"simply a power in the world's service"

The crowd attempts to silence the prophetic voice through intimidation (as I wrote yesterday) or assimilation. This second way is more subtle and usually more effective.

For example, in the protest scenario, the protesters feel that they are resisting the powers that be, making their prophetic voice heard. But by using mass action—the strength of "We, the People"—as the means to be heard (and be influential in the political realm) they are becoming just one more party in the struggle for power. They may be resisting on one particular issue, but on the deeper level they are supporting and becoming part of the worldly exercise of political force. They are not a threat to the powers that be. They have been effectively assimilated. In modern democracies, this is clearly perceived by those in office—protests are tolerated and even embraced: "See, we welcome dissent, it's part of our great democratic system... the system that has given us the power that we wield."

Assimilation is also the more perilous threat to the Christian. Because it undermines our true purpose in the world while making us think we're "succeeding." In The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, Jacques Ellul states very well the Christian's place and purpose in the world, based on Jesus' own path to the cross (my italics):

The action we attempt will always be regarded by the world as a failure, and the more so the more it is authentically faithful. We cannot be successful or show the church to be effective in the world unless we adopt the world's criterion of efficacy, which means adopting its means as well.

As the world sees it, action which is faithful to God will always fail, just as Jesus Christ necessarily went to the cross. Such action always leads to a dead end. It is always a fiasco from the standpoint of worldly power. But this should not worry us. It does not mean that our action is in truth ineffectual. Efficacy measured in terms of faithfulness cannot be compared at any point with efficacy measured in terms of success.

...These successes, this efficacy as it would be called from man's standpoint, and especially in our own society, will never amount to anything more than the approval given by the world, by society, to certain acts and means. It is the stamp of a group of men, a social body. But if we do not believe that society is good and right, this approval proves nothing except that the action is in conformity with the world. It does not mean that the world has changed; quite the contrary. Each time the people of God becomes effective according to the world's criteria, this only implies that society has absorbed our action and is using it for its own ends and for its own profit. ...The efficacy we think we have is simply a power in the world's service, for the perfecting of its own being, for its better organization....

There can be no question of securing the approval of the world or its conformity to us. ...We have simply to be, and we can only be a question put within the world, a question invincibly confronting it. This is our efficacy. It is the efficacy of the question, a question which society and sociological movements cannot assimilate. Israel and the church have never been efficacious except to the degree that the world has been unable to assimilate them. This is the vocation of the people of God incomparably more authentic than "service" or "works."

It is not at the level of works and their results that this efficacy may be seen; it is at the level of inassimilability.

ecce homo

With all the joy and happy plans leading up to a wedding, it's easy to forget this is the season of Lent. But I was reminded this morning as I read of Jesus' humiliation (in Mt 27). Perhaps the central thrust of that suffering is its social nature, that the crowd attacks him, isolating him, pushing him below them, mocking, making him seem to be nothing in the eyes of "We, the People."

The social nature of our actions came to mind a couple days ago as well. I was looking at an announcement for a nationwide protest and prayer vigil concerning the Iraq war. Several local churches are promoting it, in religious terms. The first reason given for the protest begins, "Like Isaiah, we are called to raise our prophetic voice..."

But my first thought was, "Did Isaiah need a crowd behind him in order to raise his prophetic voice?" Did Jesus? Crowds certainly gathered around Jesus, but his prophetic voice drove them away again and again, and in the end he stood alone against the money changers in the temple. And he stood alone humiliated before the crowd when Pilate proclaimed, "Behold, the man!"

Our inclination is to hide in the crowd. To stand where we feel secure, with the power of the people gathered around us. We do this even when we're trying to be "prophetic." But the courage of the prophet is that he speaks his challenging words from a place of utter vulnerability, that he trusts in the God who speaks through him and is not silenced by the power of the crowd. Conversely, speaking from the security of a crowd demonstrates, not trust in God, but trust in "We, the People."

The crowd always wants to make the individual seem like nothing, like they did to Jesus. And we reinforce that message when we have to gather into crowds to make our voice heard.

the cell

Reading Psalm 88 this morning, I was reminded of a short story I wrote years ago while in the Dominican novitiate. I still have it, and it's not too bad. I have to admit, though, that I borrowed some scenes from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, a nonfiction book I was reading at the time. Here's the beginning...

“...the darkness is my closest friend.” Psalm 88

Just before midnight, Dmitri’s shaven head snapped up. A key was rattling in the lock. He saw Ivan and Yuri jerk their heads up also as the door swung open; and then a new prisoner stumbled into the cell. He stared blankly at Dmitri. Relaxing enough to offer a weak smile, Dmitri dropped back heavily on the thin straw mattress. Just another zek. Maybe no one will be called tonight. He noticed that Pytor, lying next to him, had not looked up, though his eyes were wide open.

As soon as the door slammed and the key rattled again, Ivan and Yuri began whispering at the stranger. Yuri asked if he was from freedom. Ivan wanted tobacco. Ignoring Ivan, the new­comer mumbled something about freedom that sounded sarcastic, and began to lay out his blanket on the concrete floor between the two beds. The blanket appeared to be his only possession. Ivan lay back down, but Yuri persisted with a soft barrage of questions until Dmitri silenced him. “He’ll be here tomorrow. Go to sleep!”

Pulling his blanket close around him to keep out the cold, Dmitri resisted the urge to tuck his arms under it. Once a minute, a hostile eye peered into the cell, checking that all the prison­ers’ hands were in sight. As if on cue, the peephole cover slid open with a soft click. Dmitri closed his eyes tightly against the harsh brightness of the cell, and tried to remember that some­where it was dark.

(The whole story can be downloaded as a RTF file here.)

popping the question

Heather just sent this out to her friends and family...

So the story goes like this: right after the Plow Creek meeting Paul started wondering out loud when we would feel ready to get engaged, and ended up suggesting that if I wanted to "pop the question" whenever I felt ready that might be a great way of doing it. Well, a week passed and Plow Creek gave us their yes, and another week passed as I thought: am I really sure, am I really ready to make such a big life commitment, I've gotta be one-hundred-percent sure now because leaving someone at the altar's not very nice...

Then one sunny day (it may have been cloudy but it sure looked sunny) I made the decision, after praying with a dear friend who's been a spiritual mentor to me, and I felt completely at peace—but I had to wait till the next day because I'd promised myself for some reason that I would call my parents first and tell them I'd decided, and I didn't think they'd thank me for calling at two a.m. French time.

I could hardly stand the waiting...

The next day I called them, and told them, and after hanging up I just booked it over to Paul's house as fast as I could. I found him downstairs on the half-basement floor fetching something for Bob, the disabled man he takes care of. Did he want to go for a walk, I asked. He said, "Well, Bob's on the toilet just now, so I can't leave, and I have to make lunch for him and me in a few minutes. You could stay for lunch and we could take a walk right after..."

After lunch??? Noooo...

Me: Oh.
Him: Or we could have a really short walk before lunch.
Me: Maybe... (hem, haw)
Him: Did you want to talk to me about something?
Me: Yes.
Him: Did you want to talk about your novel?
Me: No. (uh oh, uh oh, I can feel it coming...)

Willyoumarryme?

Him: [completely surprised, laughing delightedly] Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?
Me: Yes! SO? Will you marry me?
Him: Yes!

[Then I asked her to marry me (in French): "Veux-tu m'épouser?" I even pronounced it right.]

And so we kissed at the foot of the basement stairs, and he went back up to help Bob off the toilet, and I sat on the counter while he made lunch and we chatted with his housemates and laughed and we were very happy.

Now isn't that the most romantic story you ever heard?

Probably my favorite Calvin & Hobbes cartoon. A friend who lives with me at the house (there's 13 of us at the moment, plus a baby) just gave me a book of these, including this one.

"a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife"

I took a look at Jesus' genealogy this morning. With the wedding coming up, we've given thought to the tradition of the wife taking the husband's family name. It's a tradition bound up with the male-dominated culture we live in, a culture that has also undervalued and oppressed women throughout history. As a sign of my commitment to break with that culture of oppression, I offered to take Heather's family name (instead of her being automatically expected to take mine). But the question was raised about whether this was biblical, or something Jesus would support. So Jesus' own genealogy came to mind.

The tradition about family names wasn't exactly the same in Jesus' time, but in the two recorded genealogies (in Matthew and Luke) it is clear that the male lineage is followed. This was traditional in Jewish culture as it is in ours. Looking over the names in the two lists, however, immediately raises a question. They're not the same. Why not? Scholars still argue over this, but it seems the most prevalent view is that one genealogy is Joseph's and one is Mary's. Both texts do lead to Joseph's name, perhaps to keep with the practice of tracing male lineage, but it's hard to come up with another explanation for the stark differences in the genealogies (they even have a different number of ancestors).

What caught my attention this morning, however, was that even though both genealogies seem to lead along a line of male descent to Joseph, Jesus is not a physical descendant of Joseph and his fathers. Matthew hints at this by ending his fatherly list with a motherly twist: "...Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born" (Luke calls Jesus "the son—as was supposed—of Joseph"). The story of Jesus' conception by the Holy Spirit immediately follows. If actual descent from David's royal line is important, then it has to be through Mary. Not the father's line but the mother's.

So I don't think Jesus would mind if we choose to embrace the lineage of the wife rather than the husband. (God did it!) And I think he would approve of our reasons, too. Jesus was always a friend of the undervalued and oppressed.

"the imagination is continually at work"

The other night we read a children's book at the dinner table, because the illustrator is a friend in the neighborhood. It was a story about a classroom of kids (in an underprivileged neighborhood, I think) who couldn't go to the zoo because of bad weather, so their teacher encouraged them to imagine a story with zoo animals. The animals talked with the kids, and included a blue lion king, a pink and green zebra piano player in high heels, and a rapping elephant drummer with his hat on backwards. Pretty amusing. The motto repeated several times in the story was "If I can see it, it can happen, it can happen right away!"

That got me thinking. I assume it was meant to encourage imagination in kids. Which is important, imagination is a good thing. But I wondered if that was the right use of imagination, or whether imagination was being promoted as a means of escape from reality.

Because what else can this mean? "If I can see it, it can happen, it can happen right away!" It's not about reality, reality doesn't change just because we want it to. And even if it means getting a vision that we can work towards, that change definitely doesn't happen "right away." I can certainly sympathize with disappointment about the world around us, and I've often used imagination to try to escape the reality I don't want to face—but is this a good thing? Is this something I want to teach others?

I don't think so. Because I don't think that's what God gave us imagination for. I believe God gave us imagination to explore and understand reality, the real world around us and our real selves. To appreciate the imagination that conceived the real world, God's imagination. Not to "create" an alternative world in our minds that we like better, to try to hide in a false world because we don't want to deal with the real one.

These thoughts reminded me of some lines by Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace:

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it. We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void within ourselves.

The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

She's saying that the sufferings and emptiness that we experience can become the places where we encounter God, where his love (grace) fills us. But if we try to fill those painful voids ourselves, through the wrong use of imagination, trying to comfort ourselves with a temporary escape from reality, we miss the chance for God to enter there. Attempting to heal ourselves, we miss God's healing. And when we make a habit of depending on our own power to change an imaginary world inside us, we do not depend (in faith) on God's power to change the real world around us.

vultures

I don't talk about the vultures much. For obvious reasons.

Their first appearance was many years ago, when I was still in training for the Navy. I wrote about them in my first journal, while I was walking on the Appalachian Trail in the summer of 2000, right after it had become clear to me that God was leading me into a larger pilgrimage, perhaps even a life's vocation:

When I was in Navy nuclear training in Idaho [a very stressful time in my life], I used to drive up to where the mountains started and crawl up this steep craggy monolith. From up there I could look down over rolling fields of various grains—divided by the bends of the Snake River—and out to the town of Idaho Falls. I would sit up there on my day off. It was isolated and quiet; sometimes I would gather sticks for a fire. And there was a man-sized hollow, that looked like it had been scooped out by a giant finger. I would sit in there and pray. I called it ‘the Sanctuary,’ inspired by Moses’ song on the banks of the Red Sea: "You will bring them in, and plant them on your own mountain, the place, O Lord, which your hands have made." (Ex 15.17) I loved that place.

Near the end of my time in Idaho, I was up there praying about my life, praying for guidance. I wondered if I would get married or maybe become a monk. I had only been a Catholic for two months, but I had been visiting monasteries and admired the Trappists. I was also still close with [my first girlfriend], however, despite the fact that we were broken-up at the time and she was in Germany for a year, studying. We wrote weekly, and called every two months or so (very expensive). She was to return later that month. So I was praying for guidance or light or something. Give me a sign, I pleaded.

But it was very quiet on the mountain.

There was a peak above where I sat. Not far, but much higher, with a squat, twisted evergreen on top. Gazing up at that peak, as I often did when I prayed, I noticed a vulture circling slowly. Then another. Another. Soon there were eight vultures soaring around the gnarled tree on the rock. I counted again (since seven is usually God’s magic number). No, eight. This was my sign, I decided. Eight vultures, eight years. Not an answer, exactly—I would have to wait eight years for an answer. Then I would know. I was satisfied, thinking I would either marry or enter a monastery by that time. I started waiting.

That was the beginning of August, in 1992. Eight years ago.

During the many long walks in the years that followed, I noticed that vultures appeared everywhere I went. Other birds varied in different parts of the country, but the vultures were always present, circling.

But I forgot about them until last year. Right after our invitation to the retreat house in Virginia fell through unexpectedly, I was taking a quiet walk through the woods to clear my head. I was confused and a little frightened. I didn't know what we were supposed to do next. It seemed like a dead end. But as I neared the retreat house again something caught my eye, a dark shape. I looked up and there was a vulture, sailing quiet and low over the house, circling once and then disappearing over the trees.

It wasn't a remarkable sighting. But it reminded me of my experience in Idaho, and in my state of mind (and spirit) at that moment, it seemed to me to be a sign. One year. I would know what God had for us within a year; I would only have to wait a year. I thought I could do that. And it even felt like God was saying he would open a way forward for us by then.

That was the beginning of June last year. Within a few days, I had the idea of contacting Plow Creek with the retreats-for-the-poor idea. And now we're moving there. We'll be married there on May fifth—with three whole weeks to spare...

esther

Yesterday at church there was a great play telling the story of Esther. And, like in the Jewish celebration of Purim, the congregation was encouraged to cheer and boo loudly when the story called for it. The villain even wore a sinister black cape.

One line in the story stuck with me. Mordecai says to Esther,

"If you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father's house will perish." (Esth 4.14)

I've written before that the fulfillment of God's will is not dependent on our cooperation (thank God!). It's actually amazing that God does invite us to participate in his will. That we can be a willing part of what God is doing, with all the excitement and joy and fulfillment of that experience. Of course, we can also choose not to willingly participate. In which case God does what he intends anyway, despite us, by some other means, and we are left out of what God is doing in the world. As Esther demonstrated, the other way is much better.

"a nest for herself"

The sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may have her young—
a place near your altar, O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house;
they are ever praising you.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.

As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs;
the autumn rains also cover it with pools.
They go from strength to strength,
till each appears before God in Zion.

I really like the NIV translation of these lines from Psalm 84. My mother wrote them on a card celebrating our engagement (and our acceptance at Plow Creek and our upcoming walk). And they take on an added meaning for me because Heather was once nicknamed "swallow"...