I suck at Blogging.

OK kids, Andy has flaws.

I know I know - it came as a shock to me as well. (Although, truthfully it came early. I was 4 years old and discovered that I physically cannot enjoy bleach as a beverage. Who knew?)

But truthfully I wrote that last post, fully intending to make notes along the way about reading Everything Must Change, and frankly, I HATED IT SO MUCH I couldn't bring myself to finish it. I got six chapters in, filling the pages of the book with assorted lines, circles, snarky comments... and just couldn't take the idiocy any more.

And here I am, 5 months later, grudgingly admitting I'm just not going to get to it. Frankly, to give this book the proper dissection and destruction it needs would require the kind of free time I just don't have.

Also (joyously), I discovered a blistering critique of McLaren's work (generally speaking) in the first chapter of Donald Miller's book Searching for God Knows What.

In it, Miller describes a (hopefully fictional) Christian writers' conference in Memphis, and a presentation by a nice southern lady on how to write a successful self-help book. Here's the 4-step formula:

1) Name a crisis. This isn't a problem, or a nuisance, it is a CRISIS. This crisis is life/world/eternity THREATENING, and your reader must FEAR the results of the crisis.

2) Name your enemy in said crisis. This can be a person, a group, a philosophy that has caused the crisis. That cause must be equated with the enemy of all that is good.

3) Describe the ramifications of the crisis, if left unchecked; compare this to the dramatic glory and beauty of the crisis if it is averted. You must describe a WAR against the enemy, and enlist the reader in this war. Your reader must feel they are the "good guy" railing against the forces of evil in this crisis.

4) Finally, detail a 3-to-4 step plan to deal with the crisis.


Now - Miller's point is that life, God, everything, is not so simple as to be summed up in a few neat bullet points. Our relationship with the Living God is a living thing - like any relationship (a marvellously obvious and profound truth). A book like McLaren's not only doesn't get the point of Christ's life on earth, it doesn't even grasp the point of its author's life.

My delight with Miller is that he calls McLaren out on the very exercise in shallow, uncomplicated thinking that is rife in evangelicalism. In the parlance of Volleyball, as McLaren tried to loft a ball over the net, Miller blocked McLaren's shot. More than that - it slammed an Ace right through the center of his court. It was so awesome I just wanted to yell "ROOOOOF!!!" (My apologies for the sports analogy).

McLaren's search for a "framing story" should stop with our identity as God's children. He should recognize two of his "deep dysfunctions" as borrowed from Marx. He should realize that "response called for by Jesus" is not just "hope" - but the actual power of God. Finally, he should recognize the apology he gives for his modes of expression as a page straight out of the Gnostic playbook ("the more passionate language would have been off-putting for uninformed readers (just as the understatement may be off-putting for informed readers, which shows my bias)." In that beauty of a sentence, he "dresses the emperor" (my phrase) to let you know that your qualms are probably just due to ignorance. Suffice to say, the word "nice" was sarcastically scribbled in this margin). These were just notes from the first chapter.


I've been around the block a few times. I met some of the most brilliant theologians and Biblical scholars alive today while I was at Princeton. I make no claims to any original brilliance myself, but I was trained well: know a skunk when I smell one, and Everything Must Change just stinks.

The McLaren Project

Well.

I've supported the Emergent Church movement from the outside, as one who heard some of the critiques of American Evangelicalism, and threw a fist in the air with an enthusiastic "hurrah!" when speakers told suburbanites to start serving. For example, my first taste of Donald Miller - reading Blue Like Jazz - was like drinking cool water on a stiflingly hot day. I love that book; I've lost count of the times I've read it. I even inflicted it on my Bible Study.

But.

I'd never read anything by Brian McLaren.

Having graduated from a place like Princeton Seminary, naturally I've been exposed to some alternative theologies. Some of my friends profoundly disagree with me theologically, yet we are dear friends and I love them. Even though they're wrong (teehee!). In my very first church interview, I was asked "how has your theology changed at Princeton?" and I said, "well, if I can be anachronistic," (which one should never be while interviewing with a church) "I think I've realized God is more of a Democrat than I'd have thought before." I could have thrown up on my shoes and not done a better job of ruining my chances for that job.

I was right and wrong that day. God is, in fact, more progressive in many ways than Republicans, but of course, he's also not nearly as indulgent as Democrats (not to mention that the Lord has a flat tax, and it's only 10%... which is freakin awesome). What I should have said that day was "I thought I knew a few things about God before I got here... but God is much bigger than that, and the kingdom of God is in the physical as well as the spiritual realms, and the call of god is to us in our spiritual lives as well as into the physical realm of the earth."

You know - something deeply profound and well thought-out, delivered right off the top of my head. Like you do.

But I've got my brain wrapped around taking the kingdom to the world, pressing for justice, feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, etc. I'm no big fan of the modern American Christian Enterprise (ACE, Inc. let's call it). I think most Christian devotional writers aren't worth they're salt unless they're dead (not to be graphic, but if their popularity outlasts them, you know they're not just the latest ACE, Inc.-sponsored fad).

So bundling all that together, I had heard some very good things about Brian McLaren. Then, I heard some deeply troubling things. I had a spirited conversation with a friend regarding these things, and I knew I needed to read the man for myself.

So - here launcheth The McLaren Project.

Phase 1 - Everything Must Change

I'm going to read and respond to his book, asking questions, and probably questioning his presumptions (you know - like you do). I welcome your suggestions along the way, and any of your own observations if you've read McLaren yourselves. It should be interesting, and I look forward to sharing the journey with all of you.

The Importance of Craziness, part 2

Artistry, it seems, is bound up in experience. It is experience, of a sort. My experience, the artist's experience, my experience of the srtist's work, and the experience of place and time - bound together in our mutual experiences of each other (both myself and the artist, and myself with their work).

But the question I raised a couple weeks ago, to what extent have we medicated away some of our finest artists? To what extent do we fear experiences of angst, depression, or mania, such that we pour pharmaceuticals down our throats and thus make everything "okay."

I considered this again with respect to Virginia Woolf. While gifted in remarkable ways, she was also (by most accounts) manic-depressive. She wrote powerfully moving things, and then one day put rocks in her pockets and walked into the river.

Probably if we'd had her on Xanax, Zoloft, Prozac, or something equally stunning, she'd be "just fine." But I doubt she'd be interesting. Or worth reading.

I find that I wonder about these things when I consider all our great artists who have been tortured and gifted... folks like Vincent VanGogh, Auguste Rodin... the list goes on. I wonder sometimes, if they lived in the modern age, whether they would contribute the same gifts to our common benefit, or would they just settle down and become Business Consultants at Deloitte?

I also wonder about this when I'm going through one of my depressive phases. You know - when the biochemistry dips a little, from lack of sunshine, or a crappy week of work, or the besetting of various traumas... and I wake up thinking, "just a few more days of sleep, and I"ll be fine. When a trip to the grocery store is a mammoth undertaking, and I have to plan all day in order to go to the driving range...

If I was on medication, I'd be "just fine." But owuld I cease to be Andy? Is our identity tied up in our experience of who we are, along with others' experiences of us... and along the way - does this make us a piece of art all to ourselves?

Scripturally, we are described as God's artistry - we are the experience of his creation, and we experience God's handiwork as we experience ourselves and know ourselves better. Along the way, then, it seems reasonable to suggest that if we are altering who we are in the application of self-altering medication, we cease to become who we are meant to be.

Of course, the big caveat her is the question of betterment: do we become more, or less of who we are because of the medication? Probably this is an answer that can only be answered by the individual in consultation with their physician, but the book Listening to Prozac offers an intriguing look into the psychology of psychiatric medication.

For myself, I refuse the application of medication because I don't find my moments of depresison all that stifling. (Plus - the ability to know I'm depressed excites my competitive nature, and I defiantly shout down the depression, and refuse to be subdued by it. Plus - I have rules against calling in sick simply because I'm tired.) But I deeply respect the needs of others who have to have the medicine in order to function.

I just hope we haven't lost any artists along the way, or that the voices of prophets aren't being drowned in pharmaceuticals.

The Importance of Craziness, part 1

Back in seminary, we started practicing some goofy music. At the time, I thought, “why on earth are we singing this craziness?” Now I understand: it was so I would have interesting things to talk about later.

“Let Nimrod, the mighty hunter, bind a Leopard to the altar, and consecrate his spear to the Lord.” – from Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart (1722-1771).

It was – quite literally – craziness. Christopher Smart was in an insane asylum at the time. Benjamin Britten took the poetry and set it to music that fit the mood: idiosyncratic, one might say.

I remembered all this while I read a review for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s performance of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's concerto "Nobody knows de trouble I see."

Apparently, the music was written in the 50’s in postwar Germany and, as the reviewer put it, “it represents the attempt of a German composer to find a place for an African American spiritual in the world of the then-new German music, which was trying to replace old-fashioned emotion with the scientific method.”

I wondered if perhaps this composer felt the postwar impulse to banish pathos in favor of logos was motivated by well-intentioned fear. Perhaps, trying to find a more wholistic voice that combined all parts of the self, he sought a voice of sorrow that could moan its hopeful pain through a highly structured musical medium.

As the reviewer points out, Zimmerman later killed himself, “caught in a nightmare from which he couldn't escape.”

Tragedies of this sort raise complicated questions for me. In the modern world, how many of our crazy artists would simply be medicated into happiness… have the pathos driven straight out of them? Is what we seek in psychoanalysis the discovery of a fully logical self? What of the passionate self? (This is, of course, completely ignoring ethos, the third leg of the classic rhetorical tripod).

Hmmm…. More on this later…

Are you doing any Journalling?

Once upon a time, during a particularly horrible time in my life, I was asked, "Are you doing any journalling?"

I think the idea was that, if I was journalling, it would give me an outlet. But I knew better. If I journalled, I would have a record of what was going on: how I was feeling, what was happening to me, etc.

So, "No - I'm not," I responded, "I don't want to remember what this feels like."

Every once in awhile I'm reminded of what that time was like, and still I'm glad I didn't journal my way through it. Sometimes the forgetting is important. But the limited remembering is nice, because it gives me perspective. "You see?" the Remembering says to me, "you've grown!"

Last night I finally saw "The Constant Gardener" for the first time, and I really liked it (I can always tell how much I like a movie by whether or not I watch the "extra features" on the DVD. If I REALLY like it, I'll rewatch the whole thing with the Director's commentary).

There's a scene where Ralph Fienne's character is back in London - at the house owned by his recently murdered wife, and all the memories of their former joyous life come flying back at him. His grief overcomes him (or more probably, kicks its way through his masculine facade) and plasters his face and fist up against the window, wracked in his sobbing.

And I thought, "you know - if he collapsed on the ground right now that would totally be me like 4 years ago..."

I'm glad I didn't write it down, but I'm glad I can remember sometimes.