A short poem. It came out of a question that emerged for me from last night, somehow: what if God was approached by people who want access to heaven and hell to bring love to those they loved in their lifetime here? Enjoy.
Improbable Souls
Angels dart glances on the rare occasion
Where God sits in speechless reflection
On a new request, never uttered by the
Billions before, the seemingly simple request
To have dual citizenship, bilateral passports
Into heaven and hell, for the freedom
To visit friends across the chasms,
As both are missed and loved, dearly
The impossible prayer sent to the Source:
Why should eternal punishments and rewards
Deprive them of a friend’s love?
After all, love asks nothing in return,
Love is kind, love graces without
Requirement of worthiness,
This is the infinite love,
Of which God’s brow in
Wrinkled ironies, acceded,
Greeted with the gratitude of improbable souls
Who would delight in spending time
With loved ones, faithful and fallen alike.
— Jack Ricchiuto is best known across the US and globally for his experience as writer and engagement artisan. His work focuses on teaching people how to work together well and facilitate people working together well in education, organizations and communities. He lives in the Tremont community of urban Cleveland.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Nov 21) — Had a great week this week joining other instigators at the CANA Initiative gathering, which happened here in Washington, DC.
It was a few days of brainstorming over what might come out of a network of networks bringing a range of people together who are ready to dream about, live into and experience a new kind of faith. A collaboration of collaborators—each seeking to make this world a better place—driven by the dreams of the prophets and Jesus and filled with a longing for the kingdom of God.
As Philip Clayton put it, sometimes you have to kick up the dust to see where the wind is blowing. Much dust was kicked up, including vital challenges from Anthony Smith and others on the need to expand the diversity present in the conversation from the outset (see his initial response here).
What in the world is CANA? Glad you asked. Here’s a synopsis that was created to capture some of the ethos:
CANA is a collective of Christian leaders, organizations and networks across the United States who collaborate to embody and act on a courageous, liberating and compassionate faith.
What do we love and what do we hope?
– To follow the movement of the Spirit by seeking reconciliation with God, our neighbors, and the earth; by making a fierce and constant commitment to God’s justice; and by nourishing generous Christian communities that unapologetically proclaim and seek God’s kingdom in their shared life and in the world.
– To connect around a liberating moral vision for America and do more together than we could ever dream alone.
– To participate in God’s reign of love breaking in everywhere and in everyone.
What will we do?
Broadly, we will engage in constructive, collective action. Specifically, we will …
– CONNECT groups and institutions that share common loves and common hopes, gathering a network of networks that embody a positive, progressive, courageous, and compassionate Christian ethos.
– ADVOCATE for this new ethos by engaging in passionate, constructive and civil conversation with the wider public and within broader religious, civic and educational structures.
– NOURISH those who embody this ethos by creating diverse communities of encouragement and accountability; networked structures that are sustainable and expandable; and a sustainable financial base.
– ACT by identifying shared priorities and issues, collaborating across denominations, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and organizational specializations for the sake of the common good.
A few more thoughts from the CANA website:
The CANA Initiative participants share a sense of exploration, creativity, challenge and opportunity in this pivotal and dynamic moment. Because we are rooted in a generous Christian heritage, we are eager to collaborate with people of other faiths, and those seeking the common good. Our networks of dialogue and action thus extend beyond Christian communities to persons of all faiths, as well as to communities that are not themselves faith-based. We welcome allies and allegiances wherever we find common cause.
The CANA Initiative seeks to translate critical thinking about the past and present into creative collective action for the future, and to do so in a spirit that is positive, irenic, sympathetic, and generous. We welcome people from a wide spectrum of theological, political, and ethnic traditions. We encourage a wide range of ecclesial structures. The CANA Initiative sees this diversity as a sign of health and vitality.
Along the way, we were blessed with much poetry from friend Gary Paterson from the United Church of Canada, including this gem from Boris Novak, Croatian poet:
Decisions
by Boris Novak (tr. Dintinjana)
Between two words choose the quieter one.
Between word and silence choose listening.
Between two books choose the dustier one.
Between the earth and the sky choose a bird.
Between two animals choose the one who needs you more.
Between two children choose both.
Between the lesser and the bigger evil choose neither.
Between hope and despair choose hope: it will be harder to bear.
The events began Tuesday evening with dinner in the home of the Dean of the Washington National Cathedral, Gary Hall. He and his wife were delightful hosts as we began to reconnect with familiar faces and quickly met some new ones. Since it was happening in our town, we invited a few house guests to stay with us, coming from places like LA, Denver, Atlanta, Charlotte and elsewhere. Left over wine and desserts were brought to our house Wednesday night as a vibrant after-party kept the good conversations going. It was a rich few days of thinking, collaborating, networking, discovering, and dreaming. Looking forward to seeing where things lead!
— Were you at CANA this week? Would love you to include a line or two of your experience—hopes, dreams, cautions—below.
UPDATE: Here’s one from my partner in crime, Christy: That moment on your life path when you come to a deep level of knowing —knowing you are not alone, but are walking with many others to a similar rhythm that somehow transcends categories, understanding and language. And you want to pause. And listen. And grow into the pulse of it.
So grateful for a few days of stumbling around and processing with all the inspiring initiators of the CANA Initiative!
An excerpt from An Essay On Man by Alexander Pope, 1734:
— Say first, of God above or Man below What can we reason but from what we know? Of man what see we but his station here, From which to reason, or to which refer? Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known, ‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own. He who thro’ vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs, What other planets circle other suns, What varied being peoples every star, May tell why Heav’n has made us as we are: But of this frame, the bearings and the ties, The strong connexions, nice dependencies, Gradations just, has thy pervading soul Look’d thro’; or can a part contains the whole?
Is the great chain that draws all to agree, And drawn supports, upheld by God or thee?
—
On its publication in 1734, An Essay on Man met with great admiration throughout Europe. Voltaire called it “the most beautiful, the most useful, the most sublime didactic poem ever written in any language.” In 1756, Rousseau wrote to Voltaire admiring the poem and saying that it “softens my ills and brings me patience.” Kant was fond of the poem and would recite long passages of the poem to his students. Voltaire later satirized some of Pope’s themes in Candide.
Came across this selection from In Memoriam A.H.H., by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Terrific stuff – if you’ve never read the entire poem – it’s worth it. It was a favorite of Queen Victoria, and considered by many among the greatest poems of the 19th century. Guess it’s poetry week around here.
It is a requiem for the poet’s Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833. Because it was written over a period of 17 years, its meditation on the search for hope after great loss touches upon many of the most important and deeply-felt concerns of Victorian society. It contains some of Tennyson’s most accomplished lyrical work, and is an unusually sustained exercise in lyric verse. It is widely considered to be one of the great poems of the 19th century.
Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; That nothing walks with aimless feet, That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubble to the void, When God has made the pile complete.
Behold, we know not anything, I can but trust that good shall fall. At last –far off– at last, to all, And every winter change to spring The wish, that of the living whole, No life may fail beyond the grave, Derives it not from what we have, The likest God within the soul?
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope And gather dust and chaff, and call, To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.
I came across this poem shortly after our move to Washington, DC. It was written by Pub Theology’s favorite poet, Chuck Trafelet, whose self-published collection of poetry was discovered in our previous home in Traverse City, MI. Fitting for us at a number of levels, including (or especially) the title. Picture me reading this in a house full of boxes on a cold November evening in an unfamiliar city where we’ve just uprooted the entire family, wondering what in the world we’ve done.
It was timely.
Snow falls on a church in our neighborhood, Washington, DC
roots
as evening once again steals across the land
and midwinter cold settles in the bones
here so far from home and friends
beginning a new life – ending the old
bones, why do you pain me so
you know as well as I and better
we cannot turn back now
look to tomorrow bones
look to tomorrow
quiet now, for we can do as well here
and better in time
leave me rest, do not press me so
yesterday is gone
and today fades in the night
look to tomorrow, bones
look to tomorrow
“What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say…”
– Paul Ricouer
“Really?” you might ask.
I think most of us have a hard time believing that. How could anyone make such a statement?
Surely the most important thing is what the author meant to say when he wrote it. I tweeted this quote recently and someone responded in such a fashion. The meaning then is more important than the meaning now. I am inclined to agree. As a student of the New Testament (and the Hebrew Scriptures), and someone who preaches, I spend a lot of time working hard to understand what a text meant when it was originally written, in other words, ‘what the author meant to say’.
My assumption is that the more I can understand the original intention, the better job I’ll do of being true to that text. So from this perspective, what the text originally meant seems to be the most important thing! Upon first glance then, Ricouer, a French philosopher of language, appears clearly wrong.
But here arises the challenge of understanding what the original intent actually was. We don’t always get this exactly right, do we? Someone says something, and we want to know what they intended to mean. In reality, this isn’t always accomplished even in everyday life, in face-to-face conversation. We want to be understood, and get incredibly frustrated when we are not:
Didn’t you say…?
“But I meant to say…”
“You misunderstood me!”
“That’s not what I meant at all.”
One of the worst things possible is being misunderstood.
Yet if it can happen to us today, in face-to-face direct speech acts, how much more might the written word— indirect speech—be misunderstood? And even further, the written word from a different language and culture by an author who is now centuries and even millennia dead.
(Of course this is where, in an act of faith, one might trust that the Holy Spirit will step in and say, “What I meant to say was…”!) But for the purposes of this post, let’s leave that component to the side for the time being. (Invoking the Spirit is necessary, but can often be an easy out in place of the hard work I believe God calls us to do in understanding the text).
Since misunderstandings can (and do!) happen, it seems that our best recourse is to disagree with Ricouer, and assume the original meaning as intended by the author is the most important. After all, why would we spend all the time we do trying to understand this meaning if it were not the case? In fact, it seems such an open and shut case, that perhaps we should be done with it.
But… yet… perhaps…
Importance of the Now
Back to the original provocative statement: “What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say…”
We noted earlier that it seems almost intuitively obvious that this statement is wrong.
Yet I wonder… perhaps there is something to this after all.
I wonder, if our interpretation, our attempts at recovering what the author meant to say and thus declaring what in fact the text said and says, is, in fact, more important. Think of it this way: When a preacher preaches on any given text, and supplies it with meaning —that is the meaning the listeners take away. When a person reads a verse with their morning coffee and senses, “What I just read means [this] to me”—that is the meaning this person is taking away. In this sense, I think Ricouer is right. What the text says now is more important than what the author meant to say. In fact, this has to be the case. Think about it. What the text says now is all we have. The author is dead. The Apostle Paul cannot rise up when we read a selection from 1 Corinthians and say, “But what I meant to say was…!” (Though we surely wish he would!) What we have is our understanding of the text now. What we have is what the preacher interprets the text to mean. What we have is what we ourselves take a text to mean anytime we read the Bible. That is what we have. That is the meaning of the text here and now—and it is that meaning, not the original meaning, that goes on to have impact and live into the world.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that what the author meant to say is irrelevant or unimportant. Hardly! It is crucial. And we must work hard to attempt to recover that meaning in any reading and work of interpreting. But the facts are that we can’t sit down with the writer of Matthew when we open that Gospel and make sure we ‘get it’. It’s impossible. We can’t sit down with The Teacher when we read Ecclesiastes to make sure he was as skeptical as he seems. We can’t dissect a Psalm and have David back up our interpretation.
In that sense—a perfect recovery of what any given author meant (of a text in the Bible or any other text)—is impossible. The meaning we supply to the text is the meaning we have. That’s it! That’s the meaning that lives in the world today. And the meaning that lives in the world at any given moment is the more important meaning—that is the meaning that causes people to act in certain ways, to believe certain things, to commit themselves to a certain path. We simply don’t have the original meaning in full. What the text says now is more important, as Ricouer so daringly ventured.
And this actually squares with a Reformed understanding of preaching. There’s a classic statement that says, “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” (As stated in the Second Helvetic Confession.) I always thought this was a bit presumptuous, and laid too much emphasis on the role of the preacher. Yet, in light of Ricouer’s analysis, I think there is a lot of merit to this approach. When the community gathers, and the Word comes forth, and that Word is explicated, interpreted, delivered: we all have some sense that something sacred is happening, that God is engaging us, indeed, that God is speaking.
Consider Calvin:
“When a man has climbed up into the pulpit… it is [so] that God may speak to us by the mouth of a man.”
Or Luther:
“Tis a right excellent thing, that every honest pastor’s and preacher’s mouth is Christ’s mouth…”
Invisible Readers
Ricouer notes that through writing, “discourse escapes the limits of being face to face. It no longer has a visible auditor. An unknown, invisible reader has become the unprivileged addressee of the discourse.”
In other words, at one time, the text belonged to the writer—he wrote it down, and he shared it with people, and could inevitably correct misunderstandings if they engaged the writing in person. But once the work becomes widespread – such corrections vis a vis a face-to-face encounter with the writer, becomes less and less possible. And once the author dies, impossible. The text will reach readers that were invisible to the author, indeed, readers who did not yet exist.
Merold Westphal says it is this invisibility that gives the text an autonomy, an independence from authorial intention. This is known in interpretive circles as “the death of the author.” The absolute author (the one who knows what he or she meant to say) is not replaced by an absolute reader, but by one whose authority is limited, relative to a particular context, and without the presence of the author.
You and I are such readers when it comes to any ancient text (or even reading Steinbeck or Updike).
But here our interpretive journey takes another turn.
Perhaps the author him- or herself is not in full possession of the meaning of what they have written. Perhaps more is being said than even the author was intending!
Merold Westphal notes that “not even the author is in full possession of the whole that would give fully final and determinate meaning.”
In other words, perhaps what the author intended isn’t the whole of its meaning. (I would say this is particularly the case when it comes to Scripture.)
Nick Wolterstorff gives an example of this possibility of a multiplicity of meanings:
At dinner Mom says, “Only two more days till Christmas.” To her young children, who think that Christmas will never come, her speech act is a word of comfort and hope. But to her husband “she may have said, in a rather arch and allusive way, that he must stop delaying and get his shopping done. One locutionary act [vocal utterance], several illocutionary acts [words of comfort and hope, words of warning, even command], different ones for different addressees.”
Wolterstorff shows how a single utterance can have different meanings for different hearers, and they can each be right!
Merold Westphal notes that as Wolterstorff tells the story, Mom is the godlike author whose words have just the meanings she put into them. They mean different things to different hearers so that the meaning of her discourse is a plurality of different meanings. In godlike sovereignty she knows all the hearers and controls the meaning each receives.
Westphal then proposes:
But suppose they weren’t all at dinner and Mom didn’t know that Dad was in a position to overhear her. Dad would rightly take Mom’s speech act to be one of reminder, warning, and perhaps even command, though that was not the meaning she (intended to) put into her discourse. The meaning of the utterance escapes the horizon of its author and its original, intended audience precisely because of the invisibility of at least one additional audience. This is the situation of human authors in general, says Westphal, biblical or otherwise.
By now you’re incredibly uncomfortable with this analysis. You’re resisting this approach. You’re thinking that preachers and scholars are in an awfully important (and scary) position – because they most often are entrusted with helping us understand the text.
This is true. Yet in a sense we all are in this position, we are the invisible readers, at least those of us who read and engage texts (of any sort), especially the Bible.
But fortunately, there is more to it. We’ll get to this in the next post.
So, the family loaded in the van last week and headed for the hills (literally!) of North Carolina to attend the Wild Goose Festival.
What is the Wild Goose Festival? New friend Milton described it this way:
“The festival [titled after a metaphor for Celtic Christianity] is self-described as one of spirituality, justice, music, and art. People came and camped in the woods and sang and talked and ate and looked for ways to connect. To me it felt like a cross between Woodstock and church youth camp. When I looked out over the field of participants, in most any direction I saw people who didn’t look like “church folks” who were lost in wonder, love, and grace. For these four days, they got to feel understood. “Normal.” None of us was asked to do more than be ourselves and welcome one another.
And it was good.”
Someone else called it: “A Sacred and Safe Space.” I agree. We arrived in Shakori Hills with a loaded up van, drove down a dusty road under a home-made banner with a painted bird figure and the lettering for ‘Wild Goose’.
The welcome booth was a wooden shack with scenes from Where the Wild Things Are painted on it.
We set up our tent right in the center of activity – between a smaller tent venue labeled ‘Return’, and the main stage for the festival. The theme of the festival was “Exile and Return”, so speaking/music event venues were named accordingly: Shadow, Exile, Return, and so on.
We didn’t know what to expect, other than that we loved the concept, and were excited about some of the speakers and musicians slated to be there.
Let me tell you, this was a festival!
From the first talk we attended on Thursday afternoon — Tom Sine on co-living, intentional communities, and sustainability: “It is essential that we help people reimagine new ways to live. We need to discover creative, celebrative, simple ways of life that are more imaginative than the American Dream and cost less money. And we need to do it together, in community” — to the final song by Gungor, “God makes beautiful things, he makes beautiful things out of dust. God makes beautiful things, he makes beautiful things out of us,” we had an incredible time. It was a time to imagine again what God longs for us and our world.
We met people from Pittsburgh, San Francisco, New York, Texas, Atlanta, Illinois, DC, and all over the country who are hungry for a new form of faith.
We heard Phyllis Tickle review the history of the church from Constantine and the fateful Edict of Milan to today, and the impact of the birth control pill on the future of the faith. She noted that it is time to “return to the tent” — in other words, the place of the family and the home, where the stories of faith are told, shared, and lived out before the children and the next generation. We heard Jim Wallis remind us that in the Capital power is the means and power is the ends, but that God’s way is powerlessness. We heard Brian McLaren encourage us to engage those of other faiths while holding to our own with integrity (Pub Theology, anyone?). We heard Dave Andrews, a community organizer from Australia encourage us to seek centered-set communities rather than closed-set communities. He noted: “When we don’t trust the Spirit’s presence and leading, we create [unwittingly] all kinds of programs and plans and so on that actually become manipulative and oppressive.” He reminded us that wherever we are going to serve and work we have to remember that God is already there — in that people we meet already are imbued with the image of God, and the Spirit is there ahead of us. He also reminded that it is not so much we who bring Jesus, but that in fact, as we serve, we find that we are serving Jesus himself.
We heard great music from local artists as well as Over the Rhine, David Crowder, Gungor, Vince Anderson — Joey and the boys danced and played as the music filtered over us.
We wandered around and got to chat with Pete Rollins, Mark Scandrette, Phyllis Tickle, Lisa Sharon-Harper from Sojourners. Had coffee with Brian McLaren and we mused together about our new adventure in Washington DC. It really was as Frank Schaeffer noted in his own recap, Wild Goose Our Answer to Hate, in the Huffington Post:
“The names of the speakers added up to a “draw” along with the big name musical performers. But the heart of the festival wasn’t in the events but in the conversations.
For me the highlight of the festival was the fact that there was no wall of separation between us speakers and performers and everyone there. I spent 4 days talking with lots of people from all over America and other places too, about ideas but also about very personal subjects. I met Ramona who was the cook at the Indian food stand and found she is ill and has no health insurance and I was able to connect her with a friend who knew a friend at the WG fest locally to help her get the full checkup she needs. I could do that because the festival was full of the sort of people who help, love and care so for once there was someone to call.”
The list of great things we experienced is hard for me to completely recall, there were so many things:
» Watched the first public reading of Pete Rollins’ new play before it shows in New York.
Drinking beer and discussing theology » Wild Goose Beer Tent
» Talked with Milton, a local UCC pastor who is teaching people about the importance of meal and eating together, and how all breaking of bread in some way embodies and reflects the meal we gather around as sacrament.
Was it all perfect? No. It was hot! There were ticks. There were a couple of long nights getting the kids to bed. Some sessions didn’t connect like I had hoped. But in all, it did not disappoint.
Those concerns were minor as we heartily sang hymns while sipping pints of local microbrew during a “Beer and Hymns” session, voices rising with verve (out of tune) with the accompaniment of a tattooed keyboardist.
I met Sean, the owner of Fullsteam Brewery in Durham, NC, after a session entitled: “The Theology of Beer,” which noted the importance of creation, place and celebration in a community, and how a good brewery can be at the heart of community life. I shared our own experiences at Right Brain and he thought that was pretty cool.
The kids attended sessions where they made play-doh, created crafts, played games, and learned fun new songs: “I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor—and I don’t like it very much!”
We fell asleep each night, with our tent a stone’s throw from the main stage, to late night concerts and the sounds of celebration and conversation, music and singing.
In all, it was a total blast, and we imagined—as we joined the parade the final day, singing with faces painted, “When the Saints Go Marching In”—that when the Kingdom comes in its fullness, we’ve already had a taste.
Christmas is not just Mr. Pickwick dancing a reel with the old lady at Dingley Dell or Scrooge waking up the next morning a changed man. It is not just the spirit of giving abroad in the land with a white beard and reindeer. It is not just the most famous birthday of them all and not just the annual reaffirmation of Peace on Earth that it is often reduced to so that people of many faiths or no faith can exchange Christmas cards without a qualm.
On the contrary, if you do not hear in the message of Christmas something that must strike some as blasphemy and others as sheer fantasy, the chances are you have not heard the message for what it is. Emmanuel is the message in a nutshell. Emmanuel, which is Hebrew for “God with us.” That’s where the problem lies.
The claim that Christianity makes for Christmas is that at a particular time and place “the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity” came to be with us himself. When Quirinius was governor of Syria, in a town called Bethlehem, a child was born who, beyond the power of anyone to account for, was the high and lofty One made low and helpless. The One whom none can look upon and live is delivered in a stable under the soft, indifferent gaze of cattle. The Father of all mercies puts himself at our mercy. Year after year the ancient tale of what happened is told raw, preposterous, and holy — and year after year the world in some measure stops to listen.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. A dream as old as time. If it is true, it is the chief of all truths. If it is not true, it is of all truths the one that people would most have be true if they could make it so.
Maybe it is that longing to have it be true that is at the bottom even of the whole vast Christmas industry the tons of cards and presents and fancy food, the plastic figures kneeling on the floodlit lawns of poorly attended churches. The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is a worldly language.
Emmanuel. We all must decide for ourselves whether it is true. Certainly the grounds on which to dismiss it are not hard to find. Christmas is commercialism. It is a pain in the neck. It is sentimentality.
It is wishful thinking. The shepherds. The star. The three wise men. Make believe.
Yet it is never as easy to get rid of as all this makes it sound. To dismiss Christmas is for most of us to dismiss part of ourselves. It is to dismiss one of the most fragile yet enduring visions of our own childhood and of the child that continues to exist in all of us. The sense of mystery and wonderment. The sense that on this one day each year two plus two adds up not to four but to a million.
What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us.
Advent is the church’s annual celebration of the silliness (from selig, which is German for “blessed”) of salvation. The whole thing really is a divine lark. God has fudged everything in our favour: without shame or fear we rejoice to behold his appearing. Yes, there is dirt under the divine Deliverer’s fingernails. But no, it isn’t any different from all the other dirt of history. The main thing is, he’s got the package and we’ve got the trust: Lo, he comes with clouds descending. Alleluia, and three cheers.
What we are watching for is a party. And that party is not just down the street making up its mind when to come to us. It is already hiding in our basement, banging on our steam pipes, and laughing its way up our cellar stairs. The unknown day and hour of its finally bursting into the kitchen and roistering its way through the whole house is not dreadful; it is all part of the divine lark of grace.
God is not our mother-in-law, coming to see whether her wedding-present china has been chipped. He is funny Old Uncle with a salami under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. We do indeed need to watch for him; but only because it would be such a pity to miss all the fun.
Say first, of God above or Man below
