Aidan’s Ghost

To all of my brothers and sisters, I wish you a blessed Feast of St. James and I pray that God will walk beside each of you in your pilgrimage until the day you discover that the destination of your journey, the path upon which you walk and the guide who companions you along the way is all God, and thus you have never been alone.

I hate to make a big deal out of it, but my second book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Early Christianity, was released at the beginning of May. Recently, I was interviewed by David Israel for the website MentalFloss.com. You can check it out here. (Be kind, please rewind.)

Since long before I started The Brendan Center, which had as its mission nurturing “an incarnational Christian presence in public life,” I was talking about the need for a life modeled on Christ’s incarnation. It goes without saying that I was hardly the first to do so, even in recent times. I only bring it up to note that a lot of us who began to catch hold of that vision for incarnational living often forgot that the incarnation has a particular conclusion: crucifixion. I think sometimes we thought that if we gave ourselves over to incarnational living we would experience some kind of magically more meaningful life. As I’ve been catching up on my blog reading, I happened across this by Erika Haub at her blog The Margins, where she reminded me of that sometimes glaring whole in my own expectations for the incarnational life:

I think if there were one thing I would want us to remember today as we consider all things missional, it would be that as we talk about incarnational living and incarnational ministries and being incarnational wherever we live, we are talking about a way of life that leads to the cross. It did for Jesus, and if I read Philippians correctly, it should for us as well….

A few months ago, my three-year old daughter was painting and as I walked by her easel I exclaimed happily: “Mercy, you painted a cross!” She stepped back from her paper in horror, and looked at me with confusion and even fear. For her, the cross is something terrifying; gruesome. And here I was praising her like she had painted a pretty rainbow or a happy butterfly. Mercy understands the scandal of Jesus’ death, and I hope that those of us seeking to imitate an incarnate God really understand that that means following a crucified One.

Again, she’s not the first person to say it by any means, but it’s a vital reminder anyway and one that I’m often sorely in need of.

Just in case you were wondering…

Then it occurred to Ziska that the complaints made by residents of nearby Baltimore about summer in their city — the exhaust-laden air and the way in which buildings and pavement soak up solar energy to create an abnormally warm “heat island” — could be put to good use. When he checked, he found that in fact the temperatures in Baltimore run 3 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer on average than those of the surrounding countryside, and the concentration of CO2 in the local atmosphere (440 to 450 p.p.m., or parts per million by volume) is well above the current global average. This, coincidentally, matched almost exactly what the panel on climate change predicted for the planet as a whole 30 to 50 years in the future in its “B2 scenario,” a middle-of-the-road projection that envisions continuing greenhouse gas increases but also some success in abatement programs.

So if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Hey, what’s the big deal. Global warming doesn’t sound all that bad,” now you know. We have seen the future, and it is… Baltimore.

As an approving reader of Stanley Hauerwas for years, I have had a flirting fascination with pacificism. But there are, I have learned, two kinds of pacificism: the easy (Bonhoeffer might call it ‘cheap’) and the difficult. These words from W.H. Auden are a searing reminder to me of how easily we package cruciform convictions into comfortable ‘truths’:

I have absolutely no patience with Pacifism as a political movement, as if one could do all the things in one’s personal life that create wars and then pretend that to refuse to fight is a sacrifice and not a luxury.

In many ways, not just in terms of warfare, I know that I have violated this wisdom. I say that I wish I could find a way free of the insidious entanglements with ‘consumer culture’ and the like (we used to just call it ‘gluttony,’ back before the academics got a hold of it and strangled any sense of shame out of it). Of course, that’s really just self-deception. I could unwind myself, with God’s help, if I genuinely wanted to, if I was willing to live with the consequences of being loosed. Lazarus may thank God that he has been freed from his burial bonds, but he will find that death is easy compared to the task of really living. True life, the abundant living to which God invites us, looks like death to those who are dying, who need some salve to distract them from their enslavement to their own desires.

It reminds me of the words of another hero of mine, Wendell Berry, whose poem “Song in a Year of Catastrophe” reads in part:

And I heard the sound

of a great engine pounding

in the air, and a voice asking:

“Change or slavery?

Hardship or slavery?”

and voices answering:

“Slavery! Slavery!”

And I was afraid, loving

what I knew would be lost.

Well, it’s been a long and unexpected hiatus from blogging, but I’m back again.

Boy, how things have changed. In the six months since last I posted, the family and I have relocated to McAlester, Oklahoma. It’s where my wife grew up, where I spent the last couple of years in high school and where our parents and extended family live. We’d been talking about returning to Oklahoma for several years, ever since our first little girl came along, but the circumstances were never quite right. And truth be told, culturally, economically, politically, intellectually, even spiritually, Washington was a better fit for us than Oklahoma. But our grandparents were incredibly important to both my wife and I as we were growing up, and we wanted the same for our daughters.

So, the day before Ash Wednesday (yes, the beginning of Lent), my wife learned of an opportunity to transfer with her job to an opening at an even better position that just happened to be in… well, you guessed it. I can’t say that we agonized over the decision too much, although we both had “What the hell are we doing?” moments. Anyway, to make a long story short, Good Friday found us moving into temporary quarters here in McAlester. After three months, we sold our house in Bellingham and moved into our new home here. Goodbye, Pacific Northwest. Hello, Bible Belt.

My good friend Deb Steinkamp spoke some words that I have found important to hold on to through this entire adventure. I asked her to pray for us, that we would have wisdom to make the right decisions. She responded that she would pray that we have the courage to live with the decisions that we make. That’s as wise a prayer as I’ve heard in a long time, because the truth is that courage is exactly what we have needed. We have taken the road less traveled, I believe, and like Frost in that wonderful poem, I am hoping that it will make all the difference. This southeastern corner of Oklahoma has a number of struggles, and we feel like so much of what we’ve learned especially in the past ten years is really needed here. It’s the classic predicament, choosing between the place you need and the place that needs you.

In any event, now you’ve got some context and you’re all caught up. More to come soon.

I’m still digging myself out of the holidays here, so it’s been slim pickings. Expect more from this blog after Epiphany (when the kids are back in school). In the meanwhile….

Trim the hair on your feet and find  a pub so you can raise your glasses in a toast to the master of subcreation, John R.R. Tolkien, who was born on this day in 1892. Good on you, J.R.R., and thanks for everything (except for Elijah Woods, but then we can’t blame that on you, can we?).

Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyes.

It sounds like another Foreman-Ali match-up, but it’s not. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, traditional site of the birthplace of Jesus, is maintained jointly by Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian priests. While cleaning up after the Christmas festivities, a Greek Orthodox priest apparently put his ladder too far into territory maintained by the Armenians, an offense so heinous that it led to a knock-down, drag-out brawl between the two communities.

The thought of Christians pummeling one another in the birthplace of the Prince of Peace certainly adds a new layer of meaning to the word ‘ironic’. Of course, the whole thing was filmed and photographed by members of the international media, who were present to observe the cleanup. According to news reports, a dozen unarmed Palestinian policeman (who, one could speculate, are all or mostly Muslim) tried to break up the fight, only to get smacked around themselves. Yeah, it’s an odd sort of world when the Muslims are trying to keep the Christians from killing one another, eh? I think I could be forgiven for suggesting that this that might cause Christians a bit of a PR problem. The range of comments on Breitbart’s website was suitably brutal.

Is there a moral to this story? Not that I can detect, except perhaps to note that the Roman Catholics were not involved in the fracas. Said one Catholic priest, “Hey, I’m a lover, not a fighter.” Of course, that’s a different scandal altogether. Ouch.

Blessed Winter Solstice to all.