Paradoxes of Community…

I’ve been concurrently reading Becoming Human and From Brokenness to Community, both by Jean Vanier. Jean Vanier is the founder of the L’Arche Communities; intentional communities focused on the care of the disabled. In From Brokenness to Community Vanier quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

He who loves community destroys community; he who loves the brethren builds community.

I hope I’ll never be dumb enough to try to improve on anything that Bonhoeffer has said; what I intend to do in this post is to confess conviction. This quotation caused myself to ask me the question; “Do you love your community more than the individuals in it?” My honest answer to self was; “Mostly.”

I realized that it’s much easier to have a relationship to an entity than an individual; whether the ‘entity’ be God, a company, a church or even abstract conceptual entities such as “family”, “country” or “fellow NASCAR fans”.

In Becoming Human Vanier convinced me that a deep barrier to personal belonging-ness lies in my own desire to be special, to compete, to be recognized as valuable and important. How can I belong if my belonging, by necessity, means something more important than everyone else’s belonging?

Walking with Christ is often paradoxical; it is a paradox that 1.) my own desire for community would become a block to realizing the same; and 2.) the tendency that I believe to make me attractive to others…my ’special-ness’…does in fact become a hindrance to experiencing community.

An Artist…

…by M.B. Goffstein; read by Nigel Goodwin on Dick Staub’s The Kindling’s Muse.

An Artist is like God, but small.
He can’t see out of God’s creation,
For it includes him.
With the seas divided,
All the animals named, and the sun and moon and stars
Set in their tracks, an artist spends his life
Not only wondering,
But wanting to work like God
With what he can command: his paints.
He tries to copy God’s creations.
He tries to shape beauty with his hand.
He tries to make order out of nature.
He tries to paint the thoughts and feelings in his mind.
An artist is like God
As God created him.
Small, strong, and with limited days,
His gift of breath is spent
Over his paintbox.
Choosing and brushing his colors,
He tries to make paint sing.

Capon on Left-Handed Power…

I was recently struck as I read this about how vital this approach to relationship is in our care community. By what means to we extend relationship to our clients?

There is one effect that cannot be the result of a direct application of force, and that is the maintenance of a relationship between free persons. If my child chooses not to cooperate with me, if my wife chooses not to live with me, there is no right-handed power on earth that can make them toe the line of relationship I have chosen to draw in the sand. I can dock my son’s allowance, for example, or chain him to a radiator; or in anger at my wife, I can punch holes in the Sheetrock or beat her senseless with a shovel. In short, I can use any force that comes to hand or mind, and yet I cannot cause either of them, at the core of their being, to stop their wrongs and conform to my right. The only power I have by which to do that is left-handed power – which for all practical purposes will be indistinguishable from weakness on my part. It is the power of my patience with them, of my letting their wrong be – even if that costs me my rightness or my life – so that they, for whose reconciliation I long, may live for a better day of their own choosing.

My point here is twofold. The power of God that saves the world was revealed in Jesus as left-handed power; and therefore any power that the church may use in its God-given role as the sacrament of Jesus must also be left-handed. Despite the fact that God’s Old Testament forays into the thicket of fallen human nature were decidedly right-handed (plagues, might acts, stretched-out-arm exercises, and thunderous threats) – and despite Jesus’ occasional use of similar tactics in the Gospels – the final act by which God reconciles the world to himself consists of his simply dropping dead on the cross and shutting up on the subject of sin. He declares the whole power game won by losing, and he invites the world just to believe that absurd proposition.

- Robert Farrar Capon, The Astonished Heart, pp. 62-63

Capon on Forgiveness & Repentance…

I’m going to quote a paragraph from Capon’s Exit 36; as his theology is generally served to the reader on a ‘bed of story’ as it were, I’ll have to set things a very little bit for the passage to make sense.

Anne is the wife of a man who killed himself, a priest who was having an affair with Pat.

And how about forgiveness as metaphysically identical with forgetting? Anne, presumably, doesn’t know about Pat yet. In a way, she is reconciled to her right now, both in time and in eternity. When she finds out, however, she’ll be unreconciled in time, and will have to work her way back to her present state. But then it will be a matter, not of involuntary ignorance, but of voluntary forgetting. Repentance, therefore, is a willingness to forget what Christ forgets when he sequesters evil in the eternal death of his human mind; an acceptance, as out of circulation, of what he has taken out of circulation; an agreement to stop insisting on what the word doesn’t want to talk about. Repentance as shutting up and putting on the wedding garment.

Nouwen vs. & Maxwell…

If you’ve been a regular reader you know that I’ve experienced some tension regarding my director’s decision to have our leadership team take John Maxwell’s course on the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. I’m a sort of ‘resistant to programs’ kind of guy, one of my favorite quotes has always been by e.e. cummings:

To be nobody but yourself in a world that’s doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting.

Being a regular reader you also know that I’ve worked hard to mature to the point where I’m able to accept that somebody I don’t agree with 1.) can teach me something, 2.) may be listened to without threatening my sovereignty as a human being and 3.) may be right, and I may be wrong…

Kathy Likes Bubble Gum…

Nearly five years ago K-LOVE took over KJOL in Grand Junction Colorado and signed a short-term death warrant on community based Christian radio in Western Colorado. K-LOVE stunk, and probably still does, I don’t know, I don’t listen to it. A friend described it as ‘bubble-gum’ music.

When Colorado Christian University sold (us) out, we also lost a community connection, a means for announcements and prayer requests. It was really a sad time and it made it just a bit easier to leave Western Colorado.

Today I read in “Why Men HATE Going to Church” by David Murrow that K-LOVE targets it’s programming at 18-45 year old women, whom they metaphorically call “Kathy”. Hmmm. Things are starting to make sense…

Book Report – The Next Reformation – Part Two

Subject: The Next Reformation, Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity, by Carl Raschke

Available Through: Discerning Reader

In my first report I established two realities, 1) I’m not a scholar and 2) I’m interested in broad thematics. It’s important that these two realities be kept in mind by any readers, it’s also important to realize that I have a context. Much in the same way that one verse cannot be responsibly excerpted from scripture to create a theology, my words about a book cannot be responsibly exerpted from my life to create a characterization.

So here’s some broad thematic context: In my own struggle becoming a believer I found that it wasn’t the empiricism that convinced me of the reality of Jesus, it was the experiencing of a relationship.

Yesterday afternoon as I drove back from a meeting I called my supervisor, the Executive Director of the company I work for to report on the meeting. He was having a distracted afternoon and when I was finished reporting the outcome of the meeting he said, “Well, if you get lonely on the trip back give me a call, I’m not being very productive this afternoon.” Basically it was an invitation to shoot the bull. I said, “shoot, I’m lonely right now”, and we started talking. We ended up somewhere in the conversation telling the our stories of spiritual struggle…he and I are a lot alike in some ways, but different enough to be complimentary…one of the differences is that he grew up in a family in which Christianity was a core value, not just one of the pieces. We talked a bit about a committee that he was on with someone who was a bit of a baiter of Christians; I shared my own history of baiting Christians. I told him that one of my realizations about that time was that even then I had a relationship with God; I was angry with Him and arguing with His followers.

You just learned something else about the context of my life, I tell stories to make points. My point in telling that last story was to relay my reality that my conversion wasn’t an acceptance of one “biblical principle” after another finally culminating in an understanding that Jesus was truly the Truth. My conversion occurred the moment I turned the final corner wandering back home and saw my Father inviting me into His arms of love, acceptance and forgiveness.

Then I entered into a weird world, the modern church. Sort of a circus really to an outsider, which is what I was. Now I’m an insider that feels like an outsider. The reason it seemed a circus was that from my point of view there were hundreds of barkers standing around telling me that now that I believe in Jesus, for the best results I should believe in Jesus and ______ . Bark in the blank.

One Barker Said: Don’t go by experience, stand on the truth of scripture.

Another Barker Said: Come share this experience with me, then you’ll know the truth.

There were many more barkers, but the two paradigms I listed above fairly describe my dilemna, which is balancing scriptural truth with the deep emotional and spiritual experience of having a Father accept me into His arms. One barker said that a relationship with Jesus was quite rational, the other said that I should disengage the rational and simply experience Him. A false dichotomy was created, a schizophrenia of sorts, but I wasn’t mature enough in my walk with my hugging Father to discern the problem…so I hopped back and forth.

Where the heck is the book report I promised?

Here:

I’ve accomplished four pages of the first chapter, Dr. Raschke has already begun to address the threefold purpose of the book that he pointed to in the preface and I quoted in my opening post. To this point Dr. Raschke’s been painting the picture of postmoderism’s relationship with Christianity and giving some background for his contention that Christianity made its own unholy alliance with Cartesian rationalism and British evidentialism… Now I’ve got got to try to figure out what “Cartesian Rationalism” and “British Evidentialism” are…do any of you ever join me in thanking God for Google?

Already I see Dr. Raschke begin to describe the tension I feel standing between those two barkers, I’m excited…

A Quote…

Come then; leap upon these mountains, skip upon these hills and heights of earth. The road to Heaven does not run from the world but through it. The longest Session of all is no discontinuation of these sessions here, but a lifting of them all by priestly love. It is a place for men, not ghosts–for the risen gorgeousness of the New Earth and for the glorious earthiness of the True Jerusalem.

Eat well then. Between our love and His Priesthood, He makes all things new. Our Last Home will be home indeed.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb