A Fierce and Joyous Voluntarism

Last year, my butternut squash really struggled.

Voracious chipmunks devoured the seedlings, necessitating multiple replantings.  Deer savaged the spreading vines.  It was a horticultural debacle.  I got a quarter of my usual yield.

This year, things are different.  I moved our bird feeder out of the front lawn, reducing the attraction for rodents.  I've been more diligent about applying deer spray.  

Out front, it's a riot of sprawling fan leaves and questing vines.  The most vigorous of my butternuts this season is, as it happens, not one that I planted at all.  It's a volunteer, one that came up early in a four by four raised bed where I'd intended to grow okra.  I didn't, at first, even know it was a butternut.  I could tell it was a squash of some sort, but that thumb-high sprout could have been zucchini, or perhaps a cuke.  Cucurbits...that's the common name for that family of plant...all kinda sorta look the same early in their development, at least to my amateur eye.

I thought about rooting it up, as I often will with volunteers.  I Had A Plan, after all, one that involved okra and not butternut.  But I had okra growing elsewhere.  Given the failure of my squash crop last year, I was inclined to give it a chance.  That, and if it turned out to be a butternut, it would have room to run, and butternut does the best when you let it sprawl out wild and free.

It was a butternut, and Lord, has it run.

It quickly leapt out of the bounds of the raised bed, as every single day the tendrils extended their reach.

  Its goal, best I could tell, was the sun, as it pressed due East towards the dawn.  The plant is now about thirteen feet long, the striving vines and sprawling leaves inscribing the shape of a beleafed comet onto the green of my yard.  Along those abundant vines, the glorious yellow blossoms have drawn a host of bumblebees, who will often fall asleep deep inside of the flowers, cozily cupped and pollen-drunk.  

From the female blossoms, with the help of the bees, a half-dozen squash have begun to form and fatten.  More than my entire harvest last year.

From just one plant, that showed up unexpected and was given the freedom to use its gifts.  This feels, as so much gardening does, flagrantly metaphorical.

There's a tendency amongst Professional Jesus People to assume that our task is to set agendas and establish plans and be all Leadershippy and stuff.  We are the prophets and the vision-casters!  We dream the dreams!  We know the knowledge!  Without the byzantine complexities known only to us professionals, poor hapless amateur Christians would wander around like little lost lambs in the great deep darkness.  

This is a spiritually dangerous assumption.  It's why we pastors overfunction.  It's why we're so prone to getting anxious, exhausted, and overwhelmed, as we take the entire weight of our local universe onto our shoulders.  It's why we can become megalomaniacs in microcosm, and get prone to doing things we oughtn't.  

Our pastoral task, instead, is mostly to encourage, inspire, and occasionally give some gentle redirection.  The vital and creative energies that keep our communities healthy extend far beyond our egos.  They rest within the souls who choose to give their time freely and joyously to music and mission, to service and care, to teaching and reaching out.

The best measure of a healthy church, as some of my choir folk so perfectly put it while chatting before the service this last Sunday, is that people want to be there together, pursuing a commonly held joy.

The heart of a vital and free society, as Alex of Tocqueville famously put it, is "..the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires."

Without our fierce and joyous voluntarism, nothing good can stand.

Of Vocabularies and the Hallowed

I've got another book coming out early next year.  To my great surprise, it's not either of the books I'd been working on recently.  THE YEARS DRAW NEAR, my half-finished manuscript on faith and aging in America?  Nope.  IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY, my two-thirds completed Cyberutopian Regency Action/Romance?  Uh uh.  

It's a book I first wrote back in 2015 and self-published for the devotional use of my little congregation.  THE PRAYER OF UNWANTING, as it's now called, recenters the Lord's Prayer as part of a personal prayer life.  As the prayer that Jesus explicitly taught, it pushes back against our tendency to approach the Creator with requests for power and prosperity.  It gets us out of our individual and collective solipsisms, which is kinda sorta a prerequisite for being a disciple of Jesus.

As nearly ten years had passed since I wrote the first draft, I had some significant reworking to do, which is why it's helpful to have a competent and thoughtful editor.  Dated references were removed or changed.  Flagrant errors of reasoning or continuity were corrected.

One of those reworkings was a little unexpected.  Ever since I was an undergrad majoring in religious studies at  the University of Virginia o-so-many-moons ago, my go-to Bible translation has been the New Revised Standard Version.  It was my jam during my M.Div. and D.Min. studies.  It's the translation in my pulpit, and in the pew-racks of my little church.  I've commended the HarperCollins NRSV Study Bible to numerous folks.

The NRSV was reworked in Twenty Twenty Two, and became the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.

Some of those changes were trivial, and many are entirely comprehensible.  But some of the updating seemed less a matter of improvements in linguistic scholarship and new textual resources, and more a matter of taste and nodding to contemporary culture.

Of more significance to my book on the Lord's Prayer: among the changes in the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition was a rewording of the teaching of that prayer in the sermon on the Mount.   I had an entire chapter dedicated to reflecting on the underlying meaning of "hallowed be thy name," with a focus on the word "hallowed."  I'd used the NRSV for all scriptural quotations throughout the book, which presented something of a problem.

In both Matthew 6 and Luke 11, it no longer used the word "hallowed," replacing it with the more awkward phrasing "Let your name be revered as holy."   Clumsy though it might be, "be revered as holy" is a conceptually accurate effort to transpose the Greek Ἁγιασθήτω into English. It means the same thing, even if multiple words are used where once there was but one, so it's not a question of mucking with the meaning.  

Rather, I shall surmise, it's because the word "hallowed" is slightly archaic, something we don't say often in day-to-day conversation.  That's a point I reflect upon at length in the chapter, and a fair observation.  

But then again, it's part of the prayer as it's PRAYED IN THE LITURGIES OF ALMOST EVERY ENGLISH SPEAKING CHURCH IN THE WORLD...sorry, all caps got stuck there for a moment.  And there's just no way anyone could figure out the meaning of an uncommon English word they're unfamiliar with, after all.   Oy gevalt.

As it was, it blew a giant hole in that entire chapter.  I had a choice, then.  I could reconceptualize and rewrite it because the translation that I'd used had been changed to no evident purpose.  

Or I could simply change the translation I used.  

With some regret, I chose the latter.  For consistency, I then systematically updated all of the scripture references in my manuscript to the New International Version, which is a perfectly valid and scholarly translation.

Not a big deal, in this cut-and-paste era.  No harm, no foul, and I still use the NRSVue on regular occasion.

But it did get me to thinking:  If in our faith we called to live out a discrete culture that does not conform to the expectations of broken and fractious humanity...must our choice of language be axiomatically governed by that which ain't the Beloved Community? 

And why would we expect contemporary discourse to have words for that which is holy?

We have those words.  And learning unfamiliar words isn't a chore.  It's good for mind and soul.

#Nolivesmatter

The hashtag is out there, circulating among my #hashtag-hip progressive friends, as our culture struggles with the lingering poison of centuries of class/race conflation.

#blacklivesmatter, it goes.

Of course they do, I want to say.  But, dammit, my mind insists on deconstructing it, slicing that hashtag up, analyzing it.

The one that stabs at me: "matter."  What makes a life matter?

What gives it importance?  What gives it meaning?  What gives a life...as the word "matter" implies...substance?

And as much as I want to say, yes, of course, all lives matter...the reality is that this is not true in our society.  I cannot affirm that as a real thing.

All lives have the potential to matter, of course.  Every self-aware being is capable of creating and engaging with meaning.  And as a Jesus-follower, I hold that meaning exists, deeper than our subjectivity and our cultural values.

As a person of faith, I understand my purpose.  I know what gives my life substance and worth.

But within the value set established by a society, we can also not matter at all.

In a culture that lacks any purpose but profit, what does "mattering" mean for any of us?

It certainly can't have been easy for Eric Garner to think that his life mattered.  What, from the value set of our culture, would have given him a sense of worth as a person?  He'd had a job, but work is hard to come by.  He's been arrested, multiple times, for the picayune, meaningless, should-offend any-card-carrying-libertarian crime of selling individual "untaxed" cigarettes.

Meaning, he purchased a pack of cigarettes, on which had been levied an intentionally punitive and hefty tax, which Garner would have paid.    Then, he broke it out and sold the individual cigarettes for fifty cents.  Making a little money on the side, off of a legal product, legally purchased, his own property, all taxes paid.  A "loosie," as they call it.  Fifty cents.  A quarter here, a quarter there, nothing more than pocket change.

Is this a respected vocation?  Hardly.  Was he a "producer?"  No.  Was he thriving and prospering?  No.  Was he a celebrity, or wealthy, or influential?  No.

Was his life, in any way, valued by our culture?  No.  He was unimportant.  Unimportant enough that he could inform the people who were killing him that they were killing him.  He could ask them to stop killing him, politely and repeatedly, with no cursing or profanity.   He could say "please."  He may as well have not been talking at all, an inanimate object.  Eric Garner was nothing more than a broken window, useless, to be swept up and carted away.

His life did not matter.  A life, worth less than fifty cents, less than a pack of gum, less than a twenty ounce store-brand soda.

Nor, quite frankly, do most of us really feel like our lives matter in this society.  Ours is a culture that tramples the weak and the poor, despises them, demonizes them.  If we get sick, thems the breaks.  If we lose our jobs, we are lazy.  If the stress breaks our minds, then we are dangerous.  We matter only in so far as we have the ability to consume.  Once we do not, we are...unprofitable.  Meaningless.  Worthless.  It is that anxiety, the fear, that drives us.

My leftist friends, lost in the pointlessly divisive semiotics of academe, do not quite realize how much purchase such a death has.  How much it points to how our culture commodifies all of us.  How much it illuminates how we all scrabble against the cold soulless face of mammon, anxious in our poverty, anxious in our wealth, anxious because we know we are disposable.

#blacklivesmatter?  No.  Not against the central governing value set of our society, in which color is still a visually convenient proxy for class.  #poorlivesmatter?  No, of course they don't.

To the Creator of the Universe, sure.  To families and friends, yes.  But to this culture?  No.

None of our lives matter.

Atheist Storytelling and the Sublime

Over the winter break, I read.  First, my first full novel on my new Kindle.  Then, the excellent new book by the former pastor of my church, followed by a second novel on Kindle.   Although only one of the books approached spirituality intentionally, I got some spiritual food out of all of my reading.

It's an observer effect, perhaps, representative of the universe I inhabit.   The waveform of almost any narrative I encounter collapses into some rumination on faith and meaning.   Both of the other novels I read were hard sci-fi, a favorite genre, in which the imaginings of the author are shaped by projections of future realities that are grounded in actual science.  The second of the books was an interesting rumination on the meaning of human identity in a world where the capacity to store a full neural map and transfer it to another body.  What does self mean if divorced from a single body?  Altered Carbon...a fusion of hard sci fi and pulp-noire...was well written and crafted, but ended up being a bit too sexual and ultra-violent for my tastes.

But the first was The Hydrogen Sonata, the latest novel by one of my longstanding favorite sci fi authors: Ian M. Banks.  My physicist father-in-law introduced me to him years ago, and it's been a good acquaintance.  His hard-sci-fi is delightful hoo-hah space opera goodness, all rooted in a pan-galactic society called the Culture.  He tells ripping good yarns that include both finely wrought characters and impossibly vast scopes, set firmly into the kind of plausible universe that doesn't make physicists cringe.   In that storytelling, Banks is a consistent critic of religion, as faith within the boundaries of the Culture is consistently represented as the realm of the manipulative, the weak-witted and the primitive.

But hey...a good story is a good story.  I can cut him some slack.

And yet, with all of his critiques, there's a peculiar religiosity within his books.  That goes beyond the machina ex machina endings that he's very fond of, as some astoundingly advanced species/entity suddenly brandishes a heretofore unanticipated Clarke's Third Law technology to plot-resolving effect.

Banks also integrates the concept of transcendence into his novels, as societies and individuals of particularly advanced tech or knowledge abandon our time and space for a realm of being called "The Sublime," in which the limitations of four-dimensional reality are removed.  "Subliming" was a concept explored at great length in this latest novel...and as that concept was explored, it felt more like reading the meditations of a mystic or a lama.  It was all mystery and paradox, described in terms that were more the stuff of faith.

Perhaps, just as any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from religion.

Religious Freedom, Afghanistan, and The Point of It All

This last week, a little news item flitted across the religion news pages, to be quickly forgotten. It had to do with two Christian relief agencies, both of which provide material support to the Afghan people. The Afghan government shut down the operations of both, alleging that they were involved in proselytizing, which is explicitly forbidden under Afghan law.

Neither Church World Service or Norwegian Church Aid could be described as evangelical. They're not out there trying to convert. They're trying to fulfill the Christian mandate to provide care for those in need. Both are progressive, ecumenical, and sensitive to the needs, culture, and religious sensibilities of local communities. Take a look at the Church World Service web site. Winning souls for Jesus ain't their schtick.

But after a local television station began making allegations based apparently on nothing more than innuendo and the word "Church" in their name, angry mobs took to the streets. Now both groups have been forced by the Afghan government to suspend operations, as it investigates whether these groups have violated provisions in the Constitution of Afghanistan that forbid conversion from Islam. I have two reactions to this.

First, the allegations are clearly false, but that doesn't seem to matter much in Afghanistan. Truth is hard to find, but it ain't like most folks bother tryin'. Rumors that feed existing hatreds are just so much easier. The cultural sensitivities within that community are as twitchy as a recently-set antipersonnel mine. Outrage comes as easily as flipping a rather well-worn switch. Reminds me of the Tea Party, for some reason.

Second, we recently entered into new territory in Afghanistan. It is now the single longest military commitment in American history. We've been there longer than we were in 'Nam. Thousands upon thousands of American servicemen and women have put their lives on the line in Afghanistan, and many have made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their country. Without the support of the United States, the government in Afghanistan would not exist.

Yet the government that America has put into place there imposes restrictions on human freedom that are totally antithetical to our values as a nation. Yeah, I know, nobody likes proselytizing. But a nation-state that bans it is not worth the blood and sweat of our troops, nor is it worth all the money we've borrowed from China. I'm not saying that as some way of channeling Ann Coulter, asserting that if we just forced 'em all to follow Jesus, things would be copacetic. Not at all. I just can't see the point of creating a nation...and it is our creation...in which a citizen cannot choose not to follow the religion of the majority.

An Afghan should be free to be Muslim. But also Christian. Or Buddhist. Or Hindu. Or Jewish. They should be free to be an Atheist, if they so choose. Not only that, Afghan Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and Jews and Atheists should be free to talk about what they believe, and free to attempt to persuade others of the merits of their belief. Those are the blessings of liberty which were ordained and established in the American Constitution. Those are the values that make America a good thing, even with all her blemishes.

Yeah, I know, imposing this set of values on the Afghan people would have been an affront to their culture. What we don't seem to have realized as we've poured blood and treasure into that region is that the problem in Afghanistan wasn't governmental. What made Afghanistan the seedbed for attacks against our soil wasn't a regime. It was a set of values broadly held by the society.

We've mistakenly assumed that the processes of democracy are the same as the values of our republic. And though we've done some good there, I do find myself wondering, more deeply than I have before, about the point of it all.