Halloween: Reimagining Its Liturgical Significance

Sleepy Hollow by Will Moses [1991]

For many, if not most, Halloween is an often underwhelming holiday that is typically down-played due to its unseemly connections to all the things that Victorian housewives fear the most: sugary food, pranks, the interruptions of neighbors, spooky costumes, gore, and of course, fun.

By liturgy, I am using a particular definition of “liturgical” borrowed from James K.A. Smith’s Cultural Liturgy series. He defines and broadens liturgy as something both within and outside of sacred contexts. Smith suggests a liturgy is a sort of shorthand for any practice that forms our desires, which is essentially all of them. But instead of diluting the term, Smith provides a far more nuanced and rich understanding of liturgy, what it is, what it isn’t and what it does to us – how it shapes and forms our desires. For the individual, Smith sees liturgies as almost synonymous with the ubiquity and power of habits. For example, Smith’s work discusses the liturgy of football and the mall as cultural liturgies that form us and shapes us in ways both conscious yet, more so unconscious.

In this way, Halloween has ALWAYS been a cultural liturgy of significance that has shaped us to some degree. However, due to some more narrow conceptions of liturgy and culture, it has not been recognized as such and its potential impact upon us diminished – this is what we might hope to reanimate, so to speak.

One reason Halloween gets treated as a mere apparition, I venture to guess, is that there is still a strong Victorian poltergeist that haunts our culture: it prefers the comfortable, the known, the polite, the familiar, the safe, and the clean (there are many other connotations to the word and era, but for my purposes, I want to reflect upon these in particular). Anything that deviates from these is seen as lesser and suspect. The Victorian quest for perfection (and domination) functions as a restrictive and self-flagellating mental, emotional, spiritual, and existential practice. This poltergeist is the one we need to exorcise.

So I’d like to take a stab (pun grotesquely intended) at offering up a reimagination of Halloween. Let’s start with a different, hopeful, definition: Halloween is the liturgical practice of confronting and embracing death  – so much so that we become death and all its costumed manifestations. It is the practice of breaking character with our selves, selves that are enslaved to the fear of death. The practice itself is an incantation, a summoning of a different self, an egoless self that needs not fear death, a redeemed and restored self that can embrace death as a friend rather than an enemy.

Halloween (which you can understand is traditionally downplayed in Victorian cultures) is about seeing, confronting, embracing, and even celebrating all the gifts of imperfection, all the unknowns, all the gritty, tactility of the everyday, being a physical body in a physical world. We are vulnerable to death and prone to decay. All of us. Everybody poops. So there is no use denying or ignoring these things. It would be better to see and acknowledge this vulnerability, the gore of this decay, this human frailty as fundamental realities of our selves as bodies that need not be shamed or ignored. 

In order to see how our pervasive our death-denial is, and since there is such a rich history of the expressions of death within the cultural traditions of Halloween, it will be helpful to chart out some of the connections of and associations with death. There are both direct and indirect associations to be noted. First, as a whole, death itself is often subtlety signaled by the taboo, the rotten, the outcast, the abnormal, the malformed, the ugly, and the possessed. Some of these are direct association, close signals of death: possession (which the fear of the total loss of one’s agency, or willing self), the undead, bodily decay, monsters, Satan, personified death itself; some of these are indirect associations, sophisticatedly distant signals of death: the taboo, the socially abnormal, the banned, the outcast, the unknown, the imperfect, and even the Other. 

Halloween, as a liturgical practice, allows us to look at all the imperfect things of this world (including our own weird alien selves: for we know we are always strangers to ourselves), all of these direct and indirect associations of death and embrace them with good humor and candy. As a practice, it is a reprieve from the endless machinations of the death-drive that so deeply shapes all of our fallen cultures and even our other liturgies. It is a reckoning with death, darkness, fear, and imperfection. And in that regard, modern Christianity could benefit significantly from Halloween as a practice guiding us away from our addictions to certainty, satisfaction, perfection, groupthink, and religious idolatry – all of which we have inherited, at least in part, from Victorian sensibilities, among many others. The practice of Halloween suggests that Christianity can be about an engagement of ALL of life – the good AND the bad – rather than a denial of the bad and a “clutching of the Victorian pearls” of the good we so desperately want for ourselves. 

Halloween is about wearing the monster of ourselves loudly and proudly. It is about seeing and embracing that we are imperfect, sinful selves – monsters in our own right. And that the practice of the Christian is not about disavowing or running from or killing the monster – so many have tried to kill it their entire lives to no avail – rather, it is about learning to cope and live with the unkillable monsters in our proverbial basements (a narrative brought to beautiful effect in the horror movie, The Babadook). In lieu of our inability to fully exorcise our own demons, our life is to be about cultivating a healthy relationship to our own monsters – one that begins in acceptance rather than avoidance or fear. Indeed, it is acknowledging that acceptance is the prerequisite to change. That starting with denial or fear only feeds the beast and gives it more control over our lives. And the more we come to terms with the monster of ourselves, the less likely we are to project that monster onto others and hunt them down as a way of dealing with our own sin.

Halloween is but one opportunity for re-enchantment, for connecting our lived experience to the unknown, the other-wordly, and the untameable. It is already a season that is rich with liturgical traditions that can shape us in helpful ways if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. So this isn’t necessarily about adding on new cultural practices (though there may be room for more), rather, this is about reimagining, re-seeing how our current practices and traditions can be central to rethinking how we understand our selves and the world around us – if we pay attention.

To do this, I think it will be helpful to carve out a bit more of one of the main traditions of Halloween: Trick or Treating.

Trick or Treating provides a wonderfully dark opportunity to do two main things, both personally and collectively: confront death and encounter one another at the intimacy of each other’s door step. 

For us bodies, behind the gore of ghouls, mummies, and frankensteins, werewolves, and zombies, lies the fear of our own death and decay. To viscerally confront these things by “becoming” them is to deal directly with their symbolized reality – to see death and decay in the very personal reality of our own mortality. This can function for us as a reminder of the fragility and brevity of our lives – which serves to awaken us to the gift of the life we have right now – or at least the gifts of candy our neighbors begrudgingly dole out in order to avoid trickery. This liturgy of Trick or Treating is a confrontation with death that conjures our skeletons to dance; to know that death is a part of our story is not to succumb to death as the final word but to embrace it as a word, a threshold to the next step in the journey.

In addition, the communal ritual of Trick or Treating provides an opportunity not just for creative disguises and confronting death, but also for getting out of our family boxes and meeting our neighbors. The night can be filled with spooking and scaring, with and catching up with our neighbors as we exchange care for one another as well as our shared places. Getting out of these family crypts – err, our homes – also provides another opportunity to see the beauty and needs of our places, to exact attention and care towards that which we depend upon. For a deeper exploration of the importance and communal benefit of Trick or Treating, check out Professor John Beckman’s piece on how “Halloween Can Save American Democracy.”

I’ve gone on far too long without mentioning Richard Beck. He is the only psychologist or theologian that I know of that engages directly with Halloween, its traditions and its symbols (he has a habit of engaging with all sorts of cultural artefacts over at his blog). Beck has numerous posts on Halloween and I feel it would be wrong of me to not mention how foundational his work has been to my understanding and enjoyment of Halloween. What’s more, two of his books in particular (Unclean and The Slavery to the Fear of Death) provide an even deeper foundation for my conviction that Halloween is an under explored cultural liturgy of significance, particularly for Christians.

For a Christianity that has sold its soul to the controllable, to the pure and clean, to the domination of all that is Other, to comfort and ease, Halloween stands as a counter-cultural liturgy that symbolizes acceptance of death. Halloween is about embracing the unclean, the imperfect, the outcasts and the unloved of the world as part of God’s beloved community. In fact, as far as holidays go, it is the closest thing we have to a celebration of the poor, the outcast, the stranger, the difficult to love, and the enemy! In other words, Halloween is a practice of love for the least of these. And love will have us see ourselves and each other as we really are – flesh, blood, skeletons and all.

The great thing about Halloween, for Christians, is that we need to do very little to it. It’s been curated for centuries and imbued with a rich array of symbolism, meaning, and tradition. It is not a question of building a new or different culture around the holiday, it is a question of perspective; Christians need to shift our perspective from one of abstraction and domination to one characterized by incarnation and vulnerability. And I think Halloween can be a significant liturgy that shapes and forms us toward those ends, IF we let it haunt us.

So haunt the night! Be spooky! Confront your generational demons! Exorcise your ego! Become a caricature of your worst self and see its falseness. Share some candy with your neighbors in all their abnormal and alien weirdness; maybe even learn to love them because of their difference. Stretch your costumed-creativity in becoming that monster within. Learn to love the uncontrollable, the unknown, the unscheduled, the mysterious, and the uncanny. Own your own inability to cope with a confusing and confounding world. Embrace the imperfections of your body as it carries you through the world. To be sure, all of this sounds difficult and scary, but that’s really the point of Halloween.

 

Resilience, Community, and the Religion of Positivity

The push for positivity is ubiquitous. Whether it is in a self-help book or the well-intentioned encouragement of a friend, positivity culture reigns – and sells. But, I have a sneaking suspicion that there is something devious going on amidst our relentless drive towards rational rainbows and lollipops. What’s going on here? My hunch is this: The religion of positivity is the opium of the people, and it is a part of our modern secular religion as well as the American Dream wherein there is a salvific flavor attached to our religious devotion to positivity.

I want to use the term “religious” rather
than “ideology” mainly to press the point that this isn’t simply a rational thought-process – be it conscious or not. Rather, the religion of positivity is motivated from a much deeper place that is mixed up with our desires, what we believe about the world, and how we operate in that world. The difficulty with the religion of positivity is that it is born out of will-worship, out of the Protestant work ethic, and out of the Prosperity Gospel (this last connection is best articulated in Kate Bowler’s significant New York Times essay Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me).

And don’t misunderstand, this is not an indictment of positivity. It is, however, a critique of how this good and often necessary skill-set, when understood within the larger zeitgeist, can foster an unhealthy inwardness and egoism. At its best, positivity can be connected to self-talk and resilience. At its worst, the religion of positivity is a mechanism corporations use to get employees to shut up and fall in line. So I want to contrast the religion of positivity with the concept of resilience.

I want to first define and discuss positivity before we get to resilience.

At its most basic, preaching the religion of positivity teaches the practice of IGNORING what’s going on around us, side-stepping the negative in order to only look at the positive; it’s a practice of dualism. In its dualism, the religion of positivity teaches us that there are people and places and situations that are positive and helpful (for me) to seek out, and there are people, places, and situations that are negative and should be avoided. It’s a world split between good people and death-eaters (thanks Sirius). This dichotomous worldview creates a life labeling people as toxic and continually avoiding any such person. I submit that this is, fundamentally, in direct opposition to the Christian call to love the world, to embrace and struggle with people, places, and situations in their brokenness. Positivity, as a religion, preaches the avoidance of the marginalized, it justifies our worst impulses to label, condemn, and ostracize people as toxic.

It is important to note, however, that this does not change the reality of toxic people, places, and situations. Nor does it necessarily change our response to those by way of establishing and maintaining boundaries. We must live in the complex tension between seeing people, places, and situations as broken, toxic, unhealthy AND as not without hope, healing, and potential. This means that sometimes it is appropriate to establish boundaries with a person, to move away from a harmful place, or to get yourself out of a toxic situation; but it also means that there is the possibility of remaining with a person, a place or a situation in suffering, in compassion, and in hope. These differing responses have a lot of various factors to consider that makes it impossible to prescribe a simplistic and/or shaming “should” that somehow applies to all situations. The difficulty and possibility of the latter of the two responses is what we call Christianity, what we call the gospel.

And here is where resilience comes in. Resilience takes an honest account of the reality of a situation; it is a posture of acceptance/embrace rather than avoidance. Resilience sees the darkness and presses forward in the midst of that darkness. Resilience leans into the difficulty of life, accepting its brokenness as well as its blessing. It doesn’t sugarcoat and it does not look for shortcuts. To be fair, resilience is harder to teach than the religion of positivity, it’s a little more ambiguous of a concept.

As somewhat of an aside, what helps to mediate this struggle of life best is community. Put another way, what is most healing for human beings is the interdependence of an intimate community. And if it is essential to our health and happiness to be in the midst of intimate community, how much more necessary is that community for those who may be severely broken? How much more can this community bring sanity and stability?

What we don’t need are cheap and trite answers to these people, places, and situations. If we care about more than ourselves, we’ll need to think about our own needs AND the needs of others at the same time – we need to enlarge our sphere of care. What we don’t need is the religion of positivity that plays to our already egoist motivations.

You don’t need to just find the silver lining for yourself; you need to see the clouds that affect the other. For if we always and only seek the silver lining for ourselves, how easily we will forget about the clouds of other’s experiences! The religion of positivity separates people and keeps them separate; it keeps you locked into looking for your own positive salvation out there in the world. Embracing the harshness of reality as well as its kindness reminds us of our own suffering and the suffering of others; this is what resilience helps us acknowledge so that we can move forward together.

 

On G.K. Chesterton’s Chicken Soup for the Modern Soul (aka Orthodoxy)

I recently finished G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and man, have I been missing out. Friends have been recommending it for years but I finally got around to it after starting the book with a group of students in the Spring semester. By no means a comprehensive look into G.K.’s complex commentary on the modern world, I’d like to simply cherry-pick a few of the things G.K. Chesterton talks about in reference to the modern condition. I like to think of these things as some of the main ingredients of G.K.’s balm for the ills of the modernity, or in a more culturally-fun title, his “Chicken Soup for the Modern Soul.”

What I like most about G.K.’s balm is that it has a lot ingredients to combat all sorts of things; he’s not naive enough to put forth one singular solution to the complexities that plague us. Yet there might be at least, a main ingredient: “The greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men began to use the word ‘spiritual’ as the same as the word ‘good.’” Here he combats our rampant disembodied spiritualism, this hope for a far-off home and joy that have little to do with the creation given to us as a gift, our daily bread.

Elsewhere he describes a better relation towards Nature: “The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.” He goes on to explain that Nature as mother is too solemn and commanding a position for her, but that if we let Nature be our sister, we might learn from her frivolity and begin to guard and cherish her mirth. And that is a relationship that I find to fit well with our biblical notions of stewardship.

He also combats the modern myth of progress from multiple angles, but that is far too complex to get into here. Suffice it to say that Chesterton believes there are holes in the logic and promise of progress.

Uniquely, he touches on the Christian virtue of what I am calling hopeful universalism with a heavy dose of practical realism: “To hope for all souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that their salvation is inevitable. It is tenable, but it is not favorable to activity or progress. Our fighting and creative society ought rather to insist on the danger of everybody, on the fact that every man is hanging by a thread or clinging to a precipice.”

In addition, he even gives the Christian the liberty to embrace the doubt and mystery of the one religion “in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist” and where “…in a garden, God tempted God.” This is an avenue of our modern society many have sought to address, my favorite of which is Peter Rollins’ work in helping us to embrace doubt and unknowing.

Perhaps the most timely commentary is what G.K. thinks Christianity says about politics: that “the man should rule who does NOT think he can.” And for our oligarchic times, he also says, “It is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor.”

Also, G.K. reminds us that “any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate,” and that “…sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has ended in bloodshed.” In this, he picks up on our slide into a sort of sentimental love and acceptance, our inability to conduct healthy confrontation, and a lack of accountability towards a common standard of behavior. He knows all too well our preference towards ourselves, our friends, and our family for having their own morally independent space – as long as it doesn’t directly constitute public concern. Really, G.K. thinks we can’t handle the heat of our whiskey so we’ve watered it down to fit our palates in order to drink it to mild affect rather than letting its fire fuel our passions and ethics. In the same vein as Lewis, G.K. hints that our love and passions are too commonly weak. But in my estimation, this is his most culturally distasteful point, and therefore perhaps his most instructive.

But the thing that is, for me, a hallmark of the book is G.K.’s consistent ability to showcase the old things of Christianity and of the world, things that we have lost or forgotten, and in so doing, reminds us of their value and virtue. For it seems to me that the most dangerous side effect of the myth of progress is a disdain for the past, for what is old. However, G.K. charts a path through the brambles of modern thought to show us the great cedars of Lebanon that are still standing today – the pillars of faith that give us ground to stand on and a canopy to shield us from the storms of life. Yet, in none of this does it seem or sound like he is truly anti-science, anti-technology, or anti-progress; rather, like a good ecologist, he reminds us that life for today and tomorrow is found in the very stuff of the past, that trying to bring life to a place that has been uprooted or desecrated – in Wendell Berry’s terminology – is as toilsome, ignorant, and illogical as modern lawncare and modern food systems.

In all these things, measured by their dangers, G.K. gives us reason to be a bit more reasonable, charitable, and engaged – all of which sound pretty orthodox to me.

 

Digital Engagement – Shooting Fish in a Barrel

If I believe that there is in fact a cultural battle to be fought, attempting to wage war in the digital realm is akin to shooting fish in a barrel. It’s a waste of my time and energy, and worse, though I may be randomly effective in the task, I have no idea who I am hurting when I hit something. If I do not have the strength of character and courage to have a genuine face-to-face conversation with my fellow human, I am practicing my insecurities by only expressing myself online. And this is not where battles are to be fought.

Online dialogue – especially with people you don’t know intimately – takes us back to passive aggressive note posting where miscommunication and misunderstanding reign. When we care about other people’s opinions in this vitriolic way, it leaves no honest room for dissenting opinions about the world.

We hear talk about digital algorithms that shape what we see online, but that still pales into comparison regarding how we shape what we see online. The offense I feel in response to someone else’s post is in no way coming from a position of strength and conviction. Rather, it stems from my fears and insecurities; it flies the flag of “I cannot tolerate the mere expression of differing opinions over here.” The inner tension I feel when I talk with a friend expressing her views that are very different from mine, that tension, that’s the difficulty of conviction.

Digital engagement takes a magnanimity and self-effacing courage that the vast majority of us do not have. I have seen it done and I know people who, for the most part, do it quite well. But, and I will throw myself in this boat, most of us are, for obvious reasons, incapable of honest and constructive dialogue in the digital context. And I do not mean that authors, writers, and bloggers cannot write things, share opinions, and argue positions. The digital realm is a great place to disseminate and gather information. But the rumination on those ideas and information is better suited elsewhere. Regarding where the line is between the two I’ll say this: if I am my own editor, I need to do a very slow and thorough job at editing for both grammar, content, and tact. Comment sections are too reactionary and cheap to be well-suited to the task – we are undermining our efforts.

So go, talk face-to-face with the people you work with, play with, eat with, and sleep with. Argue with them. Agree, disagree or try for something more. But, for better or worse, it’ll at least give us the opportunity for the sort of compassion, understanding, and civil disagreement that is fully human in all its presence-oriented, physical, and proximate messiness.

Warning, false binary ahead:

Choice #1: Cast this opinion aside with the rest of the trash heap you’ll clickbait today and label it simply another relativistic opinion.

Choice #2: Attempt to re-frame your entire disposition towards digital engagement, learning that when it comes to fighting digital battles, we often lose more than we bargain for.

 

A Prayer for the Injustice of the Week

*As you’ll be able to tell by its ambiguity, this post is not in response to any one particular issue, event, or person.

Lord, let us trust that you are working in the midst of pain, strife and struggle.

Let us trust that you have people already equipped and working in these places to bring about good and proper solutions. Let us trust these people who are already on the ground enmeshed in the struggle as well as their solutions more than our own sentiment and activism.

Let us trust all the more that if we are called to help, we must go, and if we are not called to help these distant injustices, we must stay and serve those in front of us whom we can help. It is in trust and hope (perhaps by way of prayer) that we can continue to put our hand to the plow and serve our own community even after learning of injustice and struggle in others’ communities.

And finally, let us remember that it is a disservice to those in front of us and those caught up in the struggle in other communities to presume to offer answers and solutions to situations in which we know very little.

May we remember the significance of incarnational living in the limited, physical world around us. In this trust, may we find peace and focus on the task and community at hand.

 

Greek Words and Self-talk: Embedding the Story

In the age of sharing videos, one would think that podcasts would be a thing of the past. But they’ve become more and more a part of my life, filling in many of the empty spaces here and there throughout the week. One of my most recent subscriptions has been to Rob Bell’s Robcast. And I am unashamed to say that I have been enjoying it, finding Rob to be honest, genuine, probing, and hopeful.

In his lastest episode, 19 Letters!, Rob explains the meaning and significance of this 19 letter Greek word, one that is used only twice in Scripture: anakephalaiosasthai. And in Ancient Greek fashion, the word is layered with different possible meanings. One of the meanings for this Greek word is a summing up and another is a retelling. Rob interprets this to mean that when we retell the story of our lives in such a way that the larger scope of the story reframes particular moments, we are anakephalaiosasthai-ing our stories. We are summing them up and retelling those stories in light of a bigger story – the story. And for Christians, the Gospel is the grandest of stories that we find ourselves in.

To be fair and clear, Rob is quick to note that this retelling doesn’t leave out all of the negative parts of our lives or even gloss over the deepest pains felt throughout the journey. Rather, Rob likens this retelling to being able to talk and laugh about a story years later after it happened – even in the midst of remembering in vivid detail all of the hurt and pain and shame of one’s most difficult moments in life; there is an equation for this: Comedy equals tragedy plus time. It is in the retelling, it is in the remembering that our stories are re-framed and given perspective.

Metanarrative is a bit of a buzzword these days. If there was an existential version of Buzzfeed, there would be a list of 18 Metanarratives to Drive You Crazy. But a metanarrative, or macronarrative, is simply a retelling of a grand story. In Christian circles this macronarrative is described in its most basic form in Al Walters book Creation Regained as four movements: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration. This is the Christian macronarrative that gives purpose, meaning, and significance to the small part we play in the grand unraveling of events in time; a macronarrative helps to situate us and our time into the larger whole.

Interestingly, when Rob was using this 19 letter word as a verb and talking about its importance for these moments in our lives, I could not help but think of the micronarratives we tell ourselves every day. Psychologists and psychotherapists call these micronarratives “self-talk.” These are the beliefs we have about ourselves, these are the stories we use to reframe and remember all of those particular moments in our lives. For example, a person with one particular micronarrative might retell their dropping their stack of notes in front of a group of people as a funny and awkward mistake that happens every once in a while to anyone. Another person with a different micronarrative might retell their dropping their stack of notes in front of a group of people as devastatingly awkward and “just another example of my lack of social skills.” And like many psychologists have said before me, these micronarratives derive from those things we believe about ourselves and the world – these micronarratives come from the macronarratives that we believe.

What struck me as profound in the midst of listening to Rob’s episode was how micronarrative and macronarrative overlap. To put it another way, the grand worldviews that we hold form and are informed by our self-talk. And what Rob kept hinting at in the episode was that the grand narrative of the Gospel, when it is applied to, lived out, and embodied in our lives, has everything to do with our self-talk. The macronarrative of the Gospel in its reframing and remembering of all of history in a certain light, at its best, directly affects our micronarratives, the little stories we tell ourselves about ourselves every day. In our prior example about dropping a stack of notes in front of a group of people, the former interpretation is a Gospel informed micronarrative of secure identity and hope while the latter interpretation is informed by micronarratives of self-loathing and shame as well as macronarratives of ego and hopelessness.

Sometimes it is difficult to catch how abstract and theoretical concepts such as worldviews or metanarratives really play out in daily life. Yet perhaps there really is some coherence between these concepts and our direct experience in the world, that the Gospel in all of its fullness can have meaning, significance, and influence right down to the way we understand and interpret the world moment by moment. The metanarrative of The Word we encounter in John’s Gospel account is eventually enfleshed in particularity and physicality to bring meaning and significance, not just to the grand retelling and the distant remembering, but to each and every moment of intimate self-talk and self-reflection. Maybe that is a small part of what it means to be a follower of Christ, to learn how to embody the Gospel not just in our actions and outward thoughts, but also in how we think about and care for ourselves.

I know that for some this has the potential to reinforce skewed behavior and ego-driven micro-narratives, but having a healthy understanding, belief, and care of self in the world is central to one’s testimony of the embodied Gospel lived out in one’s life as well as to one’s ministry to others. If the Gospel is fundamentally about moving towards the redemption and restoration of all things, then our mental health and our self-talk ought to be a part of that grand healing process. We must learn to embed the truth of the Gospel into our self-talk, to anakephalaiosasthai our stories , not in a superficial “Jesus loves me” kind of way, but in a way that emphasizes accepting and embracing brokenness and retelling the brokenness in our stories in a way that holds onto hope. And hope not just for ourselves, but hope for a world that God so loved.

 

I Don’t Know: Practicing Sabbath as Meaninglessness

In his newest book The Divine Magician (I review it here), Peter Rollins makes the case for the Crucifixion being the archetypal moment of meaninglessness in the world. He even recently did The Great Debacle with Tony Jones regarding his new book Did God Kill Jesus? on Holy Saturday. Divine killing divine. Innocent killing innocent. God directly confronting sin within themselves. Every time we try to construct a theology, it always seems troubled by some aspect of what happened on the cross.

Rollins’ point, is not that the whole world is ultimately meaningless and we just need to accept it – at least I do not read it as only that. For Rollins the meaninglessness of the Crucifixion provides an example and opportunity for humans to embrace the absurd, the mysterious and the meaningless as real parts of our experience of the world. This healthy embrace leads to, if nothing else, an honest account of the world and of God. And though I found myself shaking my head “Yes” the whole way through, I still didn’t know what to do with the reality of meaninglessness – I was still looking for meaninglessness to fit into a larger web of meaning.

Struggling with these questions drove me towards a realization that meaninglessness lived out practically in the world, looks a lot like saying “I don’t know.” Isn’t that our admittance in the midst of meaninglessness, “I don’t know?” In the midst of its absurdity, meaninglessness seems to function as a sort of way-station or a stopping point – the mad rush of meaning-making ceases, and for a moment, however brief, we rest in the reality of unknowing and we let go of the search for meaning.

What if this “letting go,” this stopping, this rest, actually functions as an existential Sabbath? In a similar way that the Sabbath reminds us of our inherent limits and boundaries in regards to what we can accomplish with our time, energy and effort, the existential practice of “I don’t know” functions as a healthy limitation on our ability to know. In the practice of “I don’t know,” we acknowledge our limitation as finite minds that cannot fully grasp a reality that is bigger and more complex than our wildest dreams and imaginations.

And, more practically, “I don’t know” reminds us that we don’t have to know, that it is ok if we don’t know, and that the point of life may not be to fully understand it, but, perhaps, more so to simply live it in obedience. Is this not a healthier disposition towards life than running around trying to find all the pieces to the puzzle and to try fitting them all together coherently? Perhaps life is one big puzzle, but it would be absurd to strive so neurotically to make perfect sense of it when we know we haven’t been given all of the pieces to the puzzle. Then again, perhaps the absurdity is in denying our limitations and presuming that we can or through our own efforts will someday finally collect all of the pieces and discover its meaning. What if the secret is that there is no secret? What if there are no other pieces to the puzzle?

Going further, are we not to discover meaning in accord with our own limitations? And isn’t this exactly how the Sabbath functions for us in all of the other spheres of life, a reminder of limitation?

When we talk about Sabbath and all of the important practices that are entailed with it, I want to suggest that we add an existential dimension.  What if, through Sabbath, we learn to embrace the unknowing that haunts and erodes our work of meaning-making in the world just as through Sabbath, we learn to embrace a gift economy that haunts and erodes of work of economic acquisition in the world? In practice then, not only is Sabbath a cessation of work and of participating in acquisitiveness, it is also a cessation of meaning-making. And on the other side of these cessations, Sabbath provides the opportunity to embrace rest, gift, and human limitation – limitation in regards to time, energy, and also understanding.

So be sure, especially if you have a penchant for trying to grasp the world through knowledge and intellect, to practice Sabbath by way of speaking and embracing “I don’t know.”

 

Missions and Ethics in a Global World

Though I clicked the link expecting something explicitly about clothing and how what we put on our character is more important than what we put on our bodies, I found this guest post by Leah Wise to be a good reflection and reminder about how our consumer choices matter.

I know. I know. For those of us who have been opening ourselves up to the realities of our globally-mechanized world, the thought of tracking down the source and process for everything that we buy is immediately overwhelming. I barely have the compassion to care, let alone the time, energy or attention to give these sorts of things. In a way, I am viscerally reminded of how small I am within the vast wheels of the world – and I either hyperventilate or I become numb and disinterested. And when I treat people’s circumstance like a boring episode of Parks and Rec (which is itself ridiculous because there are none), I devalue and dehumanize their experience as well as distance myself from my fellow human beings.

So in those short moments when we are encouraged or challenged to think about the world and our small part in it, I encourage you to be really slow and practical about your response. You won’t end slavery, you won’t stop injustice, and you won’t save the world. And none of that is your job.

What you CAN do is begin practicing non-participation in slavery and all kinds of injustice to our fellow human beings and to the world, one item/issue at a time. So here’s my advice, pick out a few of your favorite things (things you buy) and do your homework. Research and understand where those things originate, what sort of raw materials are involved, and try to gain a cursory understanding of the processes involved in making that item. Then research the companies that are involved with those processes.

For example, I really like books. Books are typically made of paper, glue and maybe cardboard if it is a hardback. But that paper has a manufacturing process – as well as the cardboard and the glue. And each of these processes use different kinds of chemicals to laminate, coat, seal, or bond their materials. Each of the raw materials comes from different things – paper and cardboard come from trees and glue comes from horses. Just kidding (mostly), glue can be made from all sorts of things – rice, flour, sap, plants, and animals. All of these materials have places of origin that they have to be harvested from. And finally, some human person has to take part, somehow, in each and every step of the process from growing or harvesting a material, chemically bonding it with something else, to storing it, shipping it, packaging it,  marketing it, and selling it. There is a vast web of connections between the things we buy and people and places. The depth of these connections itself is overwhelming to consider, but given the time to explore, can be fascinating to uncover. To learn more about the book making process, click here.

Once we begin to research these connections, even in a simple way, a number of things will happen in this process:

1. You will gain a knowledge base and maybe eventually an expertise in the things that you love.
2. You might learn how to make your favorite items for yourself – an incredibly fulfilling, liberating, and empowering practice.
3. You will be able to knowledgably buy your product from those who make it responsibly or
4. You will be able to advocate (with your dollar, voice, and pen/keyboard) for these responsible practices surrounding your favorite item.
5. You will learn how to navigate resources and do good research.
6. You will gain a broader perspective and appreciation for how broad, deep, yet interconnected the world is.
7. You will practice attention, care, and compassion.

As valuable as all of those things are, it is the last one that I care most about. Because through this process, you will be practicing your faith in an incredibly practical way that has real life implications for people today. You are habitually putting on the character of Christ.

And perhaps, over a long time, you might be able to (with the time, energy, and care that you are given) expand your research to some other products that you buy. The point is to do the slow, responsible work of care for the things we buy and for the people and places that that affects.

And here’s the thing, if the Church is sending missionaries to every nation (which it is mandated to do), then all peoples and places matter. What’s more, I do not think that our ministry to those countries or peoples is just through missionaries and donations. I think part of our ministry to these people and places of the world are the systems and structures that our purchases help to establish and perpetuate; these are the embodiment of our choices and therefore our lived values in the world.

And if we want to be the hands and feet of Christ in the world, we must acknowledge, admit, and work toward changing the hurt and pain that we’ve done as His ambassadors. In the most brash terms, sweatshops, slavery, sex-trafficking and the most horrible atrocities of the world are the lived ministry of Christ’s church in the world. We must come to terms with that, and our participation in that. (Of course the ministry of Christ’s church in the world also manifests real love, care, attention and compassion for people and places too, but we cannot fool ourselves into believing that that is all there is.) There might have been a time when these atrocities were accomplished with our economic-consent but were behind the bureaucracy and red-tape of corporations and distant transactions, but we no-longer have that ignorance.

I heard a preacher recently say, “The Gospel changes people, and people change their piece of the world.”

The reality of living in a global economy just means that “my piece of the world” gets connected, by proxy, to the plight of people across the world and I can either act responsible with my purchased pieces of the world or not.

So my encouragement is to start and stay small: Pick one thing you buy a lot of or are already interested in, learn more about it, and act differently because of what you learn.

 

On Clothing and Costumes: Why We Dress Up for Halloween

WARNING: Existential Reflections ahead. Enter at your own risk.

Today is All Saints Day – the day after Halloween, which is one of my favorite holidays. So I make no claims to objectivity here, my bias is a defense of the holiday I love. But it is not a defense of the holiday per se, but rather a clarification on the point and purpose of dressing up for Halloween. For it seems we are becoming more and more disillusioned and confused about dressing up for Halloween and what this tradition is supposed to be about, or at least what it can be about.

For full disclosure, my thoughts on Halloween are largely haunted by the work of Richard Beck in his multitude of posts on Halloween, its monsters and myths. For further reading, check out his wonderful blog on such topics here, here, and here as a starting point.

I want to suggest that the tradition of dressing up for Halloween functions as an annual practice where we get the opportunity to confront our fears. Not just our fears of the monsters “out there,” but the monsters within us as well. When we collectively put on ghoulish garb or ridiculous robes, we are confronting both the truth of those things as well as exaggerating the myths of those things. These myths are the stereotypes of the world around us. And like any good researcher, it will be important to keep in mind that stereotypes are based in statistical truth of the collective whole, but can never represent any one real individual.

And I want to further suggest that such mockery of stereotypes and their reality can be a healthy process of owning and acknowledging the reality of ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Especially at a time when so many and so much is a carefully crafted and controlled manipulation of perception, it can be incredibly important to practice to honestly face the realities within and around us. For much of our lives, unfortunately, we practice the denial of these unsavory truths about ourselves: I am a liar, a cheat, an adulterer, a murderer, etc. And perhaps more to the point, that there is a glaring disconnect between the lives that we live and the beliefs that we espouse.

There are two main issues surrounding Halloween costumes that I’d like to consider: the rise and proliferation of the “sexy” Halloween costume and racist Halloween costumes.

Over the last few years, the sexy Halloween costume industry has increased substantially. From masquerading as a sexy chemist to sexily impersonating TV personality John Oliver, there is no genre or vocation that is safe. With the general rise in sexually suggestive attire in general, I want to suggest that the conflation of Halloween costumes and, to use a crude phrase, this “sexy attire” points to the reality that the sexy attire itself always functions as a kind of costume. By that I mean that when we attempt to be seen in a particularly sexy light, it is a manipulation similar in function as dressing up as Frankenstein or a Werewolf. I do want to make the point that, for my purposes here, I’m not interested in questioning the morality of donning clothing with less surface area, but rather how this growing practice manifests deeper motivations and desires.

It is important to understand that the performance and manipulation behind sexy attire both exaggerates a truth and veils a lie. It exaggerates and distorts the truth of one’s natural beauty (typically to fit a prescribed script of beauty and attraction) and it also veils the lie of this exaggeration. The sexiness of such attire veils the lie of this exaggeration by being a distraction. And again I want to suggest that the distraction of “sexy attire” is similar to how the perceived uncanniness of the monster functions as a distraction. Both attempt to shield us from the reality of our fears. The former can veil the fear of being known in our natural state or perceived ugliness and the latter is a façade for the fear of our own moral failures and depravity. And to be clear, I do not think that the problem of the latter is the fact that we have moral failures and depravity, but that we run from and are scared to death of this reality.

In addition, it seems plain that any sort of clothing can have this ability to mask and cover up. Indeed, the connection to the biblical story of Adam and Eve comes to mind. Yet the point is not to discard all garments, but rather to be critically reflective of how our clothing can sometimes function as manifestations of deeper realities of who we are, namely, to cover up our fears and insecurities.

Another reality of dressing up for Halloween that has caused some debate recently is how these costumes often times can be perceived as racist. And the concern, it seems to me, is with the proliferation and promulgation of such stereotypes – a concern which I consider important and valid. However, I think these conversations miss a deeper function of dressing up for Halloween.  I want to suggest that part of Halloween is fundamentally about mocking things – mocking the dead, mocking monsters, and mocking one another. Perhaps then, this element of mockery can be misconstrued and indeed used to perpetuate stereotypes in hurtful ways. The danger in this direction is not at issue but is important to be kept in mind.

Yet, what if this element of mockery is about confronting our fears rather than denying them? What if mocking these stereotypes out in the open allows us the space to really deal with them? Perhaps this mockery of the Halloween costume functions as an acceptance of the ugliness and depravity of ourselves and one another. Perhaps the communal expression of such a mockery allows us to create a bond of knowing and acceptance around these imperfections rather than trying to neurotically deny them and strive for perfection for ourselves.

In addition, as Richard Beck reminds us, much of Halloween functions as a coping mechanism to deal with our own mortality, and is an opportunity for us all to see both the exaggeration and truth of ourselves. So perhaps we can learn to enjoy Halloween with a laugh and maybe even a scare, knowing that we can come to a mature understanding of our own mortality and the things that make us unique through humor and creativity, community and acceptance. Embracing the stereotypes for what they are, and perhaps airing them out and getting a good look at them will help us to disarm them and diminish their power over us. And to do this, we must mock these stereotypes, these realities about ourselves, and put them on display for us all to see. And if that is a practice that is at its climax on October 31^st, I hope that we can learn to participate in and embrace the healthy coping and acceptance found in confronting our fears.

 

No Small Hope

My hope for education and community continues to be shaped by the good seed of good people attempting to sprout life and flourishing in the midst of the suffocating, systemic concrete of their communities, and within the system of society at large. These people and their work are so vitally important, so deeply necessary.

Yet, the pervasive nature of our one-dimensional society demands that we stop only sowing seed over concrete and start clearing places where we can plant whole forests of life and flourishing once more. We need whole places which tell of a different way of life and living, not just our heroic individual attempts towards small change here or there. May we not be satisfied with those small changes, but understand that these are allowed by this very system to satiate our longing for something better – to quell it, as you would a rebellion –  so that the system can then go on largely unchanged; give the people small freedoms so that they lose sight of the unfreedom of their lives. This is my hope: That we may, “with urgency but not with haste,” see the need for flourishing forests of culture once more – whole places built and structured differently. We need a fundamentally different way of educating and living that maintains the best of the good work of our inheritance with a willingness to, at the very least, try to something different. Not that we can transcend our proneness to err, not that we build utopias, but that we try earnestly and hopefully to respond obediently to the truth that we have inherited in the time that is given us.

But do not misunderstand, there still needs to be those who crack the concrete with their patient prodding and faithful compromise. This is significant work and this work is as important as it gets and must be maintained. Ultimately, I see these forests of flourishing giving even more life, inspiration, and power to those planted within the cracks; I see these forests shaking the comfort and security of a system with their simple existence outside that system. One of the dangers of this one dimensional society is the dearth of creativity and vision of its people that struggle to see how things can be different. These forests of culture are meant to provide a modest vision of something different.

To be clear, this is not a call for everyone, indeed it is only a call for some. The small scale is not meant to be elitist, it is meant to be sustainable and manageable. So for those few of you who see the barren nature of our communities and/or the large failure of our modern educational efforts, I invite you to work with me, to risk yourselves and to build an education as well as a life that can provide substantive and meaningful hope.