Reason Breeds Insanity

Augustine said: The Church is a whore, and she’s my mother.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the church and how it relates society: the church at times has shaped society and at other times has been shaped by society. I think we are in a “being shaped by society” phase right now. When I have a hard time distinguishing between church related activities and those in secular culture, I think the society is shaping the church. I am not an advocate of the church remaining apart from culture like a little island, but I am also a huge advocate of being able to tell the difference between the lives of Christians, or believers, and the lives of those with no religious compass to point their ways. If you know me, you know that when I speak of believers, I really mean adherers to any compassion based, humanity based, love driven religion. I want to be able to tell who we are. By that, I mean, through our actions, we should know each other. I don’t care what you look like, what you wear, if you have pyrotechnics at your concerts, if you say fuck and shit a millions times, or if you are any type of freak, but I do care if you use your resources to help other people. I do care if you are compassionate to your fellow beings, if your life mirrors the life of Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, or whoever is the central figure in your religion, and if you live your life in a non-selfish, charitable way. By living your life in this manner, the rest of things (how you look, what you wear, etc.) become unimportant. I will say one thing for modesty’s sake however: no one’s ass cheeks should hang out of the bottom of their shorts, if I can see your areola, your shirt is cut too low, and if I can guess the size of your package because your pants are so tight, you probably should think about how you are dressing.

John Wesley once said, as it is memorialized in the United Methodist discipline:

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.

If as a church our goal is to accomplish this challenge set forth by Wesley, why can we not tell each other. Certainly, the emphasis of our lives is counter-cultural. Our focus is on how much we can do for others, not on how much we can do for ourselves. This, is why I think the church is being shaped by culture right now: look at all of the buildings being built and look at all the money being spent and look at all the people who still have nothing. I would love for a church to refrain from building a new grotesque structure because they have outgrown their old one and move into an abandoned store front just down the block. We need to figure out some ways to conserve our space and to stop simply building things for the sake of building.

All of this to say: the church is a whore, but she is our mother.

I think I finally scared myself out of procrastinating. I started a presentation that was due today last night at 9PM. I got finished ten minutes before it was due and slept for three and a half hours. Whew. The shocking thing about it is that I was really nervous about it because it is for the professor I think hates me, but it went really well, and she was really pleased. She only added to my presentation instead of clarifying it, which is always complimentary. Now on to making a lesson plan for the class for tomorrow morning. Whoohoo!

I had my plan of study meeting for the PhD program and I only have one literature class I have to take, the rest I get to choose. I have to take French, well I don’t really have to, but I think I should given what I am going to pursue. It would be beneficial to say the least. It seems like everyone from 1850ish to 1920ish thought they needed to use French in ther writing. And the theorists that I will most likely use all write in French. So on to gay Paris! I am also hoping to take soem religious studies adn philosophy classes. Should be good stuff.

I really don’t have much to say except that I went to the art museum with my family today, and it was really fun. We looked at some Roman art from the Louvre, and I never imagined from all the slides that Dr. Vader showed us in art history class that the sculptures would be so massive. They were literally colossal. It was unreal. The stuff was so heavy that it took three airplanes to get it to Chicago and then four semis to get it to Indy. I can’t imagine working with marble, although what I did learn, that Dr. Vader never taught us, is that the heads of almost all of them were at one point removed, broken, lost, or switched, which leads to quite a few oddly shaped sculptures. Little tiny heads on big bodies. Odd. Tiny penises on many of the men, too. I sort of felt sorry for them in a way. Minuscule really. No wonder they all looked angry.

By the way, my art history professors name wasn’t really Vader, but she did have this black mask with a breathing apparatus…kidding.

Marion Jones is still one of my greatest heroes despite her recent admission to doping for the 2000 Olympics. Click here. I want to tell these stars, these athletes who get caught doing stupid things, that I still love them. We are all human, we all fall, we all do stuff we wish we’d never done. Why are we so hard on our celebrities? Why do we hold them to higher standards than we hold our next neighbor? ourselves? I often wonder what it would be like to be in that type of limelight. I wonder how much pressure I could take before I would use drugs, before I would sell out, before I would fall.

I said before I still love her. I think such is grace. Grace means we love people who aren’t who we thought they were. We love them and we help them up when they fall, we clean their skinned knees, and we hold their elbow until they can walk again on their own.

What we don’t do, if we believe in grace, is say bad things about them, pull every last skeleton from their closets, and ridicule their existences. For that matter, we don’t do that to our friends or family who disappoint us either.

Grace is unconditional love. We love even though that person doesn’t deserve it. If they deserved it, it wouldn’t be grace! The thing about grace is that it somehow got watered down.

In the Jewish scriptures the concept of grace of forgiveness was so much more than what we perceive it to be today. Today we think of grace with a New Testament (Second Covenant) concept in which we as the forgiver are asked by Jesus to forgive unlimitedly. Great. But we also couple that with the idea that we are to forgive and forget. You know the Audio Adrenaline song says our sins are on the ocean floor.

The idea of forgiveness or grace in Jewish scriptures is much more complicated. There is this word nasa, which means to lift or carry. Basically we are given the example through several stories that we are to lift or to carry our offenders sins onto our own shoulders and carry them. Both the offender and the forgiver carry the sin together. So for example, if your daughter gets pregnant out of wedlock, if you truly forgive her, you will help her carry her burden by supporting her, by walking with her in public, by physically placing yourself in her shoes to the furthest extent possible. You literally are forced to remember the person’s sin, but you are also forced to help carry the burden of it.

Imagine how freeing it would be for others if we were to start living by this idea of grace. Would we ever have to worry about gossip? No, because everyone’s sin would be our own. We would lift, and help to carry, the sins of the world. If we all helped it would be a light load.

So, I may buy a Marion Jones shirt on E-Bay. I have her book. She makes me happy. Would she have been the fastest woman on earth without the drugs? We’ll never know, but what we do know is that she has fallen, has skinned knees, and might need some help up.

I am sitting in Bracken Library 215 listening to a marathon reading of works of Kurt Vonnegut. This is interesting on a couple of planes.

The first plane, the funny one, is that the library, yes the dean of the library at a fairly well-respected state university, sent out several pieces of publicity (5 exactly) that invited people to join GSAB for a marathon reading of works by KIRK Vonnegut. You would think that the dean of the library would catch a mistake about an author who is not only incredibly well known, but just died, and was from Indianapolis to boot. Amazing: the powers of higher education.

The other plane, perhaps the more personal, and definitely the more touching one, on which this whole experience touches me is that my high school boyfriend loved Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. He relished its every page; his version showed it too, all dog-eared, yellowed, and marked up. I used to think he was crazy for loving Vonnegut, but I know now that he was just ahead of us, courtesy of his sister, in his knowledge of literature.

The final plane interests me, and perhaps the most intimate, is the plane of emotion. Right now we are listening to the “Prologue to Slapstick.” It is sad and mostly about life, which means it is mostly about life, and it makes me sad nonetheless. The last two readings were from Man With a Country and the political writings therein are so close so deeply engrained in our society, so fucked up right now. I guess if I think about all the readings together, I can be glad that we live with strong, deeply entrenched feelings, but I should look forward to death as well and what we leave behind.

Here are a few Vonnegut quotes:

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”—A Man Without a Country

“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

“How nice–to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.” —Slaughterhouse Five

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.”

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”