Tuesday, July 31, 2007

America's Next Top Pastor

HT to the InternetMonk for this hilarious episode in reality TV:

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Friday, July 20, 2007

Interpreting the Story

The saints are the true interpreters of Holy Scripture. The meaning of a given passage of the Bible becomes most intelligible in those human beings who have been totally transfixed by it and have lived it out. Interpretation of Scripture can never be a purely academic affair, and it cannot be relegated to the purely historical. Scripture is full of potential for the future, a potential that can only be opened up when someone "lives through" and "suffers through" the Sacred text.

Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI
Jesus of Nazareth

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Saturday, July 14, 2007

Living in a Large Enough Story

About two weeks ago, I was listening to Dr. Marva Dawn's public lecture entitled Living in a Large Enough Story. The content of the lecture, but even moreso the title, seemed to resonate with a number of other sources that I was interacting with both before and after.

One such source was Irish philosopher Richard Kearney, who was interviewed in a three part CBC Radio Ideas broadcast entitled The God Who May Be. In one of the three parts, Kearney talked about the way the stories we, as a society or culture, tell ourselves shape and limit the reality we experience. One example was the stories about Irish self-identity — stories about the clear and unalterable differences between the British and the Irish races that had been told for centuries. The fact that these stories had no real basis in any scientifically observable reality did not stop them from creating and maintaining a reality of polarization in Northern Ireland. It was only after people began to tell stories of Irish self-identity rooted in the experience of the Irish expatriates around the world — who greatly outnumber the Irish in Ireland, but who still maintain fierce Irish pride identity even alongside other patriotic identity — that it began to be possible to conceive of a way in which the "two solitudes" could share power without either abandoning their own self-identity.

In effect then, the old stories were too small to permit a solution to "The Troubles" — such a solution required a much larger story, and indeed a story that enlarged the people shaped by that story.

Albert Borgmann, in his book Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology doesn't use the concept of story, but he does document the way in which our technologies have reshaped our reality, and generally in a reducing sort of way. Many things that once involved a whole community of people have now, through the wonders of technology, become things that can be enjoyed fully (?) entirely on one's own. Music, for example, once required the gathering of musicians and audience, can now be experienced in far greater quality and high fidelity on one's personal iPod. Indeed, I have been told that one of the latest "things" is for kids and young adults to get together at an iPod dance — where everyone get out and dances to their own iPod playlist. This strikes me as the ultimate in drawing a large crowd so that we can all be alone together.

While the connection of technology to story may not seem obvious at first glance, a little reflection shows just how much the technological culture relies on stories to fuel its juggernaut — stories told in many styles but mostly in 30 seconds. The entire marketing industry has developed to tell stories which encourage us to become ever greater consumers of the fruits of the technological machine.

Ultimately though, these ubiquitous small stories are small not just because they are short. Actually, their principal smallness lies in the way they make up an overwhelming story that says to each of us, "Your basic meaning and purpose in life is simple: to be a consumer", and the longer we live in this story, the smaller we become as people — ultimately we become little more than just a cog in a big machine; a battery plugged into the Matrix to provide energy for the machine world, as it were — metaphorically, if not literally.

There are, to be sure, other collections of stories focussed on a different theme: stories that tell us that our value, our worth, is achieved by accomplishing some great task. Gordon MacDonald addressed this theme in a recent print issue of Leadership Journal, in an article entitled "The Dangers of Missionalism". Missionalism is what MacDonald calls adherence to this story theme, and considers it to be particularly a leader's disease. (I would have used "missionism" or "visionism" for what MacDonald proceeds to discuss, with "missionalism" left for a different sort of thing, but that wouldn't have fit that issue's theme of all things "Misional" nearly so well. Granted, that's a small quibble about an otherwise well-conceived and well-delivered article.) MacDonald calls this "ism" a disease, because it has the long term effect of crippling the leader's soul. Or to put it another way, that story is just too small to live in without being shrunken into something less.

Getting back to Marva Dawn, the Church has been called into being as part of a very large story, and for the purpose of inviting all comers to live in this large, and soul enlarging, story. This story has cosmic scope and room for all — in this story there really are no small parts, since our value is not achieved by making our own great name nor by being fodder for the machine, but as a gift freely given — a gift that is so much larger than what we are in the habit of articulating.

What is so astounding, therefore, is that my own experience with church is that so many seem to be so full of their own variants of the larger culture's small stories. In so many ways, the large and enlarging story that is ours by heritage and by calling has been neglected in favour of the little and belittling stories that we repeat to ourselves over and over, little realizing that while they may borrow Biblical, religious and churchy language, they really are more akin to the small stories of our surrounding culture — even, or perhaps especially, when they seem to most vehemently opposed to the surrounding culture. And the longer people live in these small churchy stories, the smaller they become.

I suppose it ought not be surprising that George Barna is finding so many people leaving "church" in order to seek after God. I know I seem to find the struggle against all these small stories to be becoming a much harder and more exhausting task. Perhaps it is the haunting call that glimpses of that large story are generating that make it so much harder to live in and around all the small stories, and particularly those of the churchy variety. And yet, I am convinced that it is not possible to live the Christ-following life, to live in God's large story, by oneself alone — to do so would ultimately end up being just a variant of The Truman Story in which I play in every scene — a frighteningly small story, to be sure.

So what to do? How do I do whatever is necessary to enter more fully into this large story? I already know many of the suggestions that would come from asking these questions into the crowd of church attenders and church leavers that are seeking their own answers, and find them to be too closely connected to the very small stories I'm struggling with. The only answer that I can find is to do what I can, knowing that it will not be enough in itself, and crying out like the psalmists of old, "O Lord, make haste to save me".

Lord, have mercy on your people, for your great Name's sake.

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