speak the language of Zion - and learn that it is suitable for laughter and poetry, even for blessing and cursing. Reporters, however, appear to me more like johns than boyfriends. They come to church for a quickie quote, hoping for some headlines in return for a minimal investment of time and no investment of themselves at all. It may not be their fault if the whole thing fails to make sense - but it isn’t the church’s fault either.

The second thing I’d say about all of this is that it rests on faulty assumptions regarding faith and patriotism. The unspoken syllogism seems to be that Pastor Wright may not love America - or at least not everything about America, the man is a former Marine after all - and therefore Barack Obama can’t be president. As I say, I don’t know much about politics but I think I know a little about prophetic preaching. To point out a nation’s flaws, and to do so using outrageous language, does not violate Scripture. In fact, it IS scripture!

Amos circled eighth century Israel like a B-1 bomber homing in on its target. He strafed the surrounding nations but his ever-tightening orbit eventually dropped the payload on those who considered themselves the very people of God. (Amos 1-3-16)

Jeremiah stood on capitol hill in Jerusalem and decried the union of faith and nationalism which spawned the bastard love-child of social arrogance. (Jeremiah 7.1-15)

In the “Little Apocalypse” of Mark 13 Jesus deflected his disciples’ praise of ecclesiastical architecture and told them instead that a house of worship must forfeit immunity when it wreathes itself in the meshes of earthly power.

John the Revelator looked on a military-industrial complex that made soldier and salesman, king and capitalist alike go all tingly and foresaw it sink like an upper-millstone slam-dunked by a body-building avenging angel. (Revelation 18.1-24)

That’s three pretty good preachers and the Son of God who set the example of outrageous attacks on the power structures of nations. The fury felt by some religious conservatives over Reverend Wright’s remarks seems to me like a case of special pleading: sure, God might go jawbone hill on Israel and go Rambo on Rome, but we’re America so all bets are off. Both scripture and history beg to differ and invite us to wonder if the good pastor hasn’t done us a favor of which we’d best take full advantage.

I said I don’t claim to understand the African American experience and I repeat that I don’t. For all that, I’d like to see if I can’t offer at least an outsider’s insight on that angle of the situation as well. Charles E. Booth, pastor of the Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio, gives it as his opinion that “the unique genius of African American preaching has been the ability to wed biblical truth with social justice. . . .The passion, imagination, and articulatory skills of the African American preacher have historically been wed to the Scriptures as thrust and lift for our liberation.” I am not saying (nor do I believe Pastor Booth is saying) that only African Americans have the right to preach social justice, or that even African-Americans have the right to say things that are not true. I am saying that the boundary between politics and pulpit is necessarily more porous for those who have for centuries had access only to the latter.

And this leads me to an important point. I believe that Pastor Wright has done - or has at least attempted to do - a favor for white America: he has trusted us with a direct truth. This took great courage on his part, and requires great gratitude on ours.
Here’s what I mean. William Edgar of Westminster Theological Seminary points out that public expression by African Americans tends toward “signifying,” which he defines as “speaking a double language: to white people, he delivered the required stereotype and got lots of laughter; to blacks, he made coded in-jokes which signified, ‘We shall overcome someday.’” This is less a matter of honesty than one of survival, not so much an issue of duplicity as one of necessity. Edward Gilbreath, an African-American writer and editor, in his book Reconciliation Blues, agrees that there is an “unspoken social contract” of falsehood between blacks and whites. “For years,” he claims, “African Americans have found freedom and power in cloaking their protest and brokenness in the colors and rhythms of their creative passion.”

Ralph Ellison, in his seminal novel The Invisible Man, narrates a young, southern black man’s introduction to this concept. Berated for exposing a white trustee to an unpalatable reality of African American life, the student protests that the man ordered him to do so. “Ordered you?” thunders the college president. “He ordered you. Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it’s a habit with them. Why didn’t you make an excuse? My God, boy! You’re black and living in the South - did you forget how to lie?” Later in the same interview the president bellows, “Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!”

We might want to dismiss this as cynicism but when one ponders the fate of Ralph Abernathy or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that option disappears. And this makes it all the more impressive - and humbling! - that Reverend Wright blessed white America by at least telling us - or at least trying to tell us - the truth - his truth and the truth of his people. If we make the mistake of rejecting Barack Obama’s candidacy because of an effort at honesty, an invitation (offered clumsily, perhaps, as African American blogger Raymond Leon Roker suggests, due to lack of practice [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-leon-roker/guess-whos-coming-to-din_b_91666.html]) into a world we helped create and then suppressed - if we do this, we drive our African American siblings back into the secret world of signifying and condemn ourselves to another generation of talking past, above, beneath and beside - instead of to - one another.

I’m not telling you to vote for or against Barack Obama. I am pleading with you not to vote against him for the wrong reason.

Posted in General | No Comments »

March 13, 2008 by djackson.

I like to call it the Parable of the Bolshevik Share Croppers. Jesus tells it in Matthew 21.33-44. Seems that an agri-businessman purchased some land, rented it out to a group of sharecroppers then caught a junket back East to lobby Congress for farm subsidies. In his absence the Joad family worked hard and produced a bumper crop. But they also started reading Karl Marx and perhaps some Liberation Theology. In any case, when the owner sent his lawyer to collect they refused to pony up. Instead, they declared the farm a commune and launched a sit-in. The demonstration inevitably turned violent: the laborers beat up the lawyer and tossed him out.

The owner tried to work things out – he sent Jane Fonda and Al Sharpton and Jimmy Carter down to negotiate a solution but by this time things had gotten out of hand. CNN buzzed with scenes of cars set ablaze and angry demonstrators flashing clenched fists as they hoisted placards on their shoulders.

The owner, as it happened, had a son who had just graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D. in social work. He volunteered to go in person. He had a real sympathy for the plight of these brazeros and hoped he could reach a solution that would avoid violence. But by now the thing had taken on a life of its own. Someone on the Revolutionary Council suggested that killing the son would send a strong message against inherited wealth as a keystone of the capitalist system. The next thing they realized they had hung the young man from a street light and torched the corpse. CNN and FOX blazed with images of the smoldering body. Heated rhetoric bombarded the bloggosphere. The resulting popular outcry provided sufficient political capital for the Governor, at the owner’s request, to call up the National Guard. When a frightened campesino hurled a molotov coctkail at the nervy and undertrained troops someone started shooting. Several of the farmers fell dead; others fled and the rest were arrested. Many, found to be without green cards, bought a one-way trip across the border. Absentee landlords everywhere felt renewed security in contracting their land to farm cooperatives.

“Serves ‘em right!” bellowed the ditto-head religionists, most of whom sublet farmland they had siezed in the subprime mortgage crisis.

Jesus might have winked, or maybe he blinked away a tear. “So,” he asked, “who owns Israel?”

Posted in General | No Comments »

March 8, 2008 by djackson.

Interesting op-ed piece in Friday’s New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/opinion/07brooks.html). Columnist David Brooks ponders whether defeat in Texas and Ohio puts the kaibosh on Barack Obama’s theory that he can soar above the full-contact cage-match of presidential politics and waft to victory on the Gnostic purity of political idealism. Brooks argues that the Illinois senator can’t afford to launch a counter-attack bushwhack that sells out his core narrative. Hillary Clinton has nothing to apologize for if she turns the primary process into a full-contact brawl, because she never offered to purify the process in the first place.

Obama, by contrast, has mounted the stump like a snake-oil salesman in the old west, hawking Doc Barack’s Patented Feel-Good Ointment, guaranteed to soothe the irritating rash of electoral cynicism. If he morphs from leading man in a political chick-flick to action-hero Obaminator, he O-bandons his only edge. But as haymakers hammer his golden jaw his advisors ratchet up their insistence on the tooth-for-a-tooth program instead of all this cheek-turning. Brooks concludes:

As the trench warfare stretches on through the spring, the excitement of Obama-mania will seem like a distant, childish mirage. People will wonder if Obama ever believed any of that stuff himself.

In other words, Brooks argues, you can’t lay down your olive branch only long enough to pick up your club and then go back to messianic pretensions. A cross, inconveniently, must be carried to Calvary, not tossed aside at the foot of the hill to be picked up a mile or so down the road.

I mention all of this not because I think I have any clue about who should be our next president, but because it illustrates a theological theme. Brooks’ analysis made me think (incorrigible nerd that I am) of John Steinbeck’s haunting novel The Winter of our Discontent. The hero, Ethan Allen Hawley, comes from a long line of idealistic New England yankees now impoverished by the realpolitik of modern economics. Desperate, Ethan figures a triangulation of gambits to restore the family fortunes if only he can bring himself to blindfold his conscience for a spell and hogtie his heritage for a few days.

“Maybe I could not stop this process,” he reasons, “but I need never start another. I did not need or want to be a citizen of this gray and dangerous country.” Later on, in the same vein, Ethan muses that

my objective was limited and, once achieved, I could take back my habit of conduct. I knew I could. War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men. . . .The main thing was to know the limited objective for what it was, and, once it was achieved, to stop the process in its tracks. But that could only be if I knew what I was doing and did not fool myself -security and dignity, and then stop the process in its tracks.

No plot spoilers here, but the novel turns on the hero’s experiment with that thesis. Still, I’ll go so far as to say that Steinbeck chose his title well. The House of York wielded Richard Gloucester as a genocidal daisy-cutter in the Wars of the Roses only to find that a glorious summer of victory provided no emetic for the palliative taken during discontented winter.

I said something about theology, though I’ve talked nothing but politics and literature. So here goes. Christians, I think, often seek to dance a sort of crucifixion two-step. We like the cross as a means of redemption but find the thing a bloody nuisance (and I mean that literally) on our day to day march of cultural conquest (our our rear-guard action of simple survival). Crosses are a dandy way to obtain a home in the heavenly mansions but they don’t do much to help carve out a comfortable niche between then and now. Medieval crusaders noticed long ago that a cross and a sword have roughly the same shape and became quite adept at figuring out which one to pull from the scabbard in a given situation. We don’t want too much; we aren’t greedy. Security and dignity - then we’ll go back to the Sermon on the Mount.

But we’ve created for ourselves - well, really, Jesus has created it for us - the same dilemma David Brooks diagnoses with Senator Obama. Obama has no impressive political track record, only a chevalier’s reckless and refreshing remake of a jaded system. Without it, Brooks opines, “even if he wins the nomination, he won’t represent anything new. He’ll just be a one-term senator running for president.” In the same way, we Christians don’t have the world’s wealth of resources. Secular society can play its own game far better than we can. If we ape their marketing, their feuding, their deal-cutting and backstabbing, we don’t represent anything new. We’re just one more hyena snarling over our scrap of the kill, and not the alpha of the pack at that.

So the question becomes whether we dare live out our own rhetoric, whether we have the guts to occupy the one place in the picture which no one will take away from us - because no one else wants it. Will we, with dignity and security undetermined truly trust that crucifixion - not just Jesus’ historical crucifixion but our own daily death - is really the way to live, the way (dare we say it?) to win?

This much I know: we can’t campaign in the poetry of the Kingdom of Heaven only to abandon it for the prose of power when the situation seems to demand it. We can’t identify limited objectives of worldly conquests and then quietly take up our role as citizens of Dr. King’s “beautiful community.” Our theological ambidexterity does not work when we keep both hands nailed fast. Our ethical tap-dance requires an agility impossible to practice when weighted down by a cumbersome cross.

Posted in General | No Comments »