Turning 27...

Late last year, I was at a Sarah Slean concert and she assured the audience that 27 is a great year, but that you pay for it in year 28 and 29. When one is 27, adulthood has definitively set in and there is no escaping it, although perhaps it is the last year in which denial is quite socially acceptable. I find it difficult, as I believe we all do, to not compare myself to those around me in a variety of spheres and contexts. Some of my more famous fellow 1985 babies include: Lily Allen, Fefe Dobson, Zac Hanson, Kiera Knightly, Lady Sovereign, Frankie Muniz, Ashley Tisdale, T-Pain, and Madeline Zima. Other superstars like Miss Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga) are a year younger. While we could have a lively discussion regarding the degree of adulthood these celebrities have achieved, certainly their success and cultural influence is spectacular. Friends of mine own houses and are having babies... My parents had finished school, bought a house, and found the job my Dad continues to work at, given birth to me and were pregnant with my sister. These are examples of those who while less globally influential are discernably settled, rooted. I, however, seem to be stuck in the midst of the same existential crisis I have been in for the past at least 10 years, except 10 years ago I was more optimistic regarding the future. At 27, I am feeling both the desire and terror of settling... I am feeling distinctly exhausted with the uncertainty and transience of many peoples early and mid twenties.

Please let me be the first to be cynical regarding my own cynical out look. From any other perspective but my own, my own pathos is near inexplicable. I am married, I have travelled the world, I am currently enrolled in grad school and I have concession style popcorn machine, I live in Vancouver; life, by any reasonable external standard, is fantastic. Despite the often uncertain and unexpected series of events that have been the last decade of my life, they have been far from dull, uneventful or unproductive. However, from a young age I have had my eyes set on a world stage, and rather than making progress I find myself living everyday with angsty teenage uncertainty regarding what I want to be when I grow up. And here we are and I still don't really know or am too afraid to say or am afraid that the ongoing ambiguity determines me a failure regardless, doomed to be blown by the wind.

My eternally embarrassing confession of competing in figure skating up to the age of 16 never ceases to cause me discomfort. It is in this context of competition, my eyes always directed to national and international success, that I spent some of my most formative years. The height of my success was not a gold medal but qualifying for nationals (perhaps you can hear my disappointment). Anyway, I retired at 16 in order to more fully devote myself to school and art. My ambition for a world stage did not disappear, it merely shifted toward film and television. I have now spent 6+ years formally pursuing spirituality and theological education. But my vision/desire for global impact remains undeterred. On a side note, 4 years ago I recognized in myself a great longing to escape. This is mostly expressed in not wanting to live in North America. Despite and because of this I seem to have confined myself to the very context I both love and loathe, Vancouver.

Ambition is considered both a vice and virtue in modern society. I have mixed feelings about my own ambitions. Oh I could call them "hopes and dreams" and that would be far more acceptable but realistically it is the same. My desire to engage an audience is, perhaps, innate to my identity. There is not a time in my life that I can remember when some aspect of my time was not directed to this end in some fashion. And yet my young desire to perform and entertain has shifted to a desire to express and communicate. This blog succeeds in quenching some of that need. However, blogs and internet communication are often unsatisfying outlets, as they can feel like performing Shakespeare in the dark. Can anyone hear you? or see you? Does anyone care what about what you are doing or trying to do? These fears are somewhat alleviated here by group authorship...

My question, which perpetuates my own frustration and dissatisfaction is not: Do you care? or Can you see me? but, What am I doing? According to Dorothy Sayers I might be classified as an artist all energy and no idea... Although in reality I am exhausted and rarely energetic. I move amongst my own shadows of doubt looking for something... Perhaps we will have a child and I will find focus, perhaps I will be given an opportunity which will crystallize things, perhaps I will meet someone who will make things clear... But after 10 years of pursuing God for these things, learning to think, and discerning in community,  it is my conviction that we must learn to live in the shadowy reality of our own subjectivity. I must continue to step into the darkness by faith, because all is darkness. It is my hope to walk while holding hands with those I love. It is the deep torture of my soul to be weighed down with the call to speak and simultaneously deep uncertainty about what to say, or perhaps my uncertainty is a mask for inability to commit to a subject or perspective...

So I am most curious regarding your thoughts of ambition as a subject and its role in the Christian life...
How common is my sense of dissatisfaction? I perceive, perhaps wrongly, that many other people are much more content within life's mundane routines and much more capable of finding joy in the doldrums of the grind...
Is existential discomfort good or bad? Some might say that comfort and lack of personal tension should be considered a bad sign. 
Is the my decision thus far to confine myself to a context (e.g. Vancouver) that I do not particularly like, in order to attempt to work out my loathing of North America, reasonable or does it make more sense to run off somewhere and hopefully shatter my naive and romantic illusions regarding other parts of the world? This seems a common experience of many people.
Is my restlessness genetic, merely skipping a generation, and now simply expressed in the anxiety of my postmodern generation?
I apologize for what, perhaps, is far too personal a post for the public nature of this setting. 

CYOA: Ephesians 1 - Genie in a Bottle

I am way behind this week. Life gets crazy, I am sure you can relate. Last week I had a number of exhausting days at work that resulted in me lying on the couch all night staring blankly at the roof. On days like that, I have no energy to blog. Now that it is Monday and I have caught up on some sleep, I feel ready to share some thoughts on last weeks CYOA, Ephesians 1.

Paul is a rambler. Brilliant. But a rambler none the less. I, like Duncan, cannot help wonder what provokes one to write a letter that is so detailed yet appears to say almost nothing. This is the text though, so here we go. Paul does have some logic in this letter, the difficulty is unearthing it from the plethora of extra words, phrases, and clauses. One way to do this excavation is to break up the text into phrases and read it that way. (due to the restrictions of formatting on a blog it is not as beautiful as I would like but give it a try).

Paul,
an apostle of Christ Jesus
by the will of God,
to the holy ones who are [in Ephesus]1
and/also
faithful in Christ Jesus:
Grace to you
and
peace
from God our Father
and
[the] Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ
who blessed us
with every spiritual blessing
in the heavenlies
in Christ
just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the cosmos
to be holy
and
blameless before him in love,
who predestined us for adoption
through Jesus Christ for him
according to the pleasure of his will,
to the praise of his glorious grace
which he gave to us in the Beloved,
in whom we have
redemption through his blood,
the forgiveness of sins
according to the wealth of his grace
which he lavished on us
in all wisdom and
understanding,
who made known to us the secret of his will
according to his good pleasure
which he established beforehand in him
for the administration of the fullness of times,
to gather up all things in the Christ
—things on the heavens and
things on the earth in him—
in whom we,
the predestined,
have been allotted an inheritance
according to the plan of the one who energizes all things
according to the resoluteness of his will
so that we might exist for the praise of his glory
who first hoped in the Christ
in whom also you
having heard
the word of truth
the good news of your salvation having also believed in him
were sealed with the Holy Spirit
of promise
which is the guarantee of our inheritance toward redemption of the possession
to [the] praise of his glory.

For this reason also
I,
since I heard of your
faith
in the Lord Jesus and
love
toward all the saints,
do not cease to give thanks for you,
remembering you in my prayers,
that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Father of glory
might give you a spirit of
wisdom
and
revelation in knowledge of him,
having the eyes of your heart enlightened,
so that you might know what is
the hope of his calling,
the wealth of the glory
of his inheritance in the saints,
the surpassing greatness of his power
for us who believed,
according to the energy of the strength of his might
which he exercised in the Christ,
having raised him from the dead, and
having seated him at his right in the heavenlies,
far above every
rule and
authority and
power and
lordship and
every name that is named,
not and only in this age
but in the one to come,
he put all things under his feet, and
he gave him to be head over all
through the church which is his body,
the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.


So what does it say?

Well for starters, Paul begins with a threefold reason for his blessing of God. The reasons are 1) Who blessed us 2) who predestined us for adoption 3) Who made known the secret of his will. So in essence God should be blessed because of what he has done for humanity.

Then the second section of this first chapter is Paul’s response to this action of God. His response is that he does not cease to give thanks for the church’s faith and love for one another.

That is this text in essence. Praise of God for how he has acted towards us, and then thanksgiving for how people have responded by loving one another. Paul just uses many more words to say it.

Beyond that, it is not every week I get to write about an epistle, we have been stuck in the OT wars and genocides for far too long. So I thought I would share some of my favourite parts of Ephesisan. Neat tid-bits, if you will.

Ephesus is the most referenced place in the NT (minus Palestine because the Gospels take place there). Ephesus is a key place in Acts, Ephesians, Timothy, and Revelation. They really could not get their ducks in a row, it is a huge success and a huge failure. Thus, when one considers the how a small movement manages to spread from Judea to Rome and then to the ends of the earth, Ephesus cannot be ignored.

Point 2. Ephesus was a rough city. This was largely due to the temple to Artemis/Diana. This temple attracted people requiring healing, as well as those who were seeking asylum. It was a safe haven for people who had committed crimes. There were also many temple prostitutes. I state all of this because it ought to influence how we understand Paul’s vice and virtue lists in this book.

Third and finally. There was a large magic culture within Ephesus. Knowing about the use of magic enables us to understand the mystery talk Paul uses. It also explains Paul’s usages of the Cosmos, the high heavens, the low underworld, the powers of the air, etc. The question then becomes “Is Paul affirming such a cosmology or is he simply speaking in the language that would be understood?” The magic culture also might have something to say about the spiritual warfare in this book. I find thinking about magic incredibly revealing, as Paul argues strongly against it in this book. It causes me to wonder if Christianity does not become magic. One thing required in magic is the necessity of saying words in the correct order, or saying the right words. Maybe this has crept into Christianity in our: “Dear Lord Jesus”, “Father, Father, Father” “I pray it in the blood of the Lamb”. It is certainly worth thinking about, has God become our genie in a bottle?

CYOA - To Deny or Explain?

Daughter of Jephthah

Judges 11
 ^29-31 God's Spirit came upon Jephthah. He went across Gilead and Manasseh, went through Mizpah of Gilead, and from there approached the Ammonites. Jephthah made a vow before God: "If you give me a clear victory over the Ammonites, then I'll give to God whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in one piece from among the Ammonites—I'll offer it up in a sacrificial burnt offering."

 ^32-33 Then Jephthah was off to fight the Ammonites. And God gave them to him. He beat them soundly, all the way from Aroer to the area around Minnith as far as Abel Keramim—twenty cities! A massacre! Ammonites brought to their knees by the People of Israel.

 ^34-35 Jephthah came home to Mizpah. His daughter ran from the house to welcome him home—dancing to tambourines! She was his only child. He had no son or daughter except her. When he realized who it was, he ripped his clothes, saying, "Ah, dearest daughter—I'm dirt. I'm despicable. My heart is torn to shreds. I made a vow to God and I can't take it back!"

This passage sucks because either you deny child sacrifice, which is good but are perceived to be hand waving or you don't and you have to deal with the ramifications of child sacrifice, which are horrific.

One angle I have heard is that this is a lesson against legalism and that Jephthah should have asked to be released from his vow... for which to some degree there are specifications for in Leviticus 27.

I would be happier with that explanation if we didn't have the story of Abraham being called to sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering, although clearly no issue of a vow in that case.

So people may ask what was he expecting to come out of a house? The implication appears to be an animal, which is plausible given that animals often lived in the house with the family as they contributed to the heat as well as were too valuable to keep outside without being tended. However, I think it is a fair statement that this is a bad vow to begin with... But it seems initially to be a vow full of faith and trust in God... or is it a vow bent on manipulating God? hmmm... Why does Jephthah need to make a vow? After his long diplomatic speech about God's victory over Balak and Israel's respect of Ammon in the preceding verses, the vow seems to actually betray a lack of faith rather than great faith.

There is something distinctly and spectacularly pagan about this whole story. Our bastard hero is exiled but then returns and and saves the day winning a great battle and the cost of his victory is his only virgin daughter. I would be reasonably happy to say that this is a pagan story attempted to be revised to fit Yahwehism...

But again I would be happier with that explanation if their wasn't this odd theme of child/self sacrifice that runs from Abraham and Isaac and is culminated in Jesus, another "bastard" child and if Jephthah wasn't celebrated as a hero of faith in Hebrew's 11.

39-40 It became a custom in Israel that for four days every year the young women of Israel went out to mourn for the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite.

These final verses of the story seem to indicate that it is some sort of explanation for a social tradition.

Some commentators note that the passage ends focused on virginity not death and there is the suggestion that the daughter was not killed but devoted to a life of service as virgin, similar to nuns. This is argued  further based on the fact that the context of the situation does not fit a literal, levitical burnt offering. While clearly, a life of service, similar to Samuel, is preferable to filicide it seems possible to me that the concern with virginity rather than death is actually one and the same given that the Old Testament view is that one lives on through their children. Therefore, being Jephthah's only virgin daughter, her virginity represents the destruction of the entire family.

Sorry everybody I see all of the problems and I don't like it or any of the solutions, I welcome further thoughts...

You reached a dead end and were trapped inside the Pharoah's tomb.

Turn to page 47 if you don't like this ending...

I Deny the Resurrection

John 20:1-10

¹ Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. ² So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

³ So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. ⁴ Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. ⁵ He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. ⁶ Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, ⁷ as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. ⁸ Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. ⁹ (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) ¹⁰ Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.

Let us cut to the chase. This Choose Your Own Adventure is a check on our orthodoxy. The resurrection passages in the past fifteen years have been the standard to draw the line between the liberal and the “orthodox”, the difference between the Marcus Borg’s vs. the NT Wright’s. So I picked up my Borg book just to stir the pot a little bit. I am not going to tell you Jesus’ body was eaten by rabid dogs (although some believe this). I am not even going to say that I am fully in the “liberal” camp on this one. But before I begin I want to say some things I really like about this passage John 20:1-10.

1) I like that a woman is the first witness, it makes the egalitarian in me grin uncontrollably. 1.1) I like that it is Mary Magdalene, she is a great character and I always enjoy the events that occur when she is around. 2) I like to think John is writing himself into the story without his name, just like earlier where he lays his head on Jesus’ bosom, during the final meal. 3) I like that Peter has a moment of doubt and hesitancy at the entrance, probably because I would have too. 4) I like the self-justification “we really didn’t know…” I think it adds a lot of humanity to the text.

But the question I assume people want answered is: Did it happen historically? I’ll throw my hat in with Wright and say it did, because I think it shows a continued investment on God’s part into the tangible physical world. But I’ll also throw my hat in with Borg that there are many ways to understand this text. One of which is reading it as a truthful parable; and a really good understanding of this a parable, as he may argue, would bring about the same conclusions about God as a historical, God acting in time, reading and interpretation of this text. (I know I may get flack for saying that but I think our conceptions of truth are often too small). However one perceives this text, specifically the mystery surrounding death and resurrection, possibly the only certainty is that of uncertainty. Therefore, I agree with Borg when he states that epistemological humility and ontological humility are called for.

History or Parable? It is an age old question…well at least I think so. I think back to the time of allegory (which served the church quite well and ought not to be made light of too quickly), therefore parable may be the next in a long line of ever-wrong interpretive methods. As wrong as it might be, there are benefits to parable as it reveals dimensions of a text not comprehended previously, this works for the book of Jonah, the creation accounts, and even the exodus. Thus, if I read all of those as parable/story/truthful myth then an examination of the resurrection as such may be a beneficial perspective I have yet to examine.

So as much as I believe Jesus as a human individual in time and space did rise from the dead, I do not believe this because of a literal reading of the text. I am not a Biblical literalist by any means, I think reading the Bible literally is flat, uninspired and creates mindless “yes men” Christians, something I think God would despair over, having chosen from the beginning to give us free choice and intellect to think through choices. So I am not going to say that you must read a passage, such as this one, as literal history in order to be a Christian. I refuse to be pinned down in literalism because it is in that strain of literalism that one runs into CS Lewis thinking of “EITHER Jesus was who he said he was OR he was a lunatic”. I think once you are here you are stuck, you have laid all your cards on the table, not resting on what the bible says, in full commitment to ones cognitive constructed framework. One is then stuck in a thought framework because “The persuasiveness of this statement depends upon a literal-factual reading of the gospels. Its logic works only within this framework” (Borg’s book “Jesus” p 19). Thus you rest your entire belief on your individual cognitive makeup, which is almost certainly wrong (see “I am wrong” blog). Thus having stated my refusal to be pinned down into a specific mode of thought and regarding literalism as uninspired and highly unimaginative, I refuse to set up camp as a literalist. So where does that then land me if I am not picking either camp to sit in permanently?

I think it lands me in the best possible spot. I end up asking what is the entire point of landing in either camp? To put oneself against another who is in the opposing camp? Hopefully not! It is at this point that part of the pragmatic in me screams that I have reached a point where it is all conjecture (I don’t really believe it is all speculation I think the dialogue over biblical interpretation in valid, but there are other/better questions to be asked). I think one of these better questions is: What does it mean to believe the resurrection? As it relates to “do you truly believe the resurrection”.

For my answer to this question I am going to defer to someone who I think has said it well. Peter Rollins, who may say “I deny the resurrection all the time”.

Belief truly needs to be more than mental assent (to parable or literal interpretations) and I think he captures it. So my final reflection on John 20:1-10 is that recently I find myself denying the resurrection quite often, but I hardly think I am alone in doing so (my own little justification just like verse 9) .

I am Wrong

The wonders of the intertubes is there is a plethora of wonderful content out there, more than one life time can adequately enjoy. The trouble is finding the stuff worth watching. Thanks to social media I have a few friends who often post the best of the internet which helps me to gather from more breadth than I would personally be able to scan for quality content. I ran across this one today thanks to my brother Josh, to whom others had past this gem. After the seventeen minute video, I knew I needed to pass it on as well. So enjoy, I have not unpacked it all myself so I will not further comment on it right now, other than to say it was a serious intellectual reality check for me. Without further ado:

The Wild Goose

The Wild Goose.

So today began unlike any in recent memory...but with a simple enough explanation. Simple because it is probably less remarkable than the first phrase led you to believe. I'm visiting my brother in Whistler, he moved here about two weeks ago. I woke up under a tin roof listening to the rain fall through the trees, after a long night of omelettes, wine, and laughter. Therapeutic in that it is not the same despair of waking up in the same bed as always and still being unemployed, this time at least it was a different bed, I'm still unemployed but the view was worth getting out of bed to see. Misty mountains have got to be one of my favourite things.

The day continued to be lazy, and by the time we had watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and eaten some food for lunch it was 3pm. The great thing about having nothing to do is time becomes inconsequential, one moment is not so different from the next. One day is not more memorable than that which precedes it or that which follows. It is easy to loose the days of the week, especially when it takes all of your motivation to get out of the house/apartment and you end up calling a shopping trip to the grocery store a good day's accomplishment. Whistler, however, is full of people who are making their moments count. Unlike the rest of the world, one does not doubt that the people here came here to live, to live hard and fast. To be honest it is inspiring to be surrounded by these people again. I used to call these people my community (sure it was in Calgary but let me have the poetic licence). There was purpose, people lived to ski/bike and they worked to make that a reality. The daily grind is put up with and may be bewailed over but everyone knows the people here are not here for those moments, they exist for the pure ecstasy of life that occurs in the moments they pursue their passions.

Hmm sounds mighty Christian doesn't it. Have these people, with all their roughness and hedonistic lifestyle, found and embodied what the Christian life was meant to be? (I say hedonist with the utmost respect, God being the ultimate hedonist - to borrow from the memorable and provocative C.S.Lewis) These have been some of my thoughts as i have for the past 24 hours re-entered a world I used to know quite well. It has made me wonder if somewhere along the way I got side tracked from the life I was meant to pursue? Was Bible College a detour one I should never have gone down? Here at the end of a number of years and a large chapter of my life, I am left pondering if I was meant to pursue pleasures? (I could be nice and coat it in evangelical language and say that God made me to do the things I like to do, but the bluntness of stating that it probably just the pursuit of pleasure seems more honest, more truthful)

But today is not an average day that blends into all the rest of the days in my unemployed life. Today is Sunday, a day to rest (which seems absurd when one has not done anything that could remotely be called productive. Here I echo Duncan's angst at how we measure productivity and meaning). Sunday also has become the day we who call ourselves Christians gather, and I am glad at the breadth of the definition of Christian because some days I need it much broader than others if I hope to call myself one. So I went with my brother, and Jamie, his roommate, to Church on the Mountain. And now I expect some of you who are reading this are smiling, Silas going to church. For those of you who do not know Church is one of the hardest things for me to stomach for a number of reasons, but that is an entirely different rant for another day, so i'll use the word "veneer" as my overarching reason I struggle with going to church. But I went, I actually went two weeks ago for those of you who wanted to know, so maybe I am becoming a regular attender again...who knows.

The preamble to the little talk in the service was the wild goose, the interesting thing to me was this had been the preamble to the service I went to two weeks ago as well, but a different church in a different city, hmm coincidences. But the thing about the goose is...it was the celtic understanding of God, God as the wild goose, completely unpredictable, untameable, an image of the mystery of God. That wild goose I think has been put away for far too long and it needs to be returned to its wild state. The frustration for me is that as much as I want to experience, or encounter that wild goose, the more distant the goose seems to get. Making myself available to the goose, only results in disappointment of the absence of its presence. (Enter your anti-dote of the dark night of the soul here, but I'm sceptical of this answer that has become nothing more than a band-aid answer to me.) Thus, I am left in the state which provoked this blog in the first place, abject nothingness, complete otherness, only with time, time and more time, yet nothing. Here is to wallowing, wallowing together. Maybe if we wallow together for long enough, the goose might drop by and play in the mud with us. Or maybe I am better off returning to a life of hedonism living for moments of ecstasy. Extremes, yup, but really when have I ever not lived in extremes, that would just be out of character for me.