Clarity? (Labels, part II)

I've just gotten in from running. Within the cold, the music, and the exercise itself - everything else seemed to fade away. I'm hardly into the true zen of running, but with the right ingredients a certain clarity of mind, of being can emerge - where all the things that seemed so important and all the anxious attempting to figure everything out seem to fade away, if only for a little while. It's a feeling I need more of.

I spent most of the day today at a lecture series given by Marcus Borg, so the run was all the more necessary to put a stop to all the intense theologizing and processing I'm prone to do when new ideas are thrown at me - though maybe some of what was said is not altogether new. Parts kind of reminded me of a verse I read recently in the Psalms - deep calling to deep - something deep within me resonated with what he said, though I'm not sure I would say it the same way because to a certain extent, I think we all need our own language. Language itself, after all, is only metaphor - an approximation of what we feel, what we believe, what we try to say about God.

....which gets me back to some of what I started into with my brief rant on political labels. My dislike for categories applies even more in the realm of faith, especially as they are used to determine just who the "chosen" are and to send the rest to hell (which I am really not altogether sure I believe in, but that's perhaps another post). My problem with labels in relationship to faith is how quickly they can descend to idolatry - when being "orthodox" or "traditional" or a certain denomination becomes more important than being faithful to the Gospel. And so often with our labels and categories, we end up placing limits around God. When we try to turn the language we use to speak about God into an absolute truth in itself, faith becomes more of an intellectual exercise of assenting to beliefs than a real relationship with God - and the beliefs about God and Christ become more important than God and Christ themselves.

This gets me back to my previous post and questions about Truth. What does it mean that at the heart of Christianity we say that Truth is a person? "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life....." To say that Truth is bound up in a living and breathing person is a pretty incredible thing because no matter how hard we try to name and qualify and categorize, a person cannot ultimately be reduced to just words! Everything that can be said about me cannot say everything - and is this not that much more true for the one we say is Truth itself?

Yes, I wander into abstraction - but how much more powerful is it to say that Truth is something to be encountered (fully, with all the senses) rather than something simply to be believed (with the mind).

"Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart, mind, and strength......."

vs.

"Thou shalt accept the doctrine of the Trinity, the absolute inerrancy of the Bible, the Anselm-ian explanation of atonement...."

I will grant that labels make things easier, that categories make faith and life a little less messy, that clearly defined doctrines are perhaps more comfortable - but are these things really the Gospel, the "good news"? I am again and again struck by the fact that the Truth we ultimately seek is a person and the Bible is true to the extent that it bears witness to the Word made flesh, but the authority is in the word as incarnate, not in the human language itself.

I guess I'm just not as concerned with defining what it means to be a Christan as with following Jesus. This is not to say that "anything goes" - I suppose it's more that the devil is always in the details in the sense that the more we try to define and exclude the greater the danger there is of slipping into the legalism of the Pharisees.

Perhaps, then, it is helpful to think of all religious language as poetry in which the words always mean more than their simple definitions and when put together mean all the more. Maybe this isn't exactly clarity, after all, but it is a new way of seeing even if I'm not sure all that it means.

What is Truth?

Thinking today about dear Pilate and those who would accuse me of relativism....

Would I stand up and fight for Truth at some point? - most certainly - but let's remember that it is Truth that we nailed to a cross with all of our designs about what It was supposed to be.

Faith. Hope. Love. Those are their names of course, those three - as words so worn out, but as realities so rich. Our going-away presents from beyond time to carry with us through time to lighten our step as we go. And part at least of the wisdom of the third one is, as Rinkitink hear it, "Never question the truth of what you fail to understand, for the world is filled with wonders." Above all, never question the truth beyond all understanding and surpassing all other wonders that in the long run nothing, not even the world, not even ourselves, can separate us forever from that last and deepest love that glimmers in our dusk like a pearl, like a face.

-Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey

I am not a Republican ...or a Democrat (Labels Part 1)

Sojourners et al. took out an ad during the election that said, "God is not a Republican, or a Democrat," and I have decided it is a fitting personal statement as well (I think I signed the petition, but I can't remember). This past election, I gave up my party affiliation, though not my sense of political identity. There were practical reasons given the kind of work I do, there were reactionary reasons related to the primary process, and then there were the reasons that weren't yet reasons when I did it, but have become more prominent now.

I have always disliked labels of any kind - having been called a number of different things in my life, some less kind than others. To assign a name to something, to place something in a category so often limits or fails to capture the whole of what it is that is being described - as if to say "you are a liberal, conservative, hippie, evangelical......whatever" and that's all the person is allowed to be. You name it, you label it, and whatever it is becomes easier to dismiss or to stereotype. Or even if you try to claim something for yourself, you end up running up against everyone else's definition of what that thing is supposed to be and it becomes a fight over semantics (hmmm...framing???) rather than an effort to understand what it means for a person to try to stake a claim in the first place.

But, I'm beginning to digress into what is to be the second and more theoretical post about labeling....

So, let me say now I'm not a Democrat nor a Republican (nor a Green, nor a Libertarian, etc...you get the idea. This, of course, tends to draw criticism from all sides because (in case you missed it) there is something of a political and cultural war going on and the intransigency of the "with us or against us" mentality leaves little space for us political wanderers. But, let me clarify - I am not a fence sitter. There are certainly things I believe and believe strongly and for which I have been dragging my ass up to capitol hill for the past few years to try to accomplish. But I am more idealistic than ideological (am I falling into the labeling trap myself?) and I don't want to spend my time defending a party name, when there are a lot better things to be fighting for.

More to come...

An old poem that seems to fit....

Psalm 139

On a lonely street coner, an old man sits
worn, black leather held high in his right hand
the words coming from memory, he speaks
hellfire, damnation or salvation for the masses
of lonely people wandering in the heat of the lunch hour
words that barely penetrate the shade in which he sits
lots to the hurried lunch crowds, eager for relief from the summer's sweat
but unaware of anything more
Again, he speaks - the tired voice drones on
though not even a glance is cast his way
lost in the buzz of the crowds
but for a moment, I stop, listen
the words with little eloquence, but the sound is enough
a reminder of a past, a faith committed to memory
but not yet to heart

some days forgotten, I see the man again
and his tired persistance forces my attention again
I look around and no one notices the pause
only my soul for another moment listens
and somewhere in the heart of the suffocating city
behind the expressionless faces of the professionals passing by
burning in the heart of an old man on a street corner
there is God

A Beginning

I confess I am not quite sure what I am doing and I'm worrying not a little bit about the inherent narcissism of this kind of endeavor, but I think I needed a new and maybe necessarily public space to throw myself and my thoughts up against for a little while - as a wonderful prayer of Thanksgiving from the Book of Common Prayer reads - "for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory." Of course, I'm taking the phrase shamelessly out of context (something for which I will likely rant and rave about others doing should this take off in any form), but in attempting to commit myself to some kind of Lenten discipline in praying the daily office - okay, at least once a day! - these words continually jump off the page at me and are just beautiful in and of themselves.

Thus, the title of this blog and perhaps the purpose behind it - to sort through my own theological, political, cultural wanderings for the means of finding and holding fast to the grace that I know is always there but so often gets lost in the cacophony and brutality that sometimes is life. We'll see where it goes, especially considering I'm not all that blogically savvy.

There are tons of other voices out there speaking more eloquently, more passionately, more honestly than I can pretend to and there are many of the more progressive political and theological bent already "fighting the good fight" in the endlessly ridiculous culture wars that our country is caught in. There is the drive to define "values" and to lay one's marker down and to go toe to toe in point and counterpoint, which for me at some point becomes pointless. Though I must confess I do participate in this game myself, being my own form of religious politico and like anyone I can get a good rant going - but I made the title of this what I did, to give pause to the drive to be "correct" and try to look from the angle of grace and how to find it in the midst of the debates that are destroying us.

So, a beginning of creating a small space for myself and for anyone else who happens to stumble upon it - and a hope that it might be a means of grace for someone else as well.