Living in coronavirusworld 66: Weird Christianity

5/27

The Meer

 Today I am repping not a place or event but food.  Most specifically, Pittsburgh food. I’m wearing a PIEROGI shirt.

Pierogi

This all came from a Sunday conversation with my son in Berlin. I told him that to feel a connection with my roots I had made a casserole of kielbasa, sauerkraut and egg noodles. He smiled and said What kielbasa? I said, Polish. He says, It just means sausage in Polish.. So we look it up an discover that what we’ve been calling kielbasa is actually kielbasa krakowska, or Polish sausage, Krakow style.                                                                                                                                                            We spend our gathering time talking about  the current perceived conflict between liberty and equality. The conflict expressed by people angrily demanding their  right to go around without  masks, as if any impingement on liberty outweighs concerns for the common   good. And how my behavior affects you has  no relevance to me. This is the  context in which we discuss the recent New York Times  Op Ed on Weird Christianity, by Tara Burton. (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/weird-christians.html)   And a critique by Daniel Jose Camacho. (https://sojo.net/articles/racial-aesthetics-burtons-weird-christians)

In essence, Ms. Burton argues that  an emerging new generation is moving away from modernism towards a return to traditional forms and practices, like the Latin Mass. And that this back  to basics is a religious form of punk. Camacho, on the other hand, suggests that Burton has missed the inherent elitist posture of at least some of Ms. Burton’s weird Christians, with its accompanying imperial and colonialist attitudes.

We agree that the return to tradition is more  than finding ancient practices to have a really cool aesthetic. I point out the there is validity in her argument. That, for example, I experienced in almost  universally secular Denmark, that a growing number of young people are attracted to the quiet candle lit chanted Taize services. The Reformation movement of Luther  and Calvin replaced  what they perceived to be a practice marked by superstition and imposed ignorance with an emphasis on  the work of the mind. But in the process, something was lost.

Neotraditionalism also brings with it the sense that there is an ideal defined by certain culture norms and expressions. As if something could  be pure.

Our friend Leo lifts up the centrality of Living life under the cross that the neotradtionalists miss. 

I personally had to struggle to move beyond the material and rational bounds of the Reformed Protestant  faith I grew up in. I recalled a seminary class mate, after a class, lost in wonder. Flying buttresses, wow. He said.  A life of faith must have rook for awe. And my night at an after party for a Chronos Quartet concert where a choir of Serbian Orthodox monks passed bottles of their homemade rakia and sang the deep rich and other worldly liturgical music of their tradition. And wondered what the children of former colonial subjects now British citizens claiming the words of Shakespeare as their own means. 

Steve H says that he fullness of the  Kyrie eleison can only be felt when we hear it in  multiple languages. That true religion gets us out of and beyond our identity into the formation of a new identity. 

Steve P says that Christianity always holds two realities  in tension, that it is by nature conservative and anti-change and also subversive and future oriented at the same time. Both rejecting the world and openly embracing the world. 

And I say we need spaces to get lost. 

We affirm that diversity is the true icon of human experience. That there is a line from Origen to Howard Thurman to Thomas Merton in which contemplation takes one into the heart of suffering . That Merton had said who begins in contemplation ends in revolution. That as mystical as the Eucharist is, in the end it is the people who are the real presence. That the mystical exists between THE BODY and bodies. It is true that Breuggeman, for example, says that a preacher must ultimately be a poet.  (Or in the words of Rubem Alves, Poet, Prophet and Warrior). But reason too matters, as long as we understand it is not the only expression of truth. 

Our friend Leo reminds us that suffering must be at our center. An embrace of our own poverty and the poverty of others. To truly be the essence of punk, our Christianity  has to challenge the essence of empire.  Those of us who remain in the church have to be institutional Christians  for revolutionary purposes.  

We live in a world where reality has been I conquer, therefore I am . Where our lives are held in ransom to the market. Where the thief's  demand your money or your life  becomes your life for our money. We are called to be a subversive communtiy. One , where as Fredrick Buechner  said, our greatest gift meets the world's greatest need. 

Yes, another good Wednesday morning. 

There is a sense of calm and peace watching the geese on the Harlem Meer. 

Geese 

The helado carts have returned. 

helados