Irony at the Airport.

I am caught by irony at the airport. It’s not a place I would choose to go, but alas I must. However, each time I go to the airport, I am pleasantly surprised. With each visit, I find myself with room to laugh amidst the jumbles of people. Again, I must emphasize the airport is not a place I would choose to spend excessive amounts of time. However, it is absolutely hilarious. It’s the one place where middle and upper class Americans unashamedly sprawl out on the grimy carpet for a nap. There are many germy mysteries in the carpet, but the carpet is good enough for a nap nonetheless. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Upon arriving at the airport, it’s all rush and chaos and lines and cluelessness and stress. People look down at their flight information that they printed at home and then back up at the apparently confusing signs that indicate which airlines are which. And then when it’s settled, it’s time to wait in line, awkwardly shuffling overstuffed luggage with each step forward. It’s seems as if that man in front of me despises the clothes he packed.

After being sufficiently baptized into the airport by the check-in lines, it’s time for the notorious security checkpoint. This is what airports are known for. If you’re with a group, then at least one person is going to get stopped. The question is “who will it be this time?” “I just hope it’s not me!” It’s time to take off your shoes and belt. You begin to walk forward and then you hear a loud beeping. You realize there’s loose change in your pocket. Oh well, maybe next time.

The security checkpoint is finished. What’s next? It’s lots of people looking around as if suddenly struck with the inability to read large signs with simple print. And then after discerning the seemingly arcane meaning of those strange signs written in crayon, people race off to their “gate.” Why is it called a “gate” anyway? Why not call it a “portal”? But then again, this is the twenty-first century, so I suppose we could call it a “door.” This may be my favorite part of the airport experience because as I sit and wait at the “gate” I finally have the opportunity to take in my surroundings. At the airport, people dress all sorts of ways. Some dress as if they have just left a business meeting and perhaps they have, while others seemed to have just rolled out of bed. Still others seem to be on a hike! It’s confusing because then I don’t know if I’m underdressed or overdressed for the occasion. Should I have worn shiny shoes or hiking boots? Or should I have dressed as that older gentleman with extra short khaki shorts and tall dress socks with white sneakers?

Once at the “gate,” everyone sits and waits and waits and waits. Then I begin to laugh. All that rush to sit and wait and wait and wait! And then, as if it’s fate itself speaking, someone (a mythical figure at the airport) announces that it is time to board the plane! People swarm to the “gate” only to wait again until their section number is called. My favorite guy at the airport is the guy who races to the front of the line blocking out everyone else, and then he is the last one to be called to board the plane. He epitomizes the airport’s rush to wait mentality.

Once on the plane, the airline reiterates its low expectation of the travelers’ competency by instructing us on the proper procedure of buckling a seatbelt. Thank you airline. I only wish you had been there this morning when I got in the car. I wasn’t sure what to do.

Connecting flights are similar to referees. If everything goes well, you don’t notice. But if you miss your flight or a referee misses a call, it’s a serious offense! But it seems connecting flights and referees are each needed in their own way.

The baggage claim area is a mixed bag so to speak. It’s the best of times and the worst of times. Different people have different ways of waiting for their bag(s). Some folks seem rather indifferent, as if they despise whomever it was who packed the bag they are consequently required to pick up. Conversely, others wait as if on the edge of their seat curious what it is that the airline has in store for them. I remember one particular occasion my bag had been “lost.” I would’ve like to have asked who lost my bag, but it seems as though my bag had been placed on the wrong plane by a phantom.

The airport is hilarious. I can think of no other place that has such a potential for such a diverse collection of people, and as a consequence it has the potential for the most unexpected hilarity along with perennial hilarity. It’s a stage of comedy where the world converges with the sole purpose of diverging.

An Incomplete Reflection for the Church’s Consideration

Changes have taken place in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Many have nodded with approval, while others have been horrified and have leapt overboard. In the following I shall speak as an evangelical who holds the biblical text to be an authoritative text for the church. And I am speaking primarily to evangelicals in this denomination. This is unequivocally an incomplete reflection, for there are many sides to the goings on in the Presbyterian Church on which I shall not touch.

Christians are often hypocrites in many areas. We evangelicals, in particular, have an abysmal track record with tithing, among other things. That needs to change. Before an evangelical opens his or her mouth with any sort of rebuke towards anyone, the evangelical tithing trend needs to change. Currently, it’s embarrassing and shameful. Spirituality is a wisp of air without generosity and self-giving, and yet we evangelicals continue the scandal of wispy spirituality and self-indulgence. In this regard, we evangelicals need to stop mincing doctrinal words and need to add some oomph to our game.

The Christian life is one of perpetual confession and repentance – marriage is teaching me this. Messy situations do not call for escape. They call for grace, mercy, patience, repentance, reconciliation, and cleanup, among other things. We Americans prefer escapism to repentance and reconciliation. In this regard, we evangelicals should try being a little less American.

How many stones were cast in John 8? I suggest, instead of picking up stones, we pick up our crosses. Instead of taking the dust out of the other’s eye, we practice self-examination. Instead of condemnation, we live in faithful obedience striving for righteousness.

Over the years, I have admired most those who continue to do what they believe is right, though everyone around them seems to be adding to the moral cacophony. These sorts of people are analogous to lighthouses. A lighthouse is not needed in the daytime, but at night when the seas rage and threaten life itself, a lighthouse needs to shine as bright as it possibly can. This means not avoiding the darkness and the storms but shining through them and in spite of them.

The Way and the American Way

I am a naïve seminarian who lacks wisdom and experience. However, I have two eyes and a heart, two eyes that see and a heart that feels. I wanted to write this blog before I accrued too much American common sense and ingenuity.

While reflecting before actually writing this blog, I nearly wept thinking about these things. We in America have done the very thing the prophets warned about. We have built temples for ourselves declaring them to be in worship of God (Yahweh). Helping ourselves get away with murder, we have conveniently spiritualized Yahweh’s wishes for justice and peace. Instead of seeking to be a community of tangible justice, we have sought to be a well-ordered corporation with peaceful “souls.” The community of saints has devolved into a pseudo-saintly institution – this sentence is pregnant with sorrow. Jesus’ teachings have been spiritualized, and consequently righteousness is understood as something intangible, something “spiritual.” Since being made intangible, righteousness need not be enacted by the Christian community, for “righteousness is nothing more than what Jesus transfuses to us.” Jesus may have done such a thing, but is not the community to live righteously? And what does this mean? Is it righteous for the Christian community to spend millions of dollars on its temples and to give fifty cents to those in need? Is it righteous for our American dreams to trample the marginalized? This seems more akin to worship of mammon than of Yahweh.

Things must change in American churches, if American churches wish not to slip into irrelevance and hypocrisy, which it seems already to have done. This change will not happen overnight. It will take the extreme effort of many people over a period of time. But change must happen nonetheless. This change must be theological and practical.

American churches must do the truly “spiritual” thing and seek righteousness, living according to the Way. American churches might takes notes from some of the early Christians and some of our contemporary Christian brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. Perhaps, some might say that we have evolved since the early church. To that, I must say that, though the early churches were not free of problems, we seemed to have devolved and shame on us.

American churches must be what the church was called to be, and with a prophetic voice, the church must speak out against the injustices so common in our society, so common that we have grown accustom to them and render them as simply “part of the ways things are.” But we are not called to be a community that walks along the path of the way things are. We are called to be a cruciform community that revolts against the way things are.

Shall we continue to be a corporation that walks down the path of the American way or shall we be a resurrection community that walks up the path of our master, Jesus the righteous?

Artistry and Theology

I write this blog as a novice in almost every sense of the word, as one who is traveling through an M.Div. Nearing the end of my first year of three, it strikes me as quite peculiar that we in the arcane field of theology are not taught artistry. Any artistry we might have been taught is apparently supplanted by priority for truth. But I daresay, is not truth creative? And should we not consequently be taught to articulate truth creatively? Should not the spheres of the theologian and poet collide?

And that brings me to a particular person, who posed a particular question and who received a particular response.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

…

“And who is my neighbor?”

In response, Jesus proceeded to tell a parable. Why is it that Jesus told a parable in response? I don’t know. But I’d wager a guess that perhaps Jesus opted to tell a parable because he did not want to spend the next hundred years writing an arid discourse in response (he allowed for the next two thousand years’ worth of theologians with multiple PhD’s to do that). Of course, I am being facetious, but not entirely.

Theologians ill trained?

And so what have we with these ill trained theologians? Uninteresting dullards preaching from the pulpits to uninterested congregations in the pews. It’s a charade.

Are we to boil down truth to its “essence”? Are we to boil down truth until nothing is left? We are boiling down truth so that it evaporates into thin air in search of someone more interesting. And yet theologians boil down the truth so that it may be rearticulated “in more precise form.” Precise? Perhaps, empty and insipid. I do not contend that theologians have ill gotten goods but ungotten goods!

It thus seems to me that if an M.Div., and just about any theological education for that matter, is to carry any weight, then it must involve more of life. It must involve artistry. It must involve the poetic. Is not creation itself poetic? And if that is the case, then true theology is inherently poetic.

Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts.

Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by

Them be said,

The sky o’erarches, we feel the undulating deck beneath

Our feet,

We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,

The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of

The briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,

The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,

The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,

And this is ocean’s poem.

Will the rocks shout out? They already are.

Theopoetics

A single voice asks, “What is truth?” And thousands, millions, billions answer in response. In the east they answer with chants, dances, and riddles, and in the west they answer with analytic discourses, arid charades, and pseudo-theological chicanery.

My gospels professor said earlier this quarter, “People who read poetry will be better readers of the gospels…” I thought he was being facetious. As the quarter has progressed, I have realized he was serious and have realized the wisdom in his pronouncement.

A line of poetry or a paragraph of story cannot be matched by a volume of discourse, however well articulated it may be. It is poetry that plumbs the depths of truth and surfaces again without losing an ounce, an ounce of something true. And it is the person who reads poetry and it is the poets themselves who plumb the depths resurfacing in silence. In silence because it was in the depths that truth was spoken and having since resurfaced they are appropriately silent.

Much ink, sweat, and blood is spilled every generation answering the question, “What is truth?” But I say, “Let truth be truth lest it be dismantled into something else.”

“What is truth?” Ask a poet I say, ask a poet!

A Few Formative Years

Mud six inches thick. It swallows your ankles and threatens to take your knees too. Every step is a comprehensive bodily effort. Finally, some drier mud to sit on. Buzzing overhead. That’s the sound of bullets. Every few seconds a whistling sound and then an explosion and dirt flies everywhere. It’s difficult to see with the smoke. Another corpse missing two legs and a head. The blood and mud mingle into a dark muck. It’s just another day in the trenches.

My favorite show comes on in three minutes. “Hey mom, is dinner ready yet? I’m gonna eat in here.” Cool breeze. That’s the air condition. It’s Monday and can’t wait for the weekend. Nothing to do but chill and watch tv. Maybe go out with friends and catch a movie, maybe play pool. It’s just another day in my palace.

Both are happening simultaneously in the lives of American teenagers. The war wages on and yet many of them live like royalty with a parent to serve them.

I am still young, but I am just high enough on the “age-hill” to look back on my teenage years with some bewilderment. I have mixed feelings about those years. Some times I refer to my teenage years as my own personal “Dark Ages,” which is completely accurate – however, I do not think historically speaking it is accurate to call the medieval period the “Dark Ages,” but that’s another matter entirely. When I look back on my teenage years, I have no clue how I made it out alive and in one piece, albeit I took some shrapnel in both my legs and my chest, metaphorically speaking of course. I think I made it out alive by some stroke of luck or providence, whichever you prefer. In either case, I feel as though I had little to do with it.

It strikes me as rather strange that those few years can make or break a person’s life. Or perhaps those years do not make or break a person’s life, but those years impact the trajectory of a person’s life to a large extent.

It would almost seem that I should run around to every teenager I see to tell them that they just need to try to survive those teenage years doing as few puerile things as possible lest they be swept away into dark ally ways and dank dungeons for the rest of their lives; and it will be for the rest of their lives that they have to think about it.

It’s survival. It’s life in the trenches and bullets are buzzing overhead. One peak over the crest of the trench and that could be the end. It’s life in a palace and one too many movies and you might wake up eighty-five years old without a credit to your name, apart from successfully asking your parents for gas money.

Yet it seems impossible for an American teenager to realize the profundity of their predicament. Needless to say that is why so many take a peek over the crest of the trench to be met with a cold metal bullet between the eyes. That is why so many seep into their late twenties playing video games for the majority of their days. Thus, it is these formative teenage years that strike me as most scary, scary because though there are many things to worry about in my pseudo-adulthood it’s the teenagers who are in the trenches and do not even realize it. That’s the scariest aspect of all: that they do not even realize they are in the trenches! And they seem incapable of realizing it. They dance along the edge of a knife without a care, for they haven’t a clue that one misstep will cut them in two – imagine the trajectory of that. They tap-dance on the edge of a cliff as if they are in the prime of their life with little to nothing at stake. And yet everything is stake!

What then is to be done? Maybe a bulletproof vest to start?

Again, I must emphasize that I am a young and naïve seminary student with little experience outside of school. However, I must add that I have some experience in the teenage trenches as well as the teenage palaces. And those years were not so long ago for me, though they seem like a lifetime ago.

Sometimes the best thing to do when you’re lost is to get a guide who knows the territory. Those who survived those formative years might try to partner up with those who are still in the trenches and seemed to have lost their way. It’s not much, but it is a start.