Waving or Drowning?

The Opposite of Faith is NOT Doubt

More words of wisdom from Father Richard. I couldn't agree more, but it takes time. A lot of time.

The opposite of faith is not intellectual doubt, because faith is not localized primarily in the mind. The opposite of faith, according to a number of Jesus’ statements is anxiety. If you are fear-based and “worried about many things,” as he says in Luke 10:41, you don’t have faith in a Biblical sense. Faith is to be able to trust that God is good, involved, and on your side. So you see why it takes some years of inner experience to have faith. It is not just that somewhat easy intellectual assent to doctrines or an agreement with a moral position. This has passed as the counterfeit of faith for far too long.

When you cannot rely upon an Infinite Source, you yourself become your primary reference point in terms of all preferences, needs, results, and controls. That would make anybody both anxious and insecure.

Adapted from Jesus’ Plan for a New World, p. 118 (Richard Rohr)

Screwing With Idols

Another brilliant targum from Brian Walsh, this time on Romans 1:16-32. Here's Brian's introduction and the first bit of the targum. Click through to The Other Journal to read the whole thing. Powerful.

Ancient texts were not always ancient. That may seem rather obvious, but it is worth remembering. Paul’s letter to the Christian community in Rome was once a piece of contemporary correspondence to a particular community in a particular place and time. And like our time, theirs was a time of empire.

What would happen if a letter like this were written to us in the context of our current global economic crisis? What language would the author use if he listened to contemporary music, watched contemporary film, and felt the dissonance of the fat cats being given golden parachutes while his neighbors are handed notices of foreclosure? What would the letter to the Romans look like if it were written not two thousand years ago but last week?

This isn’t really such a novel way of approaching an ancient text. In fact, when rabbis read the Torah to the Jews of the Diaspora, they did precisely this kind of thing. Recognizing that their congregations did not understand Hebrew, the rabbis would translate the text as they read. And their translations were certainly not literal. Rather, they would update the text, apply it to the changing context, and put it into contemporary idiom. The results of such interpretive exercises were called targums—extended paraphrases of the text. What follows is a targum of Romans 1:16-32.

In the face of the collapse of the dominant worldview of the modern West,
      I’m ashamed when consumerism and greed is embraced
      in the name of a false Christian gospel of affluence.

In the face of the crisis of capitalism,
      I’m ashamed when Christians embrace free enterprise as God’s own
      choice for an economy.

In the face of thousands dieing daily of malnutrition,
      billions living in desperate poverty,
      and the world on the precipice of irreparable ecological despoliation,
      I’m ashamed that good Christian folks will appeal to “Romans one”
      to legitimate homophobic gay and lesbian bashing.

These are, I submit, shameful gospels.
      They leave me defeated, embarrassed, and angry.

But I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
      This gospel is nothing less than the power of God for salvation.
      A power that blows apart the empire,
           dethroning its pretentious claims,
           unveiling its lies for what they are.

Why am I not ashamed of this gospel?
      Because through its power, life is put to rights.

Continue reading...

Book Freak - What I'm Reading

I haven't done this in a while... here's what's on the night stand at the moment, either in progress or next in line, with lots of links:

To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, by James Davison Hunter. I'm only a few chapters in. It's deep, and I think it's going to be important.

No Salvation Outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays, by Jon Sobrino
The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God, by Mayra Rivera. Tim King told me these two were blowing his mind, and that's good enough for me.

Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures, by Kester Brewin. Only available from the UK at the moment. I'm really excited about this one.

I'm doing my best to always have one work of fiction on the go at all times. Right now it's The Passage, by Justin Cronin. Post apocalyptic, the blurb I saw described it as The Stand meets The Road, and that too is good enough for me. Can't put it down.

And as an added bonus for you, here's an article I haven't got to yet, but will. Global Problems: The Lost Dimension, by Bob Goudzwaard and Mark Vander Vennen. Two of the three authors of Hope in Troubled Times: A New Vision for Confronting Global Crises, one of the most important books I've read in the last couple years. (Plus Mark is a really good guy.) 'Nuff said.

Can't talk... gotta read.

Quick, Slow, and Inevitable

I'm doing my best to avid the temptation to post something just because Bono said it, but some days you just need to do what you need to do. His column this week in the New York Times looking at last week's historic apology from David Cameron, brought on by the release of the Saville report into Bloody Sunday, has some words we all need to see. Forgiveness, reconciliation, transformation... none of this is easy. But the opportunity costs are massive.

If there are any lessons for the world from this piece of Irish history ... for Baghdad ... for Kandahar ... it’s this: things are quick to change for the worse and slow to change for the better, but they can. They really can. It takes years of false starts, heartbreaks and backslides and, most tragically, more killings. But visionaries and risk-takers and, let’s just say it, heroes on all sides can bring us back to the point where change becomes not only possible again, but inevitable.

Read the rest here.

WWJD About BP?

Let’s be honest, this thing is a mess, in every sense of the word.

 
Twitter feed: @bpdeadbirds

Interestingly, this disaster has already cost jobs in the government, but not, apparently, at BP. At least not yet.

The Minerals Management Service of the Interior Department—the agency that has the most authority when it comes to deep water drilling—has brought in Michael Bromich, a former Justice Department prosecutor and Inspector General. Mr. Bromich’s mandate was to restructure the service. When he was done, the director, S. Elizabeth Birnbaum, found that her box was MIA from the organizational chart, so she “resigned”.

Another heavy hitter was brought in to help. Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy and former Governor of Mississippi has been seconded to draw up a gulf coast restoration plan. There’s no shortage of brainpower being applied to the issue of regulation and restoration. Now if BP could only stop the oil.

It seems like every time we look the estimates of the volume of oil flowing into the gulf have increased. Last week the number was 25,000 to 30,000 barrels per day. Today it’s 50,000 to 60,000 per day. The original number of 5,000 barrels seems like a distant memory.

The rhetoric is going up as well. In President Obama’s address from the Oval Office on June 15 he succumbed to the temptation it seems every president faces, and started to employ the language of war. The president shared his “battle plan” to deal with “the siege” of sticky goo “assaulting our shores and our citizens.”

Various members of the Obama administration have been using ‘BP’ and ‘British Petroleum’ interchangeably (even though the latter name has not existed since 2000), a fact that has not escaped the attention of the British establishment. Whether the name faux pas was an honest mistake or a thinly veiled attempt to highlight the ‘foreign nature’ of the offending party, the British are upset about it, and are questioning the validity of the ‘special relationship’ purported to be alive and well between the two allies.

The reality is in a globalized economy national identity doesn’t count for much anymore. We can’t fall back on it when it comes time to play the blame game. And in the end, it doesn’t really matter if it was intentional or not. I suspect the truth has more to do with share price than it does with national identity.

Which brings us to the issue of shareholders.

No matter how they refer to the company in question, every time it is mentioned in reference to the environmental disaster—‘spill’ doesn’t cut it—the share price takes a beating. The stock is down roughly 50% from it’s high.

 
Image from Bloomberg

About 40% of BP’s stock is held by UK-based investors, much of it in pension and retirement funds. This is part of the reason President Obama is not endearing himself to British pensioners when he says “We will make BP pay for the damage their company has caused.” (Emphasis mine). The problem is when Obama refers to “their company” he is not just referring to BP’s employees and directors. He is also referring to shareholders. And a lot of them are British. But not all of them.

On the list of shareholders by geography, the United States comes right after the UK, with 39% of holdings. In fact 5 of the top 6 shareholders ranked by holdings are American based:

1. BlackRock (New York, NY) +1 billion shares (or equivalents)
3. State Street Global Advisors (Boston, MA) +307 million shares
4. Capital Research & Management (Los Angeles, CA) 247 million shares
5. Vanguard Group (Malvern, PA) 140 million shares
6. Franklin Resources (San Mateo, CA) 131 million shares

Further down the list we find names like Fidelity Investments with 124 million shares, T. Rowe Price with 93 million shares, and State Farm with 79 million. The banks are well represented too (as of March 31), with JPMorgan Chase holding 76 million shares, Bank of America with 69 million (with the added twist that BofA holds a 34% interest in BlackRock), and Goldman Sachs with 42 million shares.

[Disclaimer, of sorts: In my previous life I’ve worked for both Templeton Management Limited (now part of the Franklin Resources empire) and Fidelity Investments Canada, which is why this ownership issue interests me so much. I recall those days well, and I remember how I would have responded back then. My feelings now are somewhat different.]

Many of us will recognize some of those names. All we have to do is look at our 401K, IRA or RRSP account statements. That’s right, if you own mutual funds from some of the companies listed above, you may very well (indirectly) own shares of BP.

To quote the great American economist Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The irony is millions of Americans are indirect shareholders of BP. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that many folks who will be seeking compensation from BP in one form or another are also owners of the company.

So when president Obama gets mad at them, he’s really getting mad at us. (Yes, I’m Canadian, but I’m probably a BP owner too, so I’ll count myself in the crowd.) Welcome to life in a global village. There is no them, there’s only us.

Ah, you say, I’m fairly certain I’m not a BP shareholder. I don’t even know any BP shareholders. OK, how about Exxon? They produce the same goo. Or, to really stretch the envelope, how about Honda? They manufacture things that burn a lot of the same goo. Don’t own any Honda stock either? How about a Honda? The truth is, if anyone is guilty, we’re all guilty, so let’s accept that and move on. Sure, I’m not at fault for the specific screw-up that has resulted in tens of thousands of barrels of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, but my consumption habits are responsible for BP being there in the first place.

Well, that’s a ridiculously brief snapshot of an incredibly complicated and horrific situation, but here’s the question I really want to ask:

What’s a follower of Jesus to do?

Image by Kris Krug

Across the spectrum of Christianity (it pains me to have to write that) it seems the same question is being asked.

On CNN’s BeliefBlog Jonathan Merit asks the question from a traditionally more evangelical, “right” position. He quotes Russell Moore, Dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went to the gulf and saw with his own eyes. (There’s nothing like going and seeing.) Moore responded on his own blog with contrition:

For too long, we evangelical Christians have maintained an uneasy ecological conscience. I include myself in this indictment . . . Because we believe in free markets, we’ve acted as though this means we should trust corporations to protect the natural resources and habitats. But a laissez-faire view of government regulation of corporations is akin to the youth minister who lets the teenage girl and boy sleep in the same sleeping bag at church camp because he “believes in young people.”

And in the left corner, we have this from Sojourners:

As our nation watches the unbelievable pictures of brown oil mixed with the blue-green waters of the Gulf of Mexico, of dying wetlands and contaminated coasts, of dead birds and animals, of coastal residents witnessing their livelihoods slip away – we must ask ourselves: How will this oil spill disaster change us?

The time has come to change our ways and to transform our society. We firmly believe that Christians can and should lead the way.

Sojourners have some great suggestions in their pledge, which I've already signed. As for me, I did what I often do when confronted with deep questions: I collaborate with friends who are smarter than me. In this case I called on my soul sister Erin Wilson.

How should we feel? Our responses are grouped under three primary emotions: anger, grief and shame.

• Anger at BP, and all large corporations who simply do not take environmental concerns seriously enough
• Anger at economic measures of "success" that require unending, uninterrupted growth
• Anger at government systems that only prevent things like this from happening on paper, but have zero impact in the real world
  
• Anger that so much money is being spent on something so preventable. Money that could have provided clean water, shelter and food to those who need it
  
• Grief at seeing what is happening to the animals and birds who live in the spill area
  
• Grief at what is happening to the land. We keep taking God's first expression of love to us, first means of communicating with us, and utterly destroying it
  
• Grief for the folks along the coast who are now unemployed, or will be soon. Their lives just keep being struck by one tragedy after another that is in no way their fault
  
• Grief that they are so dependent on the jobs that come from the oil industry that they want things to go on as they have
  
• Shame at my role in all of this
  
• Shame that my own desire for cheap fuel and goods gives permission to BP and others to do these terrible things
  
• Shame that I can't just cut myself off from using a car, and living a life full of plastics.
  

These emotions generate lots of questions:

• Is it possible for consumers to make corporations accountable? 
• What kind of moral authority/accountability do shareholders have?
• Is it possible to help to stop this from happening again?
  
• How can God bear it? How can God watch us destroy something so beautifully made?
• What does following Jesus require of me?
• Am I willing to be "inconvenienced" in order to live differently?
• How can I enrich my life further by removing (more) petro-chemicals from my life?
• How can I structure my life to use my car less?
  

OK friends, this is an open-ended post. Anger, grief, shame, questions... solutions. What are we missing? What should we add to the list?

What do you have to say?

The Fate of Narnia Depends On Me?!

(h/t to Peter Chattaway)

Tom Wright on his books and leaving Durham

I haven't had the time to do anything with this yet, including read it, but I wanted to bookmark a post Paul Fromont has with links to a recent interview with Tom Wright.

Paul writes – A recent (4^th June 2010) “written” 2-part interview with Tom Wright is the first I’ve read since his decision to resign from his role as Bishop of Durham. Part 1 of the interview talks about his books, while part 2 more centers, in part, on his decision to leave Durham.

Follow the trail here. Good catch Paul, Thanks.

Our God Isn’t An Awesome god

In fact, I don’t think our God is a god at all

Well, you’re still reading, which is a good sign… although it might just be me and you and my mother at this point (and even she’s a little nervous with where I might be going with this). But, either way, thanks for giving me the chance to explain myself.

We are a people who generally love boxes. Want to know my politics? Here’s the box. My faith? I’ve got a box for that too. And I’ve got you placed firmly in a box too, thank you very much. There are several problems with life in a box though. Boxes don’t allow much room for flexibility, for individuality. Often what’s not in the box becomes more important than what is. In other words, the box itself, as a border, as a barrier, as a divider between what I like and don’t like, who I am and who I am not, becomes more important than the contents of the box. Ever witness one of those YouTube moments where the kid on Christmas morning falls in love with the box and ignores the gift that came in it? We’re a lot like that I think.

OK, I know what you’re asking. “What does any of this have to do with the potentially heretical (but not blasphemous, in my opinion) statement above?”

I’ve been very slowly reading and rereading my way through our friend Brian McLaren’s latest A New Kind of Christianity. On p. 104 he asked a question that jarred me, as it resonated with something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.

“What if people who live in the second-grade world of polytheism [The Old Testament world where everyone had a god] need to learn about one God as superior to others before they can handle the idea of God as uniquely real?”

Let me unpack that thought a little and show you where it takes me.

It seems to me that by labeling God as, well… God, we’ve placed him (this God is almost always male) in a box of our own creation. Not that I don’t appreciate how it all started. Brian hints at it above. God chose to reveal Godself in a world overpopulated with gods. It made sense at the time. People understood the concept of gods, they just didn’t know the one true God. But I wonder if we’ve locked God into that mold—picture the old man with the long flowing beard; I’m thinking of Flannel Graph God, or God on The Simpsons —and have been incapable of truly letting God be more of who God is.

As we’ve said though, it made sense at the time. Check out this famous “name” passage from scripture:

Moses said to God, "Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them?"
God said to Moses, "I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'"
God also said to Moses, "Say to the Israelites, 'The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.' This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation. (Exodus 3:13-15)

“I am who I am.”

I love that response. I’m tempted to translate it like this: “Moses, you wouldn’t understand it if I told you, so lets not go there.” Yes, the label “the God of your fathers” was used, but I see that as more of a continuity thing, tying in to the already established Jewish story that Moses would have been intimately familiar with.

In a polytheistic world the shelf space for deities was crowded, and gods needed names to distinguish themselves from the competition, so our god, the one true God, became the LORD, or Yahweh, so the people could be clear about who the object of their worship was. Made sense.

Still, it’s a box.

Our friend Tim King likes to use the term the Unnameable, among others, and that works well for what I’m trying to say here.

When we place the Unnameable in the god-box, we’ve signed him up (remember the box comes with a gender preference) for a theistic cage match.

“My God is better than your god.”

“Your god is false, but my God is real.” Which leads us right to, “Your religion is false, but my religion is real.”

It becomes a beauty contest. We lower the Unnameable to the level of all the other gods, and then we are left to argue that our God is the only real god.

But what if, instead, the Unnameable is wholly other (or even Holy Other)? Not the One True God on a crowded playing field of false gods, but the creator of everything, who is above everything, who cannot be explained, or grasped, not by the title “God”, or even “The Very Best God”.

If the Unnameable is not a god, not even a God, and if aligning your life with the mission of the Unameable is not a religion but is instead the purpose of all life, well, that can cause problems too. This kind of thinking will not be popular with those who are in the God and religion business.

I’ve made no secret of the influence our friend Bruxy Cavey has had on my thinking in this regard. I’m in agreement with Bruxy when he says that Jesus came to teach us how to live and to shut down religion. (Of course I’m using the word religion in the negative sense, defining it, as Bruxy does, as any system of rules, rituals or regulations that we use to try and “get right” with God.) To me a natural consequence of discarding the religion box is the notion that the god box cannot be far behind. A deity requires a context within which the deity is situated, understood, and worshipped. In other words, a deity requires a religion. Get rid of the notion of religion, and our understanding of God must change. Perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that without the restrictions of religion our understanding of God is free to change, to evolve. I’m not sure Bruxy would go this far, but hey… he’s the one who got me started on this path! Is this heresy? Most definitely. Blasphemy? I don’t believe so.

As humanity continues to evolve, our understanding of the Unnameable must evolve to.

In her book The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle talks about the church having a rummage sale every 500 years or so, and I agree completely. The thing is, I think it’s our view of the Unnameable, and not just our idea of church, that is changing at these points of inflection, and causing such turmoil.

When you start to think this way, examples appear all over, including in scripture.

Jonah is one of my favorite biblical prophets. We could spend a lot of time looking at his story—I happen to think he was a wonderfully flawed, bigoted son of a gun—but I want to make another point here. What if the Jonah story was meant, among many other things, to mark that God could no longer be contained in the box that said God only cared about the Jews?

Fast forward to Jesus. What if Jesus was God busting out of the box that said to follow God was to keep the Law? “You have heard it said… But I say…” Sounds like a major point of change to me.

Reality Check Time: As much as I’d like to think that we have broken the Unnameable out of the box, I can’t. As I said earlier, our understanding of God is undergoing evolution, which is an ongoing process. At best what we are doing is moving the Unnameable from one box into another. But if the new box is bigger than the old, we are moving in the right direction, and our understanding of God can continue to expand.

In a polytheistic world the Unnameable had to present as a god—yes, the One True God—but a god nonetheless. I wonder if we are still stuck in that place.

I also wonder how the Unnameable would choose to unveil in an atheistic world.

Deep Change

A great quote on change that I've gone back to many times over the years since I first read this book. Emphasis mine:

"Incremental change is usually limited in scope and is often reversible. If the change does not work out, we can always return to the old way. Incremental change usually does not disrupt our past patterns--it is an extension of the past. Most important, during incremental change, we feel we are in control...

Deep change differs from incremental change in that it requires new ways of thinking and behaving. It is change that is major in scope, discontinuous with the past, and generally irreversible. The deep change effort distorts existing patterns of action and involves taking risks. Deep change means surrendering control."

Robert E. Quinn, Deep Change (p. 3)

'Leaps Within Us For Joy!'

The Incarnation of God into this physical world is our basis for constant celebration, or as Thomas Merton puts it: “Make ready for the Christ, whose smile—like lightning—sets free the song of everlasting glory that now sleeps, in your paper flesh—like dynamite.”

God’s only work seems to be enfleshing spirit and inspiriting the flesh; and for us, who have learned to do the same, our life, like John in the womb of his mother, leaps within us for joy! And the one great Incarnation continues.

(Richard Rohr, Adapted from Near Occasions of Grace, p. 7)