Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Mapless Journeys and a Faith that has Lost its Nerve

Today a quote via Andrew Perriman from a great little essay by William Stacy Johnson. Indeed, the whole collection of essays is well worth a read. I got the book on my birthday in 2003. It’s a great addition to some excellent books and collections of essays on reading scripture and hermeneutics

“…It is time that we recognized this foundationalist way of thinking for what it is. In its Christian guise, it represents not the strength of faith but the result of a faith that has lost its nerve. The Christian Scriptures set themselves up not so much as truth claims to be defended by philosophical foundations but as witnesses to the transforming power that no truth claim itself can contain. The gospel is not a “foundation” to render our traditional notions of rationality secure but a remaking of everything, including rationality itself…”

William Stacy Johnson, "Reading the Scriptures Faithfully in a Postmodern Age", in Davis, E.F. and Hays, R.B. (eds.), The Art of Reading Scripture, 112.

 

Slavoj Žižek Living in The End Times

While it didn’t feel like it said anything in particular, I did enjoy reading the hard copy of an interview with Slavoj Zizek in the May / June 2011 issue of Huck magazine: a magazine focused around “surf, skate, snow, music, art, & activism. 

While the magazine says to visit the website for the full transcript, I can’t find it. Instead there was only the following excerpt from the full interview: 

Rock star philosopher and critical theorist Slavoj Žižek takes on hypocrisy, cheap Hollywood Marxism and the final crisis of capitalism. 

He’s run for president in his native Slovenia, has a soft spot for Jacques Lacan, and has been hailed as the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’. With grand gestures, penetrating ideas and an articulate, super cool Balkan voice, Slavoj Žižek has a larger-than-life presence.

In his new book, Living in the Endtimes [Pub. 2010], Žižek prophesises the final crisis of capitalism, criticises the hypocrisy of Western racial “tolerance” and points to a challenging future with no easy solutions. We spoke for almost an hour and a half about all manner of issues, from Wikileaks and ideology to the benefits of skateboarding and his dream of remaking Star Wars with Darth Vader as “an enlightenment ruler fighting reactionary feudals like the Jedis”.

What follows are some of the highlights.

What do you think about the student protests in London, what’s their meaning? It’s not just privatisation of higher education, what worries me [is this trend] that says, if you want to study this abstract, useless knowledge it should be your private stuff. What society needs is useful knowledge; experts to meet social needs. […] So that, for example, when you have a crisis, precisely like the demonstrations in London, you can call psychologists who tell you how people in demonstrations behave… you know, useful knowledge. We need a more radical thinking. We need thinking which problematises problems themselves. Thinking is not to say, ‘We have a problem, help us fix it.’ Thinking is to see how we perceive the problem. Often the way we perceive a problem already in a way mystifies the problem. One example: when you mix ecology with this new age bullshit – you know, ‘We’re raping mother earth, mother earth is taking revenge,’ blah, blah, blah – all that new age bullshit means catastrophe to ecology if we approach it in this new age way.

And here I like movies. […] I simply use movies as the most subtle registration of where we stand ideologically. Take this year’s Oscars: the two big winners, The King’s Speech and Black Swan. It’s very interesting how they fit sexual difference and the problem of subjectivity today. What’s the problem of The King’s Speech? The king here is a subject who stutters, it’s clear why – because he finds it hard to identify with his symbolic title. Like, ‘My God, am I really a king? Can I be a king?’ Which is I think quite a healthy attitude, you know? It’s a sad story for me. The king is much wiser in the beginning; his stuttering means he knows that to be a king you need to believe in our kingness, which is madness, you know? So he’s rendered slowly stupid enough to believe that he can be a king. The other one is even worse. A really simplistic analysis, of course, but Black Swan, I think, is a deeply reactionary film. The underlying premise is that a man, played by Vincent Cassell, the director of the ballet, can combine the ruthless total dedication to his profession with normal private life, but a woman has to choose. If you identify too much with your mission of being a perfect artist, you are punished with death. This is a radically anti-feminist idea; that a woman and her radical dedication to her art can’t go together. It’s a beautiful film; nicely shot, blah, blah – but maybe they could have got slightly better music than that Tchaikovsky bullshit. I’m here this conservative European high modernist. Tchaikovsky is out for me, no? It’s popular music.

On the topic of music, Slavoj, what do you like? I love classical music; I’m a mega Wagnerian – Wagner, Schonberg, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann. I listen for hours every day. I work to loud music. […] Of the latest music, I like bands like the German one, Rammstein. I disagree with those who think they are some kind of proto-fascist band. They do this wonderful thing – deconstructing from within; the charm of fascism, overidentifying with it and making it ridiculous. […]

But listen, I am generally a kind of retarded guy. For example, when Harry Potter exploded, with my best intentions I tried to read the novels. Sorry, I found them boring, I couldn’t.

What do you make of skateboarding and surfing, which are perhaps closer to a purely aesthetic expression than to your traditional mainstream sport. Do they mean anything to you? Skateboarding, I think this is a great thing. […] I remember those kung fu films – did you notice the heroes were always working class? Rich people can have guards and arms, so they can afford to be lazy and consume; poor people have only their bodies and self-discipline. This is what I am for. I agree with my German friend Peter Sloterdijk: he came up with the idea that this is one of the hopes, these perfectionist disciplines, [like] a skateboarding guy who makes a mission out of [his] self-discipline. This is absolutely a positive thing..."

Remixing the Church: Towards an Emerging Ecclesiology

Andy Goodliff brought my attention to a new book soon to be published by Doug Gay. It is titled Remixing the Church: Towards an Emerging Ecclesiology (SCM / 2011) and it sounds fascinating. Here’s the description: 

“Remixing The Church makes a unique and original contribution to debates about emerging church, by offering a clear and dynamic model of how church traditions change over time. The metaphor of emergence is read and interpreted through the five key moves of auditing, retrieval, unbundling, supplementing and remixing. Remixing is informed by practical experience of alt/emerging congregations and networks and by recent scholarship in practical theology. Both scholarly and accessible, it is the first book to effectively link discussions of emerging church, ecumenism and evangelicalism. It offers both a lucid framework for analysing the contemporary church and a provocative vision for its future. It is a book for thoughtful practitioners and church leaders, which also contributes to academic discussions of ecclesiology, congregational studies, mission, liturgy and worship and practical theology.” 

Doug Gay is a Lecturer in Practical Theology at the University of Glasgow and a Church of Scotland minister. 

Andy offers a brief review here. I’ve always valued the notion of “remixing” and “DJ’ing”. For more on these subjects see Steve Taylor’s excellent Out of Bounds Church? Especially "Postcard 8": Culture Samplers pp. 137-155. 

Update

After writing the initial post, I see that Jonny Baker also has a piece about the book. You'll find it here. 

David Whyte and the Poetic Narrative of Our Times

Today, something else I’ve been reading by David Whyte (this time from December 2009); a small article titled: The Poetic Narrative of our Times. It relates well to yesterday’s post. 

Here’s an excerpt:

“…Looking up from the lit door of Keanes's Pub in the heart of Conamara, these clouds, landscapes, and even the Irishness of the night seem fuller and more essential through their disappearances as much as through their appearances. Human beings stand at the center of these sometimes swift, sometimes slow, always moving patterns of presence and absence, but rarely intuit their own essence might be revealed and magnified by what is veiled and hidden, or by what has been taken away. Yet this form of subtraction may be the very hallmark of our time. At the present time we are asked to live in companionship with patterns and dynamics that are either disappearing, have not fully emerged or can never be fully named; patterns perhaps already changing into forms for which we have yet no language.

It is tempting, in this limbo time between the traumas of a world once said to be in ceaseless war with terrorism and a not yet fully formed future ideal, to feel righteously lost. Everything seems to be paused and hanging in a mist- wrought, barely moving dance. The world's economic systems, the world's ecological systems, the relations between haves and have-nots, the sovereignty of nation states upon which many millions of individuals have based their identities, all these are taking forms which we cannot quite recognize, and in that movement through form seem to be on the verge of disappearing…”

Little wonder then that if we prefer the appearance of stability or clear unobstructed vision we will manufacture fake narratives to replace the complexity, changeability and raw beauty of real ones, especially if the stories we always wanted to be true seem to shimmer and disappear…” 

He closes the article with this beautiful poem: 

MAMEEN

Be infinitesimal under that sky, a creature
even the sailing hawk misses, a wraith
among the rocks where the mist parts slowly.
Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed
by circumstance, how great reputations
dissolve with infirmity and how you,
in particular, live a hairsbreadth from losing
everyone you hold dear.

Then, look back down the path as if seeing
your past and then south over the hazy blue
coast as if present to a wide future,
recall the way you are all possibilities
you can see and how you live best
as an appreciator of horizons
whether you reach them or not,
admit that once you have got up
from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain,
who helped to make it.

- David Whyte

from RIVER FLOW: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007
Copyright 2006 Many Rivers Press

You can read his full reflection here. 

 

The Pilgrimage of Work; the Poetics of the Political: David Whyte Interviewed - 2007

I really appreciated an interview with Poet David Whyte published in the Feb-Mar 2007 issue (# 38) of The Pedestal Magazine. It picks up some of the themes featured in recent posts on this blog in respect of poetry. 

Here’s an excerpt: 

Lee Rossi [interviewer]: Can we jump to another topic? I’d like to explore your ideas about work. You use the image of the pilgrim to explain the process of finding and pursuing good work. You arrive at one stage in your life, you pursue a particular kind of work, and then you move on to something else, as your sense of what’s important in your life expands. You point out that it’s an inner as well as an outer journey, this pilgrimage of work. What do you think are some of the inner signposts of true work? How do we know when we’ve found "true work," and how do we know when it’s time to let it go and find something else?

David Whyte: I’d say that one of the central diagnostic features is an experience of timelessness; where you feel in work that time is actually radiating out from the experience itself. One of the signs of work that’s debilitating is when you feel constantly besieged by time, when you are constantly trying to fit your work into a schedule. Now there’s no work that is immune to the sense of deadline or of being limited. But if you don’t have a cyclical visitation of the timeless in your endeavours, I’d say that’s a pretty good sign it’s not your conversation, it’s not your work and you should be elsewhere. Or you should move on from something that perhaps once brought that into your life but no longer does.

The whole idea of pilgrimage is not necessarily moving on from a particular form of conversation, but finding–and I do think work is a kind of out loud, visible conversation – it’s keeping that conversation real, and in order to do that, finding new forms appropriate to it.

LR: Here’s a different kind of question, maybe not totally unrelated. Fifteen years ago, Dana Gioia wrote a very famous and controversial essay entitled "Can Poetry Matter?" In your book The Heart Aroused you say that "he challenged American poets to climb out of their self-referential world and bring their talents back into the mainstream of American society."

DW: Yes, The Heart Aroused was published partly as a consequence of that challenge.

LR: How much progress, if any, have American poets made in the intervening time?

DW: I don’t know really. You see it in flashes. You probably know of Poets Against the War, that was catalyzed by Laura Bush’s invitation for poets to come to the White House and read at the time when America was gearing up to invade Iraq. I thought that was a very powerful and challenging response.

Personally I don’t worry about it too much because I do think that the act of writing poetry, the discipline of actually following that art, is a political act in itself. Which doesn’t mean to say that individual poets have an excuse not to participate in society. But the particular form of attention that poetry demands of you, and it’s ability to have individuals and society look at qualities and elements that the mainstream is refusing to confront, is a powerful political act in itself.

At the same time, I really do think that the mainstream world is crying out for artists of any stripe who can build a bridge between the imaginative and the strategic worlds that human beings live in. I know I was made for that, I was built for that conversation because, as I say, I grew up in a very practical Yorkshire world with a very imaginative Irish interior to it. I lived at the bridge between those two worlds growing up. I love both sides of it.

There are certain poets who are the geniuses of the interior imagination and its ability to renew the world outside through articulation. They may not be known for a couple of generations. There are probably poets writing who are socially inept, up in their garrets, who may become the brilliant voices of the 22nd century. In my mind they’re just as relevant as I am who’s out there striving amongst the money lenders…”

You can find the full interview here. 

 

Rowan Williams, Flannery O’Connor and the Importance of Stories

Aussie-Kiwi friend, Jason Goroncy, in a recent post featured a quote from Rowan Williams. I thought of a now not so recent trip to Dunedin, I thought of conversations with Alan Roxburgh, and I quietly appreciated the storytellers, innovators, poets, film-makers, artists, thinkers, and entrepreneurs that make my thought and heart life so rich. The Williams quote is woven into Jason’s reflection and it also includes one of my favourite tellers of stories, Flannery O’Connor. 

Jason writes: 

“…As Flannery O’Connor once noted, ‘there is a certain embarrassment about being a story teller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or statistics, but by the stories it tells’. 

So tell stories we must. And, of course, the Church has a long tradition of telling and re-telling its own story. And there are radical implications for so doing, for, as Rowan Williams observes in Lost Icons: ‘Every “telling” of myself is a retelling, and the act of telling changes what can be told next time, because it is, precisely, an act, with consequences. The self lives and moves in, and only in, acts of telling – in the time taken to set out and articulate a memory, the time that is a kind of representation (always partial, always skewed) of the time my material and mental life has taken, the time that has brought me here … The process of “making” a self by constructing a story that is always being told is a prosaic and universal one’ (p. 144).” 

In this passage, under the (concluding) chapter heading of Lost Soul, Williams explores both the ways in which culture forms us, but also reflects on the ways in which we in culture lose ourselves – lose whom we most deeply are. This theme is captured in a lengthy opening quote (by Jacob Needleman) in which Needleman writes: “…I would suddenly be stopped in my tracks by the overwhelming experience that my Christianity disappeared because I myself had disappeared. It was almost always connected to something minor, some personal irritation…” 

This culture we find ourselves in, Williams writes, privileges the reactive over the active, over the deliberate, reflective, and intentional. We find ourselves as “lost souls”. Deeply disconnected from ourselves; hyper-stimulated; always looking for the new; for the next thing, for the next ‘fix’… but sadly, more often than not, we’re doing this not out of who we most deeply and truly are, but instead, out of the reactive – out of some deep consumerist neediness (“always partial, always skewed”) and the unchallenged stories both we and culture tell about ourselves, who we are, and what we need. We’re always on edge; the slightest irritation pulls us over the edge… and then we’re falling.  Without intervention, and over time, we move further and further away from what is most real; what is most deep and true about us. We, and who we are and what we hold "disappears".

Maybe, more responses to Williams – not always exactly what he’s saying – and his Lost Souls in the coming days. 

Thanks Jason for the original prompt to reflect which your post provided.  

 

Of God’s and Men – Finally!

Recently I finally got to see the award-winning film Of Gods and Men on the big screen. It’s in my top 5 movies of the decade (2000 to 2010). Based on the true story of a small group of Cistercian monks who inhabit the Notre-Dame de l’Atlas monastery in the Atlas mountains near Tibhirine south west of Algiers in northern Algeria it examines links between French and Islamic culture; and too some degree, between Christianity and Islam. I’m halfway through the book-length account of the story behind the film. It’s titled: The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria by American journalist John W. Kiser. The now-abandoned monastery is located near Medea, 70 km south of Algiers. “…The monks had worked among the people in the poor district. They had provided free medical care, a service that is deeply missed by the locals…” according to the Catholic News Agency. 

Sitting in a dark theatre was a truly special experience, from the script to the cinematography, to the acting, to the soundtrack – everything worked. I loved it and was profoundly moved through a range of feelings and emotions. It’s a movie that can be ‘read’ on so many levels. It’s a profoundly human story, while also a story of friendship, community and of interdependence – in this case between the monastery and the village of Tibhirine. It’s also a story of “interiors and interiority” wrapped in a message of peace. Surely a message that is desperately needed today. Br. Jean-Pierre (age 87), one of the two survivors has said of the film that it is “an icon”. 

In many ways this is a classical and profoundly modest film, and perhaps that’s an important reason why the film really touches and moves you. There’s something about its portrayal of a full range of human emotion in the face of which, for many of us, the unrest and tension would be a sufficient reason to sever connection with relationships and place. They beautifully transition through anxiety, fear, and deep inner anguish to a place of deep rootedness, trust, and commitment. They resist every urge in their bodies which whispers to them that they should leave; or that independence is more important and transformative than interdependence, relationship, love of God and neighbour, belonging, and community. Truly important and subversive messages at a time in our Western culture(s) where everything is disposable and every person and relationship can be thrown away when the circumstances of life, inside and outside of us demand that we stretch, change, and grow. The monks of Tibhirine face into their fear and in the process create something truly beautiful, truly human against a backdrop of dehumanisation. Its a profound reminder that love is not a feeling; its an action; its actions.  

So much resonated with my own experiences of regularly being in a monastery within the Trappist / Cistercian tradition.

From the Film: 

Reading at Meal (34:22) 

“Accepting our powerlessness and our extreme poverty is an invitation, an urgent appeal to create with others relationships not based on power. Recognizing my weaknesses, I accept those of others. I can bear them; make them mine in imitation of Christ. 

Such an attitude transforms us for our mission. Weakness in itself is not a virtue, but the expression of a fundamental reality, which must constantly be refashioned by faith, hope and love. The apostles’ weakness is like Christ’s, rooted in the mystery of Easter and the strength of the spirit. It is neither passivity nor resignation. It requires great courage and incites one to defend justice and truth and to denounce the temptation of force and power…” 

This excerpt from the films script (above) is courtesy of a really helpful study guide for the film produced by Christopher Page (he’s written a few really helpful study guides for church or Christian communities with which to accompany films). You can find a PDF of the study guide here.

A written interview with the films director can be found here.  Some of you may also be interested in this essay: “When an A-Dieu Takes on a Face”: The Last Testament of Christian de Chergé, O.C.S.O (PDF) by Karl A. Plank.

 

 

Liminal Spaces and the Healing-Transformative Work

Andrew from Australia, a good friend, brought Alan Niven to dinner on Saturday evening. We hadn’t met Alan before and we all had a wonderful evening: great food, great wine, and great conversation. Both Andrew and Alan are paid theologians – both have a very practical bent to what they do; both are engaged in the ordinary and the every day. Alan’s focus is: “Pastoral and Family Studies. His teaching covers ministry formation, pastoral care and counselling, marriage and family studies, grief and loss, violence and abuse, preaching and worship, and pastoral leadership…” 

Cambridge has become a fascinating “way station” over the years – some wonderful people have dropped in. Two more did on Saturday. 

Any, here’s an excerpt from a short essay Alan wrote a little while ago: 

“…A liminal moment in ritual is created when you separate yourself from the ‘known’, the group you were part of, or the state of being you were comfortable in, and participate in and perform a ritual action. Following this action we re- enter, are reincorporated into or rejoin whatever the social system was, but we are now different. 

Pastoral theological reflection is... 

Such reflection is that liminal moment where you are aware of theory on the one hand, and you can feel the practice in your memory in almost a “body” way (for the senses and emotions are all there) yet you have suspended judgment because you have not yet allowed them to dance together to form something new - either a reframed theory or an amended practice. They must affect and inform each other. 

It’s more than a cognitive-behavioural exercise because liminal space is the arena and playground for God and the space where ministry and Christian identity begin to form and firm up. It is the point where we are most accessible, vulnerable, open, resistantly receptive (the paradox I have used illustrates that we still have choices and God is not in the business of coercing us) or obviously wrestling with some new truth which is beginning to dawn. 

We may use prompts like: 

“What’s going on for you now?” What’s being challenged here?” “What might be behind the -- anger, pain, tears, clenched fists, quiet silence, smile, resigned sigh or whatever?”

These will be the instruments that sift, probe, dig, or scrape, in the liminal moments where theory collides with, or sneaks alongside, practice or vice versa. 

There are potentially huge shifts within this liminal space: 

Anger at the stubborn Elder can become the signpost towards a growing compassion for the old worn out paddock bull who (God forbid!) may just be as insecure as we are:

Assertiveness can be sown in the fertile ground of, surprise surprise, confessions of weakness and failure rather than strength;

The long, bitter curse of infertility may be reframed as the cross of vocational blessing. 

[Loneliness, as an example, becomes an invitation not to make others responsible, but rather to discover your deepest self; to reconnect with the real you – instead of running away from that conversation. Invitations to transformation and growth are embedded in all human experiences. Alan's reflection argues for that reality – Paul] 

Theological reflection therefore creates the space for grace where theory meets practice…” 

While wordier, the way I’d articulate the last sentence is “reflection (including theological)… slowing down, meeting with a counselor or spiritual director, writing, sharing with a friend (the list goes on) creates space (Rowan Williams might call it “breathing space” cf his wonderful contemplative reflection: Writing in the Dust: After September 11) for grace and the ordinary and the everyday to be woven together, and the deep (and often quiet) transformative work to be done.  

You can read Alan’s full essay –  “Just Do It”: Misreading Nike – Why Liminal Moments in Theological Reflection Have to be so Painful (2 pages / PDF) here. 

“Retromania”: A Future for the Church?

A few weeks ago a post by Barry Taylor prompted me to write this one. The focus of Barry’s original post was a new book out by Simon Reynolds, and particularly the stimulation that provided to think about church and its future. 

Taylor wrote: 

“…I really think that Christianity/church/theology/ecclesiology etc is drowning in the past. I have been thinking this for a while and the more time I explore this thread the more it feels confirmed… 

…We have to do some thinking and exploring of our own, for ourselves, not for everybody… 

Then, this Saturday just gone, Radio New Zealand National featured a 34-minute interview with Reynolds. You’ll find it here.

Also worth a read is this interview with Reynolds. 

 

Bounded, Centred, and the Dynamic of Love

Following on from this post in which I mentioned Shelia Pritchard’s reflection Digging Wells or Building Fences, is a post from JR. Daniel Kirk who’s currently 90 minutes up the road from me in Auckland. In his first part he’s reflecting on “bounded sets”; in a future post he’ll reflect on “centred sets”. Here’s an excerpt:

“…Once we have defined Christianity as a set of beliefs that must be maintained in order to be faithful Christians, then Christian ethics boils down to maintaining “the faith” that is so delineated. 

What should Christians do? Defend the borders. 

I have recently stumbled upon the work of Paul Hiebert. Here is what he says about bounded sets: 

1. The category is created by listing essential characteristics something must posses in order to belong to the set
2. The category is defined by a clear boundary
3. The objects form a homogeneous group
4. “Bounded sets are essentially static sets”
5. Within Western conceptual categories, bounded sets tend to be ontological sets, reflecting an absolute, unchanging nature of reality.

Two things strike me here: the quote, point 4, is the one that I most often rail against here. Christian theology is not a static set, but something dynamically in process in the ongoing story of the church. See yesterday’s post: The church has to grow up to the fact that things are not simply givens, so we cannot take an 1800 year old statement as the defining marker of who we are and what we should do. 

But here’s the other problem, as Hiebert lays it out. On point 2, the category is formed by a clear boundary. 

What does this mean in practice? He says: 

Most of the effort in defining the category is spent defining and maintaining the boundary. Not only must we say what an apple is, we must also clearly differentiate it from oranges, pears, and similar objects that belong to the same domain but are not apples. The central question, therefore, is whether an object is inside or outside the category…” 

You can read Kirk’s full reflection here. Also worth reflecting on is this diagram from Alan Roxburgh:

 

And for a change of direction. I was also struck by the following statement (see below) in another post by Kirk. In this one, and it is related, he talks about the dynamic nature of relationships. It seems to me to get at an essential element of love. As individuals grow and change the dynamics of the relationship changes, as do the rich possibilities and opportunities to grow in love and through love; to deepen love; to mature and enrich love; and to be stretched and invited to grow by the invitations to love a person we choose to see afresh; to see as they are in all their wonder, richness, and mystery; and in the light of that mystery to make space for what they and we will become if we cling to and trust the work of love and grace. People and relationships are dynamic. Love is a verb; its choices and decisions and work, not a feeling. Further, it would seem to me, love is all around us; the issue is often only a matter of our openness, openness to the light blue sliver over light over Maungakawa as the sun starts to emerge, a new day, the stars in the sky, a smile - the list goes on. More often than not the only challenge is around, to quote theologian Nick Cave, letting love in.  

Here’s what Kirk wrote: 

“…In [novel] The Sparrow, the wise older married woman says she has to decide afresh every ten years if this new person who is completely different from the man she married (and from the man she recommitted to ten years previously) is worth learning to love afresh…”

You can read his complete post here. Also (his) Part 2.