A prayer from Mother Teresa and used by her Sisters of Charity in their care for the sick, poor, and dying: 

Dearest Lord, may I see you today and every day in the person of your sick, and, whilst nursing them, minister unto you.

Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive disguise of the irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you, and say: "Jesus, my patient, how sweet it is to serve you."

Lord, give me this seeing faith, then my work will never be monotonous. I will ever find joy in humoring the fancies and gratifying the wishes of all poor sufferers.

O beloved sick, how doubly dear you are to me, when you personify Christ; and what a privilege is mine to be allowed to tend you.

Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.

And O God, while you are Jesus, my patient, deign also to be to me a patient Jesus, bearing with my faults, looking only to my intention, which is to love and serve you in the person of each of your sick.

Lord, increase my faith, bless my efforts and work, now and forevermore. Amen.

At AAR/SBL this last fall Christian Amondson (Thank you, Christian, very much) made me aware of J. Louis Martyn's seminal commentary on Galatians.

Martyn's commentary is considered to be ground-breaking in that it was one of the first readings of Paul in modern biblical scholarship to highlight the apocalyptic and Christus Victor themes in Pauline thought. We tend to read Paul through the lens of the Reformation and think that Paul's main theological project was to describe how we are saved via "justification by faith."

In contrast to this view, Martyn notes how Paul's soteriology fits better with a Christus Victor frame. As Martyn has written (emphasis added):

Galatians is a clear witness to a basic conviction of Paul: the gospel is not about human movement into blessedness, but about God's liberating invasion of the cosmos.

You can see this Christus Victor emphasis right at the start of Galatians:

Galatians 1.3-4a
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age...

What we see in this is how the work of Jesus, while involving the forgiveness of sins, was critically about "rescuing us from the present evil age." Why rescue? Later in the letter Paul describes our predicament as one of slavery to dark forces:

Galatians 4.3
So with us; when we were children, we were slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe.

Being set free from these "elemental spirits" and from the "present evil age" sets up a freedom/slavery motif for the entire letter. Two of the central texts of Galatians highlight these themes:

Galatians 4.8-9
Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits? How can you want to be enslaved to them again? 

Galatians 5.1a
For freedom Christ has set us free. 

All this is not to deny Paul's focus on sin and the Law and how both place us under a curse. But as these texts make clear (along with many other passages in the epistle that can be cited), Paul isn't thinking in moralistic or individualistic terms. Paul sees sin and the Law as elemental powers that hold us captive.

What is needed, then, is less a matter of forgiveness than liberation and emancipation from enslaving powers. Salvation is less about moral absolution than God's liberating invasion of the world and the establishment of a "new creation" (Gal. 6.15).

As regular readers know, my spiritual journey was profoundly affected by my encounter, during my college years, with the work of George MacDonald. Just like C.S. Lewis, I consider MacDonald my spiritual "master."

MacDonald wrote novels, children's stories, and fantasy. But the core of his beautiful theology can be found in his work Unspoken Sermons.

If you've never read Unspoken Sermons, or even if you've read it many times, I'm excited to alert you to the fact that free audio downloads of Unspoken Sermons are now available.

How did this happen? We have David Baldwin to thank. David patiently took the time to professionally record Unspoken Sermons and make it available to all of us at LibriVox. From David's email that he sent me:

In 2008 I started reading Unspoken Sermons and before long began to think, "Reading is not enough. This I must internalize." Thus began a three year project of outlining, annotating, and recording all thirty-six sermons. Each sermon was carefully recorded using studio quality equipment with the end goal of helping others encounter MacDonald's thought in a new way or perhaps for the first time. 

The audio files for Unspoken Sermons can be found here at LibriVox.

And let's all express our deep gratitude to David.

Last week in my post Good Enough I argued that our cultural success ethos is based upon a lie, a delusional anthropology, a false conception of who we are. Specifically, I argued that our success ethos presumes that we are gods rather than finite creatures. The success ethos--believing we are gods--presumes that we have inexhaustible resources of time, energy and talent that can be leveraged into greater and greater success, improvement, betterment, and excellence.

But we aren't gods and we don't have inexhaustible resources. We are finite. We have limits. Only so much energy. Only so many hours in the day.

But still the call for more, more, more. Better, better, better. And as I argued last week, the only way for a finite creature to give more, more, more or get better, better, better is to make greater and greater sacrifices. To spread the butter a little more thinly. Maybe it is family that is sacrificed. Maybe it's your health. Or sleep. But in the end something is going to suffer or break if we, as finite creatures, keep pretending that we are gods.

After writing that post a few months ago I started reading Brené Brown's new book Daring Greatly. You may know Brown from her TED talks. Her talks about vulnerability and shame have become two of the most popular TED talks of all time. Highly recommended if you've not seen them.

In Daring Greatly Brown makes an argument very similar to the one I made last week. Brown is an expert in shame and at the start of Daring Greatly she tries to get to the root of the problem. Why are so many of us struggling with shame and feelings of worthlessness?

Brown argues that we are living in what she calls a "culture of scarcity." For example, she asks participants in her studies to answer the question: "What do you hear or see in the phrase: Never ________ enough." Brown writes:

It only takes a few seconds before people fill in the blanks with their own tapes:

• Never good enough
• Never perfect enough
• Never thin enough
• Never powerful enough
• Never smart enough
• Never certain enough
• Never safe enough
• Never extraordinary enough

She concludes: "We get scarcity because we live it." There is never enough. Brown goes on to elaborate:

Scarcity is the "never enough" problem. The word scarce is from the Old Norman French scars, meaning "restricted in quantity" (c. 1300). Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted and lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don't have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.

What is the source of this experience of lack? Brown traces it back to the very things I was describing last week:

What makes the constant assessing and comparing so self-defeating is that we are often comparing our lives, our marriages, our families, and our communities to unattainable, media-driven visions of perfection, or we're holding up our reality against our own fictional account of how great someone else has it.

Driven by these lies--"visions of perfection," "fictional accounts"--we create what Brown calls a "shame-prone culture" where many within the culture struggle with feelings of worthiness, feelings rooted in feeling a failure, feeling not good enough.

So how to address the problem? Brown argues that the solution isn't to replace scarcity with abundance. Again, as I argued last week, that just plays back into the delusions of the culture, that we are living in Eden, as god-like beings with a cornucopia of resources. Brown argues that the solution to scarcity isn't abundance but enough. "Knowing," as Brown writes, "that I am enough."

But to be "enough" is to to become vulnerable, to expose our weakness, insecurities, and failures to ourselves and others. To be vulnerable is to stop living the lie of god-like perfection and to stop maintaining that illusion before the eyes of others.

But that is difficult and fearful thing to do in our shame-prone culture where god-like delusions of excellence and perfection rule. As I argued last week, we are fearful of exposing our finitude to ourselves and others. Brown roots these fears in shame. Building upon the word of Ernest Becker, I tend to root the anxiety and shame in more foundational mortality fears, as a symptom of our slavery to the fear of death:

Hebrews 2.14-15:
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

Regardless, both Brown and I agree that the solution to all this is learning to be a vulnerable human being. Learning to overcome shame by embracing our failures and limitations.

Learning to say that being a human being is good enough.

Chapters 8-19 in The Rule of St. Benedict, as noted last week, deal mainly with the Divine Office, the praying of the psalms considered to be the main work of the monks. We come out of that material in Chapter 20 which is entitled "Reverence in Prayer." Benedict instructs:

³We must know that God regards our purity of heart and tears of compunction, not our many words. ⁴Prayer should therefore be short and pure, unless perhaps it is prolonged under the inspiration of divine grace. ⁵In community, however, prayer should always be brief...

All I can say is Amen to that.

In the language of the psychologist Barry Schwartz, I tend to be a satisficer rather than maximizer when it comes to getting things done. That is, I tend to aim for "good enough" rather than "excellence" or "the best."

This tendency of mine sets me at odds with the zeitgeist of our age, particularly in the world of corporate America--the pursuit of excellence, being the best or, at the very least, the best you can be.

Pushing back against this impulse, I'd like to argue in this post that you shouldn't try to be the best you can be. I'd like to argue that you should settle for being average and good enough rather than for excellence.

In fact, I'd like to argue that you embrace being a failure.

Why would I make that argument? Because I think the pursuit of excellence is sitting atop a lie, a fear-driven lie.

The root of this lie is that excellence--striving to be the best, or even merely better--assumes we are gods. Excellence assumes that we are not, in fact, finite creatures with finite resources of time and energy.

Of course, let me add, a lot depends here upon one's definition of excellence. By excellence I'm pointing to the impulse in our culture where being satisfied with being "average" or "normal" or "good enough" is somehow an admission of defeat or failure, a giving up or a throwing in the towel. By excellence I'm pointing to the neurotic driveness that demands constant improvement, that this year--personally or institutionally--has to be better than last year.

But as should be clear, this is impossible. You can't get better and better and better. Again, we are not gods with infinite resources. We are finite, limited creatures. We have a top, a limit. Past a certain point, you can't get better.

That is, unless, you start borrowing--or robbing--from other facets of your life. You can get better at work if you begin to borrow some time or energy from, say, your family. To get better at, say, work you can work longer hours, spending less time elsewhere. Because this is the only way a finite creature can get better. You can't tap into an infinitely deep reservoir of time and energy. You have to borrow from somewhere to get ahead elsewhere.

This is why I think the idol of excellence is a great lie. Excellence presupposes a false anthropology as it assumes that we are gods and not human beings. Human beings, of necessity, have to be "good enough." Or, at the very least, excellence entails sacrifices, borrowing from other aspects of life to get ahead in another areas. Sacrifice-free excellence is unavailable to us. We are not gods.

This is why when I hear calls for ever escalating excellence, progress, and improvement what I really hear is a call for sacrifice. Of course I could do "better" in various areas of my life. I could throw in more time or energy. But if I do that what is going to be sacrificed?

To be concrete, there are a variety of things at work where I've achieved a "good enough" level. But my workplace, probably like your workplace, can't really compute "good enough," the goal should be excellence and constant improvement. Being "good enough" is an admission of failure. We should strive to be the best. Or, at the very least, we should be better than we were last year. Constant improvement is the name of the game.

But, again, that is impossible. The only way I can improve and improve and improve across the board is if I start, say, taking time away from my family or church. Excellence is revealed to be a euphemism for sacrifice and idolatry. When an institution demands "excellence" what they are really asking for greater and greater sacrifice. Yes, I could be a better worker. But at the expense of being a worse father, spouse, or friend.

And yet, most of us are ready and willing to make these sacrifices. We buy into the illusion and the lie. We don't want to "settle" for being good enough, so we neurotically pursue excellence and betterment. Why do we do this?

I think it has to do with our fear of death. Behind the push for excellence is a fear of death.

How so?

Again, being "average" or "good enough" is often experienced as a sort of failure. But as we've just diagnosed the situation, being "good enough" isn't as much about failure as it is about our finitude. And that's where the fear of death enters in. Being "average" or merely "good enough" provokes existential anxiety as we are confronted with our limitations. Again, there is a delusional anthropology behind the quest for excellence. We'd like to think we have inexhaustible resources--all the time and energy in the world to be excellent in everything. Which is to say we'd like to be gods, beings immune to death. This desire to be god-like--to be excellent--is driven by a fear of our own mortality, a fear of our own finitude. Failure--not being excellent--reminds us that we are humans and not gods, that we are mortal creatures vulnerable to death.

Fearful of our mortality, then, we opt for delusions. We pretend that we are gods and delude ourselves with god-like myths that "failure is not an option" when, in fact, failure is a fact of life for finite creatures. Failure is intrinsic to human existence. Be be a human is to fail.

Our discomfort with failures, then, is a fear of death. Our discomfort with being "average" or "good enough" is a fear of death. The neurotic push for excellence is driven by a fear of death.

To be shamed, then, for being normal, average, good enough or a failure is to be shamed by a fear-based illusion. Basically, you are being shamed for being what you are--a human being. That's the tragedy of modern life: You are not allowed to be a human being. You have to be better, something more. A god. Otherwise you're a failure.

But I'd like to remind you--with a word of grace and truth--that you are, in fact, a human being

You are a failure.

And that means you are good enough.

As I've written about before, I tend to dissent from or at least quibble with the Protestant rejection of merit. Traditionally, we tend to think of merit as something associated with the teachings of Jesus and the Epistle of James over against Pauline theology and his "justification by faith apart from works."

But I think this is a misreading of Paul. The full text from Romans is 3.28 is this (emphasis added):

For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.

What are these "works of the Law"? If you read Paul and pay attention to the narrative in Acts you come to see that "works of the Law" mainly had to do with submitting to circumcision. This is most clearly seen in Acts 15 and Galatians. Basically, what Paul is saying is that Gentiles who want to be justified before God don't have to become Jews. Protestants have tended to miss this, missed that Paul's discussions about faith are about the Jew/Gentile issue rather than about daily moral performance.

Because when we do get to daily moral performance Paul seems to suggest, in a variety of places, that it creates merit. In these locations Paul sounds a lot like Jesus and James. Consider the ending of Galatians, a founding document (along with Romans) of the Reformation's doctrine of sola fide:

Galatians 6.7-10
Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.

"A man reaps what he sows."

"Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up."

That sounds like merit to me. And it's a teaching found not with Jesus or James...but in Galatians.

Since the publication of Unclean I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between hospitality and holiness. As I argue it in Unclean, holiness is driven by a purity psychology that, given the features of that psychology, undermines lives of welcome and compassion.

But a concern is raised that if welcome and compassion are privileged--or perhaps over privileged--where does spiritual formation take place? Where are Christian virtues modeled, practiced, and acquired? Where is saintliness and sanctity promoted, even expected?

In short, where does holiness fit in?

I think these are deep questions, and post-Unclean I've been thinking a great deal about queries along these lines.

The first thing I noted, in turning to this puzzle, was this: the people I tended to hold up as hospitality exemplars--people who showed radical compassion--were very often people of great holiness and sanctity. People of worship, prayer, moral discipline, and religious observance. I'm thinking here of people like Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, St. Francis, Jean Vanier, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I'm thinking of the people at my church: the most hospitable are often the most holy. I'm thinking of the holiness of people outside my religious tradition, like Gandhi and the Buddha.

And, of course, I'm thinking of Jesus.

The most holy people are often the most hospitable.

And yet, I stand by the argument I made in Unclean: the pursuit of moral purity often undermines the life of welcome as "sinners" and the morally "unclean" tend to be shunned and excluded. The church stories we all could share illustrating this dynamic would provide ample evidence of the dynamics Unclean was trying to describe.

So what's the trick? How are we to pursue holiness in a way that makes us more hospitable rather than less?

I think a part of the trick is this: holiness is a first-person rather than a third-person enterprise. Holiness is a personal rather than public affair.

Isn't this what Jesus was saying when he said don't worry about the speck in your sister's eye but attend to the beam in your own? Isn't Jesus saying that holiness is a first-person issue rather than a third-person issue? That holiness is about me and not about you?

When holiness becomes a third-person affair we end up as the moral police. We end up judging the behavior of everyone else. I think this is the root of the problem with the Christian culture wars. Across wide swaths of evangelical Christianity there is third-person finger wagging about the decline of values and morals in the larger culture. Christians become moral police and holiness Nazis (American culture: No soup for you!).

But in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus preached that holiness is a first-person, private, and closeted affair. Holiness is for you, not your neighbor. And what's the goal of all that holiness? I'd phrase it this way:

Holiness is a training you pursue to become more hospitable.

When I think of athletic training I think of the phrase "a finely tuned athlete." I think holiness is doing something similar, creating finely-tuned spiritual athletes.

The trouble is, to keep with the athletic metaphor, for most of Christianity holiness has become a spectator sport rather than a regimen of personal fitness.

So this is what I think is a piece of the puzzle in negotiating the relationship between holiness and hospitality. Is holiness a first-person or a third-person effort?

Holiness should be, if Jesus is to be believed, a first-person effort. Holiness shouldn't be moral blood sport, a spectator sport of moral finger wagging at the culture. Holiness should be a matter of personal training and fitness.

Holiness is about becoming a finely tuned instrument of welcome.

As a part of my efforts to scare away casual, surfy readers (here's a link to Pinterest or ESPN so you can escape quickly) and keep this blog nerdy, I'd like to revisit my recent post about transcendence and Christian a/theism.

To catch you up, you'll recall (if you read that post) that I expressed the view that while Christian a/theism shouldn't be seen as normative (i.e., I don't think it's a necessary thing to be/do) I do think that a/theism can be a helpful thing.

How is a/theism helpful? For two reasons, one epistemological the other moral.

The epistemological reason is that for those who struggle with the metaphysical claims of the Christian faith (people like me) a/theism can be a helpful approach. Doubts about metaphysics don't have to be catastrophic but can, in a/theism, be a productive theological tool, a form of apophatic theology.

From a moral perspective, as I argued in the prior post, by keeping "loving God" (care for the vertical, cultic and religious dimension of faith) tightly connected to "loving others" (care for the horizontal, human and moral dimensions) a/theism can help prevent the dangerous decoupling of the vertical from the horizontal, where religious people come to love God against their neighbors. Or, at the very least, loving God while being indifferent to our neighbors. To be sure, as I noted in the last post, there are other ways to prevent this from happening, ways that preserve the experience of the transcendent as independent from the immanent, but a/theism, in collapsing the transcendent into the immanent, is one way to keep "loving God" tightly associated with "loving others." And as I said, I tend to enjoy any theology that makes that sort of thing happen.

Okay, it's at this point where I'd like to address a common criticism that is made about what I just said. The criticism runs like this. If we collapse or conflate the vertical dimension (love of God) into the horizontal dimension (love of others) what we are left with, it is argued, is a bland and watered down liberalism. If loving God just means loving people then what we end up with is a tolerant but toothless humanism. We end up trading in our prophetic edge for a flower child ethos of "let's just love everyone!"

A related criticism here is that we end up trading in the counter-cultural politics of the Kingdom for the tools of liberal democracy. Basically, we stop becoming the church and start voting for Democrats.

The lines of this debate are pretty well-known. But I'd like to call BS on some of this criticism.

First, a clarification. It will be recalled that in my prior post I expressed the view that I wasn't too keen on a "death of God" a/theism. What I argued for was a theologia crucis focused on the weakness of God and the solidarity of God with victims and "the least of these," where the voice of God (the vertical dimension) is aligned with the voices of victims (the horizontal dimension). Theologically, I'm thinking here of things like Moltmann's The Crucified God, the work of Rene Girard, liberation theology, and Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison. Biblically, I'm thinking of texts like this:

1 John 3.16-18, 4.20
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.

The point here is that when I'm talking about a/theism I'm thinking more about the "solidarity of God" than the "death of God." Though I do believe that there is a sort of "death" that has to take place to get us to this point of solidarity with victims. This is the theological death that the disciples experience when they saw the Incarnate God crucified on the cross. In witnessing the crucifixion of Jesus at Golgotha a view of God died in the the hearts and minds of Jesus's followers. And it's a death that many contemporary Christians have yet to experience. Few of us want the Crucified God and the cruciform lifestyle to which we are called. Bonhoeffer captures the view of God I'm thinking of here:

God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.

This is the theology that sits behind many of my most popular posts, posts like Your God is Too Big, The Gospel According to Lady Gaga, and The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity. If you read (or recall) those posts you'll see the common theological thread: the cultic/religious care of God is aligned with care for others, victims and "the least of these" in particular.

Is what I'm talking about here--this Crucified God stuff--best described as "Christian a/theism"? Perhaps not, but I've tended to see it as a version of Christian a/theism because of 1) the functional outcome, the alignment of the vertical (loving God) with the horizontal (loving others), and because of 2) the fact that a sort of "death of God" is needed (Bonhoeffer's "God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross") to get us to embrace God's solidarity and identification with "the least of these." That in addition to the death--the taking up of the cross--needed to walk the cruciform path.

Okay, with that clarification made, let me return to the common criticism of all this, addressing the concern that conflating the vertical with the horizontal creates a limp liberalism and humanism, a tolerant "niceness."

Incidentally, another version of this criticism is that the identification of "loving God" with "loving others" is a caving to the Enlightenment, a swallowing of Enlightenment liberalism (what Charles Taylor calls a "universal beneficence"). The argument here is that by reducing the Christian moral witness to this universal beneficence--best exhibited in the call for "tolerance" in pluralistic societies--we hollow out the Christian faith.

But this is a non sequitur. Just because I'm conflating the vertical with the horizontal doesn't necessarily mean I'm adopting liberal humanism. Doing the former doesn't logically entail that I'm doing the latter. Why can't I do something else? In fact, that's the clarification I'd like to make.

Here's my point. When I say we must conflate the vertical with the horizontal--to form an identity relationship between the Greatest Commandments, loving God and loving others--I'm insisting that we do this in a Christian way. With Christian means toward Christian ends.

Okay, then, what would a Christian collapse of the transcendent look like?

Regarding ends, I'd say "loving others and loving God" should look like the Corporal Works of Mercy per Matthew 25: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving water to the thirsty, visiting the sick, sheltering the homeless, visiting the prisoner. In fact, I'd argue that the conflation we've been talking about here is the exact point Jesus was making:

"Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?"

The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

There it is: loving Jesus/God is functionally collapsed into loving "the least of these" through the corporal works of mercy.

But here's my point: when Jesus conflates the vertical with the horizontal in Matthew 25 no one accuses him of caving to the Enlightenment! 

And why is that? Because Jesus isn't talking about a wishy-washy liberal tolerance. Jesus is talking about the corporal works of mercy. And that's my point. A Christian collapse of the transcendent, to be Christian, isn't toward liberalism but toward individuals and communities practicing the corporal works of Mercy (along with many other things). 

Okay, if those are the Christian ends let's turn toward the Christian means.

Again, the criticism you often hear about strongly equating "loving God" with "loving others" is that in doing so we are eschewing the life of the church and trading it in for liberal political engagement (e.g., we start voting for Democrats to achieve "social justice").

But this is still BS. Another non sequitur. There is no logical or necessary connection that if I identify "loving God" with "loving others" that I have to trade in the life of the church for the tools of the state. Sure I could do that, and I might start voting differently, but I wouldn't describe any of that as Christian.

The point being, when I talk about "loving others" not only am I operationalizing this in a distinctively Christan way, I'm also opting for Christian means to reach those ends. Concretely, I'll eschew the political apparatus of the state and invest in the koinonia of the church.

Because as we all know, means are often conflated with the ends. To be concrete about it, I don't care how many Democrats (or Republicans) you vote for: you can't vote your way into being a cross-shaped person. Cruciform people just don't roll out of bed. Most of us would rather watch SportsCenter or Downton Abby than spend time with the homeless. Consequently, to get to Christian ends we are going to need Christan means, an intensive training and formation in the cruciform life. You can't separate Matthew 25 from Acts 4.

To summarize all this. While I understand the knee-jerk reaction and criticism about strongly identifying "loving God" with "loving others" much of this criticism is missing the mark. The criticism is assuming something about ends and means that shouldn't be assumed. Sure, there are many progressive Christians who collapse the transcendent in ways that aren't distinctively Christian, opting for things like tolerance and liberal political engagement. Those aren't horrible things, in fact I think those are good things. I just don't consider them distinctively Christian things because I don't see them as distinctively cruciform things (e.g., pouring out your life in the the works of mercy to give life to others).

So the root problem here isn't the collapsing of the transcendent per se, but with the ends and means of that collapse. I'd argue--I am here arguing--that the collapse of the transcendent that we see in theologies like Christian a/theism can be distinctively Christian, toward Christian ends (e.g., the corporal works of mercy) and with Christian means (e.g., the koinonia of the church).

Now at this point a reader might respond, "Well, if that's what you mean by 'Christian a/theism' I have fewer concerns. My worries are more with other varieties of a/theism." In light of that response, we might need to create some labels to distinguish what I'm describing here from other forms of a/theism, a/theisms that might look a lot like existentialism, Buddhism, liberal/radical theology, death of God theology, or liberal humanism.

So, to help make such distinctions let me presume to label what I'm describing here as Kingdom a/theism.

Why the word "kingdom"? Because the focus of what I'm describing here as Kingdom a/theism is more sociological than a/theisms that are more theological, philosophical and psychological.

Kingdom a/theism is sociological in that it is preoccupied with God's social location in the world. It is a form of a/theism in that it doesn't locate God in the vertical dimension but in the horizontal dimension as God stands in solidarity with the victims and 'the least of these.' Kingdom a/theism is also sociological in two other ways. Specifically, Kingdom a/theism is concerned with the social life of the Kingdom of God on earth (rather than in heaven, yet another collapsing of the transcendent), best exemplified in the koinonia of the church. And finally, Kingdom a/theism is concerned with the social witness and mission of God in the world, best exemplified when God's people are found at the margins of society practicing the works of mercy.

Last week we were in Chapter 7 of The Rule of St. Benedict. This week I'm jumping over a bunch of chapters to quote from Chapter 16:

¹The Prophet says: "Seven times a day have I praised you." (Psalm 119:164). ²We will fulfill this sacred number of seven if we satisfy our obligations of service of Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline.

I've jumped over Chapters 8-15 as these chapters mainly have to do with the nitty gritty of what is called the Divine Office, when each Office is to happen and what is to be done during each Office. The main thing I want to point to is the Divine Office itself.

The Divine Office, also called the Liturgy of the Hours, is a set of daily prayers scheduled at regular times throughout the day. The Daily Office structures the day like the liturgical calender structures the year. The content of the Divine Hours is mainly focused on praying the Psalms, although other hymns, texts or prayers are also used. Praying the Psalms in the Divine Office is considered to be the proper work of the contemplative monastic community. The Divine Office is the proper work of the monk.

Inspired by Psalm 119:164 (as noted in The Rule) there are seven periods of prayer during the day, the ones named by Benedict above: Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. Beyond these seven hours Benedict also discusses Vigils, prayers said during the night. All told, then, there are eight hours in the Divine Hours. The timings of the prayers from Wikipedia for the Roman Catholic tradition:

• Lauds or Dawn Prayer (at Dawn, or 3 a.m.) 
• Prime or Early Morning Prayer (First Hour = approximately 6 a.m.) 
• Terce or Mid-Morning Prayer (Third Hour = approximately 9 a.m.) 
• Sext or Midday Prayer (Sixth Hour = approximately 12 noon) 
• None or Mid-Afternoon Prayer (Ninth Hour = approximately 3 p.m.) 
• Vespers or Evening Prayer ("at the lighting of the lamps", generally at 6 p.m.) 
• Compline or Night Prayer (before retiring, generally at 9 p.m.) 
• Vigils (during the night, at midnight with some)

Non-monastics tend to simplify the Divine Hours. A common routine for those practicing fixed hour prayer is observing Prime, Sext, Vespers and Compline. That is, observing Morning Prayer, a Noontime Prayer, an Evening Prayer and Compline, the prayer before bedtime. This is the structure I try to keep, though I often forget Noontime prayer (lunch hour meetings often getting in the way) and Evening prayer (dinnertime and family time often getting in the way). But most days I'll pray Morning Prayer and Compline.

That's two out of eight. So I'm 25% monk. For this Lenten season one the things I'm trying to do is commit to the morning, noon, evening, and compline prayer rhythm.

At the start of Chapter 5 of Unclean I lead off with this quote from Mary Douglas:

St. Catherine of Sienna, when she felt revulsion from the wounds that she was tending bitterly reproached herself. Sound hygiene was incompatible with charity, so she deliberately drank a bowl of puss.

I don't know about you, but that's pretty damn disgusting. But the bit that caught my attention in the quote was the phrase "sound hygiene was incompatible with charity."

The "uncleanliness" I mainly talk about in Unclean is moral. "Sound hygiene" in this sense is moral purity, spiritual righteousness.

But there is also the more literal, concrete and bodily forms of uncleanliness and hygiene. Instead of sins there is body odor. Instead of a "moral stain" there are tobacco stains on teeth or grimy stains on clothing.

What I'm speaking to here is less the moral boundary between saints and sinners than the sensory boundary between the rich and poor.

George Orwell, in his book The Road to Wigan Pier, has a powerful meditation on the sensory boundary. In this passage he concludes that "the real secret of class distinctions," the "impassable barrier" between us, can be "summed up in four frightful words":

"The lower classes smell."

Orwell writes:

...Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West--the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.

That was what we were taught--the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race-hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot. You can have an affection for a murderer...but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath stinks--habitually stinks, I mean. However well you may wish him, however much you may admire his mind and character, if his breath stinks he is horrible and in your heart of hearts you will hate him.

When you welcome people from the margins you are going to have to cross a sensory boundary. There will be odors left on your person, in your house, in your car. You will enter places and encounter bodies where "sound hygiene" becomes thrown up against love and charity. So as with St. Catherine there will need to be a moment of self-overcoming, the disciplining of our senses so that we can become people of welcome and embrace.

Everyone will have different sensory triggers. For me it's a particular smell that pushes me to the edge. The best way I can describe this smell is a combination of feces and cigarette smoke. That particular smell, common where I'm choosing to be, is my sensory boundary.

That smell is a liminal space, a moral threshold where I, like St. Catherine, must make an intentional choice to move forward rather than backward.

The fate of my soul, my entire Christian walk, hangs in the balance at that threshold.

Two years ago I wrote about my ambivalence in observing Ash Wednesday with my church. As I noted then, it has nothing to do with Ash Wednesday, which I love, but with how my non-liturgical church celebrates it. Specifically, the imposition of ashes is "added on" to an existing church service (our traditional Wednesday night bible service) and is something you can "opt in" or "opt out" of. Those two things, for the reasons I wrote about, bother me.

Two years ago I put my ambivalence aside and went forward for the imposition of ashes. And it was a mess. Not messy with the ashes, but messy with the theology.

I'm a Winter Christian which means that lament is a pretty big part of my spiritual experience. But by and large the general tone of worship in evangelical culture tends to privilege the Summer Christian experience of unmitigated praise. The theology that informs this preference is often triumphalistic and symptomatic of what is called an over-realized eschatology. What is an over-realized eschatology? It's rushing ahead to heaven, victory, happiness and Easter. A refusal to sit with the Fall, brokenness, lament and Good Friday.

In the face of all that unmitigated praise Ash Wednesday stands out for us Winter Christians. Here is a ritual of dust, lament and ashes. Here's a worship experience that will resonate deeply with our souls.

So I went forward for the imposition of ashes. As a Winter Christian I was looking forward to the ashes, having them etched on my forehead with the sign of the cross as the words were intoned:

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust that you shall return."

Words to stir the heart of every Winter Christian.

But guess what? When you are "adding on" the imposition of ashes in a non-liturgical church people can go off script. Because we are often unaware that there is a script. And without a script--a liturgy to follow--the people leading us can improvise and say what they want to say, what they think is fitting. And when that happens more often than not people default to the dominant chord of Summer Christian spirituality.

So I went forward and when the ashes were imposed on my forehead the words I got where these:

"Jesus loves you."

Good gravy. That's a great sentiment, but I'm not coming forward on Ash Wednesday to hear "Jesus loves you." I hear that message every Sunday. What I want to hear, what my Winter Christian heart was looking for, was the hard stuff. The undiluted full-of-death stuff. "Remember that you are dust, and to dust that you shall return." But even on Ash Wednesday we struggle to get those words out. They are too scary, morbid, and depressing.

But that's exactly the point. And exactly why we need to stay on script. Otherwise our fears of death and brokenness cause us to rush past the ashes and into the happy place where all is cozy, sweet and comforting. We don't need an over-realized eschatology on Ash Wednesday. Easter, sure. But it's Ash Wednesday.

So this year, when I go forward, I'd like us to be on script. And I think we will be this year (the service is entitled Memento Mori). No chickening out. Yes, Ash Wednesday can be depressing, even morbid, but we need to say it. We need to hear it.

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust that you shall return."

It's Ash Wednesday.

At ACU this year I'm doing research as a Mobile Research Fellow about the relationship between spirituality and connectivity. A month or so ago ACU put out a press release about some the the data I collected. From the ACU press release:

“More and more studies are coming out every day documenting the cognitive and social impacts of social networking – all the texting, Tweeting, and Facebooking we do during the day," says Beck. "To date, however, no one has taken a close look at the spiritual impact of all this electronic interaction. That’s what my team set out to do.”

Beck, along with two psychology graduate students, Anne Briggs and Mary Tomkins, surveyed 313 undergraduate students at ACU about their social networking habits and how those habits affect their perceived spirituality, their relationship with God, and their faith overall.

The research also surveyed various ways students have attempted to limit or moderate their use of social networking to mitigate its impact on their spiritual lives. For example, 53% of the students in the survey report having undertaken a “Facebook fast,” where they stopped checking or logging onto Facebook for a specified period of time.

“Fasting,” Beck observes, “is the practice of refraining from something pleasurable in which we tend to overindulge. It's an ancient spiritual practice used in Christianity and other faith traditions. It’s interesting to see college students applying this discipline to the modern world of social computing. It seems that more and more people are exploring things like this in order to maintain their spiritual equilibrium in our hyper-connected age.”

Why is unplugging for spiritual purposes on the rise? According to Beck’s survey, 49% of his students agree with the statement that “the time I spend on things like texting, Facebook or Twitter has drawn me away from God."

Beck also assessed a phenomenon researchers have dubbed “phantom phone vibration,” the experience of thinking your iPhone is buzzing in your pocket, only to find out it isn’t.

“Eight-nine percent of our students reported having experienced phantom phone vibrations," says Beck. "Of these, 38% of our students have this experience every day or every week.” According to Beck, the experience suggests we have become hyper-vigilant in monitoring our cell phones.

“Even when we aren’t on our phones, we are still on the edges of awareness paying attention to them,” Beck observes. “This might be one reason we feel our social connectivity is making it more difficult for us to be fully present in the moment.”

For example, according to the ACU survey, 55% of the students reported texting other people while talking with their friends. This might be why 28% of the survey respondents agree that “the time I spend on things like texting, Facebook or Twitter is interfering with me having deep, meaningful relationships with others.”

Some of this is particularly relevant, the fasting from online or mobile connectivity, given that Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent is tomorrow.

If you read the blogs I do (and mainly I'm alerted to these things by following Rachel Held Evans) you'll have been following over the last week or so the debate about the "purity culture" of evangelicalism and the way it has created an ecosystem of shame around the subject of virginity. More, the shaming here is generally asymmetrical, a burden and a stigma almost exclusively placed upon young women.

As a man it's not my place to tell that story, or unpack that shame and damage. So let me suggest Rachel's post, the powerful "I am Damaged Goods" by Sarah Bessey, and "Virginity: New and Improved!" by Elizabeth Esther.

I'd like to add to this conversation some observations about the psychology of purity and why this psychology makes purity culture so toxic. This analysis will be familiar to those of you who have read Unclean and have thus become the resident experts in your churches about the negative effects of purity psychology on the life and actions of the church.

But for those who have not read Unclean, why is the Christian purity culture so toxic and shaming?

It has to do with the psychology of purity. At root, purity is a food-attribution system, a suite of psychological processes that help us make judgments about whether or not it is safe or healthy to eat something.

One aspect of purity psychology is how we make contamination appraisals. The psychologist Paul Rozin has been a pioneer in naming and describing these appraisals. And one of these appraisals is the judgment of permanence.

To illustrate this Rozin will put, say, a cockroach in a glass of juice and swish it around. He then removes the bug and offers the juice for participants to drink. They, of course, refuse. That's to be expected. But then the interesting part of the experiment begins. Rozin goes on to sterilize the juice in front of the watching participant. He then makes another offer. Participants continue to refuse. This despite knowing, at a rational level, that the juice has been sanitized. So why refuse? Because at the affective level a judgment of contamination continues to dominate. The juice is judged as unclean. Despite all efforts to purify, sanitize, or rehabilitate.

Rozin's demo illustrates the attribution of permanence, which is a key part of purity psychology. The judgment appears to be "once contaminated, always contaminated." The implication here is that contamination--a loss of purity--is a catastrophic judgment creating a state that cannot be rehabilitated. The foodstuff is, as we say, ruined. And if ruined it's only fit for the trash.

As I discuss in Unclean, what happens when we structure parts of our moral experience with the metaphor of purity is that we import the psychology of contamination into our moral and spiritual lives. That is, we start to use the attribution of permanence (along with other purity appraisals I talk about in Unclean) when thinking about moral failure and sin. A loss of purity is understood to be permanent and is unable to be rehabilitated because, well, that's the way purity works.

Now what is peculiar about all this is that we use the purity metaphor in an uneven manner. Most sins don't get the purity metaphor. True, generally understood sin is understood to be a purity violation. But particular sins aren't typically viewed as a purity issue. Most sins are framed, metaphorically, as mistakes or errors, as performance failures. Another common metaphor here is sin as a form of stumbling or falling. What is important to note about these metaphors--performance failures and stumbling--is that these metaphors aren't catastrophic in nature. That is, they can be easily rehabilitated. If you make a mistake you try again. If you stumble and fall you get back up. Inherent in the logic of the metaphor is an obvious route to rehabilitation.

But not so with the purity metaphor. When the sin is framed as a purity violation the damage that is done is total and unable to be rehabilitated. A purity violation creates a state of irreversible ruin.

And with that in mind let's ask ourselves, what sin categories are almost exclusively regulated by purity metaphors in our churches?

Answer: sexual sins, the loss of virginity in particular.

Think about it. I bet most of us would say that the sin most Americans are guility of is materialism. I bet most of us would even say that materialism is the sin most killing the church. And yet, when did you ever hear a talk about "materialism purity"? Beyond never hearing such a talk, the phrase "materialism purity" just sounds weird. And try tacking "purity" onto any other sin. Fill in the blank: "__________ purity." Can you think of any sin--except "sexual purity"--that works in the blank, that doesn't sound weird when framed as a purity violation?

The point is, we treat sexual sins and the loss of virginity very differently from other sins, as a class of sin unto itself. And how do we make that happen? We accomplish this by framing these sins almost exclusively with purity metaphors. And in doing so we recruit a psychological system built upon a food-aversion system, a system driven by disgust, revulsion, and nausea. But instead of directing these feelings toward food we are now directing the feelings of disgust, revulsion and nausea toward human beings. More, we teach our children to internalize and direct these feelings toward themselves.

And I think we can sharpen this point even more.

Based upon my experience, I would argue that male sexual sin isn't generally framed as a purity violation. The loss of male virginity still gets the performance failure metaphor. If a boy losses his virginity it's a mistake, a stumbling. Consequently, this is something he can easily rehabilitate. He's not damaged goods. He can simply resolve to do better going forward. How is this so easy for him? Because his sexuality is being regulated by a performance metaphor.

By contrast, and this is the heart of of the matter, the loss of female virginity is almost exclusively regulated by the purity metaphor. For females the loss of virginity is a bit more than a performance failure. It's a loss of purity that, because of the way purity works, is catastrophic and beyond rehabilitation. And because of this she's got no way to move forward, metaphorically speaking. The game's over. And thus she reaches the only conclusion the purity metaphor makes available to her: She's damaged goods. And all the emotions related to that judgment of contamination rush forward as she internalizes all the shame, disgust, revulsion and nausea.

This is the psychology that makes the Christian purity culture so toxic.

In Chapter 7 of the Rule of St. Benedict--Humility--we encounter the famous ladder of humility, the twelve steps and stages that Benedict suggests mark the road to humility.

The First Step of the ladder:

¹⁰The first step of humility, then, is that a man keeps the fear of God always before his eyes and never forgets it...¹²While he guards himself at every moment from sins and vices of thought or tongue, of hand or foot, of self-will or bodily desire, ¹³let him recall that he is always seen by God in heaven, that his actions everywhere are in God's sight and are reported by angels every hour.

Yikes! The angels are reporting on us every hour? That's not a very comforting thought.

Still, I think we can see what Benedict is getting at. I think the issue here goes to integrity, holding oneself accountable across the public and private spheres of life. We all know that humans behave abysmally when we are are in anonymous situations. Humility demands situational consistency, even when we are alone.

The Second and Third Steps of the ladder:

³¹The second step of humility is that a man loves not his own will nor takes pleasures in the satisfaction of his desires; ³²rather he shall imitate by his actions that saying of the Lord: "I have come not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me...³⁴The third step of humility is that a man submits to his superior in all obedience for the love of God, imitating the Lord of whom the Apostle says: "He became obedient even to death."

As noted earlier in the Rule, for Benedict obedience and submission are key features of humility. In our discussions, I framed this as an issue of being responsive to the needs of others.

The Fourth Step of the ladder:

³⁵The fourth step of humility is that in this obedience under difficult, unfavorable, or even unjust conditions, his heart quietly embraces suffering ³⁶and endures it without weakening or seeking escape. For the Scripture has it: "Anyone who perseveres to the end will be saved."...⁴²In truth, those who are patient amid hardship and unjust treatment are fulfilling the Lord's command: "When struck on one cheek, they turn the other; when deprived of their coat, they offer their cloak also; when pressed into service for one mile, they go two."

Of interest to me here is how Benedict connects patience in the face of unjust treatment with the Sermon on the Mount.

The Fifth Step of the ladder:

⁴⁴The fifth step of humility is that a man does not conceal from his abbot any sinful thoughts entering his heart, or any wrongs committed in secret, but rather confesses them humbly.

I'm sure alarm bells are going off about how abusive this might be, but transparency, authenticity and confession do seem critical in cultivating humility or, at the very least, an honest self-accounting. How else to puncture self-illusions?

The Sixth Step:

⁴⁹The sixth step of humility is that a monk is content with the lowest and most menial treatment, and regards himself a poor and worthless workman in whatever task he is given.

Considering yourself "worthless" is tough to swallow. But there is something about being willing and seeking out "the last place."

I remember back in my ACU theatre days when we did dinner theatres, actors serving dinner in costume before the show. Clean up after the show was, as you might expect, a big ordeal. And the rule was this: The leading male role cleaned the men's restroom and the leading female role cleaned the women's bathroom. Those in the "highest place" were given the dirtiest, lowest job. The sensibility here was very Benedictine. Growing toward humility, however, seems to be more about being willing to seek out these jobs. Volunteering to clean the bathroom.

Incidentally, I actually pondered doing something like this in my Department at school. My idea was to have faculty and students sign up and take turns cleaning the bathroom in our building. The restroom is, of course, cleaned by a cleaning person in the evenings. But I wanted to take this job over, to do it ourselves. I thought it would be good for the students to see their faculty cleaning the toilet. And for students to participate alongside as well. As you can imagine, this idea didn't go over well. But I still think it's a good idea.

The Seventh Step:

⁵¹The seventh step of humility is that a man not only admits with his tongue but is also convinced in his heart that he is inferior to all and of less value...

This one of those places in The Rule where you remember that it is a medieval monastic document, even if it was more humane and less strict than its predecessors. Still, the issue here seems to be about being humble in heart and not just in speech. A lot of people pretend, verbally, to be humble. Benedict wants humility to go deep.

The Eighth Step:

⁵⁵The eighth step of humility is that a monk does only what is endorsed by the common rule of the monastery and the example set by his superiors.

Humility is about participating in the common life of others. Humility is a communal discipline, about learning to follow the rules just like everyone else. Be a team player.

The Ninth Step:

⁵⁶The ninth step of humility is that a monk controls his tongue and remains silent, not speaking unless asked a question.

People who are full of themselves do like to hear themselves talk. But we are not as smart or as interesting as we would like to believe. So perhaps we should have less talking and more listening. Listening to others is an expression of humility. Listening a form of hospitality and making room.

The Tenth and Eleventh Steps:

⁵⁹The tenth step of humility is that he is not given to ready laughter...⁶⁰The eleventh step of humility is that monk speaks gently and without laughter, seriously and with becoming modesty, briefly and reasonably, but without raising his voice, ⁶¹as it is written: "A wise man is known by his few words."

The comments about laughter here are difficult. But the general concern, however, seems to be with a lack of seriousness. Frivolity. The concern might also be about histrionics, people who dramatically draw attention to themselves.

The Twelfth Step:

⁶²The twelfth step of humility is that a monk always manifest humility in bearing no less than in his heart, so that it is evident ⁶³at the Work of God, in oratory, the monastery or the garden, on a journey or in the field, or anywhere else...

The goal is to so internalize a humble spirit that finds expression no matter where we are or who we are with.

And at the conclusion of all the Steps, the vision of the final product:

⁶⁷Now, therefore, after ascending all these steps of humility, the monk will quickly arrive at the perfect love of God which casts out fear. ⁶⁸Through this love, all that he once performed with dread, he will now begin to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit ⁶⁹no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit and delight in virtue.

It's an interesting conclusion, suggesting that if love and joy aren't the motives in all this true humility and spiritual maturity cannot be achieved. If morbidity and a fear of punishment are driving the process we aren't going to be truly humble.

Love and joy must infuse all. Lose sight of that and you'll misunderstand the enterprise, every step of the way.

A common move in Christian a/theism is to collapse the transcendent into the immanent. That is, the vertical dimension where humans reach toward heaven and God is collapsed into the horizontal dimension where we reach toward other human beings. In a sense, the two dimensions become conflated, an identity relationship is formed. To love God is to love your neighbor. With no remainder. Those are the same thing.

I'm very happy with this move. In fact, I argue for something very much like this in Unclean. When push comes to shove if you ask me what loving God means I'll respond with "loving your neighbor." In fact, I'd go on to argue that when the two become decoupled--when loving God is pursued independently of loving your neighbor--we create the ingredients for the most toxic aspect of religion: loving God against your neighbor.

All that to say, Christian a/theism recommends something very much along these lines. The collapse of the transcendent dimension is a sort of "death of God" move that allows us, in the wake of this collapse, to find God immanently, in the brokenness of our human relationships.

And again, I'm comfortable with this move. Though I don't tend to read the collapse of the transcendent as a "death of God" move as much as a theologia crucis or Girardian move. That is, in the cross God divinizes the victim, calling us to stand in solidarity with the victim to instantiate the Kingdom of God. The cry of dereliction on the cross is less metaphysical than sociological. The issue isn't that God is dead as much as it is about where God is socially located (i.e., among the god-forsaken and cursed--the victims of the earth).

Still, the Christian a/theists make a good point in noting that when the transcendent dimension is alive and well it often captures the horizontal dimension. A theology of the cross is often trumped by a theology of glory. A related temptation that I talk about in Unclean is how the transcendent dimension creates a Gnostic pull, where we ignore the brokenness of the human, horizontal plane by escaping into spiritual and religious pursuits.

The point being that the Christian a/theists are right. As long as it exists the vertical dimension is always going to be a temptation and the source of the most toxic manifestations of religion. And if that is so, perhaps it is best, or just safer, to jettison the whole thing. Do the "death of God" a/theism thing and collapse the transcendent.

And it's at this point where I'd like to make a clarification.

It's one thing to find this move advantageous and quite another to insist that this move is necessary. Sure, it's safer, but safer doesn't mean necessary, that love of neighbor necessitates or requires a death of God move. There is a weaker claim here and a stronger claim. The weaker claim is that a death of God move facilitates love of neighbor. The stronger claim is that a death of God move is necessary for love of neighbor. The weaker claim I'm totally on board with. But I don't think the stronger claim is correct. And yet, the stronger claim is often implicit in a lot of Christian a/theism argumentation: To become a humane and authentic Christian you must undergo the death of God experience.

But that can't be right. There are just too many exemplary saints (and no Christian a/theists of comparable caliber) who had robust experiences with the transcendent aspects of faith. Think of Mother Teresa, St. Francis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Dorothy Day. Shoot, think of Jesus who went off in the early mornings to pray, who studied the Scriptures and who celebrated the Jewish rituals. The point being, you can be intimately engaged with the transcendent dimension and still radically love your neighbor. Like Jesus, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa, St. Francis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. People who prayed intensively, read and studied Scripture, and were devout in religious observance. These things do not have to be rejected or deconstructed to create radical compassion. In fact, for these cases engagement with the transcendent dimension fueled and supported engagement with the horizontal, human dimension.

Still, these are rare cases. Engagement with the transcendent is, for the reasons noted above, probably more likely to lead you away from the needs of others. You start becoming religious and pious and spiritual and self-righteous. But then again, while the transcendent may tempt you into a variety of toxic or unhealthy directions, and though a great many will succumb, this trajectory isn't necessary or inevitable.

All that to say, while I get the point of Christian a/theism and largely agree with its concerns and impulses, I do reject the notion that it is a necessary move. I think you can have a robust experience of the transcendent and be an exemplary Christian and human being, a person who is, on a day to day basis, radically available to others. Like Mother Teresa, St. Francis, or Dorothy Day. Or Jesus.

In short, you don't have to be an a/theist to be a Christ-like human being. Though for many, and this I'll readily admit, a/theism may be the best, quickest and safest route.

We continue on with the William Stringfellow Project, where I read all of William Stringfellow's books in chronological order in their first editions. See the sidebar for installments.

In this post we turn to the sixth book Stringfellow published, Count It All Joy.

Count It All Joy was published in 1967. The original dust jacket, pictured here, says the hardback book sold for $3.00. The book endorsement on the back was from Daniel Berrigan, S.J.:

William Stringfellow, a Christian without comfort, gives us, beyond all expectations, the only comfort worth having. He gives us the truth.

We are not entirely grateful--and far from easy--at the gift he lodges in our hands. How could we be? We are grown weirdly resigned to the mindless exploits of those whose theology is an empty exercise in childishness, and to the heartless exploits of those who justify death as a way of life.

For a new mind and a new heart, explored with new words, we are grateful to this innocent and troubling man. Saint James could have had no more exact and articulate spokesman.

Readers will we recall that Berrigan was arrested for the Catonsville Nine protest in 1967--the year Count It All Joy was published--at William Stringfellow's house. Quite a year for the two of them.

As Berrigan notes, Count It All Joy is a book inspired by the Epistle of James in the New Testament. Many of the themes of the book are common to Stringfellow, themes we've already encountered in his earlier books. So for this book I'd like to focus on a theme in Stringfellow that I haven't yet given much attention to--the place of the bible in Stringfellow's thought.

Stringfellow is an odd duck in many ways. On the one hand he's a liberal Episcopalian. And yet, Stringfellow has this very high view of the bible as a location of Divine agency, something you don't see a whole lot among liberal Episcopalians or other mainline Protestants.

To be clear, Stringfellow is no fundamentalist. He's not reading the bible literally. I'd characterize Stringfellow's reading of the bible as pneumatological, where the bible is a location of God's Spirit encountering us in the midst of death. (Note: Though I've used the word pneumatological Stringfellow would say "Word of God" rather than Holy Spirit in describing all this.) Thus, Stringfellow encourages us to read the bible--a lot--and listen for and wait upon the Word of God.

For example, in the Introduction to Count It All Joy Stringfellow writes (emphases are Stringfellow's):

Listening...is a primitive act of love, in which a person gives himself or herself to another's word, making ourselves accessible and vulnerable to that word.

It is very much like that when a person comes to the Bible. We must first of all listen to the Word which the Bible speaks, putting aside, for the time being, such other issues as whether the Word is credible or congenial or consistent or significant. By all means, if you will, raise these questions, but, first, listen to the Word.

A paragraph later, the pneumatological aspect comes into view, how Divine agency is experienced in this listening to the Word of God:

Some will think this a naive approach to the Word of God in the Bible. I suppose it is just that. It is one which simply affirms that the Word of God has content, integrity and life which belongs to God Himself and that this can be received and comprehended by ordinary human beings. It is a view that regards the Bible more as a newspaper than as a systematic body of theological doctrine or as religious instruction or as moral law or, for that matter, as mere esoteric mythology. The Bible reports the news of the Word of God manifest and militant in the events of this history in a way that is accessible, lucid and edifying for the common reader. The Word of God is for us, and through the Bible that Word is addressed to us where we are, just as we are, in this world.

If that all sounds a bit abstract and, yes, too theological, later in the book Stringfellow gives an example of what he is trying to describe. Stringfellow recounts his experience of being put in charge of a Sunday School class for a group of rebellious and unruly urban teenagers in New York. Finding the assigned curriculum unsatisfactory Stringfellow does something strange. He asks for everyone in the class to secure a bible (they don't) and then he just starts reading the bible aloud to the teens:

All that happened, and all that was allowed, in the brief sessions of the "class" following that first Sunday, was that I read, aloud, the entire Letter to the Romans.

Stringfellow allowed no interruptions or questions. He just read Romans aloud. Predictably, the class rebelled--for example, a boy created a disturbance by bringing a case of beer to class--but Stringfellow patiently persisted.

[T]he essential event each week remained the same--all of us simply heard a reading of the entire Letter to the Romans. It was only after the group had suffered this exercise a dozen or more times, week after week, that the tactic was changed and I proposed that the Letter be then read sentence by sentence, in its given sequence, and that after reading each sentence aloud, we all pause and ask one question: What does this say? Not, what do I think? Not, do I agree? Not, is this relevant to my life and circumstances? But, straightforwardly, first of all, What is this word?

So we persevered. It was a laborious enterprise. But we did continue, meeting each Sunday, and, as it were, reading and listening to each sentence of Romans, in turn, and asking, What is being said?

Silence--utter, unequivocal, radical, dumbfounded silence--greeted this practice for weeks. But I insisted upon it and the members of the "class" acquiesced in it, as much out of bemusement at this unorthodox "Sunday School" as anything, I suppose.

Eventually, a change came:

It was around Christmastime that the change came. The same boy who had brought the case of beer to "class" turned up one afternoon at my tenement in East Harlem. He was, it seemed to me, embarrassed to appear to have deliberately come to visit me, belabored a number of excuses for dropping in. Finally, after his protracted and circumloquacious introit, he mentioned that he had obtained a copy of the New Testament (he had stolen it, he boasted, from the premises of some other church) and confessed that he had been listening in "class," though he had not spoken out there, during all the weeks in which Romans had been repeatedly read aloud. He thought, he said, that I must have plenty of other things to do and would not bother to take time for this "class" or persist in reading the Letter in "class" unless I was convinced there was something important in the Letter. His curiosity was engaged and he had procured a New Testament, he admitted, in order to read the Letter on his own in his privacy. He had now some reflections about his own comprehension of Romans that he wanted to discuss because he had wondered if my own understanding of the Letter corresponded with his.

For the remainder of the afternoon he and I tried to talk with one another about our respective experiences of hearing the Word of God in and through the Letter of Romans.

This tough, brash, aggressive kid from the streets turned out, in that encounter, to be a most sophisticated exegete, although I am pretty sure that if I ever called him such to his face his impulse would be to hit me for cussing him. Somehow it had lingered in his conscience that the original, indispensable and characteristic question to ask, in reading the Bible, is the very question that seems so seldom to be asked in church or seminary or layman's conferences, namely, What does this say? Somehow, thus, he had come, reluctantly, against his will, with his customary hostility and suspicion, to confront the Word of God in the Bible in a way very similar to that which he would face another person.

From that beginning, a discussion about the Letter of Romans, the relationship between Stringfellow and the boy was transformed:

Among the gifts of that afternoon with this most remarkable exegete was the illuminating candor of our relationship. Now, for the first time, we met, under the aegis of the Word, in a new way. Now we were set free from from the roles consigned to each of us or adopted by either of us in the prior contacts in "class." We were no longer restricted by differences of education or learning or race or age or class or whatnot. Now, by the virtue and initiative of the Word of God, bespoken and attended to in our respective experiences in the Letter to the Romans, each of us became at liberty not only to praise the integrity of the Word of God but to be accused and convicted in our own identities as individuals. It was, in that afternoon, not just that the Word of God was, as it were, recognized as a name, but that each of us also were named ourselves in the very same happening. Now the Word of God, in the testimony of Romans, had become evident as the event in which each of us were certainly and fully our selves (cf. James 1:18; 1:21).

Part of the wonder of the occasion was and is that when and wherever the Word of God is heard and honored, human life acquires context, people are radically distinguished and identified, community is wrought, and reconciliation happens.

All that might be a bit of a stretch for those of us who have issues with the bible. Regardless, it gives you a sense of how Stringfellow sees the bible and how he views the reading of the bible. This passage in Count It All Joy shows how, for Stringfellow, the the Word of God becomes active in our lives--a location of Divine agency--when we listen and ask "What does this say?"

Years ago I did a class at my church entitled "Ugly." In that class we spent time thinking about how judgments of righteousness are often captured by aesthetic judgments, where what is beautiful is deemed good and what is ugly is deemed to be bad and sinister.

This is a bias that psychologists have studied. For decades psychologists have studied what is known as the what-is-beautiful-is-good effect. In these studies we observe that beautiful people are consistently rated as more intelligent, more able and more virtuous than the less attractive.

Think about that. The beautiful aren't simply judged as smarter and more talented, they are also judged as being better human beings. And because of this the beautiful gain a variety of social advantages. For example, the beautiful are more likely to get hired or get the promotion. Let alone the advantages in social popularity and interpersonal attraction.

I bring all this up as I was visiting with a homeless man the other day and he was missing a lot of teeth. That isn't uncommon where I'm spending more of my time as poor and homeless people without access to basic dental care will simply lose their teeth. Which can make them look sinister and scary. It's an automatic aesthetic judgment of ugliness that can affect your heart and mind. When looking at toothless smiles you need to beware of the what-is-beautiful-is-good effect (or, rather, its inverse: what-is-ugly-is-bad). And you need to educate your children about this as well. Because their knee-jerk reactions will also conflate the aesthetical (what is ugly) with the moral (was is bad).

Because as we talked about in my class those many years ago, the aesthetics of the gospel finds beauty in unlikely places. The gospel reverses the aesthetic standards of the world as the "ugly" becomes beautiful in the eyes of heaven.

One of my favorite parts of Sara Miles' memoir Take This Bread is how, after she starts a food pantry at her church St. Gregory, she gets pulled into a ministry of prayer, this despite all her skepticism about prayer:

The atmosphere of St. Gregory's drew people in: They came looking for something to eat, but often, like the woman seeking peace, or like me, they really wanted far more. I'd be lifting a box, in the noise and bustle, and someone would come up to me--a grieving mom, a lonely immigrant, a sick man, or any of the many varieties of crazy people who hovered around the pantry. "Will you pray for me?" they'd ask.

So I took a deep breath and began praying with anyone who asked...I'd get people such as Ed, a filthy white guy with long hair who'd frequently flop down on the curb, begging for help. One of our most insane and drug-addicted visitors, he'd sob and rant, in no particular sequence...I'd sit down on the sidewalk with him and wipe his nose. "Oh God," he'd say, "I can't go on like this. Help me, help me." I was sort of fond of Ed, despite his hysteria, so I'd pat his stringy arm and murmur until he calmed down a bit, then fetch him a snack, make the sign of the cross on his dirty forehead, and send him on his way with a few bags of food...

"It seems really hokey sometimes," I said to Lynn.

"I know," said Lynn. "But big deal. You just have to be there."

So I'd sit down next to people and let them talk or cry; I'd listen and put my hands on them; at some point, I'd pray aloud, without really knowing where the words were coming from. It felt homey, not mysterious. But it usually made me cry, too.

I like these passages in the book as they mirror my own experience. When you start to engage with people on the margins you are inexorably drawn into the experience of prayer. This despite all your skepticism and doubts.

What happens in prayer? Does God really listen and answer? I have no clue. But this much I've learned:

Prayer is an act of hallowing.

Imagine someone comes to you and shares a great burden. They share loss, failure, despair, fear, brokenness, or sickness. Their own or that of someone they love. What do you say upon listening? Thanks for sharing? Good luck with all that? I'm so sorry?

Something has happened, something was shared, that needs to be set apart from every other mundane and silly thing that has happened during the day. The moment needs to be hallowed--set apart, consecrated, made holy.

And so you pray. Prayer is a hallowing.

I think about the prayer time before our Sunday School class, a prayer that I often lead. We go around sharing a variety of requests. People are sick. People are traveling. People are struggling. People are broken. People are afraid. And after gathering all these requests, having openned ourselves up to each other, what are we to say in response? "Thanks for sharing everyone." doesn't quite cut it. The moment--where we weep with those who weep and rejoice with those rejoice--needs hallowing. And so we pray. Our sharing wasn't just "catching up" around the water cooler. Something sacred was going on. And so we pray. We hallow.

Do I believe God is out there answering all these petitions and requests? Again, I don't know. But I know that prayer--this ritual of hallowing--is the only proper response.