practicing

This morning, I am reviewing my reading of Christine Pohl's book. What a beautiful and inspiring challenge ... but those kudos do not do her justice. I am determined not to brush this book off so quickly.

Bear with me, these entries will be short. I am compiling my thoughts elsewhere for the time being, but as I write, I find myself longing for someone else to journey with me here, to discuss, think, and help develop these ideas.

Pohl writes that the distinctively Christian contribution to the hospitality tradition is its emphasis on welcoming the vulnerable, the poor, and the needy. And who are the vulnerable? They are those strangers who are "disconnected from basic relationships that give persons a secure place in the world. The most vulnerable strangers are detached from family, community, church, work, and polity."

Who are those strangers in my neighborhood and community? Who are they in yours? And what might be required to help these people find a place? I'd love your thoughts and feedback.

I recently purchased the study guide which accompanies this book, and am grateful that it has helped me contemplate and consider my next steps. I admit that I love riding the high tide of passion, and believe it's my own immaturity that prevents me from actually incorporating the practices of jesus into my everyday life. I feel gripped lately, like I've been taken from my complacent, angst-ridden, big-talking, "this world isn't what i thought it would be" twenty-something lifestyle, and asked to confront the things in my own life that speak nothing of the God I claim to worship.

it's the irresistible revolution, it's making room, it's conversations with our worship pastors and co-workers, it's moving toward marriage and understanding that the decisions we make today will influence our decisions tomorrow. it's watching a church community grow and wondering how many will become disciples and how many will remain consumers. it's spending time with women older than me, listening to their stories and appreciating the wisdom that experience has granted them.

i'm thankful. and i'm compelled to put these ideas, these passions, and this study into practice.

in making room, the demand to consider hospitality as a skill, gift, spiritual obligation, and practice is clear. and there are so many opportunities to incorporate it!

in the 4th and early 5th centuries, John Chrysostom urged his parishioners to make a guest chamber in their own houses, a place set apart for Christ - a place within which to welcome "the maimed, the beggars, and the homeless."John Wesley and the 18th century Methodists recovered the practice of shared meals when they instituted love feasts. Love Feasts! Maybe you laugh at the idea of such a term, but to provide simple food, and to provide a context which allows a close union of widows, of the poor, of vulnerable strangers, and of those who are already connected to community - well, bring on the love feasts!

My study guide asks the question, "what makes hospitality in the home difficult or worrisome today? What makes it important?" I'll be answering that question this morning. And if you care about hospitality, I hope you'll consider it as well. I invite your thoughts.

book club

the book club met this morning. and so my mind is swimming with thought. i'll try to get all i'm thinking out on this blog as coherently as possible ...

newbigin's last chapter, speaking the truth to caesar, is completely marked up in my book. there are underlines, exclamation points, stars, and notes in the margins (let me pause here to give thanks to mrs. sinkler for encouraging notations in our senior year reading materials). the third chapter is full of such powerful rhetoric, that i not once, but many times, audibly encouraged newbigin to "preach it!" for example ...

"the free market is a good servant but a bad master. it is not necessary to argue the point that, if we take the human family as a whole, what is experienced as freedom by a minority is experienced as bondage by a majority. adam smith himself recognized that free markets would only work for the common good if certain moral principles permeated society."

"i have the impression that the local congregation has too often been regarded in the best ecumenical circles as something which needs to be dragged along rather than as the primal engine of change in society."

it's exciting stuff. it makes me long for change and growth and truth. but there's a passage that weighs even more heavily on me, and as i left the room, i kicked myself for not mentioning it before we parted ...

Both objectivism and subjectivism are ways of evading personal responsibility for knowing the truth. And if this is so, then the call to the Church is to enter vigorously into the struggle for truth in the public domain. We cannot look for [security in a restored Christendom]. Nor can we continue to accept the security which is offered in an agnostic pluralism where are free to have our own opinions provided we agree that they are only personal opinions. We are called, I think, to bring our faith into the public arena, to publish it, to put it at risk in the encounter with other faiths and ideologies in open debate and argument, and in the risky business of discovering what Christian obedience means in radically new circumstances and in radically different human cultures ...

In a society where agnostic pluralism reigns, freedom is understood to be the liberty to do whAt you want provided it does not interfere with the freedom of other people. Freedom is the absence of limits ... A society in which any kind of nonsense is acceptable is not a free society. An agnostic pluralism has no defense against nonsense. So while a committed pluralism values freedom as the necessary (though not sufficient) condition for grasping the truth about the real world, the fundamental relation between truth and freedom is that enunciated by Jesus, when he said, 'The truth shall make you free.' That saying, we remember, provoked the furious anger of the hearers, who affirmed that they were free already and did not need anyone to set them free. Jesus tells them that they are not free until the truth makes them free, and they respond by threatening to stone him. When we affirm, as the Church must do, that freedom is not the natural endowment of every human being but is something to be won by acknowledgement of the truth, and that in the end the truth is something given in the sheer grace of God to be received in faith, there is bound to be anger. There is bound to be the feeling that the free society is once again threatened by dogma. I think the Church cannot evade the sharpness of this encounter.

I have re-read this passage at least a dozen times. What is it that stands out so much to me, that shouts to me like a warning, an admonishment that I hang my head about my faith, afraid to mention it in the public square for fear that I'll be viewed as a Crusader bent on power and domination? Newbigin is right - the Church cannot evade the sharpness of this encounter (his following discussion assesses the New Age movement's understandable popularity in questioning the whole foundation of our culture as well - a discussion which I'd very much like to address, but have neither the time nor the typing prowess to do).

I am overwhelmed with thought, and know I need more time and dialogue on the subject if I take seriously the implications of his thesis.

But I am hanging my hat on words from Newbigin's book, words said many different ways by many different authors, singers, scholars, etc, words that resonate with my core so deeply that I feel my very being was born to acknowledge them:

It is the very heart of the gospel that it both gives everything and requires everything.

hi nerds

i'm glad you're smart. because i have a favor to ask.

i just joined a book club of people way ridiculously smarter than me. people who are interviewed on npr and people who speak to thousands of others on a weekly basis. i am neither interviewed on npr nor asked to speak to large audiences. but i did get an A in Non-Verbal Communication at the UW. maybe that's why i get to come.

regardless, we're reading this book, truth to tell, by lesslie newbigin. i have to read it in the presence of my fiance, who is also ridiculously smarter than me, so that i can ask him to explain what the issue fought out between Arius and Athanasius was and why it was so important to the formulation of the Trinitarian formula (say what?).

it's a tough book. it forces me to examine some of my own bad theology (see actual conversation between me and jon below):

discussing descartes's philosophy:
me: okay, so on the basis of knowing nothing, descartes begins with his own existence ... and comes up with, "i think, therefore i am."
jon: right.
me: so his critics then question whether descartes exists, which leads them to wonder whether god exists.
jon: mmhmm.
me: "i think, therefore i am." i don't like it. but "i feel, therefore i am, " THAT philosophy i could get on board with ...
jon: wow, you really are ....
me: totally illogical, i know.
jon: i didn't say it.

so i like it. i like being challenged to really ponder, consider, evaluate. and here's where my favor comes in. i need you to ponder, consider, and evaluate, too. i need your feedback. i picked a few of the most interesting (to me) lines from the book. would you just pick one or two or all and tell me what questions it makes you ask, or what kind of response you have to it? it would help me out A LOT.

1. to abandon hope of speaking truthfully about reality is to abandon the adventure of life.

2. History is always being rewritten - not only because new evidence turns up, but also because old evidence is seen in the light of new experience. The historian E.H. Carr defined history as a continuous conversation between the present and the past. It is only in this way that history becomes part of an intelligible and purposeful life.

3. Einstein says, "what you call a fact depends on the theory you bring to it."

4. In Gibson's tart words, all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful.

5. the past 300 years have been the most brilliant in human history, but their brilliance was created by the combustion of a thousand years' deposit of the Christian tradition in the oxygen of Greek rationalism. Now, says Polanyi, the fuel is burned up. We shall not get fresh light by pumping in more oxygen.

6. Revelation is not allowed as a subject for classroom teaching. It is barred from public doctrine. Human origins are a subject for classroom teaching. They are part of public truth. Human destiny is not. It is a matter of private opinion. And if there is no public doctrine about human destiny, there can be no basis for rational discussion in the public forum about what are and what are not proper ends of human endeavor. And when there are no rational grounds for these decisions, the way is open for the sort of mindless fanaticism about single moral issues which is such a feature of our time. Bacon's vision of unlimited power, and the marvelous achievements of technology which have seemed to authenticate that vision, combined with a purely this-worldly scenario for the human story, and in the absence of any public doctrine about human destiny, creates a situation in which there are no checks on the ruthless pursuit of particular ends, moral or otherwise.

Thanks for your feedback.