Confession: I’m a huge productivity nerd. I use carefully measured procrastination time to study up on the fine arts of getting more stuff done more efficiently than the last time I did it. Like all computer science nerds, I perform tasks once. If I have to repeat a task, I script it in some way to streamline the process until I only have to provide the actual THINKING part of the process. Also, like many computer science nerds, I spent the time I wasn’t in a science class (or a writing workshop) studying bits about various forms of spirituality, including Buddhism. The vaguely Buddhist notion of “mindfulness” is a big one for productivity folks, partly because it aims to nail our attention to the task at hand, and partly because it (at its best) gets rid of all that pesky process analysis that can make us procrastinate. (Otherwise known as the nagging feeling that whatever you’re doing isn’t valuable enough to get done… that there are “bigger fish to fry” somewhere out on your horizon.)

My well-aged, spotty memory and interpretation of mindfulness would be to attain a state in which you are entirely aware of your involvement in the process at hand (i.e. if you’re stuffing envelopes, your mind is actually engaged in an understanding of how the unstuffed envelopes are piled, how your hands move, the ideal angle at which to insert the paper, etc.), but you are also in a state in which you make no value judgments about the process. To return to our envelopes, I would not be focused on the nine other things I need to do instead of stuffing envelopes, nor HOW WELL I might be stuffing them, nor how lame it is that Harry ALWAYS skips out and leaves me to stuff envelopes. In other words, you exist in the moment of process, of doing.

I’m intrigued by how I do (and might yet) feel this in relation to my Christian faith. I think this could work on both the micro and macro level. Imagine the peace of simply doing the “mundane” with a simple sense that you are doing what is to be done; that the tiny action of cleaning communion cups could be a moment of focus and connection to God’s larger work. Imagine also the macro sense of letting go of all of the easy judgments about the larger direction of our lives, of our churches, our organizations. What if instead of all of our fretting about how to be with God, how to talk to God, how to live with God… what if we could abandon prayers where we fret over our lives like worry stones, and instead enter a prayer of BEING with God, without judgment on ourselves and our communities?

Old entry I wanted to get out, April 17th:

I’m quite simply thrown back in my chair from this week’s shootings at Virginia Tech. Talking about God at times like this always takes me right to the “Why does God hate amputees?” argument made so popular lately by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Surely a God of love would refuse to let something like this happen. Surely prayer would just as easily heal those with lost limbs as it would those with mental and internal ailments so often reported as miraculous healings by more “charismatic” Christian traditions. Surely God would swoop down and grind those guns in Virginia into dust.

If you go to church this Sunday, you’ll hear about the meeting of Christ and Saul, about the mother of all conversion stories. You’ll hopefully hear that God reaches out to those who have struggled violently against themselves, against God. You might almost miss the dark shadow that passes through the very ending of both the Epistle and Gospel reading. In both, we get the faint reminder that in asking for these early members of the church to join him, Christ is really inviting the apostles to share in his suffering, that the invitation to life in Christ is an invitation to hurt, trial, imprisonment, and death.

For me, Christ (and God) overcome death in the way that we hear recorded in the stories of the canonical gospels – not by having magical or scientific powers akin to a Frankenstein movie – but by taking the real, gnawing sting of death away. People often say that everyone dies alone… I feel that the magic of that moment of resurrection comes from God’s willingness to BE PRESENT with us in the awful loneliness and fear that could be death. In other words, I don’t know if my God is a god who smites evil-doers before they can strike, but I’m glad that my God is one who can be with us and call us to be with each other in the hopes that the very act of being present for one another might undo the hurt caused by that evil.

To recap: this whole idea came to me while studying the many ways that PowerPoint is a Very Bad Thing™. The software encourages:

Simplifying topics and removing them from context. AND: Ordering (Hierarchically) and grouping topics in a way that may be artificial.

To which I say: Isn’t this the most common approach through which people are exposed to the Bible? Whenever I steel myself up and go through web boards related to people debating God’s views on sexuality, abortion, end of life rights, etc. the people who seem the most worked up have a very common method of quoting the Bible. It goes like this: Chapter:Verse. By that I mean they actually quote ONE verse! While I recognize the power of the Word in the Bible, and particularly the Gospels, I am also struck by the fact that God, the early church, all of the translators through the years, and every publisher since Gutenberg have all agreed that the Bible needed A LOT of words! To say it differently: complexity is not a vice, it’s a testament to our God who wants us to see and accept the WHOLE landscape. Those who would remove text in the Bible from its surrounding context and complexity can do a disservice to the very God that they are reaching out in love for. Let’s of course not forget the major element of context here… that the largest portion of the contents of the Bible issue forth from a civilization that existed from 4000 to 2000 years ago. Does it make the Bible irrelevant to us now? Of course not, but while we dedicatedly study the testament left to us of God and His people, shouldn’t we reach for more than the bullet-points? Would the God of light and truth want us to see anything but the big picture?

The other sin of PowerPoint creeps in through our old friend, the lectionary. (Though the lectionary sometimes does some very interesting lifting out of context as well.) But the more persistent side-effect here is in the grouping and ordering of things in sometimes artificial ways. I can’t find much info on when the idea of the lectionary came about, and I don’t have very specific examples to lift up here, but I would just ask us to think about the fact that our ancestors in the church went through all the trouble of writing down wonderful narratives in the Bible, and we now lift out pieces and group them with other pieces in a roughly “chronological” (by church year) way. But aren’t we actually just creating one of those odd “best-of” shows out material that stands so well on its own?

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t really see a way to get around the fact that if you want to get into the Bible, you really just have to wade in. Simplifying, lifting, cliff-noting, reorganizing may get the Word engaged in small pieces of worship, but it doesn’t allow the reader access to the whole scope of God’s Word.

So I just got done with my post about Desmond Tutu’s comments (which are quite old, in fact; he’s been on this tack for years) when I did something I am drawn to do often: I searched out the people who thought he was dead wrong. No surprise here, they were easy to find. Many people were nice enough to think that as an Archbishop, Tutu had meant well, but that these days they didn’t “Know which bible he was reading.” Some called him a serpent. Others quoted scripture saying that in late times there will be many who lead you astray… do not be fooled. What stood out for me was a writing style I have seen many times in my little excursions into “the other side” of debates over religious law and what God thinks of what.

But first: read these little sections from a researcher in Norway about PowerPoint. (I’m trying to plan and help execute a teaching unit about how to use the software in a meaningful way.) Then (and this will be challenging, or wrong, maybe), I want us to think of the lectionary and how people are “taught” the Bible.

seminar.net – The Rhetoric of PowerPoint:

“PowerPoint is therefore not just an alternative method of teaching and giving presentations. For as culture critic Neil Postman (1985) states, any technology is also an ideology. And Microsoft’s presentation software is a technology which fundamentally changes our way of communicating and thereby of thinking – even without our being aware of the change.

• The software makes us think and speak in isolated blocks, instead of in coherent context, totalities, narratives or linear reasoning.

• Each block makes us think and speak in concise, discrete and hierarchizing sections and points.

• The software encourages us to use particular forms of visual material and defined formats and to use ready-made visual material and animations, even if they have no clear relevance to what is being said.

• The software invites ritual conformity of visual style.”

seminar.net – The Rhetoric of PowerPoint:

“In the third place, bullet points omit and suppress important lines of reasoning as to how something works and is interconnected.

When bullets in imperative form baldly command us to increase our share of the market by 25%, profits by 30% and introduce new products; the complex relationship between organization, market and customers remains understated and unexplained. Relationships of this nature are much better described through complete sentences with both subjects and verbs.

Tufte not surprisingly concurs. Instead of merely postulating briefly that we must introduce new products, he writes, we should rather say

who might do it and how, when, and where they might do it. Then several sentences together in a row, a narrative, could spell out the specific methods and processes by which the generic feel-good goals of mission statement might be achieved (Tufte 2003: 6).”

Don’t skip ahead, I’ve got lots to say on this.

Tutu: Discrimination Against Gay People Is Like Apartheid:

“I am deeply, deeply distressed that in the face of the most horrendous problems – we’ve got poverty, we’ve got conflict and war, we’ve got HIV/AIDS – and what do we concentrate on? We concentrate on what you are doing in bed.”

– Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town

This man is freakin’ genius. Newsweek had pretty good feature a while back on how even those in American evangelical settings who still have issues with homosexuality are waking up to the fact that, at the very least, they should prioritize people who are actively dying and suffering before we argue about our differing opinions about sexuality. In Africa, where there is open conflict between Muslim and Christian, a statement like this is risky and meaningful. Trying to focus on the things that are vital for people of all faiths keeps the dialogue open.

For me this reminds me of Matthew 15, where Jesus has to explain to Pharisees that the old ways of thinking about ritual cleanliness will be rejected. (Although I’m not sure if it is the old traditions or the Pharisees themselves that Jesus means to call “blind guides.”) Of course, as Roman and Jewish Christians came into more and more conflict, this debate between adherents of “The Law” of the Hebrew Bible versus the Gentiles would amplify. To me, it seems very clear that a lot of us in the world have gotten confused between faith and adherence to religious law. How can we instead allow our faith to keep us alert to the changing face of our earth, ourselves as a people, and our relationship with God?

Always interesting to see the diversity of the UCC’s call to social justice. I, of course, knew nothing about the School of the Americas. From my limited research, it seems like these were the fine folks who trained a vast number of folks in South America in military tactics. (Read: Death Squads.) I feel largely blind to most of the turmoil in South America. Considering the rise of Chavez, I think that blindness is epidemic in the US, and we have yet again allowed dialogue to atrophy to the point that extremism flourishes. *Sigh* It’s Monday.

Chicago pastor sentenced to 60 days in federal prison for SOA civil disobedience:

The Rev. Don Coleman, a UCC minister in Chicago, was sentenced to 60 days in federal prison on Jan. 29…

I’d be really interested to see what anyone else besides Sarah and I have to say about the recent media-gasm over the “New Atheists.” I’ve just finished reading Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation, and I won’t lie, it made me mad at points (that I’ll talk about later.) Mostly, I can’t stand his assertion that either people believe in the supremacy of the Bible as the literal word of God, in which case he thinks you’re wrong, or if you are still a self-identifying Christian who thinks that the Bible is just another text, you have misunderstood Christianity, and should go to your room and think about what you’ve done.

Other folks have said it better, but I’ll say, as far as I’m concerned: The Bible is a collection of texts written by faithful people in an attempt to collect and make sense of the best available information about the ever changing relationship between the people and their God. Yes, there are people who think that if you don’t believe that Jesus is your personal Lord and Savior, you’re going to a big place underground with lots of fire. For me, Christ provides a powerful historical and philosophical framework for understanding where humanity has been and where we’re going, but that certainly doesn’t limit the possibility of there being thousands of other routes to the same sort of clarity.

Surely, there has to be a reason for all of us to be so concerned with a framework that for Harris is damaging, obscene, and futile. Is the best scientific reasoning simply that we all haven’t had a chance to think about our faith, or we’re simply of a lower form of intellect? Statistically speaking, there’s got to be a reason we all find solace in the same acts of worship. Hey, bats are magnetic, so maybe there’s a perfectly good explanation for all of this.

“Letter to a Christian Nation” (Sam Harris)

So if you’re from a more hierarchically aerodynamic religious tradition (read: Catholic, and – until recently – Anglican/Episcopalian), this part gets a little strange. The United Church of Christ maintains its congregationalist roots by having the fundamental structure of the larger “Church” being any local church. Instead of a single, large organization leading many smaller organizations (Honcho -> Cardinal -> Bishop -> Local Clergy), the UCC’s local congregations are all autonomous… but not.

As far as I know, all congregations of the UCC are members of an association (just a collection of congregations led by the whole of the association’s clergy). Those associations are then part of a larger “conference” which then sends representatives to the UCC General Synod where we debate issues like “Is Jesus Christ our sovereign Lord?” for long periods of time. (Like lawmakers, when you see a proposal for something that seems simple or obvious it usually means there’s a hidden agenda… it’s in that last question, you just have to want it a bit. Anyway, that was a BIG issue.)

SO: I belong to The Church of the Redeemer of the New Haven Association of the Connecticut Conference of The United Church of Christ, If you want to get technical.

Now, I understand the UCC to be a bunch of churches and administration in conversation with each other, not a leadership telling the churches what to do, so the local church stays the real guts of the life of the (big ‘C’) Church. Except for:

In-Care Students.

The local church approves of the candidate (or may not), but then the Association governs the in-care process. That’s who you are “in-care” of. The Association accepts you into care, assigns an advisor for you from within its ranks, and has regular meetings with you to follow your process through divinity school, and eventually, ordination. Well, actually a committee, hilariously enough called The Committee on Ministry does all of that in the name of the Association, but hey, who’s counting.

Side note: The Association also is who shows up and installs or ordains your minister in a local church.

House cleaning: I’m going to try and stick to Thursdays for posts, the school year is getting a bit more hectic.

“A student in care of an Association is a member of the United Church of Christ who has been called by God and who, under the care of the member’s Association, is preparing for the ordained Christian ministry. “

– The United Church of Christ Manual on Ministry (Section 2, p. 1)

Right. Well, I suppose we had to get the generic boiler-plate stuff in here at the beginning. “Called by God…” I guess I just feel like meditating on this for a bit, because I don’t know of anything like what’s described in all of the generic definitions of the need to enter ministry. It’s always tempting to excuse myself by using scriptural literalism as the divining tool. Moses got a burning bush. The Apostles got Christ, the Resurrection, and, of course, their own tongues of flame to encourage them. For every other person since (as near as I can tell) we’ve had this remaining image of vocation. We’re all happy and post-renaissance now, so we use that word to describe our job (happily assuming that we all get to do what we’re “supposed to do” in life.) It used to be that only folks in ministry received a calling.

Some people (good-natured-ly enough) have thought to ask me if I actually heard a voice before I decided to pursue this path. To which I can only say:

Yeesh.

Not so much. Now, I have no idea how it’s been throughout the centuries, but from my limited polling on the question, 0% of ordained clergy that I know report hearing a literally understood “voice” before they enter service. This, I feel secure in saying, is a GOOD THING(TM).

Nonetheless, sometimes I really could use a serious talking-to. Part of this process that is so painful to me is that despite my intense desire to pursue this, I don’t feel any “holier” than I did last year. Sometimes, I feel worse. I feel even more confused by a God who seems to want to put me in place to enter the ministry while still having failed to fundamentally change my spirit and my mind from someone who experiences bouts of paralyzing uncertainty, fear, guilt, and shame, to someone that leverages those traits in others into love. I feel inadequate to the task – some sort of pretender. I feel like I’ve been taking a course on algebra, and now, arriving for the final exam, find that I’m expected to be conversant in late medieval poetry.

Here’s what I CAN say: My experience as a person haunted by all of the personal demons listed above breaks my heart with compassion for all of the others in such similar condition, and even more for the people victimized by the by-products of those demons. I’m so aware of my own healing wounds, with all their itching, scarring, binding together, that I quite simply sense a personal inertia to help others reach towards that healing for themselves. (Physics metaphors are big where I come from.) The sensation is somewhere in inertia though, the tug at your physical core when you turn a corner, go over a hill, stop suddenly in your car.

I DON’T have a blind certainty that I can help all those that ask me. I’m no “Solo Christo” guy. I think that there are many powerful trends in our modern world that hope to reach out and heal some of the emotional damage that we all do to each other. I know what works for me, and I’m committed to sharing that with anyone who will listen. I’m far from perfect, so I’m no example to be held up. Also, there’s a dangerous under-current under my previous paragraph: Will I NEED to help other people in order to feel good, successful in my mission, blessed? If so, I suspect I won’t last long.

Henri Nouwen talks a lot about all of these sorts of things in his book, The Wounded Healer, which, go figure, I just read on Wednesday. One of the most intriguing things I got out of it was this notion of personal loneliness. Nouwen essentially posits that there is a core of loneliness that is part of our humanity, no matter how many people we surround ourselves with, no matter how much we love our families or our spouses. One of its real dangers is the false belief that anyone or anything can be the cure or filling up of that loneliness. (Interesting and timely for the guy who’s getting married.) In fact, Nouwen suggests that ministers need to cultivate and leave that loneliness aching at our cores, so that it might help us to reach out even more in compassion to all those around us who ache just the same, but who might not yet know that there is good news. There is someone who doesn’t come to fill that emptiness, but who can enter it, know our growling fear, doubt, and dark loneliness, and quite possibly even talk to it. Suddenly we’re all hearing voices.

“The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society” (Henri Nouwen)

So, despite all the above multi-denominational stuff I posted about before, and the theoretical definition from J.E., what are the deacons to me at this point? The way I was convinced to join was with the tag line: “The Deacons are the committee charged with overseeing the spiritual life of the church.”

For me, that’s a big draw.

Now, you might notice that the above statement is pretty broad. You would be right. Because it’s a church, there’s not much that doesn’t fall under the spiritual life of the congregation. Sometimes it seems like the Trustees have it easy; they’re just in charge of the building and plant of the church. (anyone who’s ever had to manage a physical building just either laughed or gritted their teeth hard. It’s OK folks, now just imagine doing it by committee…) The deacons get all the things that happen in the church. That’s not true of course, but in several places it’s much more clearly defined. (Music, anyone?)

In our church, this has led to a little bit of responsibility bloat for our board of deacons. Since Christian hospitality aids the sense of spiritual communion, the organizing of any and all congregational soirées crept onto the radar. Obviously, the deacons have a call to assist the pastor and staff in the preparation, organization, and performance of worship. And… since bringing up new leaders in the church helps define the spiritual future for the congregation, the deacons are tasked with overseeing the In-Care candidates associated with The Church of the Redeemer.

Which, hopefully, will be me.

So… I have to leave the deacons.