Apologies and Moo Point #5

Sorry for leaving this space unattended for the past two weeks. I wasn’t engaged in any marvelous ascetical feats for the recent fast. I’ve just been preoccupied with my new job as lecturer at a college about 20 miles from where I live. When the term starts next Monday (the 24th) I’ll be  teaching Introduction to World Religions and Introduction to Philosophy. We’ll see how that goes.

While listening to one of the Old Testament readings appointed to be read before Qurbana today I got distracted and arrived at this Moo Point instead:

So many neat, airtight theological systems can be exploded by a careful reading the Old Testament.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Your thoughts?

Moo Point #4: “Mr. President, were you talking to us?”

Two readers of the local online daily Malaysiakini wondered:

Vijay: Like the rest of the world, I could not but feel inspired and heartened by Barack Obama’s presidential address.

Just as he did in his acceptance speech just a few weeks ago, he fired up all of us with the confidence born out of knowing that change is at hand with hope and triumph over fear.

Yet as a Malaysian, I am even more prouder [sic] and stand even taller. This pride comes from the realisation that of the countless countries in the world, Obama chose only Malaysia to speak directly to, from the steps of the Capital, before the billions around the globe.

We have to acknowledge and respond, as virtue demands, to his call and perhaps warning to Malaysia that:

‘To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.’

No doubt Umno will hearken to this reminder and invitation.

HL Ooi: ‘To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.’ – excerpt from Obama’s inaugural speech.

‘The 23 people who were detained at the PJ anti-ISA candlelight vigil on Nov 9, 2008 will be charged in the Petaling Jaya court at 2pm on Thursday, January 22, 2009. – article in ‘Malaysia Today’, Jan 20, 2009.

Does the statement from President Obama serve as a warning to those who are running the federal government in Malaysia?

I really doubt the President of the United States specifically had us in mind, but that at least some Malaysians heard his words this way says something about the state of affairs in this country, doesn’t it? Americans aren’t the only people in danger of thinking of him as the Messiah, apparently.

Fifty-one years after independence, we’re still waiting for the West to help solve our problems. If this isn’t a symptom of the colonization of the mind, I don’t know what is.

But Malaysian complexes aside, may God grant to the President many blessed years.

Moo Point #3: The gospel of the middle-class

If you lived in the days before the public appearance of Jesus Christ and God had called you to prepare people to receive Him, how would you go about doing that?

There was once a man who spent most if not all his days in the wilderness, wore strange clothes and ate even stranger foods. When people asked him how they could experience God and receive His Kingdom, he told them this:

Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise (Luke 3.11).

Which is often translated like this:

Those who have extra clothing that they’re not wearing or don’t want anymore must give it to those who can’t afford it; and those who have some money left over after they’ve bought all their basic necessities, must do likewise.

Peter Gilbert once observed that some of us appear to have “exalted a sort of comfortable but committed suburban homemaking existence as the supreme pattern of heroic virtue and piety”. This kind of equivocation can of course only be sustained by contextualizing and nuancing biblical texts like this to irrelevance, to uselessness, to death, so that our discipleship can still leave our checkbooks, closets and pantries untouched.

I’ve bought into it, I live in it, I’m suffocated by it: this de-clawed gospel of the middle-class.

Moo Point #2 (being an anthology of lesser moo points)

Observations and questions while driving home from work today:

• My Christianity is really, really bourgeois.
• Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests. I have a comfortable bed in a house with hot water and an air-conditioner in just about every room.
• I didn’t sell all my possessions and give the money to the poor, but today I gave ten bucks to someone collecting donations for a charity or some sort.
• I have a vow of poverty, an iPod Nano, a Fossil watch and a pair of Doc Martens.
• What is the difference between celibacy and bachelorhood?
• Not sure if my Christianity is something more than a matter of where I spend my Sunday mornings. If so, how much more?
• I’ve never known real hunger.
• I’m not friends with any homeless people or prostitutes. Or terrorists.

Moo Point #1

He was explaining to me his reticence toward the Church; his inability to accept faith as it is lived in the Church, his imperviousness to the teachings of the Church.  He is a radiant boy, full of light, goodness and love for peace.  What can one say to such people, or rather how can one defend a Christianity in which Christ is somehow obscured from view by an accumulation of inexplicable obstacles and taboos?  Those people who have the gift of life, life’s religious sense, often do not need a “religion” which fills a void, which takes away fear.  This kind of joyless, lifeless religion repels people, mainly because its outlook on life is often mean, censorial and judgmental.

Fr. Alexander Schmemann, on a young man who’d come to see him (Journal, entry dated March 13, 1974)

When I lived in Denver, many of us “faithful” Catholics felt good about ourselves by criticizing Colorado’s neo-pagans—you know, those twentysomething yuppies who worshipped fun, who’d rather go skiing on Copper Mountain or hiking at Rocky Mountain National Park than give glory to the Lord our God on Sundays at church.  We’d point and sometimes laugh at the people who said, “My church is the [insert place of stunning natural beauty here], these people say.  Whatever.  If they only knew about the Eucharist.”

It gave us a sort of permission to feel good about ourselves—us lovers of God who, despite the clear sky and calm day, kept our communion fasts, buttoned up our pressed shirts and even put on a tie to go inside a building, sing hymns and commune with God in the sacramental life.  What sacrifice.  You can almost hear the cherubim fluttering their wings in delight at such godliness.

As the years went by, I began to realize that the mountain-loving granola folk were generally less tightly-wound, felt less guilty about being happy and, horror of horrors, actually seemed more full of life than the churchy people did.  Most of my conversations with them were not about how the Enlightenment had birthed Modernity which in turn generated misery for all mankind (or humankind, excuse me).  They were mostly about normal, tangible things, like the traffic on I-70 up the mountains (of course—they were skiers, after all), good pizza joints in our neighborhood, who’s playing at the Fillmore, or when we should hop over to the newly-opened Cheeky Monk (the bar, that is) for a communal happy hour.  I didn’t have to use words like hypostasis as much or justify my actions with Apostolic Canon 34.

And you know, I liked them better.

It occurred to me one day that the Catholic Church might not have room for such as these.  I’m not thinking of shortcomings in ministries or funding.  I’m talking about the strange suspicion that, once we got a hold of them and ran them through our catechumenate, we’d turn these life-filled, vivacious people into boring, pressed-shirt-wearing, pious church-folk who either agonize about whether or not their romantic relationships are godly enough or are tortured by the possibility of a vocation to religious life or the priesthood, or both. I suspect that their hikes to see the aspen turn and thrilling rafting trips on whitewater will be replaced by somber discernment retreats at monasteries and incessant talk about the “revelation” given by their spiritual director yesterday.  I’ve seen it happen. Compliment someone on their tattoo, and listen to a mind-numbingly boring testimony about how this person has just discovered the “theology of the body” and regrets ever mutilating his/her body like that.

I mean, all I said was, “Hey, that’s a cool dragon on your shoulder.”

No wonder some people avoid us Christians like the plague.  We say Jesus came to give life and give it abundantly, but the way most non-Christians see it, we’re here to sap every ounce of life they’ve got and make sure they’re glad they’ll have large mansions in heaven after death-marching through this valley of tears.

I suspect that there is a kind of piety that prevents Christians from seeing reality and experiencing it in its fullness.  Rather, it offers us a way of escaping reality, a way of living in a different and allegedly more “spiritual” world.  This kind of “spirituality” veils the drama of sin and redemption which takes place in this world, obscuring it with clouds of anxious novenas, apparition-chasing and sappy religious-speak. It’s the kind of godtalk that freaks the rest of the world out, only we don’t realize it because we’re so trapped in our little holy huddles or, if we do, we attribute it to our fidelity to the Gospel and their being sold under sin.

I’m not saying that Christians should be liked.  I’m saying that Jesus called us salt and light, and we have to do a better job of figuring out what that means.  If the Church is supposed to be the place of communion and life, if that Kingdom which we bless at the beginning of every Divine Liturgy has in fact broken into this world, then the peoples of the earth should feel liberated by the Gospel rather than trapped by it as they so often do.  If the Gospel is life, then people ought to be thirsting for it when Christians proclaim it, and yet they so often feel the compulsion to take shelter and defend themselves against our “good news”.  Certainly we must be doing something wrong?  You can chalk it up to the fact that these non-believers are darkness-dwellers who shun the light, but Jesus said very little about that.  He seemed more focussed on how his disciples ought to live in that city on a hill so that the nations would be drawn to it.

It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the LORD
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills;
and all the nations shall flow to it,
and many peoples shall come, and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”

Isaiah 2.2-3