Interregnum

To Think Again of Dangerous and Noble Things

2011-12-14T10:45:00.043-06:00

I was in southern Illinois visiting family over Thanksgiving and came upon a huge flock of starlings flying through the November sky. It reminded me of this wonderful poem by Mary Oliver that I want to begin with tonight. The poem is titled “Starlings in Winter” (1):

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

I don’t believe in creation care. (2) This may disqualify me from being a speaker in this series. Another disqualification is that I am not an expert in any of the disciplines related to the natural world, the environment, or ecology. I am not a scientist. Perhaps the only qualification I do have is my concern and the only authority I possess is my passion and conviction. On the other hand, as the prophet Bob Dylan has said “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” So here we go . . .

I don’t believe in creation care. Creation care is too little too late. We are past the time when any of the changes that creation care advocates recommend will make any significant difference in our environmental situation. Recycling, changing light bulbs, riding bicycles, or starting a garden will not be sufficient to address the magnitude of the challenge before us.

I suspect creation care is a moralistic cover for our ongoing complicity in an evil system that is wreaking havoc on this planet. Supporters of creation care are like the people living in the free states in the North before the Civil War. They despised slavery and made eloquent, self-righteous speeches about how cruel and evil it was to enslave another human being. However, they continued to enjoy the cotton, the sugar, and the tobacco that was grown on southern farms and harvested by slave labor. They were embedded in an economic system that required slavery for its continuation and they supported a political compromise that allowed them to publicly despise the evils of slavery while continuing to benefit from its continuation. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said “the sugar tasted good and they did not detect the blood in it.”

I don’t believe in creation care. Creation care doesn’t recognize the depth of the mess we’re in. We are, as psychologist Bill Plotkin has asserted, an adolescent society that has not yet come to grips with what being a mature human being in this world requires. (3) We use more energy to live our lives each day than any society in human history. We sustain an extractive economy that utilizes nonrenewable resources which have taken thousands of years to develop and then expends them in a matter of decades.

Governments and corporations are working together now to do whatever it takes to keep this economic system going. We will drill deeper wells, cut down more trees, fight more wars, and cause more and more environmental chaos. And for what? For economic growth and having more?

Bill McKibben has noted three fundamental challenges to our fixation on growth: first, we are producing more inequality than prosperity, more insecurity than progress; second, we do not have the energy needed to keep producing more at our current rate; and third, more growth and having more isn’t even making us happy. (4)

But we don’t have to monitor the ozone layer, measure melting glaciers, or count species depletion to know the destruction all of this is causing. We carry the environmental crisis in our bodies. We carry it in our bones. We talk about “environmental illness” as if the environment is killing us; but the environment is not our enemy. We are killing ourselves. The problem is not "out there". (5)

I don’t believe in creation care because the creation doesn’t need our care. The planet will survive even if the human species becomes extinct. The natural environment is astonishingly robust and resilient. We are horrified by the strip mined mountains in West Virginia, the land fills in Calumet, or the polluted beaches in Louisiana. We should be angry and we should work on as many fronts as possible to limit and eventually end these violations of the earth. Yes, these things are horrors and we human beings are responsible for them. But nature will eventually flourish again. We get fooled because the natural world works differently than we do. The time of the earth is not human time. Nature is not interested in speed. Because nature is slow we think nature is dumb.

The poet Mary Oliver observes the beauty of a flock of starlings in flight, moving as one creature, mysteriously communicating with one another, moving like a “wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin, over and over again, full of gorgeous life.” She tells us she is confronting her own grief but she does not tell us the reasons for her grief. She does not need to. We each carry our own grief and Oliver respects our grief by not naming hers. But this is not a poem about grief, but rather a poem about overcoming grief, or as Oliver says, “of getting past it.” The starlings inspire her so much that despite her grief she feels as if her feet will leave the ground and she will join them in flight. The starlings “improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing” inspire her to “think again of dangerous and noble things.”

The Bible tells us that God does not ignore the environmental destruction of our civilization. If need be God will enforce the Sabbath rest that God intended from the time of creation. Listen to
Leviticus 26:34-35:

“Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbath years as long as it lies desolate, or you are in the land of your enemies; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbath years. As long as it lies desolate, it shall have the rest it did not have on your Sabbath when you were living on it.”

These verses are about Sabbath. They explain one reason why Israel is in exile. They are in exile because they did not give the land the rest it needed. God sends them away. The land “shall have the rest it did not have . . .when you were living on it.” God enforces Sabbath.

The environmental destruction being waged upon this planet is the result of our neglect of Sabbath. Hebrew religion took Sabbath so seriously they believed God had woven the Sabbath principle into the very grain of the universe. The pinnacle of the seven-day creation story was not the creation of woman and man, but Sabbath - the seventh day. If the people honor the Sabbath and "keep it holy" they and their children will be blessed. If the people will not honor the Sabbath then God will intervene and the land will lie desolate until it finds its rest. “It shall have the rest it did not have.”

Globalization has peaked and is already coming to an end. It is literally running out of fuel. Globalization is a finite process; despite its surface health and the appearance of being a powerful force overcoming all cultural and natural obstacles. Globalization is already coming to an end. The world will either willingly enter into a post-carbon age or we will be forced to do so. The earth “shall have the rest it did not have.”

But clearly globalization still has a lot of fuel left in the tank. The fact that it is a finite process fueled by finite physical and spiritual resources (yes, the demonic principalities and powers are also finite!) does not mean that globalization is not a force to be taken seriously, to be struggled against and resisted with every spiritual weapon at our disposal. Sabbath is one of those weapons.

Globalization is a set of practices contrary to everything that Sabbath demands. We cannot serve globalization and Sabbath. Sabbath is a revolutionary practice contrary to everything that the global economy demands. The work of Sabbath is perhaps the primary form of communal resistance for Christians in the years ahead. But our practice of Sabbath must be broader and more systemic than just taking a regular day off. (6)

I find the principles of creation care being presented by many concerned and responsible Christian people to not go far enough. They do not grasp the seriousness of our situation. They do not address the comprehensive changes that are needed in the material aspects of our lives. They do not reflect the revolutionary potential of Sabbath.

The work of Sabbath will confront the globalization head-on in terms of our energy use. One place I am looking to with hope and encouragement is in the Transition Town movement. Transition Towns is an international grassroots network of communities working towards a post-carbon society. The aim of this movement is to equip local communities for the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil. (7)

The key word for the Transition Town movement is not “creation care” but “energy descent” and the key practice is not “sustainability” but “resilience”. The human use of nonrenewable energy that began its ascent at the time of the Industrial Revolution must not begin to descend. "Energy descent" refers to the continual decline in net energy it takes to support human society. This descent will be a long, bumpy, and perilous journey.

In working toward energy descent the crucial capacity that we need to develop is “resilience”. Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change. Resilience is the capacity of a local community to not break down as the environment around it becomes unstable. Resilience is needed when the way communities have been doing things is forced to change. Resilience is a way of avoiding despair or being paralyzed by the overwhelming challenges ahead.

I do believe there are reasons to be hopeful. A world beyond globalization need not be a barren, apocalyptic nightmare. Christians must once again do the work that Jesus called us to in announcing the kingdom of God. By announcing that kingdom Jesus was challenging us to begin re-imagining the shape of our lives. This is our calling today as well.

What does human life look like, what does Christian community life look like on the other side of peak oil and climate change? Given the certainty that dramatic changes are ahead of us how can we begin to live differently right now? Given the fact that the “land will find its rest” how can we begin to live into this coming Sabbath with the deep conviction that this will not be a lesser life than we have lived; but in fact a better life, a fuller life, a more beautiful life, a more abundant life.

I want to close where I began with another reading of Mary Oliver’s “Starlings in Winter”:

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

And all God’s people said: AMEN.

[This homily was part of an Advent worship service at Reba Place Fellowship, Evanston, Illinois, Tuesday, December 13, 2011]

(1) "Starlings in Winter" by Mary Oliver, from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays. © Beacon Press, 2003.

(2) Although I am not specifically targeting the Evangelical Environmental Network’s emphasis on “creation care” they do represent a good example of the inadequate response I am talking about.

(3) Plotkin actually calls it a “patho-adolescent society”. See Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World, by Bill Plotkin (New World Library, 2007).

(4) Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, by Bill McKibben (St Martin’s Griffin, 2008)

(5) Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge, by Linda Nash (University of California Press, 2007)
(6) A biblical and theological foundation for this work can be found in The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics, by Ched Myers (Church of the Savior, 2002); and The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life, by Ross and Gloria Kinsler (Orbis Books, 1999).
(7) Theologian Timothy Gorringe’s 2011 lecture at the Trinity Institute is an insightful theological analysis of the Transition Towns movement

My Thoughts Are Murder to the State

2011-11-21T12:48:00.006-06:00

On July 4, 1845 Thoreau moved to Walden Pond and remained there for the next two years. The year before he had returned to his family home in Concord, Massachusetts to work in the Thoreau pencil factory. He dreamed of buying or leasing a farm where he could support himself and pursue his writing. In the spring of 1845 his friend Ellery Channing had told Thoreau that he should immediately build a hut for himself somewhere. So he did.

The book that famously resulted from Thoreau’s sojourn in the woods is often interpreted as the eccentric work of an isolated hermit and social misfit. It is true that Thoreau’s solitary life and writing did occupy much of his time. In 1846 he would complete and publish his first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers which described an 1839 hiking trip with his brother Charles. But during Thoreau’s two years at Walden Pond he was also immersed in the abolition movement. By day Thoreau sheltered runaway slaves in his small cabin and at night saw them safely on their way further north.

Soon after his return to Concord the local collector came to garner six years of unpaid taxes. Thoreau was not opposed to the payment of debts, however he looked upon the imposition of a poll tax by a government that supported both slavery and the Mexican-American war to be against his conscience. He refused to pay.

Three weeks after his arrival at Walden Pond (and two weeks after his twenty-eighth birthday) Thoreau was arrested and put in the Concord jail. The legend goes that his mentor and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson arrived to visit him and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” to which Thoreau responded to Emerson, “What are you doing out there?”.

Even though Emerson was also opposed to slavery and to the War he was appalled by Thoreau’s actions. Emerson felt the situation did not demand the extremes of civil disobedience that Thoreau was advocating. Emerson had much more trust in the political process and little sympathy for Thoreau’s anarchism.

However, Emerson was not adverse to the appeal of radical activism. He did not flinch when the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned a copy of the U S Constitution declaring it to be a pro-slavery document. Emerson welcomed prominent abolitionists to his home on a regular basis. And only a few years later he would collect funds to buy rifles for John Brown.

The difference between Emerson and Thoreau at this point in time reflected their differing takes on the nature of the political crisis. Emerson still had hope that slavery could be abolished through due process and without a civil war. Thoreau thought, in agreement with the abolitionists, that the State was hopelessly compromised by its ongoing complicity with evil.

One year after Thoreau’s departure from Walden Pond, while he was immersed in revising Walden, he penned his famous lecture and essay on “Resistance to Civil Government”. It was of course inspired by his time in jail, but also informed by an 1831 poem of Percy Byshe Shelley entitled “The Mask of Anarchy” where Shelley wrote:

Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.

And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there,
Slash, and stab, and maim and hew,
What they like, that let them do.

With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away

Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many — they are few.

Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience that “if a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.” And then a few years later, in 1854 on the eve of publishing Walden. Thoreau wrote in his journal: “My thoughts are murder to the state.”

I think of Thoreau during these days of resistance. As in his day there is diversity among those of us united in our outrage at the injustice, existent evil, and imminent evil all around us. Some of this diversity reflects differing readings of the Bible or differing forms of Christian spirituality that either encourage or discourage public engagement. Some springs from differing dispositions on the efficacy of political activism. Even our small circle of Christians gathered around the concerns of “anarchism” often finds itself at odds about what implications the black flag entails for Christian discipleship.

The abolitionists of Thoreau’s day were one part of a larger reform movement that included activism on women’s suffrage, temperance, animal rights, “free love”, and communalism. The period from 1830-1860 was a yeasty time in American history in which the rise of capitalism, increased immigrant labor, the expansion of western markets, and political gridlock sparked increasing social ferment, unrest and opposition.

As perhaps the most radical of these reform movements, the abolitionists disavowed any appeal to process, appeasement, or compromise. In spite of the need to address many issues of injustice they remained focused on one. Understanding the systemic evil of a national (not just regional) economy based upon slavery, they insisted upon attacking this evil at its core. They asserted that slavery must be abolished. Period. Fugitive slaves must be protected and assisted. Commercial products dependent upon slavery (cotton, tobacco, sugar) must be boycotted. The spread of this virulent practice should be oppposed by any means necessary.

We of course know that the actions and reactions around this issue would eventually culminate in a horrible civil war that would cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and permanently change the direction of United States history.

Some would question whether the systemic injustices of our day equate with those of one hundred and fifty years ago. Others would assert that our dilemma is if anything even more perilous and fraught with danger.

Whether we are committed to a Christian discipleship focused around the individual imitation of the historical Jesus, the missionary call of Matthew 28, the social activism of Luke 4, the communalism of Acts 2, or the apocalyptic hope of Revelation, I believe we must all seek to find the one place, the one issue, the one firm grip we can grasp upon our own responsibility and calling in this time. We have always understood that our spiritual lives are caught up in a divine drama far beyond our own understanding or ability to articulate. What we perhaps have yet to perceive is that our political and social lives are also engaged with a drama (perhaps just as divine) that extends beyond the horizon of any one point of view.

Radical times call for radical commitments. Those commitments must be rooted not just in those times, but (as Thoreau would write) in the “eternities”. And yet, those commitments must connect with our times in ways that are vital and efficacious. Our actions must have bite. Finding the tender spots of the empire may not be as self-evident as it was in Thoreau’s day. But often the reactions of the principalities and powers give some indication of when we are getting close. Christian radicals should never be condemned as the toothless dogs of complacency and cynicism. Eventually we have to show some teeth.

Also published on Jesus Radicals, December 5, 2011

What Did Bonhoeffer See?

2011-10-19T13:17:00.008-05:00

In January, 1935 Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his brother Karl-Friedrick “The restoration of the church will surely come only from a new type of monasticism which has nothing in common with the old but a complete lack of compromise in a life lived in accordance with the Sermon on the Mount in the discipleship of Christ. I think it is time to gather people together to do this...” (A Testament to Freedom: the Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, edited and transl by Geffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson (HarperCollins, 1995), page 42)

This letter was written less than a year after the Barmen Declaration and four months after Adolf Hitler had assumed complete dictatorial control of the German state. It came four years before the beginning of the most devastating war in human history resulting in the deaths of 50-70 million people.

In light of that context Bonhoeffer’s proposal to begin forming a “new type of monasticism” seems like a counsel of despair, withdrawal, and perhaps even irresponsibility. It has been argued that Bonhoeffer later repented of this project and joined the assassination plot against Hitler as a better alternative. I do not want to argue that here.[i] What I do want to investigate is what might have led someone as insightful, brave, and devout as Dietrich Bonhoeffer to turn towards the Sermon on the Mount and the practice of communal discipleship as the appropriate initiative for engaged Christians in a time of global crisis. What did Bonhoeffer see in Jesus’ sermon for such a time as that? What might we still see for such a time as ours?

Bonhoeffer saw in the Sermon on the Mount the resources for responding to the German crisis in at least three ways. First, he saw that the Sermon contained the resources for resistance to National Socialism, German patriotism, and the war. Resistance would be practiced not just in subversive anti-government actions, but also in the formation of a church that could not be seduced by the false promises of blood and soil. Crucial to the practice of cultural resistance was the formation of a Christian people, a confessing church, trained in and practicing the Sermon on the Mount without compromise.

Second, Bonhoeffer saw that the Sermon and the founding of a “new type of monasticism” would lay the foundations for a new social order after the war was over. It did not matter whether Germany won this war or not (and it was clear through Bonhoeffer’s efforts that he hoped for Germany’s defeat); what mattered was establishing centers for renewal where a new type of recovery could begin and a new type of society be established. These were in reality communities of and for the future, not communities trying to preserve or recreate an idyllic past.

Finally, Bonhoeffer saw that the Sermon on the Mount was the key resource for the restoration and renewal of the church and the church’s capacity to recover her voice as God’s people. The Barmen Declaration had unmasked the false religion of the established church for the idolatry that it was. A renewed church where Christians were catechized in the Sermon on the Mount would not look like the mainline churches that had been so susceptible to the appeal of National Socialism. It would be a church founded upon and shaped by Christ alone.

Utilizing Bonhoeffer’s example what might we see in our own time of global crisis? I want to briefly suggest ten things that summarize the Sermon in language that is suggestive for our contemporary situation as radical disciples of Jesus. These may not relate well to you at all, but they have related well to others with whom I have shared them; and they reflect my own continuing attempts to understand the revolutionary potential that the Sermon contains for “a life lived . . . in the discipleship of Christ.”

1. This life is for those who hunger for justice and peacemaking (Matthew 5:6,9)

Bonhoeffer certainly did not see the Sermon as an alternative to justice-seeking and conflict transformation. Although addressed to disciples only, it was not for disciples only. On the contrary, it was by means of a disciplined spiritual formation that a broader justice and peace would be furthered.

2. This life is an oppositional, countercultural way of life (Matthew 5:10-11)

However, the way of peace is not a peaceful way. Clearly, this community will not seek to always stay out of trouble, keep its beliefs to itself, living quietly in the land. It is important that opposition come for the right reasons (“for the sake of justice”), but the absence of outer conflict is not a sign of inner faithfulness – and may in fact indicate just the opposite!

3. This life leads us into public ministry and the social performance of the gospel (Matthew 5:14-16)

The Sermon on the Mount forms a public church. This church does not reside in the public square, nor do public concerns control its agenda. But it does not confine its witness to the byways or out-of-ways, but brings it’s message out to front street where everyone can see and evaluate it.

4. This life is a creative, improvisatory style of life (Matthew 5:21-48)

Jesus contradicts the Mosaic law not to impose an alternative law, but to propose the practice of grace. A life lived by the practice of grace is going to have an unpredictable, nonconforming aspect to it. Many of the central concerns of human society (the rule of law, the sanctity of life, sexual relations, contracts, conflict) are reevaluated and transformed by the way of Christ. It is not a blueprint, but a trajectory – a way, a practice, a discipline.

5. This life draws upon a hidden religiosity, a deep spirit (Matthew 6:1-18)

Just at the time when the outer crises increase our confusion and fear we are called to go deeper, be quieter, and to seek out the hidden way of a spiritual discipline of sharing, fasting, and prayer.

6. This life is sometimes iconoclastic and polarizing (Matthew 6:19-24)

Perhaps the icons of our day are no longer the statues and relics in our places of worship, but the “mammon” that seeks our ultimate allegiance in place of God. The Sermon does not allow for a posture of toleration towards that which would redirect the way of Christ.

7. This life requires boldness, courage, and radical trust (Matthew 6:25-34)

Fear is the enemy of faith and rather than selling fear we should be nurturing faith; doubting our doubts and entrusting ourselves to the God who can still surprise us with the specificity of God’s care.

8. This life demands on-going transformation and growth (Matthew 7:1-6)

And then with enemies all around we are reminded that it’s not about them it’s about us. We are the ones called to change. We are the ones called to repentance. We are the ones God keeps waiting for.

9. This life is an adventurous but challenging way (Matthew 7:7-20)

It will not be boring! You will be called to do things in new ways, never certain of the means, yet never doubting your provision. There will be dangers, mistakes, wrong turns, deceptions, and disappointments along the way. But in the end your faithfulness will “bear fruit”.

10. This life is for the long haul and is sustainable and enduring (Matthew 7:24-27).

This is the most important passage in the entire Sermon. Jesus is not forming a people around a single issue or a common cause or a movement. This is “full catastrophe” living, which can survive any and all crises. No one would embark upon such a journey without a promise like this. We work not for ourselves or even for our children, but for our great grand children. God’s dream is the work of generations.

Perhaps, the Sermon on the Mount and the formation of discipleship communities seeking to live out that Sermon without compromise is still the place for us to begin addressing all the crises that stimulate our addictions, capture our fears, and inflame our anxieties. Perhaps it continues to be the time to “gather people together to do this.”

Also published on Jesus Radicals, October 20, 2011

[i] In a forthcoming book Mennonite theologian Mark Thiessen Nation will argue that based upon a new evaluation of the historical records it seems clear Bonhoeffer was not executed for involvement in the assassination plot against Hitler as has been commonly believed. If true, this will require a substantial rethinking of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought: http://emu.edu/now/podcast/2011/02/23/dietrich-bonhoeffer-the-assassin-challenging-a-myth-recovering-costly-grace-mark-thiessen-nation/

Leave No Trace

2011-09-23T12:05:00.021-05:00

For the past month the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) in northeastern Minnesota has been on fire. A lightning strike started the blaze on August 18th. The Forest Service was anticipating a small, controllable, environmentally beneficial burnoff that wouldn’t pose much threat to either BWCA campers or nearby residents. On September 12th high winds, high temperatures, and low humidity renewed the fire and redirected it to the south and east. It changed from a slow moving, limited fire to a rolling inferno racing sixteen miles in five hours, threatening homes and campers, and creating smoke that could be smelled 500 miles away. The Park Service and the National Guard, with help from slower winds, autumn temperatures and rainfall, are presently helping to keep the fires under control.

There are a multitude of paradoxes in the relationship of human government and our wilderness areas. Neither BWCA nor any of our other National Parks would exist without government intervention. Without federal protection, lumber and mining industries and subsequent housing developers would have devastated BWCA decades ago. On the other hand, people were displaced, livelihoods were lost, and the number of places on this continent where people might still have the option of living off the grid and immersed in the more-than-human world was further reduced. With government permission and permits you and I can visit BWCA for short periods of time. The clear water, the wildlife, and the silence can remind us of what our indigenous ancestors experienced on a daily basis. We care for and preserve these places, but we are no longer allowed to live there. We have protected areas of our country preserved like displays in a museum where we can look but not touch. We have other (also protected) areas of our country where humanity can have our rapacious way. It is an awkward and perverse contract.

Those who regularly visit the National Parks in this country are familiar with the admonition to “leave no trace.” Those who come to vacation in the parks are encouraged to leave the wilderness as they found it – stay on the designated hiking trails (or get a backcountry permit) and “pack out what you pack in”. The federally sponsored Leave No Trace program emerged in the 1990s as part of a developing minimal-impact wilderness ethic that tried to address the dramatic increase in tourism. An emerging environmental consciousness, a rapidly developing wilderness recreation industry, and a spate of adventure publications (Outside magazine began in 1977) created a vigorous capitalistic synergy around all of this. Read magazines and books about outdoor tourism, make short visits to rugged and/or exotic places, and buy expensive gear that makes it possible and enjoyable.

The underlying mechanisms are capitalistic. Those who shop at REI and Patagonia are people who really care about the environment! Environmental historian Jay Turner writes, “Only in the convoluted logic of modern consumer culture did it make sense that those actions in the shopping mall were the best way to save the wilderness beyond.” [i]

When the vacation ends, we leave these “recreation” areas behind and return to the everyday practices of our extractive economy where “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell” and where “leave no trace” rules no longer apply. [ii] The National Park system’s “leave no trace” philosophy aids and abets the dominant market forces. It exposes and reinforces the schizophrenia of our culture’s virgin/whore relationship to nature, where we have federally-protected shrines to limited areas and federally-protected abuse of all the rest. [iii]

There is some truth to conservationist Dan Daggett's accusation that the environmental movement has cooperated with the pretense of this practice by perpetuating a fundamental misunderstanding of the proper role of humans within our ecosystems. Daggett argues that humans belong on this earth too. We are not an alien presence. However, we have neglected our duties as hunters, herders, and gatherers. These human duties are just as important to a healthy ecosystem as the reintroduction of wolves! [iv]

Christian concepts of “stewardship” and “creation care” fail to address this basic cultural psychosis. We are called to be members of bioregional ecosystems not managers. Yet we have constructed an artificial world on top of the natural world. This artificial world must be undone rather than being reformed. A renewed world will begin with a renewed understanding of the rightful place of humans on this earth. We are currently doing ourselves in by depleting the sources of our lives because we misunderstand who we are. The more-than-human world that we have misnamed “wilderness” holds the key to our undoing. It is our undoing that we must seek.

The question always arises that even if this indictment is true how do we begin to address it? Where do we start? Radicals critique mainstream efforts to alter the material conditions of our lives (conservation, recycling, etc) because these efforts do not go far enough. However, changes in the material conditions and circumstances of our lives are necessary and even the smallest of changes are not without significance.

Anarchists critique mass political efforts to create more regulatory legislation and increase federal oversight, while neglecting the need for radical, revolutionary change. However, massive political action is also necessary. Coordinated actions around projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline are crucial, if for no other reason than that we must strengthen our resolve to keep saying no to the destructive trajectory of our time. The corporate and international forces arrayed against us are too powerful to be opposed by only fragmented, decentralized (or disengaged) protests. However, these actions will only provide temporary (though necessary) restraints.

We must go beyond lifestyle changes and political activism to addressing the depth dimensions of civilizational consciousness. We must enact a new way to be human that grasps our immersion in a more-than-human world that can sustain our lives in healthy, vital, and abundant ways. I believe that the anarcho-primitivist challenge to civilization, drawing upon deep ecology and the rewilding of biblical and theological studies, is a rough-around-the-edges, in-your-face confrontation with this need. It is not a sufficient confrontation but it is a necessary one. It is also not a position without contradictions, but there are no positions without contradictions.

As Calvin Luther Martin has argued in his work we must move to the deeper level of faithful imagining regarding the relationship between the human and more-than-human worlds: “Many will respond with that oft heard reply, but we cannot go back to which I respond, but we never left--never left our true, real context, that is. ‘Homo’ is still here on this planet earth, abiding in our most fundamental and necessary nature by its fundamental and necessary terms. We left all of that only, really, in our fevered imagination.” [v]

We must commence individual and communal journeys, which involve the exploration of the "original wildness" [vi] within ourselves. We are trapped in contradiction because we have been colonized by that which oppresses us. This is the key stronghold in our lives. When like Jesus we spend extended periods of time in wilderness places (even federally protected places!) we can still hear the echoes of our primal, God-gifted self; but these voices are sporadic, distant, and fading. Contemporary philosophers like David Abram and wilderness psychologists like Bill Plotkin are providing invaluable models for beginning to undo our domesticated consciousness. Plotkins’s “soulcraft” work (recently recognized by Richard Rohr) is a powerful set of disciplines for counter-imperial disciples seeking to re-establish their proper place in this world. [vii]

Premodern indigenous cultures lived in harmony with their natural environment for centuries. They were active participants in their local ecosystem enacting roles as crucial to its vitality as the ecosystem was crucial to their own survival. But they did not abide there as stewards or managers. They understood their role as members, fellow creatures, living actively but lightly on the land; immersed in a more-than-human world charged with the grandeur of God. They intuitively understood the words of Job when he said “naked came I from my mother’s womb and naked I shall return.” There is no reason we could not do that too. Perhaps this is how God intended it. Perhaps it is what we must do in order to survive.

This was also published on Jesus Radicals, October 2, 2011

[i] James Morton Turner, “From Woodcraft to ‘Leave No Trace’: Wilderness, Consumerism, and Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America” Environmental History, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2002, pp 462–484.

[ii] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The World is Charged With the Grandeur of God”

[iii] The misogynist overtones of this analogy are intentional as views of nature and masculine views of women are closely related.

[iv] Daniel Daggett, Gardeners of Eden: Rediscovering Our Importance To Nature (Thatcher, 2005)

[v] Calvin Luther Martin, In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time (John Hopkins University Press, 1993), p 167
[vi] Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul (New World Library), pp 88-89

[vii] Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (New World Library, 2003)

Christian community at Reba Place

2011-09-17T09:03:00.012-05:00

An address to the

Graduate Christian Fellowship (InterVarsity)
Part of a series entitled "How should we then live?"

Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Friday, February 24, 2006

Introduction

I appreciate this opportunity to come and be with you. I want to thank your leadership team for the invitation and I hope we can use our time well, bring glory to God, and blessing to each other.

I am the lead pastor of Reba Place Church here in Evanston, Illinois. When Hannah extended this invitation to me she mentioned that Reba Place seemed to be a place where we were “very conscientious about living a Jesus-patterned life.” I hope that is true and accurate. It certainly is what we aspire to.

And for us a Jesus-patterned life must be a life lived in community with one another. Remembering my own experience in graduate school, community was one of the deficits I felt most acutely. And so I thought perhaps I could share some thoughts on Christian community as we have experienced it at Reba Place, and then in the discussion time we could talk about how this may or may not apply to your own experience here at Northwestern and elsewhere.

I want to begin by talking about Jesus and community and then describe a bit about the history of Reba Place. Finally I want to suggest some principles that are based upon our own experience, but that might also have applicability in lots of other situations.

Jesus and community

When Jesus began his ministry the first thing he did was gather some people together and form a small community. It was an itinerant group moving from place to place. They lived off the financial support of a few individuals as well as the mercy of those villages and families they visited. It was a community formed around the personality and purposes of Jesus. In many ways we might identify it as an educational community. They were a group of learners (also called disciples) gathered around a teacher (also called a rabbi) and they were being apprenticed into a body of knowledge, with an accompanying set of objectives, disciplines, and skills.

The body of knowledge (also called the gospel) that Jesus was teaching did not just lead to the formation of a community as a byproduct, or a spin-off of what was being taught. Christian community was not an accident. The formation of an intentional community of Christian disciples was central to the gospel Jesus taught. A gospel without a community is only a partial gospel, an incomplete gospel, a brain without a body (sometimes even an embalmed brain!).

The centrality of community is implied in almost all of Jesus’ teaching. The “kingdom of God/heaven” is a social concept. You cannot have a kingdom with one person and God (although you can have a friendship!). The concepts of love, of hospitality, even of forgiveness, are not functional concepts without the reality of a community in which they can be learned and experienced.

Where the Christian life is viewed as an individual spiritual practice in which the belonging to and participating in community is only optional you have a truncated gospel, which (and I want to say this gently but firmly) is no gospel at all.

The gospel of the kingdom, Jesus’ magnificent obsession, is primarily embodied not in a text like the Bible but in a community.

The belief that an individual could not be significant outside the context of community was common in the ancient and medieval world. In Plato’s Apology, to take the most familiar example, Socrates faces the choice between banishment or execution. He chooses death because a life outside the community is something worse than death.

In the New Testament, we read Matthew 18:20 “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” And John 13:35 “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Demonstrating both the intimacy with God in community and the witness of that intimacy to the watching world.

In 1441 the Pope declared that “there is no salvation outside the church” which on the face of it was merely asserting Rome’s claim to primacy over all other Christians. But underneath that bald assertion is a core of truth that all of us should come to embrace. Every individual believer must be part of a visible Christian community in order to be faithful to the gospel of Christ. Or, to say it again in a different way there is no faithfulness to the gospel outside of Christian community.

Now it would take me too far afield to discuss how the belief in a disembodied gospel (a church without community) became dominant, especially in North American Christianity. But it is a fact that many if not most Christians no longer think of active participation in a Christian community as being a necessity for the authentic expression of their faith.

I just counseled with a woman yesterday who stopped attending any church more than two years ago, and yet tried to assure me that indeed she still “had church” by herself in her own home every Sunday morning!

Reba Place and community

Reba Place Church and Reba Place Fellowship are located in the southern part of Evanston, south of Main Street and just west of Chicago Avenue. We are part of the Radical Reformation tradition and more specifically of the Mennonite Church USA.

In case you are not familiar with the Radical Reformation, they were Christians who supported the reforms proposed by Luther and Calvin but also felt they didn’t go far enough. They upheld a simple Bible-based faith and emphasized the importance of discipleship as an expression of one’s salvation in Christ. For the most part they practiced nonviolence and advocated the separation of church and state. As a result of this they were persecuted and harassed from country to country, and in some parts of Europe almost totally extinguished.

The descendants of this tradition, the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren, began migrating to North America in the 1700s and developed farming communities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Kansas. Today Mennonites extend around the world with the largest number being found in Africa.

Reba Place began as a voluntary service project by a group of young Mennonites in the late 1950s. They bought a house on Reba Place Street and inspired by the example of Acts 2, began to share all their possessions. As more people joined and the community grew in numbers they moved into nearby apartments and eventually bought other houses and soon even entire apartment buildings.

In the 1970s Reba Place experienced a charismatic revival that by 1990 had increased our numbers to almost 400. Many lived in extended households where multiple families lived under one roof, participating in daily prayer and meals together, and sharing in the housekeeping and child rearing. In many ways it was a form of lay monasticism.

Reba Place also invested in the local neighborhood and the Evanston community by creating Reba Day Nursery, Evanston’s first homeless shelter and soup kitchen, and a community development corporation.

In the late 1990s Reba Place entered a time of reorganization that led directly to the start of a new church in Rogers Park, and a fellowship of intentional Christian communities across North America. The influence of Reba Place and other intentional Christian communities has not been extensive but it has been significant. The so-called “new monasticism” movement that was featured on a recent cover of Christianity Today (September, 2005) is a contemporary expression of the same impulse toward a concrete, communal expression of the gospel.

We believe the formation of these Christian communities represents a counter-witness to at least three of the central deities (or idols if you will) of contemporary Western civilization: Mars, Mammon, and Me. Mars as the god of war is one of the increasingly prominent idols of our age. Mammon, or money, which is the way we measure our value, worth, and security is another. And Me, or individualism, which both celebrates the fruit of freedom while simultaneously undermining its root is a third.

These idols are powerfully influential in our world today, and they have to some degree even corrupted the church itself. If we are to be obedient to Paul’s admonition in Romans 12 that we “be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds” then we must realize that we cannot accomplish that task as an isolated individual. Not only should we seek community in order to be faithful to the gospel of Jesus, we need community for our own survival and flourishing as human beings.

Spirit-formed community

Forgive me for preaching! But these are not abstract mind-games. The question before us is “how shall we then live?” The implication is that the gospel poses questions to us not only about how we think, but how we structure and negotiate the patterns of our life. We can choose to live in the world on the world’s terms, doing the best we can, and somehow fitting the church into the cracks and crevices that remain; or we can do something different.

Fundamentally it comes down to the task of moral imagination. Are we in fact capable of imaging different ways of living than those we are most familiar with? Do we dare experiment with patterns of existence that are not sanctioned by the status quo, but bear a remarkable similarity to the vision that Jesus lifted up and embodied, and that the New Testament church found compelling enough to die for?

If we were in fact to try and imagine a different way of living what might it look like? What landmarks might point the way for us? What kind of laboratory would we need for these experiments in kingdom living to take place?

I want to suggest a few parameters to you at least as a starting point. Some of them find their basis in sociology and could be common to any faith-based community. Others are more specifically Christian and therefore essential to any community that wants to be conscientious about living a Jesus-patterned life.

Proximity

At Reba Place we have found that living close together is essential for creating community. The members of most churches no longer live within walking distance of the place where they worship, or even a significant number of those they see when they go there. At its worst this separation leads to a sense of isolation and loneliness. People don’t know their neighbors. They feel they have no one to ask for help when they suffer an illness or emergency, or simply want to borrow a cup of sugar.

Living within walking distance of those you worship with increases the opportunities for fellowship and sharing. When you see fellow churchgoers outside the context of Sunday morning you learn new things about them. You move from the pseudo-community of hand shaking to the true community of embrace. When two or three Christians meet even on a street corner, a bus stop, or at a local café or coffee shop, Jesus is there with them.

Mutual Aid

The concept of “mutual aid” sounds like something out of anarchist political theory and indeed it is. But what people like Kropotkin were doing was looking at the example of communal Christian groups (like the Mennonites) and trying to explain what they saw. Mutual aid refers to a manner of living together that resembles that of the early church in Acts 2:44-45 “All who believed were together and had all things in common, they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”

Reba Place has practiced mutual aid as a form of sharing. All community is built upon sharing. Without sharing of all kinds there can’t be community of any kind. But just as the gospel is not a disembodied message concerned only with our immaterial souls, so the Christian community must concern itself with the sharing of material possessions as well as the sharing of prayer requests.

Shared housing is the most widespread form of mutual aid that we have practiced. When my wife was completing her doctoral dissertation at Northwestern we lived in a shared household with another family and two single men. We all took turns with cooking supper for example and then when the meal was over we shared in doing the dishes. On those many nights when my wife would leave to go to the library and I stayed home with two toddlers, I still had other adults to talk with and because of that much of the potential stress and loneliness of that time was relieved. Our marriage and my parenting benefited enormously from this shared living arrangement.

My wife traded childcare with other moms in our community. Three different families would take care of our children during the week and then my wife would take care of all of their children on one other day. [Please note that I am not recommending that particular mathematical ratio!]

There is considerable work involved in living in this way. You have to plan more, discuss more, and continually work at good communication and sensitivity. But these are good things in and of themselves, and to try and structure your life in a way that you are not required to do any of these things seems foolishness. And that brings me to the next principle.

Trust

Community requires a profound level of trust in order to succeed and benefit those that are a part of it. Christian community is not built by merely living together or by sharing material possessions. We are called and invited to the deepest sharing of our selves. When Paul admonished us to weep with those who weep, laugh with those who laugh (Rom 12:15) he is describing the fundamentals of community. Community is woven out of the fabric of shared joy and shared pain. It is built surprisingly enough on sin, confession, and forgiveness. If you do not know anyone closely enough to confess your sins to them, then you do not know anyone closely enough.

Christian community calls us toward maturity. It forces us out of ourselves; it pulls us out of an unhealthy introspection, and into a world of which we are not the center (otherwise known as “reality”). Community subverts the idolatry of the self. This is a good thing. And unless we intentionally structure our lives in ways that push and pull us towards maturity we are far too prone to self-centeredness and the atrophy of the soul.

Now I would contend that all three of these principles are important to all kinds of communities, but none of them in and of themselves nor all three together will identify a community as Christian. What makes a community Christian is the presence of Christ working through the Holy Spirit to the glory of God the Father. There are distinctive theological principles, actually theological realities, that are relevant and essential to healthy Christian community.

Holy Spirit

Community is the work of God. More specifically, Christian community is the work of the Holy Spirit in gathering people around Jesus and empowering them to live their life with him. Christian community is formed by God and sustained by God. Without the empowering of the Holy Spirit Christian community is simply impossible. It is not the ideals, the principles, or the structures that make community work. It is God.

Worship

Because that is the case worship is the foundational practice of Christian community. In worship we are reminded of the source of our being and existence, the author of our salvation, the only one to whom praise and honor are due. True worship saves us from self-righteousness and a holier-than-thou attitude that always seeps in where people start taking Jesus seriously. Worship purges us of idolatry and syncretism that are fatal to the life of communities (see Mars, Mammon, and Me again). Worship becomes the way that we recenter, refocus, and renew our lives together.

Mission

Last but not least there is mission. A community is like a shark it must keep moving in order to stay alive. A community does not exist for itself but for God, and for the purposes of God in the world. When communities start looking inward and sharing anxiety about their existence they begin to die. Communities worshipping the one true God, become aware of the mission of God (the missio dei) and they are called forward and become a part of it.

Conclusion

So I want to challenge you to take the call to Christian community seriously, even as Graduate students here at Northwestern. Are there ways in which the principles of proximity, mutual aid, and trust can be expressed in more powerful ways among you? Does the current structure of your life together promote and nurture these things? Can you imagine your life together being any different than it already is?

And in regards to God how can you look more effectively toward the Holy Spirit to empower your fellowship? Are you as a community worshiping God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength? Do you have a sense of common mission, or are you merely an affiliation of individuals in search of fellowship? Perhaps we can talk about that during our discussion time.

Malcolm in the Middle

2011-08-31T13:08:00.007-05:00

This week marked the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the dedication of the new King Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The Memorial has already garnered a significant share of criticism for its design, its architect, its cost, and its location; and that criticism has come from those who admire Dr. King! There hasn’t been much in the press about those who opposed the Memorial from the beginning, nor about those who still think that King has no place there among such (white) American icons as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. I would rather have the Memorial than not have the Memorial. The problem I have with memorials is not that there are too many of them, but there are not enough – and that they are almost always honoring the wrong people.

It’s about time we had a Memorial in the Capital honoring someone who was not an explicit (Washington or Jefferson) or covert (Lincoln) white racist. It’s about time we had a Memorial in the Capital to someone who did not think that America is the center of the universe and God’s gift to humanity. It is about time we had a Memorial in the Capital to someone who was suspected of being subversive and anti-American and who was assassinated not while attending the theater or out campaigning for re-election, but while planning a march in support of garbage workers. It is about time we had a Memorial in the Capital to someone who was an explicit and unapologetic Christian radical; and it is a sweet irony that that person was the son of former slaves and not the son of former slave-owners.

I share the concern of some that a Memorial to Dr. King will only further mute the radicalism of his message. I share the concern that Dr. King will become an icon rather than an inspiration. However, let’s reflect on the Lincoln Memorial and how one hundred years after Lincoln’s death his partial legacy could still be utilized to stage the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. As long as there is a Memorial to Dr. King on the National Mall there is always the potential for that Memorial to galvanize fresh reinterpretations of King’s message. As long as there are millions visiting that Memorial each year there is always the possibility that a stone of hope may still be carved from a mountain of despair. As long as there is a Memorial to Dr. King I still have hope that a new day might yet come for America.

How will we know when a new day has come for America? For many years many thought that if only a black man could be elected President then a new day would have begun. Well, President Obama is a fine man, and his election was a momentous event in American history; but there has been no new day in America and even if Obama succeeds at getting re-elected for a second term a new day will still not have arrived. President Obama appears in the present to be the harmless American hero that many fear Dr. King might become in the past. Obama’s distancing from Jeremiah Wright during his campaign and from Cornel West during his presidency is perhaps indicative of a widely-shared oversight about the needs of justice in America today. It is the neglect of the crucial complement to Dr. King found in the message and meaning of his contemporary Malcolm X. There will be a new day in America when Malcolm X has a Memorial on the National Mall right next to Dr. King’s.

In the conclusion to his book Martin, Malcolm &America (1991) Dr. James Cone wrote that: “Martin and Malcolm are important because they symbolize two necessary ingredients in the African-American struggle for justice in the United States. We should never pit them against each other. Anyone, therefore, who claims to be for one and not the other does not understand their significance for the black community, for America, and for the world. We need both of them and we need them together. Malcolm keeps Martin from being turned into the harmless American hero. Martin keeps Malcolm from being an ostracized black hero. Both leaders make important contributions to the identity of African-Americans and also, just as importantly, to white Americans and America in general . . . For Malcolm and Martin, for America and the world, and for all who have given their lives for the struggle for justice, let us direct our fight toward one goal – the beloved community of humankind.”[i] (pp 315-316, 318).

Malcolm X has been mythologized in print and film and has therefore become more difficult to perceive and comprehend. Just as Dr. King’s radicalism can be muted by hagiography, Malcolm’s radicalism can be dismissed by fear or prejudice. As Dr. Cone reminds us, we err to think that Malcolm can be forgotten or set to one side. He is part of that rich folk tradition of black outlaws and dissidents who have struggled against the established hierarchies of racist power. In his recent biography of Malcolm, Manning Marable points out that “what these black outlaws all had in common was a cool contempt for the bourgeois status quo, the system of white supremacy and its law and courts. More significantly the tradition of the black outlaw was to transgress the established moral order.” [ii](Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, pp 480-481).

A crucial difference between Martin and Malcolm (and one reason Martin has a Memorial on the Mall and Malcolm never will) is their identification with America and being an American. Manning Marable points out that Dr. King saw himself first and foremost as an American citizen pursuing the civil rights and civic privileges enjoyed by other Americans. Malcolm, writes Manning, “perceived himself first and foremost as a black man, a person of African descent who happened to be a United States citizen.” Manning believes that at the heart of Malcolm’s revolutionary and visionary faith was a politics of radical humanism, which had the potential to become a platform for a new kind of radical, global politics.

Both Martin and Malcolm are essential to the practice of radical Christian faith in America today. Dr. King demonstrated the possibilities of a faith-based movement utilizing the full (though limited) extent of the law to further the demands of justice and freedom. Malcolm X demonstrated the necessity of seeing through the façade of those laws, the pretended impartiality of that justice and the hidden traps within that freedom.

Martin and Malcolm were not saints, but we don’t need saints. Martin and Malcolm were not superheroes, but we don’t need superheroes. Martin and Malcolm were people like you and me. They were young, flawed, committed, and evolving. Their reach exceeded their grasp. Their faith exceeded their circumstances. Their impact exceeded their expectations. Their legacy will exceed that of yours or mine. I’m glad Dr. King has a memorial. I wish Malcolm had one.

“Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the beginning . . . All these were honoured in their generations, and were the glory of their times. There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten.” (Ecclesiasticus, 44:1-2, 7-10 KJV)

This was also published on Jesus Radicals, August 31, 2011

[i] James Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare? Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, (1991), pages 315-316, 318.

[ii] Manning, Marable. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011), pages 480-481.

On Christian Animism

2011-07-23T10:14:00.007-05:00

Animism was practiced before it was “believed in”. Human beings living life immersed in a living world of “other” voices is a universal phenomenon found in every indigenous culture. By “indigenous” please understand that I mean the dominant worldview of the majority of human beings for the majority of our time on this planet. Animism is our native belief.

Sir Edward Tylor, the founder of the “science” of anthropology, was the first to give a formal, academic (and pejorative) definition of “animism”. Tylor defined animism as “an idea of pervading life and will in nature.” Writing in 1871 in his tellingly titled magnum opus Primitive Culture, Tylor asserted that this naïve idea was a childish and underdeveloped stage in human development common only among primitive hunter-gatherers. A century later psychologist Jean Piaget proposed that the ability to distinguish the animate from the inanimate was the inevitable product of education and learning.

The consensus of the great Western intellectual tradition has been that the majority of human beings for the majority of human history have been fundamentally and tragically mistaken about the world in which they lived. It is not a coincidence that the academic disparagement of “animism” as the primitive belief of primitive peoples arose simultaneous with the rise of industrial and technological civilization. Before nature can be bound it must be gagged. The world must be silenced so that only the human voice can be heard; and only the human will can dominate.

In 1997 philosopher David Abram wrote The Spell of the Sensuous, a sophisticated philosophical work that questioned this Western prejudice against animism. Abram drew upon a broad survey of oral, indigenous societies, weaving these insights together with the phenomenological philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Abram’s first book and it’s recent sequel Becoming Animal (2010) should become foundational reading for anyone concerned with life on this planet: human and (in Abram’s wonderful phrase) “more-than-human”.

Abram deconstructs the Western philosophical tradition prior to Descartes (now a standard philosophical whipping boy) back to Plato and Socrates, the wellspring itself. Abram’s insightful conjunction of Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception and embodiment with indigenous stories and myths often labeled “animist” is an eye-opening, ear-opening, sense-awakening tour-de-force. Many who have read it can testify that unlike most books it can actually change the way one experiences the sensual world.

Abram presents a compelling argument that even human understandings of time and space are rooted in our experience of the physical earth. Past, present, and future are literally connected with things “beyond the horizon” and “underneath the ground”. Time and space are not conceptual categories we impose upon the world. We derive them from our experience of living on this planet, moving across its surfaces, experiencing death and decay back into the earth. From this perspective time and space begin to lose their distinctiveness and blur into “time-space” which is not a category or a structure, but a perspective upon life itself.

What Abram does not address in detail is that modern conceptions of time and space arise as part of the industrial-technological project of gagging and binding nature under the domination of humanity. Isaac Newton’s “discovery” (i.e. invention) of absolute time and absolute space was foundational to humanity’s technological dominance and denuding of the more-than-human world. Even western cosmology has had an imperial agenda.

Christianity’s involvement in, support for, and defense of these developments cannot be doubted. One can argue that such a history is not in continuity with the biblical sources or even the divine intention. One can also argue that there have always been dissenting voices in Christian history questioning, protesting, and sometimes resisting these developments. However, the condemnation of Christianity as a willing accomplice in the gagging and binding of the planet cannot be questioned.

To thoroughly hear and be convinced by Abram’s arguments is to become self-conscious of our sensual withdrawal from the world around us. We have created cultural and societal practices (primarily through our use of technology) that reinforce this separation.

The French surrealist writer Rene Daumal wrote that “we must first become human before we can become anything superior.”[i] Abram’s work raises profound questions about our ability to achieve even this basic level of life: becoming human. In the modern world we have in fact become less than human, less than we used to be, less than we were meant to be. Surely, when the Jesus of the Gospel of John (John 10:10) says that he came to bring life and to bring it abundantly he meant something quite different from what we see in our society today. When we gag and bind the more-than-human world we gag and bind ourselves. We gag and bind the God who created all of it.

I am not convinced that “animism” is alien to the biblical tradition. Nor am I convinced that the arguments of David Abram cannot be incorporated into a “Christian animist” perspective. The promise in this perspective is that the more-than-human world would once again enfold the human world; and the human find it's essential place within the more-than-human. The ungagging and unbinding of the more-than-human world would not necessarily be a simpler world. Including more voices is always complicating. But perhaps we are not called to live a simpler life but a more complex life.[ii] Perhaps we are called to live lives that listen and hear once again the more-than-human world, which has never stopped speaking in spite of our self-willed deafness.

One theologian who has been exploring the shape of a new “Christian animism” is Mark Wallace. In two recent books Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature (2005) and Green Christianity (2010), Wallace has begun to outline the biblical and theological ligaments of this perspective. Wallace is trying to rethink the Christian faith as an earth-based religion. Our Christian faith should celebrate the bodily, material world as the place of God’s indwelling and care.

Christian animism is the belief that all of creation is filled with and animated by God’s presence. The animist worldviews of first world peoples may not be fundamentally opposed to classical Christianity. Christian animism affirms God incarnate in human flesh in a “green Jesus” and incarnate in creation by a “carnal Spirit” who indwells both human and more-than-human. Wallace points out that the Bible and the Christian tradition possess rich images and stories about God as an “earthen” being (God in the wind, the water, the fire). And perhaps when the Psalmist proclaims creation as declaring God’s glory and singing God’s praises it is not being metaphorical!

The complementarity of the philosophical work of David Abram and the theological work of Mark Wallace provide the possibility for some new trajectories in radical Christian praxis. Native American writer Charles Eastman (also known as Ohiyesa) wrote in his autobiography The Soul of the Indian (1910) that “Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and that the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.”[iii] Perhaps it is not Christianity and animism that are natural enemies. Perhaps Christianity is the enemy of the civilization that has gagged and bound the voice of God, incarnate and alive within the entire, living, animate, inspirited world that God created.

This was originally published on Jesus Radicals, July 29, 2011

[i] From a letter Daumal wrote to a friend and quoted by Roger Shattuck in the introduction to Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidian Adventures in Mountain Climbing (Penguin, 1974)

[ii] I owe this observation to Wendell Berry. Scott Savage, “Introduction”, The Plain Reader, edited by Scott Savage, New York: Ballantine, 1998, p xxii.

[iii] Page 10 (Dover Publications, 2003)

Gandhi: Master of Suspicion

2011-06-21T10:04:00.012-05:00

A new biography of Gandhi has sparked another cycle of reflection upon the man himself and his legacy.[i] The world’s recurring fascination with Gandhi is almost as fascinating as Gandhi himself. Much of that fascination is a reflection of our inability to stereotype or pigeon hole Gandhi into any of our convenient political or religious classifications. For Christians especially, Gandhi has posed an abiding challenge, welcomed by some and resented by others.

The Methodist missionary to India E Stanley Jones (1884-1973) was one of the first Westerners to reflect upon Gandhi’s significance for followers of Jesus. In fact, it could be argued that the effectiveness of Jones’s mission in India, seeking to separate Jesus from Christianity, would not have been possible without the figure of Gandhi as a prime exemplar. Jones wrote, “I bow to Mahatma Gandhi, but I kneel at the feet of Christ and give him my full and final allegiance. And yet a little man who fought a system in the framework of which I stand, has taught me more of the spirit of Christ than perhaps any other man in East or West.”[ii] Martin Luther King later said that it was Jones’s book on Gandhi that introduced him to the man and to the centrality of nonviolence in Christian discipleship.

Even today Gandhi’s inspiration continues in a variety of forms: whether it is the no-tech/low-tech Possibility Alliance in La Plata, Missouri; the theological animation work of Ched Myers; or the community organizing/ worker’s rights efforts of Alexia Salvatierra and Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE). Even President Obama can claim Gandhi as “a real hero of mine” (although he has never specified in what particular way Gandhi’s example has been relevant for him . . . ).

The controversy over Lelyveld’s book has revolved around his research into Gandhi’s sexual identity, hinting at homosexuality, and documenting racist attitudes during Gandhi’s time in South Africa. Conservative Hindus in India have attacked the book as a slander against Gandhi’s character and have asked for it to be banned.[iii] Ironically, these protests come from the same segment of the Hindu population that was most opposed to Gandhi’s work and witness during his lifetime.[iv]

The controversy only serves to underline Lelyveld’s central thesis, which is not about Gandhi’s psychology, but about Gandhi’s relationship with India itself – which was a mixture of predisposed loyalty, searing criticism, and devoted reform. India has long ago rejected Gandhi’s vision for a decentralized, rural economy, where Hindu, Muslim, and Christian could live together in peace. Gandhi’s colleagues were rarely Gandhi’s disciples and their vision for India took the path of modernization and development, with all the problems thereof. Seventy years after Gandhi’s death a Gandhian critique of Indian society is no less relevant now than it was then.

Given Gandhi’s rich sense of humor I believe he would find the Hindu outrage over this book amusing and perhaps even comical. I would not defend either Gandhi’s practice of bramacharya (voluntary celibacy while married) or his sleeping nude with his young nieces. On the other hand, no one has ever accused Gandhi of adultery; and even within the Bible we have the example of the dying King David sleeping with the virgin Abishag in order to stay warm (1 Kings 1:1-4).

The controversy over this book as a debunking of Gandhi's sanctity is really about the debunking of people's hagiography. Gandhi never claimed sainthood. He saw himself as a seeker after truth. Gandhi was another master of suspicion (like Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx); but a political variant rarely seen. Gandhi suspected that many if not most civilization norms were death dealing deceptions – deadly to social, physical, mental, and spiritual health. His revolt against British colonialism was about much more than Indian independence.

Gandhi was an anarchist. He opposed the State and all of its military, legal, and bureaucratic manifestations. The State was for Gandhi a form of concentrated violence: “The State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence.”[v] For Gandhi, the greatest good could only be realized in a classless, stateless society.

The State’s addiction to violence as a social necessity was one of the norms that Gandhi put into question. But the extent of Gandhi’s critique and his “experiments with truth” extended far beyond the significance of nonviolence. Gandhi confronted issues of caste, diet, communal living, agrarianism, health care, and yes, even sexual expression. When Gandhi set himself as an exemplar it was only as a seeker, an experimenter in the laboratory of life, never as a savior or saint.

I suppose we keep puzzling over Gandhi's life because in many of us there is also an abiding suspicion that he was right about the vacuum at civilization's center and the need for ex-centric modes of life. It was Gandhi's passion for truth and the absence of any fear of being seen as abnormal that makes him continue to both frighten and fascinate us.

For followers of Jesus, Gandhi remains a compelling figure. For all of Gandhi’s insight into empire, he did lack the creational vision that the biblical tradition affords us.[vi] On the other hand, as perhaps the first postcolonial revolutionary, Gandhi still forces those who easily grasp the devastating impact of civilization upon the environment, to also take seriously the political and social structures which must be challenged in order for that impact to be lessened, or even reversed. Few of us are hopeful that a global conversion to a “small is beautiful”/alternative/earth-centered economic worldview is imminent. Certainly the fate of Gandhi’s own vision in India is a discouraging reminder of that.

On the other hand I am always mindful of Gary Snyder’s words many years ago at a symposium at Stanford University. Snyder had just read from his essay Four Changes which concludes “Knowing that nothing need be done is the place from which we begin to move.”

A member of the audience asked Snyder how this could be any kind of answer to environmental devastation. Snyder replied that Nature is eminently capable of caring for herself and doesn’t need humanity to save her. The audience sagged and then someone called out, “Then why work to stop the destruction?” Snyder grinned and leaned forward, replying without hesitation “Because it is a matter of character . . . and it’s a matter of style.”[vii]

As followers of Jesus our discipleship has often lacked not only faithfulness and effectiveness, but also character and style. Gandhi’s model may not attract you, nor his witness seem at all as reminiscent of Jesus as some of us think. If that is the case though, then Gandhi’s challenge to you is the same challenge he always accepted for himself. Do better.

[Originally published June 27, 2011 on Jesus Radicals]

[i] Lelyfield, Joseph. A Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. Knopf, 2011.

[ii] Jones, E Stanley. Mahatma Gandhi: An Interpretation (Abingdon, 1948), p 8.

[iii] “Gujarat govt bans Lelyveld’s book on Gandhi”, Indian Express, March 30, 2011 (http://www.indianexpress.com/news/gujarat-govt-bans-lelyvelds-book-on-gandhi/769242/)

[iv] Gandhi was assassinated by a member of a rightwing Hindu political group.

[v] Jesudasan, Ignatius. A Gandhian Theology of Liberation (Orbis Books, 1984), pp 236-237.

[vi] Howard-Brook, Wes. “Come Out, My People”: God’s Call out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond (Orbis Books, 2011).

[vii] Snyder, Gary. The Gary Snyder Reader (Counterpoint Press, 2000), p xx.

The Art of Not Being Governed

2011-06-17T20:16:00.008-05:00

Once upon a time humanity created the state and pulled themselves up out of the primitive and backward mountains, jungles, and swamps; away from nomadic life, slash and burn agriculture, and gatherer-hunter economies. Cities and nations replaced bands, clans, and tribes. Everyone benefitted. Wise and benevolent kings and legislators led in the creation of “civilization”; saving us all from lives of savage barbarism.

But some resisted or stumbled on in ignorance of the abundance being enjoyed by in other parts of the world. They continued on, enduring nasty, short, and brutish lives, always afraid of the future, and looking back to a mythical past. Even when they didn’t realize it, they were longing for what civilization would one day bring to them.

Like all stories that begin with “once upon a time” this story is a fairy tale. The Fairy Tale of Civilization overlooks the fact that the inhabitants of those first states were usually there unwillingly. It was not at all unusual for them to try and run away. Even the Bible (the Bible!) warns that living in a “state”, under a king, will mean taxation, conscription, forced labor, and for most a condition of servitude that supports the state’s militarism (see 1 Samuel 8:10-18).

James C Scott in his book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia[i], points out that people have always sought to escape from territorial states, creating “zones of refuge” on their periphery. In these refuge zones, on the margins of civilization, people do not live like their pre-civilized ancestors. Mutual exchange and communication with those within the state continues. But as refugees from the state’s hegemony they create ways of life that make it difficult for states to reabsorb or control them. They are less accessible, hard to tax, hard to enslave, and therefore hard to rule.

Scott writes that the agriculture, social structures, and religions of these people should not be seen as “primitive” but “as adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation". They are, in other words, “political adaptations of nonstate peoples to a world of states that are, at once, attractive and threatening." These non-primitive, non-state peoples did not fail to develop a state (the view from a civilizational standpoint); rather, they succeeded in preventing the development of a state!

Effective resistance to state development is intuitively based on an understanding of how states work, and what are the needs of the state. For example, Scott observes that rulers are not interested in Gross National Product but in the "State-Accessible Product". States therefore discourage forms of agriculture that are hard for them to appropriate (e.g. slash and burn methods). States seek resources that are easy to identify, modify, and count (e.g. storage crops like rices and grains). Massive cultivation and storage requires centralized populations and that requires a continual supply of people power, and that requires military conquest and enslavement, and that required the organization of large armies, and so on and on it goes.

State power expands where the topography is most favorable. That is, political control functions more easily where the terrain is flat and the “friction of distance” is least. Political control “runs of out of breath” when the state faces the challenge of distance, altitude, rugged terrain, dispersed populations, or mixed cultivation. Resistance to the state is most effective where populations scatter in remote, inaccessible regions.

Scott’s book focuses on the upland region of Southeast Asia he calls "Zomia" (from a term for "highlander" in the Tibeto-Burman languages). Scott calls this region a “shatter zone”. The term “shatter zone” originated in geology referring to fissured, cracked rocks filled with mineral deposits. After World War II it was used to refer to borderlands, especially those inhabited by refugee populations where people are escaping the pressures of the state or the economies of the state.[ii]

For Scott, these shatter zones are places of resistance to the most destructive aspects of state-making and state-rule. They are found wherever people have been driven to seek refuge in out-of-the-way places. Shatter zones can be found in other regions such as the Caucasus Mountains, the Balkans, West Africa, South America; or, closer to home, in Appalachia and the Great Dismal Swamp along the Virginia-North Carolina border.

Scott’s observations on peasant populations in southeast Asia pose provocative questions to those of us living near the center of empire, in servitude to civilization. In an earlier book Scott described the “arts of resistance” practiced by dominated peoples throughout history (e.g. slaves in the American South) as they enacted a “hidden transcript” which, on the surface, resembled compliance with the state’s demands, but underneath created spaces for dissent, nonconformity, and resistance.[iii]

I believe the “church” (in a form drastically altered from any we are familiar with) could become such a site of resistance; a place where the counter-imperial narrative of Jesus can be enacted in our own everyday dissent, nonconformity, and resistance. However, our geographical proximity to the state should modify our expectations of freedom from the state. Few of us will be able to find refuge in remote areas or live off the grid away from government observation, monitoring, and control. Our “zones of refuge” and “shatter zones” will often be found in dense urban-suburban environments.

Scott warns against the possibility of evading Leviathan, but does believe in the possibility of “taming Leviathan”. Our proximity to state control makes it unlikely that the state will ever “run out of breath” in Scott’s terms. However, there may perhaps be strategies for inducing the state’s shortness of breath - reducing the state's oxygen.

How might we better organize our lives around not being governed? Scott borrows the phrase “not being governed” from some recently published lectures of Michel Foucault.[iv] In those lectures, originally given from 1976-1984, Foucault describes the notion of “counter conduct”. Like many of Foucault’s concepts, “counter conduct” is not easy to represent briefly; but the central idea is that of actions which are not so much resistant to state power, as uncontrolled by state power. Notice the difference. An act of resistance against power may still be explained only by its relationship to the abuse of power that prompted it. An action of “counter conduct” refuses this dialectic altogether. It is an action that according to the state’s rationality would not make any sense. Foucault draws upon Anabaptist history for one set of examples.

Therefore, where we cannot escape the state we can perhaps live lives that decenter the state – we can live outside the story (i.e. the fairy tale) that the state would have us believe. This would require not only a deeper understanding of the nature of state power (where Scott provides us substantial assistance[v]), but also a deeper understanding of the counter conduct discipleship made possible by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This Christian counter conduct would enact the logos of God and confound the logic of the empire.

Communities of Christian counter conduct will need to pray, reflect, and experiment with relevant expressions of our internal exile. Perhaps, under Scott’s tutelage and others, we can begin to reconsider the politics of Jesus as the art of not being governed.

[Originally published June 20, 2011 on Jesus Radicals]

[i] Yale University Press, 2009.

[ii] For a North American example see Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M Shuck-Hall, University of Nebraska, 2009.

[iii] Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Yale, 1992; Richard Horsley edited a volume of utilizing Scott’s work on resistance; see Hidden Transcripts and the Arts of Resistance: Applying the Work of James C Scott to Jesus and Paul, Brill, 2005.

[iv] Security, Territory, and Population: Lectures at the College de France, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

[v] Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale, 1999.

After the Earthquake

2011-03-21T10:25:00.009-05:00

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is believed to have been about a 9.0 on the Richter scale and resulted in the deaths of 60,000-100,000 people. The earthquake and the subsequent tsunami devastated the city of Lisbon and effectively ended Portugal’s economic influence in Europe.

The consequences of the earthquake were not only material and economic but also intellectual and cultural. Fifty years before the earthquake, Leibniz had asserted that despite human evil and suffering this was “the best of all possible worlds.” After the earthquake, Voltaire pointed out that a more powerful refutation to Leibniz’s argument could not have been imagined. There was no logic and certainly no moral lesson in any of this – except to justify Voltaire’s scorn for all philosophers who tried to mute the futility of human hope.

Rousseau, that other great mind of the French Enlightenment, was offended by Voltaire’s easy despair. Although Rousseau did not want to defend Leibniz’s argument he did want to emphasize that the deaths of so many in Lisbon had as much to do with human presumption as divine negligence, impotence, or cruelty.

“It was hardly nature that there brought together twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories,” Rousseau wrote, “If the residents of this large city had been more evenly dispersed and less densely housed, the losses would have been fewer or perhaps none at all. Everyone would have fled at the first shock. But many obstinately remained . . . to expose themselves to additional earth tremors because what they would have had to leave behind was worth more than what they could carry away. How many unfortunates perished in this disaster through the desire to fetch their clothing, papers, or money?”

It is too soon to know the magnitude of the tragedy unfolding in Japan. The earthquake and tsunami alone (equal to that of Lisbon) have resulted in perhaps 10,000 deaths. Adding to that number will be the unknown, slow, invisible deaths that will occur in subsequent years through the impact of nuclear reactors spilling poison into the air. There should be no easy proclamations of divine sovereignty or benevolence after such an event. Living with the horror of all of this is a necessary spiritual discipline appropriate during Lent. “You are dust and to dust you shall return” we intoned only two weeks ago on Ash Wednesday.

But Rousseau’s sober reflection upon Lisbon should not be ignored either. Japan is perhaps a state-of-the-art society for withstanding earthquakes and utilizing nuclear power. The death toll from last year’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti may exceed 230,000; far more deaths from a comparatively much less powerful earthquake. However, it is possible that Japanese deaths resulting from the nuclear spill may in the long run exceed those of the earthquake itself.

The reality of human life on this planet is that we are always living between earthquakes. Voltaire thought the fragility of human civilization was an insult to human dignity and an indictment to any belief in a good God. Rousseau directed his own cynicism towards humanity itself. In his recently published Discourse on Inequality (1754) Rousseau had asserted that the human civilization Voltaire idolized was a trick perpetrated by the powerful on the weak in order to maintain their power. Lisbon had revealed that all of it was built on shaky foundations and all of it could come tumbling down at a moment’s notice. We do not live in an anthropocentric universe Rousseau seemed to say. Earthquakes not only level our cities, but they level our presumptions.

Civilizations have always been built on the presumption that “the earth is humanity’s and the fullness thereof.” The non-human (be it animal, vegetable, or mineral) exists for human benefit, use, and consumption. Any occurrence that would raise questions about that premise (such as global warming, peak oil, or earthquakes) should not be taken seriously. These things (“realities” some cynics call them) may raise questions about the goodness of God, but they do not refute the basic belief in the supremacy of humanity on this planet.

The Bible of course tell us that “the earth is the Lord’s” (Psalm 24) and not our own. Civilization is indeed a trick perpetrated by the human race over all the rest of creation in order to cultivate, maintain, and extend human dominance. However, the trick may be on us.

Earthquakes are dramatic, loud reminders of what occurrences like species depletion, global warming, and peak oil keep saying more quietly: humanity is not the lord of this planet. We are, like every other creature and organism part of a complex, symbiotic relationship; sustained by a planet that is continually shifting, settling, and unsettling underneath all the biotic life on its surface.

The earth is a major character in the Bible where it is seen as a creation of God (Gen 1), a provider of our needs (Psalm 104:14), a messenger of God’s judgment (Amos 4:9), and a victim of human sin (Romans 8:22). When we read the books of revelation and nature together we can conclude that the earth has it’s own story. The earth asks its own questions, presents its own challenges, and arrives at its own conclusions. How differently would we live our lives if we listened to and understood the earth’s story? That story defines the boundaries of all other stories.

In his brief letter to Voltaire, Rousseau suggested that perhaps large cities with dense populations would be one practice humanity should reconsider. But with even greater insight he observed that it was the human addiction to “clothing, paper, and money” that made those cities seem so necessary. Listening to the earth’s story might change not only our view of cities and what cities make possible and require; but it might change our view of the dream of “civilization” that makes cities seem so seductive and necessary to human flourishing.

Jesus taught that a wise person would build their house on rock and not on sand, lest that house be destroyed in a storm (Matt 7:24ff). We can take the truth of Jesus one step further. It is not only the solidity of the foundation that is crucial, but how one builds that house. Earthquakes shake all houses. Those that keep standing have been built with earthquakes in mind. If Jesus had lived on a fault line he might have changed his metaphor to something like: build your house with the knowledge we always live between earthquakes and that the earthquake will have the final word (but one).

[Originally published March 21, 2011 on Jesus Radicals]

Practicing the politics of Jesus

2011-02-18T08:59:00.004-06:00

Book Review

Practicing the Politics of Jesus: The Origin and Significant of John Howard Yoder's Social Ethics (The C Henry Smith Series), by Earl Zimmerman. Cascadia Press, 2007.

One of the challenges in interpreting the work of John Howard Yoder has been placing him in his proper historical, theological, and social location. Yoder's presence and influence in theological reflection have increased dramatically over the last fifteen years although Yoder's peculiar perspectives sometimes leave readers confused about how to interact with his thought.

Zimmerman's Practicing the Politics of Jesus begins to reorient our understanding of Yoder by focusing upon his most influential work (The Politics of Jesus, 1972). In successive chapters Zimmerman lays out the North American Mennonite, European ecumenical, and German theological influences on Yoder's intellectual development. Zimmerman is the first to utilize the extensive collection of Yoder's archival papers and letters as another interpretive key to his work. As a fellow Mennonite, Zimmerman brings the right ear to Yoder's compositions and describes them in a way that contributes to our growing sense of the significance of Yoder's achievement.

Zimmerman begins by placing Yoder's work in it proper historical location as part of a mid-century North American Mennonite conversation about the church and the world. Yoder was a precocious scholar (reminding one of the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer) and Zimmerman notes that he seems to have emerged fully formed with clear convictions that did not substantially change. He demonstrates, especially through Yoder's correspondence with Harold Bender and his interaction with the theology of Guy Hershberger and Lawrence Burkholder, that there is an astonishing truth to this intuition. The tensions revealed in these debates are still current in Mennonite circles today, especially around issues of ecclesiology and the relationship of church and world.

Zimmerman provides an invaluable chapter on the impact of Yoder's European service and study to his developing theology. Not only did post-war Europe stir the embers of Yoder's missional vision, but it performed a crucial role in forcing Yoder to articulate his views in a pluralistic context, where Mennonite dispositions, convictions, and fears were not all absorbing. Zimmerman is especially good in discussing Yoder's ecumenical activities and in describing how his studies in Anabaptist history (represented by his dissertation on sixteenth-century anabaptists) were a way that Yoder actually continued his primary theological interests in a context where the anabaptist vision was not well understood. Zimmerman notes the influence of Oscar Cullman as more determinative of Yoder's views than the work of Karl Barth.

The final two chapters embody Zimmerman's constructive theological work with Yoder, including a valuable ten-point outline of Yoder's views. He also discusses in detail how such contemporary efforts in "just peace" and peace-building (by Eastern Mennonite University and others) incorporate and build upon Yoder's work. I have some questions about this and wonder if the just-peace initiatives modeled by EMU are indeed congruent with Yoder's intentions. However, that is an another argument for another time.

What I most appreciate about this book is Zimmermans' deft attempt to change the flow of Yoderian interpretation. He seems be drawing more parallels with liberation theology, and providing some distance from those more aligned with radical orthodoxy, neo-catholicism, and some strains of evangelicalism (see Craig Carter's Politics of the Cross, 2001). Zimmerman presents a Yoder that does indeed describe a "sectarian" church (non-traditional, non-hierarchical, non-sacramental), but is nevertheless engaged, political, and involved in confronting the powers.

Zimmerman also lifts up one of Yoder's central convictions that the languages of "pluralism/relativism" (as Yoder calls them) are the water we Christians must swim in. We cannot privilege our own "correct" interpretations (either through a bibliocentric, ecclesiocentric, or even fideistic foundationalism) and then require others to play on our turf and according to our grammatical rules. Jesus models for us a servant role that learns how to work in the strange thought worlds of others while still maintaining our core convictions. This involves a willingness to be countercultural and unpopular, while not seeking to be merely contrarian (i.e. the world is not always wrong!). And this discernment about the relationship of church and world is organically linked to the necessary praxis of the peacemaking community that follows Jesus in a violent world.

[This was written over three years ago and published on Amazon.com.]

Anarchism as Spiritual Practice

2011-02-13T07:49:00.005-06:00

“Wake up to reality!”
(1 Corinthians 13:11, Phillips translation).

The fledgling democracy in Egypt may struggle to find its legs; nevertheless it is impossible for most of us to resist the joy and excitement of these events. It awakens us to how easily we succumb to the weight of “reality” where “a little sleep, a little slumber, a little closing of the hands to rest, and poverty (or tyranny) will come upon you like a bandit.” (Proverbs 6:11). That “reality” that seems so fixed and unyielding in our lives may in fact be a fantasy, a projection of our own fears, our own inertia, our own lack of imagination. No matter that that “reality” is stealing our souls, deadening us to our own pain. More often than not, no theft is even necessary. We gladly sell our souls in exchange for the capitalist trinkets and electoral air-fresheners that keep us distracted from the crises and opportunities before us. Egypt woke up. Those protesting in Liberation Square during the past three weeks have shaken themselves and all of us awake again.

A struggle for power? Of course. But first of all a struggle against power: a struggle to shrug off the paternalistic grip of a dominant father, and an effort to affirm their own dignity and integrity as human beings. A political struggle? Of course. But first of all a moral struggle to affirm their agency as human beings imagining and working towards a future of their own choosing. A struggle of the spirit? I say yes. Clearly those Muslims praying in the Square saw no contradiction between their faith and their protest. Clearly those Christians who were protected by those Muslims as they prayed and worshipped saw no tension between their witness and their defiance. Even those Egyptians who prayed with neither group participated with both in occupying a public space that did not exclude any nonviolent participant who wanted to be there. It was a spiritual struggle in that it was a struggle motivated by an abiding human desire to not be dominated by political propaganda, government coercion, or institutionalized terror.

We Christian anarchists sometimes exude an unhealthy cynicism. As anarchists our cynicism is justified. But as Christians we are also creatures of hope. Living in the creative tension of those two equally legitimate dispositions shapes our political discipleship. Anarchism need not be seen as merely political. As practiced by Christians, anarchism can become an essential spiritual practice that not only directs our engagement with the world, but also powerfully forms and develops our own spiritual maturity. How is this so?

The practice of anarchism calls us to the critique of false absolutes. The first commandment is a fundamental Christian anarchist principle: no other gods. But of course other gods are always arising, always being promoted, always holding forth, always shanghaiing new slaves to injustice. We remain constantly aware that even our own Christian anarchist hearts are prone to the worship of false idols and the false worship of the one true God. Anarchism as spiritual practice keeps reminding us of our own potential for self-deception.

The practice of anarchism, more than any other political philosophy, forces us to take responsibility for our own actions. Moses declared “Choose you this day whom YOU will serve.” There is no getting around that necessity. The existential reality of choice is not reserved for a few twentieth-century French philosophers. “Repent” is a prerequisite for the “kingdom” that the Hebrew prophets, John the Baptist, Jesus, and the early church preached about. It is a recognition, an invitation, and a command to keep turning and moving into the right direction - moving into the freedom of God. Because self-deception is a constant trap repentance is a constant necessity. Indeed, repentance becomes the escape hatch to renewed freedom as we leave the seeming determinism of an ill-chosen present and move into the undetermined, still open, and therefore hope-filled future of God. Anarchism as spiritual practice keeps reminding us that there is always something we can do.

The practice of anarchism is a call into recognizable communities, where alliances and coalitions are formed around shared commitments, in-depth dialogue and conversation, and corporate decision-making that keeps our ambitions and projects small, real, and therefore more effective. Anarchism has no room for personal grandiosity or totalizing metanarratives. It is if anything a politics of finitude, but not therefore a politics without vision or even (dare we say it?) ambition. Because it is the most open-ended perspective on politics it is also the most open to hope. Anarchism as spiritual practice keeps reminding us that wherever two or three are gathered God is there as well. And wherever God is there is no telling what might happen!

I will admit that I carry very little expectation that Egypt will become the embodiment of anything that we as Christian anarchists would celebrate. My guess is that the majority of those in Tahrir Square are not only wanting a democratic government, but also a share of the materialistic excess they see elsewhere. Look at India sixty-five years after the Gandhian revolution and you see how little impact Gandhi’s agrarian, anarchist vision has had in the face of global capitalism’s relentless march. Those who question the lasting significance of such a “revolution” have a point.

My point is that that is not the only point. Something else seems to be starting in the Middle East and since I am both a creature of hope and a scavenger for hope I am picking up things that may eventually be cast aside.

We simply don’t know what is possible. It is far too easy for us to adopt an easy cynicism that disparages the longing of others, or absolves us from direct action. Far too easy. It is my prayer that what is taking place in Tunisia and Egypt (and soon perhaps in Algeria and Yemen) will be used by God to stir our hearts and minds and renew our spirits. As long as there is a God there is hope, and as long as there is hope there is something for us to do.

Poet David Whyte concludes his poem “Start Close In” with these words:

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don't follow
someone else's
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don't mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.

Anarchism as spiritual practice calls us to see our political practice not only as the practice of our discipleship, but the avenue for God’s work in our souls. Start close in. Take a small step. Be humble and focused. Who knows what might happen?

[Originally published February 13, 2011 on Jesus Radicals]

The Wild Space of Christian Community

2011-02-13T07:48:00.003-06:00

At the beginning of the twentieth century it was theologian Karl Barth who first raised the question of a domesticated God: a God tamed, confined, and muted by humanity’s drive to control and domination. Only a few years later Europe saw that the progressive domestication of God did not lead to freedom but to the furnace and the gulag – not to the heavenly city of the eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophers, but to the hell of the twentieth century totalitarians.

The church has been just as afraid of an undomesticated, wild God as the world has been. When Moses heard the voice of the Lord in the desert at Sinai and asked for a name he was told, “I will be who I will be” – deal with it! When Jesus tried to talk about the basileos of God he had to reach for verbal and enacted parables because this movement’s exact outlines could never be fully anticipated. When the Holy Spirit came on Pentecost the early church began an unpredictable “wild goose” chase, starting new Jesus-communities everywhere they were led.

Through its institutions, its theology, and its political compromises the church has continually attempted to domesticate this untamable deity. But every once in awhile (think Azusa Street or Montgomery) the gospel escapes into the streets taking at least part of the church with it, and planting new seedlings of the Spirit everywhere it goes.

It is becoming harder and harder to dream an alternative future for our world. Political polarizations, economic integrations, and social fragmentations increase our sense of futility and despair. There is less and less room to maneuver, fewer and fewer opportunities to experiment with new ways of living and being.

We are all born into a circle of community. That first circle may be as small as a mother and child. But we soon enter into other circles: extended family, school, church, work. All of these circles shape and misshape us. They teach us about friendship, loyalty, and love. They teach us about estrangement, betrayal, and anger. As a result we all suffer from “affection deficit disorder” and have trouble forming and maintaining loving commitments. Our affections drift and fade. Our loves are often more compulsive than intentional, more obsessional than faithful.

Christian community should be an alternative community where we learn new ways of living and loving – ways that reshape our selves into the “abundant lifers” that God intended. But rather than bringing us freedom many of our churches and communities only provide alternative forms of domestication. They are not about freeing God’s Spirit within us; but binding, taming, and stifling that Spirit so that the institutional structures will remain settled and unchanged.

We can’t hope to change this situation easily or without some long-term effort. At best we can hope for “little moves against destructiveness” where we can create some “interstitial distance” from the state.

Sallie McFague originally and Emmanuel Katongole more recently have talked about the importance of “wild spaces”. Rather than focusing on participation in the halls of political power (be it governmental or denominational), or evangelism among the corporate and academic elite, the church should focus on becoming a “wild space” on the margins of the dominant culture.   In these wild spaces we could develop the skills to live lives that don’t fit societal stereotypes or conventions. It is the place where we can question social norms and imagine new alternatives. The church must find the “rifts” in contemporary culture where they can reinhabit a new way of being human on this earth.

McFague wrote: “If you are [a] poor Hispanic lesbian, your world will not fit into the conventional Western one. It will overlap somewhat (you may be educated and able-bodied), but there will be a large crescent that will be outside. That is your wild space; it is the space that will allow—and encourage—you to think differently, to imagine alternative ways of living. It will not only give you problems, but possibilities."

Hiking in Wyoming a few years ago I was continually amazed and awed at it’s natural beauty. It was a wild beauty - most beautiful where it was most untouched by human hands. A wild space is not a disorderly space, but a differently ordered space. It is an order that may look like disorder to those who are overly domesticated and tamed. Wild spaces encourage, allow, and empower us to imagine alternative ways of living. Without wild spaces we are doomed to a deeper domestication, perpetually constrained by the circles that misshaped us in the first place. Wild spaces are where we are free to be different, to experiment, to imagine, to risk, to dare, to dream, to play.

Christian community must become a wild space for the Spirit if we are to have any hope of faithful witness in the world today.   Christian community must become a place where we can resist and reshape our lives according to the freedom we have in Christ (Gal 2:4) – a place where we are being reshaped into the transformed nonconformists and creative extremists that Dr. Martin Luther King used to preach about.

This will primarily be a work of the Christian imagination. Our imaginations have also been shaped and misshaped. They have been domesticated, tamed, and disordered. We find it easier to imagine an alternative universe on a planet millions of light years away, than we do to imagine a different world right here on planet earth. If we are to reorder that domesticated imagination then the practice of worship may be the place for us to start.

John Roth wrote that “How we live is always an expression of what we worship. Ethics is an extension of worship.”   If that is true (and I think that it is) then worship becomes a foundational practice for establishing a wild space in which the Christian imagination can root and flourish.

In Christian worship we reorder our imaginations in accordance with the alternative future of Jesus through the telling of foundational stories about an alternative community no longer living according to the domestication of the world, the flesh, and the devil, but “being transformed by the renewal of our minds” (Rom 12:2).

Christian communities should be wild spaces where we are free to imagine new undomesticated ways of living out our faith: worshiping, singing, dancing, playing, working, loving in ways that to the world may look "uncivilized" and perhaps even "wild”; and yet are true expressions of our freedom in Christ and our liberation in the Holy Spirit. “If the Son sets you free, then you are free indeed.” (John 8:36).

[Originally published February 1, 2011 at Jesus Radicals]

The Things That Make For Peace

2011-02-13T07:42:00.004-06:00

Joy to the world the Lord has come, let earth receive her king!

This is the season in which we celebrate the coming of the rebel King of Bethlehem. The one sent in the words of his mother to “bring down rulers from their thrones and to lift up the humble.”

During Advent we read passages from the Hebrew prophets that remind us of the alternative future of peace awaiting the people of this earth. But it is a future we can speak of only in symbols, metaphors, and parables.   It is a future too big for our words. It is a future too big for our imaginations. It is a future too big for our faith.

But how will we ever get there? Where is the path away from the graveyards of the past? Where is the path through the maze of the present? Where is the path that will bring us into that clearing where the light of God shines unhindered and we flourish in its radiance fulfilling that ancient word of Irenaeus who said, “the glory of God is humanity – fully alive!”

Our initial response to that question is “We do not know.” We admit that in light of our finitude, our confusion, and perhaps even our shame, we simply to do not know how to get there.

Jesus recognizes us in our ignorance. Jesus sees us in our blindness.

I read to you from Luke chapter 19 beginning at verse 41:

    As [Jesus] came near and saw the city [of Jerusalem], he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. . . you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.”

In Luke 19 Jesus is coming into Jerusalem for the beginning of his final week. As he stares at the city from a distance his tears begin to flow.   Why does Jesus weep? Luke tells us that there is only one reason why Jesus weeps: because they did not “recognize on this day the things that make for peace”.

Notice the word “recognize” which is used twice in these four verses.   To recognize is to see something clearly and to be able to acknowledge what or who it is. To recognize is to understand its significance or importance and be able to respond appropriately.

Jesus weeps because they did not recognize that on this day the way of peace, the path to that alternative future, was being made clear to them. Jesus weeps because they did not recognize “the time of [their] visitation from God.”

The way of peace revealed in Jesus brings victory over all that oppresses us. It is the peace that awakens us to all God’s promises. It is the peace of those already living in resurrection power, even before death speaks its final word.

But this is not an easy peace. There are no pain free alternatives in this fallen world. We do not have a choice between the easy or the hard way, the way with pain or the way without pain. No, the way of peace is not an easy way. The way of peace is not without its own conflict, its own struggles, its own discouragements, and even its own dead ends.

Jesus himself models this hard peace.   In the way that Jesus interacts with the other, in the way that he practices radical hospitality, in the way that he transgresses the social codes of purity and insults the pretensions of piety and false righteousness we see some of the strange things that make for peace. And because it is a hard and a strange peace it is just as hard for us to understand as it was for those in the time of Jesus.

The war maker and the peacemaker have always agreed that the way of peace is not always a peaceful way. There is opposition. As Jesus enters into the Jerusalem he not only encounters opposition, but he provokes opposition. He encounters others in Jerusalem concerned for peace, but their peace is not his peace.

The Roman Empire had its own brand of peace, the oppressive Pax Romana. The Pharisees and the Sadducees sought peace through collaboration and compromise. The Essenes sought peace through an off-the-grid piety. The Zealots sought peace by violent revolution.

The way of peace revealed in Jesus was distinct from all of these. The contempt of Jesus for Roman rule was made evident by his disregard for Roman taxation and his disrespect for Roman law. Jesus used some of his strongest language to condemn the false peace offered by the Pharisees and Sadducees. Jesus never mentions the Essenes, and yet we see Jesus living a way of peace that is public and confrontational. Jesus recruited disciples from the Zealots and taught them a revolution without violence.

No wonder Jerusalem had such a hard time recognizing the way of peace!

Our own continuing blindness to the way of peace is apparent all around us. We who claim to follow Jesus seem no more knowledgeable than anyone else. We who gather at Christmas to sing “Peace on earth and good will to all people” sing it with no insider knowledge.

Does Jesus still weep?

The way of Jesus is a way of peace that does not make an easy privatized pact with the ruling empires (political or financial). It is a way of peace that does not collaborate for the sake of our own privilege and protection. It is a way of peace that does not withdraw from the naked public square, but actually has the courage, the faith, even the audacity perhaps to be naked in the public square. It is a way of peace that does not turn to a desperate violence. The devil doesn’t care who rules the world as long as they rule with the devil’s playthings and in the devil’s way.

Art Gish, a veteran with Christian Peacemaker Teams, served in Hebron for many years until his recent death at age 70. Art and his teammates would position themselves around Palestinian homes threatened for destruction, standing in front of bulldozers defying the orders of soldiers to withdraw lest they be arrested or shot. When asked his strategy for Christian peacemaking Art replied, “It’s very simple. We look where the trouble is and then go and put ourselves in the middle of it.”

What would it mean for the church to become a community of blessed troublemakers? What would it mean for the church to declare as its mission: “we look for trouble and put ourselves in the middle of it?”

Now the skeptical might say, “Well, things did not end so well for Jesus in Jerusalem did they? At the end of that week of alternative peacemaking Jesus wound up crucified, dead and buried. In what way then is this a realistic path to peace?” The threat of crucifixion doesn’t exactly motivate or inspire. And this of course puts the question right where it belongs.

Do we really believe in the resurrection? If the resurrection is only a symbol of the new being then to hell with it. A symbol is not worth dying for. But if the resurrection is the earthshaking testimony that the way of Jesus will not be defeated by any power as finite as death and that God is the ultimate peacemaker, then we have something to even be joyful about.

Hebrews 12 tells us “for the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross”. It is for the joy set before us that we walk this Jesus way of peace. It is for the joy set before us that we form communities of solidarity and resistance. It is for the joy set before us that we offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, no longer conforming to this present world, but being transformed by the renewing of our minds. It is for the joy set before us that we live out the way of peace in our relationships each and every day, sustained by God’s Spirit, loving as Christ loved, seeking God’s glory in all that we do.

The Catholic activist Ammon Hennacy was arrested at a protest for “disturbing the peace.” “I didn’t come here to disturb the peace,” Hennacy complained, “I came here to disturb the war.”

This Christmas let’s be the disturbers of the wars around us. Let’s be the blessed troublemakers. Let’s recognize the time of God’s visitation. Let’s practice resurrection and walk in the ways of peace.

This Christmas let’s honor the birth of the rebel king of Bethlehem.

Joy to the World, the Lord is come. Let earth receive her king!

[Originally published December 16, 2010 at Jesus Radicals]

Stay Together, Learn the Flowers, Go Light

2011-01-24T20:57:00.006-06:00

The Etiquette of Freedom. Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison. Edited by Paul Ebenkamp. San Francisco: Counterpoint, 2010; (130, xii).

DVD “The Practice of the Wild”, Directed by John J Healey; San Simeon Films, 2010.

If Gary Snyder is not yet an elder and guide for the readers of ERB he should be. A new DVD “The Practice of the Wild” and the accompanying book The Etiquette of Freedom provide an ideal introduction for those as yet unacquainted with the work of this significant American author. In this documentary Snyder, still physically and intellectually vigorous in his eighties, comes across as the same engaging and insightful personality that his readers have met in his poems and essays these past fifty years.

Snyder grew up in the Pacific northwest (born in 1930) immersed in the natural world that shaped his personality and vision. He learned from his leftist, politically active mother that society was a mess. But Snyder wanted something more than a life of protest and organizing. It seems he was initially attracted to Native American culture as a repository for a lost human wisdom that might address society’s ills. But a short stint at Reed College studying anthropology and an even briefer time at Indiana University studying linguistics convinced him that Buddhism was the path he was looking for. East Asian history revealed at least the possibility of “being highly civilized and still respecting the nonhuman” (p 29).

Snyder emerged on the public scene during the same period as the intellectual core of the Beat generation: Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. The Beats were the shadow side of the complacent Eisenhower era in the States, providing the first seismic indicators of what would become the wider and more intense tremors and shocks of the 1960s. Some say that the Beats have little enduring social significance except as a cultural and literary phenomenon. What were they actually for?

Snyder himself says, “I was a shadow” during this time period. In 1958 he had risen to public consciousness as the character Japhy Ryder in Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. And in this documentary poet Michael McClure tells us that on the night when Allen Ginsberg debuted Howl at the Six Gallery Reading in 1955 it was actually Snyder’s reading of his poem “The Berry Feast” (page 118 in The Etiquette of Freedom) that impressed most of the people present even more. (McClure asserts that Snyder’s poem was the first public expression of what would later be termed “deep ecology”). Snyder was an inspiration for Kerouac and a working colleague of Ginsberg, but his identification as a Beat is perhaps over emphasized. He left for Asia in 1956 to live in a zen monastery and he did not return for twelve years.

Snyder has expressed little appreciation for Christianity. A childhood query to a priest about a possible afterlife for animals demonstrated to him that Christianity had no regard for the nonhuman. Snyder’s mother was an atheist and expressed scepticism at his interest in Buddhism. “What will that do to help the people?” she asked him. Snyder seems to have been working out an answer to that question. Reincarnation he says in the film is a “charming metaphor” but no more. However, if true it would teach us that we have experienced everything in life already and therefore we should be content and focus on the present rather than longing for a different life or a different world.

Snyder has articulated a coherent social agenda and a deep spirituality in a way that the Beats never did and few Christians (or even Buddhists) ever have. In an early essay “Buddhism and the Possibilities of a Planetary Culture” (later retitled “Buddhist Anarchism”) he talked about the traditional three aspects of the Dharma path: wisdom, meditation, and morality. Wisdom is the intuitive knowledge we all possess of love and clarity. Meditation is the going inside to discover that wisdom. Morality is the bringing of that wisdom out again towards community. Community, human and nonhuman, has always been central to Snyder’s life and work.

Bioregionalism and “reinhabitation” becomes the way in which we ground human community in the community of all living things. Our relation to nature must happen in a particular place. It is in this relationship to nature and place that we build community and come into our own wholeness. It is in seeking wholeness that we resolve the tensions between civilization and ecology. In one of his most well know poems (one of several he reads aloud in this documentary) Snyder summarizes this path: “stay together / learn the flowers / go light.”

Snyder’s reflection on “wild” and “wildness” are highlights of this film and book. The wild is found everywhere and though often repressed can never obliterated. The wild exists even in our own unconscious, of which human art often gives expression. “The difference between wild mind and cultivated mind is the difference between art and accounting” Snyder says. Humanity is a wild species and our wholeness will be found in rediscovering that true wild nature. “The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.”

In all of his work Snyder articulates an ontology of trust. His “zen anarchism” affirms that the natural world would actually work in our favor if only we would let it. Alienation results from our lack of self-sufficiency and will be healed by meditation and conscious work in community with others. Not recognizing this and attempting to engineer artificial wholenss only diminishes and distorts our ability to restore original wholeness.

Snyder once wrote: “As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."

John Healey and author Jim Harrison produced this beautiful film. Rancho Piedra Blanca along California’s central coast provides the scenic backdrop for these familiar but insightful conversations between Snyder and Jim Harrison as they walk along the ridge or sit around a table after dinner. The documentary is about thirty minutes long and contains some wonderful black and white film footage from an earlier 1960s profile. We see the younger Snyder in Zen garments riding his motorcycle, presumably in San Francisco, and then earnestly reading some of the his poetry to the camera. There are the standard “extras” with interviews with the producers and director.

The book, edited by Paul Ebenkamp, contains a transcript of the film and another hour of outtakes, comments by some of Snyder’s friends and acquaintances, and a small sampling of his poems. There is a nice selection of photographs from Snyder’s life, a bibliography and reading list, and a wonderful essay entitled “Grace”, which is one of the best essays on the spirituality of food that you will ever read.

Together the DVD and book provide a delightful path into Snyder’s work. I would recommend moving on from here to his essay collection The Practice of the Wild (reissued with a new preface by Snyder in 2010 and having the same title as the DVD) and The Gary Snyder Reader (1999). Snyder will have much to teach all of us for many years to come.

[Also published in the February issue of the Englewood Review of Books]