Ribeye Films’ first project is in production. It is the story of a 38′-foot Lake Winnipesaukee (NH) schooner, the Peter M. Atwood, and her builder/captain, Keith King. The Atwood was built by Keith and his students at Keene State College in the late-70′s to mid-80′s, and then sailed as an experiential education “classroom” for 25 years.

In 2010, when Keith (at age 85) found “too much rot in all the wrong places” in the schooner’s frame, he decided to cut up this significant part of his life, and burn it. “Full Sail: Keith King and the Schooner Atwood” is the story of living and learning, growing and grieving, throughout all the seasons of life.

Here is a short 2-minute clip:

Unfurling

Virginia Woolf once referred to the “infinite possibilities… furled” within a human life.

It takes an act of the moral imagination to recall those infinite possibilities within other people– especially when we consider people who are very different from us, or who might be our enemies, or whom we might fear. Sometimes it’s the people closest to us, whose infinite possibilities we forget: familiarity effaces mystery. The unfurling of another is beyond our control, so our desire for mastery is  frustrated by the uncontainable emergence of life; the unfurling of our very own selves also can be profoundly unsettling.

Stephanie Paulsell was discussing the Song of Songs with other scholars and students at Harvard, when the Marathon bombing occurred. She remarks how the careful attention to beautiful and sacred scripture (it just as easily could have been careful attention to art, or nature) is the precise opposite of setting off a bomb amidst strangers. Indiscriminate violence kills presently; it also kills that which is poised to emerge. On the other hand, carefully attending to what is beautiful and sacred is the way to discover and to upraise  the possibilities enfolded within. Loving attention is another name for hope.

To bomb anything is the signature of some spectacular human failure– somewhere and somehow– in the unfolding of God’s purpose for the world. While it may be that, in a fallen world and within strict constraints, limited violence is justified to prevent an even graver evil– still, to destroy represents a failure. Every human life contains “infinite possibilities” furled within.

Here is Stephanie Paulsell in The Christian Century:

When I remember the bombings, I hope I will recall, alongside the terrible losses and the heroic actions, the quiet work of love I was privileged to witness that day: a group of human beings holding in their collective hands a poem rendered sacred by centuries of study and debate, prayer and argument, hope and longing. I hope I will remember the close, careful attention of those readers who cherished not only what was shining on the surface of the Song but also what was hidden from our eyes. And I hope I remember to pass on to my students not only the skills they need to do such work but the conviction that reverent attention to all that is furled within a text, within the world, within the life of another human being is holy, life-saving work.

E. J. Dionne has a piece in Commonweal about the decline of democracy in America and Europe. Hard-data seekers will be frustrated, because quantifying this decline is not possible. Historical development, like human nature itself, defies final summation in mathematical equations.

The afterglow of the dissolution of the Soviet Union is still with us. Despite our anxieties about militant Islam; despite our less than triumphant wars in Central Asia and the Middle East; despite the unraveling of domestic civility and the worst economic crisis in nearly a century– despite all this, we like to think that American democracy is the culminating apex of historical development. We won the Cold War; that victory proved the superiority of American democracy over any autocratic or totalitarian system.

Let’s say that’s true. Let’s say that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the sign that democracy won. The mistake is to believe that democracy won forever: that history had come to an end, and that all the world– if it were progressing to enlightened ends– would inevitably become like us.

The merits and shortcomings of democracy aside, what such triumphalism lacks is historical imagination. Historical imagination involves two activities of the mind: first, it considers centuries– rather than today’s hours and minutes, or the next election cycle– as the pertinent measure of time; second, it consciously resists projecting this era’s dominant worldview onto the past, or into the future. Not unlike the religious imagination, historical imagination both recalls us to the truth that our life is but a breath, and checks our natural inclination to believe that the sun revolves around us.

With historical imagination, it’s not hard to foresee a time when American democracy is not triumphant; to conceive of a day when another way will work better to meet the challenges of that particular day. Things change. They just do.

We can prepare for inevitable change– the inevitable, unavoidable change that comes at many times in a human life, and throughout human history. How we can prepare for the changes that will come, is for next time.

An excerpt from Dionne, and the link, follow:

We know American politics are dysfunctional. But after a week of scandal obsession during which the nation’s capital and the media virtually ignored the problems most voters care about — jobs, incomes, growth, opportunity, education — it’s worth asking if there is something especially flawed about our democracy….

Citizen dissatisfaction is hardly surprising in the wake of a deeply damaging economic downturn. That doesn’t make the challenge any less daunting. We should consider whether democracy itself is in danger of being discredited. Politicians might usefully disentangle themselves from their day-to-day power struggles long enough to take seriously their responsibility to a noble idea and the systems that undergird it.

Earlier this month, the Transatlantic Academy, a global partnership of think tanks led by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, issued “The Democratic Disconnect,” a sober report by a group of distinguished academics.

“Democracy is in trouble,” the report begins. “The collective engagement of a concerned citizenry for the public good — the bedrock of a healthy democracy — is eroding. Democratic governments often seem crippled in their capacity to deliver what their people want and need….”

via Is Democracy in Trouble? | Commonweal Magazine.

The Arizona State House

This little news item calls for brief theological reflection…

The AP reported last week on an incident in the Arizona House of Representatives. State representatives take turns offering a prayer of invocation; Rep. Juan Mendez– described in reports as an atheist– took his turn and “asked House members not to bow their heads but to instead look around at each other ‘sharing together this extraordinary experience of being alive and of dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people of our state.’” (from Juan Cole’s Religion Clause)

The following day, Rep. Steve Smith– described in reports as a Christian– expressed his judgment that Mendez’s offering on the previous day did not count as a prayer. (The full report and link are below).

I take Mendez’s offering as authentic prayer for the following reasons. First, it is life-affirming: his words regarding the “extraordinary experience of being alive” evoke the gift and mystery that life itself is. Second, the gesture of looking at other humans can be reasonably interpreted as a gesture pointing us to the sacred (even if, from the atheistic point of view, it does not point us to the divine). Third, his words call people out of narrow self-regard, to consider the larger whole.

Smith is right that Mendez’s invocation was not Christian prayer; it is also obvious but worth mentioning that, at the end of the day, there are irreconcilable differences between an atheistic and a Christian way of experiencing and acting in the world.

One might also plausibly think, however, that the Christian way of engaging difference– especially in this diverse and pluralistic nation– would be to seek common ground when possible. Followers of Jesus have a special obligation, in this age of fear and in this culture of death, to ally when possible with all who affirm life, and who desire to care for all people– as expressed in Rep. Mendez’s prayer– even if they don’t believe in God. This does not mean softening the gospel, or selling out to syncretism.

On the contrary, such Christian engagement comes from a deep trust in the One whose ways of working towards the fulfillment of history are mysterious: a deep trust in the God whose ways are not our ways. It is faithful, Biblically-grounded Christian practice not to put limits on how, and where, the Holy One is working out the purpose of the world.

AP today reports on an unusual controversy in Arizona over the opening prayer offered by one member of the state House of Representatives. Members of the House rotate in offering the invocation. On Tuesday it was Rep. Juan Mendez’s turn. With members of the Secular Coalition for Arizona in the visitor’s gallery, Mendez, an atheist, asked House members not to bow their heads but to instead look around at each other “sharing together this extraordinary experience of being alive and of dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people of our state.”

The next day, Rep. Steve Smith complained that Mendez’s remarks did not qualify as a prayer. He asked other House members to join him in a second prayer in repentance for there not being one the prior day. Smith said that Mendez’s remarks were analogous to someone leading the Pledge of Allegiance by pledging “I love England.”

via Religion Clause.

via Member Page.

Manhattan

Since I don’t look at mainstream media (for the most part, although– digression alert– I sometimes cannot resist the temptation of things like the dog-emerges-from-tornado-wreckage footage on the AOL Homepage), I do not know if this week’s Occupy Wall Street protest at the Department of Justice is getting any air. I found it only after googling “whatever happened to the Occupy Movement?” That the protest at Justice is focused on home foreclosures is apropos of last Sunday’s front-page New York Times article (link below), on a luxury apartment tower being built in Manhattan.

“Luxury” is an understatement: “… the top penthouse is already under contract for $95 million,” the Times’ Charles Bagli reports; the total amount under contract, at this point in the development of the building at 432 Park Avenue, is $1 billion. For those with modest desires, the asking price for a 2-bedroom apartment (1789 sq.ft.) is $9.7 million. The people who can afford this housing are the worlds’ super-rich. Because they are super-rich, they generally own several properties; but because they are human, they can only inhabit one of those properties at a time. Consequently, the 84-story building will usually be 3/4 empty.

Those protesting this week at the Department of Justice over home foreclosures are angry because they feel like the Americans who are in the class of the  rich and super-rich (who can afford multi-million dollar properties) got away with making the mistakes that led to people losing their homes. For them, “Too Big to Fail” has become “Too Rich to Jail.”

On the other hand is the defense of the rich and the super-rich: they worked for it, they earned it; and their risk-taking entrepreneurship is the rising tide that lifts all boats. Stifle that, and stifle all economic growth.

These are irreconcilable views. What is not debatable, is that the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing.

That widening gap leads to these twin questions: assuming that some gap between the rich and the poor is inevitable, at what point on the acceptability scale does the size of the gap become morally unacceptable? Politically unsustainable?

Here’s an answer: the size of the gap becomes morally unacceptable when a class of people in a society avoidably bear disproportionate pain in hard times. I think we have crossed that line.

via Boom in Luxury Towers Is Warping New York Real Estate Market – NYTimes.com.

Hauerwas and Willimon’s “Resident Aliens” (1989)

This book’s cover’s quaint font betrays its late 1980s publication date. The main idea still pertains, however, and now even moreso: we Americans don’t live in a Christian culture today, if ever we did. I don’t mean this, as some do, in a narrow, nostalgic-for-lost-morality way: restoring purity to naughty words in song lyrics would not restore Christian culture. The idea is more radical: there is no such thing as a national culture that is Christian. To be a follower of Jesus is to be– more or less, but never not– counter-cultural. It is, in a way and always, to be a foreigner, an alien, in this land. Home is not here.

Many of us live in a material luxury and physical comfort unprecedented in the history of the world. Seemingly removed from the struggle of keeping body and soul together (no one who reads this blog is concerned about a failed harvest leading to famine), the soothing strum of American consumerism in which we participate (with varying degrees of investment) lulls us into a sleepy, false sense of security: we’re safe here; this is home.

To be a follower of Jesus is to snap out of that narcotic snooze, and recognize that lie. Our only security is with Him; our true home is with the Transcendent One. From that awareness will come a re-awakened church, re-committed to proclaiming the gospel and re-dedicated to exposing the false twin-gods of our culture: invulnerability and control. Such a re-awakened church will embody and practice a trust in the Holy One– the Holy One who always defeats the false gods who spawn neurotic anxiety, ruptured relationships, fear-based violence, and exploitative economic and political arrangements. Home is not here. Home is where reconciliation is complete, and the lion lies down with the lamb.

In the meantime, we walk in this foreign land, and point toward home.

]]> http://religioninthebalance.wordpress.com/2013/05/15/resident-aliens/feed/ 1 cowen1918 Hauerwas and Willimon's 1989 "Resident Aliens" http://religioninthebalance.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/unity-and-paradox/ http://religioninthebalance.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/unity-and-paradox/#comments Wed, 08 May 2013 14:18:32 +0000 Chris http://religioninthebalance.wordpress.com/?p=2289 ]]>

Willi Unsoeld

Willi Unsoeld was a mountaineer, educator, and speaker. His talk “The Spiritual Value of Wilderness” reflects the 1970s North American/European desire to re-unify what modernity had divided. In the context of Unsoeld’s mountaineering, Outward Bound-ing life, the division of human beings from nature was the template from which all the other divisions (man from woman; body from soul; human beings from God) could be derived.

We are the intellectual and spiritual heirs of this desire for unity. One positive development is that we speak nowadays more about “healing” than about “unity.” Unity is ecstatic and therefore fleeting and adolescent; healing is integrative and therefore enduring and hopeful.

The 1970s are now two generations ago; the times have changed. Re-unifying what modernity has divided is not our challenge and call. Our challenge and call is to live the creative tension of irreconcilables– which entails living beyond the limits of reason alone. Our challenge and call is to live the creative tension of paradox.

For example. The supreme paradox of all creation, for followers of Jesus, is his nature: fully human and fully divine. Reason cannot reconcile these two essentially different natures. However, holding these irreconcilable natures in tension points us to a way of living on this earth, now, that realizes divinity present in human vulnerability, and embraces humble, human self-giving as the way God’s power is most fully expressed. An ethic of graceful, creative living follows from this theology.

In our hot and crowded world, where we live in unprecedentedly close and often prickly proximity with people and ideas that are irreconcilably different– I’ll say it again– our challenge and call is to live the creative tension of these irreconcilables. Unity is not possible, but creativity is.

Here’s my list of the paradoxes at the heart of life– seeming opposites that, in truth, need each other for completion. I’d be curious to know what you, reader, might add (or subtract!):

life and death; male and female; liberal and conservative; Christian and Muslim; active and passive; sanity and insanity; presence and absence; grief and love.

via Willi Unsoeld – Brief Biography & Quotes.

Czeslaw Milosz

The epigram of Milosz’s The Captive Mind:

“When someone is honestly 55% right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God. But what’s to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100% right? Whoever says he’s 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.”

– An Old Jew of Galicia

via Czeslaw Milosz- Poets.org – Poetry, Poems, Bios & More.

Grunewald’s Crucifixion

One theory of the saving power of the Cross is that the Cross makes the victim visible, thereby exposing– in the hope of ending– the cycle of scapegoating violence. The cycle of scapegoating violence is a cycle in which an innocent person, or an innocent group (generally an outsider or outsiders), is sacrificed in order to maintain group cohesion. Nothing promotes group cohesion better than identifying, pursuing, and killing an enemy. Sometimes so much underlying tension is agitating a group, that the search for an enemy to kill (in order to mask the underlying tension) supercedes rational reflection or moral consideration. This is the ugly side of our human nature, and anyone who thinks we’ve outgrown such primitive impulses is in denial, or not paying attention.

Why is some violence so visible to us, and other violence so invisible? Part of the answer is the mercy that our make-up is essentially partial and limited, saving us from the overwhelming burden of compassionately feeling each particular, individual, broken-hearted grief of losing a loved one to violence. Such a broken-hearted grief is happening inside some person today, somewhere– is happening even now. We keep some violence invisible, in order simply to survive without going mad. Thank God.

If that were the complete answer to why some violence is invisible, we could then excuse ourselves from any uncomfortable moral reckoning with violence outside of our limited sphere by invoking the self-preserving saving grace of denial: it’s too much for me to think about. That’s my defense. And yet…

Even if it is not my or your calling to take any action on this or that issue related to violence, we still do well to expand our visual field and allow previously invisible violence to impinge on our conscience. For example: 532 people were murdered in Chicago in 2012. Maybe you knew that, but I did not. I find the number stunning. That violence– and its accompanying grief– has been invisible to me. Now it is at least within my awareness. The drone war, with its significant number of invisible innocent victims (children), is another example.

We can’t take on every evil and injustice in the world; there are still only 168 hours in a week. We can, however, draw the perimeter of our range of visible violence ever more widely. The becoming-visible of some innocent victims of violence might rouse us to recognize a large gap between our ideals and our practices/policies, and that we need to change in order to be the people we say we are.

crucifixion.jpg (JPEG Image, 988 × 860 pixels) – Scaled (70%).

The Boston Marathon

I love the Boston Marathon. The spirit of the event is a resonant harmony of the freshness of the first warm days, the hope of early-season baseball, the perseverance of the runners, the lift of the cheering crowd, the helpfulness of the marathon volunteers, and the silliness of the soused– all of it wrapped into a ball of  joyful camaraderie that is fully lovely because widely shared. People come together on Marathon Monday in a way that calls forth our better nature: we cheer for each other, instead of harboring hidden envy. Your success is my success; my success is yours. Ubuntu.

Is the bombing really an end of innocence for the Marathon? I remember being in Hopkinton for the start of the race in April 2002, and I remember being on the lookout for suspicious bags and suspicious people. I wasn’t overanxious, afraid, or edgy– I was just aware of my surroundings, having had past trauma re-awakened the previous September. And while I am not a reporter and therefore don’t know this to be true, I imagine that Marathon and city officials rehearse for emergencies. In this era, it would be naive– even negligent– not to prepare for scenarios similar to what happened Monday.

I believe innocence is recoverable; I believe that there always exists the possibility of a second innocence rising up as a green shoot from dead earth. A second innocence will never be as pure as original innocence, but it might be richer: richer because a second innocence knows, and has some kind of working agreement with, the darkness and corruption in life. On the far side of injury, we re-open ourselves to love. We can, and do, begin again.

Perhaps Monday’s bombing was the end of a naivete about the Marathon, rather than the end of innocence. Naivete says: it can never happen here. Naivete says: I can guarantee 100% safety, all the time. Naivete says: there is a plane of existence that is exempt from the outrageously unfair. It’s right to grieve the loss of this naivete, even as we grieve for those who died, and for those who were injured in body, mind, and spirit.

On Marathon Monday next year it will be spring again, after a long winter. 25,000 runners will gather in Hopkinton, and half a million will line the route. The spirit of good will and mutual care will come alive again; again my success will be yours, and yours will be mine. What is this, if it is not innocence reborn: the willingness to share again a day that is beautiful and good, despite the memory of fear and grief; the willingness to come together again to celebrate the best of the human spirit, despite having experienced the worst? The spirit of the Marathon will have a shadow, and that shadow will add a dimension of sadness. Still– even with that sadness, and maybe perhaps even because of it– the spirit of the Marathon will be more abundantly filled with all the fullness of life.

Below is an excerpt and link to Boston Globe sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy’s column on the bombing:

More end to more innocence. One of our best days is forever tainted. The 117-year-old Boston Marathon will never be the same. The journey from Hopkinton to Boylston Street is now a 26.2-mile stretch of yellow police tape.

via Dan Shaughnessy: Patriots Day a sacred tradition taken away – Sports – The Boston Globe.