UFC, dragons and the image of God

"When we place value (the only value) in the overcoming, or transcending, or triumph over these things, (struggles, difficulties, sufferings etc.) we empty them of their positive content and value. When it comes to people then, the victim is valued when they overcome their victimization, the addict is valued when they have triumph over their addiction or when they clean up and the "criminal" has value when they are delivered from their "deviance" and rehabilitated." (hineini)

i think i hear what you are saying, hineini.

last summer, i was in a meeting where somebody made a statement that all they had had to do was pray and they were healed... that their faith had made them whole.

now, i have no problem with feeling this- i mean, it's even biblical.

however, feeling and articulating are two very different things. one must needs be careful with this kind of testimonial because of the message of hopelessness and failure that this kind of announcement indirectly puts out there for someone who is still struggling with and being overcome by something that is completely out of their control. to put it another way, the victim of an infirmity feels devalued as a person because of his or her inability to somehow slay this dragon and bring back a victory report to the crowd.

a friend of mine, an old 'saint' and one of the most faithful followers of Christ i know, had been struggling with major kidney failure and had been doing and receiving from others a heckuvalot of prayer- but was losing the battle. to make this glib 'mind over matter' kind of statement in his presence was to suggest that his faith was somehow not strong enough to overcome this physical ailment. what was intended to be a shout of victory for the encouragement of the masses within their own circumstance probably just rang out as hollow hopelessness for my friend. try to tell someone who has been praying against something for years to no resolution that 'God has no favorite children' and then listen to their side. there is this pervasive 'well why not ME then?' question begging for an answer- although my friend would never say this, i believe i might if i were in his place.

even beyond this, contrast western prosperity theology and all this 'child of the king' talk with war, hunger, starvation, disease, homelessness and natural disaster in any of the three or four worlds and see how well the rhetoric holds up to real life. i remember being rather stuck for an answer when a new friend of mine in sri lanka asked me point blank the first time we met:

"what do i tell the people of my village who have lost everything- family, friends, home, livelihood- to Tsunami? who is this God that i am to share with them?"
(rev david gunasari)

d'uh... good question.

journeys down 'alleyways of strife' have and always will be things of beauty... but not the comfortable, renaissance, dayglo psychadelic or off-in-a-field-somewhere-with-the-archbishop-of-canterbury kind of beauty... the kind of wild, action-painter beauty of jackson pollock paintings, bearing upon them the scars of the creative battle itself; the beauty of jacob's walk after his all-night UFC bout with an angel of God; the beauty of my friend rev david's angry resolve to hold tightly to his faith in an invisible God- the only thing in his life that wasn't destroyed by the disaster that destroyed his village and killed many of his family and friends.

there are very few things as inspiring to me as seeing the faith of one who is fighting an ongoing battle with something and refuses to relent on either the battle or the faith that brings greater strength to contend.

i find great inspiration in the white-knuckling of faith in the face of all manner of opposition. job's refusal to accept the advice of his wife to just 'curse God and die' makes him already victorious- but not in the manner of the 'colonial triumphalism' described above, which seems to be a 'fought the good fight, ran the good race' kinda thing.

in my view, job's 'victory' is an ongoing one of day to day conviction and plain perseverence- not in naivete but in hard-nosed faithfulness. rather than being the opiate of the people, faith for people like job and my friend is adrenaline, enabling them the supernatural strength to somehow do things that they really shouldn't be able to do.

but i don't think that any of this is what hineini is saying.
what i take from hineini's comment above is a challenge...

i am being challenged to find inspiration in the life lived in desperation, struggle and strain; the life lived to ultimate 'failure' in these Victory in Jesus terms; the life lived to bear testimony to the love and lifebreath of God simply because it is a human life, and being such bears the truth, the dignity and the opportunity to enlighten that is the very image of God.

sanctimony baloney

JOLLYBEGGAR DISCLAIMER:

okay, i've been thinking about this for awhile...
especially since we hit the 40-somethingth comment on the 'cruel God' post...
this dialogue is just too rich to shut down.

although i was trying to close off this blog, the conversation kept moving forward. it didn't even surrender to redundency and circle logic... it just kept progressing.

what kind of an idiot would pull the plug on that?
not this kind, anyway.

the challenge has been to either come up with something new to post or change the whole blog. the e-pistles idea was certainly dialogue based, but originally it was a place to put long-winded explorations of things that had sprung from other emails, comment boxes etc. after awhile, the phrase 'but that's a whole nother blog' started to appear whenever it felt like a tangent was developing. the idea of starting a blog that entertained only the tangents started around then...

a blog that allowed ideas to flow like sweet wine.
an oasis that might have five or six posts all going simultaneously in different directions... something for those of us with attention deficits... those of us who are currently reading four or five books at a time and seem to never be finishing any of them in chronological order.

lately, this has been that blog in a way. it's been a great place to talk, and has been, in the comment boxes of the last two official 'posts' changed direction and focus numerous times. it's been awesome in that it has both challenged and affirmed.

so here's what we can do...

every (or most) time(s) a comment takes us in a different direction, i will just copy and paste it as a new post so that we can continue the one thread while recognizing and embracing the new 'tangents' along the way too. this way the blog will grow naturally out of ongoing dialogue like the many tributaries of a morris louis painting, except that instead of convergent streams of paint these are divergent streams of ideas.

that's why the new name and that's why the new look. the same idea stream with a key difference: the topical flow is less restricted and less reliant upon whether yours truly has anything on his mind these days.

what follows is what prompted the last post, and probably the reason why this blog has stalled for so long. see it as a confessional.

***

i remember a conversation that i had with a friend of mine long ago. we were going through a rather 'rocky' period in our relationship, and one day he asked me why we were always fighting. i didn't even have to think... it just came out:

"because we both know we're right."

okay, so i think i'm still figuring some things out.

a few weeks back, on the same listserve that brought us that controversial piece of wisdom from charles spurgeon (don't think i've ever heard spurgeon refered to as controversial! ha ha) about what debates to enter into, there was a post by someone else who holds a very critical and exclusive (dareisay exclusionary?) perspective on postmodernity and the emerging church.

the good thing about a list like this is that it is run essentially by the people who read it (as opposed to being an 'official' company line on anything.) the bad thing is that it features mainly the cerebral meanderings of many people who should probably just start their own blogs and send the address out to the crowd one time. you can hardly even read the 'del' on my delete key anymore.

now at the risk of sounding disunitive (and amidst a fair bit of sanctimony baloney of my own) i have found the sanctimonious nature of the posts by this one writer on this one email list a bit annoying. at my darkest, i read them so that i can be annoyed, but at my brightest, i choose to not read them because they annoy me... not much of a gap there. not much grace.

so much for being mr free-exchange-of-ideas.

anyway, in his post, this guy was extolling the virtues of a certain book that, in his view, all postmoderns and all emergent pastors should read. in the same post, he shared a few tidbits as anticipatory teasers to ready the soil for the seeds of wisdom that he would be sharing in a forthcoming synopsis and review of the book.

reading the teasers caused me to wonder by whom and for whom such a book is written.

it is the same thing. no big deal, the writer just believes he's right. he's found intellectual acquiesence among many, like the fellow posting the review, who subscribe to the same views. i am reminded of the episode of the simpsons where bart gets kicked out of school and, before finally settling on home-schooling, he is briefly enroled by marge in a school that proudly but falsely promises to put "the fun in fundamentalist dogma."

you see, from within rich personal tradition and its ugly twin, ethnocentricity, people who write often write at everyone else who, in this view, is obviously wrong and misguided... not to them.

from this place, a person often thinks that he/she is helping when he/she presumes to advise others... but in trying to acknowledge societal, philosophical, theological or doctrinal change from an unchanging (although not immutable- simply subjected to and strengthened in its resolve by opposing worldviews and new traditions) vantage point, one risks mispresumption on a number of levels. i wonder how often i wear that hat? i'm pretty sure i'm wearing it now, but i'm going to stand in front of the mirror for a few minutes and just see what i look and feel like with it on.

yep- i look and feel like an ass. call me not-so-jolly-beggar- jollybeggar's ugly twin.

urochrome filter

(this) is a controversial photograph by American photographer Andres Serrano. It depicts a small plastic crucifix supporting the body of Jesus Christ submerged in a glass of the artist's urine. Some have suggested that the glass may also contain the artist's blood. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition, which is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects.

The piece caused a scandal when it was exhibited in 1989, with detractors accusing Serrano of blasphemy and others raising this as a major issue of artistic freedom. On the floor of the United States Senate, Senators Al D'Amato and Jesse Helms expressed outrage that the piece was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, since it is a federal taxpayer-financed institution.

Surprisingly, the art critic and Catholic Nun Sister Wendy Beckett voiced her approval of (it) whose public exhibition offended all conservative, most moderate and even some liberal Catholics.

Serrano produced other similar works to much less controversy; Madonna and Child II (1989), for example, in which the subject is similarly submerged in urine, is not nearly as well known...

(it) is often used as a test-case for the idea of freedom of speech, and was described in the journal Arts & Opinion as "a clash between the interests of artists in freedom of expression on the one hand, and the hurt such works may cause to a section of the community on the other."

It is referred to in many popular publications including Bill Maher's book When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden. (as per www.wikipedia.com)
***

fredcall sends me the strangest stuff. i've been on holidays from my computer for awhile, and was glad that this didn't 'expire' the way things in my hotmail junkbox regularly do when i don't attend to them.

so... this photograph. hmmmm. really bad title. kinda funny, the things that set us off. for me, i just hated the title so i substituted all of the (it)'s because the tone just brought everything down somehow. sorry- my blog, i can censor as i see fit, but let's just refer to this photograph as PC, okay? you can look it up in the wikipedia under the name of the artist if my little title problem is really bothering you.

anyway, there are two things that come to mind when i think of this photograph and the controversy that surrounds it- one has to do with literal interpretations, the other with figurative ones:

A) literal:
i've gotta give a big 'whatever' on this one.
i mean, yes, there is real urine- but let's also not forget that there is also a plastic figurine.

this isn't Jesus, it's just a little plastic thingie that bears some resemblance to him according to popular arts expressions from the euro renaissance. we should all try to remember that there is nothing inherently more holy about this figurine than about the figurine of 'earthworm jim' that is on the file cabinet behind me as i type. as a matter of fact, i believe both of them represent humankind's propensity for idol-making and fancy.

as for the urine? well, it's the very healthy product of a well-functioning urinary system which was designed by God to flush out the effluent in both animals and mammals. an entry in the wikipedia asserts that "Healthy urine is a clear aqueous solution, varying in colour from dark yellow to colourless, depending on the dilution. The main constituent besides water is urea; urochrome is the pigment that gives urine its color. Urea is one of the three nitrogenous waste products. The other two are creatinine and uric acid. Urine also contains various inorganic ions, including sodium and chloride. Lighter urine indicates higher water consumption."

so basically, plastic is plastic and piss is piss.

B) figurative:
having said that plastic is plastic and piss is piss, we probably need to look at what these things have come to represent to us. plastic first- artificiality. something easily fashioned and easily refashioned with the help of a little heat. plastic often means counterfeit or fake to us. if we want to be all uptight about the significance of things, then we should probably reconsider whether renderings of Jesus should be permitted at all. i mean, how often do people bow down before or talk to a picture or figurine of Christ as if it were the actual God? pagan idols were also representations of characters from an unseen pantheon that were prayed to as if they were the real thing, yet this was called idolatry by both God and man... oh, but it's all different when it's Jesus? i don't think so.

if one wanted to be really strict and legalistic, then the words of j.i. packer in his classic book 'Knowing God' probably bear some repitition (note: i have done a bit of clipping in order to summarize what i believe are his key relevent points of discussion- totally good book from start to finish if you're into that kinda thing)

• 1) images dishonor God for they obscure his glory...the pathos of the crucifix obscures the glory of Christ, for it hides the fact of his deity, his victory on the cross, and his present kingdom. it displays his human weakness, but it conceals his divine strength; it depicts the reality of his pain, but keeps out of our sight the reality of his joy and his power... the symbol is unworthy most of all because of what it fails to display. and so are all other visible representations of deity
• 2)images mislead us. they convey false ideas about God... the very inadequecy with which they represent him perverts our thoughts of him and plants in our minds errors of all sorts about his character and will... the use of the crucifix as an aid to prayer has encouraged people to equate devotion with brooding over Christ's bodily sufferings; it has made them morbid about the spiritual value of physical pain and it has kept them from the knowledge of the risen saviour. (Packer, Knowing God, 1973, p50-51)

as for the piss? well, typically we equate pissing on something with disrespect. that's probably why all the controversy. here's what i think, though:

art is about bringing into the physical world, the abstractions of the artist's heart and mind. somehow taking that which is intangible and making it tangible. sometimes these abstractions and the apparent metaphoric connections with life are intentional, but often they are random, unintentional and subliminal. regardless of what the artist might have intended, i take from this piece some interesting (to me) reminders of life, the universe and everything... but most importantly of God's love for me.

if we are gonna just ignore all the 'right thinking' of packer and attach something really significant to the plastic figurine, fine. i'm okay with that, because then this photograph speaks to me of the divine in the presence of the profane; the holy withstanding the unholy; life in death.

we regularly, willfully piss upon all that Christ was and is about... our pissing was and is his suffering on our behalf. as we disrespect and blaspheme through thought and action, we pour out our derision upon the crucified Christ, not even realizing that his suffering was for our relief and freedom.

yet he didn't remain submerged in it. that's where the real hope is.

and, in a miracle of mercy, grace and transformative power, he turned our fetid water into fine wine, beckoning all of us to drink deeply of it as often as we think of him. the cup of his suffering becomes the cup of our salvation because he is God and behold, he makes all things new.

all truth is God's truth. all hope is found in him and him alone.

the god-makers

lately this beggar's world has been full of all manner of calamity and wonder. these are days of faith, my friends. i honestly haven't been at 'leisure' to further attend to the discipline of blogging. however, just in case there is anyone who still checks this site for something fresh, i have decided to post something that i came across today when doing some major 'housecleaning.'

it is from a small denominational magazine that i used to write for back at the turn of the millenium...

i remember reading once on someone's blog that it could be rather interesting to repost the 23rd entry on our blogs a year later or whatever in order to note how far from then the now has taken us. well, the article below was published in october, 2000- nearly six years ago- and though my voice has changed a bit, i still hold to the same things (call this redundancy or consistency?)

maybe sometime soon i'll be able to actually put into words all that has been going on at this point in my journey. until then, however, know that life is good and God sustains me, your friend, through all things great and small...

shalom
***
All who make idols are nothing, and the things they treasure are worthless... Who shapes a god and casts an idol which can profit him nothing? He and his kind will be put to shame; craftsmen are nothing but men." -Isaiah 44.9-11

every now and then the word of God gives me a shot right in the chops.

it's really easy to justify involvement in a rather subtle form of idolatry simply by adhering to the maxim: "Give your best to God."

please make no mistake here- i will always maintain that if we are not giving our best to the Father then we are falling short of what he has called us to do for his kingdom. to withhold anything from his will is to be a gripper rather than a releaser.

as a worship leader i work hard to develop what God has entrusted to me. i drill and practice myself to blisters. i listen to maxwell tapes, attend worship conferences, subscribe to leadership magazine, even read the latest yancey title... but sometimes i think that we can carry too much of the burden of worship upon ourselves as leaders. without careful internal scrutiny, we can become too important to the kingdom in our own eyes, and this results in spiritual confusion- maybe not immediately, but inevitably.

the people in the seats become too reliant upon us to rejuvenate them; we become too responsible for the quickening of their spiritual pulse. eventually people end up worshipping the worship.

the danger within any worship context usually arises when people lose track of why they are there. it is this way because of the basic human propensity to become preoccupied with ourselves rather than God.

as spiritual navel-gazers, we allow ourselves to be the centre of our worship, rather than exalting Christ. worship becomes experiencial, rather than sacrificial. we draw energy and joy not from singing the name above all names, but from knowing that when we are singing his name we have his attention.

'all who make idols are nothing...'

personally, i cannot stand the idea of being eternally inconsequential. like a little child, i just want my God to be pleased with the present i made for him myself. i want to grow closer to him with my every offering. in offering it to him, i long for his acceptance of my gift. i want him to be proud of me and i want him to use what i made for him because then i feel less like a spiritual freeloader.

however, if my creative energies are directed towards somehow validating myself by my worship expression then i am wasting both the time and the gifts that have been entrusted to me. Christ's death already established my worth in his sight.

'who shapes a god or casts an idol which can profit him nothing?'

webster says an idol is 'an image of a god, constructed of wood, stone, etc. and worshiped as if it were the god it represents.' one of the things that we seek to do with our words or our music is to paint a picture of God's glory- to somehow make the mind-bending attributes of God understandable for normal, linear, rather blunt-minded creatures like ourselves.

no matter how big or beautifully ornamented the box, God will not fit into it.

furthermore, we must not tuck even a tiny portion of his glory into our own back pockets for our own personal use later. there was a worship leader in heaven who did this long ago and to a certain extent he still works daily at stealing the worship from Almighty God. if the people begin to worship the art as if it were the God it represents, then we are creative heretics in search of company, working away on something that not only profits us nothing, but ultimately costs us everything.

'craftsmen are nothing but men.'

unless God intervenes and transforms our efforts into something that brings him glory, our worship is only temporal. only when God is glorified will anything we do last beyond that final day when we stand, longing to hear him say

"well done, my faithful one, enter into the kingdom...
they're playing our song!"

the art of miracles?

"modern people have an almost aesthetic dislike of miracles. admitting that God can, they doubt if he would..." (c.s. lewis)

recently, a friend asked me about this quote. i had used it to reinforce a talk about miracles and faith. as i read c.s. lewis' words again, it seemed to me that the only word seeming a bit odd in its usage was 'aesthetic.'

typically we use this word to describe that je ne sais quoi of art that causes us to feel something in response to something someone has created. aesthetics is defined by somebody named webster...

(let's face it, all webster dictionaries are not equal; it is a misnomer much like saying you are taking a ride on a ski-doo when you are really riding a 'snowmobile' and then stemming the resulting post-nasal tide with a kleenex when what you are really using is a 'tissue'. apparently anyone can publish a webster's dictionary... at least that's what i was taught during my stint at university- but that's a whole nother blog)

... as 'the philosophy of beauty and the fine arts.'

okay, so what c.s. lewis appears to be saying, then, is that a modern person's emotional response to the idea of miracles is comparable to that person's emotional response to certain arts expressions... particularly (in my view) the ones that they don't understand. their personal philosophy of beauty or art (or, in their personal theology of miracles, possibility or truth) informs this response and the response informs the art/miracle to some degree- rendering the art/miracle as either valid or ridiculous in the world being conceptually framed by the assimilation of these personal experiences.

recently there was a very simple post on icarus' blog... it had three components: a picture, a price and a pronouncement. the picture? an abstract expressionist piece (above) by mark rothko. the price? $22.4 million u.s. the pronouncement? 'disgusting.' (later, another piece and another price was also added. however, the pronouncement remained unchanged...)

when prompted (or provoked- sometimes it's a thin line) further as to what was disgusting about it, a great discussion opened up once again on icarus' blog, this time concerning

'what has the right to be called art anyway?'
(http://icarusgoodman.blogspot.com/2005/11/laughable.html)

totally fun to read. the fact that everyone in the discussion seemed to feel so strongly about something that is often seen as merely ornamental rather than essential underscores the importance of arts expressions in our world- if for no other reason than to unify people in nonsupport of something that is a direct result of something that they are so vehemently in support of... freedom of expression.

about ten years ago when a comparable mark rothko painting was bought by the canadian national gallery for $1.75m (a huge price at the time but about 1/10 of its value now, for the economists in the crowd) much of the canadian public was outraged, yet the story was relegated to two opinion columns and a cartoon on page 16 in our local paper. one of the opinion columns was quite funny as the writer, ron petrie, explored the idea of selling some of his yard sale junk as art nouveau...

"(for sale) one souvenir snow orb, a water-filled bubble that depicts a wintry street scene in banff whenever you shake it up or down. only we don't call it a snow orb. heavens no. for the purpose of government appraisal, it's a kinetic exploration of the interaction between the human spirit and the natural environment, embracing not only the apparent dichotomy between the two essential elements, but also a surreal sense of their inseparability...

(now for the punchline- jb)

the orb is priced at 50 cents. the gobbledegook is an additional $1.9 million."

often the modern art question, and modern artists in general are seen by realists as simply a really good example of the swindling tailors in 'the emperor's new clothes.'

for anyone who likes delving into the dark side of this topic (that is, the alternative to slam-dancing on the work of pollock, kline, rothko, newman and other abstract expressionists) i would recommend reading 'bluebeard' by kurt vonnegut. it's good ironic fun.

but what of miracles?

well, it appears to me that c.s. lewis might be suggesting that people struggle with the same emotionally-loaded resistence to the idea that things happen in our world which they cannot comprehend as they do with the ever-enigmatic, ever-controversial subject of modern art.

perhaps God's greatest miracles have much in common with some of our modern artist's strongest challenges to our perspective. when we are ready to default to dismissal, perhaps that is the moment requiring the greatest faith which will lead to the greatest growth in ourselves as spiritually experienced people. considering possibilities rather than impossibilities requires a commitment to exploring new things rather than simply concluding that the sum total of one's own experience to date is all that there is to existence.

furthermore, it may very well be that our inability to comprehend the truth about miracles has more to do with the willingness of our hearts to consider this possible truth than it does with the actual event in question.

is the painting above simply a bunch of no-talent blobs and smears done on a huge canvas by a lunatic or a charlatan, or is it an open window into another world?

who can say?

fired

in response to a thing on another blog, shandi said...
...my sculpture was done in a different technique... coil method of building up from the groundfloor rather than taking away unnecessary clay. So... in essence... I was nothing until built up in stages. But... as you astutely pointed out... I should have been left on my own to solidify my personality before being put to the kiln. And.. yes I did crack.
***

yeah, tragically our churches can become kilnlike, can't they?

i mean, fledgling sculpture subjected to all that heat and intensity? i'm not sure that this is what Jesus had in mind when he said to a few everyday people 'come, follow me.'

shandi's description of the technique used to create that bust is beautiful and, if allowed to also stand as metaphor, is one that shines light into who we are: raw material built around an integral core becomes the realization of that which the scultor envisioned in the first place...

i have, a number of times over the last five years, wondered why God waited so long to remind me of the call to ministry that i heard when i was seventeen. i mean, sure, i got it all wrong the first time around, thinking that i was supposed to be a rockstar for Jesus or something... but why did he choose to wait until i was, like, thirty-five or whatever before suggesting we try this one again?

my eventually agreed-upon answer: because there were still more layers of the raw material that makes a person a person (relationships, experiences, learnings, pain etc) needed to be added before the intended form was realized and ready to be used in the way intended for now.

clearly, i don't have a clue about working in three dimensional mediums like clay and such, but i've got to ask: what happens to said sculpture if you never fire it? is there some way to keep adding more on there?

reason i'm asking is because i don't think i ever want to be fired alive.

i never want to have some sense of complete realization because from there you kinda go 'okay, now what?' small affirmations along the way, acknowledging the artistry of the one at work forming me i think... sure. just nothing that says 'my work here is done.'

i think that being fired may very well be (in this metaphor that naturally goes way beyond my own depth and ability to recognize logical comparisons) death itself. only then can the final form be considered and assessed.

also, once something is fired, the only way to reuse or otherwise rework it is to smash it into fragments, right?

nope- the less smashing for me the better!

now as to why the institutional church seems to be, in many cases, kilnlike? it's probably because people have allowed themselves to be fired, and now desire that for everyone else as soon as possible.

not every church is a kiln... many of them are studios.

nobody knows where you are
how near or how far
shine on, you crazy diamond
pile on many more layers
and i'll be joining you there
shine on, you crazy diamond
and we'll bask in the shadow of yesterdays triumph
and sail on the steel breeze
come on you boy child, you winner and loser,
come on you miner for truth and delusion and shine!
(waters, '75)
***
note: for anyone who's been paying attention and is wondering, it's not that i don't have anything to say about my recent trip to sri lanka, it's that i still have too much to say. eventually i will be able to write about it.

loyalty placement

my friend dennis made an observation about why people become miserable in churches, yet refuse to change environments...

"they are victims of their own standing loyalties."
BAM!
nailed it there.

it seems like people generally place loyalty somewhere... a cause, a church family, a pastor/leader, an organization, a principle...even if it is simply loyalty to their own convictions on things. this loyalty is a stability of sorts, causing one to feel grounded and sure.

the problems seem to make a break for it when the balance of reason and resolve is somehow upset by 'lower' factors (like any leadership change- particularly in style or personality) that fly under the radar and then catch us by surprise. we find ourselves unwittingly embroiled in a situation that causes us to feel compromised or otherwise inconsistent, simply due to either unfamiliarity or negative familiarity (a bad experience or strongly preconceived opinion) with the agent of change.

music, particularly worship music, is often a flashpoint because of the important role it plays in our (churched) culture and how strongly emotive a change in music can be. we get on this thing where our personal aesthetic is somehow spiritualized and we buy into the lie that there is good and bad music, when in fact music is predominantly contextual... it is a language unto itself.

the truth about most worship music arguments is that the music simply FEELs unfamiliar and people draw spiritual conclusions from those feelings.

i felt uncomfortable, months ago, attending a worship service in another (more 'mainline') denomination. the service was set up according to the lectionary, with prescribed readings and passages and hymns (the combination of which was all already light years from my personally comfortable worship zone)

now, i love hymns (particularly as a devotional or songwriting aid) but these hymns were songs that i had never heard before which were written according to a whole different set of musical and lyrical rules than any with which i was familiar. i was lost, even though the directions and page numbers and colours of the books were printed in the program that i was handed at the beginning of the service.

but it came to me, as i was about to dismiss the whole experience as 'someone else's thing' that i simply needed to sort out how to engage. i stopped singing and started reading the words while everyone around me who was already familiar sang instead. the poetry was breathtaking. the biblical truth was purely pronounced and worded in (irony of ironies) a 'fresh new way.' without the personal distraction of musical style and inaccessible melody, i was free to worship- it was a personal pentecost and i was suddenly hearing the truth in my own language.

it occured to me that this difficulty finds its symmetry whenever someone from a church like this one comes to ours to visit. it strengthened my resolve to frame things in in such a way that people are free to access an awareness of the presence of God without feeling disloyal to who they are or what they hold to be important about their own worship experience.

ultimately, as dennis put in much fewer words, we are responsible for the placement of our personal loyalty because if it is misplaced then God fails to receive the worship that is his.

poetic license

john (http://penseethoughts.blogspot.com/) said:
"The relationship between poetry and truth is key but it seems power resides with poetry when, as Christ puts it 'the people are hungry' whereas power resides with truth when people are being fed meat and potatoes."

i like the notion that poetry is sometimes the only means by which the truth can get in.

language is like digital sampling. the greater the bitrate, the truer the sample is to the sonic essence of the original sound. poetic language contains not only the factual information, but the emotive colour of the factual information as well- in many ways it is a more complete 'sample' of an idea. not only this but metaphors are so much more participative, inviting thoughtful interpretation which takes so much more involvement than simply accepting or rejecting an idea does.

Jesus' use of metaphor seems to go intentionally in one of two directions: obscuring truth to invite greater hunger for it and greater satisfaction upon its discovery; and fleshing truth out in order to make it palpable for willy lowman.

i debated this idea at length with a friend of mine once. he was a seminarian, and was in love with his books (as can happen when you spend so much quality time with them!) the idea that we were attempting to find middle ground on was this: the bible is written in ancient aramaic (old testament) and greek (new testament) with odds and sods of linguistic hybrids thrown in here and there... therefore one needs to have experience with the ancient languages in order to properly handle scripture- in order to divine truth from the words.

obviously, not knowing a stitch of any of the languages in question, i disagreed on the grounds that God's word is truth and truth is timeless and unchanging. the trick for us today is to be able to discern the difference between timeless truth and culturally specific traditions. truth or tradition: how can we tell the difference if we don't know squat about ancient peoples? well that's probably a whole nother blog, but the way i tried to make my point was using poetry...

i asked a bunch of questions which basically underscored the richness of our shared cultural experiences:
both born in the same country in the same basic time period
both speaking the same mother tongue
both raised in traditional nuclear families
both schooled in the same language
both religiously raised and trained in the same denomination
both pursued secular employment before heading into ministry

alright enough already... so the point?
easy. i asked him what i meant when i wrote these lyrics:

circumstances change but the needs are still the same
people still need love and people still love to complain
everybody dances but no one wants to stay behind to pay the band
at the foot of the cross we gape at our loss
holding bloody hammers in our hands
its the moment of choosing between life and simply living alone

well that's hardly fair. i held all the cards. no matter what he said i could have said he was wrong... but i didn't because that would have nullified anything of value that i was trying to say. he gave the perfect answer anyway...

"i don't know- i can tell you what it says to me, though."

bingo. now obviously my stuff is pretty skimpy on truth, and helplessly incompatible with scripture, but the idea that, with poetry, many lessons can be learned from the same passage is a good one. every time i pick up my bible i try to discover something new in it that i've never seen before. the search for a new idea amidst ancient words is staggeringly humbling, because of all the defaults that we have to undo, but it is also incredibly rewarding because we grow in the process.

(note- VERY important: upon arriving at a 'new spin,' the next task is, of course, to run it through the gauntlet: there are things that are very hard to prove, but very easy to disprove. what can you find that disagrees? on what grounds do the disagreements stand? is this consistent with the deep water issues of scripture? all that. otherwise, a creative person can arrive at some pretty weird conclusions if studying the bible in a vacuum! i love the ongoing theological dialogue between frankie dunn and his priest in 'million dollar baby'... take your local preacher or scriptural authority out and bounce ideas around- benefit from HIS/HER years of study to further enrich your relationship with the God of the scriptures.)

however, i'm not getting the 'power of meat and potatoes' bit of john's post. what i take from it is that when people are accustomed to logical and factual discourse, there's not a lot of power in linguistic colourature. i certainly have friends that would agree with a memo more readily than they would agree with a sonnet.

me? i believe that while some books pontificate, other books sing-
yet both can contain truth.

“Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge… there is a great deal I do NOT want to know… even the bravest of us rarely has the courage for what he really knows…”
(Nietzsche- Twilight of the Idols)

"What is truth?" Pilate asked. (John 18.38)