Outward Journey / Inward Journey

Right, so after forays from Wales to Wisconsin to Seattle to Alaska to Brooklyn to Philly to whiplash, I’ve finally (finally!) started seminary classes.  Just finished my first, actually, Christianity and the Visual Arts, taught as a January intensive by Betty Snapp-Barrett and her husband Prof. Lee Barrett.  ‘Twas a good experience, especially as someone who’s not technically skilled in artistic techniques: I realised that doesn’t matter so much.  My final project was a shoebox with ashes in it, attempting to critique our efforts at creating metaphysics to know the Unknowable.  Originally my idea was to put dog poo in aforementioned box, à la Piero Manzoni but figured that might not go down so well with the home team at First Congregational in Bloomer if they were to find out.  Other folks’ art projects were beautiful, adept, genuinely emotional, and well thought through.  Mine, probably not so much.

My next adventure here invoves choosing classes for the regular term.  I know which courses I’d like to take but whether I’ll have much liberty in my choices remains to be seen.  I’m put into a somewhat odd position as a January admission, ac hefyd I haven’t made my intentions for next autumn clear to the seminary, and I’m not ready to yet.

I’m happy with the seminary, but not sold on Lancaster as a city.  It brings to mind Bloomer without the one thing that I like about Bloomer: friendly smalltowness.  The public transit is for shizzle.  And, as in Bloomer, I’m also finding it hard to meet folks.  Other seminarians from the Arts module have been really nice, but they all live on campus and since they’ve been here for a term or more they have their own groups already going on.  I’m looking forward to the start of term.

I ventured into Lancaster’s [only?] fag bar on Saturday night.  It was dead.  When I asked the bartender when the other fags turned up, it turned out to be much later, and he made a point of telling me about his wife.  He needn’t have been concerned.  I had a couple beers and left.  I’ll go back some other weekend, much later in the evening.  I want to talk to a local to see what it’s like to be a queer here in Pennsylvania Dutch Country.  Maybe I’ll get lucky and meet an Amish poofta.  Wouldn’t that be something to write to First Congregational about, or at least a hell of an ethnograph?

    “What good is my pitying! Is not pity the Cross upon which he who loves
    mankind is nailed?["]
    -Friedrich Nietzsche (1883) Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. by Graham
    Parkes (2005) Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 13.

I’ve only just started reading this book, and I’m not familiar enough with Nietzsche nor 19th century German liberal theology to really make a judgement, but I’ve been operating under the assumption that Nietzsche is making a critique of the latter.

But that’s not where my mind went when I read this. I was thinking about my time at the Philadelphia Catholic Worker. My experience with American white, mainline, middle-class Christians and the congregations that are filled with them is that our response to poverty and the poor is one of pity. Look at pictures of poor children in the Dominican Republic, feel bad, send them money, feel better about ourselves. Vote Democratic, or at least for a “compassionate” Republican, and feel better about ourselves. Even, dare I say it, volunteer at the food pantry every couple of months, feel like we’ve done our part, and feel better about ourselves. We feel bad for the poor and try to help them, but certainly don’t question our middleclassness or heaven forbid try to abandon it.

I’m not sure this is a Gospel response. The message I get from the Jesus of the Gospels is not to pity the poor. It is to join them. And I don’t know the implications.