Happy Halloween

Instead of an unpublished post today this is my annual link post to a bunch of Halloween-themed material I've shared over the years.

Halloween, vampires, monsters. It's all here.

I hope you have a blessed and Happy Halloween this weekend. A collection of reflections for the day:

From Attachment Theory to Winter Christianity: Part 4, Winter Christianity

As I mentioned in my last post, when I analyzed how the items on measures of attachment to God grouped up all the items related to relational distress grouped together. And when I examined this group of items they looked a lot like the content found in the lament or psalms of complaint. So I called this dimension complaint.

Along with these complaint items there was a second grouping of items in the analysis. These were more positive items and when I looked over these items I saw a common theme of engagement with God. So I called this dimension communion.

Now here was the critical insight from the analysis I conducted. I'd identified two dimensions that captured relationship with God--communion and complaint--and these two dimensions were orthogonal (at right angles) to each other.

That finding was huge.

As I've described before on this blog, this finding was huge because the implicit theory most Christians and churches work with regarding the relationship of complaint to faith is that complaint is antithetical and antagonistic to faith, that faith and complaint are polar opposites. This bipolar model is show below:


The assumption of this bipolar model is that as complaint increases faith decreases. Conversely, a strong faith is characterized by a lack or absence of complaint, a lack of doubt, protest or lament.

Like with the attachment research this bipolar model effectively pathologizes complaint. Any doubt, questioning, protest, anger or distress in your relationship with God is taken to be, in this model, as symptomatic of a lack of faith.

And yet, this bipolar model seems very much at odds with the biblical witness. This is the argument that Walter Brueggemann makes in his book The Message of the Psalms:
It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented…It is my judgment that this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture. Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be, is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users, given the larger number of psalms that are songs of lament, protest, and complaint about an incoherence that is experienced in the world…I believe that serous religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s ā€œloss of control.ā€
We can see here Walter questioning the central assumption of the bipolar model, that complaint is antithetical to faith: "We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith."

But again, my research suggested that communion/engagement with God was orthogonal to complaint. And that meant that communion and complaint, set now at right angles, could create quadrants where various blends of the two could be plotted:


Importantly for our purposes, this two-dimensional model allows us to explore the quadrant where both complaint and communion are high. In a follow up article in 2007 I called the quadrant the Winter Christian experience as opposed to the Summer Christian experience where communion is high and complaint is low:


In the Winter Christian experience there is a great deal of complaint--lament and protest--but engagement/communion with God remains high. This is exactly what we see in Job and the lament psalms. Even with Jesus's cry from the cross.

And what this means is that communion and complaint are not antithetical. Communion and compliant can co-exist. And when they do they create the Winter Christian experience.

And this is ultimately why I moved away from the attachment paradigm. Specifically, in contrast to the attachment styles framework the Winter Christian paradigm depathologized lament.

In this model lament could be a natural, regular and even a healthy feature of faith. In this model you are not anxiously or insecurely attached to God. You're just a Winter Christian.

From Attachment Theory to Winter Christianity: Part 3, Is Relational Distress Pathological?

In the early days of my research when I was working with an attachment framework I would use the language of attachment theory to describe the relational distress one could experience with God. As I described in the last post, I would describe relational distress as being symptomatic of an anxious or insecure attachment with God.

But I started becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this way of thinking about things. When you describe relational distress as being "anxious" or "insecure" you're pathologizing the distress. But a lot of the distress I was seeing in people's relationship with God--and my own distress in particular--didn't seem pathological. It seemed, rather, very natural and normal. 

In 2006 I published a study where I factor analyzed two instruments that had been used to assess attachment to God, our Attachment to God Inventory and the Spiritual Assessment Inventory developed by Todd Hall. A factor analysis is a technique that groups similar things together, apples grouped with apples and oranges grouped with oranges. In this analysis I was trying to see which of the AGI and SAI items would group together.

Not surprisingly I found that most of the relational distress items on the AGI and SAI grouped together. Again, most of these items are considered to be assessing anxious or insecure attachment with God. But as I looked over these items I began to wonder, "Are these items assessing something pathological or something quite normal in our relationship with God?"

Consider the themes that emerged from my analysis of the AGI and SAI items:
Concerns over God’s reliability/trustworthiness 
I often feel angry with God for not responding to me when I want. (AGI item)

Concerns over God’s care/affection/love 
Sometimes I feel that God loves others more than me. (AGI item)

Experience of distance from God
God seems far away from me. (SAI item)

Negative emotions directed at God 
I struggle with anger toward God. (SAI item)

Theodicy concerns 
I sometimes think, ā€œWhy does God allow bad things to happen to me?ā€ (SAI item) 
When I looked over these items I asked myself, "Are these really symptoms of an insecure or anxious attachment to God?" Because that's how the attachment paradigm approaches relational distress. In the attachment to God paradigm distress is pathologized.

But these items didn't seem pathological to me. They looked like something Job was experiencing. And the writers of the lament psalms.

Think about it. If Job, in the middle of his ashes, were to have completed the AGI and the SAI how would he have scored on the measures?

Concerns over God's trustworthiness? Check.

Concerns over God's care? Check.

Experience of distance from God? Check.

Negative emotions directed at God? Check.

Theodicy concerns? Check.

Job would have scored high on all these items. But I don't think it makes sense to think of Job as being "anxiously attached."

In short, the reason I shifted away from the attachment framework is because its framework for relational distress unwittingly pathologized lament by describing it as anxious, insecure or preoccupied attachment.

And so that's why I started looking for another paradigm.

From Attachment Theory to Winter Christianity: Part 2, Anxiously Attached to God

Having described relationship with God as an attachment bond in Part 1 we can now turn to the issue of attachment styles.

In her pioneering work with children in the "strange situation"--a research protocol that observes a series of separations and reunions between a child and parent with a stranger present--Mary Ainsworth observed two different attachment anxieties, stranger anxiety and separation anxiety. Noting the levels of anxiety the children displayed Ainsworth classified them by "attachment style."

For example, securely attached children show modest levels of separation and stranger anxiety. Anxiously attached children, by contrast, show excessive levels of stranger and separation anxiety. Finally, avoidantly attached children show little to no attachment anxiety.

The point here is that while we all have attachments these attachments can vary in how much anxiety they display. Each of us has an attachment style which affects how much anxiety we experience in our love relationships--with parents, romantic partners and friends.

Much of this anxiety is rooted in fears about the attachment figure being available to us or abandoning us. When we worry about the availability of the attachment figure we might grow excessively clingy or needy. We might become jealous and never want them to leave our sight. We might grow angry when the attachment figure isn't as responsive or attentive as we'd like.

In adulthood attachments when we see a lot of anxiety like this we'd describe the person as having an anxious, insecure or preoccupied attachment. These are friends or lovers who worry that you'll leave them, demand a lot of your time and attention to feel secure, and who grow anxious, angry and/or jealous when you are with others.

Now if God is also an attachment figure then it stands to reason that we should see anxious and insecure attachments in how people relate to God. For example, people might worry about God rejecting or abandoning them. People might grow anxious if God doesn't seem very responsive to them. Finally, people might even get spiritually jealous if God seems closer to others than with us. For example, why is so-and-so always sharing about her close and intimate experiences with God when I'm feeling nothing? Does God love her more than me? That's spiritual jealousy.

In my early work researching attachment to God one of the first things we set out to do was to assess attachment anxiety in the God relationship so that we could identify people who were anxiously and insecurely attached to God to study how they differed from those who were more securely attached to God, people who felt more assured about God's presence and affection.

For example, in a scale my colleague Angie MacDonald and I created called the Attachment to God Inventory (a widely used instrument that has been translated in to numerous languages) we ask questions to assess various symptoms of attachment anxiety:
Angry protest: Getting angry if the attachment figure is not as responsive as we wish they would be.
Example AGI item: ā€œI often feel angry with God for not responding to me when I want.ā€

Preoccupation with relationship: Worry, rumination, or obsession with the status of the relationship.
Example AGI item: ā€œI worry a lot about my relationship with God.ā€

Fear of abandonment: Fear that the attachment figure will leave or reject you.
Example AGI item: ā€œI fear God does not accept me when I do wrong.ā€

Anxiety over lovability: Concerns that you are either not loved or are unlovable.
Example AGI item: ā€œI crave reassurance from God that God loves me.ā€

Jealousy: Concerns that the attachment figure prefers others over you.
Example AGI item: ā€œI am jealous at how God seems to care more for others than for me.ā€
In our research we would administer the AGI to identify people who would rate highly on items like these suggesting that these persons were more insecurely an anxiously attached to God relative to others.

Okay, so in these last two posts I've given you a quick summary of attachment to God research. In the next two posts I'll share why I moved away from the attachment paradigm toward a more existential framework, my journey from attachment theory to Winter Christianity.

From Attachment Theory to Winter Christianity: Part 1, The Attachment Bond and God

Last week it was my honor to be the keynote speaker for the CAPS East conference in Philadelphia. And the week before that here at ACU I gave a presentation to the counseling center/clinic directors from the CCCU schools. At both events I spent some time, informally or during the formal presentation, talking about a research trajectory I've traced.

You can call this trajectory "from attachment theory to Winter Christianity" and I thought I'd devote a few posts to walk you through the journey I've traveled.

Many years ago when I first started doing research in the area of psychology of religion I worked on research related to what is called "attachment to God."

Attachment to God research attempts to use attachment theory to explore our relationship with God. Attachment is the close affectional bond we form with early caregivers. Most often that's our mother and father. Later in life romantic partners and friends become attachment figures as well.

Attachment, it seems, is the language of love. Love for parents. Love for romantic partners. Love for friends. And what's interesting is how the bible describes God as a lover in each of these ways. God as a parent. God as a romantic partner. God as a friend.
God as Mother and Father:
"As a mother comforts her child so I will comfort you." (Isaiah 66:13)

ā€œOur Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.ā€ (Matthew 6:9)

ā€œCan a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has born?ā€ (Isaiah 49:15)

ā€œO Jerusalem, Jerusalem…how I have often longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wingsā€¦ā€ (Luke 13:34)

ā€œWhen Israel was a child, I loved him…it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them in my arms.ā€ (Hosea 11:1, 3)

God as Romantic Partner:
ā€œAs a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.ā€ (Isaiah 62:5)

ā€œFor your Maker is your husband—the Lord Almighty is his name.ā€ (Isaiah 54:5)

ā€œI saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.ā€ (Revelation 21:2)
God as Friend:
The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. (Exodus 33:11)

"Oh, for the days when I was in my prime, when God’s intimate friendship blessed my house." (Job 29:4)

ā€œBut you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, you descendants of Abraham my friend." (Isaiah 41:8)

"I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you." (John 15.15) 
So the basic idea is that the emotional template of our human attachments creates the emotional template for how we experience our love relationship with God.

So what is that emotional template?

Mary Ainsworth, a pioneer in attachment theory, described the attachment bond are being characterized by four things:
Proximity Maintenance: We wish to be near or close to our attachment figures.

Separation Anxiety: When separated from an attachment figure we experience distress.

Secure Base of Exploration: The attachment figure functions as "home," our emotional "base camp," giving us the confidence and security to explore the world and take risks.

Haven of Safety: When hurt, fearful or distressed we go to the attachment figure for protection, healing, and/or comfort.
We see all these at work in our relationships with parents, romantic partners and friends. We want to be close to our attachment figures. We feel distressed, anxious, or out of sorts being away from our attachment figures. Our attachment figures give us a sense of security and confidence which allows us to take risks. And we seek out our attachment figures when we're sad, scared or hurting.

Basically, attachment is what it feels like to love a person.

And most importantly for attachment to God research, these four things also seem to apply to God. We desire closeness with God. We become distressed when we feel separated, distant or disconnected from God. God gives us confidence and a sense of security. And we turn to God when we are anxious, hurt or sad.

Like a parent, romantic partner or friend, God functions like an attachment figure.

Unpublished: Watching Empires Fall

I was working through Mark 13 the other day, reflecting on Jesus's admonitions to his followers regarding the destruction of Jerusalem.

Basically, for those listening to Jesus their world was going to end. Rome was finally going to move in and raze Jerusalem and destroy the Temple. The heart and soul of the Jewish people was about to be ripped out. The world, as the Jews knew it, was coming to the end.

This would be the equivalent, I'm guessing, to an invading force entering America and destroying Washington, DC. The White House, the Capital, the Lincoln Memorial. All of it, torn down or desecrated. The ultimate national humiliation. Our world, our proud history, ended.

And speaking to those who would be living in the middle of this most horrific and epochal event Jesus says this: Flee to the hills. Don't stand with your nation and the freedom fighters making a last stand. Let Jerusalem fall. Let the Temple be destroyed.

What Jesus was saying is pretty darn startling: Flee, don't resist invaders of your homeland.

No wonder they killed Jesus. We'd kill Jesus for suggesting such a thing today.

So what were Jesus's followers supposed to do? This is Jesus's constant refrain in Mark 13: Watch. That is, in fact, how Jesus's apocalyptic discourse ends, with the command to watch.

That's what I'm doing now with my beloved America. I'm just watching it fall apart. Personally, I think we are headed to a very bad place and we've lost our ability to save ourselves. In our fear-driven panic we've lost our ability to turn back from the precipice. We're going to go over the edge. Maybe sooner, maybe later. But it's just a matter of time.

But you know what? That's okay. Empire's come. Empires go.

And the church simply watches.

--an unpublished post

Emotional Intelligence and Sola Scriptura

I was reading a comment thread the other day, a discussion about hell, and multiple people in the thread were saying things like this: "I'm not basing my views on emotion or sentiment. I've reached my conclusion because it is the one based firmly on Scripture."

I'm sure you've heard claims like that before. I've heard them many, many times.

"I am basing my views on Scripture."

"My exegesis of the text forced me to adopt the position I currently hold."

"Though I wish it were otherwise, this is the view that Scripture compels me to believe."

"This is the clear teaching of Scripture."

I once quipped at a conference that a fundamentalist is a person who thinks he doesn't have a hermeneutic.

I don't want to rehash that point as it's a point that has been made many, many times. We all have a hermeneutic. We are all interpreting the text to some degree. We are all privileging--deferring to--certain values, doctrines, creedal commitments, traditions, or biblical texts. Something somewhere is trumping something else. In a document as multivocal as the Old and New Testament this is unavoidable.

So we all have a hermeneutic. The only question is whether you are consciously vs. unconsciously using a hermeneutic. Fundamentalists are interpreting the text unconsciously. Fundamentalists are interpreting the text right and left, they are just unaware that they are doing so. This lack of awareness is what produces the sorts of statements described above.

When your hermeneutic is operating unconsciously it causes you to say things like "this is the clear teaching of Scripture."

Which brings me to my point.

What is interesting to me in this phenomenon is not that we are all engaging in hermeneutics, acts of interpretation. That is a given. What is interesting to me is how self-awareness, or the lack thereof, is implicated in all this.

Basically, fundamentalism--denying that you are engaged in hermeneutics--betrays a shocking lack of self-awareness, an inability to notice the way your mind and emotions are working in the background and beneath the surface.

I think statements like "this is the clear teaching of Scripture" are psychologically diagnostic. Statements like these reveal something about yourself. Namely, that you lack a certain degree of self-awareness.

For example, saying something like "this is the clear teaching of Scripture" is similar to saying "I'm not a racist." Self-aware people would never say either one of those things.

Self-aware people would say things like "I don't want to be a racist" or "I try not to be racist" or "I condemn racism." But they would never say "I'm not a racist" because self-aware people know that they have blind spots. Self-aware people know they have unconscious baggage that is hard to notice or overcome.

And it's the same with how self-aware people approach reading the bible. Self-aware people know that they are trying to read the bible in an unbiased fashion. Self-aware people work hard to let the bible speak clearly and it its own voice. But self-aware people know they have blind spots. They know that there is unconscious baggage affecting how they are reading the bible, baggage that they know must be biasing their readings and conclusions. Consequently, self-aware people would never, ever say "this is the clear teaching of Scripture." Just like they'd never claim to be unbiased in any other area of life, racism being just one example.

What I am saying is that when we approach the issue of sola scriptura--using "the bible alone"--there is more to this than pointing out the ubiquity and necessity of hermeneutics. There is also the issue of emotional intelligence, the degree to which you are reading the bible with a degree of self-awareness.

Many fundamentalists seem to struggle with emotional intelligence. Which might also explain why fundamentalists also struggle with things like empathy and emotional regulation (e.g., anger).

Perhaps this--a lack of emotional intelligence--is the root problem with fundamentalism, both biblically and socially.

If Only Everybody Could Realize This. But It Cannot Be Explained.

On March 18, 1958 Thomas Merton was in Louisville, KY for an appointment. Merton had been a cloistered monk for seventeen years. He had entered the monastery seeking an escape from the world so that he might draw closer to God. But on this day, standing on a street corner and watching the hustle and bustle of people, Merton had an experience of God that played an influential role in tuning him outward toward the world in the 60s. Maybe God isn't found in withdrawing oneself from humanity but moving toward them.

Merton recounting his experience (from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander):
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
On the corner Fourth and Walnut in Louisville the plaque pictured here can be found.

The Force That Can Blow This Idiocy Sky-high

On January 14, 1935 Dietrich Bonhoeffer penned a fascinating letter to his older brother Karl-Friedrich. At the time of the letter Bonhoeffer was in the middle of the Confessing Church struggle, working against the Nazi takeover of the German churches. As Nazi influence in the German churches increased Bonhoeffer's efforts grew more extreme, so much so that in his letter to his eldest brother Bonhoeffer is at pains to give an accounting of his actions.

That Karl-Friedrich would have viewed Dietrich's actions in the church struggle as fanatical stem partly from the fact that Karl-Friedrich was a scientist and a skeptic. Karl-Friedrich was a world class physicist who had done work on atomic physics with the likes of Einstein and Planck. That Karl-Friedrich didn't share Dietrich's religious convictions contributed to the incomprehension between the brothers, one a scientist and the other a theologian.

I find this letter to Karl-Friedrich fascinating for a couple of different reasons. First, I find the personal aspect of the letter poignant. Here was the young theologian rising up to face the specter of Nazism well before many of his contemporaries. The year 1935 was before the war, before the concentration camps and the Final Solution. But young Dietrich saw something on the horizon and was trying desperately to raise the alarm.

And yet, Dietrich feared that his actions in the church struggle were making him seem "fanatical and mad" in the eyes of his older brother who wished him to be more "reasonable." With the advantage of hindsight we now know that Dietrich was not fanatical, mad or unreasonable. It was the world, and not Dietrich, that was growing increasingly insane.

How did Dietrich find and maintain his sanity? That's the second thing that intrigues me about the letter.

Dietrich describes how he had grounded his conscience in the Sermon on the Mount. Dietrich states that he had been able to "achieve true inner clarity and honesty by really starting to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously." In the face of Nazism Dietrich states "here alone [in Sermon on the Mount] lies the force that can can blow all of this idiocy sky-high--like fireworks...". 

From Dietrich's letter to his brother:
Perhaps I seem to you rather fanatical and mad about a number of things. I myself am sometimes afraid of that. But I know that the day I became more ā€œreasonable,ā€ to be honest, I should have to chuck my entire theology. When I first started in theology, my idea of it was quite different—rather more academic, probably. Now it has turned into something else altogether. But I do believe that at last I am on the right track, for the first time in my life. I often feel quite happy about it. I only worry about being so afraid of what other people will think as to get bogged down instead of going forward. I think I am right in saying that I would only achieve true inner clarity and honesty by really starting to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. Here alone lies the force that can blow all of this idiocy sky-high—like fireworks, leaving only a few burnt-out shells behind. The restoration of the church must surely depend on a new kind of monasticism, which has nothing in common with the old but a life of uncompromising discipleship, following Christ according to the Sermon on the Mount. I believe the time has come to gather people together and do this.

Forgive me for these rather personal ramblings, but they just came to me as I thought about our time together recently. And after all, we do have an interest in each other. I still have a hard time thinking that you really find all these ideas of mine completely mad. Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.

I recently came across the fairy tale of 'The Emperor's New Clothes,' which really is relevant for our time. All we are lacking today is the child who speaks up in the end. We ought to put it on as a play.

I hope to hear from you soon--in any case, my birthday is coming soon.

Warm greetings to you all.
Dietrich

The Liturgy of the Hours: Some Recommendations for Starting Out

As regular readers know, structured prayer is what saved and rehabilitated my prayer life. The Book of Common Prayer has been my constant companion. Using the BCP I pray the Morning and Evening Offices along with Compline before going to bed.

Sometimes, especially during Ordinary Time, the long, mainly summertime, season of the Liturgical Calendar where not a lot is happening, I switch from the BCP to simply praying through the psalms. I use the Paraclete Psalter for this, which takes you through all the psalms in a four-week cycle, dividing the psalms up into Lauds (Morning Prayer), Midday, Vespers (Evening Prayer) and Compline.

Monastically speaking, the "work of God" is simply praying the psalms. So a large part of praying with The Book of Common Prayer is simply praying the psalms each day.

Recently, I've jumped over to the Catholic equivalent of the BCP, the Liturgy of the Hours.

This is no small jump.

The Liturgy of the Hours, also called by Catholics the Divine Office or Breviary, is like the BCP in that it gives you structured prayers for the Morning Office, Midday prayer, the Evening Office, and Night Prayer (Compline).

The biggest difference is that the Liturgy of the Hours is a four-volume set as opposed to the single-volume BCP.

The Liturgy of the Hours takes you through the entire Liturgical year. Volume I is the Advent and Christmas seasons, which start off the liturgical year. Then you move to Volume II which covers the Lenten and Easter seasons. From there you move into Ordinary Time, with Volume III covering Weeks 1-17 of Ordinary Time and Volume IV covering Weeks 18-34.

What are the costs and benefits of using the Liturgy of the Hours versus The Book of Common Prayer?

The first cost is, well, cost. You need to buy a four-volume set to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. On Amazon that set runs about $120. Though you can shop around for better prices and used editions.

An option here is to buy the single-volume Christian Prayer, which runs around $25. You could call Christian Prayer the Catholic equivalent of the BCP when it comes to having one book in your hand for praying the Offices. Christian Prayer takes the morning, midday, evening and night prayers from the larger 4-volume Liturgy of the Hours and puts them all into one book. So if you want to experiment with praying the Offices with a Catholic prayer book I'd start off with Christian Prayer.

The second cost of switching to either the Liturgy of the Hours or Christian Prayer is that navigating these books is not very intuitive. It's hard to locate where you should be and what you should pray and there is a lot of flipping around, going to this page to read an Invitatory Psalm or that page for a reading and then flipping to another page for something else. To be sure, you have a lot of flipping around in the BCP, but it's worse in The Liturgy of the Hours and Christian Prayer.

For example, so you can be prepared, when I first got these prayer books I spent a good couple hours flipping through them and figuring them out. I even watched YouTube tutorials to help. The thing I found most helpful were online versions of the Liturgy of the Hours so that I could check to see if what I thought I should be praying on a given day was, in fact, what I should be praying.

Now, if you're wired like me all this figuring stuff out is fun and exciting. What could possibly be more fun than figuring out a liturgical puzzle and learning new things about the Christian faith!

But if you're a person who hates figuring stuff out then stay away from The Liturgy of the Hours. For people who want something easy and straightforward, just read the Psalms or pick up Phyllis Tickle's three-volume set The Divine Hours.

But if you're a liturgical nut, like I am, puzzling out how to use The Liturgy of the Hours and Christian Prayer is great fun.

(Another point of contrast I should mention is that the BCP moves you through daily Bible readings with the Lectionary, printed at the back. So you have your Bible handy along with the BCP if you want to read the Bible as a part of the Office. By contrast, in the Liturgy of the Hours you have what is called the Office of Readings which includes two readings, a passage of scripture and then an non-biblical reading, usually a passage from one of the Church Fathers. The Office of Readings is not included in the single-volume Christian Prayer. So I use the Lectionary when praying with Christian Prayer as I would with the BCP. When using the Liturgy of the Hours I use the Office of Readings included in the volume.)

Okay, then, so what's the benefit of using The Liturgy of the Hours versus The Book of Common Prayer?

The main benefit is that The Liturgy of the Hours provides a richer experience of the liturgical calender. Which is the main reason why the thing is so big.

In The Book of Common Prayer you do move through the liturgical year, but this mainly affects only the edges of the Morning and Evening Offices. For example, during Advent you might open the Morning Office by saying, "The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." While during Lent you might say, Jesus said, "If anyone will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." But for the most part the bulk of the Morning and Evening Offices remains the same day to day. The benefit to this standard and consistent presentation of the Offices is that the book can stay small.

By contrast, when you pray The Liturgy of the Hours during a liturgical season, say Advent or Lent, the entire Office is filled with season-specific readings and responses and prayers. Praying through a liturgical season with The Liturgy of the Hours is a very deep and rich experience, each season with a very distinct texture.

The downside, of course, is that with distinctive and unique liturgical seasons the prayers can't be standardized. And that expands the book, bringing it to four-volumes. But again, you can get the experience by using the single-volume Christian Prayer. Just be prepared for a lot of flipping around. (For example, the books all come with five colored bookmarks. And sometimes I feel I need a few more.)

And for some of you another benefit of The Liturgy of the Hours is that it takes you through the various feast days and commemorations of the saints. For example, on July 11, the feast day of St. Benedict, you can pray the Office normally or you can add in prayers and readings remembering St. Benedict. But be forewarned, if you follow the feast days and commemorations you will be exponentially adding to the amount of page-flipping and date-tracking. To help with this annual guides are published for the Liturgy of the Hours to help you keep track of it all. Trust me, you'll need the guide. And while I love the saints, all this is a level of effort that I've balked at. I keep to the normal Office readings. My apologies, St. Benedict.

(Though I guess you could go through the calendar and pick out and prepare for particular saints who are important to you. That would make it easier, to just focus on a few saints through the year. I might have to try this. I can't miss a commemoration of St. Francis or The Little Flower!)

So, here are some recommendations for readers interested in structured Catholic prayer.

If you've been using the BCP for awhile and feel you need a change of pace, try out Christian Prayer or The Liturgy of the Hours.

But here's my admonition: Don't start The Liturgy of the Hours (or Christian Prayer) during Ordinary Time. You'll miss their particular power. Start these prayer books at the beginning of a liturgical season, with Advent or Lent.

Another suggestion. If you can't afford the entire The Liturgy of the Hours you might just get Volumes I and II, the volumes for Advent-Christmas and Lent-Easter. During Ordinary Time you can switch back to the BCP or simply read the psalms. That's all The Liturgy of the Hours ready does during Ordinary Time anyway, keep you in the psalms.

But most of all, and I know this might be a weird thing to say, but I think it's both spiritual and true:

Have fun.

Unpublished: There is an Element of Discipline in Being Prepared for Joy

I recently read the interview "Be Prepared for Joy" with poet Christian Wiman at Commonweal.

In the interview Christian speaks to issues that go to the heart of some of the things I describe in The Slavery of Death: the relationship between what I call the martyrological and eccentric identities and the experience of joy.

Regarding the martyrological aspect of joy, Christian describe how a sort of death and discipline is involved in joy. This is an experience of "crucifixion" in what Christian describes as "an obliteration of the will" which involves "an element of discipline in being prepared for joy."

Ponder that: an element of discipline in being prepared for joy.

From there, joy is found in a faith and hope that is imaginative rather than experienced. That is, a faith and hope in something that is outside--eccentric to--our experience, something that we don't currently possess but something that must be waited on and received: "Tomorrow I shall wake and welcome him."

More, enchantment is the product of faith and hope which are, in Christian's words, "imaginative—that is to say, projective—acts." In the words of Richard Wilbur's poetry that Christian cites: "what you project / is what you will perceive". And these projections and perceptions radically come to life: "With any passion, be it love or terror, / May take on whims and powers of its own."

From the interview:
...I feel that there is a great deal of joy in my work of the past ten years, but I do get letters from people telling me to ditch the sackcloth and ashes, and I get tired of my own grimace in mirrors. Can one really just decide to be more joyful, though? One aspect of joy is the suspension of will—the obliteration of will, really—though probably there is an element of discipline in being prepared for joy, just as there is in being prepared for poetry. ā€œIridescent readiness,ā€ W. S. Di Piero calls it. And there are these lines from Richard Wilbur:
Try to remember this: what you project
Is what you will perceive; what you perceive
With any passion, be it love or terror,
May take on whims and powers of its own.
The thing is, we are always going to feel God’s absence more than his presence. We are always going to feel the imprint and onslaught of necessity, which is the crucifixion, more than we feel the release and freedom of pure joy, which is the resurrection. The first we experience; the second, even when it emerges out of experience, we believe. In that tiny gap of grammar is an abyss of difference. Suffering we know and share intimately with Christ (it’s how we bear it). Faith and hope are always imaginative—that is to say, projective—acts: ā€œTomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.ā€
--an unpublished post

The True Troubler

I was reading in 1 Kings 18 recently and was struck again at how King Ahab and Elijah greet each other when they meet:
1 Kings 18.16-18
Ahab went to meet Elijah. When he saw Elijah, he said to him, ā€œIs that you, you troubler of Israel?ā€

ā€œI have not made trouble for Israel,ā€ Elijah replied. ā€œBut you and your father’s family have." 
It's a minor moment in the story, but a little debate breaks out between king and prophet about who is the true "troubler" of Israel. The Hebrew word for "troubler" here means to disturb or stir up.

The king thinks the prophet is the troubler. The prophet is the one who is stirring things up, disturbing the peace.

The prophet disagrees and retorts that it's the king who is troubling Israel.

This is a debate we still have. Prophets are routinely accused of stirring things up, making us uncomfortable and disturbing our peace.

And yet, the bible routinely sides with the prophet over against the king, over against the political status quo, over against the principalities and powers.

There is violence, injustice and bloodshed in the city. The city is already troubled. The prophet simply points this out, telling us hard truths that we'd rather not be reminded or made aware of. And for this work the prophet is blamed for troubling us.

But the trouble is actually coming from the king, from our current political and economic arrangements. 

The trouble is not being created by the prophet. The trouble is being hidden from us.

We have become anesthetized to the trouble, confused by propaganda and distracted by entertainments. And the prophet is trying to wake us from our spiritual and moral slumbers.

As the prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah exclaim:

They cry out "Peace, peace."

But there is no peace.

Stumbling At Just One Point

I've always found this particular line in the Epistle of James difficult to swallow:
James 2.10
For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.
Break one commandment and you break the whole law.

Growing up in a faith tradition that tended toward legalism this sort of text really bothered me, confirming my worst fears that God was a nitpicky moral bean counter when it came to evaluating our sins and slip ups. But reading back over James 2 my opinion of this text has completely changed.

Consider the context leading up to James 2.10:
James 2.1-10
My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, ā€œHere’s a good seat for you,ā€ but say to the poor man, ā€œYou stand thereā€ or ā€œSit on the floor by my feet,ā€ have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?

Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court? Are they not the ones who are blaspheming the noble name of him to whom you belong?

If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, ā€œLove your neighbor as yourself,ā€ you are doing right. But if you show favoritism, you sin and are convicted by the law as lawbreakers. For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it. 
The context of James 2.10 is marginalizing and ignoring the poor. And the "royal law" to be kept is the commandment "love your neighbor as yourself." Marginalizing and ignoring the poor is breaking this law.

Thus the conclusion of James 2.10: Hey, if you treat everyone well except the poor that's not just a minor detail, that's the whole ballgame.

Treat the poor badly--stumble at just that one point--and you break the entire law. 

Regional Demons and Territorial Spirits

A few weeks ago Jana and I were talking with our friend Jonathan McRay who was in town for some presentations and consulting work at ACU.

Jonathan was sharing about the importance of land and place in indigenous spirituality. For indigenous peoples spirituality is rooted in a very specific ecosystem. And in the Bible you see this with Israel, how their relationship with YHWH was rooted in a specific land and place.

Moreover, in indigenous spirituality when you fall out of step with the land the spiritual equilibrium gets out of whack. Some bad mojo starts to happen. People and land are out of sync. And again, you see this in the life of Israel where famine in the land was punishment for spiritual wickedness.

Ecosystem and spirituality go hand in hand. If the people are spiritually healthy the land is healthy. But if the people are sick the land becomes sick.

The thermometer of our spiritual fever is the quality of our soil and air.

This conversation with Jonathan got us talking about the spirituality at work in a given place or land, how the "gods" of a people are regional and territorial. There is the land and there is the spirituality at work in the land.

You can see this connection between land and spirit in Deuteronomy:
Deuteronomy 32:8-9
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.

But the Lord's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.
God divides up the land and the peoples assigning to each a "son of God," a regional deity. From among the nations God keeps Israel for Himself.

Later in the book of Psalms we see a connection between oppression and injustice in the land and the misrule of these regional deities. In Psalm 82 God convenes a "divine counsel" with the regional deities to rebuke them for their misrule:
God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:

ā€œHow long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?

Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.ā€
Later in the book of Daniel we see these wicked regional gods morphing into something we'd call demons. But even in Daniel the demon described is still tied to a land and place. In Chapter 10 we find Daniel praying and after a few days the angelic messenger appears to answer. The angel apologizes for his delay by saying that he was intercepted by "the prince of Persia." The angel was only able to get away from this demonic interference after Michael the archangel came to the rescue.

What we have in Daniel 10 is a vision of angelic and demonic combat, but note how the demon is still tied to land and place. The spirit is territorial and regional: The prince of Persia.  

The point of all this is that I think there are some biblical intersections with indigenous spiritualities, ways to look at the spirits that govern the land and how those spirits are variously aligned or misaligned with the Kingdom of God at work in a particular place and land.

How the regional and territorial spirits are either healthy or sick.

The Kingdom As Conflict

Greg Boyd has argued that Christians, and I'd argue especially progressive Christians, need to recover a theology of revolt in the face of evil. That is, to borrow from Greg, evil is not a theological puzzle to be solved but a reality that must be resisted.

One way that I've explored this notion is to see the Kingdom of God as an intrusive, interruptive and disruptive force that "breaks into" the world. This idea is nicely captured by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:
Enemy-occupied territory--that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
In support of this notion I was recently struck by something in 1 Corinthians:
1 Corinthians 15.24-25, 28
Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet...When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.
Here's the phrase that caught my attention: Christ must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. Christ's reign takes place during a season of conflict. And when that conflict ends Christ's reign ends.

Phrased differently, to confess that Jesus is Lord places us in a conflictual and antagonistic relationship with the principalities and powers. To experience the reign of Christ is to participate in his ongoing battle to destroy all dominion, authority and power until that time when God is all in all.

Unpublished: The Daily Witness of the Christian in the World is Essentially Sacramental

I was reading a little William Stringfellow the other morning (I know, surprise, surprise) and I read a passage in his book Free in Obedience that I found very profound (edited to be gender inclusive):
...Christians are free to enter into the depths of the world's existence with nothing to offer the world but their own lives. And that is to be taken literally. What the Christian has to give to the world is his or her very life. The Christian is established in such an extreme freedom by the power of Christ, which is so much greater than the power of death, that we live secure from any threats which death may make.

It is in exercising this ultimate freedom in our involvement in the world that the Christian also understands how to use whatever else is at our disposal--money, status, technical abilities, professional training, or whatever else--as sacraments of the gift of our own lives. The daily witness of the Christian in the world is essentially sacramental, rather than moralistic. The public witness of the Christian is a symbol and communication of our death in Christ every day in each situation in which we find ourselves. We thereby demonstrate our faith in God's triumph over death in Christ. The ethics of witness to redemption are sacramental ethics of grace, rather than of prudence or of law.

But such witness with respect to the world means involvement, not indifference; realism, not withdrawal; knowledge, not ignorance. The Christian is free enough both from our own death and from the reign of death in the world to realize and recognize the signs of death in the world: narcotics, slums, racism, unemployablity, disease, or the oppression of persons by the principalities of commerce, patriotism, sports, communications media, and ideologies. And the Christian is free to enter into the midst of all or any of these ordinary realities of the world's existence, knowing what they truly represent, without succumbing either to their lust for idolatry or the fear of the work of death of which they are evidence. The Christian is so empirically free from the threat of death in their own life and in the existence of the rest of the world that we can afford to place our life at the disposal of the world or of anybody in the world without asking or expecting anything whatever in return.
If you've read the Slavery of Death series you'll see this as a wonderful summary of some of the key ideas: Freedom from the fear of death allowing us to be indifferent to the self-esteem and meaning-making idols of the age: Freedom from the fear of death giving us the ability to become available to others in love.

A line I really like in Stringfellow's quote is this:
The daily witness of the Christian in the world is essentially sacramental, rather than moralistic.
A sacrament is an outward sign of grace. And Christians in the world should be such visble signs of grace.

In a world governed by death and ruled by the principalities and powers Christians should be sacraments--visible signs of resurrection, love, life, hope, joy and grace.

--an unpublished post

The Lost Art of the Church Potluck

My favorite memories of growing up in a small church are of the church potlucks. And that church still puts on awesome potlucks.

I expect that many of you have similar fond memories of church potlucks. Jana does. This last Sunday I was guest speaking at the East Side Church of Christ in Snyder. Jana was weighing if she wanted to go with me. Jana is a high school drama teacher and she was tired because her show just wrapped up and we'd gotten to bed late after striking the set.

I told Jana that after the service there would be a potluck.

"I think I'll come," Jana said, "there might be banana pudding."

And there was!

I don't know if it's a regional thing, but banana pudding is a staple of potlucks in Texas churches. And it's one of the best things you'll ever eat.

And yet, while it breaks my heart to say this, I think the art of the church potluck is on the decline.

We recently had a discussion about this with some friends at church, that potlucks are happening less frequently and, when they do happen, they aren't done very well. A symptom of a potluck gone bad at our church is when the potluck has to be supplemented by Little Caesar's pizza.

So I have to ask, is the Golden Age of the Church Pot Luck over?

It seems so.

With our friends we floated two hypotheses about the decline of the potluck.

The first was church size. It seems that churches are either very big or very small, making it harder to achieve the sweet spot for a congregation-wide potluck.

Our other hypothesis was about a loss of generational skill. The consensus was that our mothers and grandmothers really knew how to do a potluck. And the main thing was that they brought to the potluck a ton of food, enough for their family and many, many more.

And that, we all know, is the secret to having a good potluck. You have to have a critical mass of people bringing more food than they or their families will eat. A lot more food. And our mothers and grandmothers had go-to pot luck dishes to help produce this abundance.

But today the exact opposite happens. When people under forty go to a potluck most everyone brings a small side dish, not even enough for their family. And you don't have to be a resource allocation guru to know that if most people bring less than what they themselves will eat then that potluck is doomed. But more and more often that's what happening with church potlucks, people bring less than what they will consume.

It seems like an entire generation has forgotten the Golden Rule of the church potluck: Bring more that what you will eat. A lot more.

Because it's that excess and abundance that makes the hospitality of a potuck possible, allowing the spontaneous invitation to the visitor who comes empty-handed to be an experience of gift and grace.

Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala

I was watching last week how Christians on social media reacted to the news that Pope Francis had met with Kim Davis, mainly the distress and disappointment from progressive Christians who have a lot of fond feelings for the Pontiff.

I completely understood the reaction, but as I watched things play out online it struck me how emotionally reactive we are to social media, our feelings getting jerked around by the latest thing that breaks on Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes it is happiness and euphoria. Yay, our side is winning! Sometimes it is despondency and despair. Oh no, the other side is winning!

It seems that every day on social media is an emotional roller coaster ride. Our feelings swinging up and down, up and down, with every hashtag trend or viral video.

Yay!

Oh no!

Yay!

Oh no!

Every morning we log onto social media and our limbic system gets jolted. The adrenaline and stress hormones and the serotonin buzzing.

Yay!

Oh no!

Yay!

Oh no!

It all seems so emotionally and physiologically exhausting, constantly taking the temperature of the world through social media. Having your emotions ping-ponging around. Always being emotionally zapped and jolted by social media.

So let's remember the wisdom of Thérèse of Lisieux.

Our vocation is to be the heart of the church, not the amygdala.

The Hypocrisy of the Benedict Option

There has been a lot of recent discussion among evangelicals in the wake of the Obergefell ruling to adopt what Rod Dreher has called "the Benedict Option."

Rod named the Benedict Option after St. Benedict, the father of Christian monasticism. As Western culture descended into moral darkness and decadence in the waning years of the Roman Empire Benedict withdrew to create a monastic community devoted to the cultivation and protection of a rich, thick and vibrant spiritual community.

Advocates of the Benedict Option suggest that Christians today must do something similar. Christians no longer control our increasingly secular and post-Christian culture so we should give up trying. The battle has been lost. So Christians should give up fretting and raging about the loss of our "Christian nation," as so many evangelicals are doing now. In our stages of grief Christians should get past the anger and depression and move on to acceptance. Christians should now withdraw from the culture wars and turn inward to cultivate and foster Christian counter-cultures that are vibrant and rich.

Now, there's been lots of debate about the nature and shape of what, exactly, we mean by "withdrawal" in speaking of a Benedict Option. I don't want to wade into those waters. What I'd like to point out is the hypocritical nature of much of the very recent discussion about the Benedict Option within evangelical circles.

Almost all of the recent conversation about the Benedict Option among evangelicals has been in response to the gains same-sex couples have made in marriage equality. Talk among evangelicals about the Benedict Option spiked after Obergefell v. Hodges. Now that gay persons could marry it was time for evangelicals to think about the Benedict Option, time to withdraw from the depraved and secular culture.

What I'd like to point out is the hypocrisy that is haunting and contaminating this recent interest in the Benedict Option among evangelicals.

Specifically, for decades the evangelical witness regarding marriage has been abysmal. Divorce rates among evangelicals have been no different from non-Christians, and some studies show divorce rates as higher among evangelicals when compared to unbelievers. Consequently, if evangelicals cared so much about the sanctity of marriage why were there no calls for the Benedict Option decades ago? Why wait until Obergefell?

Because a Benedict Option among evangelicals, and this conclusion seems inescapable, isn't really about protecting the sanctity of marriage. It's about the denunciation and rejection of gay persons. That's the only reason I can see for why calls for a Benedict Option have been all the rage recently. Straight Christians, it seems, are allowed to desecrate marriage with impunity. But if gay people do it? Well, that's not allowed. Time for the Benedict Option.

To be clear, I'm not talking about my evangelical brothers and sisters changing their minds about gay marriage. I'm talking about the hypocrisy in their recent calls for a Benedict Option.

If the Benedict Option were really about the cultivation of a rich Christian culture, especially in the arena of marriage, we would have been having this conversation decades ago. And it would have been a healthy conversation because the Benedict Option would have been, at that time, directed where it should have been all along: at the church.

Let me be clear about that. The Benedict Option is healthy and good when it is aimed at the church.

But now? Now the Benedict Option isn't being aimed at the church. It's being aimed at a particular group of people, gay people in particular. Rather than being a reform movement of the church the Benedict Option, as it is currently being discussed, is simply an exercise in Othering, an exercise in dehumanizing.

And didn't Jesus, by the way, reject the othering Benedict Option devotees in his time and place?

Anyone remember...ahem...the Pharisees?

A Benedict Option that is motivated mainly as a response to the culture wars, and a response mainly aimed at denoucning gay persons, is a Benedict Option rooted in an in-group/out-group mentality that builds the Option upon a dehumanizing foundation.

Listen, as a progressive Christian I love the notion of a Benedict Option. I absolutely love it. I think the cruciform way of Jesus requires a rich, thick and disciplined Christian culture. I think progressive Christians should be calling for their own version of the Benedict Option. Because I think liberalism, nationalism and capitalism are corrosive to the Christian faith. I just disagree with my conservative brothers and sisters about what the corrosion looks like.

I embrace a progressive vision of the Benedict Option, a vision that might be better described as the Francis Option, named after St. Francis of Assisi.

A Francis Option would be, following St. Francis, a monastic reform movement aimed at the church where we cultivate the thick culture, theology and discipline to serve the outcasts of the world, as St. Francis and his followers spent their lives.

The church needs to form and shape cruciform lovers. And that's hard to do in America today. Liberalism, nationalism and capitalism are killing the church. We really do need rich and vibrant counter-cultures where we can detox from American culture and be formed into Christian patterns of living.

But the post-Obergefell Benedict Option being discussed by evangelicals? That sort of Benedict Option is inherently Othering and intrinsically hypocritical.

We need a Benedict Option, but a Christ-shaped version of it.

Problems with Twitter Feed

In July 2013 a very kind soul, I don't know who, set up an automated Twitter feed for this blog. Since 2013 about 700 or so people follow that Twitter feed. So I included a link to it in my blog header.

However, since last week that feed account hasn't been updating. And since I didn't create it I can't fix it.

So my question is, do people care? Do you want that fixed?

If so, I need to locate the person who created the Twitter feed to look into it or create a new one that people can join.

Tzimtzum, Cruciformity and Theodicy

When it comes to theodicy--Why does a loving and all-powerful God allow suffering?--two of the biggest theological snarls are creation ex nihilo and omnipotence.

According to creation ex nihilo God is the origin and source of creation, creating the universe from nothing (ex nihilo). And that introduces a theodicy issue because creation ex nihilo makes God responsible for how creation turned out. If not the proximal cause of suffering then the distal cause.

Omnipotence creates a second set of issues. Even if you can get God off the hook for creating a universe that is full of suffering the doctrine of omnipotence seems to put God on the hook for not doing more to reduce or stop horrific suffering.

Now, there are no fully adequate answers to these issues, but the two ideas I've gravitated to to help with these questions--creation ex nihilo and omnipotence--are tzimtzum and cruciformity.

Tzimtzum comes from the Jewish mystical tradition and describes the idea that God creates the world by withdrawing to "make room" for creation. But because this space is a space that has been vacated by God it is characterized by formless chaos, the dark and churning "face of the deep" in the opening vision of Genesis. Another way to say this is that creation, because it is formed via tzimtzum, is characterized by God's absence.

That's Act One of the story, divine withdrawal to leave behind raw materials. Act Two is God's attempt to reinsert Himself back into creation to indwell and reign over it. In the opening scenes of Genesis this is God's Spirit hovering over the chaos, ordering the chaos to create "goodness." God doesn't say the raw material of creation is good. The chaos, the deep isn't good. What is good is ordered creation. For example, God says the light is good. Tzimtzum leaves behind a raw, chaotic material. God's Spirit indwells and orders that material to create goodness. Goodness is naming the "reign" or "kingdom" of God in and over creation.

Here is where cruciformity comes in. God reenters creation not through coercive power but through cruciformity. As N.T. Wright likes to point out, God is ruling over the world and setting the world to rights through the Lordship of Jesus. But Jesus rules and sets the world to rights through the power of the cross. Yes, God is all-powerful, but the scandal of the cross is that God's power in ruling the world appears to us as weakness, as cruciform love. God is all-powerful, but that power is always cruciform.

Why does suffering exist? I don't know.

But the best answer I have is that, because God created via tzimtzum the world is characterized by the absence of God and the raw material of creation is always tending toward chaos, disorder and dissolution. But God's Spirit is always "hovering over" creation, seeking to indwell, order and reign over creation. God is everywhere inserting light into the darkness.

And yet, the shape of this invasion and ordering is always cruciform in nature.

God reigns and rules through an invasion of love.

And if God's power ever looked otherwise, or to expect something otherwise, it wouldn't be the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. True, in the face of suffering we might want a different sort of God, and that's fine, we can refuse to confess Jesus as Lord and say that we'd rather God set the world to rights by something other than love.

We can worship some other vision of power, some other God, Lord or Kingdom.

But if we confess Jesus as Lord we're only ever going to expect God's power among us, even in the midst of suffering, to be cruciform in nature. And that's always been the stumbling block.

Unpublished: To the Big Spoons

From a conversation at the Beck house:

Jana and I were talking about a speaking invitation I had received from a conservative group. As I'm not very conservative we were pondering why this group had invited me.

"Well," I said, "maybe they like to mix things up."

"Maybe," Jana replied, " but, Honey, you're a pretty big spoon."

So here's to all the big spoons out there!

May you keep stirring things up.

--an unpublished post

Thérèse of Lisieux and the Little Way

In the Catholic church today is the feast day of Thérèse of Lisieux, also known as the Little Flower. Yesterday I posted about how I use the Little Way of Thérèse as a practice of hospitality.

Regular readers will know that Thérèse of Lisieux has been one of the most formative influences upon my spiritual life.

A prized possession of mine is a vintage medal of Thérèse from Italy that Jana found in an antique shop. I'll be wearing it today.

If you don't know about Thérèse of Lisieux I devoted a series to her in 2012 entitled "Meditations on the Little Way." The posts in the series:
Part 1, Thérèse of Lisieux and the Democratization of Holiness

Part 2, Story of a Soul

Part 3, "My Vocation is Love" 

Part 4, The Elevator to Jesus: The Practice of the Little Way