At the Humana Festival for New Plays

I woke up this morning with sunlight on my face. I opened my eyes and could see across the Ohio River to Indiana, the state where I was borne. There’s a big steel clock on top of what looks to be the long brick manufacturing plant for COLGATE. Ironically, I had to borrow toothpaste from the front desk.

The bridge which emanates from almost just below my window has intermittent steel peaks that punctuate its otherwise square architecture. I couldn’t really see the peaks when the bridge was outlined in green lights last night. I see the peaks now in the severe shadow it casts next to it on the grey green water of the river below.

If you train your eye to just focus on the the line of the bridge and the line of the shadow particularly where they meet…They form the perfect figure of an eye – so gigantic that it could only be the reflection of God checking out the spring morning in Louisville.

I saw my first of 9 (maybe 10!) plays last night – Sans Culottes in the Promised Land. It was a very solid, profound, aching funny play about the “promised land” of America and the ways that that promise gets played out for black women. One of the characters was a 10 year old African American girl who was the only person of color in her riding class, her ballet class, her private school. She was obsessed with Disney heroines and over the course of the play transformed herself into (literally) Snow White. Ouch.

I listened to a bunch of Mars Hill tapes that Matt let me borrow. I because more deeply convinced of how important it is that mainstream Christianity be exposed to the ways that Social Constructionist / PoMo thinking meshes with Christianity. The tyranny of Natural Law thinking, Platonic ideals & Allen-Bloom-like-devotion-to-High-Culture sometimes make me feel claustrophobic…

…But the freedom to think and listen and drive en route (!)

…The Persian food I had for dinner last night(!)

…the prospect of three plays this afternoon (!)

It’s funny how I feel a little bit guilty about blogging from the place of delight. (as if the very nature of blogging belongs to the world of mundanity – to the quotidian) But I know that the delight of the weekend is only as sweet as it is because it is bounded on both sides by a return to my world.

Hope a little of delight surprises you whether you're a weary sojourner, in a hospital in florida, or juggling children, house-showings & a speaking engagement....

Peace~

is "community" a mask for ugly oppression?

One of my favorite students said to me the other day, you know X class hasn’t really turned out to be a community of learning. People are all just doing their thing as usual.

I was at Home Group last Sunday night and we were wrestling with the controversy from Hebrews 6:6 and one of the insights that my wife keeps feeding back into our talk about Hebrews is – to think about the ways in which any writer addressing Jews must be thinking of the problem of the individual and the community. Steve suggested that in many ways Jesus, his teaching, and the teachings that radiated out from Him were probably fairly radically individualistic for that time and place. And I think that both of them were pointing out that people (like us) who live in a radically individualistic society really struggle to figure out the hermeneutic wriggle we must do in order to apply such passages to our life.

If you live in a world where faith is so collective that you struggle to have a sense of personal agency (and piety) then Hebrews (and other scriptures) make perfect sense – but when you live in a world so jagged with individualism, how do you read the salve of “community” into passages written to the collectivist world?

We came up with some decent answers, but I did get stuck on the question a little bit. I’ve noticed that Community has become a kind of ideological battleground. People from the right and left in almost every setting are vying for it – and I’m not just talking about governmental politics now.

At the little evangelical school where I teach, the fundamentalists (who currently control Student Life) have a term called the "community agreement." Rhetoric which COULD BE a helpful way to get students to own their own role in taking responsibility for their own actions as well as the actions of others. A way to figure out that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

Ironically, instead it’s actually a cloaking device by which an increasingly Byzantine set of rules and regulations is enacted and perpetrated by an incredibly centralized oversight mechanism.

The term is also used well (read: in ways that resonate with my experience). Romanowski uses it as one of the key challenging points for contemporary media mythology. I participated in a group (at work again) called a learning cluster – part of a larger national (and beyond?) movement toward learning – in – community. The same favorite student told me that he had experienced a sense of community amongst filmmakers on campus....

I feel embedded in community these days. There are several axes around which these social networks form. But I also feel keenly the precariousness of all of them. Set adrift from the assumption that anyone will live for their whole life in just one place. That language patterns, family systems, land or work set few constraints on our mobility. Aware that some of the patterns of interaction in these groups are just being initiated and realized. Aware that other patterns have reached a pattern of rigidity which threatens some of the members.

I wonder if there is sometimes a temptation to confuse community with the feeling of social support? Or the experience of celebration? A sense of shared aesthetics?

What * is * essential to community?

Here’s my start:

Continuity

(Balancing) Coherence

(and) Diversity

Relationship

Tradition

Movement

Shared Experience

(somewhat) shared vision (which is a kind of coherence)

(partially) shared past (a kind of continuity + tradition)

Elements of community that I'm suspicious of: (and please feel free to deconsruct my suspicion)

intimacy (i'm not suspicious of it qua it -- i'm suspicious of it as an assumption and prerequisite for community -- since it seems most likely to emerge within homogenous, mutually satisficatory relationships...)

stability (b/c it seems like communities that over-fixate on finality -- tend to become rigid more quickly and maybe even get confused about whether they've arrived at their destination long before they should...(?) i'm reflecting my derridean tendency toward the endless deflection of final meaning....)

impermeability (both from within and without -- i *know* that this is a reflection of my individualism -- but i just get so stuck on the PROBLEMS of small communities which are non-integrative (both abstractly and in terms of their members)...)

Is there an irony in Me (one voice, one man) announcing autonomously what community is? There would be if it weren’t an invitation…. Your thoughts?

sorry to be so long winded....

i'm off to see a bunch of plays at the Actors Theater. It's a birthday weekend. Thanks, Lynn!

~peace

when we were young

erik and i used to sit around strumming our A chords, our G chords and our C chords til there was nothing left of our fingers. We talked of faith and politics and work and relationships.

marcaus let me drive his vehicle around a roundabout and several other areas of Melbourne. We talked and laughed and prayed and mugged.

david and i discovered the shock of email together, chatting in computer labs seven hours apart, shocked by what the world used to be and could never be again. revelling in our rudd-ness, parsing the world with our gigantic intellects.

when i first knew my students, Skylark thought "feminist" was a four letter word, Bemis threw her shoe or her notebook at me (I forget), Mandy listened and cocked her head to the side and seemed both baffled and intrigued.

....and look, this set of blogs is like a fabric with patches from all of them woven in....

i know such nostalgia, such gee-whiz-aint-that-internet-somethin is neither hip nor erudite --

but I just wanted to say thanks to all of the aforementioned for stopping into the blog. I *love* the timbre of your voices in my life...

~peace

intergenerational acceptance

when my wife was growing up her family used to hide their VCR everytime Grandma came up the drive. VCRs were an unreasonably extravagant luxury; she would not have approved at all.

my grandmother sent me a letter the first time she saw in a picture that I had grown a ponytail. She wrote: "So and So asked, 'does Andy have a ponytail?' I said no, that must be some shrubbery." My cousins referred to my ponytail as shrubbery ever since. My Grandfather slipped a little handwritten clip of paper into the same envelope. He wasn't the writing sort; as far as I knew the last letters he had written were to his mother when he was in the military in WW II. The clip of paper read:

"1 Corinthians 11:14 - Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?"

That's all. No personal note. No context. Judgement had been rendered and imparted.

It seems like a telling anecdote because it condenses all that I wonder and fear about growing old....

My father in law once told my wife that her mother thought I was drinking too much. (we were in France -- where its actually a sin if you *don't* drink too much).

A different day, my father suggested that perhaps i shouldn't tell my mother about my drinking.

(and for the uninitiated, this is *not* a drinking problem -- this is a divergence from the fundamentalist position of teetotalling...)

and last night i was feeling sad about having to monitor myself when talking to my Grandmother. I know that this is a universal practice -- code-switching for Grandma's, but there comes a point where you just think -- at what point along the playing of a part, the monitoring of selves, the secrets that underlie relationships -- do you cease to really know one another?

it's a seam that i'm endlessly curious about -- and not in a dispassionate way?

It makes me feel sad, I said to Lynn as I turned out the headboard light. That's its such a fact of existence. Isn't there anyone anywhere who can just love across difference? who can know fully and still love completely?

It seems least possible, least likely across generations --

is this what *keeps* generational chasms wide? even after the aesthetic differences of adolescence and the battles surrounding of coming of age have faded from importance...?

~?