No More Water: Pentecost the Day after This Week

Was this week the end of something, or was it just the beginning? In a historical sense, the events of this week are the continuation of a vicious circle: of struggle and oppression, of silencing and outburst. But for many it also feels like a breaking point, when blackness has been negligible for beyond far too long, and the time has come for power to feel pain. In a country where the cries of violence toward persons of color have become a constant background noise, what will it take to awaken the conscience of the status quo? For many Americans, this nation has been burning ever since its birth. How can the rest of us come to see it?

Red Cardigan Christmas: The Beatific Vision of Fred Rogers

“You are truly beautiful . . . being at every moment what you are . . . you whose name is love of humankind.” – Gregory of Nyssa

“. . . the just man justices; / Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; / Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— / Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his . . .” – Gerard Manley Hopkins

“As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has—or ever will have—something inside that is unique to all time.” – Fred Rogers

Yesterday was Christmas, which means that today is not.[1] Which means that soon enough all the material “magic” will be over and we’ll be left with only the “memories” we’ve made. Great joy will recede into perfunctory fun, and most of the warm goodwill we’ve basked in—through sweets and stories and songs—will gutter and dim in the new year bleakness.

And yet, for many a “Christian” person at this time, there is often a nagging sense that the true essence of Christmas does not come to an end after December 25^th. That there is more to Christmas than all this thingliness. It’s almost a cliché, not just in churches, but even in certain media, this feeling that the deeper beating heart of Christmas should not, even must not, die off in our new year lives—and yet can, and might.

The Worst of Good Friday: On Crosses

“There is but one road to the kingdom of God–a cross, voluntary or involuntary.” -Theophan the Recluse

“In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that at their worst. That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilization. . . . [Human beings] could do no more.” – GK Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“I would love to believe that the principles [of the Church] were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or for what we call the Christian world.” – James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

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I believe the “God debate” is dead. Perhaps it is a consequence of our post-2016 era–we are too busy debunking each other’s news to worry about the veracity of “religion” (a false monolith for very plural phenomena) or God’s proposed or denied “existence” (a fallacious category for that which is both within and beyond being and nonbeing). Perhaps the question of “God or Not-God” has been dead from the very beginning, due to the fact that the “God” that either side has argued for or against has never really lived. A truly living God, like the God of the Bible, would be too concerned with matters of life and death, of justice and injustice, to care for the vanity of changing someone else’s conjectures and opinions. Right belief in such a God would not be argued so much as acted out. Disbelief would cast almost no shadow at all compared to the many towering idols made by arrogance and anxiety. The conflict between this “God” and “Not-God” has been mostly immaterial to the incarnate struggles of humanity. It has been mostly words, and little flesh.

Advent in America: The Presence of Tradition

Before the president was, Jesus claims, I am. At least this is what we would hear him saying if we read the Bible like he does. Before any crown or empire, before words like “nativity” or “Christmas” ever had a real-world referent, before the spirit ever descended to the status of a feeling, God was, which is to say is.

Advent in America: The Presence of Prayer

Last week I attempted to show how one “tradition” of scripture might help us bring back the sense of God’s presence in our rancorous time and place. And indeed, just as they were for that very first Advent in Bethlehem, much of the prophecies of ancient Israel continue to be of great importance for any potential appearance of God in America. To understand this scripture properly, however, is not ultimately to memorize a verse but to intuit a spirit. It was with this sense of scripture that Jesus proclaimed, along with Isaiah, “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners” (Isa. 61:1; Lk. 4:16-21); and it is with this same sense that we might lament with Moses, “Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!” (Num. 11:29). Because the true “spirit of Christmas” depends upon how fully we follow “the word of the Lord”—the “word” (davar) being that concern-becoming-accomplishment of the creator toward and with and through creation. To hold to this version of scripture is not only to see God’s will in the heaven of our heads, but also to show it to the earth around us. To prepare for the coming of Christ is to make God more social than we have previously allowed.

But there is also a tradition of scripture that honors that inextricable personal dimension in us. And this is good, as the privacy of the self is both indeterminately deep and endlessly treacherous. Even as scripture works as an external witness of God’s righteousness, it also becomes an internalized representation of God’s relationality. Scripture, in its vital self-awareness, actually addresses the supposed perception of God’s presence in the mind. In its critical iconoclasm, it questions any ossifying image of the invisible. It even searches after the humanity that may hide behind the very anticipation of the divine in order that it might arrive at a profounder view of God. In other words, this sort of scripture clears the mind of false Gods just as it connects the mind more closely to the one true God. It is therefore a more private form of preparation for divine advent.

Advent in America: Preparing for the Presence of Scripture Today

Advent is traditionally a time of preparation for the arrival of God. Historically the sense of this arrival is threefold: in the Bible as the parent of Israel and as the person of Christ; in our lives daily; and in our world to come. Unsurprisingly, there is a certain continuity to the presence of eternity in time. The parousia is always here.

But our brains, so bound up with time and things, do not always testify to this reality. In fact, they more often than not seem not to. The God who speaks is thus a God whose words must be written down. The God who arrives also reminds. Hence, tradition.

This Advent finds much of American Christendom in a kind of twilight. There are serious concerns about the waning status of scripture in our lives—about the rise of so-called “biblical illiteracy.” Judging from the reduced form that scripture takes in so much social media—limited to cliché in garish font if it should appear at all—the “Word” often wanders in our private memories.

The Real Life of “Santa Claus”

Today marks “Santa’s” one and only day on the Christian calendar. (At least on the Western calendar–he gets a second on the 19th in the East.) It is of course Saint Nicholas’ day. But as with any other saint’s day, it is meant to stand for that eternal day in which we always dwell, whether are awake or sleeping, helping or hurting, alive or dead. And like any Saint, he is meant to stand for the Person we might be more like, if only we were awake and alive enough to help.

The person of Saint Nicholas is certainly more like God than any human being I have met. For that he is perhaps too alien for us to fathom. Too hard for us to comfortably admire. No wonder we turned him into Santa.

Advent in America

What do Americans expect from Christmas these days? What does it really mean to them?

These questions are being asked all over the place, and not just by Hallmark movies. The claim of “That’s what Christmas is all about!” was perhaps first popularized by Charlie Brown (or rather that little saint, Linus), but it has become a strong if semiconscious impulse in our culture wars. It has become like that notorious description of pornography: we can’t define it, but we know it when we see it. In other words, Christmas has become a source of purely material provocation. Whether our reaction is excitement or scandal, we seem to relish the shared spectacle and the easy high it gives us.

This is the same vague sensational Christmas that our president has sought to promote.

Thanksgivenness

There are many verses in the Bible about being thankful. For anyone who grew up hearing scripture read out loud, the mere sound of the phrase “give thanks to the Lord” is enough to conjure up entire lines of psalm. These verses are a cause for thankfulness in themselves, as they release us from our petty worries by reminding us of profounder joys. “Give thanks to the Lord,” is the great refrain, but the praise is incomplete without the reason: “for he is good; his love endures forever.” It is for this reason that many American Christians may be still consulting them to this day. No matter the amount of falsehood or division around us, we hold onto the promise of a true and abiding love inside us.

But there is still more to thankfulness than this, and anyone who has read the Bible beyond hearing it aloud will be able to think of examples of this claim.

Write the Bird: Skepticism and Knowledge in the Age of “Fake News”

“My people go into exile for lack of knowledge.” -Isaiah 5:13

“Therefore be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” –Matthew 10:16 

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I began this blog with a couple of very post-2016 intentions. One was to question the media, specifically the nature of my increasingly mediated experience—my participation in media and its effect on me even without my choice or knowledge. The other was to make my America more than Donald Trump. This last intention I attempted largely through evasion of his name, which, after all, has become such a buzzword that it drones us out of other topics. And for a time it was easy enough to explore the contradictions and deeper resources of myself and my society as I saw it by using a healthy-minded skepticism. I was able to operate under the illusion (perhaps then-useful) that I was at least on a personal level outdoing the Internet by bringing my books to it, by filling my negligent corner of cyberspace with mile-long sentences and more timeless (or merely interminable) thoughts. I was writing essays in the magnanimity of Montaigne, not blog entries with the animus of a talking head. The many platforms might be ever-flattening themselves and their users, but as for me and myself, we would fill our souls.

I was, at times, really that unrealistic.

But over the past few months I have seen what I think are the limits of my attempted healthy-mindedness. With its zero-tolerance immigration policy, I have found it no longer viable to ignore the current administration even in my meditations. And with his most recent truth-claims and –denials, I have found it impossible to avoid thinking and writing specifically about Trump.