Retreat time…

I’m going on a retreat for seminary orientation so hopefully I’ll be back with the blogosphere by Friday.

Happy blogging!

j

Lies, truth, and who cares?

I was responding to a post on one of the sites I read a lot but don’t usually comment on, The Episcopal Majority, and I started thinking.

The post is called Falsely Accused, by the Rev. Thomas B. Woodward.

Now don’t get me wrong– I think he did a great job of writing that post.

I just have my own opinion and the post got me to thinking.  I have a slightly different emphasis and I wanted to express it.  After all, that’s what the blogosphere is all about, right?

And before we start– I may sound a little… angry?  bitter?  something in this post.  I realize that I’m arguing with an invisible debate partner.  So no offense to anybody in particular when you’re reading- it’s not personal.  At least it isn’t intended to be.

My original comment on the post was essentially along these lines:  Yes, the ultra-right wing folks may say all those things about us, and no it may not be true- but it doesn’t really matter.  The thing which we should focus on is the fact that it doesn’t matter whether or not it is true.

We are not the Presbyterian church, who has a Book of Confessions, which is revised every time they have their General Convention and dictates what their orthodoxy and theology is.  The Lutherans have something similar- the Book of Concord, and so do other denominations.  We just don’t work that way.  Oh, I know, I know– we can talk about the quadrilateral and the articles and the creeds and blah blah blah.  That’s just not the same thing.  We are not a confessional church.  We do not spend much time talking about our common theology.  We spend the bulk of our time worshipping together around a common liturgy.

There may be an embedded theology within that liturgy.  But we don’t spend countless hours talking about it in our common life, other than maybe in the blogosphere.  I can’t remember the last time I heard of a local parish meeting on whether or not to revise the theology to more clearly re-articulate our belief in predestination or not to present for general convention, and so forth.  We are more busy acting on our faith than talking about what our faith should look like from an esoteric point of view.  And that’s one of our strong points.  We should sell it, and sell it hard.

If we don’t like it, or if some don’t like it, then they should propose changing it.  Let’s sit down and have an honest and open dialogue about having a confessional document listing out what we think about all of it.  Everything.  Every cotton-pickin’ thing.  And we thought GC06 was hard.  Because if we’re supposed to all agree, I think that’s what we’re talking about.  But I don’t think that’s what anyone really wants.

Being Critical of the Bible

In orientation at seminary this past week, we were studying a book which I have discussed here several times.

In that discussion, at one point I began a comment with, “I loved this book, so don’t get me wrong when I’m critical of it by saying that…” or something like that.

The professor who was facilitating the discussion (who happens to also be one of the Bible professors) made an interesting comment that I think is worth repeating.  She said, “Just because you like something doesn’t mean you can’t be critical of it.  That is true of this book, and it is especially true when we start discussing the Bible.”

I appreciated that comment.  I wonder if somehow some people might not be confusing the ability to be critical of the Bible with the belief that the Bible is not worth studying.

I’m sure that there are those for whom it is dangerous to be critical of the Bible because it raises fear within them- critical thinking may undermine their whole belief system.  Something like this:  “I believe that Moses wrote Genesis as it was revealed to him from God.  To be critical of that work by reminding me that it was actually authored after Israel was in exile in Babylon and that the authors had that specific historical context undermines my ability to believe in the story of Genesis because now I have to find a new way to believe that the story of Genesis is Holy.”

Of course, that is an extreme, and I would hope that there are relatively few of us left who believe the literal creation story, with a canopy hanging over us that has stars suspended from it and so on (as Genesis and the authors depict).

But hopefully you get the point.  Even when we get to the finer points it seems to me that many times the response is many times less “interesting observation, but I disagree” but more “that’s heretical because if I try to believe it my apple cart would be turned upside down.”

Breaking Down Walls

Today, in our continuing new student orientation at seminary, we had more faculty introductions.

One professor said something that especially caught my attention.

He said, “We tend to define ourselves by those we disagree with.”

I found myself identifying with that, much as I didn’t want to.

Over the past week, I have been in a place of much movement.  I started on the defensive, and due to a few limited instances of over-analyzing things that I said or heard would be very quick to try and hear things that I disagreed with in an effort to quickly shut-down so as to protect my ideology/theology.  I had been concerned about being in a conservative part of the country, and I moved here knowing that I would potentially have to make a conscious choice to reassert my position in order to keep it.

As the week progressed, I realized quickly that this is going to be a very rough three years if I try to keep that up.  I am not going to be able to learn without opening myself up.  Staying on the defensive takes a lot of mental energy, and prohibits my ability to process information that can also be formative.  Turning on the filter, in other words, filtered out too much.

We had several sessions yesterday that were very inspiring- seemingly direct answers to my prayers about how to deal with this.  I don’t know if more progressive faculty were put in front of us, or if I just felt that way.  But we heard directly about how our experience will be shaped by the fact that we won’t always agree with faculty.  We heard about the need to find our passion- to stay connected with our call- and let that carry us through the difficult times in our ministry.  We heard about the need to trust the process of formation that has been carefully planned and developed not to deliver us into a specific shape or substance chosen by the faculty or anyone else but instead to form us in such a way that we will find the shape and substance given to us by our calling.

That was helpful.  That, combined with some helpful conversations with some students about the diversity and fallibility of all of us, eased my mind greatly and allowed me to relax.

AND I touched based with a few non-seminary people, got off campus a little and had dinner with some non-seminarians for the first time in a week… a little break never hurt anybody!!

A Quick Note on Subject Matter

As a tenured almost week-long seminarian now, it’s become clear to me that writing much about my seminary life isn’t going to work in this forum because our seminary is so close-knit and doing so might be seen as an invasion of that inner-seminary life.

So I’m going to have to get creative about my content, since I imagine over the next three years most of my inspiration will likely come from my life experience as a seminarian…  I have one such topic in mind at the moment but the kids aren’t awake yet and I’ve got 30 minutes to get them up, dressed, fed and off to school, so it’ll have to wait!!

j

Social Justice and Pastoral Care

Well, I’m not quite sure where this post is going to go today.

We had a site visit yesterday as part of our new student orientation for seminary.  My assigned site was a local Episcopalian-run homeless day shelter.

A few days prior to the site visit, just to set my mental context for the day, I had a few experiences worth mentioning.  When standing around some of the campus housing talking to some seminarians and their spouses, there was some level of… surprise when a seminarian mentioned that some local homeless people may be using the pool in the middle of the quad for bathing quarters.  My oberservation is that the spouses in particular had a level of fear about homelessness that I’m not judging but observing.  I would imagine that because their children play in this area, there was a concern about some of the side effects we were discussing (human waste, etc.) leading to unclean conditions in the area.  On the other hand, I (only half-jokingly) suggested we put a bar of soap by the pool to see what would happen.

Then I had a conversation immediately prior to the site visit with a seminarian who had spent some time at the shelter as a chaplain.  He told me about some of the issues he faced trying to help folks that he met, and some of the social issues involved in causing homelessness in Austin in the first place.  Apparently from his perspective one of the biggest problems is that prisoners, when they are released, are given $20 and their prison id and told that they can use that id to get work, which isn’t correct.  But to get a driver’s license or state id costs $24 and requires a social security card.  To get a social security card requires a birth certificate.  So there is a whole sequence of events that has to happen before a person can even get an ID to begin looking for work; something I had certainly never thought of.

Why isn’t there a “rainbow color”?

My son, who recently started 1st grade, was assigned the “red group”.  That means that all his activities are pretty much segregated for simplicity’s sake to this group of kids assigned to the color red, including eating in the cafeteria.

We were talking about eating lunch last night, and he said, “I don’t know why there can’t be a rainbow color.  Then I could eat with all the people.”

I thought that was pretty profound.

The gay flag, of course, is a rainbow flag meant to symbolize the diversity of the gay community.  Since moving to Austin I have been very acutely aware of racial/ethnic differences in our society and how we, in the name of “political correctness” seem to ignore them despite the very deep impact they still have on our society.  The non-ethnic divides certainly exist too- as our current “Anglican crisis” shows us.

I started seminary yesterday – new student orientation, anyway.  One of the things that struck me was how different the students were from what I expected.  I’m really looking forward to going through these next three years with these folks.  There was a lack of ethnic diversity, which didn’t surprise me, but a really broad spectrum of life experiences.  The church and the way she operates in this part of the country is just very, very different than what I am used to back in California.  It will be interesting to watch as we all go through our formation together and see how we change; how we either split into “red, blue and green” groups or into a “rainbow” group.  Let’s hope that we elect to go for the latter, even while our mother church appears to be opting for the former.

I guess I like sitting with all the people at lunch, too.

j

Time out for time outs?

Last week I went to my four-year-old’s pre-k orientation.  Her teacher said something I thought was very interesting.

When discussing discipline, she said she didn’t use “time-out” because she didn’t think it worked.  Instead, she used only positive reinforcement.

On a separate but related note, Saturday I gave my son a time-out because he clamped his hand over my daughter’s mouth when she was irritating him.  He was very upset, and cried.  Then last night I gave him another time-out– this one more serious (a time-out from video games)– because he did it again.  From his response you would think there had been a death in the family.  I really thought he had gone into shock.  He didn’t talk to me for about an hour and just stared at the wall.

I’ve been struggling to put these two events together.  I have always believed the traditional notion of development that choices have consequences, and part of healthy child development is to help the child learn the connection between the choice and the consequence based on both positive and negative choices.

Lately, though, I have begun to question that strategy.

As the pre-k teacher indicated, it is far easier and more productive to focus on the connection through positive choices.  I think as humans we have a tendancy to focus on the negative choices; or should I say the negative consequences.  At least most parents I observe focus more on negative feedback than positive feedback, and many religions within Christianity focus at least as much on what we “should not” be doing more than what we “should” be doing or how well we are doing it.

To some degree that is probably a difference between healthy adult development and healthy child development.  But at least in my own children, one in particular (my son) I have noticed that due to his sensitivity about negative feedback, I really can’t use much negative feedback without having an unintended consequence of damaging his self-esteem.

I’m not generalizing here– I’m talking specifically about my son.  I was at another event the other day where another child was spitting water at someone else in the room and the teacher could do nothing to stop him.  It appeared that no amount of negative feedback could stop him from continuing.

Job

The Daily Office is in Job now.

I’ve got mixed feelings about Job.  I like the representation of Job as the human who has enough trust and faith in God to wait and endure because he knows that God is just and will not curse God.

I don’t like the portrayal of God in Job.  I usually just write it off as a kind of a fable meant to teach a lesson about how we should respond to the unknown actions of God rather than a lesson meant to teach specifically the nature of God.

What the reading made me think of today was just that.  How Job suffered and suffered, and eventually was justified in waiting for justice.

That’s a great story for liberation theology, since we’ve been on that topic for a few days.  The oppressed, or anyone in any kind of suffering, can take heart in that story (although again I find it a little traumatic to think of God as allowing or gambling away our peace of mind and health in a cosmic bet with Satan, but ignoring it again focusing on Job’s response…).

If we all were to have Job’s “patience” (is he really that patient?) then I wonder what the world would look like.  If we all waited, demanding justice for the ills of the world rather than submitting to the circumstances around us- not in an “entitlement” sort of way, but a real peace and justice sort of way- what would the world look like?  Not a new question, but one worth thinking about every once in a while.

B033, the resolution that caused so much sorrow in our church, is still causing sorrow.  It didn’t wear off.  We’re still demanding justice.  I suppose from the orthodox perspective, they believe they are demanding their perspective of justice too.  So maybe all is as it is suppose to be.

So I’ll try and be patient, and wait and see where God is taking us.  Job sure had a lot more patience than me; it is so easy to want to force fit my answer in the place of God’s.  Especially if you think God is prone to gambling.

j