One of the most complex things in our world is figuring out who you are. I used to think that the answer to this was a single answer - that you discovered who you were and that one thing was it. It was a huge relief to learn sometime in my 30s that we are all made up of many people, that we all wear many hats, have many personas. Wikipedia defines a personna as:
in the word's everyday usage, a social role or a character played by an actor. The word derives from the Latin for "mask" or "character", derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning.
it does not usually refer to a
literal mask but to the "social masks" all humans supposedly wear.
One of my personas is as a gadfly. The term originated in the 16th century - it has a number of meaning nowadays. The official source - Mirriam-Webster - defines it as:
1: any of various flies (as a horsefly, botfly, or warble fly) that bite or annoy livestock 2: a person who stimulates or annoys especially by persistent criticism
The establishment of a duty to seek to do good (as well as to avoid doing harm) is the deafening “music” that Socrates
hears as he listens avidly to the rhetorical arguments of the Laws,
long after the assertion of the no-harm doctrine has made his choice
clear. Socrates’
capacity to do good for his fellows is implied by the extended gadfly
metaphor. He imagines that his critical sting really can awaken at
least some Athenians and he refuses to regard anyone as ineducable. His
conviction that he had a duty and a capacity to improve others was (or
at least Plato supposed it was) why the real, historical Socrates chose to defend himself before the mass audience of Athenian jurors in
399
.
Trust me, I am no Socrates - I am a gadfly none the less. And I think Jessica Hagy of indexed has been listening into my joys & struggles when she posts this today:
My friend Nathan George is a person with wisdom in the confluence of churchianity & consumerism. Far too often, I think these are only enemies. Nathan has the kind of soul that can see through that frame, past that to a place where choices faith communities make can be an engine for redemption and trasformation.
Nathan leads one of the most distributed programs I know - TradeAsOne - that swims in the the confluence of churchianity & consumerism by selling products that come with meaning and stories behind them. They describe their place in the world:
There are two worlds.
One where people are poor. The other where people have money to buy things.
Color us innocent, but we think there should be one world.
So we set up this site so people in America can buy things from people in the developing world.
We get beautiful and useful things. They earn a living.
That sounds like a fair trade to us.
Shelton Green is a local organizer who has worked like a house a' fire to make this vision a reality among several Austin area faith communities. He has a wonderful job in coordinating coming to Austin to discuss serious social justice issues and to put on
fair trade markets in partnership with local churches where everyone is
welcome to come and put consumer dollars to work for a noble cause,
helping the poorest among us. A special Saturday Workshop and
Interactive Discussion will take place at our faith community Journey on Saturday the 5th. Nathan will also be at Mosaic Austin and Riverbend while he is here.
If you are in the Central Texas area, I really encourage you to consider joining this high impact chance to make a difference :
I used a spreadsheet to estimate - I have listened to over 2,500 sermon from more than 500 different preachers. That may make me many things - numb, excited, connected, humored - but it does make me a Jesus follower, or a Christian or even a believer.
Stories are what form me, they are the soil I grow in, they are the compost that feeds me. On my email signature (the bumper sticker of our time), I use this quote:
The universe is made of stories, not atoms. - Muriel Rukeyser
I really believe that - that the ocean we live in is filled with stories, not facts or atoms.
A hero of mine - Ira Glass of This American Life- talks about it in this interview (below). He says that to
succeed as a storyteller, or in any creative endeavor, you’ve got to
enjoy killing (the part about killing starts around 1:30 in). You've got to tell those stories of death, of transformation - rather than domesticated facts, agreed upon doctrines.
Chris Jones comments on this, in the context of software development - I think it has huge implications for folks of faith:
This idea that entropy
is the enemy when you’re building something really makes sense: The
universe is fighting against you. It’s trying to make whatever you’re
creating chaotic and disordered. Everything will decline and degenerate
unless you stop it from happening.
Jones is so spot on here - and I have watched so many battles fought in faith communities that try to hide the entropy, try to deny the chaotic, try to re-organize the disordered.
The irony here is that the story we follow is that death is not a defeat, but a triumph. The Jesus story that I live in is that the Liberating King was killed by a competing empire, executed in a way to communicate humiliation and subjugation. Death is not an end state, it is an avenue of hope. Decay is not something to cover up with make-up, it is a mark of wisdom & experience that defines our creation in the image of God.
I'll probably hear a sermon this week..and the next ...and the next. It is just part of churchianity. We give people - usually guys in America - big talking sticks, then we get disappointed when we find they are humans with doubts, decays & foibles just like us. I'll take the sermons - it's just part of the game, the price of admission, even occasionally the game itself - but I'll swim with stories.
Muriel Rukeyser is right - The universe is made of stories, not atoms. We people in faith communities seem to not like that, we seem to water to turn wine into water, stories into atoms. That's shame - the water will flow, the stories will come.
And they will set us free. The tomb is empty, the pulpit abandoned - stories resurrect, facts kill.
“If the news is important, it will find me”
— Brian Stelter has a great piece in the New York Times that I urge
anyone interested in the media business to go and read right now — I'll
wait — and that includes reporters, editors and (most of all) managers,
and probably IT departments and designers as well.
In my last post in this story setBook Autopsy I reflected on my holy story of death & new life, on the power I have invested in the books that I hold so dearly. Books are dying - as a unifying form to communicate ideas, as a handy way to embody a deeper meaning, as pieces of paper with ink sprayed on them to trigger the almost primal capacities of our imagination. I may have my own feeling about this, but a new way to "to see for oneself" (the meaning of the word autopsy) is coming into being. History is not silent, very little of our lives are at a standstill.
For a variety of reasons, I have planted a lot of my adult life in places and organizations that revere the book, in situations & institutions that can sometimes be said to even worship the book. I am committed to heroes & villains, to beginnings, middles & ends, to sequential paginated truth, to things being bound and distributed. I literally am bound to the form of a book, just as surely as my genetic makeup binds me to certain experiences, privledges and weaknesses.
I often think these institutions, these "people of the book", they do not realize that the books that bound their sense of power & authority are dying.
That is not fair. They know very well they are dying. We all know that, right ?
And like most human beings, these institutions react to this decay & death by YELLING, by publishing jazzier books, with snazzier titles, filled with provocative formats and strident ideas. They crank up the volume, try to copy the new forms, try to even impersonate the new forms. Or far too often, they try to contain, to neutralize the new forms - not just out of spite, but also out of fear. They are like dinosaurs, who flail and scream as they enter the final throes of their demise.
I can not explain why these groups of fellow human beings react this way. I can not even explain why I act this way. But I do act - I think that scarcity is the rule and that I must look out for me if I am to continue to exist. I play out these fears and kill/be killed rules most acutely when it comes to ideas.
Mary Chapin-Carpenter has a wonderful song that includes these lyrics:
They fall from the sky, they run round your head,
They litter your sleep as they beckon,
They'd teach you to fly without wires or thread,
They promise, if only you'd let them.
For the language of longing never had words,
So how did you speak from your heart?
Yet here is a box that swears it has heard that,
Ideas are like stars.
From my experience, I have seen too many battles and too much pain from people trying to get other people to not look up at these stars. Ideas are like stars - the dictionary definition of stars is:
a mass of gas held together by its own gravity in which the energy
generated by nuclear reactions in the interior is balanced by the
outflow of energy to the surface, and the inward-directed gravitational
forces are balanced by the outward-directed gas and radiation pressures.
I have been scarred by these gravitational pulls and these nuclear reactions. There are few star wars quite as violent as battles of books. I was profoundly injured when I wondered too far from the canon, questioning authorship and the story arc. I have cooked the books, pilfered from books, even thrown the book at my share of strangers and loved one.
Nothing quite prepared me for having the book thrown at me. It slayed my spirit, it laid me flat on my back, it shattered into shards that found their way in every nook and cranny of my world.
And that moment of death taught me so much, stuff I'll spend the rest of my unpacking.
Like a friend said recently, if you asked me to tell what I know from this, I'd have to ask you how long do you have ?
Then I would try to serve my story as best I can. No happy ending, no hidden message, no villians or heroes, no third acts or killer chapter.
Just a messy, breathing, morphing story - raw, uneven, a bit amatuerish. More likely a whole lot amatuerish.
And that's one of my a-has. Somehow, the death of books is a function of excellence, of airbrushing all the twists out, buffing up pain into bromides, spitting out simple 7-step models and graphics that explain it all.
Who is killing books ? That's simple: people are. People who read and those do not. People who write or copy of even pre-chew. We've turned stories into reality TV, non-fiction "memoirs", celebrity worship. We've tamed mystery, complexity, story - domesticated it so we can keep in nice, safe homes on our shelves.
We've bound stories - and thanks be to God, stories are escaping and taking on new life. Visit any of the legacy organizations of our times - businesses, the education machine, the academic guild, churchianity - and you will excellent books dying. Not quiet, singular - think Ebola or the Plague.
If Mary Chapin-Carpenter is right that ideas are like stars, then stories are like oceans, at least for me. Larger than we can imagine, calm & fierce, able to destruct and nourish. They are the very means of movement, the space that we are suspended in.
Sit with someone 6 years old or someone 86 years old and let the waves of their stories wash over you.
Books have died for me and millions around the globe because we stopped conserving this ocean. We over-fished where those stories brought fame or fortune. We dumped the toxic muck we could not deal with in these oceans. We stopped taking any responsibility for conserving these oceans, these stories.
My story of dying book is communicated here on the anti-book: the blog. The essence of destroying these oceans is captured in the story told below, via Linda Hunt's phenomenal voice and award-winning filmmakers (Sea Studios Foundation) and animation
studio (LAIKA/house). The Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School produced this 10-minute film, reconnecting us to the importance of the marine environment for all life on
Earth, including human life. This fictional narrative blends moral & visual elements of a fairy
tale to inspire us to recognize the importance of ocean conservation.
For me, it tells that story about the ocean of stories as well.
Alleluia, the book is dead the Story is Risen indeed, Alleluia !
Will Scott is an associate pastor at one of the West Coast's giants of faith communities -- Grace Cathedral
in San Francisco, Calif. When we lived in the Bay Area, I got to spend a little bit of time with Will - you could really sense just how drawn he is to intentional
community, the pursuit of global justice, and the witness for
peace by the parade of Jesus followers. Will blogs occasionally at Yearns and Groans.
He posted his sermon from this past Easter evening, placing the power of the resurrection in the stories of people like Dr. King, Dorothy Stang and Steve Biko. Preaching a sermon like this is brave, almost reckless, even in a city like San Francisco. You really ought to read the whole sermon, but this portion really grabbed me:
Archbishop Nungane spoke of him as his hero when our group heard from him at the TEAM Conference in Boksburg, Biko is remembered to have said,
"It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die."
The
Resurrection of Jesus is an idea that lives --- and Jesus' life, death
and resurrection continues to inspire and empower movements of
liberation, justice and peace in our own time. May we be willing to
give our all for the sake of God's truth, God's nonviolent victory of
life over death --- peace over war --- mercy and forgiveness over
vengeance, solidarity over oppression.
We are at the cusp of
some major changes, changes that we either make for ourselves simply to
survive or changes that we make together --- to make peaceful and just
the future of this planet.
We desperately need salvation ---
and a savior --- this Savior comes to us in the form of strangers on
the side of the road, on the margins --- strangers who speak to us of
the reality of God's challenging call for change --- for repentance ---
for new life.
Resurrection is about transformation --- and we
human beings would rather pretend that change is impossible --- than to
own up to our responsibility for being an alternative.
We have work to do --- each of us --- to make ready the world for God's full reign.
The
resurrection -- is not comforting to those who would like things to
stay the way they are --- the resurrection is for those who cry out for
change --- who believe that another world is possible --- who are
willing to be opened up --- to being connected to the movement of
Jesus.
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