I have officially graduated from Yale Divinity School. I have driven over 1800 miles in three days. I have finally moved into the apartment that my wife and I have kept in Austin for the last year. It has, all in all, been a fabulous, joyful, and exhausting time. I have to say, I’m struggling with learning to be at rest now. I still wake up early, filled with a bit of anxiety about what comes next. (What we actually hope will come next: at least two months of real “down time.”) Added to this has been a deep desire to claim this home of ours as a real home for me. Austin, though admittedly hotter than any place should ever be, feels like home. (Though this may be only because it also is home to the lovely lady that I so rarely have gotten to live with, regardless of its very limited ministry opportunities for me.) I woke up this morning and pondered for the first time what life would be like if I never found a settled pastorate, which is indicative only of how easily I can be sidetracked by self-doubt.

Regardless, we are indeed finding a pattern to life here in the Parker household. We’ve set up my workspace, gotten settled enough to run in the mornings from time to time, and enjoyed the simple act of cooking and eating together. Part of that joy has been falling in love with Antonelli’s, our local cheese monger. It’s a husband and wife operation (our age), and so we enjoy going to visit them to try new things, and laugh, and “hm” appreciatively as we listen to the stories of the foods they collect for us.

One of the things I think I will miss the most from my divinity school experience is the large group of seminarians there who have fallen in love with doing deep theology around food and feeding, so I am glad to have this little place where I can be with people who are clearly enriched spiritually by feeding others, even if they don’t use theological language about it. As far as our house goes, we are glad to finally be able to open up our house to people on a regular basis for food and conversation. Some of the grad student population here at UT quite simply does not eat as much as they should, and some simply need a place that can be a hearth-place, a comfortable place for fellowship and time together apart from the demands of the outside world. Anyway, it feels good to do some of that work, whether it remains a ministry simply of food, or something akin to the house/dinner-church traditions that I’ve experienced up north.

Largely I worked for a good sweet while talking about the psychology of procrastination as I’m feeling it right now for a while. Then I went ahead and killed my draft in a pretty spectacular fashion. I’m here in Texas, FINALLY! Sarah still has classes, so during the day I’m somewhat a prisoner of this hotel-like tower that she calls home. Nonetheless, I’ve gotten an almost historical minimum of work done in the past two days, mainly driven by the fear of coming off like an idiot, bringing shame upon my family and loved ones, and having to go into remedial theology of some sort. (I wonder what that would look like…) Anyway, so today I call upon my patron saints of productive thought and writing: Anne Lamont, whose “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life” should be required reading for all people who think that want pursue anything beyond data entry in the world, and so, will have to occasionally write down ideas in a way that is compelling and coherent. (It should be noted that I have often pursued employment in the data entry constellation of jobs, and far from turning my nose up at it, find that group of workers to be some of the most focused, zen, and altogether creative people I know. I’m a man of the people, don’cha know.) Also, Merlin Mann, whose site, 43folders, gives me hope that I will some day be a productive member of society, with some bare minimum amount of organization surrounding my life.

Here’s Texas, as I know it, so far:

Well, I definitely hope to do something better with this space than just simple reporting in the academic genre, but hey, I have no energy right now. So, for those of you keeping score at home, this is what I’m taking this semester:

O.T. Interpretation with Prof. Carolyn Sharp

Systematic Theology with Prof. Miroslav Volf

Foundations of Christian Worship with Prof. Bryan Spinks

Liberation Theology in the Global Context with Prof. Kwok Pui Lan

My regrets? I’m in a pretty heavily theoretical space with these classes. That is more than a little shock to my usual demeanor, which though not exactly practical, tends to at least be very concrete. It’s still pretty fun though. I’m having to retrain my body after 6 years of associating reading with getting ready for bed… “NO! It’s not time for a nap! It’s time to read 200 more pages!” O.T. Interpretation has to be my favorite so far (I’ve always had fun with biblical critique), but Liberation Theology is pretty out in left field for me, so I’m intrigued.

The Guidebook for Taking a Life

The Times ran this article today. Largely, I’m just sad. I also cling to Jim Wallis’ phrase: “The answer to bad theology is not no religion, it is better religion.” The notion that killing can be justified because the fate of those killed can be outsourced to God is just painful… largely because God calls me to be more accountable to those around me, not less.

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.