Coming Back
August 10th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I told myself that after my vacations and the church mission trip I would begin to blog again. My life seems to have been sorely lacking writing/blogging energy and I fear that might mean I am running low on creative energy as well. I might be in a period where I am learning more than saying more, but I figure it would help to try and discipline myself to write more both here and on the Barth blog. Discipline has never been a word I liked very much in my life, but I am aware that it also helps make up the word disciple. So for the first time in my life I am trying to embrace some discipline. It started about 8 months ago with the Barth project of 5 pages a day (which I have kept up on, just not blogged about), and then moved to running every other day in February as well as eating a healthier diet, and now I think it might mean doing something for my creative life as well as spiritual life. On the spiritual side, I am adding in some new disciplines but creatively I would like to start by trying to write on the blog at least twice a week for this year. For a couple of months two years ago I managed to blog almost every day so that seems manageable, but it also means you the reader (if there are still any) will have to put up with attempting to regain my writing legs. So here’s to disciplines and for putting up with half-baked often incoherent ramblings and #1 out of 104 entries.
June Newsletter
May 26th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Not sure why I am not writing as much lately but hopefully I will get back on track at some point. Anyways here is my June Newsletter about a youth ministry conference I attended in Seattle.
where you do not want to go.
March 11th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Before I begin I should say I had a great time at MHGS. I say this because as hard on it as I am I did enjoy myself, learn a lot, and grow with a group of great people.
A couple of weekends ago Rob Bell visited the seminary and had a good interaction with students there. I watched the exchange online and enjoyed seeing Rob interact with people at MHGS. After he attended the school he wrote this on his webpage:
I had the chance to speak at the Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle. Those folks are so far out ahead. When you start there, you essentially do group therapy for a while, because, as they say, “you can’t take people where you’re not willing to go yourself.” Brilliant. This kind of holistic, flesh and blood, theological education is where it’s at.
Here I think Rob points out very clearly what is billed as the central experience at MHGS, Practicum. For many people at MHGS this type of situation is a well needed breath of fresh air that helps them get perspective on their lives. For many students the Practicum experience is a gateway to professional one on one therapy that continues healing for them but at times can turn into a sort of fetish for the MHGS student.
But I think my biggest problem about what Rob’s quote states is that it signifies an attitude that floats around the school that therapy is the thing that is going to take us to the places where we are not willing to go.
Granted, I am not the typical MHGS student, but practicum never met in that way. Maybe I wasn’t open to it, or it was the wrong time, or I was just too worried about passing. However, practicum served as a good opportunity to try on different modes of listening, and understand issues of transference. But there are those at the school who would echo what Rob is saying here and that therapy is the realm where we will surpass where we will go.
On a biographical note, when I was halfway through MHGS I started volunteering bi-weekly at a ministry for the homeless. It was the place I didn’t want to go but I found myself there none the less. I would sit and talk to people who from week to week couldn’t even remember my name. I soon learned that I had nothing to offer them, but I kept going and through the process people close to me began to notice I was changing as a person. After I graduated I started spending three mornings a week with the folks at this ministry. I would come into the house in the morning put on a pot of coffee, do the dishes, and just sit. Some days I broke up fights, some days I hung out in garden with them, some days I helped them with laundry. I prayed a lot. It was a humbling time, but with little else to offer it was what I did. This was the place of transformation, my holistic, flesh and blood education.
Before I came to MHGS I read a Brian McLaren book (I can’t remember which one) where he laid out that seminary could be a place where people came together and did things like this. I had misinformed myself enough to think this is what Practicum was and failed to ask the right questions before attending. While Practicum and therapy was for many students what Rob says it is I felt lost with the singular option I was expected to fit into.
This is my problem – when I think of flesh and blood, holistic theological education I don’t think of the classroom or the therapy session with other emerging adults, but of the places that Jesus will carry my body that I do want to go. When I hear what Rob describes I just can’t imagine the therapeutic experience aimed at creating a healthy individual who can enter into community changed but something else. I think of places we could not go but for Jesus carrying us there. Sitting in silence (see the bottom of this article by feminist theologian Sarah Coakley), placing our bodies between conflicts, teaching at risk youth coffee skills, joining a black Pentecostal church, going to the godless, working with the homeless, prostitutes, or the mentally disabled. I think the key thing for me is that I am convinced going places where we don’t want to go involves Jesus carrying our bodies there and not just our minds/souls.
I was one of a few students that got votes to address the graduating class and was asked to pray at the ceremony. Being aware that people thought of me as one to address the class I began to ponder what I would have said if I was giving one of the speeches and the only I think I could think of is this section of John that I feels gets to the heart of what I was trying to say during my time at MHGS:
Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, "Follow me!"
Advice from Hauerwas
March 9th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Never lie. Never Lie.
And you’ll discover that is hard work. And part of what it means not to lie is to preach truthfully and what it means to preach truthfully is to preach in manner that you expect God to show up because the Word has been proclaimed. As soon as you hear a minster say, “As my six year old was saying” you know its going to BS. Because its going to insight on the human condition that anyone could have at the Kiwanis club. What it means to preach truthfully and not to lie is to be willing to say when you don’t know what needs to be said…”But that we do see Jesus. We are not sure we know what needs to be said. If I said more than that I would be lying to you. But we do see Jesus.”
I also of course think it is very important to see Jesus in the body and blood of Christ… That won’t make us more faithful but at least God promised to kill us if we do it unworthily or at least make us sick. And I figure that that’s better than dying of boredom. If we return to Eucharistic celebration in a serious manner who knows what God would do with that. What it means to be a Christian is very simple. It means you worship Jesus. But it forces a extraordinary intellectual and moral challenge and we need to be people confident that God will help us speak and live appropriate to the speech we have been given. What I hope we do in the divinity school is give you confidence that you can use the language of the faith, Jesus is Lord without apology. Because if you do that God will show up and scare the hell out of you.
I know that I said I wouldn’t post aimless quotes here but at the tumblr instead but I broke that rule with this one. I think it’s because this quote seems anything but aimless.
March 3rd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Today I had intended to write a post on seminary education using these quotes but somehow lost the thread I was using to tie them all together. If you can find a way to make it happen write the essay yourself but here is what I was going to work with:
Nerd Much.
January 19th, 2010 § 2 Comments
A current high point in my New Year. Eccentric Existence by David H. Kelsey. The remaining Yale School theologian. 1050 pages. Two Volumes. My Christmas money gone.
I am hopeless.
30 Hour Famine
January 18th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Hello, whoever might happen to still read my blog. One of the activities that I am doing with the youth group this year is the 30 Hour Famine in partner with World Vision. The premise is pretty simple: The youth raise funds for a month and then on February 26-27 we will go 30 hours without food, while participating in a local service project and an experience that challenges us to look harder at global hunger. It is really a great program and the youth have decided to direct our funds to World Vision’s Haiti Earthquake relief. World Vision has worked in Haiti for 30 years and has some 800 staff in country. Please join us in praying for the children and families devastated by the earthquake in Haiti. In joining with the youth I have decided to raise funds as well and participate fully in the 30 Hour Famine. If you are so inclined to support me just click on the link and give whatever you would be willing. Thanks!
Thinking with Lindbeck
January 9th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Looking back at seminary it would be hard to name the thinker who had the most influence on me, but someone who must be named in the conversation is George Lindbeck. For instance, his thoughts came up this morning while I was reading this article in the New York Times. One of the most remarkable lines from the article reminds me of one of the more prominent discussions that kept coming up at MHGS. Ethan Watters writes:
Behind the promotion of Western ideas of mental health and healing lie a variety of cultural assumptions about human nature. Westerners share, for instance, evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We’ve come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. (The National Institute of Mental Health reports that a quarter of Americans have diagnosable mental illnesses each year.) The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence. These ideas remain deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, the Freudian duality between the conscious and unconscious, as well as the many self-help philosophies and schools of therapy that have encouraged Americans to separate the health of the individual from the health of the group. These Western ideas of the mind are proving as seductive to the rest of the world as fast food and rap music, and we are spreading them with speed and vigor.
What Mr. Watters so clearly shows in this article is that mental health and psychology are products of their environments and the goals (ie what is seen as healthy) clearly stem from very western mind sets about the notion of the self and “health.” While most of the people I went to seminary would agree with his general premise, that it is wrong to export this stuff to different cultures because of the colonizing nature of such an enterprise, thinking with Lindbeck gives rise to a different set of questions. What Mr. Watters sees as marks of different cultures (notions of the self, dualities, health of individuals over the group) is exactly what Lindbeck thinks we should be taking away from our religions (which he conceives of in cultural-linguistic terms). Christianity (or fill in the blank religion) clearly has different answers to many of the question we must answer before we begin on the road of mental health and while Christianity has largely not made this clear the rise of Christian counselors as a class (and in some places even a vocation) seems to further continue this colonization of the mind rather than combat it. But Lindbeck would be clear that buying into the Western answers from the get go lead us away from finding how our religion might encompass our world and teach us different patterns of existence that might not rely on earlier cultural constructions.
Mr. Watters ends his articles with thoughts that point to what Lindbeck is referring to and the questions that must be asked if Christianity and world’s religions are capable of sustaining meaning in the face of such a totalizing narrative.
Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering. If our rising need for mental-health services does indeed spring from a breakdown of meaning, our insistence that the rest of the world think like us may be all the more problematic. Offering the latest Western mental-health theories, treatments and categories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress sparked by modernization and globalization is not a solution; it may be part of the problem. When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing, we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress.
continual contradiction
December 29th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Jesus Christ continually contradicts us and the way we experience ourselves as alive and he compels us to radically redefine what we mean by life. He encounters us the way he encounters the disciples on Easter Sunday on the road to Emmaus. They the ones marked out for death, those who have survived him were really the dead. He the dead one was really the living.
Every time I get a new Moleskine or Field Notes Journal I put a quote on the front page that I feel encapsulates the journey my life was currently on when I started. The quotes have varied from poems, to quotes, to bible verses, some I look back with awkwardness towards and others I am still drawn towards. This quote, I have no clue it was actually from, was on the inside of my journal that I started my final year of college (03-04). That year was a year of pretty big transitions in my spiritual life and ended with my first call into ministry. It’s funny to stumble upon the quote when I was cleaning my office up today because the journey from the day I wrote that to here pretty much contains a continual contradiction of myself by Christ. What I once surely believed was life everlasting has become only the shell of something more, and what I once thought clearly was death has become radically renewed. Looking back at the journey I can see all the fun, the pain, the good conversations, and friends that helped me along the way, but I also wonder what might be coming down the pipe. Next month I get installed as minster at the church and I can’t help but think that means I will again be pushed down that path towards life with Christ, that is in Christ, and yet at the same time I find myself wanting to stop. Can’t I have it figured out at some point? I mean do I really want to always be discovering anew what it means to preach Christ and him crucified? Don’t I ever get a break? And yet on the other side of the want for control and false peace stands the journey I took from ’03 to the present that says it is worth it.
What does this mean? I don’t know. But the more important question is how long do you hang on to a Moleskine before you throw it away?
December 26th, 2009 § 2 Comments
After a brief foray into the world of other blogging sites I am back to wordpress much wiser (not really). I don’t know if will take up writing that much again but I figured it would be good to have a blog people can actually comment on without having to sign up for an account. This blog won’t pull in my Flickr updates and will feature less random stuff. If you are interested in still seeing my photos and the oddness I find all over the internets you can check my tumblr. And of course you can read the Barth blog if your interested in that kind thing. Here’s to attempting to be a blogger again.
Grace & Peace
