In the ancient sacred narratives of scripture, there are many examples of leadership. Some are stories of success, of triumph against the odds, of building and renewal and integrity.
Others...aren't. There are plenty of brutes and despots, incompetents and grifters, villains and bumblers.
One of the notable Biblical stories of failed leadership is that of Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, the king who broke the people of Israel in two.
Under Solomon, there were tensions between the northern tribes and the southern tribes, tensions that had been carefully managed. But where Solomon used a balance of force and wisdom, his son lacked any and all capacity for diplomacy. The leaders of the northern tribes came to him, and asked that some of the pressures of punitive laws, predatory taxation, and oppression be removed.
The advisors who had served the Solomonic court told Rehoboam that he should show mercy, that he should be gracious, and thus earn the respect and loyalty of the north.
But Rehoboam was a fool, the spoiled child of wealth. Instead of making peace, he listened to his own ego, and to his hangers-on and sycophants. "Double down," they said. "Show them who's boss," they said.
"Tell 'em your little finger is thicker than your father's loin."
That's "loins." Ahem.
Anyhoo, that's exactly what Rehoboam did. He doubled down. He bullied and provoked and threatened. The northern tribes, led by Jeroboam, son of Nabat, rose up in revolt, and the young nation fell to ruin.
Rehoboam destroyed the Davidic reign, which would make him sort of an anti-messiah.
As it so happens, Rehoboam's name means "the enlarged people" in Hebrew. Or, equally...if more pointedly but fairly translated: "The People Made Great."
I mean, it's all there in the Bible. Straight up.
Those who don't know scripture are doomed to repeat it, eh?
The morning was bright and sharply cold, the sky a deep rich blue.
The pup set out across the driveway with me in tow, eager to go about his morning business, and I glanced upward at the moon, low in the waking dawn. It was a sharp-edged crescent, enlarged by the illusion of the parallax effect, lovely in the sky.
We bustled up the street, he snuffling at the scent of earth, me perusing the beauty of the heavens. I'm not sure when I became a person who liked rising at first light, but the loveliness of morning's first embrace is a peculiar side benefit of being in charge of a dog's morning potty break. We walked up the hill, and I reflected on that crescent, so perfectly inscribed in the warming navy of the sky. Such a moon would have meaning to billions of human beings, a marker of faith. For me, it is simply beautiful, and a work of the Creator.
Our eager boi sniffed and marked as we made our way up the street, then came to the stretch of sidewalk where he always goes. Like clockwork, he did. I cleaned up, and we turned to return home.
Halfway back, I saw movement in a driveway. I wasn't quite clear what it was, not at first. A form, crouched low on the ground at the end of the driveway of a neighbor.
The neighbors in question have a home decorated in Americana, flags and eagles and the like. They drive Fords and Fords only, SUVs and a well equipped F-250 that sees use as a commuter car. They own very very big dogs. She's of the wave-and-say hi sort, and he's lean and bald and bearded. At one point, for a brief while in 2020, that big ol' truck sported both an NRA and a Trump Punisher sticker, so, well, that's what that is.
I wondered, for an instant, if one of them might have fallen on a patch of ice, so I quickened my pace.
As I approached, I realized two things. First, that the person on the ground was not one of them. It was a delivery man. Deliveries are at all hours now, early in the morning, late into the night, so this was not a surprise.
Second, as I watched him rise, resettle his janamaz, and kneel upon that mat to again bow himself in prayer, that he was Muslim.
He remained deep in his morning prayer as I and the dog passed, and I left him in peace beneath the crescent moon and dawn. By the time I had reached my house, and turned to look back up the street, he and his vehicle were gone.
We are, apparently, about to enter into a time of rapid unscheduled disassembly. The American people, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to tear apart the social order that rose from the greatest generation and America's rise to power following the Second World War.
It's time to try something new! Let's break it all apart, and rebuild it!
So we're going to completely dismantle the regulatory structures of government. The systems for weather reporting and prediction? Sure, they ain't broke, but they aren't ideologically acceptable. Turn 'em over to the private sector. The systems that check that our food is safe? They impede freedom, and so do the systems that require radioactive waste to be carefully disposed. You're convinced that you can do better. The social protections that were put in place after Americans last starved en masse, when the entire banking system collapsed a century ago? Bah! You can do better.
Let the miracle of innovation and market-solutions do their job, we say. We're entering into a period that will be defined by what I think we can fairly call the SpaceX strategy. You try, and you fail. You determine the reasons for that failure, and you try again. And you fail. You do this over, and over, and over again. Fail, eat, sleep, repeat, until you stop failing. It's iterative and evolutionary, and under optimal circumstances, it works.
But there are some nontrivial caveats writ into the Terms of Use.
Here, the two key principles for constructive failure need to be brought to mind.
1) Failure must be a learning opportunity.
We have to be able to fail. Failure is how we learn. Failure is how we grow, and how we improve. But to fail well, we have to be able to acknowledge that we have failed. For rockets, this is pretty danged obvious. Well, that didn't work! Try again!
In my little church, we also try new things. Sometimes, like our Community Garden or our Little Free Pantry or our livestreaming, they take off. Getting to livestreaming involved a whole bunch of learning from failure. We showed forbearance and patience, and members with technical aptitude took over from the eager but less apt pastor (ahem), and we got there.
But for governments, particularly ones that have an authoritarian bent or ideological blinders, this is waaaay harder. Like, say, the Clinton/Bush-era offshoring of American manufacturing. Ain't no way you can persuade Rust Belt factory workers that this was a good thing. No way in the world. It was a catastrophe, and was always going to be a catastrophe. It made the investment class richer, and royally reamed everyone else. Or Reagan-era Keynesian economics, in which the assumption was that you could govern a great nation with fairy dust and unicorn farts. That Voodoo never, ever worked, unless the plan was to cast shackles of forever-debt around this nation. It created deficits that are unmanageable, and told the lie that government in a Republic can survive if its citizens contribute nothing.
Your choice, when something fails, is to 1) acknowledge the failure and the need for a course correction, 2) double down on the propaganda and the hype, or 3) blame someone else.
Politicians and pitchmen will almost always steer away from door number one. Ideological information systems are for crap at recognizing their own shortcomings, or acknowledging when errors have been made. Corporate hype machines are equally wretched, and authoritarians are the absolute worst. You gonna be the one to tell Dear Leader that he was wrong? Do svidanya, comrade!
When your knee-jerk reaction is to double down when confronted with disconfirming information, you can't ever learn from your mistakes. Like an overconfident cokehead driving a Hummer EV in a blizzard, you ignore the signs, and just get yourself deeper and deeper into trouble.
When your hype machine requires every failure to be trivial, you gloss things over with spin, and people who know no better see the pretty pretty sparkle falling from the sky rather than realizing something has gone very, very wrong.
And therein lies the second principle: decatastrophization.
2) Failure must not actually kill you.
Decatastrophization. It's a big ol' made-up word.
All it means is that you can fail without doing significant damage. It is safe to fail. This is key. To fail and learn, you have to survive the failure.
This is easy if you're building rockets. Oops, blew that one up! Golly, looks like that one also exploded! Tee hee! No biggie.
You just pour government dollars or investor money into the next one, and you keep at it until things finally start working. Then, and only then, do you put human beings into your ships, because Kerbal Space Program levels of fail are less funny when the screaming astronauts are actually screaming astronauts.
But when you're responsible for disaster relief, and you try something wildly different? When that doesn't work, what happens? Or if you're responsible for ensuring that food isn't dangerous to eat, and you kinda sorta miss something? Or if a new and unanticipated virus comes along, and you call it a hoax, politicize it, and then promote both resistance to basic hygiene and quack remedies...or destroy public health entirely? Or if you put a halt to the systems and structures that fund cancer research, without any plan to replace it? These scenarios exact a significant, unrecoverable price, one measured in human lives.
People die. People die by the thousands, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands.
Or, if you screw up the entire planetary ecology, billions.
When a nation fails to recognize and grow from failure, that failure comes at an existential cost.
I was introduced to David Lynch way back in the day.
As a young man drawn to the subversive and the countercultural during the soulless pastel venality of the Reagan years, I'd seen the iconic image of the titular character to Eraserhead often. It made a fine t-shirt and/or poster for those of a punky or anarchic persuasion.
The film itself was a fever dream of paternal anxiety, fiercely unsettling. I saw it first on VHS, natch, but hadn't "seen" it until I went for a viewing at the long-lamented Biograph in Georgetown. I left the theater with a lingering sense that the world had been knocked slightly askew, as the movie seemed to warp the world around its claustrophobic vision.
When Blue Velvet dropped, I saw it the very first weekend, sitting alone in the theater, as I so often did as a socially awkward, anxious, and desperately lonely teen. It was technicolor gorgeous and seethingly, subtly horrid, skewed and shaking, which utterly fit my grim adolescent cynicism about the world. I found it so amenably disturbing that I immediately told my punkish friends that they had to get out and get equally shaken.
I went with them for a second viewing two weeks later, but as it happened, in between first and second viewings I'd had my quite belated first kiss. And my second. And thirtieth. My entire view of the world had shifted, and riding high on the bliss of fresh first love, Blue Velvet parsed as a darkly preposterous absurdist comedy. My friends were shaken. In the theater, I laughed and laughed and laughed, out loud and often.
Which...er...wasn't quite the response of the rest of the audience. It...um...may have cemented my reputation as being a little on the weird side.
Love sees the world differently, eh?
Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart and much of the Lynch ouevre were staples of my edgy young adulthood. I went back and gloried at the dark, grotesque, defiant humanity of The Elephant Man. I lamented the corporate sabotage of his tragicomic attempt at Dune, a lingering reminder that mercantilism is and will always be the enemy of art.
But none of these are my favorite Lynch film, the one that stands out and away from every other one of his creative outputs.
My favorite Lynch film is...hands down...The Straight Story, and it is unlike almost every other thing he made. It shows the same attention to craft, the same gift for visual composition, and bears all of the marks of an auteur.
It's based on the true story of Alvin Straight, an elderly man who was deeply estranged from his brother. Upon hearing his brother had had a stroke and might not live, Straight determined to go and visit him to reconcile. But he'd lost his license, and had no car. Stubbornly determined to make the trip himself, Straight got on his ancient lawn tractor and traveled hundreds of miles, from Iowa to Wisconsin, set on restoring his relationship.
It is a David Lynch film, and as such is as deeply committed to concept as any other of his works. Yet it is tonally unique. The characters aren't caricatures, but neither are they warped and seething with madness. They are human...and decent...and good. The world through which Straight travels on the road to a hoped-for reconciliation is vast and glorious, dangerous and beautiful. The whole film is suffused with light and fiercely, authentically kind. It's marvelous and human, grounded and spiritual.
But it isn't subversive, you might suggest. Ah, but no. No no no.
I would contend that, of all of his films, The Straight Story is the most powerfully subversive.
And being weird, as I still am, of course it's my favorite.
Back during the pandemic, my little church scrambled for a way to stay connected to one another.
Worship is the beating heart of congregational life, the place of shared experience that engages, sends forth, and re-engages. It's an experience that is at its best incarnate, but that can be shared through media if distance or plague so demands. As generally speaking the goal of my little church is not to send our worshippers to meet Jesus face-to-face before their time, that meant COVID forced our hand. We had to livestream, and had to scale up to meet that need.
Our choice, for its ubiquity, was Facebook. As we reasoned it back in 2020, Facebooks' depth of engagement and relative ease of use made it an good medium for streaming. It allowed the sharing of invitation across our personal networks, which meant it was open to those who might wish to visit, and wasn't delimited to invited members.
It's worked for that purpose, more or less, but lately it's become...well...worse.
Our worship is traditional, meaning the hymns we sing are...more often than not...reflective of this pastor's strong preference for sturdy old Gospel standards.
They're meatier theologically than most Christian contemporary music, but they also rise to meet the vocal capacities of a little church. They're lovely and totally singable if you can sing, which my fellowship can. And if you can't, there's something about old gospel standards that brings beauty and grace to the heartfelt caterwaulings of even the most vocally challenged faithful.
Almost every week, we're hit with copyright claims, as Facebook's avaricious algorithms flag the hymns we sing as violations of copyright.
The latest ding was for singing a beautiful mid-nineteenth-century standard, Abide with Me. "This is our music," said a subsentient fragment of code slaved to Warner/Chappell Music USA. "It belongs to us. We demand our cut of ad revenues from this video."
To which I say, advisedly and with purpose, the hell it is.
The music dates from 1861, so far out of copyright that it's utterly preposterous to even suggest ownership. It's sacred music for a sacred purpose, one that goes deep back down into the evangelical tradition, back to the time of the founding of my humble historic church. We're singing it from a hymnal, copies of which were purchased for use in public worship.
Our "ad revenue" is, of course, zero, as corporate sponsorship of worship isn't something we do. These claims don't impact our worship...not yet. But the needling annoyance of these mammonist machines seems a marker of a shift in our culture, as the crass profit-maximization of our increasingly false and decadent society stakes its claim.
Does this impact our religious freedom? No. Not really.
Facebook is not a public space. It is an owned space, a place of radical venality, where we and our relationships are bought and sold like chattel, and where even our most sacred time is commodified.
If you're a predator, the shallows are your friend.
When I and my family vacation at the beach, we sometimes get the opportunity to observe this reality at work. Pods of bottlenosed dolphins prowl up and down the shoreline after daybreak, delighting the countless hairless bipeds who dawdle in the sands. But unlike the homo sapiens sapiens who watch them, these cetaceans aren't vacationing. They are, as a tribe, on the hunt.
You can see this when a patch of water starts to boil and churn, as a school of small fish is forced into a tightly knit ball. The dolphin work together to herd them into a place from which there is no escape, where every possible path has been cut off. The fish can't flee to the depths, because there are no depths. Right above them, sky. Below them, sand. And pressed against the crashing waves of an unforgiving shore, there's nowhere to go but into shimmer in a tight trapped churning mass, moving as one. From there, the tribe that hunts them can take what they want at their leisure.
Shallow water is a dangerous place if you're a fish.
But the shallows are no less dangerous for human beings.
We human beings have been induced to gather virtually, now, in the tightly controlled confines of the shallowest of mediums. Our every social exchange, managed and moderated and sorted by algorithms designed to "serve" us in the same way that the towering alien Kanamits "served man" in that old classic Twilight Zone episode. We are encouraged to burp out short fragments of thought, or regurgitate prefabricated memetic sentiment, devoid of depth and complexity, designed to maximize immediate emotive engagement and stir the greatest reaction in those around us.
Those synthetic social exchanges shorten our attention spans, making even the most basic of concepts TLDR, stirring blind reactivity to our most immediate context. We don't think long term, or even beyond whatever reaction has been triggered by the fish around us. We flit and dart en mass and on impulse, driven into a place where our every connection is seen and known, and our every movement predictable and tightly constrained.
I mean, it's hardly a complicated thing. It's one of the most familiar rituals of the Christian faith, and it's pretty danged simple. This isn't a deep dive into the discursive techniques of Thomistic theology, or a treatise on the distinctives between Tillich and Berdyaev.
It's not particularly trendy, or buzzy, or pushing the leading edge. It's just the Lord's Prayer. We all know that already, right?
It's. Just. So. Basic.
I mean, of course it is.
But how are we at the basics? How important are the basics?
If you're entirely new to the faith, how much do you know about the point and purpose of prayer? What do you know about this core Christian practice, and the whys and wherefores of this thing Jesus asks his followers to do? There was a time when most Americans were culturally Christian, but honey, that time ain't now. Sure, it's basic. Basics, after all, are a good place to start.
If you've left the church, burned by politicization or the mean-girls cruelty that often drives folks from communities, were the basics what drove you away? Likely not. I bailed on church in young adulthood after a totally pointless ego-driven fight tore the church I'd grown up in apart. Watching Christians squabble and scheme over control of a church just made the whole thing seem like complete [bovine excrement]. When I finally returned, it was to the simplest practices of following Jesus, of service and prayer. When you start again, it's a fine idea to start at the beginning.
But what if you're deep in, so far past the first stages of being a "Baby Christian" that talking about the Lord's Prayer feels like going back to read Hop On Pop or Horton Hears a Who. You're sophisticated. You're experienced. You've got your doctorate in Presuppositional Apologetics, or host a podcast on Queering the Meta-liturgics of Contemplation.
You need this prayer.
Because when Jesus taught this prayer, he didn't describe it as a "starter prayer." This isn't a prayer for beginners, to be replaced by more sophisticated mystic incantations as we advance to higher and higher levels of spiritual power. This is. The Prayer. It doesn't matter if we've just discovered the grace of the Gospel, or if we're the Renowned Senior Pastor of a Gigachurch. It doesn't matter if we're tenure track or if we've got 97,000 followers on ChristTok.
This is the prayer we are meant to pray.
It is meant to shape us and form us and remind us of our purpose, no matter where we are in our journey.
And as we're in a time when Christians have kinda forgotten the purpose of prayer, when we pray for wealth and material success, when we pray for political power, when we pray for influence?
As the snow fell, the first notable storm in years, I found myself mumbling to myself that maybe I oughta have rented an SUV.
Unlike most Americans, I don't own a four-wheel-drive 'ute, because ninety-nine point nine seven five percent of the time, I don't feel the need for one. Our old-school sedan does pretty much all that we need, and our battered but trusty old van does the rest. Both are front drive, and if you can't figure out how to drive in the snow with a FWD vehicle, you shouldn't be out on the road in the first place.
As a Virginian, for three hundred and sixty four days and twenty three hours of any given year, I don't require an SUV, and I don't want to consume thirty percent more fuel for the dubious privilege of maintaining excess capacity I barely need.
But when the snow gets deep, there's only so far skill and confidence can get you. Anything more than eight inches of snow is borderline undriveable, and anything more than ten and you're just going to hang up.
Ground clearance matters, and so when it looks like we're getting more than twenty centimeters of the
white stuff, I'll rent me a Jeep or a big ol' pickup truck. It's functional, allowing me to get to my rural congregation, and to check in on elderly parents. And it's fun, because snow driving is a hoot. But this latest snow was only supposed to yield about five inches, so I held off.
In the hours before the snow fell, the forecast kept bumping up, until the average fell between six and twelve inches. I felt a bit of SnoFOMO, but as my brother was still visiting with my Mom, and my father-in-law was doing just fine, and I didn't need to get to church 'cause it was Monday, there wasn't really a *need.*
The day arrived, and the snow came down, eventually building to seven inches and change. A fair amount for the mid-Atlantic, but hardly a blizzard. That day, I spent my energies digging out. The plows came by, once, then again, and by late the next morning, the roads were completely passable.
Did I need four wheel drive? Nope. Not for an instant.
All I needed was time and patience.
And I thought: which is the greater mark of a person's wealth? Am I "wealthy" if I must always be on the move, fearful of being trapped in snows that come with less and less frequency, and have a vehicle that reflects that mostly-imaginary need? The marketers want me to think so.
Or am I "wealthy" if I have the time to let a storm pass, to simply let the sun's warmth and the passing of a day melt away the snow?
There, on the concrete slab of my carport, was a box. It had arrived in the dark of mid-evening, as packages so often do. I picked it up, a little uncertain as to what it might contain. Was it a belated Christmas gift? An early Christmas present? I was, for a moment, genuinely fuddled.
When I got inside, I peered at the box, but my reading glasses weren't on me, and the label was just the sort of blur that most things are when you're well into middle-age. "Hey honey," I yelled. "Were you expecting anything?" She wasn't, so I figured I may as well just open the thing up. I popped my knife out of my pocket, and did so.
Inside...books. My books, as it happened, fresh off the press from my publisher. Oops. Guess I wasn't going to make the now-obligatory Author Unboxing Video.
The Prayer of Unwanting is my first swing at a devotional, a tart, playful little read that recenters the Lord's Prayer as the heart of the Christian prayer life. The book pushes back against the dominant prayer ethos of American Prosperity religion, which pushes prayer as a means by which we get what we want. We pray for material attainment, we pray for success, we pray to get and to have and to manifest, for shine and for fame and for glory.
This paradoxically carnal spirituality has nothing at all to do with Jesus, and everything to do with consumer culture. What Jesus wants us to do is set all of that aside.
This is why the prayer he taught has not a danged thing to do with having anything more than what we absolutely need. It's not about getting what we want. It's about changing what we want, conforming us to God's grace rather than feeding our bottomless hunger for [stuff] and fame and power.
The challenge, now, is that I'm expected to market the book, to leverage my platforms to maximize the reach of the book. So...how do I do that?
Firstly, it ain't like I'm oblivious to the irony of marketing a book about not desiring material success. I'd like people to read the blessed thing, of course. But the moment I'm grasping about it, the moment my pride and my desire for recognition and lucre become the impetus for my efforts, I'm in a difficult place.
It's a tricky wicket.
And secondly, I'm fiercely aware that desiring the "platform" that is such a prerequisite for success for Christian authors these days is the enemy of my calling as a pastor. Celebrity pastors and Jesus-influencers are in a dangerous place spiritually, as the siren song of growing follower counts and maintaining influence can easily supplant the dual demands of humility and servanthood. To stay relevant, you need to get into every theological fight, you need to court controversy, you need to pitch out hot-take after hot-take...and wisdom and grace slip from your fingers.
As a committed servant of small congregations, I think this is doubly true. Small church ministry demands that you set aside the trappings of platform and get your hands in the dirt, honoring and supporting the spiritual gifts of your sisters and brothers. Again, you're not to desire a platform. You may have a pulpit, sure, but it's more for the convenience of your congregation's sightlines than a marker of your exalted status as the Most High Jesusy One.
As small church guru Karl Vaters put it in his fierce little volume De-Sizing the Church:
"..when we elevate leaders through their ability to become celebrities, giving them power over our feelings and decisions while having no genuine proximity in our lives, that celebrity culture always elevates, alienates, then devastates its prey. When you have power but no proximity, you have little to no accountability. And power without accountability always--absolutely always--leads to an us/them, have/have-not, rich/poor dynamic that ruins everything it touches." (p.83)
But celebrities and influencers actually sell books. In an era when the publishing industry struggles to survive, it's hard not to walk their path, because it does kinda sorta work.
So it's a balancing act, as one treads upon that high wire strung between idea and actualization, wobbling between a failure to use one's gifts and the failure to stay in the Spirit.
All the more reason to keep oneself centered in prayer, eh?
Posts
