The Corner

Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock

Sharon Astyk~Indigeny Part I: Becoming Native To Your Place

Rod Dreher is always pointing to Sharon Astyk’s blog Casaubon’s Book- her post Indigeny Part I: Becoming Native To Your Place is really provocative in thinking through what Sharon suggests are steps to "becoming local to your place, creating a culture that can go on, not just ’a bit after the fossil fuels run out” but for generations, and one that results in a life worth having."

Indigeny is an intriguing concept - in biology, this means a species that evolved and still exists within an original ecosystem.  The word indigeny comes from Latin word gignere, which means to give birth to, bring forth, bear.  Communities & cultures are foundries for this bearing & brining forth, when we are living out what we are created for.

I was most struck by Astyk's assertion:

Having contiguity with your past is considered desirable, not bad.  Modernity reduces the past to a few heroic tales, and makes the past literally uninhabitable to the present.  Thus, those who came before us know nothing of value, and the ways of the past are archaic and foolish.  Sustainable cultures on the other hand, focus on the ways that the present, the future and past are linked to one another.

I am prone to be so focussed and now & the future, but I find myslef starving for deeper connections with what came before, the steps of other folks who are indigenous to my experience.

Astyk's post is the first in a series - well worth tracking.

Where the Wild Things Are: I Can Not Wait for This Film

Happy Feast of Annunciation: I don’t understand it, Lord, but let it be done in me according to your word.

Today is the day that some Christian traditions remember the angel Gabriel visiting a peasant teenager in Nazareth in Galilee.  The angel told Miriam, who was engaged to be married,  that she would conceive a child to be born the Son of God.  These faith traditions celebrate the Feast of Annunciation on March 25, which is nine months before the feast of the Nativity of Jesus, or Christmas.

That young girl must have been scared and confused.  Miriam came from the tribe of Judah, and in the line of King David - her people knew of a God who did extra-ordinary things.  She is described as a virgin, likely 13 or 15 at the oldest, just betrothed to Joseph, son of Heli.  Mary’s confusion disappeared when Gabriel told her: "The Holy Spirit will be with you, and Holy child which shall be born to you will be the son of God."  When Mary heard these words, she said: "I am the servant of the Lord, and I will do all the things which are asked of me."

In a meditation for today, Vicki Blacks points to this passage from The Violence of Love by Oscar Romero:

Faith consists in accepting God
without asking him to account for things according to our standard.
Faith consists in reacting before God as Mary did:
I don’t understand it, Lord, but let it be done in me according to your word.

Last night at our house group, we talked a bit about what believe.  So much of the energy in the room was around what we used to believe, what we no longer believe - faith as what bound us to our lineage.  Someone pushed back, asking "what is we frame this as what we understand, rather than what we think or believe". This wise friend captured something that I have learned more & more - that faith is a body of experience, rather than a checklist of declarative statements that I think or can recite.

I wish more of my faith reached for Romero writes about, for the joy that Miriam sang about her song The Magnificat.  In his book Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope , Brian McLaren invites us to listen again to a remix of this song:

My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my personal Savior, for he has been mindful of the correct saving faith of his servant. My spirit will go to heaven when my body dies for the Mighty One has provided forgiveness, assurance, and eternal security for me–holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who have correct saving faith and orthodox articulations of belief, from generation to generation. He will overcome the damning effects of original sin with his mighty arm; he will damn to hell those who believe they can be saved through their own efforts or through any religion other than the new one He is about to form. He will condemn followers of other religions to hell but bring to heaven those with correct belief. He has filled correct believers with spiritual blessings but will send those who are not elect to hell forever. He has helped those with correct doctrinal understanding, remembering to be merciful to those who believe in the correct theories of atonement, just as our preferred theologians through history have articulated.

McLaren suggests that this is a song of a people recapturing a hope for the "fulfillment of its original promise".  No litmus test, correct answer for a quiz on original sin or unoriginal oppression - instead the faith of a scared young girl who said yes even when it was something that did not make sense.  Reaching for what we are made for,

That sense of surrender, of giving ourselves over to the dance of a God in community:

I don’t understand it, Lord, but let it be done in me according to your word.

In Memory of Oscar Romero

Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated on this date 29 years ago while saying mass.   The day before his murder, Romero preached to an angry an army of peasants:

Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your fellow peasant . . . No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God . . . In the name of God then, in the name of this suffering people I ask you, I beg you, I command you in the name of God: stop the repression.

His death was his final act of solidarity with the poor and oppressed people of El Salvador, whom he defended with great humility and courage.

His message of a Gospel that transform lives stands as one of the most prophetic of the late 20th Century:

God needs the people themselves to save the world . . . The world of the poor teaches us that liberation will arrive only when the poor are not simply on the receiving end of hand-outs from governments or from the churches, but when they themselves are the masters and protagonists of their own struggle for liberation

share

share

Posted using ShareThis

the sound of grace

image from marymachin

I spent a great deal of Thurs - Sat immersed in sound.  All told, we probably saw more than 20 different acts, ranging from hip-top to straight ahead rock to folkie meets synth.  There was a moment in the Thursday night set by Phosphorescent that just pulled me out of space & time - that happened again & again, all the way up to the rhythms of The Knux as they performed at Waterloo Records.

In seminary, we learned a great deal about χαρις - a word that occurs in the Greek text of Christian Scripture something over 170 times.  The word means beauty, a certain pattern that is pleasing beyond our ability to consciously process.  If the Spirit of God is likened to the wind (the Hebrew word ruach), then I wonder if the grace of God is more like a sound.  That sound envelops us, it draws us in, it makes even the most discordant or painful thing beautiful.

Beth Maynard post on this in relation to the new U2 set of music:

it seems clear to me that "the sound" is one central metaphor. We have three "let me in the sound" requests, as well as "I found grace inside a/the sound" and "people born of sound," all of which have an essentialist, palpable ring (especially if you want to argue for a vague John 3 echo in the last one.) Along with these, there are more evocations of sound per se as granting some kind of mysterious access to the ultimate: "hear the universe," "roar on the other side of silence," and "the rhythm of my soul... that yearns to be released from control." And don't forget this album's ineffable soundscapes themselves, such as the one that begins "Unknown Caller." Because of all that, I am more inclined to understand "sound" in NLOTH as pointing to mystical communion with God now, rather than as looking forward to songs sung by others in heaven.

So often, we are taught that this grace is conditional - that only worthy or refined ears can hear the sound.  There are whole schools of theology that will tell you whether that grace is

• Divine grace, unearned favors received from God.
• Prevenient grace, an Augustine Christian theological concept
• Irresistible grace, a Calvinistic Christian theological concept
• Actual grace, a Catholic theological concept.

I did not finish seminary,so maybe I  missed the class - but I know the look on a face when it is "let into the sound", on a band member's face when they hit a groove, the way a room shakes and rattles with sound.

God who dwelt on earth with no home to call your own,
Have mercy on all who are homeless and without shelter today.
God, who lives amongst us, hear our prayer.
God who was despised, rejected, and spat upon by those in authority,
Comfort all who are cast by the wayside and ignored today.
God, who lives amongst us, hear our prayer.
God who offers abundance and plenty where we expect scarcity,
Provide for all those who are hungry and in need of food today.
God, who lives amongst us, hear our prayer.
God who promises security and safety when we expect turmoil,
Provide for all those who have lost jobs and are forced into homelessness today.
God, who lives amongst us, hear our prayer.
God who grants us rest in face of our fears and anxieties,
Provide for all those who are anxious about finances today.
God, who lives amongst us, hear our prayer.
God who provides community for all who are alone and abandoned,
Provide for all who feel abandoned and uncared for in these troubled times.
God, who lives amongst us, hear our prayer.
God who is always in control even when nations shake and economies crumble,
Fill all who are empty and rescue those who are enslaved by debt.
God, who lives amongst us, hear our prayer.

Pause to offer your own prayers for the lost, the lonely, the hungry, the anxious and displaced

God, you see the unlovely in all of us, yet you still love us. You ask us to reach out with your compassion to all who are unlovely. Open our eyes so that we can see beauty in all people and practice your hospitality, particularly to those homeless and faceless ones who are usually over-looked or ignored by us and by our society.

Source: Christine Sine (adapted version)  via Mark Bushor

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

pray as one reflection # 4: safe ? silence first

Our faith community is spending much of Lent praying as one, taking stock of our journey with God in a Jesus way.  This fourth week, our focus is:

we will create a safe community

image from Badger 23

A safe community. 

What an absurd idea.

Honestly.

Our faith community is like some type of witness protection program for church folk.  Pastors who were thrown out of their churches or denominations.  Lay leaders who were walked the front door and told to "git".  Somehow, some way, we find our rag-tag community, show up at our gatherings, be present when lives unravel, transform or move on moment-by-moment.

There is a scent to this feral-ness, something that you can not wash off with tears, alcohol or even Dr. Pepper.

There is wildness of the soul that unsettles folks, haunts us in the code words (like sin or Kingdom or Jesus) or in the song sung or rituals attended to.

We were told that this stuff is safe before - fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters , Annie Dillard writes:

The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, making up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies hats and straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.

Crash helmets, life preservers, flare signals - that sounds more like the thoroughly modern experience of churchianity.

The entity that is Journey Imperfect Faith Community - the gatherings, rented building and activities - it is no more safe than a construction zone, a birthing room or a welder's hut. 

A church as a safe community ?  As if.  An oxymoron at best - at worst, a tarp dressed up like a warm, fuzzy blanket.

But the members of this witness protection program - so much like countless other groups - we have the chance to hold safety, embody safety, to be present with that feral entity that Parker Palmer writes of:

Just like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, savvy, resourceful and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. Many of us learn about these qualities in the darkest moments of our lives when the faculties we normally depend upon utterly fail us—the intellect is useless, the emotions dead, the will impotent, and the ego shattered. But sometimes, way back in the thickets of our inner lives, we sense the presence of something that knows how to stay alive and helps us to keep going. That something, I suggest, is the tough and tenacious soul.

And yet the soul, despite its toughness, is also essentially shy—just like a wild animal. It will flee from the noisy crowd and seek safety in the deep underbrush. 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 into the woods quietly and sit at the base of a tree, breathing with the earth and fading into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek may eventually show up.

How does this happen ?

I am no expert, but my own experience is that this starts with shutting the hell up.  No sermons, no praise choruses, no offertory prayers or team reports.

Shutting the hell up - more commonly called silence.  Sitting in a room - an operating theater or a jail cell or at a kitchen table.  Silence is the mid-wife of safety,  birthing words that communicate, rather than persuade or pontificate.

A wild animal approaches - a pack even of feral beasts who are wounded and hungry and even a bit ornery.

My advice - my prayer - the last hope I can hold onto in the thicket that is institutions - is:

silence