I keep forgetting

I have this experience where I think to myself, "I need to write that down." And when I get here, I can't remember what I was going to write.

Perhaps I was thinking about the coming summer, my anticipation of being with family at the beach. This summer, unlike last year, there are no workers. The house is finished. 

I did have the idea yesterday of kudzu being used in the parables. Mustard seeds, fig trees - those provide nice metaphors for faith and perseverance. Kudzu covers the land, prevents erosion, and has some nutritional value, but is overshadowed by its nuisance value. It's everywhere, coming over the backyard fence, covering abandoned homes and swaths of trees along the interstate. It's wild green and beautiful and a threat to life itself. It's chaos and rhizome. Kudzu is the early church: before the black holes of sects or the treeform of hierarchy. Kudzu is bre'r rabbit's line of flight.

Kudzu wasn't around for the 19th century bre'r rabbit stories - hence a briar patch was the closest nuisance ground cover. Scripture's not keen on briars, thistles, thickets and the like. But kudzu is a different beast. Originally it was exhibited as an ornamental vine. Then it  seemed to provide an answer to problems of erosion and cheap forage. It does these things very well. 

The fault in kudzu is not in the plant, a legume. The plant has many uses. The fault is with us: it is more than we can handle. We cannot handle its speed and volume. Kudzu is too friendly, too helpful. It is generosity run amuck. We did not prepare for it. We did not realize that the little bug that checks its growth in Japan doesn't live here. Nor that the little bug might like different plants here. Kudzu is pure capitalism. It is not contained by banks but overruns them. It flows over the land and shows that wealth that is too accessible is devalued in human eyes. Kudzu indicts us. It puts our bad qualities in contrast. We don't think things through. When we're given what we want, we don't use it. We complain about abundance. Pure capitalism is frightening in that, like the open range, money's just there for anyone to use (we've got to keep it inside the banks where special people can say who gets to use it). Kudzu is the rhizome par excellence in that it insists we be as creative as we claim we are. How quickly its persistence, its abundance, and its utility sap our strength and render our imaginations futile. Kudzu is answered prayer, but like manna and those refugees from Egypt, we only murmur and complain about it.

A piece of paper cut up in the scrap paper bin with these words: the homiletical plot. Like the gunpowder plot - except here, the machinations of scripture.

Charles Williams, in his Descent of the Dove, was the first person I read on the Subintroductae. There are a few scholarly articles on the practice. Women and men would cohabit together, without sex, for a spiritual benefit. I Corinthians 7 and Paul's vague language about virgins is usually cited as the earliest instance of the practice. No one knows what exactly went on since the practice was banned, eventually, and as was the practice in the early church, the winners got to define what the losers said, did and were about. Williams writes that it was "yet another victory for the weaker brethern." 

Just because you get rid of the subintroductae doesn't mean you get rid of sex. At least here was a place where libidinal energy was channeled into spiritual paths. There were failures, but the potential for success is great. Certain saints exemplify a sexual energy: St Theresa, Bernard, John of the Cross. The libidinal energy is still there, but with no place to go. Instead, people waste a lot of time beating themselves up about it. The writer of Colossians complains of that very thing: beating yourself up about something looks very spiritual, but is really fake. The subintroductae were real, but their detractors were threatened: they did not want to use their imaginations - they only wanted rules and conformity to authority. 

A community like Oneida showed how this kind of thing might have worked out. For a few years it did. Oneida is a parable of a sort. Like the early church it was a utopian socialist community that survives today as a business enterprise. The thing with the church is that people are frequently inspired to experiment again. That's what new wineskins are about. Not reviving the structure but throwing away the structure. 

We are confused because we think that the first believers wanted to create a structure. The institutional churches are happy to perpetuate this notion. Institutional structures are able to marshal numbers and generate force. But the experimental edge is rhizomatic - it is a-structural and doesn't marshal numbers or generate force. The rhizome covers everything - like kudzu. From the outside this is seen as a threat. The banks will be overrun. It is too much. And the rhizome cannot be politically organized. 

Be clear, the rhizome is not the sect. Small churches that set themselves up against the institutional are just as anti-experimental. Deleuze and Guatarri are dead on about the dangers of the molecular, the black holes of subjectivity. The sects want to set up structures as well, but structures that suck out. People in them are disconnected from their surroundings.