Avdat

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!

 

My life, such as it is

My comprehensive exams begin next week. I must pass all five exams in order to move to the dissertation phase of my program. One exam is a 20-25 page paper. My paper will summarize recent scholarship on Christianization in late antique and early medieval Gaul as well as the questions said scholarship raises.

In the other four exams, I have eight hours to answer four essay questions per exam. The questions are below the fold. Yes, I already know them; in fact, I wrote them! (In consultation with my advisors.) One of the biggest challenges with comps is composing questions you can actually answer.

You would think that studying for questions you've already written would be a snap, but I have never worked this hard in my life. My life has boiled down to sitting in a study carrel and reading all day, every day. It's not hard like coal mining, but it's mentally taxing. The challenges include exorcising the demon of reading without comprehending, despair over ever fully mastering the material (what one of my professors calls "control of the sources"), and despair over having anything new to say about texts and artifacts that scholars smarter than you have picked over from time out of mind.

I remember Joa Garagiola calling a baseball game once, and bemoaning the fate of poor catchers who catch knuckleball pitchers. Joe said that even catching a five man rotation, you never got away from it. You'd opened the refrigerator and there's a knuckleball staring at you.

I feel the same way about comps. I go to bed at night composing answers to questions in my head. (I don't recommend this. It's nothing like counting sheep.) I compose answers while going for a run (which I insist on doing. I may fail these exams but I will not come out of grad school fatter than I came in!) I find myself composing answers in my head at the dinner table. Tonight I even summed up an answer out loud for my long suffering wife.

If I'd worked this hard in high school and college... (But if I'd worked this hard back then, I never would have had time for fruitball, or watching trains demolish the offerings we made on the RR tracks, or wedgies, or meaningful conversations with parricides and future stars of true crime novels and made-for-TV movies on the way to EB 201 in Broughton Hall.)

If you aren't in the business, you may find these questions mildly interesting, mostly boring or just plain mystifying. But if you are in the business, and you have advice or tips, feel free to comment or Facebook me:

Sleepwalking through Easter

Lent. Meh. This was the most spiritually indifferent six weeks before Easter I've ever experienced.

I thought about adopting some sort of new, Lenteny discipline, but anything that came to mind seemed forced. So I plodded through the usual: morning devotion, get kids to school, plow through one more book on Merovingian France, eat dinner, run, family time, evening prayer, sleep, wake up from anxiety dream about comps, go back to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat.

On Sunday I did change it up by not going to the library and going to church.

I could tell it was spring, but I couldn't tell it was Lent. Why not? I chalked it up to the misfortune of my Saint Matthew's Passion CD ruined by crayons melting on it in the car, and my grad school budget ruling out purchasing a new copy.

I chalked it up to the practical atheism inherent in being a religious professional. How many of us are so earnestly interpreting texts and the tradition and yet utterly oblivious to their power to interpret us? We become Wizards of Oz. Behind the curtain, we conjure up mission, meaning and even God himself for those who listen to our words.

I also chalked it up to the subject matter that confronts me every day in my carrel. I swear to God, if I read one more story about a Christian bishop conspiring with a Christian king to have his half-brother and his infant nephews assassinated...

But I figured out what it really was when I got up this Easter Sunday morning, opened the Times-Dispatch, and saw a classmate of Ethan's on the front page:

For 17 years, Karl and Linda Peterson have been fighting — in courtrooms and schoolrooms, in doctors' offices and living rooms — to bring consistency to a child born to chaos.

On this Easter morning, a time of rebirth, James Peterson has never been closer to revealing himself as the young man his family prayed lay within the labyrinth of his autistic barriers.

On Good Friday, in Mechanicsville, James — the young man who for years wanted to be alone and barely spoke — went bowling with friends.

"We are on a long journey, and there is a long way still to go," said his mother, Linda, as James padded around the family's Hanover County home last week. "But the signs of accomplishment and growth we had always hoped were there have never been more obvious. He has become a new person from what he had been."

This month, James, 17, ended six years of schooling at Dominion School for Autism, which began in Westminster Presbyterian Church and is among the few intensive, hands-on learning and behavioral treatment centers in the area specializing in helping autistic children.

"James became someone who was incredible in wanting to engage, who thrives when he's congratulated, who grew with positive reinforcement and developed a strong sense of self-advocacy, which he'd never had before," said Jennifer Morgan, his teacher there.

His entry two weeks ago into Northstar Academy, a private school in Henrico County for special-needs children that expects a high degree of behavioral self-control, was a long-sought goal. "Years ago, I told myself if he ever was able to go there, I would be the happiest mom on Earth," Linda Peterson said.

That quote by Linda Peterson in the fourth paragraph--I could say the exact same thing about our situation. Things were very, very bad this time last year, but then they started getting better. And they keep getting better.

Pastor Janet announced that she was organizing a new Sunday School class for middle schoolers and pretty much told us that Ethan would be in it. Now Ethan had never made it through a Sunday School class before. But we did as we were told, and he loves it. The other boys in the class (they're all boys) have accepted him, or at least put up with him. I suspect this is due in part to the fact that they have their own issues as well, and due in part to the fact that Ethan earned a little street cred with them one Sunday when he lifted up his shirt and showed them his surgical scars.

Laura has said that one of her biggest fears about leaving Salisbury was finding a church that would accept our whole family. They loved Ethan at John Calvin Presbyterian, but he was theirs from three months of age. When they aren't yours, they're harder to accept unconditionally. But the Gayton Kirk has.

I could go on and on. He broke his camera last summer, and instead of beating one of us up over it, or breaking a lamp, he spent his own money on a new one. He came up with that idea all by himself.

I attribute his success to his having the right amount and variety of medication in his system, the outstanding education he's getting at the Dominion School, and to his own maturity.

When he was younger we grew afraid of punishing him for misbehavior because it just threw gasoline on the fire. That's a maddening feature of autism--when you're so curved in on yourself that you don't respond normally to carrots and sticks.

Then we became acquainted with ABA therapy, which counseled us to ignore the bad behavior and lavishly praise the good behavior. So we started doing that, and it did seem to pay off (although you'd never want to raise a non-autistic child like that; you'd be raising a sociopath).

But by late last year we seemed to have gotten all the mileage we could have out of that technique, and still there were an annoying set of misbehaviors we weren't having success with. So one day, fed up, I rolled the dice. I said, "If you do that again, you'll lose your allowance for this week." Well, he did it. So I said, "No allowance."

"You can't do that!" he yelled. "I am doing it," I replied.

More misbehavior. "Now you've lost a second week's allowance," I said. And on it went until poor Ethan had lost a year's worth of allowance.

So I made him a deal. No misbehaviors, and he could earn back a few weeks every day. And he did! Rationality! God be praised!

And so this, you see, is why I had no zeal for Lent this year. Because for me, Easter had already arrived. What I described above as the seeming drudgery of my life is actually the secure rhythm of a rather settled life, unpunctuated by broken furniture, raised voices, bruises, and tears of rage, regret and fear, which was how our life was for a long, long time. Like Hawkeye Pierce, who only belatedly would realize that the shelling had stopped, it was only this morning that I realized that, in a penultimate but nonetheless real sense, The strife is o'er; the battle won/The victory of life is won.

Naturally, one would not want to reduce the Resurrection to mere normalcy. And there are those theological rigorists who decry comparing the unique event of the Resurrection to any old death and rebirth experience, like Springtime, for instance. Or even, I suppose, to coming out of the tomb of developmental disability.

But the New Testament makes some large claims for Jesus Christ, namely that all things were created through him. And the Church has made some equally large claims for Jesus Christ, that in the Incarnation he assumed human nature itself, and not merely one, particular human personality. So it seems reasonable, if not irresistible, for Christians to refer all events to the one in whom all things hold together. Or, in the words of the hymn In the Cross of Christ I Glory:

Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure

By the cross are sanctified

Peace there is that knows no measure

Joys that through all time abide

We made it through church today as a family! We sang Jesus Christ Is Risen Today, and Pastor Janet admonished us, in the words of Wendell Berry, to "practice resurrection." We hung out this afternoon, chatting on the phone with loved ones. We went to Bryan Park and walked among the azaleas. We ate a delicious dinner my wife prepared. And now I am going to go to bed.

Today we "sat under our own vines and under our own olive trees and no one made us afraid." If that's not practicing resurrection, I don't know what is.

In which I get up-to-speed on the Belhar Confession

I've been out of the parish and holed up in a carrel long enough that the MDiv students now know more about church politics than I do. The Belhar Confession has come up several times in Theology II this semester, a class in which I am a TA. Turns out that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is voting this year on whether or not to add it to our Book of Confessions. I didn't know what the Belhar Confession was, so I had to look it up. (Shorter Belhar Confession: Apartheid is a sin).

In this afternoon's section, in which we were considering the relationship of the Church to society and reading the Confession of 1967 in that context, one student asked why there was any opposition to the Belhar Confession since the Constitution already contains a document that condemns racial discrimination, namely C '67. Another student replied that some people fear that Belhar is a trojan horse for approving gay ordination.

Sigh. This is pure guilt by association. And faulty logic:

Some people who support gay ordination also support the Belhar Confession.

I do not support gay ordination.

Therefore I cannot support the Belhar Confession.

No, I don't think it follows either.

I suppose one could argue that since our Book of Confessions already condemns racism, why add another confession that does the same thing? But the thing about a Book of Confessions is that you have multiple documents treating the same subject. For instance, a majority of our confessions contain expositions of the Ten Commandments. Should we get rid of all except one? No, because there is value in the particular treatment that particular documents give to a given topic.

That said, I have a feeling that amending our constitution in this way is just one more symbolic gesture. Presbyterians are surfeit of symbolism, but what we need are deeds, not words. Despite our formal and seemingly endless endorsements of diversity, the Presbyterian Church (USA) remains overwhelmingly white, middle class and on the far side of 55.

One student quipped that the Confession of 1967 would have been a much more prophetic document had it been the Confession of 1957. Too right.

And that makes an interesting point about our consideration of Belhar. There's a whiff of Donatism at work here--establishing one's contemporary purity on the basis of the purity of one's ancestors. Only the Donatists had real martyr ancestors. We Presbyterians invent them by endorsing their words ex post facto.This gets us perilously close to those Pharisees whom Jesus condemned during Holy Week--the ones who decorated the tombs of the prophets of yesterday while stoning the prophets of today.

Somewhere I read that the chief predictor of a congregation's multiculturalness isn't its denominational affiliation but whether or not it was established before or after 1970. So it seems to me that if we want a truly diverse church we need to A. Establish new churches and evangelize young adults (who don't have the hangups about interracial worship and marriage that their elders do), and B. Train pastors to transform congregations imprinted by the segregationist culture in which they were founded.

That takes more than amending the constitution. That takes money. Big money. "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."If we care about breaking down barriers, to say nothing about making disciples, we'll put our money where our mouth is.

It also takes a willingness on the part of presbyteries to ordain and authorize people to work in new, creative and unorthodox ways to make disciples and found congregations.

I take it that either the money or the creative thinking is lacking given that the denomination has planted but 20 new congregations in the last five years. Whether we adopt Belhar or not (and let me be clear--had I been able to attend my presbytery meeting I would have voted for it), we are not a denomination that cares much about either making disciples or creating a multicultural church. Deeds, not words, tell the story. "Ye shall know them by their fruits."

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!

A Christian Dao?

We did Chinese religions in class last week, and the homework assignment was to read the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) and write two pages that answers the question, "What is this text?"

It's not an easy assignment. If your working definition of great religious literature is "profoundly obscure," you'd be hard-pressed to find a better example than the Daodejing.

In one of the best essays I read, a student wrote that what he loved about the Daodejing was the lack of coercion or compulsion here that seems to be in every other religion. He's right. Animism is all about wearing amulets or memorizing spells to manipulate the spirits or the ancestors into blessing your fields with a bumper crop, not a blight. In their classic forms, Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity are all about subduing desire, whether it's socially conditioned or biologically generated. And then there's the other-directed compulsion--everything from religious wars to blue laws and whatnot.

If you haven't read it, the Daodejing insists that an impersonal absolute, the Dao, is the warp and woof of the universe. Further, much of what passes for civilization, making a name for yourself, governing nations, winning wars, starting a business, etc., is so much futile swimming upstream. It's painful and stressful because you're going against the grain. Why keep hurling yourself against "the uncarved block?" It's an immovable object, and you are no irresistible force.

Just go with the flow. It's given to the crocuses to come up every spring. The trees blossom of their own accord. The house wrens turn up every April 15, right as rain. They're in tune with the Dao. And you'll blossom too, if you throw away your paddle and drift downstream.

I suppose that the natural point of contact between Daoism and the West is Stoicism, which commends conforming oneself to nature and fate, but there are hints of it in Christianity too:

Jargon watch, week of February 7

• Instantiate, instantiation
• Concresce, concrescence, concrescing

Instantiation was one of Carl's favorite words, and I can't believe I didn't include it in the original list. But it came up yesterday, so better late than never.

Ph.D. and Gender

Matt Yglesias posts this chart that breaks down newly-minted Doctors of Philosophy by gender and field of study:

I had no idea that my field, religious studies, would perform so poorly. I attribute my ignorance to:

1. Getting a Ph.D. in a theological seminary whose high percentage of female Master's Degree students skews my perceptions and,
2. Being a lifer in the white male club, which inevitably leads me to see the gender equity glass as half-full.

Of the three of us who entered UPSem in the fall of 2008 seeking Ph.D.s in the History of Christianity (me, Sandi and Christian) 33.3% of us are women. So yeah for my cohort for beating the national average!

(Unless you see us more as historians than as religious scholars, in which we underperform. But people keep telling Christian that he's not a real historian since he's a historian of religion, so we'll go with the religious studies category. Which really chaps Christian, and me too, come to think of it. Under the frumpy sportcoats with leather patches on the elbows, are labor historians and military historians really just union bosses and admirals in disguise?)

The most interesting analysis of this graph comes from someone named David Adams in the comment thread at Yglesias' blog:

It doesn't surprise me that fields with a low tolerance for ambiguity (both in terms of having very precise and objective answers (physics, engineering, CS, math, astronomy) as well as having no objective answers at all and therefore an implicit requirement for false certainty (philosophy and religion)) would attract the type of jerks who think they know all the answers and therefore to whom any difference of opinion reflects poorly on the Other (of which women are the most obvious--though I'd be curious to see other measures of diversity charted in the same way).

Fields that require a tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty (and biology fits the bill among the hard sciences as the workings of our cells and ecosystems are far more complex than interactions of particles, elements, or stars) will attract folks more open to diversity in their colleagues and diversity of opinion in general, and therefore more welcoming to colleagues unlike themselves with correspondingly different intuition about the subject matter.

I don't think it's stretching things too far to see the chart as a proxy for how exact and precise the "answers" to questions posed by the field are required to be.

Put differently, "Ambiguous research topic yields a diverse pool of researchers. Unambiguous research topic or mandatory false certitude yields a pool of white, male, douchebag theologians."

Roger that.

In which I am corrupted by comparative religions

So, I am teaching Into to World Religions this spring. And all I can say is, Props to the Jains. You know the Jains. They're the Indians who brush the sidewalk in front of them with a broom to avoid stepping on ants or other little creatures. Also they don't tell jokes, because most jokes involve some sort of exaggeration or tall tale telling, which is really a form of lying.

From a Kantian perspective, this is a religion that hits the ethical sweet spot. If you were "to act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should be a universal law," you'd have to be an absolutist about killing and truth-telling. And why shouldn't you be? If nobody killed anybody or lied to anybody, it'd be a virtually perfect world, wouldn't it? "Be the change you want to see in the world," said another famous Indian.

And Jains are graceful folk. They fast most of their lives, and then graduate to the next level of consciousness at a time and place of their own choosing by abstaining from drink as well as food.

True, they believe in an eternal Creation and not in a divine Creator. Some would count this as loss. But we have to admit that a Godless religion enjoys some apologetic advantages--namely immunity to atheistic complaints about theodicy. What a relief, not breaking your head over the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" You can just be a doctor or a pharmacist and move turtles out of the road, and the world will be a better place.

And there's reincarnation, and karma, and body-soul dualism, so there's the usual sops to Eastern and Western metaphysics.

If you weren't what you already are, why wouldn't you be a Jain?

Plus, you get to walk around naked.

Jargon

Yesterday a normal human being, i.e. not a theology student, pointed out to me my use of an unfamiliar word in this here blog: hermeneutic. All disciplines have their shop talk--the military is famous for its acronyms, for example--but for sheer pretentiousness, few can compare to theology.

I feel a meme coming on! So, I aim to collect as much God-jargon as I can, especially the kind you hear around mainline seminaries, and create some kind of absurd game with it. Here's my short list, mostly from the last time I was in school, before The End of History had cut off liberation theology at the knees, but there's a few new words in there too:

• actualize
• causality
• compatablist
• contextualization
• gyn-ecological
• hegemony
• meta-narrative
• missional
• post-colonial
• post-modern
• post-structural
• post-postal (a word I just made up for the next generation of mass shootings, whenever and whatever that may be)
• praxis

This language does have some potential outside the ivory tower. When I was a MDiv student I had a friend and classmate who absolutely dreaded telling the ladies at Moe's and Joe's that he was an aspiring Presbyterian minister. So he told them he was studying "ethics" or "philosophy." And when he'd had enough to drink and felt a little more honest, he'd tell them that he was "a keeper of the hegemonic meta-narrative." Yup, that's the clergy for you.

I'm short on verbs. So please, email me the words whose definitions still elude you, but you're too embarrassed to ask the meaning of (and you'll have to ask since they aren't in any dictionary). I will guard your confidentiality like a priest guards the confessional.