credo

I came across this fragment of a creed I was working on a few years ago. I think about replacing the perfectly serviceable creed in my PIF (that little form for employment we Presbyterians use to disclose the surface facts of what kind of minister we might be - think computer dating: "loves Calvin and Barth" for "likes long walks and listens to Sinatra". 

Here goes: 

I believe Jesus meets us along life's way - that Emaus is a metaphor for life - and that Jesus is discovered in the life symbolized by the sacraments. He is the sacrament par excellence - that is, as the living word, he brings to speech the covenant centered creation of the triune God.

As God Jesus reveals the life of the Father Son and Spirit among humanity in creation. In his love, teaching, ministry, acts and word, he displays the emptying of the abundance at the heart of God.

In his death he demonstrates what people are in their fears and limitations and what God is in God's courage, love and forgiveness. He suffered death for all and brought death into the life of the Trinity where death was transformed from and end without possibility into an event containing both grief and hope. 

...

[here my manuscript leaves off. I really have to ponder how I might revise what I've written and complete it. I'd like to think it's a bit more adventurous than the kind of boilerplate I'm using now. But it wouldn't be the first time that someone pointed out how standard it still is.]

a poster for the prometheus movie

The emblem of inerrancy

 a mediation about death - I'm having many of these lately. I think, "I'm going to lay off thinking about death for a while." But then something happens and I'm reminded that most things in life are simply diversions to keep our minds off the fact that we're going to die. Happy Holidays.

Sometimes I write something so profound and playful, so redolent of word play and insight, so much a river flowing from my unconscious, that I can't stand myself.

letting death bury itself

Matthew and Luke record Jesus replying to a disciple's hesitancy with the remark" let the dead bury their own". This abrupt phrase has a tone of bitterness in it. Something I might say after hearing a litany of excuses - offers of help that are immediately rescinded: I'd help but not now; I'd lift a hand but I'm in the same boat as you. We all have this way of expressing sympathy that is at once a giving alongside a removing. If you think of our symbolic commerce, that we have a symbolic commerce - if you thought to symbolize the commerce of emotions like we symbolize the commerce of money, using quantitative graphs and statistics, such an accumulation of giving and taking back might create a graph of a downward curve, or whatever graph might be interpreted as a depression. Perhaps that's how it feels - like that Sam Phillip's song "help is coming one day late." I listened to that song a number of times during a pastoral internship in Birmingham. It's like the punchline to a joke, a dry dark joke. My dad was a master of this type of joke - a joke that takes on the shade of life. Like the end of the movie All That Jazz: an upbeat Broadway chorus chanting "bye bye my life, good bye". I feel more often now the tug of death in life. The feeling of being brought down to earth. My dad telling me, "sometimes you have to let your dreams die" coupled with deaths of friends and relatives becoming too frequent. Not just physical deaths but, as with my dad, the deaths of dreams, the deaths of careers, the deaths of friendships. All has a way of tugging back into the past. The past where perhaps things seemed more alive. "Life was back there," I might say. "Did I misplace it among some boxes; lose it at a rest stop; inadvertently loan it out to someone?" Freud in his book, On Jokes, remarks that jokes operate from the unconscious. Jokes are connected to the death drive while trying to squeeze some kernel of truth frosted with laughter into our conversations. "Let the dead bury the dead" has a joke-like quality - a bit of wit that recognizes the letdown, the reality check, that thrives among our intentions. What wonderful intentions I have - and the people I know have marvelous intentions. I don't know that I've ever met or heard anyone voicing bad intentions. If we could quiz Iago he might aver that his intentions were actually toward the good (on second thought, no - only in the sense of false advertising - or perhaps it's here where irony seeps into  my musings). History is ironic that way; we are ironic that way. I think of Twain, who is recognized as a giant of American humor - how that humor became more pessimistic over time. Zizek compares that wry humor, such as exhibited by Groucho Marx, as an expression of the super ego. People who posit the super ego as "the moral function" of the self - a kind of helper to the ego in its battle with the id (and I've heard people say this) have no idea how Freud and later Lacan characterize this process. The super ego manufactures that catch 22 inside each of us - Enjoy! along side the Well you've blown it this time! we hear inside our heads (as well as advertised on screen and polemicised from pulpits). Twain, Groucho, they'd see the humor in the dead burying themselves. Freud and Lacan would see how this statement symbolizes how the dead threaten to bury us: Lacan calls it the narcissism of the lost cause. No one quite has a lost cause like our lost cause - no one has lost like we've lost. No one has a past like mine. And if we look through photographs we might see grand pa and great grand pa and all their ancestors and if we listen we hear them screaming up through our marrow: "Avenge me" "Improve on me" "Remember me" - all those messages we received as children. Messages wrapped up in love from people we love - but inherited in us like a heart disease or cancer: these messages take an important place in our lives. Too often they give us a reason to hate, to be jealous, to be stingy. Sometimes we need to see how our lives are encumbered by the dead, by yesterday, as it were, and "let the dead bury their own dead."  Let go of the past; let go of disappointment, and live right now. Just you and the person you promise to help.