Avdat

Mitch Albom feels sorry for your kids because he's a really naïve and sentimental guy

"I feel sorry for today's kids," writes Mitch Albom. They've no time to catch fire flies in mason jars or get lost in the woods. Their overachieving parents have enrolled them in too many internships and computer camps. Summer vacation is a thing of the past."We need to lighten up," he writes.

I bow to man in my zeal for taking it easy. But is it really the case that Type A parenting has killed summer vacation?

Think about it. Why are kids enrolled in camps from Memorial Day to Labor Day? Why, because both parents work, and the camps serve as child care when school's out.

Now why do both parents work? In part because today's women have lots of opportunities to work that were denied to Albom's mother. And in part because wages have been stagnant for nearly 40 years now, and it takes two salaries to maintain a middle class lifestyle.

And why is that the case? Does it have anything to do with the weakness of the labor movement? Or an increasingly regressive tax code? Or the tendency of corporations to reward their senior management handsomely and act like misers toward their lower echelon employees?

It might.

The reason why Albom's mom could order her son out of the house with the words, "Go. Don't come back until supper," is that neighborhoods in the 1950s and 60s were overrun with a creature called homo housewifeus. No matter where Albom and his ferrel friends went, they weren't too far from parental contact. But homo housewifeus is an endangered species today (for the above mentioned reasons), and the exotic, androgynous species, work-from-homeus parentus hasn't really taken over in its place.

Now if Albom had written a column titled Working Women Deny Their Children the Joys of Summer, I would have to object on the basis of my commitment to gender equity. Or if he'd written a book titled For the Kids' Sake: Look for the Union Label, I might agree more with that, although unions haven't been an unalloyed good in the U.S. economy. But either would have been more provocative and closer to the truth of what was really going on back when Albom was lying in his back yard deciding which clouds looked like dragons and which looked like horses.

This isn't surprising. Expecting an author like Mitch Albom, who' made a mint mining veins of nostalgia and sentimentlity, to write a hard-hitting piece of social, political or economic commentary for Parade magazine is really expecting too much. It would be like expecting Albom to write a book that conceived of heaven as beatific vision instead of, say, an eternal ferris wheel ride at that big Coney Island in the sky.

Some parents do need to chillax. Others won't be able to rest until the society they live in starts to value rest. Still others really do need to work because it is their calling and they have skills and talents best utilized outside the home.

CPE in the 6th century

On Facebook Brother Bill called me out for missing the presbytery meeting today. But the Lord's work detained me! I was reading Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks.

There's a lot of blood and guts in The History of the Franks, and more than a few head-scratchers too. Today I read about a hapless young man admitted as a novice to a monastery renowned for its severe discipline. One day the monks left the novice in charge of the wheat harvest drying in the sun. Suddenly a thunderstorm blew up. What was our poor novice to do? His brothers were too far away to summon. So he did all that he could do. He prayed.

And a miracle happened! The rain fell in torrents everywhere except precisely over the precious stalks of wheat.

The monks with the abbot came running, and they saw the dry wheat and the novice prostrate in prayer. What did the abbot do? He smacked around the novice for being a show-off and threw him in solitary confinement for a week.

Damned if you do; damned if you don't.

If Christians believed in reincarnation I could totally see this abbot coming back to be a CPE supervisor. Because it never mattered which verbatim you turned in for review, did it? They could turn any material they had on you into a turd sculpture of your ministerial incompetence and heart of darkness.

If it was a visit that went badly and you wanted advice, they never gave you advice; they gave you a lot of observations about how your dysfunctional family and your own cluelessness rendered your ministerial dexterity right up there with a bull in a china shop. Or if you turned in a beautiful verbatim, they contemptuously and openly doubted your honesty or sneered at you for your desperate need to impress your supervisors and outshine your peers. By the end of the internship, even you had to admit that a Christian coming to you for pastoral care was like taking a sick pet to a taxidermist instead of a vet.

But we're the better for it, aren't we? It was like boot camp, but now we wounded healer Christian ministers are the Marine Corps of Christianity, aren't we?

Gregory of Tours certainly thought that the novice monk's experience was good for him. Gregory reports that the man is now so hard core that during Lent he only drinks a cup of barley water every third day. BTW, Gregory refuses to identify the monk lest he see his own name in print and get puffed up with pride--for he does have a problem with pride, doesn't he?

Shorter History of the Franks (for the non-insane, non-aspiring PhDs reading this): Gregory loves miracles, so long as the miracle worker is dead. Somebody like, say, Martin of Tours, whose bones are interred in Gregory's church. Dead miracle workers are no threat to a living bishop's authority!

 

Little book review--The Mermaid Chair

The Mermaid Chair, by Sue Monk Kidd. Jessie, the protagonist, leaves her husband Hugh behind in Atlanta and grudgingly returns to the South Carolina barrier island on which she was raised to deal with her mother's mysterious act of self-mutilation. While she's there she falls in love with a monk at the Benedictine monastery and gets to the bottom of deep, dark family secrets.

This book is The Bridges of Madison County in a salt marsh, marinated in a little Low Country Roman Catholicism. The religious angle takes the star-crossed lovers trope to a whole new level. What I mean is that the book seems to argue that adultery really ought to be a sacrament. See, rolling around in the mud with a holy man is such a beautiful act of self-expression--it's art, really--and this manifestation of creativity is just the ticket to the self-differentiation that both marriage partners need. And Oh--the noble tragedy of knowing, really knowing how much harm your act of self-indulgence is going to inflict on the innocent. Why, it's practically a cross to bear!

And another thing: assisted suicide ought to be a sacrament too. If you're going to off yourself, there's no better place than a church!

There's nothing subtle about either the self-absorption on display in this book or the shopworn contrast between religion and spirituality, art and dogma. It took every bit of self-control I could muster to keep from throwing this book at the nearest wall, but hey, if it provokes feelings that strong, there must be something to it, right?

Or maybe not. At the end of the novel, Jessie recalls a day she spent hiking with Hugh early in her marriage. The day ended with them frolicking naked in a creek and making love. I thought to myself, "This woman's problem isn't that she lost herself in her marriage. Her problem is that she hasn't been getting it enough in the great outdoors."

If only ol' Hugh had known. If only he'd have driven her up to Kennesaw Mountain every month or so for a romp in the bushes. All this could have been avoided.

A poem for the Monday of Holy Week

Or any day, really... 

Before I knew its power, I asked in prayer

For love of Christ, believing it was sweet;

I thought to breathe a calm and tranquil air,

On peaceful heights, where tempests never beat.

Torment I find, instead of sweetness there!

My heart is riven by the dreadful heat:

Of these strange things to treat

All words are vain;

By bliss I am slain,

And yet I live and move.

Jacopone da Todi, Cantico dell'amor superardente, as quoted in Erich Auerbach's Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages.

 

Why I can't sleep

I just finished Julia M. H. Smith's Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000. It's a book that poses the urgent question, Is Smith an alien? Do people like Smith, Peter Brown and Ian Wood have an extra cerebral cortex marked "Just for History" floating in a vat in their office? Are they time travelers from the superintelligence, singularity future masquerading as medieval historians? Where do they get all this?

Whenever I finish a book I Iook up scholarly reviews of said book to see if my opinion of it agrees with the scholars' opinion. For some strange reason, my first query this afternoon turned up no reviews for Smith's book. But it did turn up her review of Carole Cusack's Conversion Among the Germanic Peoples in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.

Awesome! The topic of Cusack's book is basically my dissertation topic.

And Smith lowered the boom on poor Carole Cusack. Cusack's book, said Smith, relies too heavily on texts in translation. Her bibliography is shockingly short on non-English secondary sources. Her conclusion, that kings had a lot to do with it, will surprise no one.

That's "Booyah!" in academeze.

This is exactly what I'd be capable of producing at this moment in my grad school career: a completely unoriginal synthesis of English-language scholarship on a selection of early Medieval texts translated from Latin. My nightmare is that this is as good as my French, German and Latin will ever get, and if I do manage to eek out a dissertation and if it ever gets turned into a book, an 800 pound gorilla like Julia Smith will squash me like a bug.

And you know what that means. That means teaching remedial English in an open door admission community college built on a former nuclear testing site--my office a cubicle demarcated by Les Nessman-like imaginary walls in a trailer where the AC wall unit always shorts out.

Or even worse. It could mean... back to the parish!

Aw hell

Facebook friends and others have directed my attention to the latest tempest in the evangelical teapot: über Christian Hipster Rob Bell has gone wobbly on hell. Here's one response which also includes a video trailer for Bell's new book.

What strikes me about Kevin DeYoung's critique of Bell is that he doesn't bother to argue for the existence of hell; instead he argues that giving rid of hell cuts the nerve of Christian ethics and proclamation. No hell, DeYoung maintains, means no remonstrating with unbelievers, no rationale to love enemies and a weakened rationale for loving God. It makes you wonder: if hell didn't exist, would we have to make it up?

No, we wouldn't. One reason to love enemies is to literally heap burning coals on their head, as Paul says. But we find another reason in the Sermon on the Mount:

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' ⁴⁴But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. ⁴⁶For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? ⁴⁷And if you greet only your brothers and sisters,^* what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? ⁴⁸Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

The Father loves gratuitously and indiscriminately, and so will his children, what with the apple not falling far from the tree.

What about scaring people straight into the everlasting arms of Jesus with warnings about hell? Admittedly this was Paul's approach with Felix, as DeYoung mentions. For the complacent and the unaccountable, "meditation on the future life" as John Calvin calls it must needs be an anxiety provoking experience. I doubt that Paul handed Felix a tract with a picture of the lake of fire. Perhaps all he did was tell the judge that one day he would be judged.

Still, I'm more inclined to approve of the approach that Karl Barth took in a sermon he once preached in his hometown jail on Ephesians 2:5, "By grace you have been saved." Stressing the passive voice and pluperfect tense of the verse, Barth does not warn the congregation that they need to save themselves; he announces that God in Christ has done for them what they could not do for themselves. Hell is now a thing of the past. It does not loom on the horizon like an iceberg waiting to sink you.

In a wonderful illustration he mentions a recent incident known both to Barth and the prisoners. A man had gotten lost in a dark and snowy night. He walked this way and that until he found shelter, only to find that he'd been walking all night across the frozen Lake Constance. One wrong step and he would have crashed through the ice and perished. When he realized where he'd wandered, he broke down in terror and relief. And that is what it is like when we have been saved. Only after the fact do we realize the danger we were in.

And yet, the danger was real, was it not? Which means that hell exists, does it not? Whether it's a place, as it often appears to be in the gospel of Matthew, or an event, "the wrath of God," as it is in Paul's letters, eschatological unpleasantness crops up enough to resist easy erasure, even in the name of that slogan that brings tears to the eyes of every liberal Protestant: God's inclusive love.

I'm not particularly happy about it. I don't really get it. Contra Anselm, I do not think that human beings are capable of an infinite offense, even though the one they offend is infinite, because they themselves are finite. Thus an eternity in hell seems to me to be a gratuitous punishment, and I have a problem reconciling gratuitous grace and gratuitous punishment in one God.

Perhaps hell is self-imposed. But that raises questions of the limits of free will which are not easily answered. Perhaps hell is purgatorial in nature, and God's grace will one day call everyone out of it. Perhaps Origen was right, that if God is to be "all in all," then even the devil himself will one day be saved. But those are speculative responses, which have their own set of problems.

Long story short: Bell's instincts are right and DeYoung's are wrong to make fear the linchpin of your theology and ethics. I believe that what C.S. Lewis said about the devil we can also say about hell: Don't say too much about it, and don't say too little about it. When it turns up in the lectionary readings, preachers should not shy away from it, but nor should they make a mountain out of a molehill. Say as much, and no more, than what a close reading of the text will allow you to say. And if hell isn't in the text, don't smuggle it in.

Making better Hindus

Apropos (or not, perhaps) of a recent dialogue between Lee and Camassia about interfaith dialogue (a meta-dialogue, perhaps?) is the same Andrew Walls essay from his book The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Walls' essay is a series of reflections on Baptist scholar and missionary Kenneth Scott Latourette's A History of the Expansion of Christianity. In the book, Latourette lays down three criteria for a successful Christian mission:

1. Increase in worshiping congregations
2. Emergence of new movements and institutions that owe their existence to Christ, and
3. The "effect of Christianity on mankind as a whole."

Walls notes that Latourette's criteria were just a bit too optimistic for Reinhold Niebuhr. Which should be more than enough to vouch for them since everyone hates Reinhold these days.

The third criteria is slippery. How do you measure Christian effectiveness? Walls adds to the slipperiness with his choice of Raja Ram Moham Roy, the 19th century Indian social and religious reformer, as an example.

Roy wanted to learn English and was introduced to William Carey, a Baptist missionary to India, widely regarded as the patron saint of Protestant foreign missions. Roy's encounter with Jesus through the ministrations of Carey led him to crusade on behalf of women's rights in India. He helped end the practice of sati, in which Indian widows either willingly or unwillingly immolated themselves on their deceased husband's funeral pyres. He fought for the right of women to inherit property and to end child marriages. He strove to limit the massive amount of political and social power held by high caste Bengalis. He founded schools. He held to a kind of bottom-line monotheism: all reasonable people recognize that God is One and can be worshiped anytime, anyplace.

But he was never baptized (I think). And as Roy's reforms solidified, a curious thing happened. Conversions to Christianity from Hinduism began to dry up. Hindus (especially the high-born types the missionaries coveted) no longer had to go outside their own religion for the kind of reformed doctrine and morals they were looking for.

But Walls seems to think that this counts as successful Christian mission. In this case Christianity made a positive impact on Indian society as a whole, even though that impact ironically strengthened a rival religion. Is it possible for Christ to fulfill not only the law and the prophets, but also other religions, and not only by co-opting them, or syncretizing with them, but by sending them on their way with a blessing?

Mary's agency

While preparing a sermon that may or may not get preached this weekend depending on how this nor'easter sets up, I ran across an unfortunate contrast that Douglas Hare draws between Mary and Joseph in the Interpretation commentary on Matthew:

By focusing on Mary, Luke emphasizes the essential passivity of the human response to God's action: "Let it be to me according to thy Word" (Luke 1:38). Matthew, on the other hand, by selecting Joseph as his leading actor, stresses the active component in the human response. Three times Joseph is instructed by an angel in a dream, and three times he must do something.

I take it that, as a NT scholar and a Protestant, Hare doesn't buy into medieval Catholic notions of Mary delivering Jesus without painful contractions or a breach in her hymen. So what does he think the Mother of God was doing those nine months? Watching General Hospital and eating bonbons? How is consenting to a shotgun marriage more active than consenting to an unplanned pregnancy?

Granted, "He took her as his wife," sounds more active than "Let it be to me according to thy Word." The verb in the first sentence is transitive and indicative; the verb in the second is intransitive and subjunctive. (In English anyway; my Greek is horribly rusty).

But the difference is more apparent than real. Mary's response sounds like a variation on the Royal We, a more majestic way of saying, "I agree," or, "You've got a deal." Maybe one reason why Roman Catholics call Mary the Queen of Heaven is that she talks like one.

And granted, one could read the Annunciation as supine acquiescence to the sovereign will of the Almighty. One could interpret Gabriel's words as "An offer she can't refuse." He doesn't say, "Will you conceive?" but "You will conceive."

But one doesn't have to read it that way. Gabriel doesn't announce a fait accompli and depart. The climax of the story is Mary's "Yes" to the angel, and I believe that her Yes was genuinely hers. Indeed, she can only say Yes by the grace of the Son to be born in her, but God's grace does not create robots; it liberates men and women who were formerly slaves of sin to offer themselves wholeheartedly and willingly to God's strange purposes for their lives.

I wonder if Joseph's seems the more active response to God's action because in the back of our minds float traditional notions of who is the more active partner in the sex act, despite the fact that intercourse reportedly did not occur in this instance. But as Hugo Schwyzer points out, one can speak of a woman enveloping, engulfing and surrounding her partner just as easily as one can speak of a man penetrating his partner. That we don't has less to do with the biological reality of intercourse and more to do with the social arrangements in which intercourse is situated.

Likewise, if we fail to speak of Mary's agency in the incarnation event, that has less to do with the text itself, and more to do with the social arrangements in which the text is read and interpreted.

Incarnation and mission

Warning: this post is long,rambling, and ranting.

In an essay in the book The Cross-Cultural Proces in Christian History, Andrew Walls disputes the conventional wisdom that Church History is the story of Christianity going from strength to strength. In fact, Christianity often has found itself in deep, deep water, only to survive by having the good sense to grab whatever lifeline was thrown to it from some distant shore.

Case in point: Christianity had essentially hit a dead end only a few years after Jesus' resurrection. If it hadn't been for some anonymous believers in Antioch who got a wild hair to preach the gospel to some Gentiles, Christianity likely would have died out as any number of apocalyptic first century Jewish sects did. Instead, Christianity uprooted itself from its Palestinian Jewish soil and flowered in Greco-Roman society. In a few centuries the Jewish Messiah had become one substance with the immutable God of the philosophers.

Examples abound. It was mighty convenient that when the dioceses once administered by Augustine, Athanasius and the Cappadocians were falling to the Muslims, Pope Gregory was commissioning a mission to the Angles and the Saxons, the new pagan overlords of Briton.

The same process is at work today. Secularism has displaced Christianity in Europe far more quickly than Islam ever did in North Africa and the Near East, yet Christianity has found a new lease on life in Africa. At the beginning of the last century, 90% of Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today, 60% live in Africa, a monumental and lightning-quick shift in the religion's center of gravity with which no one yet has come to grips.

Walls makes a couple of points about this two-steps-forward, one-step-back narrative.

How elite are you?

Claire Berlinski read Charles Murray's op-ed on the New Elites, and turned it into a quiz. Kevin Drum proclaimed the quiz worthy of being a meme, and I agree! So here's the quiz with my results:

1. Can you talk about "Mad Men?" No.
2. Can you talk about the "The Sopranos?" No.
3. Do you know who replaced Bob Barker on "The Price Is Right?" Drew Carey.
4. Have you watched an Oprah show from beginning to end? Yes.
5. Can you hold forth animatedly about yoga? No.
6. How about pilates? No.
7. How about skiing? During the Winter Olympics I can.
8. Mountain biking? I can fake it.
9. Do you know who Jimmie Johnson is? Both of 'em.
10. Does the acronym MMA mean anything to you? Yes.
11. Can you talk about books endlessly? Not only that; I READ books endlessly.
12. Have you ever read a "Left Behind" novel? Nope.
13. How about a Harlequin romance? Yes. I pilfered one of my mother's at the beach one summer.
14. Do you take interesting vacations? I think so.
15. Do you know a great backpacking spot in the Sierra Nevada? No.
16. What about an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor? No.
17. Would you be caught dead in an RV? I have filled the tank, checked the oil and washed the windows of many an RV. So, yes.
18. Would you be caught dead on a cruise ship? I'm not planning on being caught dead anywhere, but I know my time is coming.
19. Have you ever heard of of Branson, Mo? Yes.
20. Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club? No.
21. How about the Rotary Club? No. Does the Optimist Club count?
22. Have you lived for at least a year in a small town? Yes.
23. Have you lived for a year in an urban neighborhood in which most of your neighbors did not have college degrees? No.
24. Have you spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line? Yes. In fact, that's our situation right now.
25. Do you have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian? Yes.
26. Have you ever visited a factory floor? Yes.
27. Have you worked on one? Yeah, baby!

I give myself a score of 6.5 elite answers out of 27. In other words, I am 24% elite, if I did my math right. I'm a regular rube.

Murray's column reports that the Tea Party is darkly warning that a new elite--ignorant about regular folks--has taken over America. But who gets to decide who's elite and who's not? A New York Times poll last spring reported that members of the Tea Party turn out to be more highly educated and wealthier than the average American. Sounds like an elite group to me!

There are elites who actively work to maximize their plutocratic interests and those who don't. I suspect that the former try to hide their rapaciousness from themselves and others with assorted attempts to keep it real (a little MMA or NASCAR watching). And the former accuse the latter of elitism. That's chutzpah.

So, dear Elitist, I absolve you of the obligation to fly down to Talladega this weekend and slum with the rest of us. No need to display your drunken contempt for Kyle Busch by flinging a chicken bone and crushed can of Bud in his general direction. All I ask of you is that you use your outsized financial, cultural and political influence on behalf of us rubes. A progressive tax code, a living wage, universal health care, and no more rich man's wars and poor man's fights. The usual stuff. Those who do such things are by no means out of touch with the rest of us.