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I told my cousin, Cheryl, today that I thought I'd put my e-mail up so that I could get some feedback from my readers. I've been told that I have some. In the interest of avoiding e-mail programs that scan the internets for addresses to spam, I'm giving my address in a form where you must supply the @ and the dot: fredericwise gmail com. That seems simple enough. I look forward to hearing from you all.

Untitled

An epic begins with an invocation of the muse. Sing Muse - the poet intones, yadda yadda yadda, this or that, and then commences with the middle of the story.
Today we live an epic, what Baudelaire called the heroism of modern life: where everyday each of us commences an existential odyssey armed with "the denial of death" and a few tools. We are either Moses, Odysseus, Aeneas, Agememnon, Hector, Achilles, Leopold Bloom or Stephan Daedelus. We have our friends.
We have our challenges: the TV where politicians and news anchors read off a prompter, is a kind of fake invocation of the muse, in an imitation of prophetic or Delphic ecstasy. And what is the word "media" but the word for middle - what is between us and understanding or misunderstanding. Media is hot and cold - as McLuhan said, and used by us or uses us. The CBS logo is the Cyclops, a corporation invested in diverting our attention. Is our only escape from this cave to blind the giant? Or else we risk being devoured.
What is the denial of death? It is that mechanism that allows us to carry on with our lives, otherwise we would be overwhelmed by the futility of it. Ecclesiastes is very aware of this mechanism and counsels us to live in the moment, not selling our future into a reliving of the past, nor becoming so absorbed with the past that the future surprises us. Live now. Love now. Enjoy this moment. Thank God for this very now. Create now.
Not an easy thing to do. We may wander 40 years in the desert or spend 10 years enchanted on some island. Will we find ourselves transformed into beasts? Will we be swallowed by the earth or refuse to enter the promised land, spooked by the unknown?
Giants and Sirens threaten and beguile.
How like Calvin's description of the dangers that await us simply by walking down the street or sitting in the privacy of your garden (Institutes I, xvii, 10).

Dancing

Sing Muse - wouldn't that be a great way to begin a sermon. Sing Muse, the man of infinite shuffle, who jigs and jives, who makes his way down river and up wind, who consumes wine curious and victuals greasy. Oh Homer Deranged, that man, that mensch unmentionable, who's sauntering shambling shoe scruff wends across woodland and road bed. That I may prove the ways of God to humanity sing the vim and vigor, the trim and trigger, the prim and pregger. Sing, Sing, Sing.
In media res, that thing in the middle, the nougat of a kernel of a chewy centaur, whereat and where four, I fake my shaker shakes at all and all that find me here and wrathful spewing and fuming and gating and gyrating a pirouetting lunair landing habitating and sating my hunger mungered mongering. Fish.
I ventured into this country on the middle river flat boated on a spring day carrying all my worldly goads and freshly shod and newly minted. Hey fellows manure Ol factly stated solid wastrels wassailing, camp me quarters and draw me shotters, my sisters daughters, I framed me a time and times again anon. Clacking and stamping stomped my insignia on pine top and birch bottom. Cedar maple? Willow. Willay. Verdant forest crawled down to the bank and I disembarking shifted my stance and plowed plains geometric, buffaloing my pace, a ring rang true and rung me up.
We fresh fished fresh faced fissured and moved swiftly, now straw-hatted; I stammered and stumbled how and wondered at the play of shadows on the wall. Stewing. I ate. Spewing I sputtered and buttered my candle on both ends. An ensuing happiness and postluding sappiness. A clenched hand does not possess, but the tighter the grip, the less it holds. The old factory ruins into the ground, and we gather at the tavernacle to sing and sway. Straw boat across the lack, waveless and placid, lured beef and beet end down eider down. And my hands shake now and it's colder in the morning and I take longer and have shorter and see and hear and the nearer and the drearer and the pier or the port.
Not to tell of the long journey and the affair of the kegs, the lumber mill paddleboat fiasco, the election of geese, the totem kegs of fetishville, the maidens of the sun dial patio, the unedible hors d'oeurvres and their strange design, the meeting without meaning, the cave of the winds warm and stinting, the apocalyptic events of the ice cream cart, the election of the fool from the wallow, and the migration of the clockwork of the tidy poltergeist.
To name a few.
I think I also baptized Stephanos, but anyone else I don't remember.
The flock of miner birds from the hill top cross cut.
Counter culture - yogurt with a purpose.
My politics were red; my hair was invisible.
The emperor has no clothes but does have good hygiene, which will do for the time being. Not to say that the emperor doesn't have any luggage. How is that? The cry of "the emperor has no tail" went unremarked at the time, and continues to be unremarked.
I carried a big stick which fell on my foot. I spoke softly. Thereafter I felt more free in my movements, not having to buy an extra seat for my stick. My foot thanks me, as does the person in the bottom bunk.
Now to the end, the period and the full stop. Sheep croftly and bury a fat steak.

Christ is Risen

One of the great paintings at the Chicago Art Institute is Picabia's "the priest" which I snapped a photo of here. I'm amazed at the size of it. Picabia, one of the founders of Dada, created a large piece here, I suppose from his post-Dada interest. In the 1940s he did a series of pastisches on movie posters. Mostly he's known for his earlier work. This piece looks like it's from in the teens or twenties, and it exhibits features of synthetic cubism - color variation, organic shapes. Note how the eye and face of the priest are suggested, but then fragmented. Perhaps this refers tot he fragmenting relationship of the Church and society of that time.
This photograph gives the sense of the painting's scale and size. It is a monumental image in this gallery space, controlling a large area around the painting. Unlike Seurat's Grande Jatte in the same museum, this painting doesn't draw people into its space but sends them back. In this way the priest is an intrusion, carrying a larger than life aura into the room, but an aura that people cannot connect with.

Good. Friday

One of the first classes I had at Columbia was Walter Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology class. One thing I learned from this class is the pattern of exile and homecoming or the progression of orientation-disorientation-reorientation. This theme is the theme of Exodus, but also the theme of the Abraham story, the Joseph story, and the greater theme of the prophets. As Christians we read the Old and New Testaments as this pattern writ large. And here at Eastertide, venturing from Lent to the Ascension, we encounter this pattern again in the Good Friday-Holy Saturday-Easter progression.
Even today I find reading his Old Testament Theology satisfying. In this class I began to take the Old Testament seriously: I had the evangelical habit of weighting my theological thought entirely on the New Testament at the time. Even though I had bought Breuggemann's Old Testament Theology in 1999, I had not engaged with it, or understood it, until in taking his class, being challenged by him, and becoming prepared to discuss with other students the book's content, I entered into a conversation: a description of dialogic truth.
Lately I've been reading from it as I go to bed at night. And I'm reminded that one important thing about God's speech to Israel is that people make a mistake when they treat God as just another actor on the stage. God does present himself as loving and sustaining, in solidarity with Israel, always faithful - but as Exodus 34:7b reminds, "who will by no means acquit the guilty." God reserves to herself a strangeness, a mystery. As God responds to the wicked in Psalm 50:21b, "you thought I was like you," the common mistake of humanity: to think that God is one fact among others, something to be investigated, experimented upon, and understood as acting in a predictable way. God, though, is elusive, as well as loving and merciful and just.
When God dwells among humanity in the person of Jesus, God continues to display unpredictable behavior, as well as accepting, healing, and challenging behavior. The cross is an example of this behavior par excellence, especially in that it is the recommended act in which we are enjoined to participate with him. He asks us to follow him, taking up our cross. What is a cross but an acceptance that people will act emotionally for us (as in Palm Sunday) and against us (as in Good Friday). A cross is not so much something we carry as something we discover - when we discover that we only need God's approval. A cross is also an intersection between desire and what we don't want, between love and abandonment, between life and death. Between chocolate cake and broccoli.

Maundy Thursday

We don't often think of the Three Graces as a Holy Week thing, and admittedly I've written the word Lent in the upper left corner. I have nothing today, but another transcript of something written earlier, years ago, in response to Billy the Kid's last words: "Pete, who are these people." The Kid had eluded his pursuers, Pat and Stacy Garrett of Elkhurst, IN, only to accidentally run into them at a tourist spa run by a friend in Fort Sumner, named Pete. The Kid had been taking a mud bath when he stumbled to the kitchen, caked with mud, and, noticing several strangers than mosts standing around, sought out his friend Pete. He went to Pete's room and stuck his head between the door edge and door jamb while asking his fateful question: "Pete, who are these people?" A question he never received an answer to, unless you count a load of lead heading toward your vitals as an answer. Pat and Stacy had stumbled onto the spa, having no idea that The Kid was there, and they were inquiring of Pete, in his darkened room, as lamps were scarce, whereabouts the Kid's whereabouts were. Imagine how surprised they were when a mud-caked Billy cracked open the door and asked his incurious untimely question. "Pete," he stammered, "Who" he questioned, "Are these people?" he queried? No sooner, no jayhawk, no aggie, had the words left his mouth than the clicker-clacking of liver loaders and spleen splicers snapped to and two and blasted towards his opened hands and mouth, coinciding finally with his chest, legs and adjacent bits of wood.
It's thought by the savants and cognoscenti that his last question- Are these people- foreshadowed the alien landings at Roswell 100 miles south and 67 years later. I speculate in Billy the Kid on Mars that Billy was spirited away by Martians to the Red planet just before the leaden bullets billeted their way into his luggage, and this is the beginning gist of my story of Billy finding the Femme Fatale and Lenny, the Russian bear, and the Buckarooskies attending his presence and strange teleportation.
I here as promised above supply the alternate version of Billy's final words that I had written under a different impetus:
[As guns blaze and Billy leaps for cover behind a flour barrel]
Billy: I find my life caught in a dialectic: past and future, sheep and cattle, farmer and railroad;
[switching guns]
Once freed of adolescent uncertainty, I embraced the ambiguity of adulthood -
YOU SONS OF BITCHES
an ambiguity wherein my very identity remained a question;
[leaping up he takes the schoolmarm by the neck as a shield]
I would wake up trembling and then I saw that only despair could drive me to accept the answer to this question- an answer of silence beyond past and future,
[he vaults onto a horse]
DAMN YOU LET ME DIE!
[his ear is shot off]
But an answer of transcendent position; I saw myself as ---
[has a sneezing fit]
--- Pete, WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

Holy Saturday meditation

Tomorrow is Maunday Thursday. Today is Wednesday without a name. If you've successfully kept the ashes on your forehead this whole time, you can wipe them off now. As for the ashes in your heart ....
Holy Saturday looms ahead. Hans Urs Von Balthasar championed a consideration of this day as a day of deep contemplation. The Easter story boils down too readily to Good Friday - Resurrection without an adequate consideration of what it means that God's son, the world's savior and Lord, has died, and died as thoroughly as any human being in the course of history. More over, that Jesus' resurrection is not just a resuscitation, but a genuine new life, a renewal of the very elements of creation. That is, just as God created all things good, ex nililo, so ex nililo resurrected life walks into a fallen creation. What can this mean but a pushing back the veil of creation's fallenness? A swallowing up of death - just like Isaiah 25 says and 1st Corinthian 15 repeats.
Holy Saturday is liminal space. In many ways it is like the life we live. In that day is a promise, a promise voiced by Jesus time and again, that he would be killed and rise on the third day, and,, coupled with this, that those who have faith in him would have eternal life, but that day also contains a grim reality that is persistent and undeniable: death is everywhere and colors even our happiest moments. Holy Saturday is the time we live in. Holy Saturday is 33 CE to the year x CE. Our lives take place in such an environment: death and life existing side by side; beauty and perversity; order and chaos - all is an exile between the orientation of an old life and the reorientation of a new life. This is the story of Exodus, the wandering in the desert. On Holy Saturday we are in that desert, Christ having split the Red Sea, journeying by stages until we cross the Jordan, the river of life.
Holy Saturday is a model of our Christian life, a life spent waiting for Christ's appearance, making all things new. Meanwhile we remain faithful. We have good days and bad days. Sometimes our emotions get the better of us and we lash out or fill with anxiety. There are time where we rise to the occasion and love beyond what we thought possible. The Holy Spirit helps us, awakening us to the possibilities of understanding each other, seeking peace and promoting social justice. At times perhaps we can see the perspective of history from a Sinaic viewpoint: on one side is Egypt, a place of violence and enslavement, typified by Good Friday, and perhaps we even long for the supposed benefits of such an existence - there we were able to indulge our hatred and anger and lust; on the other hand is the promised land, God's eschatological kingdom, Easter, where we discover that we are accepted by God and express our gratitude in works of love and faith. In Egypt we feasted on leeks and onions; in God's kingdom we will feast on rich food and supple wines.
In this in between place we are called to live out the story of God's generosity in a world that tells a story of scheming and grasping and lying where necessities are scarce and must be hoarded.

St Patrick's day during Holy Week

And why wouldn't Jesus go right to his local tavern after such a triumphal entry. Do we want to think maybe he went to a tea at the Swann Coach House and traded bon mots with the garden club over finger sandwiches? I think that in the headiness of the moment that the disciples got smashed. They would be coming out of their hangovers just in time for Maundy Thursday.
In both these photographs of paintings you can see my right foot wearing Merrills.
Top: Naked pregnant female Christ. In death rebirth, the pangs of a woman in labor. How I would have gathered you like chicks under my wing but you would not.
Bottom: St Catherine of Sienna.
Hello Mother-
Hello Father-
Here I am
With my stigmata.
Sheets are messy.
Clothes are ruddy.
Who knew holiness could be so awful bloody.
(sung to the tune of Heus Mater, Heus Pater, Hic Sum, In Castris Granadis - an old latin hymn. The exact hymn that caused Ambrose of Milan such consternation if I'm not mistaken. Some scholars think that this hymn may be contemporary with the Incarnation hymns in Colossians and Philippians, if not older. Some discern the influence of Q or Thomas in the pacing of its lacunae.)

Image with words

A beautiful day.
Though cloudy.
A bit windy.
Slightly chilly.
Though improving
tomorrow, only
to slide back
to the 50s.
I hope that we don't slide back to the 50s for too long. Can it already be Tuesday? Can tomorrow be Wednesday?
I feel bad about the bland church, and I've been considering ways to make its blandness work for it (and how helpful it would be if in CIFs churches would be honest and say "we're a rich white church and our best days are behind us. We enjoy paying lip service to concepts of growth and fidelity to the gospel, but really we just like to hear a sermon that doesn't challenge us so we can go home and watch TV." Or "we're thoroughly dull and afraid of our own bodies. The sound of our voice in a crowded room, when unaided by alcohol, spooks us." etc): one way would be accepting worship time as a time for drama in a low key Beckettian sort of way. Or farce in a high toned Beckettian sort of way.
It's difficult saying goodbye to Lent. Lent with its red carpets and parades. Lent with its lentils, each pea a little Lent, so that eventually you've gone from a bowl full to a mouth full to a stomach full of Lent. Lent barreling down the bowels to the Jakes. Odd isn't it? For Christmas retailers go on a 4 month odyssey of banging the drum; the assertion is made that consumer goods are a great substitution for love and forgiveness. For Christmas we've got Santa. Then for Easter we've got the Easter Bunny and people break out their best attire. The Easter parade, The Easter bonnet (with all the thrills upon it). But what does Lent have? Valentine's and Mardi Gras are carefully scheduled before it and thus take most of its glory. Lent is left to wander about in rags as it were, starved, a slow fast, with people moaning about giving something up (though the taste of this seems to be lost now a days). Show some enthusiasm. I hope that in these waning days of Lent that we all can savor the denial of it.

correct me if I'm mistaken

Yesterday I was wrong. It was Sarah Coakley who proffers 5 interpretations of the kenosis passage and its meaning for the incarnation. Her reference to NT Wright is his "exhaustive survey of the possible meanings of harpagenos [a thing to be grasped, booty] in this context" on p 81 of his "The Climax of the covenant." The title of her book is not "submission and the powers" but "powers and submissions." I can't understand why my memory reversed the terms. Her book is a good book with a wonderful Piero della Francesca image of the Madonna della Misericordia on the cover. Piero, as his friends called him, was an inspiration to 20th century American modernists, who saw in the geometric simplicity of his forms and the monumentality of his compositions something they wanted to do, without the attendant religious symbolism or necessity of church patronage. There's a relation between Piero and Cezanne. One of my art professors would go on and on about him and then do a painting of a big color field of gray with a collaged image from Hustler about the size of a postage stamp in one corner. He loved Ezra Pound. At the time he was very liberal, an ACLU officer, and I was very conservative. We got along wonderfully, and now I wonder at how gracious he was to me. He died in 1987 of cancer. The other day, as we were moving, I came across the bulletin for his funeral at 1st PCUSA in Athens. I wish that I could speak with him today. Often since then I've wanted to say, "look what I'm doing now, what do you think?" And now I have my own big volume of the Cantos sitting on the shelf next to my desk. "And the sun high over horizon hidden in cloud bank/ lit saffron the cloud ridge/ dove sta memoria." LXXVI. The other day, reading the periodical Poetry I read some fellow taking pot shots at ol Ez, and I thought, "oh sure. You say this now that he's long dead. But if you were locked up in St Elizabeth's, no cadre of poets would come to your rescue and plead that the government let you go and not hang you." And that says something that Ezra Pound was more than a poet as we meet them today; he was a full blown person, whose verse was the residue of his passion. That's perhaps one reason my very liberal professor could like the "fascist" Pound - as well as why TS Eliot, Robert Frost, and others, who didn't share his ideas, liked him as well. This person, this genius with crazy ideas but great feeling for life, is seemingly absent from our world. The art magazines are full of wonderfully bright artists, but they are either "bad boys/girls" without substance or overly substantive (do we suspect that there's less there than meets the eye?) without generating much passion. The same in poetry and music. I scan the horizon and don't see another Pound.

What argot shall I mortgage

Today we went to a bland church. On the outside the church building and grounds were beautiful and relaxing. Inside though, the sanctuary was devoid of any decoration, which is fine if the architectural lines are strong and the texture of the walls presents some visual interest of play of light. There were no banners, no flowers, just cold white sterile walls covering evident dry wall. Then the worship leaders proceeded to deliver the liturgy in a flawless monotone. "Worship the Lord today!" - now say that like you might doze off. And then the sermon didn't have a focus or a function: the "what do you want to say" and the "what do you want people to do" one-two punch we're taught these days - and the minister used qualified language, lots of "perhaps" - it was a wonderful exposition of what my class was taught "not to do." I was reading Placher's "Jesus the savior", and he quotes Barth as saying, "The sermon must not be boring." Barth goes on to say that the sermon must be biblical, that a biblical sermon cannot be boring. Yet I would say that this minister, who relied on commentaries a lot [and maybe that's a sign that cutting and pasting what commentaries say is not necessarily biblical, even though it's ostensibly biblical material], pulled it off.
Needless to say the Philippians passage dealing with kenosis was not used, the safe territory of recounting how the triumphal entry leads to the cross was. But I should say that such territory is "safe" with caution. You could be boring. You could pepper your sermon with vague personal anecdotes and talk about what commentaries say and then offer some bland hope that "perhaps" we'll meet Jesus, if we"perhaps" attend to this. What's the point if I'm facing a double-perhaps. The double-perhaps is the the "I have to wash my hair tonight" of sermon expositions. If there's only a vague happenstance that we'll meet Jesus in this practice, then screw it. The ACC tournament is on; I've got books I haven't read; I need to get a haircut.
We went to the bland little church in the wildwood in order to avoid the possibility of hearing a preacher who tends to meander a lot before getting to the point. But now I see my mistake: he at least has a point and his preaching is biblical and he is not boring. He has passion.
What is then biblical preaching? As I mentioned, the preacher above certainly spent time telling us what commentators had said, especially about the donkey and the colt and the foal (I thought, "not this shit again.") ; however, there was no evidence that she'd grappled with the commentators, taking issue with them, had an existential moment in her own soul about them. I couldn't tell what in this text she was passionate about. I thought, "why should I care?" And that sentence is a key. If the preacher doesn't care, why should the listeners care?
Barth mentions joy often in his dogmatics, recognizing that if a Christian's testimony is to a morose gospel, then two failures have occurred: the world believes wrongly that Christianity is joyless, and a Christian has misunderstood the gospel (and I believe Barth is talking about believers who generally display depression and disaffection about their faith, not people who are sad during a crisis or limit situation) or else become focused on the nothingness of the world.
Enough of my carping.
I take sermons seriously, just as I do paintings. I know in art that it is possible to get away with "pretty" paintings that seem well done, but are artless - no struggle, no discovery, no development, no process or progress. People who buy them might as well frame squares of wall paper. Do I think the same thing happens with sermons? I think it's endemic to America now a days: we are presented with the fake as the authentic- indeed the fake is authentic enough.
Now consider this, that we are coming to the end of Lentapalooza. Every Lent's end effects me. I suppose I miss the parties, the comradship, the all you can eat steak dinners and the two for one bloody Marys. The Lenten bloody Mary comes with an extra celery stick and no salt on the rim. When I watch those kids coming in the door to the sanctuary waving those palms, their bright eyes and their ill fitting clothes, I'm reminded of all that is good and clean and real. And I wonder what happened? What happens to the child when she wakes up and is 20 and needs to write a paper all night; what happens to the child when he wakes up and he's 69 and needs an operation. In their experience of the Church what will we have given them that stays with them and is true, that is a symbol of joy that shines in their dark moments? Do we build a wall between them and Jesus - the real Jesus in the Bible who gets himself killed because he cares more about pleasing God than pleasing people, not the fake American Jesus who waves a flag and helps people hate immigrants and shoot the enemy.
I had meant to discuss epistemological problems today, as well as ontology and phenomenology, in my attempt to get some understanding on how life is spaced out, and understanding what is happening when it is happening just in case something could be said to be happening.
About the Philippians text, Sarah Coakley writes about kenosis in her book "submission and the powers" where she mentions that NT Wright has posited at least 5 different ways this text has been understood through the centuries. I think that those who preached on this text this palm Sunday were brave. The incarnation is incredibly important to understand in order to think and to ethically behave as a Christian, and often it is schloffed off. Like with the Trinity our main doctrines don't seem to be exciting enough to preach on.
There, I've dug myself a nice hole. I've taken my typical elitist position, with my shoddy thinking and my unreal expectations. Here I sit; I can do no other.

Palm Sunday

I've spent some time on the Easter liturgy, mostly with the two texts that mention a feast, and it's not even Easter yet. In fact the interesting time of Palm Sunday is tomorrow and awaiting us in the lectionary is kenosis passage from Philippians, an early Christian hymn that Paul either wrote or quotes here that goes like this:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, 8 he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. 9 Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
As in Corinthians, where Paul is responding to difficulties between believers, he offers an example of Christ's obedience. Where in Corinthians Paul speaks of Christ's crucifixion as the power that establishes God's wisdom and renders the wisdom and power of the world foolish and weak, in this passage Paul uses the whole of Christ's incarnate existence as an example of the Christian life.
Throughout the centuries there have been arguments as to what Christ's emptying of himself might mean, and though it was very certain to Paul's hearers, it is less obvious today. Certainly if you are in a church tomorrow that uses this passage for the text, you should expect evidence of some wrestling with what "emptying" means - accept no easy answers. Likewise with the statement that Christ was in the form (morphe) of God and took the form (morphe) of a slave - expect some grappling with docetic tendencies in the Church. This passage also invites a discussion of the resurrection that pays great attention to the incarnation: how does the incarnation lead toward the resurrection and how does the resurrection flow from the incarnation. But more so, Paul is arguing for servant behavior among the community of faith - and so this passage echoes Christ's discussion of who will be the greatest (he must be servant of all - you call me teacher and lord, and so I am, but I am among you as one who serves).

I stoutly spudder [along]

Last year when I was visiting the Chicago Art Institute, I had lunch at the cafeteria there, and I went straight to the counter where a big hunk of corned beef, which was being served with potatoes and carrots and onions, was displayed. The man behind the counter said to me, as he sliced the meat, "you look like a fellow that likes to eat." And as he delivered to my plate a generous portion I responded with Yes. Yes I am a man who loves to eat.
When I was younger I ate copious amounts of fried chicken, gnawing on the cartilage around the leg bone and on the sternum, crunching into the bone and sucking out the marrow. Chicken, ribs, steaks, pork chops - I gave them all thorough attention. And I loved nothing better than eating outdoors in the summer time with my family. I would have a plate piled high with chicken thighs, deviled eggs, field peas, collards and cracklin' corn bread, with a sliver of Vidalia onion, all in one hand on a precariously weighted paper plate, and in the other hand a big glass of sweet tea, poured out of a gallon jar warm onto crushed ice.
I have a series of black and white photos taken a few years before I was born of such a meal spread out in the back yard of my great-grandfather's farm. A white cat sits under a simple white wooden table loaded with chicken and bowls of vegetables. In other photographs my grandfather and his brothers sit around a semicircle on metal chairs talking. In back of them behind a row of trees are acres of cotton. In another photo my grandmother and other women are circled closely together laughing. In another photograph my uncle Wesley stands in a bowling shirt and pleated trousers sucking on the very end of a chicken leg. In all these photos I'm as good as there. I can pet the cat, chase the chickens, hear the laughter, feel the comfort, and taste the marrow of what it must have been like.
All this no longer exists. The children in the photos are retired now and the elders are long since passed. The farm is under a subdivision and the farmhouse was burned down to make place for a day care center. I once went back and discovered that some of the old oaks were still standing where an old shed once stood near the road. I walked around one of them, placing my feet on the roots, touching the rough bark, closing my eyes and trying to breathe in an air of memory, hoping that somehow I might touch again a time, hear a voice and feel the touch of love that wrapped me like a blanket when I was young.
Is this something of what happens where some fragment of ruined hope remains, where like a wailing wall we approach, hoping that by touching the fragment we can grasp the whole and take into our memory and feel in our being an embrace of something lost. And we hope that that embrace would never leave us.
The text in Isaiah 25 demonstrates this, the image of a banquet, of a restoration of a hope that might have been, of being able to taste again and laugh again, after all their loss and exile. How starved they must have been, how homesick, how grief stricken. God though doesn't give them an image of the past, a promise of restoring a golden age. They are not allowed to turn the past into a shrine; instead they are invited to imagine a future better than any past. Not just a future for them but for everyone. Imagine a future where the shame of being exiled is removed; where the grief of loss is replaced with the happiness of discovery; where the fact of death looming over our lives is taken away.
The fact of death looming over our lives is taken away. That must be the crux of the message that joined the first Christians together. As wonderful as the story of Jesus is, his parables, his compassion on women, beggars, lepers, the nearly dead, the shut-in, and the blind, the incredible nature of his defeat of death is what captivates the imagination. He defeated death, never to die again, but to live a new kind of life. And this is the crux of the gospel that the heart of all our fears and the heart of sin that exists in us and in the world is the fact of death. Death tells us that we're doing all we do for nothing. The struggles we face today, whether we get a promotion or find a job, whether we marry this person or have a child, and many other things that seem so important, so important that we endanger ourselves and others in our cars or break in front of old people waiting in line, are rendered laughably moot by the fact that we're going to die. We might say that to live successfully is to successfully deceive yourself about death. This is why the basic message of Ecclesiastes is "live for the day - don't be obsessed with the past or anxious for the future." All Jesus's words in the sermon on the mount fall into this category as well: "Don't worry about the future, consider the birds, consider the flowers - they don't stress their problems and know that God will clothe and feed them."
Not that for Jesus Death is a light thing. He contemplates his death as something that might be avoided, and though he suffered it in obedience, he felt real agony and was shaken to the base of his soul. As it is written, "for the glory set before him." Paul might have said for the feast set before him - and Jesus used the event of a feast to describe the kingdom of God so prominently that, based on this Isaiah passage, we might suppose that for "this gluttonous man and wine bibber" that would be the best kind of outcome.
But this is our hope, that Jesus defeated death, swallowed it up, and his life is the renewal of creation. In his life, by the power of the Holy Spirit we experience this renewal, we are reborn.
As people who have been removed from the threat of death, what manner of life should we expect. Certainly we can still expect to die, but what death means has been changed for us. Death no longer means the end. Death no longer hovers above us, threatening us if we get out of line. This is where our freedom occurs. We are freed in Christ for getting out of line. We are freed in Christ to be indifferent to our death, and we are freed in Christ to become engaged with life. We can now live life as life. Where before we lived a life as an escape from death or thinking about death - becoming immersed in consumerism, in workaholism, slaves to fear, to anxiety, to sin.
This is the meaning of Christ being sacrificed for us - that we can attend the feast. That no longer fearing what Death can do to us, we can feast, we can celebrate with one another (and it is with one another, because no one feasts alone). We are freed from ourselves and for each other. We feast together in the freedom of Christ. We feast freed from the need to sin - we no longer survive by sin, by envy, pride, lust, greed, avarice. We now survive, we thrive, by Grace. What wondrous freedom this is; and it is ours in Christ.
So just as the resurrection is not merely the resuscitation of a dead body, so this feast is not merely a meal, a satiation of hunger. In the Church we are about something more than gathering people together. In the Church we prefigure this eschatological reality. In the midst of our bureaucracy, our meetings, our differences and difficulties - the hilarious audacity of our some of our political strivings and social activities - the Holy Spirit causes our spirits to thrive together and grow together: we participate in God's generosity with our offerings; we participate in God's creativity with our acts of praise and art; we participate in the life of the heavens in our worship. And we taste something of this when we share communion together.
This is not just the eating of a piece of bread or the consumption of some grape. In this supper, around this table, we're lifted up by the Holy Spirit into the presence of the Trinity where we feed on the benefits of Christ by faith. In this feast we remember that Death has been swallowed up and we've been freed for serving each other and the world. So let us practice this feast, accepting our shortcomings and bearing with one another, as God bears with us and accepts us, knowing that Christ's love is working in us in a new creation.

night, vision: goggles

Isaiah 25:6-10 6 On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. 7 And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; 8 he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. 9 It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. 10 For the hand of the LORD will rest on this mountain

1 Corinthians 5:6-8 Do you not know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? 7 Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.


The feast in Isaiah 25 is presented as a future event. It is an event of generosity and abundance. The Hebrew text is about fat and dregs, really good marrow-filled fat and decanted-dregs. The centerpiece of this feast is the removal of the shroud of death, the shroud that shrouds all the nations and peoples; the swallower is swallowed up. The flow of tears will cease and the disgrace will be removed from all the people of the nations. The hand of God rests on the mountain, the mountain of the feast. That this takes place on a mountain is a sign that this feast is a heavenly feast. This is the salvation that the people of the nations have waited for. It is a salvation that they have not found in the valley of death's shadow. And it is only when they are brought to the place where God's hand rests that they find salvation.
In 1st Corinthians 5 we are invited to another feast, but it is a feast right now. We are told to clean out the leaven that disqualifies us, that we should be a new loaf. Isn't it interesting that the Church is asked to imagine itself as a loaf, clean, unleavened. Christ our paschal lamb has been sacrificed, and we are asked to celebrate, having cleansed ourselves, the Church having cleansed its body of malice and evil, and presenting itself authentic and truthful.
We live our lives in the now and not yet. The feast at hand and the feast to come. This feast at hand is practically the Eucharist, the Lord's supper that we eat. Indeed it is a common liturgical phrase: Christ our paschal lamb is slain; therefore let us keep the feast. But this feast at hand is not necessarily the Eucharist in this passage. Paul, talking about the lives of the believers in Corinth, has chided them throughout this letter for their factionalism and for their lack of concern with sanctification. The Corinthians don't seem to differentiate between their life before knowing Jesus and their life after knowing Jesus. Their lives continue to be leavened with their old ways; they do as they please: they defraud each other; they compete against each other; they tolerate behavior not tolerated in the pagan world. What makes their church different from any other social association?
Paul says that the difference is to be found in Christ, who sacrificed for them, for all humanity, has brought them out of the fear of death, and brought them into the presence of God. Paul uses festal imagery here, as if echoing this Isaiah passage, as well as Jesus's parables about the kingdom being like a great feast, where all the poor, the outsiders, the lame, the blind, the leperous are sought out with great effort and compelled to attend and to feast like royalty. I am unaware that Paul uses this feasting image anywhere else in his letters. Its use here is brought about by the singular issue that the Corinthians pose for him. The issue is this: What binds us together as believers in a world where competing claims and narratives vie for our loyalty outside the fellowship of the Church?
Paul encounters them as people who bring the world's methods into the fellowship of the Church. Not only that, they bring the world's narrative in as well. The world's narrative is this: that matter is all their is; that we must fight to have access to scarce resources; that people must watch out for themselves; and those who falter have only themselves to blame. In the world robbery, permissiveness, greed, gluttony, and pride, especially when conducted under cover of legality, may be winked at; in the world of the Church, a communal world in those early days, such actions harm the body - as if the body were attacking itself. As believers we have to trust each other - we have to trust each other with even the most intimate concerns of our lives. This became especially true in the years after Paul wrote this letter, when during persecution Christians had to trust each other for their very lives. The Christians who live in Iraq and the West Bank and Gaza are living out this intimacy of support right now. They live under threat of losing their lives- and they cannot afford leaven in their midst. Perhaps if we allow our imaginations to think of their struggle, we can taste something of what action and what fellowship Paul is extolling the Corinthians to in his phrase "let us keep the feast."
Let us feast in the eating of the bread and the drinking of the cup: realizing that this feasting is a sharing. What we share together is Christ, and we share Christ with Christians all over the world. This sharing does not come cheap. Throughout the years and to this day men and women suffer for the gospel. They suffer because they follow Jesus who said something about taking up a cross and following him to the place where crosses end up: exposing us, rendering us weak, taxing our endurance.
When we feast we share a cross. We don't fear being executed on our way back from church, or having our land confiscated or being denied the ability to travel to work. Our cross is located in our comfort and our affluence. We fear being uncomfortable and being poor. We hold onto what we have with a fierce grip. You can guess what Christ would put on your cross can't you?
"Let us keep the feast" in our being together, in our sharing, in our discovery of what God's abundance means for us and for our world. The world needs to see this story of God's abundance translated into a living paradigm. The story of scarcity is very strong in the world we live in. How can we increase our imaginations in acts of "faith working through love" that would demonstrate the truth of God's generosity versus the lie of scarcity that leavens the world's discourse?
First we must remember that without the Holy Spirit we can do nothing. When we embark on making this feast a reality, we do so in faith, that what seems impossible, can become actual.
Second we must remember that a feast is not for a single person but for many. And so our churches are not made up of single people but of groups. This very thing is the topic Paul begins with - that we must do away with factions and recognize that in the faith we have common cause. This common cause springs from our relationship with Jesus.
Third we must use our imaginations and not be afraid to act on them, to join together in creative endeavors.
And we must be patient and forgiving of each other. Certainly toes will be stepped on, and it is in this process that we must be open to laughter and graciousness.
There is a feast to come, to be sure, but our task here, as an expression of gratitude for all that Jesus has done for us in bringing us from the mire and blindness of our sin and the sin of the world, is to practice the principles of this feast here in the world.

Time like an ever running stream

Time as if a continuously streaming run, runs streaming as if timed. Some time ago I told Joe at Twain's as we sipped red ales that I hoped one day to preach a sermon that was pure gibberish. Which seemed like a good idea to us at the time: a time where we reveled in our post-seminary life, that we'd proved ourselves (though we know we've a lot to prove, and part of that is knowing that we've nothing to prove, as far as proving goes, though we are just a couple of guys, who at the same time have nothing to prove). We relished our hot dogs, and we brooded our brews; we winged and had nachos. What a relief to have seminary behind us. Seminary, like art school, of course, is the place where you can experiment: a fact lost on most of the students there who seem to strive after conventionality. Seminary is the place you can do the sermon that is gibberish, take the gloves off, and, in the spirit of our professor, Chuck, preach naked. The forces of conventionality are strong at seminary, even so, and I can understand why people feel put in their place. I still think of how the powers came down on Joe, who did the most purely Rabelaisean act of all during Carnival (again a production of Chuck's where the campus was encouraged to engage in radical truth telling through satire - which campus seemed radically unprepared for).
I can't say that Duke is any more immune to the forces of conventionality: a lot of expensive buildings and the presence of great wealth give off an aura of "fitting in." Chuck is bringing his carnival and naked street preaching here next Fall, and it will be interesting to see how that fits in with the campus climate.
My hope now is to find ways of making the Church a haven for the unconventional. An individual church could be what seminary can't be: disproving what I said about seminary being like art school. A seminary - art school cross pollination would bring about a revolution; maybe enough to counteract the seminary - business school cross pollination that occurred a century ago. And so a artist - church cross pollination might get the ball rolling.

memories

Here I am now in a new presbytery: the third presbytery of my life. I've ventured from Sierra Blanca in New Mexico, to Greater Atlanta, and now I'm in New Hope. I interned in Birmingham at Sheppard's and Lapsley, so I could count a forth as well.
As I answered questions at presbytery Tuesday, I considered how my study was influenced by the last examination I'd had. Or perhaps by the examination I'd heard on the floor of this presbytery last February. I considered the aphorism that generals tend to fight the last war. And that is a problem: that it is almost impossible to prepare for future problems in a complete way. That is, one can guess, and in some cases, it is possible to anticipate some of what will be asked. Still the tendency to attack yesterday's difficulties in the context of today persists.
This mistake is exemplified when teams try what worked for last year's champions. I remember the year the Falcons adopted the one back offense, right after Washington had won a super bowl with it, and the Falcons failed. It was a miserable experience, painful to watch. The Falcons have made this mistake, and many others besides, predictably over the years.
As an investment firm commercial says, "past performance is no guarantee of future success."
Whatever the past might have been, and past performance can tell you something it's true, you're entering into an investment that is founded on faith.
In life our predictions often don't pan out. Witness how Ivy League trained thinkers are unprepared for the consequences of war for instance. Every day and night on TV we witness intelligent men and women being flat wrong about many things, and their failure doesn't stop them - but certainly when I listen to them, they are consistent in approaching today's problems with solutions for yesterday's problems.
Life is more about faith. The question is What have we put our faith in? Niebuhr reminds us that we sin when we attach ultimate value to finite (non-ultimate) things, and finite value to the ultimate. When we treat God as a thing, a disposable commodity, and when we attach faith to, and give worship to, some temporary thing ( the market, a job, fame, our persona) we sin.
I think an element of faith is to enter into a new thing without thinking about the past, consciously not trying to fight the last battle, or answer the last test. Faith involves a letting go of the past.
Faith also involves imagination. Imagination is vital for living in new moments. I remember Faulkner saying that in the South the past isn't even past, and I think about how stultified the Southern imagination generally is. Part of the failure of unions to take hold down here certainly results from the population in general, seeing the failures of mill strikes in the 1930s, being too much in shock to imagine a world in which they would be better off without these kinds of jobs and that kind of paternalism.
We need faith that things can be different, and imagination to see how we can make these differences real - especially in the face of a world that puts all its effort in the narrative of real politik. The world loves nothing better than that the past should not be past. In the Balkans, in Ireland, in Palestine, all over the world, the past is firmly set in people's minds as an inescapable legacy requiring vengeance (though Ireland has moved beyond this, it's troubles are recent enough to recall how fixed in stone they were). The imagination and faith needed to move forward are hard won.
The Easter text in Isaiah 25 presents just such an imagining of God's abundance (which we must practice faith to see) over against the story of real politik - Moab that is crushed like straw. Of course Israel lives in the context of Moab, of exile, of displacement, and Isaiah's vision of a feast over flowing with wine and meat (and a vegan selection) is an eschatological promise, an elusive promise - but it is where faith leads. We wander in the desert to find it.
And this vision of Isaiah's is God's promised land of milk and honey. It's as if at the end of the Deuteronomist's history that God had said, "not here; this monarchy, this isn't it." Israel has not just wandered 40 years in the desert, but the subsequent 500 years as well. And here we are 2500 years later, called to engage our imaginations to find how faith will lead us to the feast.

The one - two prophet

Years ago, when I lived in New Mexico, I went to a service where the hymn "sweet sweet Spirit" was sung, a hymn which contains the line "you're the one-two prophet." I've wondered since then about this prophet, his or her jab and hook: one two, one two and through and through the vorple blade went snicker snack - a line from Jabberwocky that perhaps describes something of the quixotic nature of this prophet, an Amos perhaps, who eventually was done in by his combativeness, or so we suppose from the apparent brevity of his career, a soul of wit. Sol Lewitt, the Bauhaus artist who settled in Black Mountain and taught during the war, died recently, leaving behind many intriguing ideas for conceptual drawings. He also was a one-two prophet. Any one can take his instructions for drawing and have a Lewitt on the wall. We should do that more often, making marks on the wall: what a joy it is to apply a mark directly to the wall.

Painting

A couple: Adam and Eve; Paolo and Francesca; Laurel and Hardy. Frick and Frack - who were they again? Cain and Able and Ted and Alice; Bonnie and Clyde. The place: Hope Springs Eternal; the crossroads of Vice and Virtue; the friendly skies.

It continues to rain here in Durham

Rain falls unabated Durhamward from cumulonimbus formations aloft above, soaking earth and human - all creation is drenched. Water beads on every surface and the air is moist to the touch. And underfoot is a comfortable give in the ground and a smattering of mud on your shoe, dug into the tread and flecked along the margin of the leather and the sole. The woods are quiet but for the branch to branch coursing of the water dripping finally to the ground.
In time the wind picks up; the clouds clear away; and parts of the ground dry up: the sidewalks, the street, the high patches of bare earth. The creek remains swollen with muddy moving water, indifferent to the meandering of its banks and for a time free to explore along the road and into the forest.

I can't find a photo of the academic nude except for this one where it is on top of the calling of st. matthew. Placed in this way though, it calls into question the roles of private and public.

I believe that people can comment again

I had made it more difficult to comment, but now I think that people can comment again. Too much blog spam in response to one of the subject words to my 'billy the kid on mars' entry. I believe the word was alien, which elicited spam before (and I'd forgotten).

Would you be free

Painted 14 years ago when I lived upstairs in a house church in Athens, GA, in a tiny room, and the women in the house next door let me use a screened porch as a studio, where I could paint and read. I painted this baptism. I want to say little more about it, because people provide such a wonderful interpretation on their own. Joe Evans offered a succinct observation, which I can't remember here. And Anna Carter Florence now has this painting in her office. Or she has it somewhere. Anyway she appreciates it and understands me as an artist. A preaching/painter or painting/preacher.
The subject matter comes from the revivalist upbringing I experienced, fraught with blood imagery (would you be free from the power of sin, there's power in the blood) and repressed sexuality. Hence I quote that hymn at the top of the painting. The minister is an all too common figure, floppy bible raised high, wearing white shirt and tie - he's very uncomfortable, a sign that faith should be uncomfortable. The woman, who could be any of us, male or female, is resigned to plunge beneath that flood. But more so, a fortiori, as a woman, she is the victim of patriarchy, a rule that determines how she should act and what she should speak, a rule that has stripped her of her voice and reduced her to a naked, faceless object.
There's a fountain filled with blood for you.

History/Probability

In a week I'm talking with the examinations committee here to join this presbytery and then I"ll meet the COM the next day. What will be the upshot? I'll be here, perhaps as a member at large. I'm a minister without portfolio. As an artist I have a portfolio, as well as a ministry. But how to pursue it?
How can I convince people to give me sums of money that will fund my project? I'm calling it "big paintings for the Church." What "big paintings for the Church" will do is provide churches with large paintings, perhaps conventional canvas paintings, but I can see a function for other genres: spray paint for instance - what if churches tagged their communities: they could drive their volvos and buicks and step out in their suits and dress clothes and plaster billboards with slogans like "rogue state" and "What the F**K would Jesus Do." My favorite "the dead in Christ shall rise - come see us this Sunday." Of course I won't tell the committee about my ties to the zombie wing of the Presbyterian Church.
Anyway, I'm thinking "big paintings for the Church" will do fine. I'll start by simply painting one painting for one church of reasonable size. However this will take support from people who share my vision for Art in the Church. Tubes of cadmium red and flake white don't grow on trees (except at this superfund site in Missouri).
I also have big concepts for the Church - concepts so big, so enormous, so vast - well I got nothing, at least right now.
I will say this: in Pierre Boulez's Repons, on a Deutsche Grammaphoe recording, on track 3, 1 minute and 43 seconds into the track, the most wonderful piano phrase occurs. I've played it again and again, driving in the rain today, where Durham is still under drought restrictions, in the rain driving down 147, where I've occasioned to repeat this phrase so much that I missed my exit and found myself at the airport. It goes: dot ta de da da da dot te dee da di di di deh di di deh. It would make a wonderful intro to a radio show, such as are heard on NPR, where I would answer people's questions about art and spirituality and cheese. People could come visit me and tell me about their experiences with painting, yoga and wenslydale.
Two days this week rain has come down in buckets here in Durham. Beautiful.

Something written

Here's something I wrote 10 or so years ago on an old Underwood typewriter displayed in the special collections room of this library I worked at.

"Change, mutatis mutandis, assumes ordinary means,
mundanely maintaining status quo anarchic relations static
in its inexorability, till nothing is the same as memory
serves to remember; the past, unrecognizable in its odd
costumes and customs, alienated from the artifacts
of the human condition, used and spent, becomes the shibboleth for
nostalgia, marketing and disinformation. If anything, the
examination of some of these artifacts, in their husks, as it
were, reveals a rich variety of pursuits, at times seemingly
negligent of the recognized clamor of the times, and at times
infused with irony: how small the mistakes of the past
seemed in their nativity, great goods abused and evils
nurtured--as today might be seen in fragmentation of
society, stratification of culture and re-emergence of
violence, ideological and unconscious together.

"What once were follies become worldly wisdom, masked by
consensus and commercial approbation. Hegel, saying that
history occurs twice, the first time as tragedy and the second
time as farce, finds ratification in post modern gilded age
quandaries: the second house, the celebrity lifestyle, the third
family, and the car, plastic and mediocre, appealing to loves of
surfaces. What surfaces is what we cannot escape: the lapsed
moral fund of another generation's dreams, spent on margin and
moonshine, comes calling again in our very public privacy, our
predilection for the errant detail, the chivalrous minutiae of
politics.

"Note the lapsed insignia of our epic bygonnes: the scattered brick,
the rusticating masticators, and the off-bloomed rock garden
bouquets. And the purchase, a seen unsighted, for sure, eyes of
time holds the past enjambed and blank versus a present
obliquely irresponsive to urgings, proletarian and urbane. Again
the incredible abomination insinuates itself among the dinner
guests, suited sleek and polished, conversant in controversies
and consultant of swat, based in our own dark regrets. Inanition
under God, with libertine injustice furrow auld, as our forfeiteers
fore-swore unhsaven ears ago broad fort a knewn Haitian, that
that that that that which might be become that furture known
and absolved of perfidy, by any other name, a saint among
sinners, a haint among hinnners, We've found our lost coin after
alla nd what's valued demurs to some baser coinage, always and
ever more extent in the back ways of history.

Lentapalooza

Is it possible that I could be repeating myself? I was going to write something and then thought that I had written it before. Had I written it before? I could be repeating myself.