The Corner

Where can we connect our story with God's story ?

image from omarrun

Henri Nouwen once said that church "tries to connects our story with God's story."   Nouwen, who had known great pain himself, went on to observe that

every time there are losses there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper

In the American experience of churchianity, times of great shared pain have triggered an increase in church attendance.  During the Great Depression, church attendance surged as Americans turned to faith in difficult days.  After 9/11 there was just such a boomlet in seeking God in local faith communities all over the country.

The troubled times we find ourselves in right now seem to be breaking that pattern, with people seeing churchianity more as a complicit partner in these troubles, rather than a vital wellspring for "passages to something new, something wider, and deeper"

   

Losing Wealth, Finding God?

Contrary to recent media reports suggesting that the country's economic troubles have led to higher levels of church attendance, a Pew Forum analysis of polls by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that while the Dow Jones Industrial Average has shed over half its value since October 2007, there has been no increase in weekly worship service attendance during the same time period.

_{Worship attendance data from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press surveys.}

_{Market data through Feb. 27, 2009, from Dow Jones.}

There is so much in our shared narrative right now around anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment - the media blares it to sell their advertising, we traffic in it throughout our daily stories.  People are struggling to make meaning amidst all this loss.

The community of people who followed Jesus were also grappling to make meaning, suffering after the Empire executed their leader.  The book of the Acts of the Apostles tells how they struggled to re-member themselves to a story:

You know the story of what happened in Judea. It began in Galilee after John preached a total life-change. Then Jesus arrived from Nazareth, anointed by God with the Holy Spirit, ready for action. He went through the country helping people and healing everyone who was beaten down by the Devil. He was able to do all this because God was with him.

I am heartened that the official doofus of Christian Scripture - Simon Peter, the  Galilean fisherman who went on to be the apostle to the Jews - that Peter proclaimed Good News in the midst of all that anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment :

The Message he sent to the children of Israel—that through Jesus Christ everything is being put together again—well, he’s doing it everywhere, among everyone

People are hungering for lives put back together, for healing after being beaten down, for total life-change - they are looking for something new, something wider, and deeper.

Churchianity is not offering that.

Who will ?

Really sensational post Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web  from Tim O'Reilly:

any substantial non-fiction work is a masterwork of curated links. It's just that when we turn to ebooks, we haven't realized that we need to turn footnotes and bibliographies into live links. And how many publishers write their own books? Instead, publishers for years have built effective business processes to discover and promote the talents of those they discover in the wider world! (Reminder: Bloomsbury didn't write Harry Potter; it was the work of  a welfare mom.) But again, we've failed to update these processes for the 21st century. How do we use the net to find new talent, and once we find it, help to amplify it?

In the comments, there is great stuff as well:

I'm all for sustained narrative. But as a friend of mine said long ago, "You pick the hat to fit the head."

There are a lot of ridiculous books out there providing sustained narrative about how to use twitter, a format that doesn't justify that kind of narrative. The service is dead easy to use. But there are hundreds of interesting add-ons, plus interesting ways that people have demonstrated to get more out of the service. The episodic format we chose is matched to the subject matter, just as your sustained narrative is matched to the subject matter of your superb book. (Disclosure: I am the publisher :-)

My point was that publishers need to think more broadly about what constitutes a book, and what constitutes reading, in the age of the web.

NYC Street Park

Across from the office I had long, long ago.

Raindrop Melody Maker

make your own experimental music composition

this is so, so, so calming

Pete Seeger on Performing

GREENPEACE: This fragile Earth needs action

We Must Not Torture: may healing overcome brokenness, hope overcome fear, and action overcome despair

By now, you’ve probably read about it: a Middle East religious and political “dissident” taken captive by a Western government, interrogated, ridiculed, made to endure denigrating postures, beaten and eventually killed.

His name? Jesus Christ.

Two thousand years later, Christ remains with us, and so does torture. Holy Week is a time that followers of that torture victim meditate on the sufferings of Christ.  This is not a military or political issue, not a dirty necessity of battle - torture is a moral issue.   An issue that does not afford us the luxury to "just keep walking… Some things in life need to be mysterious."  Torture is a moral issue, a question of right & wrong.

I first posted about my country torturing our enemies in 2004.  The email I received from people - mainly men - who self-identified as Christians was truly revolting.  Men asking me what I would do when my wife or daughters were horribly attacked, pastors telling me that I was ashamed of my country, friends telling me I had no sense of the threat we face.

It has been sobering to watch a "Christian" nation deal with being lied to, turning our collective eyes away, even using Scripture as some type of cover for infliction of intense pain to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations, the Commissioner for Human Rights, the UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Human Rights First (HRF) and Physicians for Human Rights (PFH), Amnesty International, and many other experts classify what America has done over these past 8 years as torture, and also consider the techniques ineffective. For its use on Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, the government of Canada added the U.S. to a list of countries that employ interrogation methods that amount to torture.

As so many have said, this is a defining moment for America - and for faithful people in this country.  We can lead, we can be silent or we can simply wash the blood off our hands.

I urge you to join the National Religious Campaign Against Torture , alongside over 250 religious groups from Roman Catholic, evangelical Christian, mainline Protestant, Orthodox Christians, Unitarian, Quaker, Orthodox Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Baha'i, Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh communities.  The NRCAT has been wokring for the past several years to give voice to the opposition to torture - they are now focussing on U.S.-Sponsored Torture: A Call for a Commission of Inquiry.

My prayers for us at this moment echo these words from NRCAT:

God of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, we give thanks for your abiding presence with our ancestors and pray for your continued guidance to us, to all your children, and indeed to all your glorious creation.

Help us, gracious God, to act faithfully upon this truth: each human being is made in your image, sisters and brothers to one another.

Help us, gracious God, to teach our children and grandchildren to live together in peace and without fear. May they, like we, be passionate and persistent in ensuring that all forms of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment are prohibited by law, and that our nation consistently upholds its deepest values.

We confess, gracious God, that we as a nation have permitted the practice of torture. Give us the courage to investigate our nation’s use of torture, to understand our own complicity and to seek healing for both the tortured and the torturer.

We pray, O God, in the hope that the integrity of our nation and its stature in the commonwealth of nations will be restored. We pledge ourselves this day to work without ceasing for the establishment of an independent, nonpartisan Commission of Inquiry to understand the causes, nature and scope of U.S.-sponsored torture. May such an inquiry help to prevent the use of torture in the future.

O Merciful God, may healing overcome brokenness, hope overcome fear, and action overcome despair. Lead us in your way of truth and justice.

And let us say, Amen.

Kevin Kelly: The Nine Laws of God

In the Shoulda Been Dead episode of This American Life,  they open with a story of a man who

traveled to Jerusalem, to photograph Easter ceremonies. Unexpectedly locked out of his hostel and without money for another place to stay, he wandered Jerusalem's Old City and finally found the doors to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher open. Inside, he fell asleep on a stone slab.  The next morning he followed the crowds to the Garden Tomb, where he experienced a profound conviction that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead.

That man - Kevin Kelly -  returned to his hostel to rest, and there had a strong sense that he would die within six months and that he should live accordingly.  Kelly did not die - he went on to be the editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, as well as the founding executive editor of Wired magazine.

Kelly is a unique figure in American culture - able to navigate the technology & faith world with equal comfort & insight.  In the Spring 1994 issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, Kelly wrote what he calls the 9 laws of God - they are profound 15 years later as they were when Kelly first wrote them:

Distribute being. The spirit of a beehive, the behavior of an economy, the thinking of a supercomputer, and the life in me are distributed over a multitude of smaller units (which themselves may be distributed). When the sum of the parts can add up to more than the parts, then that extra being (that something from nothing) is distributed among the parts. Whenever we find something from nothing, we find it arising from a field of many interatting smaller pieces. All the mysteries we find most interesting - life, intelligence, evolution - are found in the soil of large distributed systems.

Control from the bottom up. When everything is connected to everything in a distributed network, everything happens at once. When everything happens at once, wide and fast-moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore, overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command. A mob can steer itself, and in the territory of rapid, massive, and heterogeneous change, only a mob can steer. To get something from nothing, control must rest at the bottom within simplicity.

Sow increasing returns. Each time you use an idea, a language, or a skill, you strengthen it, reinforce it, and make it more likely to be used again.

Grow by chunking. The only way to make a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex organization - such as intelligence, or a market economy - without growing it, inevitably lead to failure.

Maximize the fringes. In heterogeneity is creation of the world. A uniform entity must adapt to the world by occasional monumental revolutions, one of which is sure to kill it. A diverse heterogeneous entity, on the other hand, can adapt to the world in a thousand daily mini-revolutions, staying in a state of permanent, but never fatal, churning.

Honor your errors. A trick will only work for a while, until everyone else is doing it. To advance from the ordinary requires a new game, or a new territory. But the process of going outside the conventional method, game, or territory is indistinguishable from error. Even the most brilliant act of human genius, in the final analysis, is an act of trial and error.

Pursue no optima, but multiple goals. Simple machines can be efficient, but complex adaptive machinery cannot be. A complicated structure has many masters and none of them can be served exclusively. Rather than striving for optimization of any function, a large system can only survive by "satisficing" (making "good enough") a multitude of functions.

Seek persistent disequilibrium. Neither constancy nor relentless change will support a creation. A good creation, like good jazz, must balance the stable formula with frequent offbeat, out-of-kilter notes. Equilibrium is death. Yet unless a system stabilizes to an equilibrium point, it is no better than an explosion, and just as soon dead. A Nothing, then, is both equilibrium and disequilibrium.

Change changes itself.  Change can be structured. This is what large complex systems do: they coordinate change. When extremely large systems are built up out of complicated systems, then each system begins to influence and ultimately change the organizations of other systems. That is, if the rules of the game are composed from the bottom up, then it is likely that interacting forces at the bottom level will alter the rules of the game as it progresses. Over time, the rules for change get changed themselves.

Australian Childhood Foundation is the organization behind the campaign.