Avdat

Traveling companion

I was in a gloomy mood. I'd just said goodbye at the train station to some new and lovely friends.  But the train station was in Glasgow, a few thousand miles away from home.  No family was there to greet me. 

At the time it'd seen like such a good idea:  round off the pilgrimage to Iona with a weekend of sightseeing.  And save some money in a hostel!  But I was unenthusiastic about bunking with a bunch of strangers.  What if my roommates were psychos?  Or more probable:  what if I awoke the next morning to find my shoes filled with a stranger's vomit?

I needed a travel companion.  And I found one in a Border's on Buchanan Street, Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island.  How clever to stick a British Isles travelogue in a bin close to the door through which many foreign tourists were sure to pass?  I was a sucker.  Having howled my way through The Mother Tongue and A Walk in the WoodsI grabbed it immediately, a precious gift of levity for my homesick heart.  And so, as President Bush made his valedictory tour of Great Britain, I on the same weekend made my maiden voyage through the streets of Glasgow, and, accompanied by Bryson, toured the streets of Dover, Oxford, and Edinburgh as well.

Bryson is an American who's lived, married and raised a family in Great Britain.  Before he and his family relocated to the States for a time, he decided to tour his adopted home and write about it.  He begins with not so fond memories of his arrival in the land, a cold, rainy night spent outdoors, and then some uncomfortable time in a B&B run by a Nurse Ratchet figure allegedly named Mrs. Smegma.  Misery loves company.  Thanks to Bryson's hilarious writing, I woke up in my hostel room in a much better mood.  Plus there was no vomit in my shoes.  Just the peaceful sound of snoring Aussies.

Bryson is good at making the minutiae of life fascinating and funny.  So he does with British place names and people names.  It's hard to decide which is funnier, Bryson's made-up locales, or some actual town names he reports.  It reminded me of a game our choir director played with us once.  She'd read three country music song titles, and we had to decide which one was fake.  Hint:  If the Phone Don't Ring Baby, It's Me is a real song.

Tea time, says Bryson, has made the British some of the kindest people in the world, apologetic to a fault, capable of taking extraordinary delight in simple pleasures.  Brits, says Bryson, suffer from an inferiority complex, but why should they?  They won the war they needed to win, dismantled their empire (peacefully, for the most part), and built in its place a social welfare system that's the envy of the world.  Their train system is efficient, comfortable and a real deal for the taxpayer.  Plus there's all this old stuff, everywhere!

But not as much as there used to be.  Bryson's description of any given town includes its lovely architecture and a seething critique of those modern glass and concrete monstrosities that have elbowed lovely Victorian, Georgian and older styles out of the way.  It became a game with me.  Which new adjective would Bryson hurl at the horrible post-war construction he took in on his road trip?  Criminal?  Obnoxious?  Hideous?  After reading Notes from a Small Island, one could be forgiven for concluding that post-war urban planners did more damage to Britain's architecture than the Luftwaffe.

Bryson can be wickedly funny in his descriptions of others, and himself.  Cheap but elegant might summarize his preferred accommodations.  I have close relatives who've hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, and they were greatly disappointed with Bryson's A Walk in the Woods because he only made it as far as Tennessee.  But after reading account after account of Bryson storming out of a B&B at the first sight of a little mildew in the sink, it's a real wonder he attempted such a feat in the first place!

Glasgow was one of the last stops on Bryson's trip, and his take was essentially the same as mine:

It has all this new-found prosperity and polish, but right at the very edge of things there is always this sense of grit and menace, which I find oddly exhilarating.  You can wander through the streets on a Friday night, as I did now, and never know when you turn a corner whether you are going to bump into a group of tony revelers in dinner jackets or a passel of idle young yobboes who might decide to fall on you and carve their initials in your forehead for purposes of passing amusement.  Gives the place a certain tang.

Finding a pulse

The long, slow decline of mainline denominations and the explosion in size and political clout of Evangelical congregations is a story with which we're all familiar.  We're well into the fourth decade of telling this story, and from the telling, at least two truisms have spun off:  1.  There are two Americas, one religious and politically conservative; the other secular and politically liberal.  2.  Conservative churches grow because they offer straightforward answers to life's questions and a black and white morality.  Liberal churches are declining because their theology and ethics are muddled.

The problem for Diana Butler Bass was, these truisms didn't describe her own experience.  She was attending a theologically moderate to liberal Episcopal congregation that was growing in both numbers and vitality.  Wondering if there were other exceptions to the rule, she set out on a three year journey to find growing, vibrant mainline congregations, and document what they have in common.  The result is Christianity for the Rest of Us:  How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith.  Our congregation's Session is reading this book in preparation for a mini-retreat this weekend, and I commend it to you.

Bass is not polyanish about mainline American Christianity.  How could anyone be at this point? 

But Bass identifies a different set of problems than conservative critics usually do.  The churches didn't take the wrong stand on civil rights and women's rights, but their reasoning was grounded in the shallow soil of secular individualism, rather than the biblical saga of God's liberating Israel and tearing down dividing walls in the person and work of Christ.  The secularism of mid-century Protestantism is striking.  People went to church to hear about God, not to experience God--certainly not to experience God through sight, taste, touch and smell.  And, when the neighborhoods and cultural patterns that mainline congregations were woven into began to fray in the '60s and '70s, many congregations were left hanging.

But Bass found many mainline congregations that have turned themselves around.  She identifies ten common factors, which she calls signposts of renewal for pilgrims and exiles wandering purposefully through this strange, new, post-Christian land:

1. In a culture of strangers, these Christians practice hospitality, which is an end unto itself, and not a tactic of new member recruitment.
2. Rather than management by objectives or Roberts Rules of Order, these Christians make decisions by practicing discernment.  With tools as varied as Bible Study and Quaker silence, they are always asking, "Where is God in what we are doing?"
3. These Christians understand salvation as a process of healing the body, soul and mind, rather than making an instant decision for Christ that applies only to the hereafter.
4. In a world of noise, these Christians are contemplatives, carving out times and places of silence.  Paradoxically, quiet generates...
5. Testimony.  Unlike tongue-tied mainliners, these Christians know how to articulate their faith.  But they do so by telling the story of how the Holy Spirit has guided their lives, rather than hitting people over the head with four spiritual laws or forty days of purpose.
6. These congregations aren't like corn fields, a monocultural environment that produces high yields (Evangelical megachurches).  They embrace diversity, and are more like native prairies with various and sundry grasses growing--and more sustainable.   This diversity isn't a PC mandate but a gospel imperative.
7. They do justice at the grass-roots level, rather than lobbying for top-down political solutions or limiting themselves to charity.
8. Their worshipservices are experiential, celebratory re-appropriations of ancient rituals for the 21st century.  They've been non-combatants in the worship wars, insisting on innovation and experimentation rather than a particular musical genre.
9. Taking the Bible seriously but not literally, the reflect on life in light of scripture and their denominational traditions, and
10. they embrace the visual and performing arts, for beauty is a refined form of prayer, a way of "telling it slant," as Parker Palmer puts it.

Bass' ideal church eschews the extremes of secular liberalism and religious conservatism.  Her book is a winsome argument for a new "vital center" that's more than a blended compromise, but exhibits the virtues of humility, hospitality and hope. 

If you're of the temperament of Barry Goldwater ("Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"), or Molly Ivans ("The only thing in the middle of the road is yellow stripes and dead armadillos"), then Bass' centrist religious vision may not be for you. 

Then again, in an age of violent religious extremism and political polarization, perhaps even you might concede that Bass' updated Via Media is an idea whose time has come.  Indeed, it's already coming in "authentic, quirky, eccentric, rough around the edges" congregations around the country.   

Psychotherapy by proxy

I can't get Gershom Gorenberg's book on the birth of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza off my mind.  My review is here.  In short, the settlements weren't the result of any government policy.  They happened in the absence of a government policy as politicians, bureaucrats, military officers and citizens acted in an ad hoc manner to colonize the Occupied Territories.  Eventually there was a showdown between the government and the burgeoning settler movement, and the government blinked.

It can be read as a damning indictment of Israeli political cowardice.  But for me it increased my sympathy for the impossible situation Israel finds itself in 41 years after the Six Day War.  Like the Labor governments of Levi Eschol, Golda Meir and Yitzak Rabin, I would rather let things ride, avoid conflict whenever possible, and postpone hard decisions until the last possible minute.  I can see so many sides of an issue that I become paralyzed by its multifaceted allure.  I didn't expect that a work of contemporary Middle Eastern history would become a tool for my own personal self-assessment, but it did.

Establishing facts

I'm nearly finished with Gershom Gorenberg's The Accidental Empire, a fascinating history of how the West Bank and Gaza Strip came to be dotted with Jewish settlements in the aftermath of the Six Day War.  As the title implies, the Gordian Knot both sides find themselves in wasn't tied by a formal government decree.  The government never developed a strategy for the land or its Palestinian residents.  Individual Israelis, private citizens, government officials and military officers, thinking that "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission," filled the policy void with brick and mortar.  Lacking an overarching strategy, the government found it increasingly difficult to say No to the settlements.  As Goremberg observes, even governments usually have to have better reasons than "Because I said so."

Many factors contributed to Israeli policy paralysis.  When a week's worth of fighting left Israel controlling twice as much real estate, and a whole lot of Arabs, no one was more surprised and flummoxed than the government.  The newly acquired land offered Israeli access to biblical sites and a buffer against Arab tanks.  But in the long run it threatened to undermine the Jewish majority in lands under Israeli administration.

It's interesting to view the recent fury over Jimmy Carter's book about the West Bank and Gaza, the mere title of which provoked such consternation, in light of Gorenberg's history.  In the late 1960s Israeli government officials themselves were comparing their control of the West Bank and Gaza to an equally odious African regime:  Rhodesia. 

So what do you do when the dowry's nice (the land), but you aren't so sure about the bride (the Palestinians)?  For every cabinet minister there was a plan.  The Labor governments of Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir could never find consensus.  Nor did they particularly want to.  Why risk the government falling?  And with their American patrons preoccupied with Vietnam, there was no external pressure to do so.

Zionist pioneers came to Palestine under Turkish and British rule, often in defiance of immigration policy, to establish facts.  Living, breathing Jewish settlements in the Holy Land would eventually necessitate international recognition of a Jewish state.  These immigrants were secular, even atheistic, often communistic and anarchistic in their creation of the kibbutzim, the communal farms where even the children were raised collectively. 

The '67 war gave the Zionist pioneer spirit new life.  Yet the kibbutzim did not yield up its children to establish new outposts in the Occupied Territories.  It fell to Orthodox Jews, many of whom had been skeptical of Zionism, to fill the land, and the policy void.  In a time in which the New Left was rising in democracies everywhere, made up of the comfortable children of "the greatest generation" with something to prove, in Israel a New Right arose.  They too had something to prove.  Their absorption of Zionist nationalism, or rather, the sacralizing of Zionism, is a major and fascinating theme of the book.

So the pattern was repeated.  Only this time the facts were being established in defiance of Jewish governors, rather than Brits or Turks.  "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," and flouting the rule of law in the name of the people who live under it was a noble task, one that neither the State nor public opinion had the will to say No to.

Oddly enough, the disastrous Yom Kippur War gave the Settler Movement a boost.  Possessing the territories, it turned out, was not a sufficient buffer against Arab aggression.  And the settlements didn't help but hurt the war effort, for they had to be evacuated under enemy fire.  And confidence that the Messianic age was near, fed by the overwhelming success of the Six Day War, would seem to wither in the face of heavy casualties and a partial Israeli pullback in the Sinai. 

But Gorenberg observes that various apocalyptic movements have reconstituted themselves in the face of even worse evidence to the contrary.  Doubt chases certainty.  In the case of the religious Zionist settlers, it chased them up into the hills around the Palestinian cities of Nablus and Jenin.  And they're there to this day, like Jacob and Esau struggling together in the womb.

Gorenberg writes well.  He tells a story of war, bureaucratic inertia and diplomatic intrigue through compelling biographical sketches: 

• Moshe Dayan, the general and cabinet minister who liked to plunder women almost as much as he liked to plunder archaeological sites;
• Eshkol, the PM, of so many minds on the issue that Goremberg likens him to a walking parliament;
• the melancholy writer and '67 vet Amos Oz, opposed to the settlements;
• the wrathfully reactionary Golda Meir, and many others. 

The book offers no predictions of a blueprint for the future, but it's invaluable as an information source for how we got into this mess we're in. 

The Syndrome

One of the more interesting essays in Grossman's Death As a Way of Life is about Pope John Paul II's pilgrimage to Israel and Palestine in 2000.  As an American on a Christian pilgrimage to the Jewish state I often wondered what I and people like me look like to the natives.  So as I read I imagined Grossman was writing about my pilgrimage.

Turns out the curiosity goes both ways.  There was extraordinary interest in the worship services that the Pope presided over because most Israelis have little if any experience with Christian worship.

This took me aback.  It's easy to think of Israel as something like New Jersey, a place where lots of Jews and Christians live together.  That's because the Christian tour experience in Israel is so skewed.  You hit all the places sacred to Christians, throw in the Wailing Wall for good measure, and stay in hotels where everybody speaks English.  Sure the road signs warning "Camel Crossing Ahead" are exotic, but they're also in English, in addition to Hebrew and Arabic.

But Israel is actually a Jewish state.  Believe it or not, you might miss that if you ever go.

The other thing I wondered about during my pilgrimage was, "What is it like to live every day in the Holy Land?"  I remember one evening in the little Negev Desert town of Mitzpah Ramon.  It sits on the lip of a vast crater, the Grand Canyon of Israel.  We walked from our hotel to the crater to see the stars.  Along the way, you'd hear dogs barking, or catch the blue flicker of a TV set in someone's home.  And I'm thinking, "Here I am, in the Holy Land!  This might be the very spot where Balaam's ass flung the hapless sorcerer to the ground!  And in that house somebody might be watching American Idol."  (Which they get on cable in Israel.) 

Grossman writes that the whole idea of the Jewish state is to give Jews the opportunity to just, you know, live their lives.  Not be "The Jews" as Christ-killers, or "Jerusalem" as the heavenly city, or Israel as a metaphor, but people who live on their own land, farm it, pay taxes, defend themselves, are born, marry, and die.  In one sense you'd have to "get over" all that history.

But there's no getting over it.  About Jerusalem, writes Grossman, everyone is hypersensitive.  It is all that history for all those religions and so much more.  About a hundred or so pilgrims per year lose their minds in Jerusalem.  Some people label this experience a diagnosable mental disorder.  And the permanent residents of the city are a prickly lot, prepared to take umbrage at anyone who fails to give due consideration to Zion's "towers, ramparts and citadels."

I'm not sure if this post has any real point, other than you can visit a place and not really visit it, and meet people but not really get to know them.

Memes ahoy!

The one book meme:

1. One book that changed your life:
The Politics of Jesus, by John Howard Yoder

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
Crime and Punishment, by Dostoyevsky (I've started it three times, but never finished it.  Does that count?)

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
The Book of Common Worship

4. One book that made you laugh:
Rainey, by Clyde Edgerton

5. One book that made you cry:
The Bible

6. One book that you wish had been written:
A History of the Poor People's Campaign, by Martin Luther King, Jr.

7. One book that you wish had never been written:
Mmm, none.  That's too much like book burning.

8. One book you’re currently reading:
Born Fighting:  How the Scotch-Irish Shaped America, by Jim Webb

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
The Next Christendom, by Philip Jenkins

10. Now tag five people:  Again, Jennifer, Jennifer, Jonathan, Lee and Sarah.

Overheard: best pickup line ever

If you were in my gaming world, I'd give you 18 charisma.

Mixing politics and religion

Apparently, it's mandatory.  Reviewing the book Broken Churches Broken Nation, Ken Carder observes that the last time the churches steered clear of politics for the sake of church growth, what we got was the Civil War. 

This sort of tracks with the sideways look one gets at Billy Graham in Ron Ferguson's biography of George MacLeod, founder of the Iona Community.  Ferguson writes that in the early 1950s,

It seemed as if the liberal evangelicals who had dominated the Kirk since the First World War, the social gospellers and the dialectical theologians (the disciples of Barth and Brunner...) had come together in a coalition, however shaky, based on the need and opportunity for mission in a Scotland which showed a renewed interest in the old faith.

Then the Billy Graham Crusade came to Scotland and shattered that fragile coalition.  MacLeod couldn't stand Graham's absolute refusal to engage social problems, and deeply distrusted mass evangelism, but was criticized for just being jealous of another gifted preacher.  Whether or not to support the Crusade became a deeply divisive issue among the Church's leadership.

Ferguson reports that the result of the Crusade was a wash.  20,000 people answered the altar call, but 62% of those were already regular church attenders.  He adds that the rolls of Church of Scotland began their long, inexorably decline in the mid-'50s, shortly after Graham had come and gone.

Christianity is an incarnational religion.  When we make an incarnational religion other-worldly, the Church is no longer being true to itself.  No preacher, no matter how skilled, and no evangelistic outreach, no matter how relevant or slickly packaged, can save a religion that's not true to itself.

It seems to be something of an inherent problem in institutional, American Christianity.  I don't know how you root it out.  Rooting it out begins by recognizing that Billy Graham, a very kind man, has been part of the problem, not the solution.  That's a rather counter-intuitive argument to make. 

C'mon baby; I haven't read Pushkin but I have heard of him! Her?

In this post, Jennifer muses about what your bookshelf says about you.  This dovetails nicely with a weekend New York Times article about how a guy's literary tastes can be a useful Match.com filter.  I am more than a little pleased that, in both the column and the NPR discussion of it, Atlas Shrugged comes off as a big time deal-breaker for all smart Manhattanite hotties.

What our bookshelves say about us is that we stopped buying books around the time our kids were born.  Which means there's a lot of college textbooks, some literary classics, and middlebrow fiction from the early to mid-90s.

To find out the real me, you'd need to be someone empowered by that lovely Patriot Act to look at our library records.  And then you'd find:  Magic Tree House!  Captain Underpants!  The Hardy Boys!

Is The Shore Road Mystery a deal-breaker for attractive, well-paid young women who work at Big Apple publishing houses?  Good thing I'm not making deals any more.

Doubting Thomas

Glenn W. Most has written a most interesting book on Doubting Thomas.  It combines a close reading of the story in John 20 with an examination of how the synoptic gospels handle issues of doubt and faith after the resurrection, as well as interpretations of Thomas by the Church Fathers, Gnostics and medieval and renaissance artists. 

Most shrewdly observes that no where does it state that Thomas actually touched the wounds in the body of the resurrected Jesus, yet we tend to mis-remember the story as if he did.  This is due in some part to a long history of interpretation that insisted he did probe the wounds in order to refute the Gnostic denial of a resurrected body.

But there's also the problem of visually representing a modal verb.  Simply put, it's easier to paint a finger entering the hole in Jesus' side than painting an invitation to put said finger there.  We remember the story as we've seen it on the canvas and in stained glass.

In the chapter on Thomas in art, Caravaggio's portrait is the hub around which the discussion spins.  Most doesn't shy away from pointing out the contrast between Jesus' delicate, wounded body and Thomas' crude violation of it, represented by the vulva-like slit in Jesus' side, and the stiffly erect shape of Thomas' probing finger.  Are we meant to feel revulsion at Thomas' impertinent request?  Or, noticing Jesus' hand on Thomas' wrist, which may be restraining Thomas' hand or pulling it toward the wound, are we meant to see something different, a discovery that leads to the miracle of faith?

Most observes that Thomas' forehead is furrowed in a way that seems to indicate astonishment, even wonder, while the other two disciples' brows are wrinkled in a manner than connotes extreme concentration.  One thinks of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson, which is also pictured in Most's book. 

Perhaps for this reason, Most argues, the Italian Cardinal Ottavio Paravicino wrote of Caravaggio that he had painted "some paintings which were in that middle between piety and profanity, such that I would not have wished to see them (even) from afar," for in his Doubting Thomas, the artist has represented "the irrevocable conflict and the indispensable interdependence between" faith and doubt, scientific belief and religious skepticism, and the knowledge that arises from a leap of faith and that which is the result of "scrupulously punctilious inquiry."

Most concludes by observing that we live in a relentlessly skeptical age, and yet our relationships demand that we suspend for a time the very skepticism that has generated such advances in knowledge in favor of a trust that cannot be justified on rational grounds alone.  Thomas thus represents both the doubters and believers among us and within us.