My excuse...

I really don't care about so much of the stuff that seems to be the life-blood of the Church these days.

One of the problems for me of being a priest in this time is that I'm just not a program type of guy and right now the Church is all about program (still?--yes). I want reality, not programs.

I wonder if this is just the cost of doing business (and even that kind of talk is already deadly, BTW)... I wonder if it's just necessary in our time and place... Or is it just some by-product of the true religion of our time (What do we want to name it? How might we describe it?) that the Church has been (too easily) assimilated to... the religion that we really practice... a bowing down to the god(s) that we really trust? The kind of religion that has no problems with language like "the cost of doing business."

In any case I don't get it and I don't want to. The Church can only be retarded by it. It certainly isn't a neutral phenomenon.

I suppose this could all just be an excuse.

When it comes down to it, I just want to pray, to study, to celebrate the Mass (and the other sacraments) and preach, to teach, to offer spiritual guidance and pastoral care, and to be re-made by the Holy Spirit operating in these things and in the community that the Holy Spirit is re-making through them into the Body of Christ. Is that so strange for a priest?

promised land...

Have you seen it? The cross or the fish (ichthys) sticker on one side of the car or truck bumper and the flag sticker on the other? Even worse, the cross and the flag somehow made into one image?

When will we learn?

America is not the Christian promised land. Our promised land (the Kingdom of God) doesn't have geographical or cultural or ethnic boundaries.

"...with your blood you have redeemed for God, from every family, language, people, and nation, a kingdom of priests to serve our God."

(A Song to the Lamb, Dignus es--Revelation 4:11; 5:9-10, 13)

Something true...

How many books written to the brain... the intellect? How many written to the heart (not in the rich Biblical sense, but in the modern, emotional sense?)... to sentiment? Thiness... too much of it.

The very real problem of the Christian life and faith cut off from everyday people and yet the very real problem of people cut off from God.

Those who too easily claim to be in relationship to/with God (all "Jesus" this and "Jesus" that) usually make it harder for the rest of us (not to mention themselves) to really get to know him... the real him... because their "Jesus this" and "Jesus that" is an idol.

Libraries--certainly my bookshelves--are full of theology books. I don't know how many more we need. How many books do we need about God? How many words? Theology shouldn't be a matter of learning facts or ideas about God. Theology should lead us to union with God and to transformation in (and into) Christ.

How many years did I want to write big and serious theological treatises and join the ranks of the greats? Now I just wish I could be half as honest as Flannery O'Connor. I just wish I could write something true.

...like marriage without sex.

A Church without sacraments (especially the Eucharist celebrated in its full richness) is like marriage without sex. It might be church, but not the way it was meant to be...

Reflections on Authority

B. was the great artist one year ahead of my class in college. We all wanted to draw as well as he did. We all tried. It was our goal.

Near the end of my junior year (B.'s senior year), talking to Pat Schuchard (painter/professor) while looking at our work hung on the wall during a break in one of those long studio classes... looking at B.'s in particular... Pat says, "It's good."

"Very good," I agreed. Still in awe, I guess.

A pause.

"You know, he was that good when he was a freshman."

I did know that.

Silence between us (where the real communication happens). I got what Pat meant. B. had spent nearly four years here and to what end? All this time, energy, money and B. had never allowed himself to be a student... never allowed himself to submit to a master... never grew.

The theology of dogs playing on the beach

On the beach in St. Augustine, Florida:

There must be a theology of everything because I am pretty sure I was watching God’s hand, God’s joy in the play of two dogs on the beach… in the water and on the sand…

Whatever the theology of dogs playing on the beach, I’m sure it’s a beautiful one.

Apologetics

My heart just isn't in apologetics--in proof or arguments for the Christian faith besides transformed lives or (better) a transformed community. Apologetics just seems like a nicer way to coerce.

The truth is the truth. Some people get it. Some people don't. Just like some people get Quentin Tarantino, some get the Sopranos, some get Bob Dylan and some get Picasso. Most of us only half get it at best. And who does and who doesn't get it and how much any of us really gets it changes over time.

+

Disneyland. For whatever reason, very uncrowded. Lisa and I on a boat in Pirates (years before Johnny Depp found his way there).

Watching the animatronics when the attraction was quiet (the skeletons), not such a big deal...

But then the room when the song starts up in earnest... "Yo ho yo ho..." Spectacle. Energy. Ingenuity. Semblance of enthusiasm. But no one is on the boats in front of or behind us. When we passed through, no one would be in that room. No one watching, but those figures keep singing and moving. The hint of sadness as the spectacle continues and no one is there to enjoy it.

Maybe that sort of thing is about as close as I get to 'traditional' apologetics.

Too much Baez. Not enough Dylan.

Anglicans are so polite. We almost never get near the gospel. Why can't we worship with the seriousness and abandon of snake-handlers? We've domesticated God's grace. Not by "creating" sacraments or rites as too many evangelicals and pentecostals want to claim. Not by the fact of sacramental mediation. We've domesticated (Christ's giving of himself to us in) the sacraments themselves.

We're too much Baez. Not enough Dylan.

Between spits, the painting...

I’m in the dentist’s chair. The hygienist leans over me. She’s talking. She’s describing a painting she saw at the art museum. She doesn’t like it. It’s ugly, she says. It’s big. It dominates the room. It’s all black and grey and brown paint. It’s thick. She hates it.

As she describes it, I recognize it as an Anselm Kiefer painting. I love that painting. I remember standing in front of it for some time on more than one occasion. Ugly? Maybe. But beautiful in the ways that matter. If you stop, you can spend time with it. You can live in it a while. You can come back to it and not have exhausted it. That makes it a good painting in my book.

Between spits into the bowl, I tell her I know that painting. I like it. I think it’s good.

She gets all worked up. It just seems like a mess, she says. Why do you like it? she wants to know.

And here is the problem. Words. Because a painting isn’t about words. If it were, it would be a poem or a story or something like that. It’s a painting. But she wants to know why I like it. She wants words.

She asks, What does it mean?

I don’t know. What does the Grand Canyon mean? What does the ocean mean? What does freshly mowed grass mean?

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., Martyr

No matter how many times we say he was assassinated... No matter how much the secular left and the religious right (each for their own reasons) prefer to minimize the role of his Christian faith in his mission and ministry, we Christians should remember and insist that the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. was not assassinated... he was martyred. There is a difference and it matters.

...on April 4, the feast day of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Deadwood--What we were to be and what we actually are...

Watching Deadwood. Season 2. Episode 4. EB Farnum is frustrated… humiliated… And he says to Richardson, his chef, who is simpleminded… (roughly—a paraphrase) “You don’t know yourself.” And I can't shake the impression that this is true about all of us—we are all as wretched as Richardson. Made for glorious lives—a glorious creation filled with God’s glory… And yet we end up fallen, broken… I am struck by the discrepancy of what we were to be and what we actually are. Hightened, I guess, by the show’s depiction of such a grim, dirty, stinking camp and the beauty of gold sufacing here and there only to be lost again... squandered...

This is not a blog...

This is not a blog.

It's a collection of fragments...

...and since I am not an expert in theology or philosophy or cultural criticism, and since I have neither the brains nor the vision nor the discipline to make them into the essays or books they might become, fragments they will remain... like the broken pieces of the body of Adam that struggle against each other and yet ache for communion.

At least I'm not alone:

Fragmentary writing is, ultimately, democratic writing. Each fragment
enjoys equal distinction. The most banal one finds its exceptional reader. Each,
in its turn, has its hour of glory.

Of course, each fragment could become a book. But the point is that it will
not do so, for the ellipse is superior to the straight line. It is also a
matter of laziness: one has no right to waste time to no good end, any more than
to exploit oneself to no good end. And a matter, too, of compassion for words,
which have done so much work already.

By contrast with those who place all their hopes in the indigestion of
ideas and arguments--the abuse of ideas, the prostitution of words and the
textual harrassment of language would be an interesting subject for debate--you
will be judged on the brevity of your intuitions and arguments.

Jean Baudrillard--Fragments (Cool Memories III, 1990-1995)