A Christmas Story (Paraphrased and with License)

While it is the case that the majority of Christianity would find my theological beliefs unpalatable and while I'm sure they also leave some people trying to figure out why I call myself Christian, I have always loved the Christmas season.  That might have more to do with family traditions and experiences growing up and my love of all things winter and hot cocoa while it's snowing but I also love a good story.

The wonderful part of the birth stories for me is that we essentially have a family who, for whatever reason, has fudged the cultural expectations of there day a bit. Joseph got Mary pregnant before their "marriage" was officially official.  The sticky wicket in which they found themselves, however, had more to do with political expectations.  Rome was in the middle of making sure they were getting all of there taxes (as empires do) from everyone they "owned" and it was decreed by the provincial governor that every man (along with his family, because, ya know, only men count) was to return to their place of birth in order to be counted and taxed accordingly.  It was a bit of a hooplah and Mary was in her third trimester.  I imagine Traveling with a very pregnant woman is no big deal.  I mean, there's only the threat of early labor, dangerous traveling conditions, potentially life threatening situations; if ever there were such a thing as a cake walk, this would be it.  They didn't really have a choice, so they went.

Thankfully, mercifully, gracefully they arrived in Bethlehem without major incident. I say major because I can imagine there were myriad and justified amounts of discomfort, complaining and anger from everyone involved.  What I mean to say is everyone arrived alive.  But of course, owing perhaps to the slower pace which they were forced to take on account of Mary's very pregnant condition, one of the few places left to stay was somebody's stable.  Soon after Mary went into labor. We have no idea how long or how hard that labor was for Mary (thanks, undoubtedly, to the male writers of the gospels and their keenly honed sense of important details).  From what I can cobble together from the women in my life, that shit ain't easy.  It's absolutely true that said labor involved lots of blood, body fluids, ungodly amounts of pain and a healthy stream of cursing unleashed in Joseph's direction.  Mary probably called him a viper a time or two which in today's parlance translates to something like, "Joseph, you fucking asshole, this is all your fault," (I looked it up).

Anyway, they did it.  Mary gave birth to a very loud baby, wrapped him in some blankets and laid him in a feeding trough as is the customary thing to do...kind of (but not really at all).  As good Jews they took the baby after eight days had passed circumcised him and bestowed upon him the most godly name they could think of, Jesus (or Yeshua or Joshua or something or other; the point is the name is actually quite ordinary).  And later, as is prescribed in the Torah, they presented Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem with a sacrifice honoring their god, their culture and their ancestors.

The point of all of this has nothing to do with Jesus as god's son born to save the world from itself.  That's not really my thing.  The miracle is in the fundamental and ordinary experience of creating and caring for life.  The wildly divergent emotions and expectations and everyday life of people sharing the struggles and joys of bringing a child into their lives.  The miracle is that life happens in some of the most peculiar and ordinary and exceptional ways.  For myself, there's no place for some fabricated fanfare about a virgin birth or a chorus of angels and there's no need for shepherds and wise men paying homage to a new king (although it does make for nice story-telling).  I feel like and think that the point has something more to do with the fact that the birth of and care for any child in any place at any time should be enough to call all us to hope (and act!) for peace and love to reign on Earth.  I think we would do well to pay more attention to those mundane things in life, to remember that ordinary doesn't preclude the experience of the sacred or transcending but that the ordinary is very much the heart of what is sacred and transcendent.

Eliade and the Recollection of Undergraduate Studies

As part of our graduation requirements and exit interview in my undergrad program we were to come prepared with a statement on our understanding of religion.  It was an exercise in reflection as we were also required to write a similar statement when we entered the program.  Mine was relatively short:

Religion is a tool people employ to help them order their world. Whether it is making sense of suffering or explaining that which one does not know, religion and religious thought aids people by providing a framework that allows them to perceive understanding and control of the world in which they live.

The statement was meant to be as value neutral as I could manage while simply stating that religion is essentially utilitarian.  I took pains to make sure that it didn't set religion apart, that there is nothing particularly special about religion.  The reason is wrapped up in the naming of this blog and Mircea Eliade's seminal work The Sacred and the Profane.

In the work Eliade provides an argument for understanding both religious and non-religious experience (or to use the title of the work, the experience of the sacred and profane).  One of his contentions in the work is that non-religious people still act "religiously" when ordering their life or assigning value to specific events.  It is an interesting point as Eliade attempts to differentiate between sacred and profane experience via an understanding that the experience of the profane, while arguably religious in nature, tends to be personal and private and the experience of the sacred tends toward to the communal and becomes ritualized.

I loved Eliade (to be fair, I loved most of what I read in undergrad) but his concept of sacred and profane created a problem for me.  Creating the dichotomy of "sacred" and "profane" naturally created other dichotomies in his work that tended to force divisions in his analysis where I never felt there needed to be.  The part of Eliade's work that tended to embed itself in my thinking, however, was the fact that religious practice and experience is and has been an incredibly ordinary experience in human history.  Instead I choose to subvert Eliade's dichotomy of sacred and profane because I can't help but see the myriad constructions of religious belief and practice throughout the world and acknowledge that religion is not special or unique or at all sacred.  It is simply the experience of different cultures, both privately and publicly, attempting to make sense of life.

I bring all of this up because I'm truly fascinated by the way different people understand their worlds.  Whichever way one approaches the world, I've always thought the key to continued progress as human beings is through understanding of ourselves and those around us.  For myself, religion has played an important role in my life and over time I've come to understand that, in the end, religion is really a story about us.  For my own experience the journey to understand the meaning and purpose of the divine has really been a journey to understand myself.  As Eliade would admit religion is about the stories we tell and the meaning we assign to those stories.  It is, in an oddly peculiar way, what we do as human beings as well.  We tell stories.  We construct our mythologies and assign to those mythologies symbols and rituals to remember them by.  And I wouldn't call that a religious endeavor, I would call that a human compulsion.

What about you internetland?  How do you see the world around us?

Heaven, Hell and Everything in Between

Rob Bell recently published a book titled, Love Wins.  The book deals with Christian notions of heaven and hell and specifically the idea that traditional Christian concepts of hell aren't really all that important.  From the brief media appearances I've seen of him talking about his book it seems Bell's point is that, in the end, God's act of redeeming the world cannot fail and so the concept of hell should take a back seat to much more important theological concepts (like God's love for the world).  I haven't read the book yet, and I'm not sure that I will, but what's made this book so controversial is that Rob Bell is a pastor of the evangelical, 10,000 member, Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI.  Evangelicals aren't known for cozying up to ideas that even approach the theological territory of universalism.  The odd part (though perhaps not surprising) is that Bell isn't espousing universalism and while I might be called a universalist, that's not really at all what his book makes me think about.

I don't remember the first time I posed the "what happens when I die?" question to my parents.  Hell wasn't really a topic of conversation at home or in church and heaven always hung as this background fixture in the ambiance of sermons or Sunday school lessons.  It just wasn't a topic my church or my life seemed to care that much about. Instead the recent media frenzy over Bell's book makes me think about the fact that in different places and at different times Christianity is and has been very different.

What is it about Christianity that makes different denominations and conglomerations of Christians so terribly concerned with doctrinal orthodoxy?  What is so important about retaining this orthodoxy?  Perhaps the sense of inclusion and identity is important for some.  For others, maybe, it's about feeling in control of some aspect of our knowledge of god.  To be honest, I couldn't say.  As a lifelong holder of unorthodox and unpopular ideas I'm not sure what it is about difference that concerns people so much and I'm not sure what it is about unpopular theological ideas that so threatens the very fabric of Christianity.  If all of this is an issue of identity then I think it would be prudent to begin by at least acknowledging the fact that the various forms and expressions of Christianity throughout the world are different enough to warrant their own parking space in the list of world religions.

It's interesting to me though because many of us (especially those in the ecumenical movement) are enamored with the idea of unity.  We can accept that Christianity is different and the myriad expressions of it so long as we still get to call it all Christianity (I guess, because, what else would we call it?).  And I think there are some positives to this.  I think it allows us to accept what different denominations and groups have contributed to Christian faith over its history.  It prevents different groups from dismissing each other outright even if it doesn't prevent them from disagreeing and condemning each other.  In the end, it reminds us to be in dialogue with one another.

And yet, clinging to this notion that we can still claim some unified piece of the religious landscape creates problems for me.  At the very least I find it a tad disingenuous (while we might all claim Jesus as foundational to the faith, we definitely don't agree what that means).  At worst it continues to prevent the majority of Christianity from accepting those elements of our faith that are indebted to other religious traditions in the world.  It's like we keep telling ourselves that Christianity is just so unique and thus, just so right.  Perhaps this is all just semantics in the end but I really do think that being able to be honest about the reality that Christian theology can be varied enough to effectively function as different religions is important.  Perhaps it could teach us how to celebrate difference rather than hide from it.

Tragedy

We are, for the most part, terrible at confronting tragedy. Grieving is a process we rush, not one we savor, stories are retold so long as they have happy endings and we love revisionist history when it acquits us of the sins of our fathers and mothers. I’m not sure I could pinpoint what part of our society reinforces this relatively common experience, but I am certain that we are simply dumbfounded when it comes to confronting, living in, and learning from the tragedies we experience regularly in our lives. In my religious upbringing hope was the refrain heard most often over the discordant melody of tragedy; that somehow god would make something good out of a bad situation, that we should hope for a brighter tomorrow and that things will eventually get better. And I have to confess that these are compelling beliefs for me as well but there is a part of me that can’t quite stomach the notion that there is always some good that comes out of our tragedies. I feel like, sometimes, hope gets in the way of the more human part of reacting to tragedy. We don’t know how to live with sorrow or trade our feelings of loss. We worry about visiting our own demons on others or subjecting them to a version of ourselves we’re not altogether comfortable with.

I did not attend my grandmother's funeral the reason for which (the one I shared with my father and others) was primarily logistical. My partner was in St. Louis in the middle of student teaching and I was missing her terribly and boarding a plane to go see her. The other reasons that I failed to share with anyone at the time were, perhaps, the more important ones. My grandmother had fallen into increasingly deeper spats of dementia as her life ended and there was a large part of me that already felt she was gone. The last time I saw her, it wasn't her anymore. I suppose (or at least convinced myself) that my grieving had already begun. I said goodbye that final visit in more ways than one. I had no intention of attempting to visit my grief on others.

A month or so after the funeral the family gathered to bury Grandma’s ashes. Not all of us were there, just like before. The moment was awkward. Someone suggested we bury one of our beer cans with her and the only thing I could think about was whether or not anyone really wanted to talk about the fact that Grandma was, for all intents and purposes, an alcoholic. I was asked to offer a prayer and over the swelling and passing sound of several cars, I did.Then we buried our grief in the ground.

And so, Good Friday will come and pass this Lent with all due haste.We'll take a moment to leave our sanctuaries in a Tenebrae silence and then quickly shuffle on to the joy of Easter. It’s so much less effort this way, so much less awkward. The dwelling will be on new hope and new life rather than living the lives that are so obviously staring back at us. Because, in the end, we still don’t know what it means to live the tragedies of everyday life even though we are all painfully aware that we need to.

“The glory of god is humanity fully alive.” – Iranaeus of Lyons