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Take This Job and—

September 10, 2012 Church, Culture, Economy, Practices, Relationships Comments are closed

Ponderings in becoming bi-vocational

Lately I’ve been hearing from more and more places that bi-vocational is the way to go for churches that want to be as missional and fully engaged in their broader communities as they can.

(Not to be pedantic, but bi-vocational refers to people in ministry having a second job in addition to their pastoral duties to help pay the bills.)

David Fitch, at rethinkingthemission.com noted last week that:

“Leadership must migrate from a paid professional clergy that spends all its time in maintenance functions/ministry of existing Christians, to a bi-vocational flexible clergy that is able to earn (at least some of) its financial support in the marketplace. I believe this new relationship of money between people and leader changes the dynamic of an organization in many many ways that lead to mission.”

Kurt Willems at the Pangea Blog had a guest blogger who offered similar sentiments: Bivocational Ministry Makes a Comeback.

I have been thinking about this more and more because for my new venture of starting a church in Washington DC, it looks like I may well need to supplement my income from other sources, as funds are limited, and DC is an expensive place to live.

So far I’ve applied for jobs as an editor, adjunct teacher in religious studies, writer, floor scrubber, and something else I can’t recall… oh yeah, working in a bookstore (how could I forget?). (And in case you’re wondering if I’m hitting the big-time as an author, I get about $1 for each copy of Pub Theology sold, and the average new author book sells about 1,000 copies – which I have yet to reach. So if I’m lucky I’ll be able to take my wife out to a nice dinner with my annual cut, but it won’t pay the rent).

I’m hopeful something pans out, but as my resume highlights, I’ve spent the last seven years being a pastor, and I’m not sure many employers know what to do with that.

The argument for bi-vocationalism, as I gather, is that having the pastor have a ‘regular job’ in addition to pastor duties makes him or her ‘more regular,’ it breaks down walls of superiority, it gives natural inroads for relationships in the community, it shows you’re as committed to the community as everyone else, it breaks down the clergy-laity walls, and so on. Those reasons are very compelling to me as I consider this option.

Yet, as I wait for the phone to ring about a job I’ve applied for (even though I’m moving because I’ve accepted a job that can’t yet pay me), I wonder what others have experienced — and whether or not bi-vocational is mandatory for a community to be considered missional.

Carol Howard Merritt reflected on this issue as well at Christian Century recently. She asked, “Should bi-vocational ministry be the new norm?” In that article she ponders:

“As I think about the larger church, I often hear that bivocational ministry will be the reality for pastors entering the ministry. Our economic model is breaking down. It has become more difficult for a church with fifty households to support one pastor. Even when a minister is willing to live frugally, the cost of education and medical benefits keeps getting higher. So, many people jump to bivocational ministry as the answer.

That makes me pause. As someone who has been living in a bivocational reality for a while now, it would be good to have a long discussion about this and ask ourselves some important questions.”

She then asks:

•Are pastors truly nurturing two callings or are we baptizing a shift to part-time ministry? It is one thing to be called to two vocations but it’s another thing to suddenly pay your pastor part-time and expecting her to work bagging groceries on the side.

•Will this shift discourage younger pastors? Most mainline denominations have high expectations of their pastors. Which is good. We go through seminary requirements, ordination examinations, psychological testing, congregational internships, and clinical pastoral education. All of these requirements are costly and they made a lot of sense when people were entering a stable 30-year career with health insurance and pension. Does it still make sense to ask people to go through all of this while telling them that they’ll be lucky to get a part-time job at the end of it?

These are good and important questions.

I wonder:

Could it be that bi-vocational allows certain pastors to feel less guilty because they aren’t such a ‘drain on the budget’ of a smaller community? Definitely.

Could it be that certain people need other outlets for their areas of giftedness, and these other vocations give them deep satisfaction? Yes.

Could it also be that such outlets give them credibility with others? I suppose so, though a pastor ought to have enough credibility for his or her clergy commitments.

I’m not sure we have this with other professions – but then again, perhaps the argument is that we shouldn’t have a professional clergy. But then we ought to change our training model, expectations, and so on. I do think this is happening at some level, but the kind of communities of faith we will have on the other side of such a shift remains to be seen. I’m not sure how many are interested in moving to a completely lay model, where no one has theological or ministry training.

I have seen several friends attempt the bi-vocational path while also planting a church. Neither of these churches exists any more. There could be many reasons, but I suspect that having a leader who is spending at least half of his best hours working at a hardware store may not be the most ideal path. In such a setting is he able to give the best he has to his community, which —especially in its embryonic form— relies upon such a leader/facilitator to get things in motion? I’m sure there are some who can. But should this be the norm?

Another person noted the personal and professional disaster that a bi-vocational approach created for him:

I was bi-vocational for 12 years. Honestly? I would never do it again. The amount of hours I put in to pastor and work a secular job hurt my family and eventually my health. It was part of the cause of going through divorce, and part of the wounds my children suffered thinking their father didn’t have time for them. Even though the wounds of my children have been healed, the loss of a marriage and the loss of health still remain. So, glamorize it as you will, which I did when I was young, but coming on age 50, as I look back, I would absolutely never do it again nor would I think it was the will of God.

I noted in a discussion of this elsewhere

“Bi-vocational sounds great, but I’ve also seen friends (and their communities) struggle mightily b/c their time, energy and focus is pulled in too many directions.

I’m a little concerned that there is this idea that “pastoring is so easy, why don’t you just get a real job? (And be an amazing speaker/planter/counselor/theologian/spiritual mentor/chaplain on top of it).”

I’m all for a flat ecclesiology—we’re all ministers, no hierarchy, the whole nine yards—but there are some challenges when you don’t have someone theologically educated and ministerially prepared, or, having such a person and expecting them to do it for free or for peanuts.”

We like to think that a genuine community can exist where we are all the same. But we are not all the same. We have different gifts, and should use them accordingly. My gift is not carpentry, so it would be silly for me to try to spend time fixing roofs during the week so that I’m not such a drain on the budget. That doesn’t mean there aren’t options where I do have abilities to earn an income outside of the church, and I certainly am willing to explore those.

Someone posted recently seven jobs with full-time pay for part-time work as something pastors should look for. I clicked on the link. The jobs included: veterinarian, acupuncturist, master plumber and physical therapist. Sign me up! Because I obviously became an expert in Eastern medicine, plumbing, and performing surgery on cats while studying church history and homiletics.

My gifts are in relationships, counseling, writing, thinking deeply about theological issues and creatively about ministry, preaching, studying the text in its original context and helping us make sense of it in our own. These kinds of things would surely suffer if I spent half of my working hours bartending or accounting, or something else.

The church my wife and I started in Traverse City was the most missional, organic, non-hierarchical, communally-involved and led group I’ve ever been a part of, and it was my full-time job. We had an office inside a multi-use campus of buildings with a yoga studio, art galleries, coffee shops, cafés, wineries, accountants, environmentalists, filmmakers, bakers, and more. My ‘job’ involved hanging out in this place and rubbing shoulders with these people. In some ways I was the guy people could ‘go talk to’ if they had an issue, or the guy who could do your wedding or on-the-spot counseling, or be there simply to listen. Almost a campus-pastor, if you will, even though those people weren’t paying my salary. Yet my community felt it was missional to have someone like me available and present for our own people and the broader community we were naturally a part of. That felt pretty integrative and missional, and if I’d had to have spent half my time elsewhere earning my living, perhaps would have made less connections – and I’m not sure that that would have given me more credibility or made me more of an insider.

Was our faith community too reliant on me to make such connections? Perhaps. I don’t know. I’m simply exploring the question.

It is true that as a smallish community, we struggled to pay the bills, and I was the biggest expense. But I wonder if we would have been what we were had I divided my time.

I’m willing to be wrong, but I also wonder if its unfair to think that pastors can use all their gifts, maintain a healthy family, healthy relationships, and facilitate a community in which everyone’s gifts are used, worship is communal, and missional involvement in the wider community is expected of everyone » while also making sundaes at Dairy Queen.

Maybe there is such a person. Perhaps I’m about to find out.

—
Bryan is a pastor, writer, and church planter. If you’re interested in learning about his new church in Washington DC, click here:
Roots DC: an urban faith community.

Of Paths and Prairies, Gods and Tears

May 8, 2012 Books, Culture, Economy, Philosophy, Politics, Practices, Readings, Relationships, Theology, Travels Comments are closed

Video created by my new Minnesota friends Tory and Rachel. Reading is an excerpt of Wendell Berry’s “A Native Hill.”

In his interesting book on the collapse of community and the rise of the service industry, The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits, John McKnight begins with a story of a different collapse. The following is an excerpt:

The story begins as the European pioneers crossed the Alleghenies and started to settle the Midwest. The land they found was covered with forests. With great effort they pulled up the trees, pulled up the stumps, and planted their crops in the rich, loamy soil.

When they finally reached the western edge of the place we now call Indiana, the forest stopped and ahead lay a thousand miles of the great grass prairie. The Europeans were puzzled by this new environment. Some even called it the Great Desert. It seemed untillable.

The settlers found that the prairie sod could not be cut with their cast-iron plows, and that the wet earth stuck to their plowshares. Even a team of the best oxen bogged down after a few yards of tugging. The iron plow was a useless tool to farm the prairie soil. The pioneers were stymied for nearly two decades. Their western march was halted and they filled in the eastern regions of the Midwest.

In 1837, a blacksmith in the town of Grand Detour, Illinois, invented a new tool. His name was John Deere, and the tool was a plow made of steel. It was sharp enough to cut through matted grasses and smooth enough to cast off the mud. It was a simple tool, the “sodbuster,” that opened the great prairies to agricultural development.

Sauk County, Wisconsin is named after the Sauk Indians. In 1673, Father Marquette was the first European to lay eyes upon their land. He found a village laid out in regular patterns on a plain beside the Wisconsin River. He called the place Prairie du Sac. The village was surrounded by fields that had provided maize, beans, and squash for the Sauk people for generations reaching back into unrecorded time.

When the European settlers arrived at the Sauk Prairie in 1837, the government forced the native Sauk people west of the Mississippi River. The settlers came with John Deere’s new invention and used the tool to open the area to a new kind of agriculture. They ignored the traditional ways of the Sauk Indians and used their sodbusting tool for planting wheat.

Initially, the soil was generous and the farmers thrived. However, each year the soil lost more of its nurturing power. It was only thirty years after the Europeans arrived with their new technology that the land was depleted. Wheat farming became uneconomical and tens of thousands of farmers left Wisconsin seeking new land with sod to bust.

It took the Europeans and their new technology just one generation to make their homeland into a desert. The Sauk Indians, who knew how to sustain themselves on the Sauk Prairie, were banished to another kind of desert called a reservation. And even they forgot about the techniques and tools that had sustained them on the prairie for generations.

And that is how it was that three deserts were created: Wisconsin, the reservation, and the memories of a people.

A century and a half later, the land of the Sauks is now populated by the children of a second wave of European farmers who learned to replenish the soil through the regenerative powers of dairying, ground-cover crops, and animal manures. These third- and fourth-generation farmers and townspeople do not realize, however, that a new settler is coming soon with an invention as powerful as John Deere’s plow.

The new technology is called “bereavement counseling.” It is a tool forged at the great state university, an innovative technique to meet the needs of those experiencing the death of a loved one, a tool that can “process” the grief of the people who now live on the Prairie of the Sauk.

As one can imagine the final days of the village of the Sauk Indians before the arrival of the settlers with John Deere’s plow, one can also imagine these final days before the arrival of the first bereavement counselor at Prairie du Sac. In these final days, the farmers and the townspeople mourn the death of a mother, brother, son, or friend. The bereaved are joined by neighbors and kin. They meet grief together in lamentation, prayer, and song. They call upon the words of the clergy and surround themselves with community.

It is in these ways that they grieve and then go on with life. Through their mourning they are assured of the bonds between them and renewed in the knowledge that this death is a part of the past and the future of the people on the Prairie of the Sauk. Their grief is common property, an anguish from which the community draws strength and which gives it the courage to move ahead.

Into this prairie community the bereavement counselor arrives with the new grief technology. The counselor calls the intervention a service and assures the prairie folk of its effectiveness and superiority by invoking the name of the great university while displaying a diploma and license.

At first, we can imagine that the local people will be puzzled by the bereavement counselor’s claims. However, the counselor will tell a few of them that the new technique is merely to assist the bereaved’s community at the time of death. To some other prairie folk who are isolated or forgotten, the counselor will offer help in grief processing. These lonely souls will accept the intervention, mistaking the counselor for a friend.

For those who are penniless, the counselor will approach the County Board and advocate the “right to treatment” for these unfortunate souls. This right will be guaranteed by the Board’s decision to reimburse those too poor to pay for counseling services.

There will be others, schooled to believe in the innovative new tools certified by universities and medical centers, who will seek out the bereavement counselor by force of habit. And one of these people will tell a bereaved neighbor who is unschooled that unless his grief is processed by a counselor, he will probably have major psychological problems later in life.

Finally, one day the aged father of a local woman will die. And the next-door neighbor will not drop by because he doesn’t want to interrupt the bereavement counselor. The woman’s kin will stay home because they will have learned that only the bereavement counselor knows how to process grief in the proper way. The local clergy will seek technical assistance from the bereavement counselor to learn the correct form of service to deal with guilt and grief. And the grieving daughter will know that it is the bereavement counselor who really cares for her, because only the bereavement counselor appears when death visits this family on the Prairie of the Sauk.

It will be only one generation between the time the bereavement counselor arrives and the disappearance of the community of mourners. The counselor’s new tool will cut through the social fabric, throwing aside kinship, care, neighborly obligations, and community ways of coming together and going on. Like John Deere’s plow, the tools of bereavement counseling will create a desert where a community once flourished.

And finally, even the bereavement counselor will see the impossibility of restoring hope in clients once they are genuinely alone, with nothing but a service for a consolation. In the inevitable failure of the service, the bereavement counselor will find the desert even in herself.

The professional co-optation of community efforts to invent appropriate techniques for citizens to care in the community has been pervasive. We need to identify the characteristics of those social forms that are resistant to colonization by service technologies while enabling communities to cultivate care. These authentic social forms are characterized by three basic dimensions: They tend to be uncommodified, unmanaged, and uncurricularized.

The tools of the bereavement counselor have made grief into a commodity rather than an opportunity for community. Service technologies convert conditions into commodities, and care into service. [note: this is only one example of a professionalized service industry, and McKnight goes into others in more detail]

How will we learn again to cultivate community? E. F. Schumacher concluded that “the guidance we need. . . can still be found in the traditional wisdom.” Therefore we can return to those who understand how to allow the Sauk Prairie to bloom and sustain a people.

One of their leaders, a chief of the Sauk, was named Blackhawk. After his people were exiled to the land west of the Mississippi and their resistance movement was broken at the Battle of Bad Axe, Blackhawk said of the prairie:

There, we always had plenty; our children never cried from hunger, neither were our people in want. The rapids of our river furnished us with an abundance of excellent fish and the land, being very fertile, never failed to produce good crops of corn, beans, pumpkins, and squash. Here our village stood for more than a hundred years. Our village was healthy and there was no place in the country possessing such advantages, nor hunting grounds better than ours. If a prophet had come to our village in those days and told us that the things were to take place which have since come to pass, none of our people would have believed the prophecy.

But the settlers came with their new tools and the prophecy was fulfilled. One of Blackhawk’s Wintu sisters described the result:

The white people never cared for land or deer or bear. When we kill meat, we eat it all. When we dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don’t chop down trees. We only use dead weed. But the whites plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything.
The tree says, “Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me!” But they chop it down and cut it up.
The spirit of the land hates them. They blast out trees and stir it up to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them. . . They blast rocks and scatter them on the ground. The rock says, “Don’t. You are hurting me!” But the while people pay no attention. When [we] use rocks, we take only little round ones for cooking. . . .
How can the spirit of the earth like the white man? Everywhere they have touched the earth, it is sore.

Blackhawk and his Wintu sister tell us that the land has a Spirit. Their community on the prairie, their ecology, was a people guided by that Spirit.

When John Deere’s people came to the Sauk Prairie, they exorcised the Prairie Spirit in the name of a new god, Technology. Because it was a god of their making, they believed they were gods.

And they made a desert.

There are incredible possibilities if we are willing to fail to be gods.

Common Sense Jesus?

October 25, 2011 Culture, Economy, Entertainment, Politics, Pub Theology, The Text, Theology Comments are closed

Some fun in light of a recent politician’s statement about Jesus:

“For over 2,000 years the world has tried hard to erase the memory of the perfect conservative, and His principles of compassion, caring and common sense.”

What do you think? Did Jesus have an uncommon amount of common sense?

Consider the following from the site Common Sense Jesus:

—
and finally:

What do you think? Was Jesus all about ‘common sense’?

I tend to agree with this blogger:

I’m pretty sure Jesus’s principles were anything but common sense. In fact, in my recollection, they were the complete opposite. The story of the Gospel is Jesus openly challenging the prevailing norms, social structures, and power dynamics of his day and turning them on their heads with a radical message of humility, non-violence, selflessness and faith in the seemingly impossible.

But what do I know? I have been accused of lacking common sense myself.

Post your thoughts below!

What Would Jesus Deconstruct?

April 13, 2011 Culture, Economy, Philosophy, Politics, Pub Theology, Readings, The Text, Theology Comments are closed

Taken from chapter 1 of John D. Caputo’s What Would Jesus Deconstruct:

Posed in the subjunctive, what would Jesus do or deconstruct, the question turns on the structure of the archive, of memory and repetition. How does the New Testament preserve the memory of Jesus? I prescind from all historical-critical questions here, which open up another abyss (about the arche itself). One abyss at a time! I treat the New Testament as an “archive,” a depository of memories, which presents a certain way to be, a certain “poetics” — not a politics or an ethics or a church dogmatics — that I like to call a “poetics of the kingdom,” which lays claim to us and which calls for a transformation into existence.

How are we to translate this soaring poetics into reality? Were this figure of Jesus, who is the centerpiece of this poetics, or theo-poetics, to return today, what would he look like? An illegal immigrant? A child dying of AIDS? A Vatican bureaucrat? And what do we imagine he would expect of us here and now? The question calls for a work of application, interpretation, interpolation, imagination, and self-interrogation, and all that is risky business. To interpret is always a high-wire act, balancing oneself on a line stretched across an abyss and in constant danger of constructing idols of its own imagining. The name of “Jesus” is too often a mirror in which we behold our own image, and it has always been easy to spot the sliver in the eye of the other and miss the two-by-four in our own. The question presupposes the inescapable reality of history and of historical distance, and it asks how that distance can be crossed. Or better, conceding that this distance cannot be crossed, the question resorts to the subjunctive and asks how that irreducible distance could be made creative.

cracked church wall — cracks let the light in

How does our distance from Jesus illuminate what he said and did in a different time and place and under different historical circumstances? And how does Jesus’ distance from us illuminate what we must say and do in the importantly different situation in which we find ourselves today? The task of the church is to submit itself to this question, rather than using it like a club to punish others.

The church, the archive of Jesus, in a very real sense is this question.

It has no other duty and no other privilege than to bear this memory of Jesus and ask itself this question. The church is not the answer. The church is the question, this question, the gathering of people who are called together by the memory of Jesus and who ask this question, who are called together and are put into question by this question, who stand accused, under the call, interrogated and unable to recuse themselves from this question, and who come to understand that there are no easy, ready-made, prepackaged answers.

The early church is a lot like the characters in the hit TV series Lost —the title is appropriate!-– waiting to be “saved,” which is the soteriological significance of that show where everyone is given a new being, a fresh start. At first, the survivors hang around on the beach waiting to get “picked up” (in a cloud, St. Paul said). After a while, they conclude that the rescue is not going to happen anytime soon and so they reluctantly decide to dig in and prepare for the long haul. Hence the existence of the church is provisional – like a long-term substitute teacher – praying for the kingdom, whose coming Jesus announced and which everyone was expecting would come sometime soon.

But this coming was deferred, and the church occupies the space of the “deferral,” of the distance or “difference,” between two comings. (I just said, in case you missed it, the church is a function of différance!) In the meantime, and it is always the meantime for the church, the church is supposed to do the best it can to bring that kingdom about itself, here on earth, in a process of incessant self-renewal or auto-deconstruction, while not setting itself up as a bunch of kings or princes. The church is by definition a call (kletos) for renewal.

That is why the church is “deconstructable,” but the kingdom of God, if there is such a thing, is not. The church is a provisional construction, and whatever is constructed is deconstructible, while the kingdom of God is that in virtue of which the church is deconstructible.

So, if we ask, “What would Jesus deconstruct?” the answer is first and foremost: the church!

For the idea behind the church is to give way to the kingdom, to proclaim and enact and finally disappear into the kingdom that Jesus called for, all the while resisting the temptation of confusing itself with the kingdom. That requires us to clear away the rhetoric and get a clear picture of what “deconstruction” means, of just who “Jesus” is, and of the hermeneutic force of this “would,” and to do so with this aim: to sketch a portrait of an alternative Christianity, one that is as ancient as it is new, one in which the “dangerous memory of Jesus” is still alive – deconstruction being, as I conceive it, a work of memory and imagination, of dangerous memories as well as daring ways to imagine the future, and as such good news for the church.

–Post any thoughts or comments below–

Pub Theology Recap Feb 17

February 18, 2011 Culture, Economy, Politics, Relationships, The Text, Theology Comments are closed

Despite being displaced from our normal spot on the back pew, we had a good evening of conversation last night. Over a dozen people, including a couple of new folks, not least of which was my wife Christy. She made a rare late appearance, bringing sushi no less.

On to the topics:

Is anything really *new*?

progress

change

dualism

explosions

In detail:

1. Is there anything under the sun whereof it might be said, “This is new.”?

2. “Society determines what and how we know, and forms us into the kinds of people we are. Thus as members of society we are never truly free, but instead formed into the sort of people power decides we ought to be.” Fate, Determinism or freedom?

3. What is progress?

4. What is the one thing you’d most like to change about the world?

5. “Religions admittedly appeal, not to conviction as the result of argument, but to belief as demanded by revelation.” Isn’t revelation an argument?

6. The Buddha: “The mind is everything; what you think you become.” Think about that.

7. Does theism necessarily imply dualism?

8. “Religion is most effective where it is least obvious.” Do you agree? If so, why?

9. “Religion is the metaphysics of the masses; by all means let them keep it. Just as they have popular poetry, and the popular wisdom of proverbs, so they must have popular metaphysics too: for mankind absolutely needs an interpretation of life; and this, again, must be suited to popular comprehension.”

10. Scientists discover that the explosion, which, in the Bible signals the divine message, was effectively the visual trace of a terrible catastrophe that destroyed a flourishing alien civilization. Likely?

11. “When was the last time someone questioned you about your faith? Whereas once the question would have been ‘are you a Christian,’ the phraseology is now more often along the lines of ‘would you call yourself a Christian.’

The first is an objective statement of being, an absolute. The second a subjective assessment – you might not call me that, but that’s what I call myself. Perhaps the move from objective to subjective ontology is part of a wider cultural shift…”

______________
Wow. That’s a lotta stuff. Someone was a little over the top in putting this list together.

Given the size of the crowd, we split into a couple of groups, and I was sometimes in on one discussion, sometimes another. Discussion ranged on what does ‘new’ mean, and does technology count as new? Obviously when Ecclesiastes was written and Qoheleth was musing on the endless repetition of the old which gets passed off as new, he probably did not envision someone at a pub in 2011 looking up his writings on their digital communication device in another language. That seems sorta new, or is it merely a repackaging of the old?

For that matter, is technology progress? Can progress be limited to things that seem to happen ‘out there’ in the culture, things in technology development, methods of science or learning… Is progress also related to things that happen to a person spiritually, socially, internally?

And speaking of internal development – are we free to develop and grow as individuals, or are we constantly being shaped by the cultural currents in society, by institutions, by ‘the powers that be’?

There was some talk of the Buddha, but I’m not sure that was fit for print here.

Regarding revelation, we pondered the difference between an argument based on reason, science, logic, etc., and that which comes via the divine or even through someone else or through intuition, what we might call revelation. Is revelation always personal? Does revelation happen en masse? How do you know when to listen when someone says, “God told me”? And what about when we are separated from said revelation by thousands of years and it comes via a canonical tradition which says, ‘This is what God has said.”? It was noted that people tend to be more and more skeptical of that which comes via revelation, we want cold, hard ‘facts’ which can be positively demonstrated. Yet is there more to life than ‘the facts’?

Regarding explosions and flourishing alien civilizations, several stories of the ‘paranormal’ were shared, including an out of body experience and a night-sky sighting that seemed to defy the laws of physics.

Also noted was the possibility of nano-bots running the universe once we hit ‘the singularity’, or of the world ending in a mess of grey goo, of the fact that nano-bots might be the means by which God brings about the new heavens and the new earth, that we ourselves might be more implicated in the final realization of the kingdom of God than we might think.

All in all, a good night, and the Dark Side chocolate stout was not to be missed.

To See and Not to Inquire

February 5, 2011 Culture, Economy, Entertainment, Politics, Relationships Comments are closed

Came across this post today at darkhorse… some raw potency at work here…
–
Mirari non rimari sapientia verum est
To see and not to inquire is true wisdom
–

I see the innocence of a suburban lawn mower, and the progress from pushing to riding, and I see the oil gushing from a hole in a pipe in the Gulf of Mexico, and I see that oil in the stay-cold Big Gulp the suburbanite is drinking as he mows and I see him drinking the oil, or is it Coke or is it corn syrup or is it oil does it matter, and I see a film in which the middle and upper classes eat and drink oil and shit beautiful gourmet meals into immaculate toilets and the rest of the world living in the sewers fighting over the bones and after the rest of the world eats the crumbs under the tables the rest of the worlds’ bones are compacted and crushed and become the next layer of oil or the fertilizer under a suburban lawnscape and by drives the happy sixteen year old on the cell phone so driven so successful so happy this is what everyone would do if they could isn’t it isn’t this what everyone wants why shouldn’t I enjoy it I do my service projects I go to church I am a good person I am nice and there she goes with her cell phone and her hideous grin is the innocence of every corporation licking its chops and innocence always drives consumption cause hey ya gotta eat and this country was never meant to lead we were only meant to develop the systems of satisfaction of efficiency we are proud of our breakfast cereals we are proud of our hard smooth roads we are proud of the effort we make for no return we make effort so the more effort we make the more pointless can be the reprieve, the more intense and stupid and stupefying the violence and I must go mad I would grow my own vegetables but I am too busy with fulfilling an academic resume for an academic status quo that now disappears into the trash can of neoliberal society and everyone buys the social sciences and everything is monetized sorry grandpa we can’t monetize your wisdom you are for the incinerator sorry New Orleans you already enjoyed yourself you accepted poverty that is your cardinal sin you are now punished for your hedonism and decadence we let you die a profound thesis is that there are no natural disasters anymore every disaster is a referendum on our values they only happen to those we don’t care about we don’t care about New Orleans we want it die we want the gulf to go away we only want the engine of work the technocratic machine and I see the confusion of the obese in my neighborhood they are thinking so hard, thinking about oil and guns and transactions, because these are swimming around in their cells, in their cancer, the cancer they are ingesting to become the research specimens of the petrochemical industry that makes the chips that makes the soda that makes the cure for cancer you are what you eat you eat what you are and there is no reprieve the system is itself a cancer that can only follow its own logic profit profit profit but why do you work for that which is not bread you cannot eat profit and profit does not make bread it only makes more profit the apocalypse is long, and excruciating, and slow torture, nothing happens in the blinking of an eye, every day is torture, and they don’t know it on 19^th street but the decorated houses celebrating the prom king and queen will one day be against the law because poverty and happiness are oil and water they can’t mix but oh they can and the secret is we need nothing, we are sources not consumers we are creators not consumers we are suns and stars we explode at every moment with life.

Rain + Crops + X + Food = Joy

February 2, 2011 Culture, Economy, Politics, The Text Comments are closed

“He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” ~Acts 14:17

Paul speaks these words to a crowd that is unfamiliar with the God of Israel. They are worshipers of the Greco-Roman pantheon, confusing he and Barnabas for Zeus and Hermes.

He attempts to correct their confusion not by denouncing Zeus and Hermes, per se, but by pointing to the natural world, and saying, this is all the result of God.

Look about you, says Paul, the valleys and plains are fertile. The rainfall here is fairly abundant. Those large drops of water are gifts from the heavens, bringing life to the verdant earth, which in turn sprouts crops – grains, vegetables, fruit, which in turn fills your bellies as you sit around fires and tables with those you love.

At those meals, as the shining faces of those you love reflect back to you the very joy you yourself feel, the goodness of life assaults you. Your heart is filled with joy.

Paul’s declaration of God to these people is based on the natural world. On the common joyful experience of life shared by all humanity.

Revelation 4:11 puts it this way: “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and for your pleasure they are and were created.”

Perhaps our joy is rooted in God’s joy. God created the world for his pleasure, and invites us to join him in that.

So Paul says: rain comes from God. Rain leads to crops. Crops lead to food. All of this fills our hearts with joy. But how do we get from rain to crops? And how do we get from crops to food? What is missing in this equation?

Work. There are some natural crops that will grow, to be sure, but when the time is taken to consciously plant and tend and harvest – the more fruitful it is for us and others.

And I think it’s understood in what Paul is saying, that work is part of what fills our hearts with joy.

Work and joy? Unfortunately, that is a rare combination today.

When you ask someone what gives them joy, or about what’s great in their lives – too often work is not a part of it. We sort of ‘put up with work’ so that we can then do the other things we really care about. By and large work is not what gives us pleasure.

In today’s economic reality, we have separated work and joy.

Wendell Berry, in an essay entitled “Economy and Pleasure” notes in regard to God’s delight in creation: “This bountiful and lovely thought that all creatures are pleasing to God – and potentially pleasing, therefore, to us – is unthinkable from the point of view of an economy divorced from pleasure, such as the one we have now, which completely discounts the capacity of people to be affectionate toward what they do and what they use and where they live and the other people and creatures with whom they live.”

Yet Berry notes we are not unfamiliar with pleasure:

“It may be argued that our whole society is more devoted to pleasure than any whole society ever was in the past, in the fact that we support a great variety of pleasure industries and that these are thriving as never before. But that would seem only to prove my point. That there can be pleasure industries at all, exploiting our apparently limitless inability to be pleased, can only mean that our economy is divorced from pleasure and that pleasure is gone from our workplaces and our dwelling places.

More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement. More and more, our farms and forests resemble our factories and offices, which in turn more and more resemble prisons – why else should we be so eager to escape them? We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure. We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there either. We turn to the pleasure industries for relief from our defeat, and are again defeated, for the pleasure industries can thrive and grow only upon our dissatisfaction with them.”

And Berry, like Paul, encourages us to turn to the natural world:

“Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world.”

Paul says – this world is filled with evidence of God. And these good things: rain, crops, food, work – these are evidence of God’s kindness – they give God joy, and in turn ought to give us joy.

And where does our dissatisfaction with work lead us?

“As evidence of the fact that we don’t like work,” Berry says, “we have mechanized and automated and computerized our work. But what does this do but divide us ever more from our work and our products – and in the process, from one another and the world?”

Berry concludes: “In the right sort of economy, our pleasure would not be an addition, or by-product or reward, it would be an empowerment of our work and the measure by which we gauge such work. Pleasure, he says, perfects work.”

Part of the problem is that we associate work with “drudgery”, especially hard work. And so we attempt to remove drudgery from our lives, and assume that if things are easier, we will be happier.

Wendell Berry gives a personal example:

“I can say, for example, that the tobacco harvest in my home area involves the hardest work that I have done in any quantity. In most of the years of my life, from early boyhood until now, I have taken part in the tobacco cutting. This work usually occurs at some time between the last part of August and the first part of October. Usually the weather is hot and the work is extremely demanding. Because all of the work still must be done by hand, this event has maintained much of its old character; it is very much the sort of thing the agriculture experts have had in mind when they have talked about freeing people from drudgery.

“That tobacco cutting can be drudgery is obvious. But for me, and I think for most of the men and women who have been my companions in this work, it has not been drudgery. None of us would say that we take pleasure in all of it all of the time, but we do take pleasure in it, and sometimes the pleasure can be intense and clear. Many of my dearest memories come from these times of hardest work.

The tobacco cutting is the most protracted social occasion of our year. Neighbors work together; they are together all day every day for weeks. The quiet of the work is not interrupted by machine noises, and so there is much talk. There is talk involved in the management of the work, speculation about the weather, and there is much laughter. Because of the unrelenting difficulty of the work, everything funny or amusing is relished. And there are memories.

The crew to which I belong is the product of kinships and friendships going far back; my own earliest associations with it occurred over fifty years ago. And so as we work we have before us not only the present crop and the present fields, but other crops and other fields that are remembered. The cutting is a sort of ritual and remembrance. Old stories are retold; the dead and the absent are remembered. Some of the best talk I have ever listened to I have heard during these times, and I am especially moved to think of the care that is sometimes taken to speak well – that is, to speak fittingly – of the dead and the absent. The conversation, one feels, is ancient. Such talk in barns and at row ends must go back without interruption to the first farmers. How long it may continue is now an uneasy question; not much longer perhaps, but we do not know. We only know that while it lasts it can carry us deeply into our shared life and the happiness of farming.”

The happiness of farming. The happiness of work.

Sadly, becoming more and more rare.

And it seems the more and more we’ve come up with processes to mechanize work, the freer we have felt to destroy the world that God created for his pleasure, rather than live in harmony with it. We now can farm tracts of land that would have been incomprehensible without machines, even if the land is not best suited for it, or a loss of topsoil is the result. Or we can strip mine in ways that give little thought to what we are doing to the land, or clear cut forests with little thought to the local culture and economy, shipping the ‘resources’ elsewhere, and leaving a wasteland behind. We use poisons and toxins to make sure the crop is not hindered by insects or disease, forgetting that our “technological fixes” while providing a bumper crop now, undoubtedly involve larger costs later. Technology is not the problem in and of itself. It can be a great good. It is technology without conscience that gets us in trouble.

We need less people to work, because we have replaced them with machines, because we value efficiency over process, because we value the dollar over everything else. And what has this done but force more and more people from rural life into cities, where there is no such work to be found, yet they continue to go under the myth of ‘progress’ and ‘new opportunities.’ The result is higher unemployment, and higher dissatisfaction with life, and a further distancing ourselves from work that gives us pleasure, and so we come up with whole industries to make us feel better about our lives and forget our misery. In other words, things that drug us to continue heading in the same miserable direction without once considering what might be the root cause of our unhappiness.

God has created a world for his pleasure, and invites us to join him in the delight. But when we despise those gifts, when we think we can outsmart God by constant and further industrialization and destruction of the world he has put under our care – and then live for the weekend – I think it seriously hampers our ability to preach a sermon like Paul is preaching in Acts 14.

We must find our pleasure again in God and in the world he delights in and has put under our care. That care requires work.

Perhaps most of us are not farmers, yet we can support local farmers who operate with the above mindset, shopping at local farmers markets, we can participate community-supported agriculture. We can tend our own small gardens and put our hands in the earth. We can get involved in our local watersheds and rivers, helping protect forests and becoming more conscious of how each activity we engage in impacts the people and world around us.

And we can delight in our own work – whatever it is. Work that operates in harmony with the world around us, that respects it and seeks to sustain and delight in it, such work must also bring delight and pleasure to the Creator.

The natural environment is not something simply to be used for our own ends. It is not just something given to us to “grow the economy.”

It is, as Paul reminds us today: a window into the divine, a picture of the wonder of a God who said, and still says of his world today, “It is good. Very good.”

So good, in fact, that he’s decided not to scrap it. Maybe it’s time for us to support that decision.