Community

Index of Hobbes’s Leviathan (by Rosie)

"To me this film would be as awful and haunting as cell phone videos of real death, and seeing violence of this kind, even if it’s passed off as art, is a kind of voyeurism I just don’t want to participate in. Violence in communities of color must be discussed, but it will never be entertainment."

—

Julianne Hing, on the new film ‘Precious,’ over at ColorLines.

Pastor Molly preached on this last year, acknowledging that although she consumes it and although media violence may not beget real violence, there is a “soul-shaking disconnect” between the “real violence we condemn and the fake violence we consume.” Violence in our lives is muffled, “by distance and by euphemisms,” and I wonder if ‘Precious,’ and its mass marketing isn’t more of the same.

How do we walk in the way? Molly didn’t have any answers, but she thinks about this topic a lot and I recommend her sermon to you.

Community, capitalism, and the human story

It occurs to me that this blog’s new title is Community, and I found that word echoing in my head last night as I asked a question at Union Theological Seminary’s “mega-class.” Following are my question and Dr. Serene Jones’ response – I addressed the question to her because, after hearing the fabulous Gary Dorrien answer a half dozen questions on the AIG bailout, I wanted some theology. Also, I’m transcribing - and not linking to the video podcast of the course - because this way I get to edit my incoherence.

Q: Professor Dorrien said that neoclassical capitalism pays no heed to community, and that economic democracy is a brake on human greed. It seems that those two work together: community may curb greed, and greed harms community, right?

But on the human level, it wasn’t [Reagan-era] globalization that destroyed that community, it was industrialization and the ability to simply buy something from two towns away.

As Christians, we feel this anachronistic call to a community that began to decline with modernity itself. What do we say to a world which lacks the sort of robust community that can curb our sinfulness, curb our greed?

Serene Jones: Community is an interesting term because, like many of the things we’ve been discussing, community isn’t inherently a progressive or positive space. You can have really corrupt forms of community and when you get corruption going in deep, communal ways, it’s bad. So we can’t just sort of invoke community as if it’s a nostalgic, utopic space somewhere that if we just got reconnected to one another, we’d be alright.

But what I do think your question points to is that this is all transpiring in the context of a world populated by people who still have very fundamental desires for intimacy, for connection, for being seen and being known, for being held and being loved and being fed. Again and again, if those sort of basic truths that the Christian story lifts up in profound ways stay at the center of our reflection on this, then we stop thinking that we’re dealing with human beings who are creatures other than these kinds of creatures, and we stop thinking as if these systems have a life of their own and [realize] they’re systems that these kinds of people with these kinds of needs have generated. Then we keep coming back to the earth of our existence as the place in which we are most likely to find – not always the most immediately practical answer – but we will get the impulses and the desires that point us in the right direction when it comes to articulating those policies.

In one regard, Dr. Jones fixated on my use of the word “community,” when I was really trying to recall the broader litany of grievances Prof. Dorrien raised against “neoclassical capitalism.” However, inasmuch as I was trying to say, “we Christians want this deeper thing than a post/modern world has ever offered,” she rightly took me down several notches in reminding me that community is anything but a “nostalgic, utopic space somewhere.”

I think my choice of that particular word is unwittingly rather revealing; any who know me can attest to my deep reverence for relationships and the often sabotaging ways in which I can elevate the role of community.

The body of her answer, though, gets to the heart of why I feel called to seminary of all things. I’ve been fiddling around, trying to find what felt like a rationally sound way to simply say, “Christianity tells a story of truth.” A story, where analytic philosophy simply strikes out at the thing. Embodied as we are in time and place, aren’t humans always entangled in the story of our lives more than any Platonic forms?

Dr. Jones’ answer exemplifies that growing conviction of mine, that the Christian story pushes back against our willful belief that, “we’re dealing with human beings who are creatures other than these kinds of creatures [who have orchestrated the current economic catastrophe], and we stop thinking as if these systems have a life of their own.” Scripture is so troublesome, but humanity is still more so. I find a truth in the way the Christian story contains so much, and wraps all of it in God’s love and justification.

I explain myself these days by saying that I head to Union to give myself to God. Said less biblically, I go to recognize that my life is not my own. It may be God’s (I’m beginning to believe so), or it may just belong to fate, nature, the soil. That giving up makes increasingly little practical sense as job prospects dwindle in this economy, but I find the end of Dr. Jones’ answer deeply affirming. Places such as Union, study such as this, may “not always [be] the most immediately practical answer – but we will get the impulses and the desires that point us in the right direction when it comes to articulating [just] policies.”

I am eager to spend a few years seeking to form those impulses.

On prescience

Reading Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, I was impressed by how well America’s preeminent theologian foretold something like 2003 from 1933. To wit,

[Modern men of power] may still engage in social conflict for the satisfaction of their pride and vanity provided they can compound their personal ambitions with, and hallow them by, the ambitions of their group, and the pitiful vanities and passions of the individuals who compose the group.

Niebuhr demands an account of the “vanities and passions” which led us to war in our time; I suspect that even the staunchest of doves among us have a bit of reckoning to do there.

Two more stories of prescience. I rode over the hill from Social Work to Union Theological Seminary, thinking on this text and on Niebuhr’s prescience, and remembered my own occasion to peer into the future as a boy with a new bike.

I was having a great deal of trouble getting my feet into the clip-and-strap pedals on my new town fixie. After years of racing on clipless pedals, it was minutes-long struggle to find the rhythm necessary to get my shoes into the straps in rhythm with the spinning cranks. “Go on ahead!” I’d shout to friends as I turned in wobbling circles, staring at my feet with gritted teeth. I thought,

This is awful, but in six months I’ll be able to slip into these without hardly thinking about it, and it will be great to look back on this time.

And of course it was true. Run, jump, kick in, off we go on a green light before the cars even get rolling. I love that memory of prescience, of anticipation for the proficiency and joy to come.

Last story. We’re riding over the hill again, in the rain, to Seminary and the peace it brings. Thinking of prescience and another memory comes dripping back in, a long-forgotten one from the First Church mission trip to Colima, Mexico. From my laughably abbreviated journal,

It’s late & dark on the steps outside the girls’ apartment, but the night is the most beautiful - beautiful thing, no less noisy & a little bit warmer than home but somehow transcendent & distinctly of this time & place. Maybe for once I can see it in the moment - this will be a time whose smells, tastes, little triggers of whispers of memories will bring me vividly back. Or perhaps not, but here we are now.

Brakes squeaking over wet bicycle rims on a New York City street, it was precisely a year later - to the day - that my moment of meta-prescience had recurred, and indeed, smells and words do triggers memories of that time. The smells and godliness of Union bring me back, as does a good quesadilla or a Negro Modelo.

Molly was in town this weekend; dinner with she and Rafe and others last night and that most certainly brought me back. She gave me this most knowing of glances as dinner wound down and I wonder about her own prescience, prodding me along to Seminary. All of this discernment feels a fumbling task now (“Go on ahead!”), but maybe in a few years, I’ll look back just the same? The future can hardly be known, but when I have gotten quiet to think about it, it has usually served me well. Up, over the hill we go.

The Little Gate to God

As he closed his powerhouse lecture on Walter Rauschenbusch at Union Theological Seminary last night, Gary Dorrien quoted at length from a poem written in the spring of 1918 by the eminent theologian and founder of the Social Gospel movement, as Rauschenbusch neared a premature death from cancer.

The poem caught my ear, but every mention I’ve found on the internet seems to have selected a few stanzas with varying interpretation of the line breaks. Due to the relative rarity of the book I know it to appear in, I’m going to reproduce the entire poem, eight stanzas in all, and claim fair use, though I’m not sure that’d hold up in court - interested parties, please contact me to take it down. In the meantime I hope you find it, as I did, a profound and mystic expression of communion with God, one still laced with WR’s thirst for social justice in this world.

In the castle of my soul
Is a little postern gate,
Whereat, when I enter,
I am in the presence of God.
In a moment, in the turning of a thought,
I am where God is.
This is a fact.

This world of ours has length and breadth
A superficial and horizontal world.
When I am with God
I look deep down and high up.
And all is changed.

The world of men is made of jangling noises.
With God it is a great silence.
But that silence is a melody
Sweet as the contentment of love,
Thrilling as the touch of flame.

In this world my days are few
And full of trouble.
I strive and have not;
I seek and find not;
I ask and learn not;
Its joys are so fleeting,
Its pains are so enduring,
I am in doubt if life be worth living.

When I enter into God,
All life has a meaning.
Without asking I know;
My desires are even now fulfilled,
My fever is gone,
In the great quiet of God.
My troubles are but pebbles on the road,
My joys are like the everlasting hills.
So it is when I step through the gate of prayer
From time into eternity.

When I am in the consciousness of God,
My fellowmen are not far-off and forgotten,
But close and strangely dear.
Those whom I love
Have a mystic value.
They shine, as if a light were glowing within them.
Even those who frown on me
And love me not
Seem part of the great scheme of good.
(Or else they seem like stray bumble-bees
Buzzing at a window,
Headed the wrong way, yet seeking the light.)

So it is when my soul steps through the postern gate
Into the presence of God.
Big things become small, and small things become great.
The near becomes far, and the future is near.
The lowly and despised is shot through with glory,
And the most of human power and greatness
Seems as full of infernal iniquities
As a carcass is full of maggots.
God is the substance of all revolutions;
When I am in him, I am in the Kingdom of God
And in the Fatherland of my Soul.

Is it strange that I love God?
And when I come back through the gate,
Do you wonder that I carry memories with me,
And my eyes are hot with unshed tears for what I see.
And I feel like a stranger and a homeless man
Where the poor are wasted for gain,
Where the rivers run red,
And where God’s sunlight is darkened by lies?

"These students live in a bubble, and they know it. But then, people like me live in a bubble, too, and, on the whole, we don’t know it. From my angle, of course, our bubble looks bigger and better. Theirs: a constricted, six-thousand-year-old world ruled by an incorrigibly small-minded God, the secrets of which are to be found in a black-bound anthology of unreliably translated old tribal stories, poems, directives, and tracts. Ours: an unimaginably immense, unimaginably ancient universe ruled by no one, the wonders and beauties of which are continually being revealed to us through our senses and our minds."

— An laughable straw man of religious faith from the frequently histrionic Hendrik Hertzberg, but a rather insightful piece overall - he has been in politics for a few decades, I guess: Three Strikes (Strike Two: Pastor Rick).

Does Somerville have a prayer? If so, there’s a team to help →

From Pastor Molly:

Peter Gomes, preaching professor at Harvard Divinity, bests the rarely-bested Stephen Colbert: hilarious!

Peace in the City: Fifth Avenue Presbyterian

No matter how you come to show up on the beautiful Midtown stoop of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian, it will have been a bit of a walk, and a blustery one from the NRW or the FV trains on a winter’s Sunday morning. The greeters at the neo-Gothic doors to the sanctuary know that, however, and when I arrived late to the service on consecutive weeks, they gave me a firm handshake and a knowing sort of smile, “It’s okay.” At an appropriate pause in the service, I would be let into the sanctuary to find a spot in the long, curved pews that fill this capacious sanctuary.

It’s a large church that comfortably fills the floor and balconies with well-dressed, Park Avenue-type congregants twice every Sunday (9:30 and 11:15), and they pull in the talent to match it. There were guest homilists both weeks: the Rev. Dr. Barbara Lunblad and Rev. Dr. Cleophus LaRue; both teach preaching at esteemed seminaries and both are engaging, insightful, and inspiring speakers. Their personalities filled the sanctuary, and their measured ecumenical approaches to the Bible were perfectly Presbyterian (though neither of them is).

FAPC is the kind of place that Protestant tourists go on a Sunday morning (I did, on childhood visits to the city), it’s sandwiched between H&M and Harry Winston in perhaps the glitziest part of Midtown (57th and 7th) and is just up the block from the New York’s most famous place of worship, St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The leadership here knows their place: serving the well-to-do professionals of Manhattan, and they gear the myriad small groups towards the target audience: twenty- and thirty-somethings, newcomers to NY, professionals. I counted some two dozen deacons carrying well-laden offering plates up the aisle - an impressive sight. At least some of that money goes towards the homeless shelter the church runs year-round (and has fought to keep up, despite the “types” it attracts to the area), and seems to have an active, engaged group of members.

As we sang the closing hymn from the Presbyterian Hymnal and received the benediction, I looked up above the pulpit to take in the view: an animate choir, a historic organ, and so many New Yorkers in their Sunday best, greeting one another on their way up to coffee hour. FAPC is a very large and historic, but it’s hardly out of date. The church clearly cares about its family, even if some among them can’t seem make it on time. What a comforting start to my search.

Up Next: Greenwich Village’s First Presbyterian Church NYC

Peace in the City: An NYC church-hunt

St Patrick’s Cathedral,
originally uploaded by Farl.

Starting this afternoon soon, I’ll be blogging my experiences and impressions of the churches I’ve visited and will continue to visit on my journeys through subway tunnels and into pews as I attempt to find a warm, welcoming, relevant, ecumenical, progressive, and familiar Protestant congregation here in New York City. You would think it shouldn’t be very hard what with eight million people milling about, but every church has its strengths and its weaknesses. I’ll elucidate those diverse personalities fairly and succinctly to the best of my ability and hopefully provide a resource to future sojourners looking for an open spot and open hearts to settle down with in the Big, Big Apple.