“Apart from the fact that they prostitute their daughters, the Lydian way of life is not unlike our own.”
– Herodotus
Dearest Lydia,
Once again I find myself writing to you.
We have become intrinsically connected. Perhaps there was once an 'us' and 'them', a 'you' and an 'I', but in this mad storm of passion all things have blurred together. I have gone into you, and you into me and we have become one flesh.
And what is this talk of prostituting daughters, Lydia? Slanderous, slanderous! Those who tell me I am blinded by my love… fools! It is my love that allows me to truly see. Let me cast out the one who speaks such words. Let me speak of your beauty, let me speak of the longing the fills me when I am apart from you. I pray that I will never be parted from you again.
“let's grow old
and die together
let's do it now”
– Ani Di Franco
By the Rivers of Babylon
By the rivers of Babylon,
Where we sat down and wept,
When we remembered Zion.
Upon the willows in the midst of it
We hung our harps.
For there our captors demanded of us songs,
And our tormentors mirth, saying,
“Sing is one of the songs of Zion.”
How can we sing the LORD’s song
In a foreign land?
-Psalm 137.1-4
I’m taking a course in Washington that focuses on journeying with people who are oppressed and feel abandoned by society, the church and God.
As part of our program we visited a camp for migrant farm workers where we saw the living conditions and heard the stories of some of the leaders in the community. All the workers were Mexican, and all were illegal immigrants. One man told of his family being kidnapped and held ransom by the smugglers. Another man talked of the farms in California that charge more for rent than they are able to make during a month’s work. A third man told us how his nephew had just been killed in a car accident. He asked for money so that they could fly the body back to Mexico. It’s actually cheaper for them to send their dead back across the border than it is to have a burial in the USA.
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
May my right hand forget her skill.
May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
If I do not remember you,
If I do not exalt Jerusalem
Above my chief joy.
-Psalm 137.5-6
I understand what the Prof was trying to do – make the stories real, give suffering a human face, perhaps awaken dormant consciences. Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were going about everything the wrong way. It felt more like a peep show than anything else. A quick glance, a hurried intimacy, and then they’re off to the fields and we’re driving back to the classroom.
I’m always left wondering: how do you walk the line between promoting awareness and contributing to the problem? There must be a way in which such things can be spoken of, can be communicated, that does not contribute to the problem. Such things cannot be unspeakable for that only furthers the isolation and alienation experienced by those who have suffered.
I think that being entertained by the suffering of others is a epidemic problem in our culture. Although the emotions such sights arouse in us are not always termed pleasurable it seems that we take pleasure in having such emotions aroused. It is doubly epidemic in our churches where we not only treasure those feelings but then treasure the feelings of sympathy that follow close behind. “Look, I’m crying… I’m such a loving person, such a good Christian.” We think we are loving or compassionate because of our feelings, never realizing that we are apathetic or hateful if such feelings do not result in action.
I can empathize with the grief that causes the Psalmist to conclude:
O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one,
How blessed will be the one who repays you
With the recompense with which you have repaid us.
How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones
Against the rock.
– Psalm 137.7-9
Sometimes it is hard not to resort to violence.
On Calling(s)
When I was young, around thirteen years old, I remember I started doing a lot of thinking about vocation and what to do with my life.
In the midst of all that I had a dream.
In the dream I was walking beside a river and Jesus was walking on the other side. I remember asking him, “What should I do with my life?” and he stopped and rested his hand on the tree beside him (funny how I remember his smallest movements yet can’t recall anything about the way he looked). A picture formed before me of a gathering of all sorts of wild animals all clustered together: giraffes, hippos, rhinos, lions, zebras. Then I woke up.
At the time I thought that was a “call” to go into missions in Africa. So I ended up attending a Bible college, and now, as I continue my education, I am doing a Master’s in Christian Studies.
The thing is my sense of vocation has shifted.
As I have journeyed with people who are suffering, as I have journeyed with the abandoned and oppressed, my passion for journeying with those who are suffering, for not only working front-line but for addressing systemic issues has increased. So then I started thinking maybe I was called to work with the poor in Africa. But the more I have become aware of the root of problems the more I have become convinced that the source of suffering in the third world is found in the first world. In fact, I have become increasingly convinced that things will start to radically change when comfortable middle-class Christians in North America begin to understand what it really means to follow Jesus. And so, without abandoning a journey of intimate love with those who are suffering, I am increasingly searching for a way in which to transform middle-class Christians.
But every now and again I would wonder about this dream and the call I thought I had. I wondered if I was drifting away from a road God had called me to travel. In the midst of this I read a book by a Christian philosopher attacking the idea of using the Bible as a defense for foundationalism. He argues that it may be possible that God sometimes tells us things that are less than true in order to point us in the right direction – much like parents over-simplify things to their children, in order to guard and guide them. I started wondering if my original interpretation of the dream was simply intended to get me to pursue the education I chose. Perhaps it had another meaning altogether.
And that’s when I remembered Peter’s dream in “Acts”. Peter, too, had a dream full of animals. The purpose of it was to reveal to Peter that the Gospel was not only for the Jews but also for all the people of the earth. A voice says to him, “What God has considered clean, let no man consider unclean.” I think that a parallel is there. Perhaps my dream wasn’t so much a call to missions as it was a call to journey with those that society and the church have considered unclean and cast out. It is a call to go to the rejected with the good news that, behold, God can make all things new.
Trees Walking
I often feel like Jesus' disciples before Pentecost.
It's as if I'm starting to get it but there are a lot of things I'm missing. Like Peter confessing Christ one moment and then completely misunderstanding what that means the next moment. That's why the story of the blind man who was touched twice proceeds Peter's confession. Peter understands Jesus' title but misunderstands the implications. He thinks Messiahship is all about victory, conquering and glory when Jesus is trying to tell him its about victory through suffering, conquering through sacrifice, and glory in humility. The blind man represents the disciples. They have started to see, but at the time, only see people that look like trees walking. It is only after Pentecost that they fully see and understand.
I think I am that blind man. My vision has been partially restored. Whereas before I was blind I now can see. But something is still off, people look like trees, I'm still waiting for the picture to be made clear.
I'm still waiting for Pentecost.
How can I still be waiting for Pentecost?
How can I be a member of the people of God and yet feel that I do not possess the Spirit of the new age?
Darkness and Light
You see, it breaks down like this:
The church looks out on the world and sees a mass of people who are blind. The blind leading the blind to their own destruction. And so, remembering her call to be a light in the darkness, she wades in proclaiming, “I have found the light, I am the light! Follow me!” Some of the blind hear and disbelieve because all they've ever known is darkness and they have no frame of reference for light. But others hear and want there to be something more. And so they follow. But they're blind. It's hard to follow a light you can't see. Relationships breaks down. The blind wander off, the church gets frustrated and jumps from one to the next. “No, just trust me,” she cries in desperation, “I really am the light.”
Before long everything is a mess.
This is the problem, the church is claiming to be a source of light and asking people to follow her… but she's not bringing people out of darkness. She says she's the light, but everybody is still just as blind as they were before they heard her summons.
Instead of trying to lead the blind the church needs to give sight to the blind. Understand the difference? It's monumental.
The problem only gets deeper when we realize that if the church has not broken through the darkness of the world around it, maybe she's not actually a source of light. After all, when light comes into contact with darkness it can't help but illuminate it. That's just the way light works. You can't bring light into darkness and have the darkness remain. Maybe the church is blind as well and only thinks that her darkness is light. Having never seen the real light she mistakes her version of darkness for something it is not. And the blind lead the blind to their own destruction.
Jesus said he was the light of the world and restored sight to the blind. Somewhere along the way the church has lost this. And I, I'm looking for it like a blind man groping for the colour. Only not entirely. More like a person in a deep, deep hole, who every now and again has seen a shaft of sunlight break in. I've seen something. I know the light is there, and as I scale the walls of this pit I see more and more all the time. The grey of the mud and rock giving way to browns and greens and blues and whites. What I don't know is how to help others to see, how to become the light and not just observe it.
Of Cakes and Candles and Coincidental Gifts
And these feelings – when they’re stirred – are not substantial.
A lingering emptiness long unnoticed is recalled.
It’s not a presence that reminds me of what I had.
It’s an absence that reminds me of what I lost.
Of her, of I, of us together.
If I’m honest I would say that I still love her.
(Though as time passes I think less and less with those words.)
Like a wound that heals slowly and imperfectly
It becomes routine and I am ever surprised
To discover that I’m still limping.
Now I know her faults and all the ways she wronged me.
But still… I know the way she smiled in the morning,
And I know she meant – even for that moment only –
The words she spoke as she pulled me down beside her.
The firelight dancing on her skin.
Tired
It’s the freight ships I didn’t expect. Enormous rusted hulls, broad flat decks with stained white towers. My mind keeps wandering back to them. I find myself wondering: how do you get a job on one of those ships? Could I do it? What’s involved? Part of me badly wants to find out… but then I wonder: what sort of people work on those ships? Coarse men, absorbed in a world of working and drinking and fucking? Where would I fit into that company? I’ve seen too much hurt, the consequences of too much chauvinism and objectification to be able to just sit by idly in the midst of all that. It wouldn’t take long for me to be hated in such a crowd as that… and where would that leave me? Or am I simply stereo-typing labour workers, playing off the negative impressions I received from those I knew working on oil rigs?
What I had expected was the islands. Driving up the coast sandwiched between the mountains and the ocean I wasn’t surprised to find myself dreaming of working on the islands. Living away from all this industry and concrete, working outside with my body.
Something is always calling to me.
Come away, come away. Disappear. Escape.
Here is peace, here is laughter. Here is rest.
How long will I feel this pull?
Like a moth following the moon, every lamp along the way urges me to turn aside – especially when the clouds come and darken the sky and the rain makes it hard for frail wings to fly.
Via Dolorosa
Whenever I have been away for awhile I find it so hard to get back in.
There is so much hurt, so much rage, so much brokenness here. Here the waters are deep and slick with blood and everywhere I look another person is drowning.
How many times will I have to jump back in?
Whenever I have been away for awhile it’s like I return to strap on a bag of rocks. A bag full of hurt that cannot be carried alone. Not that I can carry it for them, although somehow we seem to make progress together.
How many times will I have to carry that load?
I once worked alongside of an elderly woman who was full of dignity and beauty and wisdom. As I talked about these feelings she told me about friends who had worked in this field and were unable to take it. They never became calloused, they never got hard. They would go home every night and cry themselves to sleep. In the end they ended up leaving. They weren’t cut out for this work. She questioned if I was the same as them.
But I find myself wondering if this is what it means to lay down my life for those I love. Maybe that’s not just romantic language, maybe it’s a real death I experience every day. Little by little, until, one day, maybe I too will be shattered by the storm.
Whenever I have been away for awhile I find a voice inside of me that says, “You are too sensitive to carry this cross.”
But there is always another deeper voice responding, “No, you are too sensitive not to carry this cross.”
Farewell to Morality
“And he [Jesus] said to him [a lawyer], 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”
–Matthew 22:37-40
For as long as I sought moral perfection I was unable to attain it. The more I tried the more I failed. Even in the simple things, the most clear-cut and obvious things that were impossible to rationalize, I found myself unable to create any lasting positive change. There were moments of conviction, moments of passion but they were fleeting and inconsequential.
I have given up the pursuit of some transcendent state of moral perfection.
After all, that's not what we are called to as followers of Jesus.
Christians need to give up the pursuit of moral perfection.
Instead we are called to journey in love relationships with God, with others, and with the rest of the cosmos. We should be pursuing love relationships, in particular we are to pursue love relationships with those who are most vulnerable – those who have been abandoned, abused and shattered.
It is only after we have begun to prioritize love and journey in those relationships that we discover that love truly is at the heart of the law and prophets. Suddenly we discover that the morality we were incapable of attaining as an end of it's own is something that occurs as we are transformed by intimacy. Things that always seemed forced become natural. Actions that seemed alien, that seemed to belong to the character of a transcendent God – and certainly not to the character of a finite being like myself – suddenly are the only actions that seem to be true to who I am.
When we journey in love relationships the sayings ascribed to Jesus and Paul suddenly gather a whole new coherence. What once seemed a poetic phrase about love and Law, or an abstract theological argument about grace and Law, suddenly make practical sense. Increasingly I find myself thinking, “Of course that's the way it is. Of course.” It just makes sense.
The problem is that the church has prioritized moral perfection, often at the expense of love. Not only is love neglected but by making morality the foundation of a Christian ethic the church gives itself an impossible task and dooms itself to failure. It is only on the foundation of love that any sense of moral perfection (or understanding of what that even looks like) becomes possible.
I've given up on perfection, in the end I think that whole idea has a lot more to do with Greek philosophers than with the God of the Bible.
What I have not given up on is love. It is love that lies at the heart of the Triune God.
Illusions of Grandeur
I think I am more self-conscious than I used to be.
That is to say, I have become more self-absorbed.
Whereas before I could care less about what others thought of me, I became accustomed to being liked and even admired. As a result I have come to lose the very characteristics that produced those relationships in the first place. I have come to care greatly about what others think of me – and I have come to expect them to think highly of me.
Now, I've always been a shy person, but for the last half dozen years I've been able to hide that fairly well.
To be shy and arrogant, that's when the trouble truly begins.