Anyone else unable to put down Patti Smith's new memoir of her coming of age in New York City and her early relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe? Just out, Just Kids is a beautiful and literate story is getting lots of press and is #100 on Amazon, a surprise bestseller. Check out this review in the New York Times and a wonderful interview with Terri Gross on NPR's Fresh Aire. I loved Horses and got her recent album Jubilee when it first came out but never listed to her best-selling album Easter till the last couple weeks. All in all she is compellingly engaged in religious questions, including primary Christian ones. I wonder, however, if Christians are reading her book. I say this partly because of her reputation as the Godmother of punk, not the most pious genre, but more because of her subject in the book, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. His photography of the gay S&M scene, most notably in his "X Portfolio", raised the heat in the culture wars during the 1980s and earned him the condemnation of many a Christian group. Yet clearly they were both deeply marked by Christian roots and by the search for ways to express their sense of life's fullness outside the constraints of traditional orthodoxy. They provide an example for me to think through the framing of my work on Broken Hallelujah as I head into the chapter on Evangelicals and pop culture including a case study on Focus on the Family. The typical 'either/or' framing, no matter how nuanced, does not offer a very sophisticated way to understand how God might have been working in and through these two intense and beautiful artists' lives and work. Smith signals as much in her epigraph in the book:
Much has been said about Robert, and more will be added. Young men will adopt his gait. Young girls will wear white dresses and mourn his curls. He will be condemned and adored. His excesses damned or romanticized. In the end, truth will be found in his work, the corporeal body of the artists. It will not fall away. Man cannot judge it. For art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him.
The conservative Christians damned him and the secular liberals romanticized him. Neither, Smith seems to say, really understood him because in order to do so one has to see his work--and any art--in God. She has the lay theological perspective to do just that, and it sings. I am the truth, Jesus says. Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Somehow within the web of lies we've woven, the ways we've twisted trajectories within which our lives must be lived, we can nonetheless find ourselves caught up in moments of deeper connect to the life that gives us our lives, and in touch with that deep grace we can live fully alive. Perhaps we can say that kind of a 'yes' without having to gloss over the brokenness, the troubling aspects of our lives or of the lives lived by Mapplethorpe and Smith. Perhaps, exactly in looking directly at the contradictions of broken splendor we can see the space in which God is at work in us.
So in an effort to be real, I am trying to give up working so much at home and be more present especially to my kids as a discipline for lent. That means less computer time at home, mainly, and admitting that when I have my computer in my lap the kids think I'm working even if I think I'm goofing off. It is a discipline tied to that basic baptismal practice of saying yes and saying no. The renunciations of the powers of evil are dramatic but the way it works out in everyday life is more subtle and difficult.
Anyway, so I've not been and won't be blogging as much as I have at times because the hours of the days don't allow it. Perhaps Monday mornings will be a time to get a few done before heading into the week. We'll see. But blessings on your Lenten journey and let me know if you want to what crazy thing you've taken on as a discipline this forty days.
On heavy rotation for me today, U2's beautiful anthem from their last album titled, "Moment of Surrender."
This lyric particularly helps me today.
My body's now a begging bowl
That's begging to get back
Begging to get back to my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control
Sin is captivity. To acknowledge our brokenness, to open our hands asking, pleading, for the renewal that can release us from that control and again offer us the rhythm of our heart, of freedom, of the love of God.
St. Benedict of Nursia lived in the late 5th to early 6th
centuries. Legend has it while living in solitude, he was befriended
by a raven that later saved his life. He is most remembered for
writing the Rule of St. Benedict that, among other virtues, teaches
humility. Inspired by this Rule we humbly offer St. Benedict’s Winter
Ale, a hand-crafted ale using generous amounts of dark roasted malts
and the finest noble hops for a robust warming flavor. John Zappa, Stevens Point Brewery’s brewmaster, says this: “We
use traditional abbey-ale ingredients, including a highly kilned dark
malt, a two-row dark chocolate malt and even a two-row pilsener-style
pale malt. Together these impart a smooth, well-balanced maltiness to
this beer,” he explained. “St. Benedict’s Winter Ale is top-fermented
with a special Belgian ale yeast, and we cellar-condition it at the
brewery. The end result is a dark reddish-brown ale rich in flavor
accented by hints of dark chocolate.”
I've been on a bit of a philosophical pilgrimage the last month or so into the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is one of those great paradoxes in that most recognize him as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century yet most don't have any idea what he said, let alone what it meant. I've been mucking around behind a few theologians I admire (Rowan Williams, Fergus Kerr) to understand their common mentor Donald MacKinnon. One of MacKinnon's key issues was epistemology and the debates between realism and idealism. MacKinnon was, it turns out, was influenced by Wittgenstein and encouraged Kerr to read him leading to Kerr's excellent book Theology after Wittgenstein. So since Christmas break I've been reading a book I've had for years but never read: Ray Monk's fantastic biography Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. I have grown in my admiration for this deeply troubled and brilliant man. I'm especially interested in what I might describe as his practical bent in thinking generally and philosophy generally. Here's a characteristic and punchy quote:
"What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausability about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious . . ." (In a letter to his friend Norman Malcolm)
This approach to thinking extended to his religious views, as well, and I would think ground a robust critique of (some) Lutheran tendencies to grasp after pure doctrine as our solid ground upon which to build our version of Christian life. Here is is comment from the notes published as Culture and Value:
"I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life). "
Yet despite this the paradox is that he remained a deeply religious person who could not bring himself to practice faith. He could not pray; "it is as though my knees were stiff," he commented. I feel myself being changed through this deepening study of W but I'm not altogether sure how, except that I know I have been drawn to his work over years, through many pointers including Charles Taylor and Pierre Bourdieu. So while life goes on, I have this intellectual self-study going on that at every turn forces examination of the direction of my life. More on this to come in this space.
Anyone who knows me knows I like Pete Rollins, the incendiary theologian from Belfast. I've hosted him both at Yale and at Luther on book tours for How (Not) to Speak of God and The Fidelity of Betrayal. We've talked on and off over the past four years about his ideas and theodramatic explorations with Ikon. I've learned a lot from Pete--his work is brilliant, whatever critiques one might have on any number of levels.
So I'm not surprised to have some friends email me with questions about the (now second) spat between Richard Sudworth who blogs at Distinctly Welcoming and Pete. The current mash-up is over Pete's intellectual dependence on the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and to what extend we ought to worry about Zizek's status as a Christian (among other things).
A couple too-short replies to this circumstance and broader issues it raises for me before I get back to writing--I'm madly trying to finish Broken Hallelujah, my next book, and finding it extremely difficult to move quickly on. Writing is actually always like this for me, but I forget that it is, and become overly critical of myself.
1. Not that many people care about Pete, Richard, and Slavvoj debating the monstrosity of Christ. I served dinner at the homeless shelter on Saturday night. The family of Ben Larson, the Lutheran seminarian who was killed in the Haiti earthquake, worshiped at our church a couple weeks ago. Etc. The suffering and struggle and deep need cries out and the most brilliant scholarship mostly remains the privilege of the elite who are fed and housed and whose details of life are cared for. I was so struck by a NYT snap of Cornel West's life. I want to go home to my kids, hear about their day around the table, sing our song of thanksgiving before eating, mundane as it is. Such things as these are the bearers of the Holy, and I don't need Zizek or Rollins to tell me that.
2. Come on, people, just read the hard stuff. Now that I've said most people don't care, for those of us who do, buckle down and read Lacan, read Hegel, read the hard stuff and learn from it and make up your mind. Don't take Pete's word for it, or even Slavoj's. I have had a long and very fruitful dialog with philosophy and critical theory, including Lacan (who I quote in my first published article "Ideology, Ritual and Christian Subjectivity" ) One reason I've liked the emerging theological conversations is that they insist participants read hard books before they come. Well, not really hard books. But something. You can't just show up expecting to be filled like an empty gas tank. Come with your gas tank full, ready to run, to challenge, to engage, to question. And when we read, people, it doesn't matter if authors are Christian. We'd never read Isaiah or Job if that was the case. I'd say it is better, sometimes, if they are not; that critical proximity to common issues of concern make such thinkers very challenging in the best ways. Take my friend Miroslav Volf. He couldn't write theology without Nietzsche on his shoulder. Foucault is never far from mine.
3. Those of us who want change in the church can get obsessed with cool new ideas just like we flip over cool new technology. But I'd like to say this. We are the recipients of a deep and rich tradition. Its convictions, spiritual disciplines and ritual practices go deeper that we ever get, and extend more broadly than we can ever know. Simple things like liturgy done really well with and for a mourning family in the face of tragedy are not that 'hip' but they are powerful in ways we can't say but know. Good old ordinary church, done well and faithfully, has more riches to offer us that we might have even understood possible. At his best Pete is deeply aware of this and playfully engages it. But by his own admission he hasn't been part of a 'regular' congregation for a long time. So I worry in the absence of dealing on a week by week basis with blue-haired ladies like Myrtle, he might fly off into the ether and lose the vital tether to the everyday challenge we pastors face in leading communities week after week in worship and Christian living. Not that I think he will. But I value submission too much to put up with cavalier dismissal of the church. Luke Johnson told me long ago that the much harder journey lies in the direction of loyal dissent.
4. But those of us who want change in the church ought to get some guts and experiment boldly. We in the ELCA have seen decline every year of our church's life and that ain't stopping soon. I now teach at our largest seminary and I for one refuse to teach for a dying church. Pete (and others thinking provocatively) have given me the desire for risk, creativity, experimentation. I'm increasingly sure we also need something like what Pete created with Ikon--a third space beyond home and church to try out things that will spark our imagination for what can happen both at home and at church. To this end a few of us at Luther and in the MSP area are going to form an alt worship collective that reads, talks, plans and engages in creative worship interventions in the life of the cities (email me if you'd like to connect with this effort, launching this spring). The first book we're reading, however, is not high theory but stories of action, similar to the second half of How (Not) to Speak of God. Called Creating a Scene, the book is by the New York collective Improv Everywhere, and it will spark our imagination about where God is at work and ways we can open ourselves to the disorienting experience of actually being made God's flesh.
Here's an example of their creative work. Anon, and +peace, Chris
Check out Ann Power's provocative take on the ways the Grammy Awards highlight changes in music as multi-performance, multi-media and social media impact how people experience music and the arts. Her blog Pop and Hiss at the L.A. Times is consistently one of the best I read. I think she overrates the 'end of the album' however. What's happening is the album and its work is changing as a result of a number of factors, including the whole digital music experience and the ability to get one song, or three, rather than albums. The counter argument comes in part from Green Day's win for best rock album and its basic concept, a rock opera, is not a new concept. They took a page from The Who and Queen, among others, in doing this. And Kings of Leon, who even Jay-Z claimed had the best song of the past year, do pretty straight up stuff, album after album, developing their sound to be sure, but with a kind of classic energy that recalls The Ramones or Patti Smith. So have things changed? And if they have, how? Is it really that profound that Bon Jovi played a song requested by fans via social media? It is an interesting moment we're living in. Bono says they don't make any money from putting out an album, and haven't yet made a profit on their massive tour despite it being the biggest spectacle in rock history (perhaps only eclipsed by their own ZOO TV tour). The Black Eyed Peas have flexed their style to follow club trends, also not a new move, but interesting to see DJs setting the pattern for albums rather than the reverse. Hip-Hop has been doing that for decades, but it perhaps is spreading to other pop genres as Kanye West has wanted it to do. So perhaps things are just more fluid, more creative, and more loosely connected to the big label managers. That, I'd say, is a good thing, and bodes well for the future of pop music.
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