Rebirth

This was the Confession from worship on Sunday. The whole service touched me–going into it I was very unsure about a circumstance in my life. On my way down to church I was praying, “Lord, show me how much You love me.” After the service I left with a clear indication of the radical love of Jesus, not just for me, but for the whole world. This piece really spoke to me, about what I’ve been through in my life, and what I’m going through right now.

We are the locked door, the stone not rolled away,

you invite us to cross through waters, walk dry roads

look towards transformation, in every wilderness.

You believe we can.

We want other gods, other commodities–

depth without the daily searching.

You offer us a simple table

and the words, follow me.

You believe we will.

We choose a meager vision,

hold tight to the catch of our nets.

You tell us a story that asks, which one was the neighbor?

You believe we understand.

We are perplexed

when you appear in our untended gardens.

You say, peace,

to all our uncertainty.

You show that new life

comes with time, with practice,

and the sowing, however small,

of stubborn hope. You believe we will grow.

Torches Together

Why burn poor and lonely under a bowl.
Under a lampshade or on the shelf
Beside the bed where at night
You lay turning like a door on it’s hinges?
(First on your left side, then on your right side, then your left side again)
Why burn poor and lonely?
Tell all the stones, we’re gonna make a building.
We’ll cut into shape & set into place or you’d rather be a window,
I’ll gladly be the frame reflecting any kind of words.
We’ll let in all the blame
(And ruin our reputation all the same)
Never mind out plan making,
We’ll start living……anyway,
Aren’t you unbearably sad?
Then why burn so poor and lonely?

We’ll be like torches
we’ll be like torches
We’ll be torches together! torches together
well be like torches
we’ll be like torches
With whatever respect, our tattered Dignity demands
Torches together, hand in hand

Why pluck one string – What good is just one note?
Oh, one string sounds fine i guess….We were once ‘One Note’,
We were lonely wheat quietly ground into grain
(What light and momentary pain!)
So why this safe distance, this curious look?
Why tear out single pages when you can throw away the book?
Why pluck one string when you can strum the guitar?
Strum the guitar!
strum the guitar!
strum the guitar!
With no beginning, with no end
Take down a guitar and strum the guitar
strum the the guitar if you’re afraid,
And I’m afraid and everyone’s afraid
And everyone knows it but we don’t have to be afraid anymore

You played the flute but no one was dancing
You sang a sad song but no one was crying(x4)
you played such a sad song….such a sad song

Single Awareness Day 2009, part 2

In my previous post, I quoted postmodern cultural critic Chuck Klosterman at length on his critique of media portayals of romantic love, and how we are complicit in perpetrating those narratives in our real lives. But for all his critique, all Klosterman offers us in response to these metanarratives are despair and cyncism. Is there a way out of that? For the Christian steeped in Western late consumer capitalistic liberal democracy, that question is of supreme importance.

For a decidedly Christian response, I will turn to the Christian postmodern culture critic Rodney Clapp at considerable length. In his essay “From Family Values to Family Virtues,” (in his book Border Crossings), Clapp takes to task Christians for participating in the prevalent narrative of romantic love.

“Inherent to the ethos of romantic love is the notion that it is ‘natural’ and universally inevitable. People fall in love as surely as the earth orbits the sun and heavy objects roll down hills. No doubt much of the uncritical acceptance of romantic love among Christians is due to the perception that it is natural, rather than a contestable tradition. It has been second nature to most moderns to think of emotions (like romantic love) as somehow deeper, truer, less contrived than thoughts or behavior. But emotions have histories and social origins too. They are, after all, more than mere sensations–else how do we distinguish between abject fear and cheerful excitement? In either case, heartbeat speeds up, stomach tightens, lungs draw air more rapidly. What sorts of things will frighten or happily excite someone? Who should feel fear (or excitement), and when? How is fear (or excitement) expressed–is it hidden, demurely shown, displayed in weeping or laughter? Emotions are interpretations of objects and circumstances, and as such they are always culturally formed and informed. ‘Feelings,’ anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo has well said, ‘are not substances to be discovered in our blood but social practices organized by stories we both enact and tell.’ Feelings, like selves in general, are shaped by culture and may be understood as the ‘creation of particular sorts of polities’ or embodied traditions. The emotional life, it turns out, is no less political and traditional than the thought life….

“For what the narrative of romantic love tells us is that we are powerless to ‘make’ and sustain real love. Remember, according to this tradition true love can never last. We simply fall into it and are swept into the arms of that special person destined just for us. (The feeble Christianization of this romantic plotline is the supposition that God has somewhere out there that one person exactly right for each of us to find and marry. Hence the widespread and heightened anxiety that ‘I might be making a mistake,’ for well you might if there is only a single person genuinely fit for you in a world of several billion. This is searching for a unique needle in a haystack full of needles.) Even at its most sentimentalized, when the tale of romantic love ends with the couple living ‘happily ever after,’ the marrow of the fairy-tale is never about actually living happily ever after; romatic love cannot even provide us with a description of ‘ever after.’ It is all about a goal, a goal that can never be achieved but is by definition best dreamed about and pined after….

“A pernicious irony of the narrative of romantic love is that, for all its supposed adoration of the love object, romantic love is not really about loving a particular person–it is about being in love with love.

“Romantic love is based on inconstancy, on feelings unanchored in reality. That is why so many popular romantic love songs protest of illicit affairs, ‘How can this be wrong when it feels so right?’ Of course, many of those who have succumbed wholeheartedly to this myth realize, at least when they’re not in the throes of love’s latest spell, that they said exactly the same thing to the earlier lover they’re now betraying. So it is that romantic love leaves us prey to both sensuality and cynicism. And in that regard it’s worth noting how well the narrative of romantic love supports the ethos of advanced capitalism, which demands that the ideal consumer be perpetually frustrated and never really contented [Remember Klosterman?]….

“I say all of this by way of suggesting that challenging the myth of romantic love is a matter not merely of confronting Grace Livingstone Hill or Danielle Steel [or Say Anything or Coldplay, for that matter]; it’s a matter of going toe-to-toe with Wall Street and Madison Avenue. And there’s something that may be more interesting that falling in and out of love ad nauseum.

“[James] McClendon properly reorients Christians for just such a fight when he writes, ‘While the romantic myth moves from love to death, the Christian story moves (through death) to newfound life–in the body.’ In the shadow of Christ’s death and the light of his resurrection, the Christian master story recasts the story of love so that it does not end at the wedding and the commencement of ‘ever after,’ but instead begins there. As Michael Ignatieff puts it, the Christian marriage ceremony, with its vows to love in sickness or health, until death, replaces the romantic tale of falling in love with ‘the arduous drama of staying in love.’ Romantics make love in private, at best oblivious to the welfare of the surrounding community. Christians make love in public, realizing that Christian love is much more than mere sexual passion, and trusting that they can build an enduring, open, and generous love only through participation in the surrounding community called church.

“I suspect that we might best de-idolize romantic love by giving more attention to friendship in the context of koinonia, or churchly community. I have in mind Aristotle’s highest form of friendship–the friendship of those devoted to a common cause. Christians are those people caught up in an adventure nothing less than the destiny of the world. As such, we hardly need the comparatively puny and petty adventure of romantic love. Christians do not get married because monogamy is an aphrodisiac; they get married because this is the key way they participate as sexual beings in an adventure far surpassing the potentials of any aphrodisiac, the adventure of witnessing to and building up God’s kingdom on earth.

“The important question for Christians, then, after five, ten, fifty years of marriage, is not, ‘Am I still in love with my spouse?’ The better question is, ‘Are we stronger, deeper, continuing Christian friends?’ That is to say, are we supporting and challenging each other in the faith, in service to one another, to our children, to our church, to our neighbors? In the words of Diogenes Allen, when Christian marriage is friendship rather than romance, ‘We do not fight dragons or villains, as in “love stories,” but fight with ourselves, as more and more of our self and our partner is revealed with time and through the ups and downs of life. We face an inward struggle with what we are [and...a political struggle with what world wants us to be]. What is won is oneself and the other. Married people become people who love each other.’ In short, the sex lives of Christians can improve. But they can only improve once we learn to make love after we have fallen out of love.”

And so gentle reader, if you have made it this far, this is what I yearn for. I realize I live in a world steeped in the myth of romantic love, there isn’t an easy way out. I buy into these narratives, just like everyone else. But regardless, I want the rare woman who can read the above and say, “Sign me up.” A wife will fight with me against the powers and principalities of this world, in “witnessing to and building up God’s kingdom.” And I want a woman to fight against me when I’m selfish, mean, and uncaring, to show me how to love unconditionally. Ultimately, a woman who is done with fake love, and ready for the real thing. If you know where I can find her, send her my way.

Single Awareness Day 2009, part 1

Last year I posted a something on my MySpace blog about Valentine’s Day. Or rather, it was an examination of what I considered flawed thinking by some of my married friends and their desire to see me happy with relationship bliss. In that post I came off as cranky and bitter. This is my attempt to correct that. This will be a two part blog–part one will look at the problem of modern romantic love. Part 2 will look at a distinctly Christian way of dealing with it.

—

“No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either.” So says Chuck Klosterman in the first sentence of “This Is Emo,” from his his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Cheery thoughts, especially as I ponder what it means to be single on the worst day to be single in this culture.

However, Klosterman is quite correct. No one can truly satisfy me.  And I can’t truly satisfy anyone else.  The problem is that we all think we can. It’s in the atmosphere, in the water, all around us in our media saturated culture. Think about the narratives we tell each other, the narratives we consume in the name of entertainment. They all tell us we are incomplete without that someone special in our lives. Klosterman continues,

“Whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inablility to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take fall for this.”

So who takes the fall? In postmodern fashion Klosterman deconstructs our pop culture naratives. Romantic comedies in general, and Say Anything in particular. I like Say Anything. I relate to Lloyd Dobler. I want to find my Diane Court. I want to live the Love Against All Odds story. Does anyone see a problem with this?

“Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least of our worries. The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy. There is no ‘normal,’ because everybody is being twisted by the same sources simultaneously. You can’t compare your relationship with the playful couple who lives next door, because they’re probably modeling themselves after Chandler Bing and Monica Geller. Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake….

“At least on the surface, movies and television actively promote dating the nonbeautiful: If we have learned anything from the mass media, it’s that the only people who can make us happy are those who don’t strike us as being particularly desirable. Whether it’s Jerry Maguire or Sixteen Candles or Who’s the Boss or Some Kind of Wonderful or Speed Racer, we are constantly reminded that the unattainble icons of perfection we lust after can never fulfill us like the platonic allies who have been there all along. If we all took media messages at their aboslute face value, we’d all be sleeping with our best friends. And that does happen, sometimes. But herein lies the trap: We’ve also been trained to think this will always work out over the long term, which dooms us to disappointment.”

For all of his critique of fake love (he skewers When Harry Met Sally, Coldplay’s “Yellow,” and the implausability of Woody Allen being considered “desirable”), Klosterman cannot find any resolution. After deconstructing our cultural narratives, all that’s left is cynicism–

“I remember taking a course in college called ‘Communication and Society,’ and my professor was obsessed by the belief that fairy tales like ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ were evil. She said they were part of a latent social code that hoped to suppress women and minorities. At the time, I was mildly outraged that my tuition money was supporting this kind of crap; years later, I have come to recall those psuedo-savvy lectures as what I loved about college. But I still think they were probably wasteful, and here’s why: Even if those theories are true, they’re barely significant. ‘The Thre Little Pigs’ is not the story that is [messing] people up. Stories like Say Anything are [messing] people up. We don’t need to worry about people unconciously ‘absorbing’ archaic secret messages when they’re six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are conciously accepting when they’re twenty-six. They’re the ones that get us. because they’re the ones we try to turn into life. I mean, Christ: I wish I could believe that bozo in Coldplay when he tells me that the stars are yellow…I wish I was Lloyd Dobler. I don’t want anybody to step on a piece of broken glass. I want fake love. But that’s all I want, and that’s why I can’t have it.”

So what now? Next we’ll turn to another critic of culture to find our way out.