The Corner

Carpe Fiasco

Every once in a while, I get inbound emails from people who read this blog.  There tends to be no rhyme or reason to the emails - with one exception.

When ever I post about failure or mistakes, a wonderful group of people chime in to tell me that there are no failures, no mistakes - only opportunities for growth, teachable moments.

The concern is appreciated - but I do not buy it.  There are mistakes, there are failures - even fiascos.  This I know - there are complete and ignominious disasters, catastrophes, debacles, flops, even bombs.

If you do not believe me, then spend an hour listening to Ira Glass's TAL episode of Fiasco! - the first 23 minutes, when Jack Hitt tells the story of a small town production of Peter Pan, in which the flying apparatus smacks the actors into the furniture, and Captain Hook's hook flies off his arm and hits an old woman in the stomach, is true genius.

Truth be told, one of the things that attracts me to feral followers, to the D.I.Y tribes and The Rise Of The Prosumer is the likely outcome of a fiasco at some point in the story.

It may seem counter-intuitive:  Carpe Fiasco !

Another Pentecost Wish: Bring Out Our Dead

When my dad died, we decided to have a memorial service for him, rather than a formal graveside ceremony.  We gathered, family & friends, in the chapel of the church my dad was raised in, a faith community that his father helped found.  Doug Richnow stood at an altar and spoke this prayer in my Dad's memory:

Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to you our brother Alva, who was reborn by water and the Spirit in Holy Baptism.  Grant that his death may recall to us your victory over death, and be an occasion for us to renew our trust in your Father's love.  Give us, we pray, the faith to follow where you have led the way; and where you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, to the ages of ages.  Amen.

My dad dying shook me, to my very core.  The boundless sense of power & immortality that blew my sails in my 20s and 30s went silent, replaced by an understanding of how fragile & temporal this life is.  My soul truly got the meaning of this prayer of commendation that is part of the funeral service:

Give rest , O Christ, to your servant with your saints,
where sorrow and pain are no more,
neither sighing, but life everlasting.

The faith tradition I grew up in - a mongrel version of Anglicanism that is 1 scoop Catholic & 1 scoop late 20th century Evangelical - does a lot things well, but nothing better than funerals.  My dad was baptized in this tradition, wondered thru many other traditions all his adult life, but ended up being buried w/in this tradition.  That tension seems to fit some of the arc of his life, his struggle & his joys.

Something that does not fit for me is a simple statistic:

A new study finds that only 1 percent (my emphasis) of U.S. religious congregations go out of existence each year, "which is among the lowest mortality rates ever observed for any type of organization," according to an article to be published in the June issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

More & more, I am struck by how unified Western Christianity can be in our  fear of death, our denial of the natural facts of institutions.  "The denial of death" is a phrase from Ernest Becker, and the title of his most famous book The Denial of Death , which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Becker's book focuses on how we human beings develop strategies to fend off awareness of our mortality and vulnerability and to escape into the feeling that we're immortal.  Rather invest our hope & work in faith, Becker suggest we are committed to what he calls immortality systems, which we protect  against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others.  To do this, we scapegoat,  attack and degrade--preferably kill--the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute-truth systems.

Dave Olson, author of a fascinating new book The American Church in Crisis , obverses an interesting set of implications of this phenomenon:

A "surprising fact" is that mainline churches tend to have lower closure rates than evangelical churches do. He sees an inverse correlation: the fewer churches that close, the more the denomination declines; the more churches that close, the more the denomination grows.

Like so many things in our generational shift, I suspect the Boomers will leave the recognition of death to the generations that follow them.  Boomers seem to value the pretense of immortality above all things, searching for ways to trick decay or distract from the certain signs of expiration.  So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice versa; upholders of the American way of life denounce "foriegners";  non-orthoxs are branded as heretics; conservatives branded as bigots; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil.

Here's a wish for Pentecost, which is just a few days away.  (if you are keeping score, this is my 2nd wish - here is my first). What if we looked in the mirror & embraced the immortality of some of our institutions, what  if we stopped using fear & threats to keep Pastor Enkvest full-time or Sharon as the organist or even the glorious facility that is empty 163 hours a week.  What if we took this day to day to celebrate hope, a hope evoked by the knowledge that God through His Holy Spirit is at work among     His people. As a celebration of newness, of recreation, of renewal of  purpose, mission, and calling as God’s people, what if we starting planning proper funerals from some of our dying churches.  As a recognition that God's work is done through the beloved community as God pours out a certain presence, what if we stood by the graveside, mourning with songs and words and tear.  What if we commended these glorious artifices to God, honored them, as a form of  a celebration of God’s ongoing work in the world.

As is so often the case, my imagination for this hope is captured in a movie clip, one that rather graphically depicts the denial of the death that we churchgoers choose over the joy of resurrection, the promise of new life.  Watch this - then wonder about the refrain "I'm getting much better":

I know a number of people who have had what they refer to as conversion experiences in their lives - a specific moment when they entered into a deeper experience of God, a greater sense of being God's beloved, even a connection to their immortal being.  For these folks, the people around them at that moment, the songs being sung, the place this took place, even the seasons or the smells that surrounded them - they are all fixed in their memory, just as real as the moment that just finished.

We do not get to pick who we form as people of faith with, just like we do not get to pick our family or our home football team.  Anne Lamott writes about why she ended up at Presbyterian church in Sausalito - it was closest to the Planned Parenthood Center she had just left, a safe place that would let her sit as she came off being high.  The illusions of control fall by the wayside when it comes to issues of faith & transformation & recovery - coming to Jesus (or anyone else) is rarely planned or logical.

Separating yourself from that experience, or the people who were a part of it, is often one of the most painful things a person of faith can do.  The man who married Lisa & I turned out to be someone whose approach to faith & life was something I could no longer connect with, despite the fact that he led the church of my youth & my family.  There was no public renunciation, no press conference to parse the meaning of condemn vs. condone.  That said, it still hurts, even 20 years later, to remember that part of my story with that central figure out of the image.  Life stories are sometimes like a puzzle - take out some pieces and they look forever different.

Watching Barack Obama dealing with the fallout from the Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle is just painful:

Maybe I am playing armchair analyst, but Obama strikes me as a person really in pain, struggling with shifts in his life that are much larger than being a politician or responding to media machine.  His reaction is complex and in process, something that just does not work well in the American scorecard mentality of winners & losers, heroes & villians.  What ever the results of the campaign - I still hope very much that Obama is inaugurated - one of the candidates has now lost his relationship with his pastor as a direct result of the media machine & the whiplash we all take part in.

I am really sobered by how the country I love and the people I live among - how all of us - are struggling with issues of race & faith & identity.  A man who gave 40 years of his life to inner city ministry - after a career in the military - is used as a prop, a caricature of what many white voters will perceive as "The Scary Black Man".  A man from a mixed racial background, with a moving personal story of reconciliation rising from faith, has to balance political expedition & personal formation.   A country that has been manipulated by marketing & political wizard who use faith as a dog whistle, now must struggle to find some sense of hope & a way forward.

Millenials Take Charge: Makeover or CageMatch

image from MarionQuagga...

More fascinating than the Obama phenomenon in this presidential cycle has been watching the melding of technology and politics that has given young people born in the 1980s and 1990s - Millennials - a new power to shape American politics with social networks.  There is a new book out called Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics, written by two decidedly non-Millenials Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais.  inograd is a former policy advisor to Al Gore, and Hais is a retired executive for communications research firm Frank N. Magid Associates.

Here's a clip:


In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, they had this interesting observation:

What happens is, the attitudes and beliefs that each generation has determines how they use the technology, not the other way around. Here come social networks, which could be a very libertarian kind of technology - the Internet was always thought to be - so we'll let anybody do whatever they want.

Except the Millennials come along and say let's get all our friends together and have 1,000 of them on Facebook and that's how I'll use this technology because I want to create a collective purpose. The technology always arrives in time for one of these generations to use it to communicate and organize politically as well as socially. We give credit to the tools to enable it to be so effective, but we give credit to their parents for why they want to do it.

Millennials have been raised to jump in, to pull their weight, to step up to the opportunity. Winograd & Hais write "Eighty percent of Millennials have done some sort of community service in high school. Eighty-five percent believe that directly contributing something to the community is an important way to improve it."  Boomers do many things really well - standing down or even sharing power is not one of that generations' strengths.

They go on to contrast Hillary Clinton's campaign - which they characterize as "top-down, media-dominated, television-message-controlled" with the Barack Obama campaign, which to a great extent has placed the power and decision-making at the edges.

image from tenshirisu

I do not envy the job ahead of the Democratic Party, as it navigates what seems like cage match it has on its hands.  If the outcome is a group of top-down people telling Millenials and people of color to wait their turn, I suspect the battles that we see right now between 2 politicians will pale in comparison to the generational battle that looms just ahead. 

Twistori - pulls out the tweets that have the words love, hate, think, believe, feel, and wish in them

Twistori is the first step in an ongoing social experiment, based on twitter. inspired by wefeelfine and drawing data from summize, hand-crafted by amy hoy and thomas fuchs.

Here Come The Creators !

I have worked in media all of my adult life - helping to sell it, market it, distribute it and provide systems that support media.  As a result, I have more friends in the creative side of things than many of my friends who have worked in law or medicine or construction or professional ministry.  These friends are often more than a bit freaked out when someone like me - who loves media, owns a ton, has his 401(k) held by media companies - when I talk or post about the death of formats, like CDs or web pages, sermons or even.....books. 

While this may surprise you, I get no joy from freaking people out.  Okay, that is not totally true - I do enjoy the random prank or hack.

But my sense is that we are living in a time when a set of commercial media formats are, at best, maturing; and more likely, they are expiring as a viable way for many to make a living or to impact culture.

That is an opinion.  Mine --- and some other people.

Here is a fact - there are more people creating & distributing media today than last year, 10 years ago or 100 years ago.  This is particularly the case in writing - shifts in culture, identity & technology have translated to an explosion in the number of writers who share what they write.  Rachel Donadio writes about this in a piece from Sunday's NYT You’re an Author? Me Too!:

In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles.

University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work.

The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals).

And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”

Donadio ends her piece that by observing "In short, everyone has a story — and everyone wants to tell it. Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, as good old Walt Whitman, himself a self-published author, once put it."

For many in the elite of mainstream, this explosion is something to make light of, too many people with too much time on their hands.  For people who make their income on these mediums, there is some mix of exhilaration and fear in the incongruent lines of number of readers & number of writers in this image from You’re an Author? Me Too!:

Someone who much smarter than me about all this - Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at New York University's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) - has written a sensational...book....cue the irony.....on this phenomenon called Here Comes Everybody . I love the fact that Shirky popularized the phrase 'the internet runs on love".

He calls the gap between people creating and people interacting cognitive surplus, something that has been building up for more than 50 years.  In his post Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, Shirky contrasts passive mediums (like TV) with interactive or social mediums - even though some of his conclusions can bee seen as the triumph of the new, I suspect he is on target when he suggests that that social or interactive media, however lame or goofy, has an added quality that sitting in front of a box does not.

I am intrigued by one of Shirky's observations about this threshold shift we seem to be in:

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.

That is such a generous phrase - failing informatively.  It is an ethos that is much more prevalent in edge tribes - actors, hackers, artists - than it is in institutions that see themselves as housing power or sitting at the center.

Imagine a group that set as part of it's mission statement to fail informatively, to help mark a path, to blaze a trail.  A trail that may dead end.  A path that may reach a cliff.  Those lessons are likely to persist much longer than the page they are printed on, the wiki they were posted to, even the people who discovered them (again).

In these shifts, the strong forces that try to hold them back, I sense a lot of what people characterize as Postcolonialism, a break from the binding of oppression that has held voice back, that have bounded the sognitive surpus - even made this to look like a creative deficit.  You can see these discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies in battle in our culture, our politics, even our faith communities (especially our faith communities).  This disruption is painful for commerce and institutions, but this surplus is something that excites me with every new voice I hear or read or met. 

 

Researchers Discover Massive Asshole In Blogosphere

from pshab's photostream:

View pshab's map

       Taken in                         Bristol, England         (See more photos or videos here)

51°26' 33" N, 2°35' 32" W51.44254-2.592328

"go to work, send your kids to school
follow fashion, act normal
walk on the pavements, watch T.V.
save for your old age, obey the law
Repeat after me: I am free"

Graffiti on Philip St, Bedminster, Bristol, UK (opposite Windmill City Farm)

Telling My Holy Story: Reclaiming My Feral Soul

I made a mistake at a gathering at our faith community Journey IFC  this past Saturday night.  I got in a rush, did not check whether I had the right video clip - and boom, there was Samuel L. Jackson saying a word not generally uttered in large groups of people seated in a something even vaguely approximating a sanctuary.  Don't get me wrong - I love Mr. Jackson's work, particularly in the movie that the clip sampled from.  But that was not the clip I hoped to play in the otherwise wonderful comedy night that so many people contributed to.

I have made more than my share of mistakes in churches in my 44 years.  I can remember getting in trouble for sneaking food from the BBQ pit at the church I grew up in.  I can remember singing parodies of praise songs at Happening services - I can REALLY remember Pat Hutton shooting me a look that reminded me that there were proper words to sing.  I can remember...um, I am thinking that maybe a separate blog, regaling all with stories of my endless church mistakes, might be in order.  Both of the people that read this blog might also read that one.

Back to my mistakes - most of the mistakes I have made in faith settings have been minor.  Some have been much larger and more more complex.  What ever you want to call it - a slip up, an error, a booboo, a blunder, a mixup, a miscue - I can assure you I have made them.

There is something peculiar about making mistakes in church.  The era that has consumed most of my adult life in churchianity can be characterized in one word:

excellence

Excellence in planning, excellence in execution, excellence in marketing, excellence in growth - most of my experience in churchianity is of good people striving to excel.  We were sold an equation:

meaning = excellent preaching + excellent music + excellent facilities + excellent programs

The pursuit of excellent depends on predictability, on the ability to perform, on a sense of superiority.  Excellence can be trained and managed and measured and attained.

Mistakes are not the enemy of excellence.  I was taught this in the faith tradition of my birth, one many traditions that houses it's orthodoxy in the rubrics of it's sacraments.  There are approved sacraments, there are ways to conjure those sacraments, there are people who know how to conjure them, there are even people who can evaluate how you conjure them.  And most sadly, there are people who are "allowed" to take those sacraments - and even more people who are not allowed.

This line drawing is not unique to the liturgical traditions.  For many in the evangelical world, there are approved books & approved preachers and ways to think about atonement and even approved ways to say you made a mistake.  While conservatives & liberals seem to agree on very little, they are united in their ability to assess compliance and performance and inclusion.

No - these mistakes that the powers that be track are significant, but they are not the enemy of excellence.  Authenticity is the enemy of excellence - things that are genuine, real, even indubitable.  The root word for authentic comes from the Greek word  authentikós which meant original, primary, at first hand.  Most of the excellence we distract ourselves with in churchnianity comes from the fear of these primary things, an anxiety at the things at hand, a desire to be smarter or better - certainly not primitive, like those other people.

It has taken me a few years, but I realize that somehow I have become one of those other people.  A balding white guy, with a belly, born, raised in the buckle of the Bible Belt - Dallas, Texas - with no tatooes, no facial hair, no piercings.  This becoming did not start with my head, with my knowledge or my understanding.  It started with a disruption in my soul, much like what Parker Palmer writes about in A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life when he writes about our soul as a wild animal that needs a quiet and safe place to emerge:             

What sort of space gives us the best chance to hear soul truth and follow it? A space defined by principles and practices that honor the soul’s nature and needs. What is the nature, and what are those needs? My answer draws on the only metaphor I know that reflects the soul’s essence while honoring its mystery: the soul is like a wild animal.

Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient. It knows how to survive in hard places…Yet despite its toughness, the soul is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush, especially when other people are around. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth, and fade into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek might put in an appearance. We may see it only briefly and only out the corner of an eye—but the sight is a gift we will always treasure as an end in itself.

It was a strange realization for me - to realize that I am a feral follower of Jesus, escaped from domestication, returned in some part to the wild state that Palmer writes about.  I lived for too long in the cage of my own making.  I have bought into the tame dreams of success and consumption.  I avoided all that was uncivilized or uncultivated, preferring numb dependability.

This feral following of Jesus has not come with ease or even comfort for me - as Wikiedpia says about feral shifts:

Rarely will a local environment perfectly integrate the feral organism into its established ecology. Therefore, feral animals and plants can cause disruption or extinction to some indigenous species, affecting wildernessecosystems.

Despite this unease or discomfort, I count myself lucky.  The pack I run with, of other primitive folks, of other wild things, of other nature women & men - these feral followers that are my tribe - they are forgiving and loving folk.  They traffic in grace, able to breathe with the earth, to even forgive 7 times 70 when a mistake happens or even a failure occurs.  We feral followers of Jesus tend to get spooked by cages, to pull against domestication, to even see beauty in the way we run - like the wild mustangs that still can be seem roaming the American West.

image from dbarronoss

These feral packs are not new to North America (or the earth) - they have existed since history began, weaving in and out of extinction.  They are seen by others as strays, as creatures far too primitive or uncivilized.  But they roam together, finding life in their shared journey.

If you know me even a little, you realize what a profound shift this for me, how unlikely it is to think of me as shy.  This shift is still something that trembles & roars, but more & more, with every mistake and every joy, I sense more of what Palmer describes when he writes that seeing our soul in the wild is:

a gift we will always treasure as an end in itself.