Pluck O’ The Irish

The things you learn from watching PBS:

In St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, there is a stained-glass window paid for by Benjamin Guinness (yes, that Guinness).  Guinness actually funded a major reconstruction of the Cathedral, and I believe this window was part of that. The window offers an interesting bit of allegorical interpretation, or spiritual exegesis: “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink”!  Indeed.

Better Late Than Never

Before I get too buried in the wonderful music of 2009 (Hello Animal Collective, Neko Case, Grizzly Bear, and Elvis Perkins!) I figured I should put my year end lists up here.  Yes, they are ridiculously late, but maybe they will actually get read now that they don’t have to compete with Pitchfork and SPIN.  2008 was a gem for music, here are my fave albums and tracks; check em out, you will not regret it.

Albums (In order):

1. Portishead – Third
2. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
3. Fleet Foxes – S/T
4. Born Ruffians – Red, Yellow and Blue
5. TV on the Radio – Dear Science,
6. Lambchop – OH (Ohio)
7. Pale Young Gentlemen – Black Forest (tra la la)
8. Department of Eagles – In Ear Park
9. Deerhunter – Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
10. Kanye West – 808’s & Heartbreak

Tracks (Not necessarily in Order)

• Walkmen – In the New Year
• Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – You Want that Picture
• Portishead – The Rip
• Beck – Walls
• Coldplay – Viva La Vida
• Bon Iver – Blindsided
• Damien Jurado – Last Rites
• Dear and the Headlights – I’m Not Crying, You’re Not Crying
• Deerhunter – Microcastle
• Department of Eagles – No One Does it Like You
• Fleet Foxes – Ragged Wood, White Winter Hymnal (2 songs)
• Lambchop – Slipped Loosed and Delivered
• Land of Talk – Some are Lakes
• No Age – Eraser
• The Music Tapes – Cumulonimbus
• Okkervil River – Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979
• Pale Young Gentlemen – Our History
• The Roots – Rising Up
• Ruby Suns – Remember, Adventure Tour (2 songs)
• Shearwater – Rooks
• TV on the Radio – Dancing Choose
• Wolf Parade – Language City, Call it a Ritual (2 songs)
• Silver Jews – Candy Jail
• The Mae Shi – I Get Almost Everything I Want

Ash Wednesday

If it is true what Soren Kierkegaard says of the poet, that he or she is one “whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music” then Elvis Perkins may be the poet par excellence.  Just a quick glance into the backstory of Perkins’ debut album Ash Wednesday (XL, 2007) shows that he is one well acquainted with sorrow.  Perkins, the son of the actor who played Norman Bates in Psycho, recorded the album over a period of roughly six years.  The recording sessions (like many events in many Americans’ lives) were interrupted by the attacks of September 11, 2001.  But for Elvis these attacks hit closer to home than just his own piece of the damaged American psyche.  His mother was on American Airlines Flight 11, one of the planes hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center towers.  And as if that wasn’t enough, this happened a day before the 9th anniversary of his father’s death, a death due to complications with AIDS.

One can then understand the canvas upon which Elvis paints the maladies and madness of modern society.  In “All the Night Without Love” he imagines loneliness as someone who would actually visit gotmilk.com and portrays our existence as waiting in line to place drive-thru orders and seeking connection in athletic insole displays inviting the consumer to “touch me.”  In “Moon Woman II” he puns on the community forged by the necessity of asking someone else for a lighter and the need for human connection: “Does anybody have a light/I’m cold as a stone/And it’s dark in the night/And I’m up here all alone.”  The album suggests that the root problem is isolation, the horror of being trapped within ourselves, and it voices the longing of human community and contact.  In Elvis’ world we constantly reach out for that touch but we’re always ultimately thwarted.

And so it seems Perkins finally yields to a kind of hopeless nihilism.  On the title track he warbles “no one will survive ash wednesday alive/no soldier no lover, no father no mother/not a lonely child.”  Thus Elvis voices the truth that Christians hold concerning Ash Wednesday.  As the beginning of Lent, the journey with Jesus to the cross, we recognize our utter mortality.  Everyone is equal before the power of death and despair.  And so we mark ourselves with ashes “dust you are and to dust you will return…”  In this we recognize our fleeting attempts and characteristic impotence to build any kind of lasting community.

But that’s not where the Christian confession ends.  For after being reminded that we are dust and ash, we are instructed to “…repent and believe the gospel.”  The gospel, the good news that God, in Jesus, put skin on and reaches out and touches, connects, holds, and ultimately bleeds.  And so it seems that the good news is precisely that no one will survive ash wednesday alive, for in that dying, we are opened to the new life which God brings on Easter, a time according to the Bible when Jesus will again reach out, embrace, touch, and be touched (John 20.19-31).

Elvis ultimately comes to this conclusion as well, as he ends the album with a song called “Good Friday.”  He realizes that the connection longed for on tracks 1-10 of his album, and the connection longed for in our daily lives, are found in the giving of “the body and blood.”  He finishes with the hope that “Though this life is Ash Wednesday…It forever approaches Good Friday.”  And we can travel that far with Perkins, and on to Easter morning.

“Truer Words May Never Be Spoken”

It’s Saturday,…(again) from Ryan Adams on Vimeo.

Why I hate Eat, Pray, Love

Since landing on Oprah’s Book Club, the hype about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love has been almost endless. Consequently, the memoir has spent about a million weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. As most readers know, that doesn’t always mean a book is good. So what’s my verdict? After spending three days pushing through it, my suspicions were confirmed: the book is a new-agey piece of trash.

Gilbert’s memoir gets an F for many reasons. I’d estimate that it could be pared down to about half of its mind-numbing 352 pages. I don’t care to read chapter after chapter of self-pity about her divorce from a husband, who, God forbid, wanted to have a family. I should also mention that the life she described didn’t seem too bad: a nice job, a big house, etc. When she’s supposedly at rock bottom, her editor gives her an advance on the book that funds her year-long trip around the globe. Boo hoo.

I could continue my rant about the suck factor of Eat, Pray, Love, but let me get to the heart of why I think her memoir is nothing more than soul-less soul-searching. All of my hatred for this book culminated in the third portion, “Indonesia.” In this section, Gilbert arrives on the doorstep of an elderly healer/magician, who is supposed to teach her about what he does, apparently so she can feed the void. While in Bali, she crosses paths with another healer, who is also divorced, but lives in poverty and struggles to support her young daughter. Being a typical, dumb Westerner, Gilbert thinks she can “fix” this woman’s situation by throwing money at her to buy a home: $18,000 she collected from her equally typical, dumb American friends. After several weeks and no home purchased, Gilbert starts putting the pressure on this woman to buy a home before she returns to the States. After all, Gilbert wanted her American friends to see evidence that this woman’s life was changed. Long story short, Gilbert’s friends and lover convince her that the woman is scamming her. So, Gilbert concocts a lie that her friends will take back the money unless she buys a house before Gilbert leaves. She takes the bait.

So why is Gilbert a typical, dumb Westerner? Not because she was supposedly getting scammed by a suspicious, poor, local woman. She thought her money could fix everything–including what she perceived to be a flawed, backwards culture. And shall I also ask, why perform this act of kindness and include it in your bestselling book? I wonder if she’s sending royalties to the woman and her daughter who helped make her book such a success. Perhaps Gilbert also passed along Oprah’s other favorite book, The Secret, so they could find a way to pay the property taxes on that nice, new house in Bali.

Finally, let me make it known that I didn’t choose to read Eat, Pray, Love recreationally or because I belong to the Church of Oprah (because I don’t); it was required reading. While I could write a book’s worth of material about why I think Oprah is poisoning the minds of countless individuals, I’ll leave that for another time.

Feast of John and Charles Wesley

Monday this week was the Feast of John and Charles Wesley according to the Anglican liturgical calendar. Somehow we always miss this one in the Nazarene Church.

This is more or less a link post, but let me introduce it with just a few thoughts. Wesleyan theology, now more than ever perhaps, is crucial for the witness of the Church of the Nazarene within the broader Catholicity of the church and also within the broader culture. We have ceded too much ground to other movements and have become content to call ourselves evangelicals, emergents, protestants or any number of other things. This has led to a forgetfulness of Wesleyan theology (mostly under the smoke and mirrors of saying Wesley wasn’t a systematic thinker). But Wesley was a broad thinker and brought holiness thought to bear on many subjects and phenomena (economics, sacraments, scripture, eschatology, science, to name a few). If we as theologians in the Nazarene Church are to avoid on the one side the banality of generic evangelicalism and on the other side a complete disengagement with the laity of the church, then the Wesleys need to be our starting point, the fountain from which we think the holiness movement and it’s larger place within the Catholicity of the church’s witness.

Let this not be mistaken as a call for a firmer grip on our “identity” as Nazarenes whatever that might be. David Belcher over at Sanctifying Worship has illuminated how Christian pefection has become not only the central doctrine of the Nazarene church but also that by which we have begun to define our identity: “and thus the beginnings of a potential rift are already forming (since inevitably the necessity to form an identity for ourselves is motivated by some kind of claim, some kind of possession…and I think we all know how possession begets competition, and competition division).”

Rather, let this call back to a starting point in Wesleyan theology be a kind of letting go, letting our identity be de-handed, or given back out of the plenitude of the gift already given. For is this not how Wesley thinks the gift in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection?

I’ll be your alligator

I have always favored multi-instrumentalists in bands (e.g. Jonny Greenwood in Radiohead). This is probably why I am also drawn to multi-instrumental artists like Andrew Bird and Sufjan Stevens. But what happens when you have a whole band of multi-instrumentalists? Grizzly Bear is what happens: drums, guitars, keyboards, clarinet, autoharp..they can do it all, and they all sing on top of it. If you haven’t heard Yellow House or the nearly as brilliant Friend EP you should check them out. This video is very much worth the half hour, and I am excited about the ways I already hear them reworking “Deep Blue Sea” (possibly towards an appearance on their next LP?).

“I Teach Sunday School, Motherf***er”

This video was brought to my attention via Rusty’s Post.

Stephen Colbert would make the short list of people that I love. Of all the late night talkers he certainly has the most ability to converse intelligently with his guests, which makes for very interesting and entertaining television (and made the writer’s strike almost bearable). One of those recent guests was Dr. Philip Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect (which inexplicably has black and red puzzle pieces all over the cover). I have not read this book, but based on how easily Mr. Colbert shredded his argument I can imagine it would be frustrating to get through.

Zimbardo explains that his task was to understand how good people became evil. Colbert asks if one can’t be good by following authority. Zimbardo then says that’s exactly what authority wants us to think, but there are a lot of corrupt and unjust authorities. And the best solution that he can come up with in light of this is “mindful and critical thinking,” i.e. a hermeneutics of suspicion.

But Colbert objects, “If they are unjust, they wouldn’t be authority.” With that one statement Stephen Colbert demonstrates that he has done his homework on Romans 13 and that Zimbardo’s argument is silly. Is every act of evil committed simply because someone didn’t question their social situation? How then do we measure a standard of good and a standard of evil? From what he says, it seems Zimbardo holds to a “Situation Ethics” without a measuring rod for each situation. This kind of thinking displaces guilt and responsibility from the person and hefts it upon society. It is not that the person has done a bad thing, it is just that they have not thought critically about the evils of the unjust authority before going along with it.

As Rusty points out, Zimbardo seems to hold to a dualism between good and evil, that these concepts are equal in stature and locked in an epic struggle for supremacy. Thus humans, according to this framework, can choose between either option. But Colbert objects to this when he argues that Good and evil started in the Garden of Eden. There was no “choosing” (Bonhoeffer states this well in Ethics) before original sin; to discern a good and evil already points to, in Bonhoeffer’s words, “a falling a way from [the human's] origin in God.” In other words, in Colbert’s terminology, the devil critically assesses God’s authority and determines it to be unjust and this does not lead him to a choice between good and evil, but to a falling away from the origin of obedience to God’s authority which is the good. Evil is not another option opposed to the Good, evil is the absence or a falling away from the Good. Colbert understands this, Zimbardo does not–and so his argument gets even sillier.

Zimbardo goes on to say that if God were into reconciliation he would have admitted that Lucifer was right and God was wrong (presumably about free will and the ability to question authority) and he would not have created Hell to send the devil and all the evil people to. Colbert again rises to the theological challenge. He demonstrates that this Hell Zimbardo speaks of is not created by God, nor is it prior to the rise of evil but is in fact the human person’s removal of self from God’s love. Again, we have a sense of evil as not a thing, but as a deprivation, an absence or falling away from an origin. God doesn’t send us to hell, we place ourselves there by removing ourselves from God’s love, Colbert states intensely.

At this point, the only thing left for Zimbardo to do (as Colbert has just unraveled the argument of his nearly 600 page book) is to smugly say “Obviously, you learned well in Sunday school.” Normally this would render anything Colbert had said in the argument as irrelevant, but not this time. Colbert responds without a pause with the statement that comprises the title of this post.

This statement from Colbert demonstrates exactly the kind of “militant” Christianity that is needed in this post-modern, post-Christian world. Allow me to explain.

The Political Beard

What is it, I wonder, that has so marginalized the beard in politics in the last hundred years or so? We have not had a president in the US with a beard since Benjamin Harrison, and the last one with even a mustache was Taft. The beard used to be a sign of fortitude and stature. What happened…seriously?! my coworkers and I have been talking about this and we couldn’t really come up with any answers.

We decided that the best current candidate for beard growing would be Mike Huckabee. We fashined a beard out of paper and put it on the computer screen. It was quite fitting for him, actually. We called it his “endurance beard.” We came to the conclusion that if he grew this beard he might have a shot at the White House…which is scary. But think about it, Al Gore grows a beard and wins the Nobel Prize. Food for thought.

Now I am off to have what I have come to call “The Gerald R. Ford Breakfast.” Apparently his favorite breakfast was a grapefruit, an English muffin, and tea. It’s a great combo. See you learn all kinds of things from hanging out here, kids.

I Voted