Friday, June 30, 2006

fireworks!


Matt reminded me of how much fun it is to hear all the public service commercials about fireworks safety while driving here in Richmond. "Your friends at [insert company name] care about your safety, and urge you to use caution while blowing stuff up in your front yard, or in the street, or your roof... really, wherever you idiots are blowing them off. Unless you're the creep up the road from me who shoots them off at 2am, in which case you can go ahead and blow your hand off." Something like that. My favorite one was from the local Harley dealer- there's no law here that motorcyclists must wear helmets, so the Harley dealership ought to have larger safety concerns in mind than sparkler accidents. Perhaps people are shooting fireworks while riding motorcycles without helmets... this really wouldn't suprise me much.

If a similar commercial aired in New York, it would sound more like this: "This is friendly reminder from [insert company name] that the state knows that you are an idiot, and has therefore strictly regulated the fireworks trade so that the already overfull emergency rooms aren't stretched beyond their limits. Yes, this means that the fireworks you smuggled in from Indiana last year were illegal, and they would have totally busted you for holding your own fireworks show if they hadn't been busy chasing the drunken rednecks down at the lake. No, arguing that the state laws are made by a bunch of socialists from the city will not cause the judge to revoke your fines. The regulators know what's best for you, so just have a pleasantly boring 4th, OK?"

All of which reminds me of Michael Bérubé's post on evaluating personal freedoms. Personally, I'd rather live in Indiana with the helmetless bikers than take my chances with getting busted in New York for possessing fireworks. I don't have children, though- perhaps I'd appreciate the regulators more if I had kids to worry about.

Thursday, June 29, 2006

avery dulles

Anyone who has ever read Models of the Church will find this quiz familiar. I'm pleasantly suprised to find that my score matches what I thought of the book when I read it in undergrad.

Mystical Communion Model

89%

Servant Model

84%

Sacrament model

84%

Herald Model

67%

Institutional Model

22%

What is your model of the church? [Dulles]
created with QuizFarm.com


(h/t to carl)

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

seems like the right kind of day

e. e. cummings...

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shops and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you

update on the gym

I've obviously been going to the wrong one.

I'd definitely be into slowrobics, if I were a circus sloth.

growing guns

I've been going to the gym, and I can now see my triceps. I'm not sure what I think of this development. Good feminist that I try to be, I think I ought not have a problem with seeing my triceps. I might be disapproving of them, though.

Discuss social constructs of femininity in the comment section... or Linda Hamilton will kick your ass.


Seriously. Don't mess with her.

Sunday, June 25, 2006

points of information

Tip gathered from this morning's sermon: If you should ever find yourself writing a sermon on how salvation in Christ cannot be lost, making 2 Peter 2 your main text will be awkward.

"These men are springs without water and mists driven by a storm. Blackest darkness is reserved for them. For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of sinful human nature, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity- for a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him. If they have escaped the corruption of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and are again entangled in it and overcome, they are worse off at the end than they were at the beginning. It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn their backs on the sacred command that was passed on to them. Of them the proverbs are true: 'A dog returns to its vomit,' and, 'A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud.'"

Presuming that all of us are hellbound before knowing Jesus as Lord, and further presuming that hell is a rather rotten place, it's difficult for me to see how "worse off at the end than they were at the beginning" translates to "still going to heaven, but Jesus might frown a bit." The preacher argued that the folks who "return to their own vomit" were never really saved to begin with, which seems to me to make a mess of what it means to escape "the corruption of the world by knowing" Jesus. I guess you'd have to "know" Jesus in a nonsalvific way, which is all kinds of problematic.

I'm intrigued by the paralleling between being mastered by corruption and knowing the Lord Jesus, though. Last night, I went to an evening service at a Wesleyan church -OMGIWTAWC!*- where the sermon title was "Do Christians And Muslims Worship The Same God?" I won't spoil the fun by giving the answer away too quickly; we need to be gracious to even those heathen Muslims who worship some other God. (Some Allah fellow, or so I hear.)

The Wesleyan preacher started off with similarities between (conservative) Christianity and Islam, such as respecting prophets, devotion to prayer and helping the poor, belief in heaven, hell, and angels, reverencing a holy book, and denouncing sexual immorality, pornography, abortion, provocative dress, and the use of alcohol.** Chief among these similarities, though, is monotheism. Christians and Muslims share the belief in only one God, which unites us.***

However, while Christians believe that God is our Father, personally and intimately involved in our lives, the Koran carries no mention of Allah as Father. In fact, it's considered blasphemous to refer to Allah as a Father, because it insinuates that He had sex with your mother.**** Even though the Koran is clear that Allah is a provider and caretaker of all creation -that's what was said in the sermon, anyway- the missing relational aspect of fatherhood clearly delineates between the two visions of God.*****

The sermon went on in this vein, discussing doctrinal differences between how salvation is gained, understandings of the person and work of Jesus, and the nature of our hope in the next life. Important differences between Islam and (conservative) Christianity were noted in detail, but they only contributed to the argument that (conservative) Christians and Muslims worship different gods if it is assumed that worship works like firing a gun, where a change in the alignment of the muzzle will affect the direction of the bullet.****** No case was made, so far as I heard, that worship of the Christian God can only be obtained by doctrinal purity, and without that case all the carefully noted distinctions between (conservative) Christianity and Islam become irrelevant.

The similarity that I found myself considering this morning, though, is in that idea of mastery. Both Islam and Christianity, at least in some strains, emphasize being in submission under the will of God. As for which God, President Bush seems to think that Christians and Muslims do worship the same God, and Jon Levenson argues that "since monotheism means that there is only one God, no monotheist can ever accuse anyone -- certainly not another monotheist -- of worshiping another god, only (at most) of improperly identifying the one God that both seek to serve."

*Oh My Gracious, I Went To A Wesleyan Church! I'm sure the new net-acronym will catch on eventually.
**And I quote: "We have more in common with Muslims than with some ultra-liberal Christians." Likely true, although I'm not sure that reflects as well on his brand of 'orthodox Christianity' as he thinks.
***Notably, Muslims think that we're polytheists, due to the doctrine of the Trinity. But what do they know?
****What's a deity without a sex scandal, really?
*****And I quote, again: "It just doesn't make logic to say they're the same God." Personally I prefer to make logic out of Play-Doh and shiny pebbles; probably this is why I'm not a Wesleyan.
******I recognize that this is a terrible metaphor for worship. Better versions would be appreciated.

Saturday, June 24, 2006

golden book - updated

Via B:

I remember having this book when I was a kid. I think I like the Zogg version better, but age doesn't always bring maturity.

Update: Oops. Here's the link to the Zogg book.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

conversation with God

After Mr Miro's experience with involving iGod in the job hunt, I don't know why I thought mine would go better. At this point, though, anything's worth a shot:

Me: How about a job for me, too?
God: How about it.
Me: Well, I've been turning in applications...
God: How about that. Where were you turning in applications?
Me: Food service places, mostly. I'm taking my resume to Manpower tomorrow, though, even though the name irritates me.
God: You can't live without food. Where are you taking it.
Me: Amen to the food bit. Mostly I've been taking food from my apartment to houses where I'm dogsitting, although tomorrow I'll be taking food to a movie night.
God: What's your favorite prayer? Where were you taking food from your apartment to houses where you are dogsitting although tomorrow you will be taking food to a movie night?
Me: I don't know if I have a favorite prayer, although I like John Baillie's prayers.
God: Would you like to know? How much does it cost?
Me: How much does it cost to pray? What are you, some pre-Reformation God?
God: You can download me for free! I don't know what I am some pre Reformation God.
Me: Ah, but free grace doesn't seem to be getting me a job.
God: So you understand. Good. Define free.

It seems, then, that getting a job will require me to define freedom. Feel free to leave suggestions toward that definition in the comments.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

word of God

In belated reply to Brian's question, we did not hear a sermon on the Federal Marriage Amendment. Instead, we're on what appears to be a three week cruise through why the Bible is the Word of God and the only path to salvation.

Last week, I knitted furiously while muttering, "gee, that's not how my copy of the book of John describes the Word of God." I forgot my knitting at home this week, so I started flipping through the pew Bible. Spurred on by irritation and boredom, I upped the ante by placing my copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight inside the pew Bible and nodding along to the alliterative verse. Much better, and I don't think anyone noticed.

This coming week, I'm predicting that we move past the DaVinci fascination to various remarks on the Gospel of Judas, with perhaps a smattering on faithfulness in world witness because that hasn't come up yet. We shall see.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

horns of power


Moses with horns!

clearness committee redux

What is a clearness committee?

I asked that over and over, in the past few months. To begin with, “clearness” is the Quaker term for (relative) certainty of the will of God. One becomes clear on a ministry, a move, or a marriage, sometimes with the aid of a clearness committee. A clearness committee is a gathering of discerning people who hear the question on your heart, hold it in prayer, and ask questions of you and your question in return. You’re the focus person, here, the center of attention of the friends willing to sit with you. Those friends devote a few hours to meeting in a worshipful manner with you, supporting you as you look at your question and try to gain this elusive clarity. Don’t tell the Quakers, but it’s a lovely liturgical approach to corporate discernment, in the broad sense of liturgy as the form of holy fellowship among the people of God. You tell the committee how you think the Holy Spirit is leading you, and the committee listens for the Spirit to testify to their spirits on the question at hand.

Quaker committees have clerks, rather than chairs. The idea is that the Spirit is providing the leadership, and the clerk is just tidying up the details. Clearness committees (and maybe most committees, for all I know) have a clerk and then a recording clerk, who gets the awesome job of trying to write down everything that the committee asks and the focus person’s replies.

That’s a vague answer, though. For me, clearness committee was first a class assignment- we have a required course called Discernment of Calls and Gifts, and the final project is participation in a clearness committee. As I thought about how to set mine up – what do I ask? who do I invite? what do I do with it? – clearness committee became an opportunity to listen to stories from friends who had participated in a clearness process before.

Storytellers are marvelous folks, sometimes, when they think their stories are unique. Almost to a person, everyone I asked for stories told me that their committee wasn’t representative of a "normal" committee. “Well, this wasn’t the normal was of going about setting up a clearness committee, but here’s what I did…” was a common introduction to what would prove to be a lovely story that revealed more about the storyteller than about the clearness process.

This “norm,” as far as I can tell from listening to these stories, is a fictional one. It’s a rhetorical device, something to compare ones own clearness committee against to define the particularly special ingredients. Accordingly, I’ll subjectively define a clearness committee for you by telling you about mine, and folks more knowledgeable than me are invited to refine my definition(s) in the comment section.

Clearness committees are fantastic, to begin with. And I don’t mean “fantastic” in the weakened sense in which we print it on colored stickers and plop it on second graders’ subtraction worksheets, not that there isn’t an element of the fantastic in mathematics. I mean fantastic in the wilder sense of a phantasm, something that is utterly captivating in part because it is utterly unfamiliar, something that makes familiar the extraordinary. In this sense, clearness committee sums up my whole year here at ESR- a fantastic mashup of new experiences and ideas, new friendships, and that pervasive sense of disquieting beauty within the newness.

Clearness committee isn’t entirely new, though- it’s a form of corporate discernment, a liturgical advice asking that I’ve done before in other arenas. It’s something like going to the Dances of Universal Peace and dancing to a Buddhist song with a familiar bell that rang after every verse, and eventually realizing that I hear that same bell ring in Catholic services when the spirit of Christ enters the host. The
similarities are surprising, and part of the fantastic element of the process.

Clearness committee was a stressful thing to set up, in part because it forced me to ask other people to do me a favor. A rather major favor, in fact: spend at least two hours of their lives listening to me and my problems, with no immediate expectation of reciprocity. For someone who’d generally rather listen than be self-revealing, and rather help than have to ask for help, this was the least fun part.

Clearness committee is a process that helped me see the distinction between participating in a Quaker process and pretending to be a Quaker. I spent some quality time trying on the latter role, even after sitting in class for two weeks discussing authentic ministry and knowing our true selves. I’m really not a Quaker, though- I’m a mongrel Pentecostal. I can’t tell you clearly why that distinction made such a difference in my approach to the clearness committee, other than that I invited folks over for supper, but it was a big deal.

Clearness committee is when a friend agrees to clerk the whole shebang, and comes over for breakfast the morning of the committee to help me sort out the questions I’m actually going to ask the committee, not acting like he minds that the responses are vague and phrased in terms of William James and Zorba the Greek. This sorting of the questions is a necessary process, even though a part of the clearness process was writing a profile of my gifts for ministry with a lucid paragraph of questions for the committee, because I wrote that profile a week ago and thus it is terribly out of date.

Clearness committee is something so distracting that I offered this friend tea, but forgot to put any water in the mug, and he accepted this distracted hospitality like the attempted gift it was.

Clearness committee is when I spent most of the rest of the day chopping tomatoes, peppers, onions, carrots, spinach, strawberries and cucumbers, making chili, salad, and quesadillas and letting my hands be clear when my head wasn’t. Supper seems a poor return gift to folks who put so much energy into me, but it was pretty good chili and even the burnt quesadillas were enjoyed.

Clearness committee is when four friends of mine came over for dinner and discussion and left pieces of themselves behind, so that when I look at the chairs where they sat I think of the gifts they were willing to give me, even though I was still confusedly talking about William James and Zorba the Greek. Some of their questions landed like gentle grenades and sprayed kindly like pellet guns, peppering the newly decorated walls of my apartment with both large and tiny openings for reflection. Other questions landed softly, more like moths alighting on the side of the couch where I sat, but sitting here typing I can still feel all the queries watching me, waiting in the almost-empty chairs to be dealt with each in turn.

Clearness committee is when these friends said nice things about me that I’m not entirely sure are true, and I couldn’t disagree or politely return the compliments. They’re still sitting in gracious piles in my apartment; I’ve begun trying them on to see how they fit. It’s when those friends offer to come back and listen with me again, and the offer is both dearly appreciated and nearly overwhelming when I’m already feeling covered in the help they’ve given me.

Clearness committee is something that leaves me spewing sappy blog posts, flipping through my thesaurus for words to depict and maybe moderate or disempower an experience that seems to have its own conscious direction within me. Off and on, this year, I'd lay on my bed and try to think about prophecy; I could feel my pulse becoming capricious out of anxiety. Now, I lay on my bed and think about prophecy, and it feels like something is growing inside, like a great springy turtle turning small circles in my belly.

Clearness committee, though, is not easy to talk about. It leaves me stammering. It's like walking out of my apartment on a clear night and stopping on the step to stare at the stars. I don't know how to say it, exactly, but it's a wonderful thing, in the same broad sense of "wonderful" that I meant with "fantastic." I sit and wonder at the power that a new liturgy has to build on the grammar of my God-talk.

Clearness committee doesn't have a clear conclusion, immediately, but a good one.

in lieu of a poem

“At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I’s. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one- which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is you I.”
-Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

Saturday, June 03, 2006

clearness committee

I wondered, today, if I was stressing too much over scheduling my clearness committee. I came into school again today, checking my email again, in hopes that someone wrote back to me. In the course of consoling myself over my empty inbox, ever so devoid of helpful notes like "sure, I could show up then!" and "yes, I'll bring beer and chocolate over right now!" I ran across this:

...and nearly fell out of my chair laughing. Probably I am stressing too much.

That's awesome, though. Good job, Matt.

things learned recently

More organized, due to complaint:

I told my mother that I was getting a job in a whorehouse to pay my rent. She said that she didn't think I could get anyone to pay to watch me read books, and that I was too lazy to do anything else.
Thing learned: My mom's gotten to know me fairly well in the past 24 years.

Aaron fixed the chain on a bike that I'm borrowing for the summer. Riding it went well until I got to the corner south of the bike shop, at which point I tried to slow down, realized I had no brakes, and went flying off the curb into traffic. All ended well, but I had to peddle it back to the bike shop for further repairs.
Thing learned: Bikes are much safer with brakes than without.

This Sunday, "Southern Baptist pastors are being encouraged [...] to preach about the necessity of a constitutional amendment to protect traditional marriage. The legislative matter is scheduled to come before the U.S. Senate for debate and a vote next week." It's Pentecost Sunday, and we're talking about how Jesus would send down holy fire to limit the powers of citizens to make legal contracts with one another. 'Cause if there's one thing Jesus spent a lot of time talking about, it's the balance of power between polis and governors in a representative democracy.
Thing learned: Tomorrow's sermon will probably make me angry.

The Hero With A Thousand Faces, thus far, seems like a confusing jumble of Plato-slanted Greek myths and some stories about the Buddha. There's not as much as I expected pertaining to any other mythological systems. I'm not very far into the book yet, so this isn't really a fair criticism, but...
Thing learned: Reading Joseph Campbell isn't nearly as interesting as listening to people talk about him.