Outward Journey / Inward Journey

Awhile ago, my seminary friend Luke and I had a conversation on this blog, and he implied that I was overly concerned with the opinions of dead white guys. I chose to discontinue the discussion because I was becoming needlessly cranky with it, but I have been mulling over the matter since. It came up again in my in-care meeting, when I talked about our fascination with novelty — a trend I think the Church has aquired from American culture. Look at Cleveland’s slogans on behalf of the UCC: ‘Our faith is over 2000 years old; our thinking is not.’ ‘Cutting edge theology.’ Ad nauseum. No thanks. I was given a hard time at that in-care meeting, and I can’t help but wonder if I would have had an easier ride if I had read less Antony the Great and more queer theology dreck. This thought gives me heartburn.

I am unrepentant. I think the best way of knowing where the church is today is to read the dead people. Incidently, they’re not all men. Or ‘white’, whatever that means in pre-modern contexts. What I am not advocating is that we adopt an uncritical, neophobic position when we read the Fathers, the Reformers, and others. What I do advocate is that we pay careful attention to them, their writings and teachings, their liturgies, and their lives. I have long thought that if a Martian visited the typical American Protestant church today, she might think that we believe God plopped us in the middle of the 20th century with no historical context whatsoever. We need to recover our sense of the historical, one, holy, catholic Church established by Jesus Christ, over which he is Lord and King, and which Protestants are a part of. The church is not a country club, nor is it a Political Action Committee, nor a social service agency, nor the amen corner for American triumphalist nationalism. It is the sacred community of believers to which Christ gave his grace-imparting sacraments. The more we recover and pay attention to the Fathers, the Reformers, and others, the more we can recover the Church as catholic and the Church as the mission through which God acts to reconcile all things to Himself.

Thx @ Tortoise of Dissent:

Are your books of any use?
Are they? Are they, Dr Seuss?
Rhymes divine, but logic flimsy:
aren’t your works mere idle whimsy?
Cat in Hat, Things One and Two -
do they speak of what is true?

True, my friend? You ask what’s true?
True is what’s revealed to you.
Logic is not here or there.
Logic won’t go anywhere.
Sometimes what you read won’t fit.
Sometimes that’s the point of it.

Look, here’s Karl. Now gather round:
he will show you what he’s found.
Word is spoken (can you guess?):
God’s big No and bigger Yes.
Yes, I like the Son of Man!
Yes, I choose him, says I Am.

Seuss and Barth and Barth and Seuss:
sauce for gander, sauce for goose.
Thus a simple children’s rhyme
holds a truth to last all time.
Jesus loves me, this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.

Who’d have thought that Fox in Socks
might be neo-orthodox?

Magnificent.

So I’m at the Wisconsin Conference’s Annual Meeting in Green Lake and serving as a delegate for my congregation.  My pastor, the Rev. Philip Schneider, is one of the organizers of this thing, so we came down yesterday to help him set up.  I will try to post some different things as the meeting proceeds, although I’m not sure how interesting it will be because there’s nothing controversial coming up this year.  The theme is ‘Transforming Conflict in the Church’.

Reset Dialogues on Civilizations has published a series of articles on Being a Christian in the Middle East.

I sit in Harrisburg train station, waiting for the 1430 to Pittsburgh, two more connections and a car ride before I get home. I’m too fidgety to read my book right now; I’m snobbishly proud that I’m reading a Nobel-winning author whilst others, philistines, are reading cheap paperback suspense or mystery novels by pulpy and hackish authors. In spite of my origins, in spite of other evidence to the contrary, I fancy myself cultured and will grasp at straws to find proof of it.

Another passenger, about my age and like me wearing sandals, waiting for his train, pulls out a mandolin and begins to play softly. His improvisational music haunts our section of the station. Five Amish people walk by, three women and two men finding their way to their platform, chatting in German dialect. An older straight couple puzzles over which platform they ought to be at. In his teeth the man grips a pipe. The part of the pipe which holds the tobacco is held in place by pieces of wood resembling fingers. I don’t know if it’s lit, but I can smell the tobacco.

I could very easily fall in love with a musician, a man who expresses himself through his stringed instrument. Tacky representations of angels depict them as playing harps, but this symbolises how through music our souls can find a foretaste of heaven. When the right music reaches me at the right time when I am in the right state, I am in escasy  and the here-and-now kingdom of God is readily apparent. Perhaps that’s why I find musicians so alluring — even though I’m not a musician myself, not really an artist at all — having a life filled with music is one of the happiest ones that I can imagine this side of the eschaton.

Today, it’s the soft, sublime mandolin music that reaches me when I am receptive to it. Just momentarily, I fall deeply in love with the player. Of course, being a complete ninny, my response is not to go over to chat with him, but instead to write about it on my laptop. He puts his instrument away to start eating an apple, and suddenly it’s all over.