Of Darkness and Clarity

Progressive Christians love complexity and uncertainty.

It's a significant part of the discourse, as integrated into the prog faithy schtick as Kramer's abrupt arrival through Jerry's front door or a Dangerfieldian tug at one's collar.  

The world is complex! The world is uncertain! Therefore, faith is complex and uncertain!  One must, if one is a progressive, embrace the Holy Dark, that place where we cannot see and where our path is unclear.

This, one is led to believe, is a marker of authenticity, a sign of progressive faith's connection to the Unknown and the Unknowable.  "Look at how bravely we acknowledge that we know nothing, and accept that our faith centers on simply sitting with our uncertainty!  Embrace the darkness!"

There is, of course, a truth to that.  We contingent, mortal beings cannot know the wholeness of the Divine intent.  The Numinous is infinitely beyond us, because, like, yo, that's what makes it Numinous, brah.

But true as that might be, there's a practical flip side to that truth.

If you're a church hawking uncertainty and complexity?  No-one, by which I mean pretty much functionally no-one, wants what you're selling. 

Why would they?  They have it already.  I mean, seriously.  It's the old "selling-refrigerators-to-the-Inuit" absurdity.  

Our blighted saeculum provides complexity and uncertainty by the heaping bucketload, every single day.   We are stuffed like foie gras geese with meaninglessness, directionlessness, and the irreconcilable cognitive dissonances of culture.  Truth and meaning are torn from our grasp by the shrieking winds of political disinformation and mammonist hucksterism, and human beings feel utterly lost in the yawning chaos of it all. 

We can feel it tearing at us, taking us apart, bit by bit.  Our sense of ourselves trembles, and the yearning is for something...anything...that can hold us together.

A theology that says, "Well, sure, yeah, we have no idea what we're doing, really, I mean, who even knows, lol, whatevs?"

Sure, you're "being authentic."  You're "authentically" offering cups of water to the drowning. 

That is not what the Gospel is, nor is that what souls seek when they realize how very lost they are.

Faith embraces the cloud and the Holy Dark.  Sure.  Fine.  But it is also and more vitally the pillar of fire by night.  It is the light that shines in the darkness, that the darkness cannot overcome.

The Tomb of the Emergent Christian

I'm a sentinel of sorts, now, standing vigil over one of the last markers of a movement that flickered and died.

After a brief conversation, Presbymergent shut down its Facebook presence many moons ago.  As the remnant of folks left as admins all wanted to keep the page up as an archive of sorts, I volunteered to serve that end.  For a page to exist, there has to be at least one admin, and so that's what I've become.

I am the last Presbymergent on Facebook.

Emergence was a thing, for a while, a decade ago.  It rose out of two simultaneous threads.

In the old-line denominations, emergence was a reaction to the stultifying institutional inertia that can makes denominational ministry such an awkward, lumbering, graceless thing.  Be open to the new!  Don't crush everything under the weight of bureaucratic anxiety management processes and protocols!

For those who'd been brought up in the corporate dynamics of the megachurch world, emergence was a reaction to the synthetic falseness of business-model Christianity.  Be flexible!  Be organic!  Be less like a JeezMart, and more like a gathering of creative friends!

The spur to emergence in both of these milieu was the advent of new and dynamic media, which seemed to offer the promise of communities dynamically being amazing on the interwebs together.  It had the potential to stir the oldlines to new life, and bring authenticity to the groupspeak of evangelicalese.

And it didn't work.

Just didn't take.  The reasons were varied and complex.  Emergent folk weren't really... um ... how to put
this... "organizational" people.  Efforts to fuse the ethos of generative entropy with articles of incorporation and denominational schtuff proved untenable.  I know.  I was on that committee.

That, and we manifested the counterintuitive tendency of anarchists to over-organize, creating such complex structures to insure that every voice is heard that no decision can ever possibly be made.

There were other things.

There was a whole bunch of deconstruction, but not much construction or permission-giving to simply create together.  As the winds tousled our hair, we talked about how to make a sail, and lamented the incompetence and abusiveness of other sail-makers, and dreamed about new ways to harness the wind.

But we did not, in all of that, get around to making a sail.

And so the energy dispersed, like winds uncaught.

What I find fascinating, honestly, is that people still come by on social media.  For a while, folks would post stuff...political links, self-serving links.  Those, I deleted, and shut down unmoderated posting permissions.

Such is the task of a sentinel.

But other people still come and leave their "likes," expressing approval, one or so every week.  I love those little moments.

It's like the roses and cognac, left by masked visitors on Poe's grave, to honor what was.  Or those leavings on the grave of F. Scott and Zelda, little trinkets, wine and beads, tokens of respect.

Oh, this was a lovely thing, those likes seem to be saying.  What it could have been...

So it goes, when you stand vigil at the grave of a movement.

Emergence, Faith, and the Many Worlds

Over the last month, I've gotten some response from what may potentially be a publisher for The Believer's Guide to the Multiverse.  I've been pitching it for much of the last six months, with the typical form-letter results, and was on the verge of going the self-publishing route.   But now, there's a possible nibble.  It's a fledgling e-book shop, one that focuses on editing and marketing rather than physically producing books that inhabit the cutting edge of faith.

Publication will be contingent on getting the manuscript refined and edited, so it isn't a fait accompli quite yet.  But with an editor now lined up, I'm back into thinking about quantum theory, the Many Worlds interpretation, and the ramifications of that great big bucket of fascinating cosmological crazy for Christian faith.  

My return to the manuscript has played interestingly off a slight stirring in the emergent movement, as folks have wrassled with the state of that conversation.  Emergence is still out there, talking and deconstructing and churning.

It's still a conversation, and one that engages.  Folk move around the edges of the conversation, dancing in and out of the discussion.  Like, say, Rachel Held Evans.   She's everywhere now, and her thoughtful voice resonates with that conversation.  But is she emergent?  I just don't know.   How would one know?   What I've continued to struggle with is the explicit connection of this movement to theology.

I've been able to find that, within my own corner of Christian faith.  Semper reformanda, or always reformed and reforming, as we Presbyterians say, and that works well with the openness to new forms that is a significant part of the emergent ethos.

But my sense of it is that you've got to go deeper than that if you're going to make a meaningful statement about faith to those who don't already inhabit your particular tradition.  You've got to be able to put the essence of your faith into a comprehensible worldview.

So for emergents, the challenge has always been: Why does the emergent take on faith better articulate God's self-expression into creation?  Sure, we can talk about the Spirit, but why is tolerance, openness, and creativity a more powerful articulation of what God is trying to work in us than absolutism?

Fundamentalism also has a story about existence, and a potent one, that casts all of being into a binary and linear narrative.  The literalist view of the cosmos is a heady mix of ancient story and an industrial/enlightenment-era mechanism.  Absurd?  Perhaps.  But what it does for those who hold to it is place their faith into the context of that worldview.  It establishes a clear cosmological foundation for why it is what it is.  That may be flagrantly wrong and a tiny bit insane, but it's there nonetheless.

Emergence, on the other hand...well, what does it have?  How does one say that openness to various paths to truth is reflected in the nature of creation?  I've heard little of that articulated in emergent conversations, and I've hungered for it.  It would take what has often primarily been a critique, and make it into something constructivist.

What's struck me as I've explored the theological implications of the Many Worlds/multiverse interpretation of quantum physics is that it gives deeper ontological ground to theologies of grace, freedom, tolerance, and mutual interconnection.

If this is the nature of the Creation into which our God has etched us, then the ethos of emergence makes a whole bunch more sense.   A faithful emergent soul says, "Be generative!  Be open!  Be creative! Be loving!"  And if underlying the structure of creation is the actualization of all possibility and not simply one linear time and space, then the emergent statement harmonizes with that logos.  

Emergence and Purpose

Amongst the folks I blog-feed, there are many who are wrassling now with the state of "emergence," that conversational/relational movement within Christianity that fluttered into being just about a decade ago.

Emergence has been described as many things, and presented in many ways.  It's resistance to the theological rigidity of literalist fundamentalism.  It's a struggle against the strangling formalism of the dying old-line denominations.  It's a wandering away from the bright shiny falseness of marketized Christianity.  It is those things.

But mostly, it has been talking.  Or rather, talking about talking.  Emergence is, in my experience, a fundamentally epistemological movement, to use a big honking incoherent philosophical term that just shows you how very smart I am.  Ahem.  Epistemology means, more or less, the study of knowing how we know.  It is seeking to know how we know.  It is talking about how we talk.  It's very postmodern.  It's very academic, in the pejorative sense of the term.

Epistemology is a sign, pointing to a sign, pointing to a sign.   It goes nowhere, an ouroboros serpent devouring its own tail.   Epistemology has defined philosophy for a hundred years, which is why philosophy as a discipline is now utterly irrelevant.  It is also a defining feature of emergence, which is an ill wind for those who hope it might become something more than it is.

To be a movement, emergence needs to find its ontology.  Meaning, it needs to be articulating something fundamental and transforming about the very nature of being.    Philosophy used to have the ovaries to make such statements.  That's what made it fun.  That's what gave it purpose.  That's what made it relevant.  Not "culturally" relevant.  Bigger than that.  Deeper than that.  Relevant to our existence as beings writ into the fabric of reality.  Relevant to what God hath wrought.

Making those statements...using theology as a way to point to the depth of the creation we inhabit...is one of the things that faith needs to do if it is to be meaningful.  Faith says: this is how the Creator has spoken and shaped the Universe.  This is the Real.  Because of this, I will orient myself towards reality in thus and such a way.  It doesn't dither about, unwilling to commit itself to any statements about anything.

Why is it important for the faithful to be tolerant and open minded?  Why is relationship and transforming conversation so meaningful?  Why should we place such a high value on creativity and dynamism and seeking the joyous New?

And...for Jesus folk... why is this way of understanding faith a more reliable expression of God's Word than the faith claims of fundamentalism?

Emergence needs to be able to claim that it knows something about what is true.  

I think it can, but for that, the conversation will have to change a wee bit.

More on that tomorrow.

The Emergent Conversation

In a post over at Pomomusings, Adam Walker Cleveland finds himself wondering about the state of the emergent/ emergence/ emerging thing.  That, in the event you've not been attending to it, was the brand spankling new churchy trend circa 2003 and 2004.  It was postmodern and relational, a simultaneous critique of the bureaucratic staleness of the oldline and the shiny consumer falseness of Big JesusPlex religion.

It seemed to have promise, back then.   Reflexive conservatism resisted it, as it does most things.  The liberal wing of the church gave it a big hug, as it does most things.  A community of like-minded souls formed.  Drums were played.  Incense was lit.  Polyvalent liturgies that explored the semiotics of meaning were earnestly explored in respectful dialogue, as participants liveblogged and tweeted earnestly, the bright apples glowing on the backs of their laptops.

And a community formed, woven together from shared interest and experience.   Their conversation continues, with a recent annual gathering.

Emergence, like Occupy, spoke into a deep and very widespread reaction to a troubling reality.  It rose in response to a gut-truth felt in the souls of many Jesus-folk, the truth that few of the current forms and the structures of the church were effectively articulating the reality of the Reign of God we're supposed to be manifesting.  It's why I got into it, why that little banner ad thing still sits for the time being on the right of this blog.

But like Occupy, what Emergence did not become was a movement.   It hasn't moved.  It has sustained, and maintained.  It remains, after ten years, essentially the same thing that it was when it began.

The "why" of this is a tick hard to nail down, but I think a substantial portion of that "why" lies in the intentional formlessness of emergence.

What is emergence?  No-one is quite sure, even after ten years of talking.  It seems to defy definition, at least in any meaningful way.

It has a hundred different definitions, all of which are equally valid.  The postmodern character of the conversation precludes the expression of a clear vision or direction, because articulating a clear vision would by necessity crowd out other possible visions.  The essential ethos of emergence is the open, non-judgmental sharing of theological perspective...and there's some real value in that.  There's also a significant focus on deconstruction and analysis.

But perhaps it is the conversational, deconstructive, and relational character  of emergence itself that prevents it from becoming a movement.

Movements arise when energies are directed towards a common purpose.  Movements rise up when human beings encounter something that offers to shape and give meaning to their existence.  And and wonderful and life-giving as those intentionally open-ended relational conversations are, what they do not seem to provide is the framework for channeling those conversational energies into a movement.

If you're intentionally eschewing norms and structures, a framework is unlikely to arise.

That may change, or shift.  But for now, it is what it is.  A continuing conversation.  So it goes.

Emergence, The Spirit, and the Trap of the Klatch

There's been much to do lately in my denomination about the intersection between the "emergent church" and the Presbyterian Church. To hear it from some, it's the great hope of the church. The synthesis between this postmodern and socially-networked movement and the mainline church will, finally, bring in the young people.

Meaning, people under the age of 40. Sigh. I'm not even young by Presbyterian standards anymore.

There are articles about it in Presby magazines, and on the Presby website. Folks are eager to embrace this new movement. Of course, given the rapidity with which Presbyterians do things, this new excitement more or less coincides with the death of the emergent movement.

Truth be told, we're not a particularly lively critter lately. There's some puttering around on the presbymergent Facebook page, and a few meetings of good hearted fellow travelers. But the contagious energy and passion that drives and grows a movement? I wish I saw it, but I don't.

Where I still struggle with emergence, in either it's generic or presby manifestations, is in two particular areas.

First, that I just can't seem to find anyone else who's willing to write or say: emergence is a manifestation of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. Yeah, I know, progressives and mainliners get all stammery and awkward when that topic comes up. We'd rather talk about interpretive frameworks and the dynamics of community and a relational church. Those things are nice and comfy and process-oriented. But somewhere, someone needs to be saying: "I've had a dream. I'm feeling a calling. I feel God moving in this." They don't need to be getting all glassy-eyed and Benny Hinn about it. We're just not that thing, thank the Maker.

But if this isn't about God working something new to transform and further our understanding of the Way Jesus lived and taught, then it's...well...not really worth paying attention to. It's just another incursion of cultural expectations into the life of the church. Yeah, it comes out of liberal academe. But if that's all it is, it's of no more spiritual value than the cultural phenomenon of the megachurch, and with considerably less influence. Maybe I haven't read enough. Maybe the forty presbymergentish bloggers whose feeds feed me just haven't gotten around to saying it or pointing me towards someone else who does. I'll keep listening.

Second, and related to the first, if the idea of relationality and the transforming power of Spirit-lead dialogue is to have any impact on the church, then it needs to be expressed in a very different way. Best I can tell, emergent conversations tend to be conversations among the like-minded. Little circles of young and youngish progressives gather to suck down Starbucks and light candles and read Rumi and do drum circles and talk amongst themselves about how crappy and abusive the rest of the church is. Sometimes, those same progs go and klatch with older progs in crumbling mostly-empty buildings. Candles are once again lit. It's all very cozy and safe. It's a fallout shelter for progressive Christians in a megachurch-nuked America.

But transformation only occurs when you graciously engage with the Other. That means making a point of getting out of our comfortable klatches and pushing outward into ones that aren't quite as easy. Can we share the value of Spirit-driven relationality with that fundamentalist blogger? Or that atheist with a chip on his shoulder? Do we reach out to that young Korean who's burned out on the relentless demands of the church she grew up in? Or that soldier who has returned from war with a shattered faith? Or that mom who goes to a Big Parking Lot church because it's kids program is a well-oiled machine that fits well with little Tyler's soccer schedule? Or the blue-haired matriarch of that little country church with 22 members?

Entering into dialog with folks who are Not Us in this era of social media is not logistically hard. Just spiritually challenging. Those conversations require us to speak our truths and have them tested. They require us to listen to others, and to speak the grace that we know in ways that might speak to them. Our faith does not ask us to limit our conversations to those who are us. Or to only value and show grace to those who are like us.

In fact, we're required to do exactly the opposite.

Trolls and the Holy Ghost Dialectic

One of the things the emergent church gets pinged on a great deal is our relentless focus on conversation. We chat. We gather. We discuss. We convene. The idea behind those conversations is to get to know the other, to open ourselves to who they are. In those exchanges, we find understanding of the other. More importantly, it is in conversations with those who are not exactly "us" that we can find the deepest and most potent movements of the Holy Spirit.

The problem for emergents, as I see it, is that we don't really quite grasp how significant the thing we're doing is. While this approach is a foundational and roots-rock approach to both proclaiming and living into the Reign of God, we keep it in house. We like to talk grace amongst ourselves, but often don't realize that the same grace needs to be intentionally applied to our more challenging relationships. It needs to be expressed outside of comfortable places, in relationships that go beyond cups of coffee or tasty microbrewed beer shared among like-minded people.

We need to be graceful to our trolls.

Trolls, as anyone in the blogosphere knows, are those true-believing souls who take it upon themselves to attack and subvert those who fail to meet the pureblood standards of their particular belief. I've had several over the years. I've had hard-core neoatheist trolls, who have mocked my faith and my stupid fake Easter bunny God. I've had hard-core fundamentalist trolls, who have hurled snippets of scripture and bitter invective in equal parts. I am currently in between trolls, although there are some recent promising prospects. Hi Mark!

It's easy...and, in it's own way, fun...to hammer on these folks when they show up. What is not quite so easy is to realize that when Jesus told us to love our enemies, he was talking about trolls. It's a tough thing to do. Our immediate and human desire is to go to war, to open up the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

This is what the trolls want, although it isn't what they need. They look to the troll-lords on shout radio and shout-tv for inspiration. Trolls want to rant and bellow. Trolls want to find self-affirmation in a seething and closed-circle hatred of those who are different. As such, they are part and parcel of the cult of baseless self-esteem that has come to define our increasingly blighted society. But what they need is the same thing that we all need: the transforming grace of Christ and the Holy Spirit.

So...get to know your troll. Hold on to what is good, and defend what is right, but still be sure to show 'em a little lovingkindness. When they spit on that grace, offer up some more, and then some more after that. The font of our grace is, after all, infinite and without measure.

Evil is, after all, not overcome with more evil.

Up

Pixar just amazes me. Almost every time I go to one of their films, I have this expectation: This will be, finally, the mediocre one. They can't all be good. Everyone messes up now and again. The creative process just isn't that consistent. Every once in a while, you make something that is very slightly craptacular. You can't help it.

This afternoon, I went with Rache and the boys to go see "Up." Thanks to Beltway traffic, we arrived immediately before it began, which in a sold out theater meant we had to sit in the very front row. I haven't intentionally done that since I was a late-tween, when I plunked my scrawny behind down in the front row for Return of the Jedi. I spent the whole movie looking up at the vast screen before me, which seemed appropriate, if a little taxing on my aging vertebrae.

It ended up not making a difference. The film did not disappoint. What is simply stunning about Pixar is not their technical proficiency, although that is certainly there. It's that the whole 3D CG thing doesn't get in the way of some strikingly effective storytelling. It's real pathos, genuine and potent. It's deep and profoundly human, yet totally accessible. A great film, and one that plays interestingly off of a thread that's been on my mind a whole bunch recently.

That thread is the division of the generations, a deep and systemic rift in our culture that flies in the face of the Christian message. The breaching of that divide was, in part, the whole point of UP. But where Pixar pitches out a story...shoot, a parable...that establishes commonality between young and old, we Jesus people seem totally unable to figger that one out.

In particular, I struggle with how the generational divide has popped it's mutant gopher head out of the emergent church gopherhole. The emergent church, or so the idea goes, is a "young" and "trendy" church that appeals to "young adults" who are looking for a "postmodern" and "relevant" church experience that "speaks to them" and "provides free wifi."

All of these things are fine, up to a point. Where they cease to be fine is when a movement that exists to serve the Gospel starts focusing more on the dynamics and processes of a single demographic than it focuses on the universal values that make Christianity worth bothering with in the first place.

Conversation and relational ethics are at the heart of the emergent movement, and it is in that powerful, creative dynamic that emergence has its strength. If those conversations and relationships are limited to conversations within the movement, as young and youngish folks with hipster glasses natter on to each other about stuff they all can relate to, then the movement will fail. It'll be just another reason for folks to go to conferences where they can find other people like themselves, and when we seek those who are "us" and not "other," we're delimiting our possibilities for growth.

But if the tranforming relationships the emergent movement declares as central to our faith are forged across generations, across cultures, and across theological lines, then...well...then maybe the Spirit is at work.