Archive - 2016
February 22nd
Another Blank Page
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 02/22/2016 - 21:26I’ve been spending a bit of time looking at the blank page, trying to decide what to write, or perhaps, what not to write. I look at the news, the Uber driver in Kalamazoo who shot a bunch of people, the latest stories about the various political campaigns. None of that seems worth writing about.
I think about my spiritual journey. There is a lot to write about there, but things are still not clear enough for me there. I don’t have an idea taking shape into a poem. I look at my writing notes, and find nothing there developed enough to become a post.
Today was a long day, and I don’t have the energy to explore ideas deep enough and long enough to develop a post on some new topic.
So, I return to the blank page, and what is, at least to me, another unsatisfying blog post.
February 21st
How Should We Then Live?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 02/21/2016 - 16:41I attend a “mainline Protestant” church, an Episcopal Church, to be precise, and I’m currently exploring what God might be calling me to within the church. It is a fairly diverse church, but many of my friends at church are fairly liberal. When I was younger, I attended a wide array of different churches including some fairly conservative fundamentalist evangelical churches.
So, some of the recent discussions about what is happening with various different churches catch my attention. Recently, I stumbled across Peter Thurley’s On Leaving Evangelicalism (The Short Version). It references Rachel Held Evans, Liberal Christianity, Conservative Christianity, and the Caught-In-Between from a few years ago.
It seems like a lot of people are talking about being caught in the middle between conservative fundamentalist evangelicalism and liberal mainline Protestantism. There is a dualism that doesn’t see a middle ground, or, perhaps, something completely different. Thurley illustrates this with a reference to David Gushee’s Conservative and progressive US evangelicals head for divorce. Gushee draws the battle lines between “conservative evangelicals [who] mainly lean toward a Calvinist/Lutheran Gospel centered on Christ’s work on the Cross for the saving of souls, on biblical inerrancy and pure doctrine, and on conservative social values” and progressive evangelicals who “tend toward a Radical Reformation type Gospel centered on the justice-advancing ministry and teachings of Jesus, and on his message of the kingdom of God as holistic salvation and social transformation”.
Somehow, this sounds like a false dichotomy to me.
I thought about this today in church when our seminarian spoke about Jesus not coming to establish a new earthly Jewish political kingdom, and how we need to keep this in mind as we listen to current political candidates quoting scripture. To me, it sometimes sounds like the favorite verse of many of the political leaders is from last week’s Gospel lesson, the middle of Luke 4:6 “I will give You all this domain and its glory; for it has been handed over to me.” Context matters. In this case, it is the Devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness.
Part of the Old Testament lesson from Ash Wednesday seems to fit more closely with my liberal mainline Protestantism. Isaiah 58:6-7
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Another article that caught my attention this past week was Kate Bowler’s Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me, where she writes about finding she has stage 4 cancer after years of studying the American prosperity gospel. As I read this, I thought of Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss.
With all these things in my mind, the title of the noted evangelical, Francis Schaeffer’s book, “How Should We Live Then?” comes to mind. Where is the common ground for conservative fundamentalist evangelicalism, liberal mainline Protestantism, and maybe even some followers of the American prosperity gospel?
For me, some of the answer comes through a weird amalgamation of fundamentalist evangelicalism, Franciscanism, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Part of my Lenten studies includes reading emails from the Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr.
"A true inner experience changes us, and human beings do not like to change." The Gospel is about our transformation into God (theosis), and not about mere intellectual assurance or "small-self" coziness. It is more a revolution in consciousness than a business model for the buying and selling of God as a product.
The word ‘theosis’ caught my attention. Wikipedia has
In Eastern Orthodoxy deification (theosis) is a transformative process whose goal is likeness to or union with God. As a process of transformation, theosis is brought about by the effects of katharsis (purification of mind and body) and theoria ('illumination' with the 'vision' of God)…
According to Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, the primacy of theosis in Orthodox theology is directly related to the fact that Orthodox theology (as historically conceived by its principal exponents) is based to a greater extent than Western Catholic Latin theology on the direct spiritual insights of the saints or mystics of the church rather than the apparently more rational thought tradition of the West. Eastern Orthodox consider that "no one who does not follow the path of union with God can be a theologian".
As I read all of this, my memories come back of my evangelical friends in college. “Have you found Jesus? Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Savior? Have you made Christ the center of your life?”
Last year, I had a deep religious experience where I was overwhelmed by an awareness of God’s love which is beyond comprehension, in spite of my own failings. This love wasn’t just some bible tract phrase or some grand concept. It was deeply personal and came with a call, to show that love to others.
I don’t see this as bringing prosperity, health, or any sort of power. I do believe that this love is something that needs to be brought into the political discourse, showing love to all candidates, no matter how challenging it might be. I believe it includes a call to love the sinner, no matter how offensive we think the sinner might be acting and recognizing that we are all sinners. I see it as including feeding the hungry, to provide shelter to the homeless, and clothes to the poor.
This is something I suspect I will frequently fail at, that we will all frequently fail at, but that we must all seek to do more. Two of the questions from the Episcopal order of Holy Baptism comes to mind.
“Do you put your whole trust in his grace and love?” and “Do you promise to follow and obey him as your Lord?”
As I think of my own discernment process and the process of others, the idea of putting our whole trust in God seems crucial. This is something that is done in communion with God, and not just our own doing.
Perhaps this is where Eastern Orthodox theosis, Franciscan transformation, and the fundamentalist idea of a personal Savior all come together. Perhaps this is what we need to be seeking during Lent and throughout the year as we seek to understand how we really should, then live.
February 20th
“Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism?”
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 02/20/2016 - 18:57I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about otherness recently, trying to tie together various thoughts, borrowing from Lacan, Levinas, Delueze, Guattari, Focault, my own spiritual journey, and, of course, others.
My thoughts all remain someone unclear and disorganized. This is at least my third attempt to try and organize clarify them into a blog post, but I expect, instead, it will be more like random, incompletely partially related thoughts, with no clear beginning of end.
One idea I’m grappling with is Lacan’s L’Objet Petit a, the unobtainable object of desire, with its echoes of Melanie Klein’s object relations and Winnicott’s transitional object. Related to this is the Le grand Autre, which I have even less of an understanding of.
In my mind, Le grand Autre is somehow connected to collective memory, to official history, orthodoxy, the agreed upon master narrative. This leads me to Foucault and counter memory, and perhaps through that, back to Lacan and L’Objet Petit a. We connect with one another sharing our stories of the hidden unobtainable desires, and it becomes a counter memory, an antithesis to the dominant collective memory, and ultimately the two become synthesized into a new collective memory.
I think of this in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Rhizome. All our L’Objet Petit as connected to collective memory and counter memory, constantly evolving, shifting.
Somewhere in all of this is alterity, with a nod to Levinas, our sense of self and not self in this great dance. As I try to wrap my head around this, I stumble across Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume’s Radical Alterity. The MIT Press page about the book asks, “Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism?”
My thoughts move to my spiritual journey, my discussion with my bishop about embracing otherness, our discussion of Christ’s otherness, fully human and fully divine. Fully self and fully other? How do I embrace otherness? Otherness of people different from myself, whether it be Donald Trump, or the homeless man on the street?
“Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism?”
I’m reading Slow Church right for one study group. The book challenges the much of the discussions about church growth, but it feels like it is just another angle of the same insular cultural narcissism. I’m also reading The Monastery of The Heart for a different study group. A Benedictine based rule of life seems much more other, much more of a challenge to cultural narcissism.
These are all still random thoughts in the early phase of formation. I worry that to the extent I’m still scratching my head over all of this, it may seem even more obtuse to many reading it.
Yet I put it out there. Does any of what I’m saying make sense to you? Does it spur thoughts in your mind? Do you have insights that might help me out?
February 19th
The Other
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/19/2016 - 12:54There is always an other in the room with us
whether we know it or not
whether or not we are alone.
There are those we know;
our mother,
an ex-girl friend
from long ago
who still haunts our memories
whom we’re never able to quite forget,
and that teacher
from that time in class
whom we’ve never have been able to forgive.
There are those we don’t know;
the unknown soldier in the faded photograph on the wall,
the homeless man that once slept in this room,
or the man
who died of AIDS
that no one remembers.
There are those we seek to know
Elijah, Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus.
Then, there is the other inside of us,
the other we seek to deny or kill off,
our greed and lust,
our desires for earthly goods,
that nice watch that man is wearing,
our desires for physical pleasures,
as we look at someone attractive.
It is hard to write in the voice of the other,
those we remember, those we repress,
and those we seek to serve.
Note: This was written for a poetry group prompt about writing in the voice of someone else
Finish Later
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/19/2016 - 00:12This evening, I went to hear Jonatha Brooke at The Kate in Old Saybrook. It is very late, too late for me to try and write anything very coherent, but I want to get down some of my thoughts, even if I’ll need to finish them later.
One of the songs she sang was parts of some of Woody Guthrie’s writing, including one with the words, “Finish Later” at the bottom. When I heard that, I knew that would be, at least part of my quick evening post.
It seems like more and more of my writing is falling into the finish later category, ideas for blog posts, parts of poems.
It made me think of a poem by Billy Collins about unfinished poems by Paul Valery, January in Paris. These partial memories make me think of another poem by Billy Collins, Forgetfulness.
But this is a digression. Another song Jonatha Brooke sang was about her mother as the Alzheimer’s took hold. “Are you getting this down?” her mother would ask her. I’m trying to get some of my reactions to this evening’s music down.
One of the things she spoke about between songs was about that doubt that wracks all writers. I touched on this doubt in a recent blog post talking about Lent and The Accuser. It relates to my daughter’s book, Don’t Make Art, Just Make Something. I’m sure there is material here for me to explore in my discernment process. Where does art, being a creator created in the image of The Creator, yet tormented by doubt about being good enough, a good enough writer, among other things, fit in?
One other song she sang was about when her mother went into hospice and she wasn’t ready. She sang about The Last Call, and Red Molly’s song “The Last Call” came to mind. Poetry, music, art, woven together with doubt, uncertainty, reconnecting art to daily life, reconnecting spirituality to art and to daily life.
There is so much more that needs to be written about all of this, when I’m not over tired, when I have more time. So this, too, will end with
Finish Later.
