Bleak Theology

On the 70th Birthday of Ian Curtis and the Calendar of Saints

2026-07-15T20:47:32.000-04:00

Today, July 15th, is the seventieth birthday of Ian Curtis. And the outpouring of remembrance by the post-punk world has been great. A young man who lived only to the age of twenty-three has unintentionally influenced many decades of music and subculture. His words, voice, and story have touched the hearts of millions. Curtis’s private, internal struggles and desires have been laid bare in film, video, and print. His immediate world has become a place of pilgrimage for fans around the world.

Most likely, he would have hated all of this.

Instead, his inner circle of family and friends, which include his bandmates, have shouldered (to various degrees) the public burden.

It is human to love saints, even if we don’t call them saints. They may not be “holy” in the religious sense, but we make them holy, we make them distinct from the profane, the every day. We make these individuals different and then we associate ourselves with them. In a strange way, we make ourselves the same as them. We don’t want to be them, but we want to emphasize ourselves that are like them, that aspire to be like them, these saints. Saints are kind of heroes.

For many devotees of Joy Division, Ian Curtis is a kind of hero. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike is the authority on this, having written two books about Curtis fandom. I think it’s wrong to see him as a savior, though his lyrics have saved more than a few people. He’s no martyr, though immediately after his death one music writer, seized by the moment, claimed he was. And it’s inaccurate and unfair to Curtis to consider him as one. He was no prophet. The irony is that Curtis, having a school-age encounter with Anglicanism, would have known well what it meant to be a savior, a martyr, a saint, a prophet. In fact, saviors would appear in Warsaw’s “Leaders of Men” and saints and martyrs in Joy Division’s “Wilderness”. The unknown martyrs “had tears in their eyes.” A prophet lay dead in “Interzone”. Now, it is devotees of Curtis who cry.

Religion is hard to define, technically. People may say that they despise religion or more specifically “organized” religion. But people organize themselves religiously in other ways. Identity markers, devotional practices and rituals, special gathering places, shrines and pilgrimages, ideals and aspirations. Hope, faith, and love. Prayers. Manchester City and United fans know all about this. There are plenty of saints to go around.

The natural enemy of a hagiographer is a saint’s mother, for she knows her child like no other.

Hagiographers and historians are different species entirely. The memoirists… well… They tell a different story.

Both Curtis’s wife and mother remark that Ian was born on St. Swithin’s Day, the feast day of a medieval English bishop. The day has cultural cache because it functions like the American Groundhog’s Day.

St. Swithin’s day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain.
St. Swithin’s day if thou be fair
For forty days ’twill rain nae mare.

His mother recalled that it did not rain the day he was born.

St. Swithin’s Day means nothing to most people but Curtis’s birth means a lot. There is the axis of July 15th and May 18th, his birth and death, and in between, every significant Joy Division event. There is a kind of Joy Division calendar, whose dates shine brighter as we are reaching the half-century mark for the beginnings of punk and post-punk. Joy Division’s calendar is a function of the calendar of rock n’ roll. Each subculture has its own tradition that accounts for its luminaries.

In our secularizing world, saints don’t mean so much. But our rock stars do, especially as we age and tether ourselves to the formative soundtracks and mixtapes of our youth. The calendars are for us, not for them. We demarcate ourselves as such, discern and find our subcultures.

Youth is wasted on the young, of course. And then there are those, like Ian Curtis, who remain young eternally. Joy Division could not continue without Curtis and became New Order, which is now decades old, and has split, as families do. But Joy Division shall forever remain intact – even for those who were not there at the beginning.

Time becomes a flat circle that way, with the way that we listen to the bands that make us. The thing about a calendar is that it always start again, strange ouroboros that it is. And we are made young again forever.

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The Eternal Return

2026-02-02T18:34:09.000-05:00

The heaviest burden: “What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh… must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!’ If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?”

(The Gay Science, s. 341, Friedrich Nietzsche)

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Imagining Epiphanies of Artistic Action

2026-01-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

We’ve finally reached 2026! Happy New Year! Perhaps, you’ve chosen a few new year resolutions. The endeavoring to start the new year with resolutions is an admirable one, even if those resolutions hold firm for only a few months at best. We often base our resolutions on our perceived shortcomings or our desires to change for the better. Often these resolutions don’t stick because we lose our desire or interest, we become distracted or lose focus. The reasons are endless.

What if we shift our focus from what we are lacking to what we can create? Instead of focusing on the beginning of a new year to turn over a new leaf, why not focus on the appearance of the idea, itself? What if we take the focus on that creativity one step further to meditating on ways we can artistically act to better not only our lives, but the lives, the community of which we are a part?

New Year’s Day is the eighth day of Christmas, liturgically speaking. But five days later on January 6 is the Christian holiday of Epiphany, when we remember the arrival of the Three Magi who visit the infant Jesus. It is the first public appearance Jesus makes to the world. It is not revelation, but appearance.

When we talk about creativity, we often talk about epiphanies, those unexpected moments of realization. How often do we have these moments, yet never act on them? What are the epiphanies we are having now at this turn of the year? About ourselves, our practices, our communities, our country? How can, how ought we artistically act upon them? What if in community, we can find inspiration and encouragement to act?

On Epiphany of last year, Creative Bond, St. Lydia’s Dinner Church‘s arts initiative, invited number of creatives, artists, and community activists gathered in Gowanus Brooklyn at for Epiphanies of Resistance: A Gowanus Arts Community Roundtable Dinner Against Fascism. It was exactly two weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump into his second term. We knew it was coming. How could we creatively prepare for and resist the social and political changes that we could only imagine. After two hours of deep conversation, we returned to our own communities invigorated even as we were uncertain of the future. Over the course of 2025, the Trump Adminstration has created a climate of fear and oppression against the most vulnerable, shaking our country’s foundations, and seeking to suppress creative expression that dares to resist it and speak truth to power.

This year, Creative Bond is calling again to all people who are creative in whatever capacity the imagine themselves to meet to discuss our theme Epiphanies of Artistic Action. How can creative people, one year into Trump Administration, envision new ways of artistic action in our lives and for our communities? Today, Zohran Mamdani is inaugurated to become the mayor of New York City – our city! How, in our own ways can we continue and expand that grassroots, artistic action that propelled him to Gracie Manor and inspired a new energy and enthusiasm to make that change? For those who celebrate Epiphany as the public appearance of Jesus to the World, how can we use our artistic gifts for a theology of liberation?

This is an important time not just about epiphanies that we could imagine for ourselves, but to ask what are the epiphanes that we having now, in this moment, that we can creatively forward and put in action, as artists, as creative people for ourselves and for our communities. Come imagine with us! Perhaps, an epiphany will appear to you! Perhaps, you can inspire epiphanies in others.

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An Update About My Joy Division Book

2025-10-16T16:40:59.000-04:00

This blog has been mostly on hiatus for the past four (?) years because I have been focusing on writing my book, Tears in Their Eyes: Joy Division as Theological Lamentation. I am finally nearing completion and it’s about time to start creating some buzz about it. This book approaches pop music and theology from the bottom up, letting the music, history, and culture of Joy Division frame and present its own “crypto-religious” (to use Paul Elie’s term) concerns for the reader’s benefit. What the invested reader then does with those concerns, is up to them.

I’d originally chosen the main title “Don’t Walk Away”, which is from Joy Division’s monumental single “Atmosphere”. I thought it captured the cry of someone pleading to not be abandoned. And the Book of Lamentations is all about a person in the midst of societal ruin asking God to not abandon them. But as I attempted to interpret “Atmosphere” theologically as an analogy of the church abandoning people, I realized that the lyrics and the biblical text did not mesh as well as I’d hoped. So I had to (ironically) abandon that approach.

It was an 1980 interview with Bono that led me to the new main title. In the course of my research, I discovered that Joy Division was early U2’s greatest influence. This was when three-fourths of U2 were members of Shalom, an intense “para-church” that had doubts about the band’s secular aspirations. I ended up writing over eight thousand words about early U2, their faith journey, and their relation to Joy Division in what I dub “the Shalom Crisis”. Among the U2 biographies, commentaries, and Christian devotionals, no one has taken the time to critically examine the relationship between Joy Division and U2

In the interview, after talking about the death of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who U2 had met during the recording of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, Bono talks about other bands in the post-punk scene. He isn’t impressed with Magazine, which was Howard Devoto’s band after he left Buzzcocks. Bono says that “They lose out in terms of emotion, in terms of that sort of ‘tears in their eyes’, but they had something there.” Bono is quoting the frantically repeated last line of Joy Division’s “Wilderness”, which is a caustic takedown of the church. I realized that “tears in their eyes” was much more encapsulating of my project.

U2’s chapter is juxtaposed to a chapter on photographer/film maker Anton Corbijn, born into a family of Reformed pastors, who upon hearing Unknown Pleasures left Amsterdam for Manchester to photograph the band. The chapter also explains how “Atmosphere” was posthumously transformed into a dirge. U2 wanted Corbijn to be their photographer after seeing his iconic work with Joy Division. Corbijn would go on to direct both the video for “Atmosphere” and the Curtis biopic Control. His religious background is constantly in his photographic mind, especially in his portraiture. Just don’t call it “iconic”. He hates that.

Right now, I am working on a chapter of the indirect influence of Joy Division upon communal encounters with the Divine. My three topics are Manchester music promoter (and Nico’s manager in her later years) Alan Wise, England’s most famous dance club The Haçienda, and the Manchester Passion, which BBC3 broadcast live on Good Friday in 2006. It’s less about Joy Division and more about how the band has been used for other people’s visions. It’s also to demonstrate that I am not forcing this religious understanding of Joy Division, but that Mancunians, themselves, have done this decades before I have.

What I do is look at Manchester’s post-World War II religious context, especially during the blight in the 1970s and 80s. Within that I assemble the religious biographies of the members of Joy Division and Factory Records. I also appraise Closer‘s cover image of a Good Friday scene, the women mourning the dead Christ. From there, I analyze the overtly religious lyrics in “Wilderness”, “Passover”, and “Colony” and based upon that, frame “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “Atmosphere” with the disintegration of the relationship between the believer and God and the believer and the church, respectfully. What I hope to convey is that Joy Division has always had a theologically lament aspect. No one has taken the time to examine it.

My final chapter is my own spin on all of this. I explain how Joy Division’s music can serve as a soundtrack (dare I say hymnal) for lamentation in a time of increasing secularization and disillusion with religious institutions. U2 demonstrated on just their second album how this was possible. Resisting the beatification of Ian Curtis, who was no saint, we can still appreciate his personal “deconstruction” as his theological world collapsed. Furthermore, I emphasize the cathartic role sad songs play to comfort and edify us at our lowest, much like the Psalms and other biblical texts can do. Through lamentation about God, the church, and our selves, we can better understand in our world the absence and presence of God through both fear and trembling.

Yes, this is all very niche and very subcultural. But if you’re into post-punk and religion, then this book is probably for you. Please understand that this is not an evangelical – or even exvangelical – take, if that means anything. But it is for those theologically disenchanted of a particular bent.

If you would like to receive updates about the book, please subscribe to my blog. That’s the best way right now to know about its progress. You’ll also get the jump on when it will be available and if there will be any events.

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“When There’s No Future, How Can There Be Sin?”: A Response to David Dault on Nihilisms

2025-09-06T01:50:59.000-04:00

[TW: I mention suicide in this piece.]

The Two Nihilisms
On his Substack, David Dault has written an important essay entitled The post-American Present, where he considers two nihilisms that are two sides of the same coin, omega nihilism and alpha nihilism. He asked his readers to help him think through these nihilisms, the former abandoning the present for the future, the latter abandoning the future for a permanent, sharper present that only looks to the past. Given the subject matter, I could not resist such an invitation to the dance. So I laced up my Doc Martens and gave it a whirl.

As I read the essay, I was surprised that I found Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and The Sickness Unto Death offered a solution. I know well that it is cliché for me to say that about Kierkegaard. But even if I wasn’t a Kierkegaardian, I would think “Oh. Kierkegaard actually says something about this.” But that’s not this response. Because I find that I have an escape, I can allow myself better awareness of our catastrophe and spend quality time with these nihilisms that Dault identifies.

Nihilism Omega
Dault starts with Nihilism Omega (NO), the conventional, traditionalist nihilism. NO is our palatable nihilism, because gets us out of the present for something better beyond our horizon. It is an “optimistic” nihilism, a hopeful nihilism. NO is not the postponement of present satisfaction for attaining it in the future. It is the development of personal discipline to abandon the present in expectation for something more desirable in the future. Dault cites evangelical finance guru Dave Ramsey as teaching this.

Yet the prosperity gospel also teaches this. The prosperity gospel, which comes from Pentecostal Word of Faith teachings, prooftexts Bible verses to create a promise of future material blessings beyond imagination for present faithfulness in God. Read your Bible. Pray without ceasing. Its safeguard is that if you don’t get those things, then you didn’t believe enough or the right way. The prosperity gospel is a kind of New Thought from the same well that Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking” (and whose Manhattan church Trump attended as a youth) and The Secret‘s “manifesting” come from. The present – YOUR present – is dead. It’s about the future at the expense of the now.

I found myself thinking of the Great Disappointment as another NO example. The Great Disappointment is one of the most significant religious events in American history. Adventist William Miller preached the imminent return (“advent”) of Jesus and gave a specific date: October 22, 1844. His followers sold all of their possessions in expectation of the Second Coming. The present was wholly abandoned for the future, for the advent. After the day came and went, the Millerites (as they were pejoratively called) were yanked back into the concrete now, laden with burden of living forward. They had to rework their understanding of themselves and what happened. One of these groups that refashioned itself is the Seventh Day Adventists. The SDA understands the consequences of such nihilism even as they still look forward to the Second Coming.

Nihilism Alpha (Johnny Rotten: Radical Theologian)
I was pleased to see Dault cite the Sex Pistols in his description of Nihilism Alpha (NA), the despairing, “pessimistic” nihilism. I can talk about the Pistols at length. He describes their unexpectedly final gig at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. They start with “God Save the Queen” (my favorite of theirs, btw) and Dault quotes the refrain: “No future! No future! No future for you! / No future! No future! No future for me!” In the world of the Sex Pistols, we share that eternal present that is no future for either of us.

Dault does not explicitly cite the following stanzas, but they’re theologically important, especially coming from the anarchic, “anti-Christian” Pistols:

God save history
God save your mad parade
Oh Lord God, have mercy
All crimes are paid

When there’s no future, how can there be sin?
We’re the flowers in the dustbin
We’re the poison in your human machine
We’re the future, your future

Here, Rotten sings his sarcastic, subjunctive plea for divine mercy and absolution. But he goes further: “When there’s no future, how can there be sin?” In Christianity, sin indicates a redemptive future for the possibility of and opportunity for its forgiveness. Even lapsed Irish Catholic Rotten gets this. If there is no sin, then everything is permissible. It is soiled beauty. It is poison in the organism. An eternal present is an amoral, anarchic now. The goodness and beauty of Creation dies because it cannot continue forward, poisoned by an ever-present present. There can be no Advent, no Eschaton, no Parousia. The hope of Christianity is wholly transformed into despair with not the telos, but the terminus of time. And Rotten proclaims that our future is not only that of the Pistols, but the Pistols, themselves, which ironically had less of a future than even the band expected.

Capitalist Realism
Letting the Pistols’ suicide resonate, Dault turns to English writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher. Fisher’s brilliant dissections of culture and capitalism made him into a philosophical authority for the underground beginning in the early aughts. He utilized Derrida’s “hauntology” (a pun on “ontology”) to describe how our contemporary culture experiences “lost futures.” Dault focuses on Fisher’s appraisal of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” and what it means to dwell in that space. It’s not good. Dault writes:

For Fisher, capitalism has brought us to the point where our imaginations have atrophied, in every possible sense. We have lost the ability to imagine a future different from the present in which we are living right now. More than this, however, the present itself has lost its ability to imagine a future, and so it simply begins to mine and reproduce the past, in ever-more-detailed repetitions. To paraphrase a line or two from Capitalist Realism, we find ourselves watching 1970s sitcoms on high-definition television screens.

(Dault does not note in his essay that Fisher committed suicide in 2017. Is it significant to mention this terrible tragedy? One can never truly understand a person’s decision to end their life. Fisher was not a nihilist. He did not believe in nothing. Far from it. But whatever it was that drove his hand, it overwhelmed him to the point of no return.)

Sharper and Brighter
NA is the collective nostalgia that perceives and experiences the future only in the memorialized past and then is aborted. Presently, we stream our pop cultural reboots and revivals all the while with fascism’s return and reinstatement of Confederate statues and draconian zombie laws, of manufactured propagandistic pasts. MAGA seeks to reinstate a past that never existed except in its projected racist, misogynistic, poly-phobic imagination. It is the worst of recycling and it is an excessively bright present – like how watching an atomic blast is bright, like the stopped watches in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are trapped in their eternal present after a brilliant, blinding brightness. Dault describes NA as a present “where nothing ever changes, only the images get sharper and sharper.” Brighter and brighter. Sharper and sharper. Until you simply can’t live with yourself… or others.

My favorite sentence of Dault’s essay is this:

The temptation of alpha-style nihilism is the oubliette of solipsism—a mass delusion in which we forget the possibility of a future, and only remember the past insofar as it becomes a wash of the perpetual present.

For those who don’t know (because I didn’t), an “oubliette” is a tiny prison where a person is effectively “forgotten.” It is a torture chamber of isolation wherein the prisoner is left by themselves with only their thoughts to consume them. The Alpha Nihilist proclaims their freedom from the future by containing themself in a present of their own making, gazing back at the past of their own recollective formation.

When There is No Sin in the Present
“When there’s no future, how can there be sin?” The Alpha Nihilist never sins, because there is no sin. The Alpha Nihilist never needs redemption because there is no need for redemption. They are already now Great as they once were great. Greatness needs no redemption. Fashioning themselves from their imagined past, they made themselves Great Again. “Again” is an adverb of the present. It is the repetition of the past into the now. The future exists only in the service of the past for the purpose of the present. It is a future of the past, which is the present. Past sins are absolved by the Greatness of the everpresent present. Sin no longer exists. “Sin is an artifact of the past,” proclaims the Alpha Nihilist, “when we were less than great, before we were and are now.”

Dault determines the climate crisis as the “metastasization of alpha-style nihilism.” In his observation that we are trapped in a position where we can imagine the end of the world, we delude ourselves that were are merely observers even when we are suffering along with our loved ones the collapse of our planet. It reminds me of Fisher’s observation in Capitalist Realism where he describes it as similar to “Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Zizek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” We can imagine the end of the world, but we can’t imagine ourselves suffering while it happens to us.

“When there’s no future, how can there be sin?” In the NA of climate collapse, how can there be sin against our neighbor, against Nature, against ourselves, against our Creator? There is no future. There is only burning and the suffocation on noxious fumes of our planet as we repost memes on social media. Our attention is attuned, presently, to our screens. NA is a kind of incurvatus in se, a “turned inwardness toward the self.” It is a vile selfishness, consumed by its own desires, greed, and concern at the expense of all else, our neighbor, Nature, ourselves, our Creator. To steal a title from Neil Postman, we are emojiing ourselves to death through the glory and greatness of data centers and ChatGPT and LLMs, the collective amalgamation and regurgitation of stolen, tokenized data.

Dault understands these two nihilisms as two sides of the same coin: the macho alpha male and the sole survivor omegaman. And he sees these two archetypes as “empty shells” seeking the “promise of life,” but never living in this age. This is our post-American present.

The Present Greatness of MAGA Man
I will take his ideas a bit further. MAGA Man is the Omega and the Alpha of nihilism, but ends and begins nothing. He looks toward his future as he abandons the present. His future is the present that is found in the past fashioned in his own image. He sustains himself with the aesthetics of power. He feels great again. Living in the present, he has no regrets other than the time when he lost the feeling of greatness. More greatness is just over the horizon, as long as he believes in his own greatness. His greatness is at the expense of all else in the present and the past that he doesn’t fashion as his own. MAGA Man gets by by feeling he is getting by. He does it first, like America, and he does it alone, like America. MAGA Man is a great American. If he is told he is getting by by the right people who make him feel great, he will believe he is getting by. This will inevitably collapse, but until then, MAGA Man will need greater and greater amounts of greatness to feed his desire for a great present. As long as he can keep the threshold of despair at bay, at a distance from his permanent present, then he is doing just great. With no future and no sin, MAGA Man can do no wrong. He can only be great until the world engulfs him in the conflagration of his own self-deception and time moves on without him.

Survival After Punk
A few thoughts on the Sex Pistols in relation to nihilism. The Pistols died for a number of reasons. But with the death of Johnny Rotten, John Lydon was able to create Public Image Limited. Their first single, “Public Image,” rails against NA, explicitly against capitalism.

Two sides to every story
Somebody had to stop me
I’m not the same as when I began
I will not be treated as property

Public Image

Two sides to every story
Somebody had to stop me
I’m not the same as when I began
It’s not a game of monopoly

Public Image

Public image, you got what you wanted
The public image belongs to me
It’s my entrance, my own creation
My grand finale, my goodbye

Lydon seizes his own identity from those who would exploit him. He acknowledges those who would fight him. He acknowledges that he has a history and that he has changed. He seizes his own identity. He is not a nihilist, neither omega nor alpha.

What is important to realize is that Public Image Limited is not a punk band. It is post-punk. As romantic as UK punk can seem, it only lasted about eighteen months in the late seventies. Then the media had its fill and moved on. But the music and the subculture that punk had creatively inspired moved on its own direction: post-punk. Yes, that’s the name it was given. AFTER punk. It doesn’t have its own name.

There was a nihilism in punk, because it was nihilism toward the malaise and stagnation UK youth experienced in the seventies. But it also served as a spark of creativity for hundreds of youth who had long felt there was nothing for them. The Sex Pistols vocalized that nihilism and frustration and the fires of punk burned bright, hot, and fast. As music labels and fashion sought to cash in on punk, it couldn’t live with itself. Maintaining a permanent present is exhausting.

But the double-sided nihilism that Dault describes is more dangerous, more systemic, and more widespread in our country than punk ever was in the UK. The media created the moral panic of punk out its purposeful spectacle. We, however, are suffering a real cultural situation that has already mutated into a fascist stance and action. When “no future” passes beyond a lyric or mantra and becomes a socio-political stance, no one is safe.

After the Pistols played their standard cover of The Stooges’ “No Fun”, Johnny Rotten squatted on the Winterland stage, stared out at the crowd and said, “Ah ha ha! Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated. Good night!”

And that was it. The end of the Pistols. Nihilism cheats everyone out of not only a future, but a past and purposeful present. And when the backlash comes, nothing is safe.

Dault provides a useful rubric to help understand the kinds of nihilism that threaten us with abandonment and absolute selfishness. Further exploration and reflection is necessary, but nihilism is something for which we need collectively to raise the alarm.

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The Last Sunday of Epiphany

2025-03-02T21:49:30.000-05:00

It is the last Sunday of Epiphany, Lent days away. My inbox is full of Lenten opportunities, the seasonal advertising of New Year’s resolution gym deals. I walk into my local Italian bakery to get a Carnival pastry. An ecclesial shock to my tongue.

When I ask the woman at the counter for one, she doesn’t understand what I want. I repeat myself to no avail. She asks the woman next to her what I want. I repeat myself. She pronounces it correctly. SFIN-jee, instead of my hard “geh.” I realize I’m pronouncing the word as if it were German. She tells me it’s two dollars and fifty cents and I hand her a five. She dully gives me my change and my mispronounced confection. Protestantism 0: Catholicism 1.

Back on Court Street, the wind is cold and sharp in the bright afternoon sun. The second day of March is leonine. I take a bite of Carnival and my teeth and gums sing as they sink in. I am listening to an episode of the Paris Review podcast, a memoir of a lover dying of lymphoma from AIDS in 1994. Everything is heightened and I am experiencing that heady eeriness I get when attuning myself, availing myself to writing. I soften myself up like this. It’s a bacchic synesthesia for craft that I do not recommend.

Sfinge are for St. Joseph’ Day, later this month. But it will do. It’s the alcoholic’s binge before going dry. Tomorrow, a Danish fastelavn. Tuesday, a Polish pançzi. Shock the system. Shock the system. Shock my system just two months into this officially fascist America. Then Ash Wednesday with the oil and the ash and the pressed smear and the warm words of death with the sugar still in my gut, circulated through me.

Ash and sugar and dust and fried dough topped with cream. Wipe my creamy finger on wax paper. Wipe your oily finger on my face. Remind me of who, of what I am. It is the last Sunday of Epiphany. Eat your weight in revelation. Gorge on the shock of the new. Lent comes quickly.

Karneval, by Max Beckmann.
Oil on linen canvas, Mark Ranney Memorial Fund, 1946.1
Stanley Museum of Art, University of Iowa.

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A Bleak Theology Guide to Resistance

2025-02-06T17:49:51.000-05:00

Everything is terrible everywhere all at once. What to do? How to respond? Here is a Guide of ten things to help weather this storm. I hope that you will find this Guide helpful. It is a longer read, but I believe it is worth it. Take your time. Ruminate on it. Share it. Peace be with you.

First, for those who don’t know, bleak theology is an existential theology in that it focuses on not only questions and concerns about meanings of life in relation to a possibly and seemingly silent or absent God, but also how to discern living authentically and deliberately in relation to such irresolvable questions and concerns. Bleak theology is not nihilistic, but is not optimistic. It is also a theology about bleak circumstances. Let’s accept this truth: life will suck at some point. This is a theology about that. It is about living authentically, existentially in bleak times. It is, as I like to say, a post-punk counterweight to joy. Unfortunately, bleak theology seems to be having its moment. Here are utensils that I can offer.

Find your eras of resistance. It’s bleak, kids. But remember, it’s been bleaker. Find the historical moments that matter to you. We’ve been here, in some way, before. My two personal go-to historical eras for understanding religious persecution are the early church until 313 CE’s Edict of Milan, when the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity an approved religion, and the underground church during Nazi Germany. These eras resonate with me because I have a degree in classical civilization and because of my German heritage, though my family line left Germany decades earlier. Forget the romanticism of martyrdom. Things were bad. Countless people were killed for their beliefs and their resistance. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is just of one of thousands who perished, like the members of the White Rose and countless others in the anti-fascist resistance. They did not see the end of their cause. At the end of ELCA Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton’s Youtube response to the lies spread by Elon Musk and former General Michael Flynn, she recalls the 258 CE story of Lawrence, who when pressured by the Roman Empire to turn over the church’s coffers, liquidated every asset and distributed the money among the poor and needy. When the Emperor Valerian asked where the treasure was, he gestured to the sick, widows, poor, and needy behind him and said, “These are the treasures of the church.” And for that he was martyred and eventually made a saint. “Be of good courage, church,” concludes Bishop Eaton. “And let us persevere.” She knows the worst is yet to come. Let us prepare.

Name your saints of resistance. Saints serve as models for living. They inspire us, reassure us, challenge us, and for some people, protect us. Christianity has saints for pretty much every person and occasion. In these bleak times, we can also look beyond the church for those resistors who can provide us with the individual and collective inspiration we need. These days, we find saints where we can. Saint comes from the word “sanctus,” Latin for “holy.” Who is holy for you? Who are your holy resistors, set apart in distinction against the powers that be? Who speaks truth to power for you? Read about them. Keep a picture of them near. Is it someone spiritual, political, cultural? All three? Or more? Are they an artist? What is their creativity? Make it yours. Saints, by their nature, are subversive. Mere pietism doesn’t make a person a saint. Who’s your transgressor? Your resistor? Your agitator? Hold them dear. Know their story. Make it part of yours. Warning: your saints may have been killed for their efforts. Know what you’re getting into, because you already do, really.

Create rituals and practices. In a time of chaos, we need personal order and regularity. Our bodies, minds, and spirits need it. Control time and event as you can. Rituals and practices disrupt chaos. Establishing rituals creates a miniature universe, a superstructure within which one can dwell and move and create a practice. A practice is not something done toward perfection, but mastery. A practice is a sustained action by which one becomes intimately familiar with a regular routine and its sublime meanings. Imagine your repeated effort through time as a kind of corkscrew by which we can understand ourselves better and find rest. Set a time to take a walk outdoors, to meditate, to stretch your body. Move your body in space and time. Schedule time to create art, to make something. Look at what you have created. Go to a church service that offers Vespers or Evensong. Have a set game night with loved ones. But do it regularly. This is not your new normal. This is intentional. Intentionality is not normality. Intention requires desire and effort. These are not normal times.

Tell your story. All theology is autobiographical. For Paul? His first letter to the Corinthians. For Augustine? Confessions (Confessions is actually a prayer, in which he tells his story.) We have been telling such stories for two thousand years. We connect to and see each other through acts of storytelling. Are you deconstructing your faith, critically analyzing it after a childhood of fear and dread? Tell it. Have you experienced radical hospitality and kindness when you most needed it? Tell it. Did you have the opportunity to be Jesus to someone? Tell it. Did you see the humanity in someone marginalized by society and share solidarity with them? Did someone feel seen? Tell it. Have the teachings and love of Jesus helped you love others as you desire to be loved? Tell it. Have you witnessed injustice firsthand? Tell it. Is having faith in God and humanity difficult right now? Tell it. Does God seem silent if not absent or even dead? Tell it. Have you received grace from someone? Tell it. All theology is autobiographical. Autobiographical theology is constructive theology. It builds, undergirds, and creates its own foundation and scaffolding through personal story. And in doing so, it challenges systematic theology, those constructed, yet academically helpful categories that work to make sense of God. Our stories present ourselves as human, especially in a dehumanizing age.

Read meaningful things and reflect. Each of us have favorite readings that reassure and edify us. A poem, the Book of Psalms, a favorite essay. Something small and manageable, something that you can pause in the middle of and think about what it means for you. Read such meaningful things. Keep them in your heart and cherish them. These words can be sad, very sad. Sad words pierce our hearts and cause the flow of tears. These are very sad times. We can be sad, together. Mourning is the vulnerability of humanity. Lamentation is the outward cry of inward sorrow. And share these meaningful things with others. Words are gifts to be shared. A gifted word is a remembered word. Create connections with each other through words. This is communication and the reaffirmation of truthful things. Read meaningful things for education. Theologians like Delores S. Williams, Rosemary Radford Reuther, Dorothee Sölle, James Cone, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer can teach us from their own vantage points how to understand and to find hope while combating fascism and oppression. Dwell on these things. Share them.

Become “degenerate.” In 1937 Munich, the Nazis put on an exhibition of 650 art pieces from over 5,000 works they’d seized entitled Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art“). The fascists’ intention was to instruct the public as to what should be understood as perversion. The show included paintings by now-beloved artists like Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse. This exhibition absolutely backfired on the Nazis and introduced artistic innovation and creativity to countless people. It’s possibly one of the greatest modern art exhibitions ever held. During a fascist age, this degeneracy is a virtue, speaking subversive creativity to power. Fascism seeks to control and establish what is “normal.” But we have the Paraclete, the helper that is the Holy Spirit that works against hegemony, that queers conformity. I have written about this before. In a word, “queerness” is this degeneracy. How are you degenerate in the eyes, in the face of fascism? How do you not comply? How are you insufficient for fascism? How are you abnormal? How do you not conform? How is your art degenerate?

Remain artistic. Christianity believes in a creative God, mostly readily evident in Genesis 1-2 and John 1. Created in God’s image, we are imbued with creativity and it is good. Creativity is a good. We are artists by default. Let us act accordingly. Remain artistic in the face of conformity and tyranny. Incorporate your artistry, your creativity in the practices you create for yourself. Good art requires non-conformity. It resists kitsch and commodification. Earlier this year, at a January 6th gathering we called “Epiphanies of Resistance” that I led at my church with local Brooklyn artists, I shared a few books that inspire me in my creativity during these difficult times. They were eagerly received. Perhaps, you will find them useful as well.

Making Art During Fascism, by Beth Pickens (pdf download)
On Artists and Hopelessness, by Beth Pickens (pdf download)
Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, by David Bayles and Ted Orlando (I don’t like linking to Amazon, but the book is hard to find elsewhere)
Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist, by Albert Camus

Creativity, artistry resists stagnation, resists stasis. We cannot be creative without incorporating ourselves. Let us be artistic as only we can for each other and our community.

Be kind to be resistant. After I wrote about this last November, I was surprised how quickly my idea has been picked up by others. Kindness is resistance. Full stop. MAGA, Christian Nationalists, and now even our federal government are engaging in a kind of cruelty that we naively imagined was left behind in our country’s history. Evangelical Russell Moore was aghast to hear conservative Christians saying that Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is “too liberal.” Matthew 5-7 is clear and non-negotiable. This is the foundation of Christian ethics. In the Trumpocene, even the most basic act of kindness is a form, a direct action of resistance. History is rife with unkind, shitty Christians. Let us resist their current cruelty and evil with that love in action that is kindness for the least of us, even if that kindness may put us at risk of suffering the cruelty of our neighbor and government.

Sustain meaningful community. As I watched the election returns, my stomach sank as I realized that I have absolutely no power at the federal level. Living in New York City with eight million people, where is my agency? I realized that my agency is with my immediate community in my immediate surroundings. In Brooklyn, I learn and understand very quickly who my neighbor is. The opportunities are actually overwhelming, so I must choose carefully for my self-preservation. I am active in our son’s school, my writing community, but most significantly at St. Lydia’s, my little dinner church on the banks of the fragrant Gowanus Canal. St. Lydia’s practices radical hospitality in the ritual praxis of preparing and sharing a sacred meal every Sunday night. We welcome the stranger. We share and listen to our stories. We sing. We pray. We mourn. We rejoice. We eat and drink. We practice right action over conforming “correct” belief. We remember the story of Jesus and put it into action in our lives. We create community with and for each other. We are a nerd church, full of creative individuals, including writers, musicians, composers, singers, visual artists, playwrights, dancers, architects, and many more. We are the creative arts and letters. This is my home for over a decade, on the banks of the fragrant Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York. We are a Lutheran church, the kind that Elon Musk and General Michael Flynn despise. Find your meaningful community, whatever it may be. Make it your own. Sustain it and in sustaining it, you will be sustained. This is the direct action of kindness that is the church that the Paraclete helps. Because when the government strikes, and unkind Christians strike and MAGA strikes and seeks to tear your community apart, you will have already woven together a textile, a garment that cannot be ripped apart.

Assess your gifts and talents. Everything is terrible everywhere all at once. What to do? How to respond? Everyone has a particular aptitude and agency. Your role is what you do best. What are you best suited for? Are you a protester? An educator? A writer? An organizer? A boots-on-the-ground worker? A liaison? A networker? A pastor? A counselor? A caregiver? A strategist? An encourager? What haven’t I mentioned? Is that what you’re suited for? Of course, it is! You are made for action. You are a human being! You are *already* wondrously made for these times. You may just not be needed at this very *moment*. But you are and will be needed. You are essential. Each of us is essential. If you are panicking, if you are despairing, think of how you are wondrously made for this moment. You are needed. We need you. I need you. Each of you. Peace be with you.

Take this Guide and share it widely, if you so choose. Use what works. Modify as necessary. Make it your own. Tailor it to your self and your community. It is bleak because we live in a bleak age. But it is loving action in the midst of bleakness. This theology, this bleak theology acknowledges the unknowability and mystery and danger and inconsistency and raw humanness of existence and belief and action and is but one of countless theologies. It admits our circumstances and the fact that we may not survive intact, that we may not even get out alive. But it seems to be a useful theology for this moment, for this age. Love one another. Be kind to be resistant. Welcome the stranger. Help your neighbor. Live the Gospel. Be of good courage, church. And let us persevere.

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Kindness is Resistance

2024-11-07T15:00:00.000-05:00

Things are bleak. It’s only going to get worse. We are starkly faced with the existential choice of how we are going to act for our neighbor, for our nation, for ourselves. Fascism is here. Cruelty is here. It is in the bones and muscles and veins and nerves of our nation. We are not safe. No one is safe. Dread and Despair pursue us like relentless furies. There is no safety. Where is God amongst our ruins? Where is our salvation? Where is our hope? There is only sorrow and fear. It sounds like a psalm, the bleakest of psalms. The darkest of lamentations. But this is not some ancient biblical text. This is our United States of America.

Years ago, when I began imagining this bleak theology, it was in many ways a reaffirmation of Christian existentialism, but in a contemporary frame. It takes Kierkegaardian anxiety, despair, and the leap into faith painfully seriously. What is bleak about it is the context within which our actions and being (i.e., our becoming) take place. And it takes into account the fact that this bleakness is intrinsic to who we are and how we choose to act and become. It is intensely personal, existential, radical about the self. It is about the self, but it is in no way selfish.

This bleakness is also one of perspective about the condition of humanity. My theology is, to borrow from Kierkegaard, a particular religious understanding, discernment, and judgment about our collective and individual condition and situation. My conclusion is that our condition and situation is very bleak. And it’s always more bleak than we can comprehend. It has always been this way, but now we see it more vividly and exacting and severe, because it is.

This necessitates our individual and collective response, which is kindness. These are our works of love. In an earlier age, kindness would be called “charity,” but that word has been infected with a sanctimonious and philanthropic tone that I despise. The Greek of this kindness is agape, the Latin Vulgate’s caritas. Bleakness requires, demands love. In our lifetime of bleakness, love your neighbor as yourself. Because things are going to get worse. Soon and fast. And yes, I believe were are at this most basic, foundational level of action.

Kindness is resistance. In the wake of this election, where fascism and Christian nationalism has won not just the day, but our American age, this simple phrase keeps repeating in my head and heart. Kindness is resistance. The protective institutions we have built for ourselves, for so many reasons, have failed us for so many reasons. We risk failing each other and ourselves. But kindness can never be institutionalized. It requires the creativity of the human imagination and heart that institutions can never fathom or implement. Kindness is a work of love. It is a practice. We must cultivate these practices of kindness. We must make them real and lasting.

MAGA is the incurvatus in se, that selfish turning inward, for one’s own self and one’s own kind. It creates an imagined, pompous history of prosperity and status. It is cancer. It feeds on itself to kill. But kindness does not exist in such an environment. Kindness turns outward toward God and the neighbor and the stranger and the least of us. Kindness exists most brightly, most boldly in the bleakest of moments and situations. Kindness presents the saints. My bleak theology emphasizes starkly the bleakness of our world and how we live within and a part of it. Kindness is resistance.

The sobering part of kindness, the kindness that Jesus taught, is that kindness is risky. Kindness is threatening and has consequences. Protecting and aiding the vulnerable, the undocumented, people of color, women (especially trans women and women of color), trans and non-binary people, the queer person, the child, the disabled, the poor, the sick, the hungry, and so many more. These are risky behaviors for risky people. Such kindness can have repercussions, bleak ones. Kindness can get you killed. Kindness is resistance.

Kindness is subversive. Kindness resists dogma. Kindness resists law. Kindness resists oppression. Kindness resists division. Kindness resists fear. Kindness resists inaction. Kindness displaces despair. Even in our despair, we can act in kindness. Even in our hopelessness, we can act in kindness. This is the radicality of agape love. The bleak theology is that in despair, in anxiety, in our sorrow and lamentation, we can and must and do love one another. Kindness presents the saints.

The Bible is rife with stories of people – faithful people – being oppressed and imprisoned and killed. This is kind of the Bible’s thing. People suffer. People die. For Christians, this is most of the New Testament: living, surviving or dying in a hostile Roman Empire. The texts that became the New Testament circulated and were compiled within a hostile empire. The texts are about a hostile empire. The early followers of Jesus did not bow down to that god of empire. And they suffered for it. Empire is never our friend. Empires are of the greatest unkindness. MAGA is our empire now. We must act accordingly.

My bleak theology, our bleak theology is a theology of now. It affirms not only suffering, but our understanding of the present world, this present America in which we live. Our present is bleak. Our future is bleak. We do not know what will happen. We act, as Jesus taught and acted within the Roman Empire, against the MAGA Empire within which we live. I do not know what will happen to us. But I will act in kindness in the ways that I can. Bleakness does not mean to live and act without faith, hope, and love. It is about the condition and the attitude within which we live and find our being. Let us love one another, regardless of what the future will bring. Kindness is resistance. Kindness presents the saints.

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Ian Curtis, “Discovered on the Sabbath”

2023-05-18T08:16:28.000-04:00

Today is one of the saddest days in the history of rock music, the death of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. In the early Sunday morning hours of May 18th, 1980, he hanged himself in his kitchen, Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot still spinning on his record player, a note left for his estranged wife. Factory Records co-founder and friend Tony Wilson, a Catholic always ready with symbolism, recalled in his book 24 Hour Party People that he was “discovered on the Sabbath”, the holy day of rest. Soon after his death, one reviewer, whose name I can’t recall, wrote “Ian Curtis died for your sins.” Is Curtis a rock god? A martyr? A saint? Should he be?

The hagiography, the construction of sainthood, surrounding this tortured young man is fierce. He is the subject of devout adoration and analysis. Having read so many memoirs and biographies about Curtis, I know that he was no saint in the traditional sense. Yet all our saints are dead. We need them dead because we can then press upon them what we need. We can cast them in the image of how we want them. They cannot refuse us. We put ourselves into our saints.

“Pray for us,” we beseech our patron saint. “Just listen. Please.” Someone, please listen. Perhaps we light a candle, a small flame flickering over melting wax encased in glass. If that’s our tradition, or perhaps if that’s our desperation, having never lit such a candle before. When we know nothing, believing a saint has special knowledge, special proximity and knowledge beyond what we have, what we know, that is reassuring. Curtis’s lyrics and urgent voice are so profound and jarring, so worldweary and insightful about isolation, pain, anxiety, and frustration, how can he not know something?

Pilgrimages are made to his Macclesfield. We remember May 18 as a solemn day. It has a hallowedness to it. It is a day set aside to listen to a particular meaningful song of Joy Divisions’ catalog, to dwell on the tenuousness of mental health, to remember a particular moment of crisis we knew had to come, when Joy Division provided, perhaps, both the spirit and the feeling to endure, to push through some terrible moment. Bassist Peter Hook tours the world playing his own band’s songs – even in former churches. Even in the very church Curtis attended as a boy, Christ Church Macclesfield. He played Joy Division’s full catalog there on May 18th, 2018.

The Anglican Calendar of Saints is empty on May 18th. There are no saints, today. So perhaps it is fitting for Curtis to be canonized by those who need him. Ian Curtis, who grew up going to Christ Church Macclesfield with his mother, who went on work trips with his organ repairman uncle, who excelled in his Anglican studies at school, quarreled with his Anglican teachers over theology and the Bible, became disenchanted or disillusioned (or both) with God. Saints can’t refuse their sainthood. Would he? I think he’d chuckle about the whole thing.

Curtis knew about saints. He sings about them at the beginning of Unknown Pleasures‘ “Wilderness”. When asked what he’d seen in his travels, he cries, “I saw the saints and their toys!” These holy paragons and their emblems are cast as children clutching useless playthings in their hands. Saints are the first thing he sees and he sees them worthless. What good are saints? They are stories in stained glass and carved stone. Models of righteous living. Something to shoot for. Something to pray to. Saint Ian Curtis, staring, dancing, flailing before his microphone on the verge of an epileptic seizure, what Hippocrates called “the sacred disease”?

Writing about saints is a tricky endeavor. The closer you look at them, the more you squint, their sainthood becomes both muddied and distilled. Their actual lives and the stories about their lives are not the same. Writing this book on Joy Division has been a very arduous task. Listening to singular songs over and over and over, discerning their meaning, allowing myself to feel the weight saturating into me. All for insight, something possibly theological and useful. A theology of Joy Division exists. That’s the upsetting, problematic thing. It’s in the lyrics. “Day of the Lords”. “Wilderness”. “Passover”. “Colony”. It’s on the cover of Closer. It’s impossible to separate the lyrics from the man. It’s impossible to separate the man from the band, from the sound of Joy Division.

And then the whole story now iconified in sound and image and text and film and even theatre. The stories keep getting told over and over and over. This is how saints are created. At what point do Joy Division’s songs become hymns? When “Atmosphere” is played at funerals? When “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is played at memorial concerts? At what point do the songs become psalms of lamentation? Did a saint write them? No. He was just a young man trying to get his thoughts out in front of him, recording them in the dead of night with the lights down low. Trying to find a clue, trying to find a way to get out.

Today, May 18th, we remember a young man who was a brilliant, tortured artist. But we must remember that as we hold him up as a brilliant, tortured artist that he was just a person like the rest of us, with fears and dreams and complex relationships, who loved to joke and play pranks and married too young. Ian’s mother wanted everyone to know that he was a happy child. When we create saints, we don’t focus on the parts that don’t fit into the sainthood we want to create.

There is an empty space on the Anglican calendar of saints today. Shall we light a candle for our anti-saint? This psalmist and icon? This singer we ascribe something darkly hallowed for the salve and catharsis of thousands? Shall we say, “St. Ian, pray for us” or shall we simply beg, like he did, “Don’t walk away… in silence. Don’t walk away.”

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The Solitude of Writing.

2023-04-25T16:23:56.000-04:00

In the writing process, there comes a threshold whereby the author enters a situation of solitude. This is not about sitting in a library alone or a cafe alone or their room alone. For true solitude comes when the writer understands themself to perceive, to understand their subject such that no one else can possibly comprehend it their particular way. Then, physical proximity is like unto the space between the Big Bang and the End of the Universe.

All the information and its arrangement and the relationships among and between and the force and inertia all through the self and lens and voice of a single individual now constructing the voices and actions and beings of everything else of that individual’s subject. That realization of solitude, of absolute loneliness is when that threshold is crossed.

And the author says to themself, “No one else can understand this. Not like this.” And from that point is the ache that comes with every key and pen stroke, ever sigh of imagination and frustration that builds a work for the reader, the reader that can never quite comprehend as the author, while the author deceives the reader to think that they, reading this author’s work, *gets* it. And can then go further.

Is this the Faustian bargain that each author is almost offered, the exchange of being understood at the cost of relinquishing their private possession of comprehension, of self-comprehension? Writing is a curse. A Sisyphusian torture that can only be aleviated by not writing, to suffer the pain of not writing, the agony of stasis. Yet, the Furies shall not allow it.

“Keep writing!” they cry. “Push your loneliness higher toward the surface of the world!” And there, as the writer watches the stone slip from their fingertips and roll back down that well-worn mountain, that most intimate Fury whispers, her nose lightly, warmly against the back of your ear, “No one is going to get it.” And down you go again, back to write your chapter, knowing well that when you finish it, it shall still never be ended.

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Good Friday and Joy Division

2023-04-07T13:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve been quiet for the past few months while I’ve been focused on writing my book, Don’t Walk Away: Joy Division as Theological Lamentation. What I thought would be one obligatory chapter on religious history of became three very unexpected chapters. I’ve been making good headway, currently working on lyrics analysis. I would love for the book to come out by the end of the year. We’ll see how things go.

Good Friday loomed heavily for Joy Division in 1980. On that first night of the Christian Triduum, Ian Curtis would suffer an embarrassing epileptic seizure on stage while performing in London. On Easter morning back in Macclesfield, he would thwart his own suicide attempt of overdosing on medication. But a few weeks before that, he would have agreed with his bandmates on the image that would be used for the cover of Closer, a French photograph of Italian funerary statues, of women mourning Jesus in the tomb. In May, he would be dead and in July, Closer would be released.

Below is my section from my third chapter in Part I: The Factory and the Cathedral, about the Good Friday scene used for Closer and the story around and behind it. There is some art criticism, some Bible, some Dostoyevsky, and some respectful speculation. I have attempted to contact Peter Hook and Peter Saville with no success. I don’t know how to contact Morris and I know that Sumner would like to leave Joy Division in the past. I’m doing what I can to bring this ignored aspect of Joy Division’s history to light for the first time.

Feel free to share, but do not steal. Citations are in my draft and any permissions required will be secured.

“We’ve Got a Tomb on the Cover of the Album”

During the second half of March 1980, Joy Division was in London recording the songs that would become their second album. Knowing Saville did not meet deadlines, Gretton brought the band to his nearby studio to pressure him into presenting cover ideas. Unsurprisingly, Saville wasn’t prepared, even as he had not heard any of the tracks of the still-unnamed album. But to show what was exciting him at the time, he pulled out a copy of Zoom magazine that featured photos of statues by the French photographer Bernard-Pierre Wolff.

(photo by Stuart Freedman/In Pictures via Getty Images Images)

The tomb photographed lies in Genoa, Italy’s famed Monumental Cemetery of Sagliano, sculpted by Demetrio Giacomo Paernio around 1910 for the powerful Appiani family. What struck Saville was the lifelike appearance of the statues. The high quality of the figures and the photography made it difficult to determine if they were statues or if they were dusty models in a photo shoot. Saville understands them to be “a view on classicism through the contemporary medium of photography. That’s what makes it postmodern and ‘neo-neoclassical’.” Wolff had intriguingly juxtaposed in a single shoot Saville’s two poles of classical and contemporary. Saville did not expect the band to have such an immediately positive interest and reaction. Hook notes that Curtis really liked them. Joy Division looked through the pages and collectively agreed upon the now-iconic image.

At first glance, it is a life-sized burial scene from ancient Roman times captured in chiaroscuro. The image is of a dead young man lying on a stone slab that is draped in a cloth. His hands resting on his chest, he is wrapped in a burial shroud with his serene, bearded face uncovered. Mourning him are four women, positioned declining from left to right to draw the eye down toward the deceased. The left hand of the standing woman’s rests on the right shoulder of another woman kneeling, who clasps it with both of her own. The kneeling woman stares intently at the haloed man’s face. The woman to her right, head lowered, supports her left arm against the slab. The fourth, her head against the floor, her hair flowing over her arms. In the lower right hand corner on the floor is an ancient oil lamp. This is inside a tomb and it is dark.

More carefully examined, this is not simply a group of women weeping over a loved one or a saint, but a final scene from Good Friday. They mourn over the crucified body of Jesus in the tomb reserved for Joseph of Arimathea. His halo, carved in relief, is faint but distinct. Even in death, his divinity shines. Soon, the women will leave and the great stone will be rolled against the tomb’s entrance. But for now, this single moment of the story is captured eternally in rock. It is solemn, silent, still.

Wolff’s photo, however, is a close-up of the Appiani tomb that, through both framing and shadow, does not present the entire scene of the sculpture. Though Saville and the band and ourselves do not see the the full tomb, it is valuable to provide a comprehensive account of what is left out of the shot. The woman standing on the far left is, herself, haloed, indicating her as Mary, the mother of Jesus. To remove all doubt, below her in stone is carved the words “STABAT MATER”, Latin for “The mother was standing”, from a famous thirteenth century hymn to Mary. Her gaze is raised toward Heaven. The two middle women could be Joanna and Mary, the mother of James. The bare-headed fourth woman, is possibly Mary Magdalene, who is mentioned being at the tomb and is sometimes attributed to be the unnamed sinful woman who wiped Jesus feet with her hair and anointed him with perfume. Hovering above Jesus’ haloed head is a dove, representing the Holy Spirit that appeared descending upon Jesus at his baptism, grasping an olive branch, the sign of peace, in its mouth. Equidistant from Mary and the Holy Spirit above the dead Christ is a small outline of a cross, with four human figures in each quadrant of space it creates, possibly signifying the four evangelists of the gospels. For a static tableau, it is a very busy scene full of biblical allusions and meaning.

This scene of collective mourning is known in art criticism as a Lamentation. If the scene had been only Jesus and his mother, it would be a Pietà. Not strictly from the gospels, these scenes come from later apocryphal and meditative narratives, first presented in medieval art. A Lamentation coincides with, but is not directly taken from, the Entombment, Holy Week’s fourteenth and final Station of the Cross. The Stations of the Cross are a liturgical account of the biblical events of Christ’s day of execution, beginning with his condemnation through his death. The Stations are most commonly found in Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions and are an essential part of celebrating the Passion and the end of the forty days of Lent.

In 1980, Ash Wednesday fell on February 20^th. The liturgical season of Lent was well under way when Joy Division was in the studio recording in late March and when Saville showed the photographs to the band. Reflects Saville, “But what was Ian already thinking? I’m showing them images of tombs because I think they look trendy, and for all I know he’s thinking ‘That’s where I’ll write my suicide.’” Collectively, everyone around Curtis did not expect him to end his life, admitting to misunderstanding the severity of his depression and to missing or ignoring the signs of his imminent death.

It is impossible to know if Saville is correct, but liturgically-astute Curtis may very well have been of that mind. Only in retrospect can such questions and possibilities seem clear as we interpret events and objects from a particular frame of reference. All theology is autobiographical and my personal connection to Joy Division informs both my vantage point and my theological constructions. Thus, such suppositions are part of my reflection process as I correlate accounts of experience with the broader Christian tradition. As a theologian and one deeply appreciative of the sound, images, history, and possible meanings of Joy Division, I find such attention and analysis compelling. There is value in delicately and respectfully exploring the theological meanings that could be attributed because it offers both new lenses of understanding of Curtis, himself, and an opportunity to wrestle with broader theological themes and matters for ourselves. I do this not to attribute motive or to provide a definite account or interpretation, but because it allows me as a fan and Christian to delve deeper into the theological issues of anxiety, existential suffering, and lamentation.

Within the liturgical context of Lent, an unsettling timeline appears from Joy Division’s meeting with Saville during the recording of Closer through his first suicide attempt earlier in April and his second, ultimately successful one. It is a sophisticated reading grounded in liturgical, literary, and artistic symbols, but symbols that Curtis would be readily aware of and able to utilize for his own self-understanding. Beginning with Wolff’s photo, I suggest Curtis created a personal connection between that Good Friday tomb scene and his established love for both the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Iggy Pop.

Curtis was a voracious reader of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a fellow religious, epileptic writer who focused deeply on existential themes, notably the human condition and suffering. He owned a Penguin Classics edition of The Idiot. Hook notes that he enjoyed talking with his girlfriend, Annik Honoré about Dostoyevsky and William Burroughs. Inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, he penned the lyrics for the posthumously released “The Kill”. One of his favorite albums was Iggy Pop’s first album apart from The Stooges, called The Idiot, released in 1977. David Bowie, another favorite artist of Curtis, had introduced Pop to Dostoyevsky’s novel and had helped him produce the eponymous album, which the novel inspired.

The novel’s protagonist is Prince Myshkin, a kind and wise young man, who is treated as an “idiot” because of his seemingly blithe understanding of the world. It is an expectedly complex and deep work and arguably Dostoyevsky’s most explicit investigation of Christian themes. The Idiot was definitely in Curtis’s personal library. He very well could have recognized that the album owed itself to the work.

At the sight of the dead Jesus at the Appiani tomb, Curtis may have paired the image with the timely fact that it was Lent. He may also have recalled a significant painting in The Idiot, Hans Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb. After the epileptic Prince Myshkin and Rogozhin gaze at it, Rogozhin asks him if he believes in God. To which the prince cries “Why, a man’s faith might be ruined by looking at that picture!” Myshkin then shares four recent encounters he has had with people concerning faith in God: an atheist, a murderer, a traitor, and a faithful new mother. He then says, “Listen, Parfyon; you put a question to me just now. This is my reply. The essence of religious feeling has nothing to do with reason, or atheism, or crime, or acts of any kind—it has nothing to do with these things—and never had.” His faith remains intact. Later, the atheist Hippolite Terentyev remembers being also captivated by the painting. In the midst of a long meditation on the work and the agony and radical theology of Good Friday, he says,

“But, strange to say, when one looks at this corpse of this tortured man, a certain curious question arises: if just a corpse (and it certainly must have been like this) was seen by all His disciples, by those who were to become His chief apostles, by the women who had followed Him and stood at the foot of the cross, by all who believed in Him and adored Him, how could they believe, gazing on such a cadaver as that, that this martyr would be resurrected?’

While Holbein’s painting presents the brutalized dead Christ alone on a slab, the cover of Closer is this agonizing scene of The Idiot fully visualized. Is it not possible that Ian Curtis, having undergone his own personal crisis of faith, is seeking to present his crisis visually along with it lyrically or perhaps to invoke such a crisis within others? Could this Lamentation, sculpted by Paernio, unwittingly be Curtis’ lamentation about his own loss of faith in God, in his own disbelief in the Resurrection? Could he be surreptitiously presenting the viewer with the crises of faith presented to both Myshkin and Terentyev?

Through Wolff’s photograph, Curtis confronts the viewer of, the listener of Closer with a dead Messiah, “with the women who had followed Him and stood by the cross” mourning him in stone. In this theological crisis that the first followers of Jesus experienced, Curtis is presenting it anew in this modern age of anxiety. Collapsing two thousand years of history, Curtis follows Søren Kierkegaard’s observation in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: the contemporary follower of Jesus had no advantage over any believer later in history. The women in the tomb and viewer of Closer must freely decide to have faith in the Resurrection. While only the viewer can choose whether they side with Myshkin or Terentyev, it is Terentyev in the next chapter, after a length speech about religion, who attempts to shoot himself, failing only because he neglects to load the gun properly.

Saville’s suggestion was an unexpected godsend. Curtis and Gretton had chosen not to use religious imagery for Unknown Pleasures’ title, but here was a fortuitous opportunity presented by the designer, himself, and in which the band was enthusiastic. The potential meanings of the funerary photo could personally satisfy everyone involved. It was cool and it was bleak. With the cover image agreed upon, Curtis continued to wrestle with his inner turmoils about his relationships, his physical and mental health, and his future with the band; his ruined faith represented here for all to see.

During a grueling concert schedule, on April 4, Good Friday, Curtis suffered on stage a significant seizure in London. Back in Macclesfield, on Easter Sunday, he consumes an overdose of his medication, but panics, thinking he has not taken a sufficient amount. Fearing that the medication will severely injure him, he asks his wife to take him to the hospital. The liturgical timing of the seizure, combined with a recollection of the decision to use the Good Friday photo provides Curtis with an opportunity to reflect on Holy Saturday, the darkest day of the Triduum when Jesus is dead in the tomb. Paradoxically, the suicide attempt on Easter Sunday could be one of release. Did he see himself as Terentyev? Curtis’ rationale could have been not for ultimate resurrection, but for escape from his mortal coil.

In mid-May, Curtis found himself at his absolute end. Alone at home on the night of May 17^th, he watched on television Werner Herzog’s Stroszek. The film is about a German musician who travels to the United States, seeking a better life with his girlfriend. After his girlfriend leaves him, he eventually shoots himself. It has been speculated that watching the film partly influenced Curtis to follow in the main character’s footsteps. After his death, Pop’s The Idiot was found still spinning on his turntable. Back in 1977, Ian and Deborah had gone on a date to see Pop at the Manchester Apollo on his Idiot tour, where Bowie had played keyboard, and he had been deeply affected by Pop’s performance. Deborah says that in his note found to her, he wrote that he no longer wanted to be alive, but did not explicitly say that he wanted to commit suicide.

I suggest that for Curtis, listening to that album was a way of simultaneously connecting to the themes of existential crisis, epilepsy, and religious faith he had read in Dostoyevsky’s gargantuan novel. This connection is similar to the possible sense that he connected with Herzog’s film featured a musician alone, wrestling with an impossible situation. The Appiani tomb photo becomes less Saville’s “suicide note” and more a despairing image regarding one’s loss of faith. Consumed ultimately by anguish and overwhelmed by sound and vision, all hope was, indeed, lost.

Later that day on May 18^th, Tony Wilson called Saville to tell him that Curtis had hanged himself. Absorbing the horrible news, Saville replied “Tony, we’ve got a tomb on the cover of the album.” At that point, the sleeve was close to being at the printer, if not already there. An emergency meeting was called and the three members decided that because Curtis had been part of the process and had agreed upon that image, they would leave it unchanged. In the aftermath of the album’s release, they was accused of exploiting Curtis, the public unaware the band was honoring the wishes of their friend.

The two studio albums of the band demonstrate a shift toward overt theological lamentation. Joy Division discarded crying in the wilderness and embraced crying in the tomb, the outside for the inside, the most distantiated for the most intimate, the absent most present for the present most absent. Rather than embracing the prophetic words of terrible things to come, Joy Division chose the memorializing image of terrible things that had occurred. Rather than crying about what could happen, Joy Division later embraced crying over what had happened. In Unknown Pleasures there was an aborted religious beginning and in Closer its successful end. In Saville’s studio, Joy Division chose not merely an image of the dead Christ, but the dead Christ prepared for burial and mourned. In the end, Curtis and Gretton got their religious tears. But those whom Curtis left behind, they had tears in their eyes.

This dialectic of beginning and end, of action and memorialization could be seen as a stretch, or even a hermeneutical leap. Except that in the aftermath of the death of Ian Curtis, that is exactly what the surviving members did. In 1981, the survivors of Joy Division released a compilation of unreleased tracks and live recordings. They named the album Still. Joy Division had ended, no longer able to move, yet now remained and remains eternally present. Resurrected as New Order, the surviving members, now with Morris’s then-girlfriend, later wife Gillian Gilbert on keyboards, got back into the studio at Wilson’s urging and would release that same year their first album Movement. What had ended in tears had begun anew in hope.

Religious language and image are powerful tools, often so unwieldy that they escape the author and artist’s control. Such language and image function beyond the immediate, the specific, and the intentional to provide opportunities of new interpretation and understanding. “What was Ian already thinking?” asks Saville on our behalf. He voices what we do not dare say – or suppose – aloud. But with time and the gradual inability to identify or recognize particular religious symbols, religious language and image become unfamiliar and ineffectual. At some point, we don’t even know to ask the thoughts of Curtis. The iconography of the album, itself, develops a status of its own.

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S1 E2 Exvangelicals, Deconstruction, and World’s End

2022-05-08T15:00:00.000-04:00

The “biblical worldview” is a foundational understanding of reality that forms and shapes the lives and identities of white evangelicals. It structures, explains, and enforces everything from science to society to salvation. Increasingly, younger evangelicals are reassessing and challenging this worldview through a process commonly called “deconstruction”. As they realize the internal incoherence and inconsistencies of the biblical worldview, as well as the toxic and abusive role of power and authority in the evangelical Church, they leave the only world they’ve ever really known. The term #exvangelical has become a way of identifying those whose who have consciously left – and often at great personal expense. It’s the end of the worldview, but it can feel like the end of the world.

This episode looks at how this biblical worldview came to be and what it has done through the American twentieth century to put us in the fraught socio-political position we find ourselves in now. It also examines the context and unique role #exvangelical plays for those who embrace the term. Can the exvangelical truly escape evangelicalism?

I also consider the phenomenon of deconstruction, focusing on the popular and influential Deconstructionist Podcast. I know they’re not the only example of deconstruction out there. But I believe they’ve done an excellent job of spreading the term and concept for evangelical Christians to use in their self-reflection and critique of the worldview they have inherited. And I think it’s worthwhile to look at the term as they – and many others – understand it. Am I deconstructing deconstruction? Judge for yourselves! (That’s an insider Kierkegaard joke.)

It wouldn’t be bleak theology if Plato, Nietzsche, and Derrida didn’t show up and there’s even some Marx, just for fun. I can’t say that it’s postmodern Marxism, but maybe? Judge for yourselves!

There are show notes for greater context, links, and related information. Be sure to listen, sigh, subscribe, and share this podcast with anyone whose day you’d like to ruin. I’m sure there’s at least one person you want to bring down. You can leave comments and questions on my Podcast page.

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S1 E1 Everything is Terrible

2022-04-15T13:09:04.000-04:00

Welcome to the Bleak Theology Podcast.

It is Good Friday and to coincide with this most dreadful day of the Christian year, I am sharing my first episode. I have been writing bleak theology for a long time, but with the world as it is these days, it seemed that such a podcast might be well received.

The first episode is a primer or rather, an orientation of what’s in store. I am not aware of any podcasts like this one, which is one of the reasons why I’ve started it. I hope that you will find it meaningful, especially on this second day of the Triduum.

All episodes will be available on the Podcast page, as well as on your preferred podcast app. The podcast will be available on Apple Podcast, iHeartRadio, Pandora, and Overcast in the very near future.

If you would please rate and review the podcast, I would greatly appreciate it and I encourage you to subscribe and share the podcast with others. If you have questions or comments, feel free to reach out on the podcast page.

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Introducing The Bleak Theology Podcast

2022-04-12T20:28:19.000-04:00

The world doesn’t need another religion podcast, but I started one, anyway.

COVID, war, racism, existential angst, climate collapse, economic injustice, genocide, fascism, sexism, racial injustice, trans- and homophobia, general malaise and anxiety, etc., etc. Things look pretty bleak, right now. Let’s talk about that.

If you’re into Christianity, existential crises, and the seemingly insurmountable abyss between the human and the divine, then this is your podcast.

First episode drops, unsurprisingly, on Good Friday.

S1 E2 Exvangelicals, Deconstruction, and World's End – The Bleak Theology Podcast

Has the "biblical worldview" always existed? Can the exvangelical escape evangelicalism? Why does "deconstruction" sound so familiar? So many questions. My answers will probably trouble you. But it wouldn’t be bleak theology if Plato, Nietzsche, and Derrida didn’t show up, right? And there’s even some Marx, just for fun. I can’t say that it’s postmodern Marxism, but maybe? Judge for yourselves! Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, The Republic, Book VII. The School of Life video: PLATO ON: The Allegory of the Cave “The Evangelical Roots of our Post-Truth Society”, by Molly Worthen "Fundamentalism Turns 100, A Landmark for the Religious Right, by William Trollinger, Jesus and John Wayne, by Kristin Du Mez.The Rise of the #Exvangelical, by Bradley Onishi for Religion and Politics The Deconstructionist Podcast, Episode 1 – “Deconstruction: What? And Why?” (Cited section begins approximately at 5:15)The Deconstructionist Podcast, Episode 136 – Adam Narloch “What is Deconstruction 2022?” (Cited sections begins approximately at 50:30 to about 1:15:00)Jacques Derrida explains deconstruction in “Letter to a Japanese Friend” Richard Marx – Should've Known Better (Official Video) “4 Causes of Deconstruction" by Joshua Ryan Butler for The Gospel CoalitionFriedrich Nietzsche, “The Horizon of the Infinite” from The Gay Science (Sorry for the sound. I'm still figuring this out.)Support the show

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Watch This Void

2022-03-02T19:00:00.000-05:00

For Ash Wednesday, I’m inviting you to watch this void for big news coming this on this side of Lent about a new Bleak Theology project. You’re sure to be disappointed – but in a good way, I promise.

I’ve also got a new logo, thanks to Matthew Baker of Entheos Designs. I think it encapsulates the ongoing state of affairs nicely, no?

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Now Is The End of Our Certainty

2022-03-02T03:01:02.000-05:00

Today is Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Carnival. The last festive day before the forty days of Lent. It’s hard to imagine letting the good times roll in our own communities as Putin’s tanks roll toward Kiev. They are already in Kharkiv. The Russians are committing war crimes, while Ukrainians fight for their country, for their very lives.

Pandemic, xenophobia, racism, insurrection, invasion, selfishness, cruelty.

“Where is God?” in the midst of this horror we cry. Yes. This is a good question. Not the very best question, but a very, very good question. Asking this question creates a vacuum that necessarily attracts and speeds toward us every answer, no matter how profound or insufferable. Because answers make us feel better. They reassure us. Even the answer “There is no God” is reassuring because it is definitive. One less thing to worry about.

We have had too much to worry about. As people. As parents. As political animals. As religious creatures. As breadwinners. It’s almost too much to write about, to think about. It’s understandable to want a bit of distraction from the news. Something away from social media and our phones. Will we feel guilty for it, for not paying proper attention, to participate by means of awareness, of knowledge of the horrors that go on only a few blocks away or over the horizon?

Worrying about God seems just one more thing. We can accept an answer or we could do something else. We can understand that the answers, themselves, are distractions. They give us something to hold in our hands, something just weighty enough that we can squeeze and rub our fingers around, like a smart phone.

If we accept Lent as significant to us, to our self-understanding, then we accept the day before as significant, as well. We accept the time before Lent as a time of certainty. Entering Lent, tomorrow, let us enter a new uncertainty in this uncertain time.

When Jesus enters the Wilderness for forty days, he is uncertain and we do not know what will happen to him until we are told the story. Arguably, nothing good happens to him. Where is God? God does not appear. And the story, found only in the Synoptic gospels, tells only the bare minimum.

Uncertainty isn’t necessarily doubt or agnosticism. Uncertainty is the tension of the indefinite, the intangibility of the absolute, the absence of the sure.

If we are able to allow, to permit the uncertain in our lives to become familiar, then we can approach the unknown in new ways. Where is God in relation to this pandemic, to Ukraine, to America, to our neighbor’s selfishness, to our own lives?

I’m not going to make you feel better with an answer. I’m going to say you should eat something. Have some King Cake, some pancakes, some Fastnacht, some paçzki, some saltkjöt og baunir. Eat something, spend time with loved ones however you can, someone who certainly knows you.

Because we don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. But we can certainly hope and work for Ukraine’s survival in a season of certain uncertainty.

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War as Ruined Time

2022-02-27T22:39:42.000-05:00

These words by Phil Snider, a pastor at Brentwood Christian Church in Springfield, MO, really spoke to me. I hope they will speak to you, too. He’s a favorite writer of mine and I hope you will read more of his stuff.

As if our world could take one more thing.

War is ruined time. It is forged for the sake of ego and empire, and it leaves those who put their faith in it forever hungry for more, with an insatiable thirst that is never satisfied, all while those who so desperately want to avoid war instead find themselves weeping for irretrievable pasts and lost futures, wondering how they will endure it all, or if they can endure it all.

War doesn’t fill the void, it exploits it, exposes it, enlarges it. Violence begets violence, and the world loses count. There is no glory in warfare, only loss, only sorrow. Loss of life for the victims, loss of soul for the perpetrators, and loss of promise and possibility beyond anything we will ever know. War is an incalculable evil that breeds irreparable loss. That nations try to find meaning and purpose in it is a sickness unto death.

In Dante’s Inferno, there’s a place in hell where despots and warmongers have to acknowledge the traumatic truth of who they are, to come face to face with how much suffering they caused. Only then can they change. But the problem with that is not just that it’s fiction. Even if it were real, by then it is still too late for this world, where the warmongers have already created too many hells on earth. And it does nothing for those in Ukraine, who just want to sleep and just want to live, who just want to be able to step outside and walk down their street. Which shouldn’t be asking too much.

Justice is always too late for this world, it seems, and I guess sometimes that just grieves me beyond words.

My heart and prayers are with the people of Ukraine.

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The Eternal Return

2022-02-02T14:42:29.000-05:00

(The Gay Science, s. 341, Friedrich Nietzsche)

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Plague-Waiting for an Eschaton – Plague Epistle XI

2022-01-21T15:00:00.000-05:00

At some point, they stopped waiting… or at least stopped waiting so expectantly. For some, maybe the first or second generation of followers, they stopped after a few months. For others, it would be much longer. Others held true to the promise, to the hope. Jesus hadn’t come back. But he said he would. And they waited.

Around the year 50, Paul wrote to the church in Thessaloniki, urging, “Hey, I know you don’t need to be told all this. But just in case… keep watch. Keep waiting and take care of each other.” Paul tells them to live their lives, to keep going. But don’t just sit around waiting. And then he ends his letter with a laundry list of last minute things to keep them going. It’s been around twenty years by now. Think of waiting that long for something so important to be resolved – not reunited or reattached, but resolved. Think of a story and a promise you heard. Maybe you read a famous letter or two. Yet, there’s nothing official and nothing in stone. Paul writes to the Thessalonians during the reign of Claudius. The emperor is not a fan of new religions or telling people about new gods. You’re waiting for something, something to not just break, but break open.

In twenty years, the Temple at Jerusalem will be broken apart and knocked down and it will feel like the end of the world. And Mark, like a lion, will soon proclaim how Jesus said it would happen and how the end of the world would come. Matthew and Luke will spread the the tale. Jerusalem fell in the second year of the Emperor Vespasian and life went on in the Empire. Somewhere, along the line, people had to rethink this parousia, this Second Coming, this eschaton, this End. This waiting wasn’t working the way they expected. Who remembers?

Who remembers Y2K? Do you tell your kids about it? That was an apocalypse that never was. Can they understand September 11th? That was twenty years ago. Does it still pack a punch? Are we telling the story correctly? The way we want to? We keep thinking about it, remembering the time before and rethinking the time since. Twenty years.

Time is weird. Things get laid atop of other things. Time smears and crumbles. Time cakes and dries out, gumming up our joints and the gears of our memories. It mummifies. It decays.

It was two years ago yesterday, January 20, when the first case of COVID-19 is confirmed in the United States. A man returns to Snohomish County, Washington from visiting family in Wuhan, China and develops a fever and cough. He is hospitalized and survives. On Friday, March 13, I pick up our son from first grade for the last time before going full remote schooling. New York City, entering lockdown, soon grinds to a crawl. For the first time, I hear mourning doves outside my apartment window. Sirens take the place of the snuffle of highway traffic. A midnight helicopter hums in the dark. It hovers for what seems like an hour. Was it that long ago? I can still hear the whup of the rotors. They won’t go away.

Trump breezily assures the country that COVID will be gone by Easter. His base will be back in church before they know it, he promises. “It’ll just disappear,” says the man whose one doctrine is the power of positive thinking. We feel trapped in our apartment in a city of eight million people. People moving away. White refrigerator trucks humming alongside hospitals. Sirens and statistics. They grow. The story remains in the eternal present. It is vivid and now. It doesn’t disappear.

Our eight year old son says that he does not really remember the Before Times. He was six, then. How much of first grade life do any of us recall? He dutifully wears a mask as if it were something as ordinary as a pair of socks. Remote schooling was a disaster. He sees his best friend in a park and they run around for hours. Instinctively, they keep a safe distance between themselves. They are dragons and free from the world they fly around the open field. We go home again. It will be weeks before he sees her again. He is happy to be back in school. This week, the school sent home test kits. We were relieved to receive them. Elementary school is a time of memories made. He hates the masks, but he wears them. Every morning, he remembers to put it on as we go out the door.

Two years ago, we had no comprehension of what was in store for us. No vocabulary or grammar. No vaccines. No variants. We waited. We waited for information. We waited for it to pass. We waited for safety. We waited for something better. And over time, we have come to understand that this virus is here to stay. There is no “return to normal” and there is no “normalizing”. We have had a collective experience of the transformation of the world. There is the Before Times. And there is the time after. This is the Now. Now, we wait and live, but for what?

The first followers of Jesus expected his return “soon”. That was part of the Good News, it seemed. Something to overcome this infernal Empire. In wild and unearthly images, Paul and John of Patmos vividly describe what that “soon” would look like. When you have nothing to go on, the imagination can go wild. But then the Eschaton began to drift further and further away. And people “normalized” it in their own particular ways, however they needed it. But others needed the Eschaton ever closer, ever imminent.

The Millennium approached and people got excited until it passed and life went on in Europe through the Medieval Age, Reformation, and Renaissance, spreading out to colonize and conquer. On October 22, 1844, the Millerites experienced the Great Disappointment, the failure of Jesus to return. Darby, Ryrie, and Scofield created a dispensationalist Rapture, the keys and codes revealed in their Bible commentaries. Tim La Haye and Jerry Jenkins fictionalized it all for a new generation in Left Behind. Still today, amongst the American evangelicals, perhaps a faithful remnant can force the return of Jesus, a kind of christofascist accelerationism. And the rest of us mark time in Anno Domini, the Year of the Lord, the Common Era.

This is all very labyrinthine, I understand that. What to say about time, expectation, and salvation from the Ruin of the World? We expect something for us, our loved ones, for our society. We have seen and experienced the strains upon self, community, state, and beyond. Death and its threat dwells among us in new, intimate ways we’ve considered in only dystopian fiction and century-old history. Resistance comes from unexpected places, families and communities torn asunder over a mask and a shot. We are exhausted and fatigued. An eschaton of many kinds has appeal, something to end and something to begin. But who we were, what we had, and how we lived before are no longer existent. Over 800,000 lives and counting in the United States alone are non-existent.

We pray and lament and seek meaning and understanding and peace. And we do all this in expectation, in expectation of resolution and relief. Something must give. It must, must it? That’s what we’re hoping for. How shall we understand God to act? How shall we understand ourselves to act in faith, hope, and love toward others? We act in time, because we are creatures of and in time. We must act in time, hoping to contain it as best we can.

Time often appears in boxes. A statue’s time capsule. A box of first-marriage mementos. A loved one’s coffin. The back of a closet. We put it there. We find it there. We know it’s there. We leave it there. We move on with our lives… or we try to or we wish to remain there at the side of this box, waiting for something more. Waiting for relief and comfort. Keep waiting and take care of each other.

For something, for someone to return, we are waiting. I’m so tired.

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The Whitening of Martin Luther King, Jr.

2022-01-17T15:30:18.000-05:00

Right before the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, a Harris Poll found that 75% of White respondents and about 50% of Black respondents disapproved of him. White people were turned off by his opposition to the Vietnam War and his support for labor reforms. Black people were dissatisfied that he had not done enough for the cause or was going the wrong direction. In the wake of his murder, Nixon would be elected and the Black Panthers would be on the rise.

White Americans prefer the MLK of August 28, 1963, who marched on Washington. But it is only the last part, the impromptu part, the part urged by Mahalia Jackson, when she shouts to him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” We only remember the sweeping end of the sermon. That famous soundbite found at the speech’s end is an aspirational bromide: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” And White conservatives say to themselves and Black America, “This is enough. I accept this dream. Haven’t I done enough? Aren’t you satisfied?”

We ignore earlier when King cries out,

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: “For Whites Only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

There is today a White Evangelical, conservative, nationalistic upsurge to erase even the question of “When will you be satisfied?” The bugbear and cultural panic of Critical Race Theory, a technical and once-obscure legal framework for understanding systemic racism in the justice system at the graduate school level, has been purposely misappropriated and misinterpreted to erase and whitewash the awful truths of American history. Anti-CRT propaganda seeks to whitewash American history and to whiten the legacies of Black Americans who fought for change. States are rewriting their school curricula to whiten and brighten their own identities even further. The governments seek to make their white populations more comfortable with themselves, to create entire schools that remain comfortable with the imaginary past of when America was “great” and had no such troubles.

Focusing solely in MLK’s Dream is to whiten him, to make him palpable to white audiences by focusing solely on something that can be easily and readily shared: a dream. A dream that remains safely in one’s mind and spirit. A dream that can be remembered and agreed upon, but never put into practice or reality. Dreams are so much more pleasant than the real-life nightmares of police brutality, economic inequity and inequality, and generational marginalization and exclusion.

White America wants to remain in that hot Washington August in 1963 when it was in most agreement with King, when King seems more like ourselves, more like where we think we want to be. White Christians don’t want to be in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, just a few months earlier in April. From a Birmingham jail, he writes,

I MUST make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Will the White Evangelical erase this essential, provocative letter from our necessary collective history in the name of saving the church and the children from the uncomfortable truths of White Christian apprehension and denial? Will the “White moderate” look distastefully upon Black Lives Matter and say that direct action and cries for justice against police brutality, against the squelching of voting rights, against the willful ignorance and denial of a nation’s own racist history and legacy goes too far?

King is the only Black member of the broader White Church and only so much as he shall be tolerated. Only his Dream is allowed inside, only the younger King and only so much. The segregation we see now in White churches is the erasure and ignorance of the Black Church. What has truly changed since King’s observation about Christianity in America?

Until White America can fully acknowledge and implement the admonitions, direct action, and full legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., White America will continue to whiten him in its own image so that it may remain comfortable with merely a holiday in January and an inspiring paragraph that comforts their own sense of character.

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Epiphany and Our Crisis of Authority

2022-01-06T16:10:00.000-05:00

Epiphany is a word we use akin to “revelation”: a sudden realization, an unexpected vision of the true and possible, that eureka moment of creativity and insight. “And then, I had an epiphany.” We “have” epiphanies. We possess them. We feel compelled to share them. Epiphanies abound.

Western Christians observe (if they do) January 6 as Epiphany, the day the Magi, those astrologers from the East, visit the infant Jesus. The second chapter of Matthew tells of the first appearance, the manifestation (ἡ ἐπιφάνεια) of the Jewish Messiah to the Gentiles. Three fahncy gifts (gold, frankincense, and myrrh) are given and so we traditionally imagine that three Magi made the trip. An angel dreamtells them to avoid King Herod on their way out. Herod, fearing for his power and wanting to snuff out the competition, orders the slaughter of all children under the age of two. Rachel wails for her children. She will not be consoled.

On Epiphany last year, then-President Trump, fearing for his power and wanting to snuff out the competition, incensed his devoted mob to go to the Capitol to prevent the certification of the electoral college votes. They obeyed his authority, waning and sharp. Proud Boy plans were put into motion. A gallows was raised. Pence and Pelosi hid and were hunted. Police officers were assaulted and injured. One died soon after. More died by their own hands. An insurrectionist was killed, a few others died. Our elected officials were protected and the votes were counted and approved. American democracy prevailed, but only just.

As I watched aghast the insurrection unfold on the Capitol steps, I saw Christian Nationalism rear its ugly and profane head. In the churning crowd were numerous Christian symbols and slogans: Protestant flags. Banners proclaiming “Trump is my President Jesus is my King”. Shofars blown. Later, we would see video of insurrectionist prayers loudly lifted up on the Senate floor. Their cause was righteous and true, commanded by their divinely appointed, anointed ruler. In contrast, in the Capitol, countless Congresspeople and staffers hid and silently prayed for their safety, only walls and locked doors separating them from those who would do them real physical harm.

Matthew’s story of the Epiphany is a story about authority. The Magi are Star-Readers. Their trade, interpreting cosmic time and truth. Magi work outside of government policy and religious edict, while even creating and enforcing it. Their authority is not grounded in earthly kings, but above in the dark heavens. The Magi bring gifts to Jesus as any ambassador would bring to a new ruler. They accept Jesus as a king, their visit auspicious (though that myrrh is suspect…). But beyond King of the Jews, Jesus will be given by the Church command of Time, Itself: A.D., Anno Domini, in the Year of our Lord. Time, an ultimate authority, is the realm of the Star-Readers, the Star-Readers who transgress in transit from the East, from the Land of Rosy-Fingered Dawn. Their word has, for better or worse, cache.

Herod the Great, installed as king of Judaea by Mark Antony and the Roman Senate, would not be usurped by this “king of the Jews” these foreigner seek. Jesus is an illegitimate threat to the power bestowed on him by Senatus Populusque Romanus. As a client king of Rome, he must demonstrate dominance by force. And thus, Matthew has him order the slaughter of infants. There is no record of this erasure outside this gospel, but it fulfills for Matthew the words of doleful Jeremiah. Epiphany has a dark side to it, even under the glimmering light of the Star of Wonder.

One needs not read the stars to see that our nation’s democracy is in crisis. Our epiphany is not a revelation, but a manifestation of the erosion of authority. This is the greater crisis. Critique of authority is valid, but critique in the absence of understanding is foolish and full of danger. The Big Lie sows disinformation within a public uninformed or preconditioned to accept propaganda as truth. But within American conservatism, under the guise of “freedom”, authority itself is increasingly balkanized to the point of solipsistic narcissism.

This narcissism goes beyond politics. It has become pervasive in science (vaccines and climate), society (race and gender), religion (salvation and providence), economics (wealth and infrastructure policy) and culture (nationalism and purity). It is an epistemological narcissism that prejudices the autonomy and authority of the individual’s self-understanding over the acceptance of the knowledge and expertise of professionals. It is the Dunning-Kruger Effect writ large. “Do your own research” and a banal edification by social media provide an aesthetic of authority and value, a self-enforcing reward pellet for having done any work whatsoever toward a perceived understanding toward truth. Yet, this kind of “truth-seeking” leads toward the single truth-telling that fascism proclaims for itself, from hallowed origin story to near-past and present to glorious horizon of eternal power.

A significance of Matthew’s Epiphany is that the Gospel cannot be controlled. Outsiders, the marginalized, the oppressed will find it. It is a different kind of authority. Yet, Christian Nationalists, in the name of their own freedom, seek to control State and Church, locating God’s Anointed, the Messiah in Donald Trump, who will Make America Great Again, restoring the mythological past to create an eschatological future so glorious and powerful, each of us “will become tired of winning”. All science and politics and culture shall submit to this power and virility. This is their gospel of authority and control, an authority seized by crisis.

On January 6, 2021, the insurrectionists, from Republican legislator to Proud Boy proclaimed their freedom to enforce their will upon the will of the general electorate of the United States of America. On January 6, 2021, this is the epiphany, the manifestation of Christofascism, Christian nationalists who “did their own research”, spreading the infectious lies of election fraud. People who knew better. People who felt threatened by the outsider, by change, by a new ruler. Christofascism can only abide democratic rule if it is in the pocket of its own ruler, a sycophantic Senate leaping at the whims of its Imperator.

A century ago, the nascent NSDAP was derided by the general German populace. They were called “nazis”, slang for bumpkins, simpletons. They were understood as brutes and idiots. And they rose to power through lies and crises and fear and force. They seized authority. And they seized the churches. And the rest is history. Epiphanies abound.

20 + C + M + B + 22

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We’re The Saints Who Don’t Want to Be Found

2022-01-01T18:36:55.000-05:00

The end’s not near
It’s here
Alleluia
Spread the cheer
And watch the millenarians
Throw a party for a thousand years

You won’t see the pious praying
They’ll be too busy flaying
All the martyrs with better ways
To stop the world decaying

If you call me I won’t be home
I’m hiding from the kingdom come
They can’t see everything on earth
With the satellites and the roving drones

This is why hell is underground
Like a reclaimed bad part of town
We don’t want to lose our souls
We’re the saints who don’t want to be found

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Twenty Years After September 11th, This Day of Lamentation

2021-09-11T12:30:00.000-04:00

I had just walked outdoors from my homiletics class at Yale Divinity School when I overheard a construction worker on his cell phone saying “What do you mean a plane hit the World Trade Center?” The Tuesday morning air was crisp and bright. The robin egg blue sky identical to that of eighty miles almost due west of New Haven. The sky with columns of blackening smoke and sirens wailing. I went to a nearby campus apartment building and turned on the television. Helpless, I watched the towers. I prayed the prayer of a helpless person, of a person unable to help. I solemnly turned the television off after the first tower fell, unable to watch endure anymore.

I thought, “Theology is going to change after today.” My theology student mind abstracted the horror of the moment. While planes hit the towers, people lost their lives, and our world began to turn upside down, I had spent ninety minutes in a preaching class learning how to convey the inexplicable. And what I conveyed to myself in some strange coping mechanism was the observation that everything had changed.

It was naive to think that terrorist attack would usher in a time of mourning and reflection and a desire to reconsider American Christianity’s relation with the world and how Christianity understands itself as empire. It was the abstraction of a second year theology student. It was what I wanted, what I hoped for in a moment of hopelessness. What happened, instead, in much of our country was the opposite.

I soon shuddered at the muscular nationalism that caught fire among evangelicals, within the heart and mind of President Bush. To describe this new war, he used the word “crusade”, the worst possible word, that he soon sought to recant. But the damage was done. It was good American Christian versus evil terrorist Muslim. The whole of Islam was demonized. A religion whose tenets few American Christians could explain suddenly became the object of revenge. Centuries of Islam summed up and embodied in Wahhabism. The actions of a few cursed the rest.

Blind rage bled out as hate crimes against Muslims, even to Sikhs and Copts, whoever seemed a stranger. I wanted “how did we get here?” and saw “how did they get here?” And the mourning and sorrow and fear poured out further and further, casting neighbor against neighbor. I had thought better of many of my fellow Americans. The actions of a few cursed the rest.

The majority of American popular evangelical theology is unsophisticated by design. It’s about personal salvation, not collective care. It bunts international issues into cosmic struggle. Two millennia of theological reflection made digestible for the Sunday sermon set, with an American flag beside the Christian one beside the pulpit. The Stranger is the enemy. The American Empire is a shining city on a hill. God is not on America’s side. America is on God’s side. Somehow, our foreign policy and more than century of geopolitical maneuvering in the Middle East and beyond did not matter, or was simply absent. So, we invaded Iraq. We invaded Afghanistan. We invaded our own communities with the cross wrapped in the Stars and Stripes.

In 2004, I received the quixotic opportunity to attend the Republican National Convention in New York City. The whole experience was surreal and I will forever be appreciative of what I saw. In our Trumpian Age, we forget that the GOP was all in for this War on Terror. It was a glorious, righteous action and President Bush and the military he commanded had countless prayers of support. This noble struggle against evil would be decisive and complete.

I watched Contemporary Christian Music legend Michael W. Smith sing in Madison Square Garden about the American flag. His lyrics do not reference God, but they do not have to. It’s Michael W. Smith singing a song about the American flag. The message is unmistakeable. As he walks off the stage, the crowd goes wild, a sea of American flags, shouting USA! USA! USA! Old Glory provided power and agency in a war against a nebulous foe: Terror, itself, and its nefarious evildoers, an entire major world religion. The crowd wanted blood with a cudgel and a song. Had theology in America changed or had a particular branch unexpectedly found itself a new way to cement its dominance?

I still feel a sort of helplessness about September 11th. I felt helpless in those hours and days immediately afterward, gathering in YDS’s Common Room and listening to people prepare to give blood that would not be needed, to help survivors who were never pulled from the rubble. I felt helpless when we journeyed to Lower Manhattan to see The Pile that November. It wasn’t a pilgrimage. I don’t know what it was. I want it to remain nameless, a void. Soon after, at the church where I served as an intern, I gave my very first sermon. The verse was from the Book of Job, the sermon was about the fear of God not speaking. There was so much silence. And in all such silence, I felt such helplessness.

For those of us who remember that day, we are forever in that day: that crisp autumn morning when two airliners and towers fell out of the sky. An airliner fought into a Pennsylvania field. An airliner setting the Pentagon’s side ablaze. When a great unkindness and unspeakable evil was wrought upon the most unsuspecting and least deserving. The day does not stop. It is with us, that eternal, infernal day.

The act, the practice of lamentation is a paradoxical one. It is helpless and it is help, itself. Mourning is a cry for help. Mourning is helpful. Mourning is help. It is a solitary act. It is a communal act. It is a timeless act. It is a timely act. When we have no other power, we can mourn. Mourning is our power. We mourn to God. We mourn the absence of God. We mourn our confusion and uncertainty. We mourn our loss of what we cannot convey. We wail and we are silent. We are deafening. Does God even hear us? We even mourn about that. Our mourning will never end.

We take pains to remember our pain. We assemble and create as a marker in the place where we have lost, where obliteration and disintegration has occurred, has been made upon us. We assign, we find, we attribute God’s and not-God’s presence and agency and lack thereof. Where was God on that bright morning? Theology is about presence and praxis, absence and action. We do this to say something that seems coherent in the face of the Absurd. And we memorialize, we create monuments to the dead and to the future to say to ourselves and our children who were not yet born on that fateful day,

“Here are the Dead. Do not forget them. We can barely live without them.

Hear us. Hear their names.”

And what of the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last twenty years? How shall we remember their most vulnerable, those caught in our raging conflict? The Americans who went for so many different reasons and returned home utterly transformed by what they experienced, perhaps to the point of death? What shall we say about America and God and what shall we hear? What do we do to and for those who helped us fight our wars as translators and guides, those who were simply living their lives when they heard the thudding chop of rotors approach, those who prayed for relief from oppressive totalitarianism? What does our belief and action require of us toward them? For the Christian, it requires more than a thought and a prayer for their own son or daughter.

In this midst of this mourning on this singular, unending day, I seem to always return to Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” from their Insomniac release. For me, it’s my hymn, for lack of a better word. The lyrics tell of an eschatological vision of reunion among black-eyed angels, an impossible moon, all possible origins and futures, and fantastical modes of transportation. And in the end, “there was nothing to fear, nothing to doubt.” The vision is repeated to the listener. Listen. No, listen again.

The video is one of absolute catastrophic collapse and a single diver seeking to finding their place of simple comfort at home. At the end, there is, like in the song, a kind of ascent. The song has nothing to do with September 11th. But in it, I listen for the opposite of that wretched, catastrophic day of fear and doubt.

My theology did change that September 11, twenty years ago, today. Though, I didn’t realize it at the time. I think my theology deepened into the possibility of disaster. That terrible, inexplicable things do occur and that my theological terrain and territory is there, not directly in the trauma, but in the lamentation thereafter. It stirred within me the non-foundational foundation of lamentation on a national scale and a lamentation for the stranger, the outsider with whom I am connected even in conflict. Within lamentation is the possibility of comfort and the manifestation of divine compassion through human action. Let us set this day aside not for patriotism, but for humanity and the hope of solace and comfort and relief.

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Re-Membering in the Time of Trial

2021-04-02T02:03:08.000-04:00

Sermon for Maundy Thursday, St. Lydia’s Dinner Church, Brooklyn, NY.

Luke 22.1-62 (viz, 39-46)

For more than a year, we have wept bitterly. For more than a year, we have witnessed this pandemic overturn our world in ways previously unimaginable to us. And only now, with vaccine distribution, do we begin to see relief, can we begin to unclench. So much has been taken from us. This plague that has ravaged our world, our communities, our families, our lives. It is overwhelming. It is not over.

When New York City first shut down, we did not have much time to prepare to let go. Out of self-preservation, we scrambled for what we could not knowing how it would affect us. In this process of our isolation, we have become dis-membered. We have lost so much. Lives lost. Jobs lost. Safety lost. Futures lost. We are unable to gather in person.

What we have lost is not what can be found. What we have lost can never be recovered. What we have lost can only be remembered. And it is in the act and ritual of remembering, re-membering that together we create something new. We create new understandings about what has happened to us. We create new community. We create new stories.

Tonight, we read Luke’s long account of the final night of Jesus before his execution. At the Passover meal, Jesus gives us the foundational way of how we remember him. For us Lydians, this remembrance is a foundation of our dinner church. This night of Maundy Thursday is part of our origin story. Jesus gives his disciples the cup. He gives them the bread. “Do this in remembrance of me.” In telling us to remember him, Jesus lets go. He gives us the elements and the ritual by which we can hold onto him by holding on to each other. This is what brings us together and sustains us. We are not letting go.

The Passover dinner complete, Jesus and the disciples go out to the Mount of Olives. Upon arrival, Jesus tells them to pray that they “may not come into the time of trial.” The Greek word for “time of trial” is used in Luke’s Lord’s Prayer: “Save us from the time of trial”. It’s not just “temptation”. It’s the period within which each of us must hold on, the period within which we are tested during adversity. Luke is warning us: in the middle of it, don’t let go. Jesus goes off to pray. He tells God he wants to let go of the cup from which he’s been given to drink. Jesus gives us the cup and asks that his own be removed. It’s tempting… but, no. In his time of trial, in the middle of it, Jesus does not let go. “Not my will, but yours be done.”

The Gospel of Luke tells us next that an angel appeared and that Jesus’ sweat became like great drops of blood. Spoiler: in our earliest copies of Luke, who cribbed from the Gospel of Mark, there is no angel. No divine strength is given. This Deus ex machina is added later, reassuring the reader that God is with Jesus, that God is with us. The massive sweating is an added touch, too. Someone long ago chose to ensure us that our bond between Heaven and Earth remains intact, complete with obedient Jesus as the middle.

We are to be reassured in this revised text that we are not alone in our suffering. That we can let go and that God is there. We are vividly shown divine comfort and aid in time of true agony and anxiety to give us strength – even when our bodies seem to be on the verge of biological failure. But this comes afterward in the later reading, when we retell the story, if we can. Each retelling is new.

The original story is sometimes more troubling than we care to remember. Jesus is as human as ever. God is silent. Or perhaps there is divine silence. And in that silence, Jesus receives his answer. He is alone with the disciples, who we hope will not fail him. Except that everyone fails him. Even Peter. Especially Peter.

When Jesus gets up, he goes and discovers that his disciples have cried themselves to sleep. They are exhausted. And as he is lecturing them again, warning them to pray about the coming time of trial, he is interrupted by a crowd led by Judas. The time of trial is now. They do not have time to prepare to let go. Everything is now set in motion. Everything will happen so fast. Jesus will be dead before we know it. His disciples afraid and scattered.

There is a strange mechanic to separation. When we lose something, it is taken from us, we lose our agency. Letting go is our deliberate act toward loss, toward absence, toward end. But when we let go, we retain our power, which makes it all the more difficult. We do it. It is our will. Letting go can be liberating and devastating in the same act. Loss is a paradox.

When Jesus prays that he will not fight God’s will, he lets go. He doesn’t get an answer to anything. Letting go, everything intensifies. Luke’s story gets louder, more vibrant. Everything that has led up to this point at the Mount of Olives is now sharper. It is sharper in part because everything about it is coming to a singular moment and action: the crucifixion. It is in the crucifixion that everything is let go. Everything is lost. Jesus lets go.

When Jesus establishes the Last Supper, he is letting go of his disciples. He is preparing them for their loss. He is instituting his memory. When we remember Jesus and we break bread and eat bread and drink from the cup, we remember that we, too, are letting go. We are letting go of a particular orientation, a particular understanding toward the world. In eating a sacred meal together, in remembering the Passion of Jesus, we are not alone. We do this together. We act for each other in the name of Jesus. This is the love of God.

And yet in the same night when the disciples are commanded to remember Jesus, they abandon him. They let him go – Peter, especially. He goes even further, denying three times that he ever knew him. We don’t dwell on that part of the story, how the disciples, maybe with the taste of dinner still in their mouth, let go of Jesus so fast. We have layered the story with a better outcome. The original is often worse than we can bare to remember. This cannot all end with the crucifixion. We just cannot bear it. But on that night before the execution, this is all there is.

At the Mount of Olives, Jesus commands the disciples twice to pray that they do not enter the time of trial, but it is too late. They are already in it. Here in our plague-ridden world, we are already in it. It snuck up on us. We fall asleep exhausted, in grief. There are countless ways we endure our time of trial. Fortunately, St. Lydia’s is one way we can endure it, to re-member ourselves with each other, God, and the World, and hopefully remember both the good and the horrible, letting go as needed and as desired.

Letting go is to release one’s self from something tangible, something that provides an anchor. In letting go of someone or something, the meaning of that relationship intensifies. Becoming absent, what we let loose becomes more present. It feels more present, sharper, more vibrant. In our loss, it becomes here and now. The Eucharist is about remembering the absent and discovering – making the absent present. It is an irresolvable paradox. A mystery.

Tomorrow, we enter the Triduum, the darkest and brightest moments of the Christian calendar. Let us not forget what we have been given. Let us not forget what we have let go of. Let us not forget each other in our time of trial. We are already in it. Let us remember. Let us let go and move forward. Amen.

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The Eternal Return

2021-02-02T13:28:25.000-05:00

(The Gay Science, s. 341, Friedrich Nietzsche)

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This Evil Insurrection. This Infernal Godhead.

2021-01-10T17:27:06.000-05:00

This horrific insurrection before our eyes is of the dumbest, most ignorant parts of America. It refuses to accept juridicial verdicts about the veracity of their claims, even the review by SCOTUS with three Trump appointees. It refuses to accept the legislative authority of the Electoral College and the executive authority of the Vice President. This insurrection is thoroughly unconstitutional.

It proclaims law and order, but only as far as law and order expresses itself through direct legislation for their own benefit, through executive might channeled into punitive police force, and through indirect validation via supportive judicial ruling. Such tripartite proclamation is of pure self-interest and dismissive of impartial justice. Impartiality is understood as weakness. Fealty is understood as true strength.

It has no intellectual foundation except for the conspiratorial kaleidoscope through which its putrid world is made true, pure, and good. White supremacy, misogyny, and Christian nationalism are the three persons of its Unholy Trinity. Eternally this infernal godhead devours itself as it crushes the vulnerable, poor, and oppressed. Adherence to Trump’s words and reactive action is conservatism. All else is their understanding of that perennial bugbear Communism™, the globalist diffusion of property and individual identity.

It is pure passion, the kind that is lustful suffering. It is the suffering of grievance. Such passion cannot suffer the architecture and slow machination of law and order. It requires immediate implementation of force of will. It takes on and embodies its law and order in extra-judicial execution. Their self-deception is that they do not commit murder, but perform bloodletting for their nation born again.

These insurrectionists are brutish and brutal. Their seditious America is a rusted knife they plunge into their own abdomen to excise the disobedient organs. These insurrectionists are true totalitarian threats to the body politic that is our democratic republic. They have one but savior, that God-Man of Grift. These fascists feast upon his lies and remain forever starving for more. Blood will not quench their thirst. Truth will not blind them from their hunt.

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Our Democracy’s Moment of Krisis

2021-01-08T14:15:00.000-05:00

And upon that cold, grey day of Epiphany, hung before the Capitol I saw among the seething mob of welcomed insurgents a giant flag proclaiming JESUS 2020. I saw erected before the Capitol dome a cross and a gallows. I saw people huddled fearful for their lives as fascists shattered windows and through marble halls hunted with flex cuffs in hand for elected officials. This was no Johannine Apocalypse, but the very Acts of the Apostates in the civic temple of our own Congress.

The ancient Greek word krisis can mean decision or judgment. This very moment in the United States is our time of crisis and our time of krisis. As individuals, we can only do so much. We must act together against the Acts of the Apostates. We have put our hope in our democratically-elected leaders that they will do the right thing – even to serve to correct when our other elected leaders shall not. We must speak truth to the conservative power of fascist lies and undemocratic force.

Christian nationalists have played an integral part not only in this coup, but in the long formation of this rancid ideology. So many Americans have been fattened with lies from the pulpit and cultural echo chambers. It is all they know. It is all they want to believe. Against their enemies, they seek to usher in the rotted realm of Christendom, their kingdom come, its will be done.

In truth, however, the Christian has no nation. This is a troubling reality for those who would hear and accept the Gospel, because it requires relinquishing a particular kind of essential power. It is that primal, self-assuring power that only territory and history provide for. Yet, the crucified god is the geopolitical failure in the quest for earthly power. The State wins. The State always already wins until The End, whatever and whenever that is. The Christian exists in a perpetual state of anxiety living in the World, yet not of it, in the hope of something else that they can never see or touch. This is the geopolitical agony of the Christian: to have no home, yet to hopefully possess the luxury of the right to participate in the democratic freedom of self-determination in relation to the State.

The Christian who cannot bear being without a nation, the Christian who suffers such an anxiety about their relationship with the World, risks falling for the fascist security of the totalitarian State. The Christian nationalist, the Christian fascist requires not only the safety of worldly power, but the lies that they are the rightful heirs and protectors of that worldly power against, ironically, the world. They believe the nation in which they live has been stolen from them and it is their God-mandated duty to take it back by every force available and imaginable. And that force shall be used against those who differ in mind and body until they are no more or, indeed, fascists, themselves.

Yet, how can I call these people “Christian”? Because Christian nationalists have been doing terrible, godless things for the selfish purposes of the State for literally centuries. These people are bad Christians and they should be called as such. They seek not the Kingdom of God, but earthly Christendom. “Christendom,” Kierkegaard wrote, “has done away with Christianity.” Christendom is the realm where its citizens cannot dare to live with the internal uncertainty that comes with the individual’s anxiety about themselves, the world, and God.

The Christian who curdles into a nationalist, who becomes fascist sins against themself, their neighbor, and their God. The Christian nationalist becomes the nihilist. Their sin is Kierkegaard’s sickness unto death. They do not die, but they are always dying. The name of their sin is despair. And in their dying they are bent to take all others with them toward the grave. Despair is the ultimate conservatism, because it is the ultimate stasis. The power and authority of despair is the refusal of freedom and possibility. This is Christendom and is yet another plague we must suffer.

Conservatism, by its nature, takes no risks. Everything is and must be certain because power is and must be so real. Power must even feel real. Conservatism is ultimately about retaining power. The goal of conservatism is to acquire more power to protect the power it already has. Christian nationalists understand themselves all too well as conservative. Christian nationalism only understands a single, absolute ruler and full obedience to him (sic) to establish and conserve its own power over and against all who are outsiders, who are different.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” wrote Kierkegaard. And freedom requires risk, which is why it is always so fragile. The power and authority of freedom requires the lasting and involved action to take care of each other to preserve it, not to selfishly seize its power, thus killing it. The power of democracy cannot exist without risk and democracy understands that. Democracy understands its greatest threat is when the force of fascism seeks its power for itself and thus seeks to kill it.

Remove the President by Congress or the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Now.

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“The End’s Not Near”

2021-01-01T05:01:32.000-05:00

The end’s not near
It’s here
Alleluia
Spread the cheer
And watch the millenarians
Throw a party for a thousand years

You won’t see the pious praying
They’ll be too busy flaying
All the martyrs with better ways
To stop the world decaying

If you call me I won’t be home
I’m hiding from the kingdom come
They can’t see everything on earth
With the satellites and the roving drones

This is why hell is underground
Like a reclaimed bad part of town
We don’t want to lose our souls
We’re the saints who don’t want to be found

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The Days of Our Dead – Plague Epistle XI

2020-10-31T15:05:01.000-04:00

Our catharsis of Halloween is thin this year. Our distraction of making things scary to control and laugh about what scares us seems to be cold comfort. We envelope ourselves in costume, transforming ourselves into someone, something else to embody… what? Halloween is an annual ritual about safety.

We ward off fear and suffering by donning the images of fear of suffering. We make fear and suffering manageable. We make it our own. Our costumes are our mirrors. We laugh cheerfully at ourselves and each other. We gather in community and give each other candy and compliment our creativity. We wear masks.

In our eager performance to embody the dead, we have become ignorant of the dead. Our costumes are parodies of unspecific, mass-produced undead creatures, their human features erased by violence, decay, and time. The dead do not have distinct identities, unless they are characters in our popular culture. We become anonymous. We do not dress up as our dead loved ones. We do not dress up as who we have lost. To do so would be understood as distasteful. Don’t make it so real. Halloween is a time for fun.

On Halloween last year in my brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood, Christ Church Cobble Hill Episcopal Church made a little shrine in their churchyard for trick-or-treaters to come and light a candle for the dead. Many people came. Many people shed tears. They wrote down the names of those they had lost, of those they had remembered. They thanked the priest for creating this space for them, for mourning, for remembering. For a small amount of time in a small amount of space, Halloween returned to what this day, this night is about: our dead.

Over time, we have willfully forgotten, we have successfully detached ourselves from the more sober, somber roots of Halloween: Samhain is treated as an esoteric novelty. All Saints’ Day is a spot on a liturgical calendar – if you even know what that is. Día de Muertos is in that Pixar film, Coco. We’ve become ignorant. We avoid the unfamiliar. Our mortality has become distant to us until death is at our door, knocking in its all too familiar, all too human way.

Blame capitalism. Blame evangelicalism. Blame secularism. Blame whomever you’d like. But death is here and death is coming. It always has. We’ve tried to explain it since telling each other creation stories and our answers are as insufficient as essential are our questions. And we are better served acknowledging our shared inevitability and allowing ourselves and each other mourn.

Now, we are living in the Days of the Dead. There is no foreseeable end. There is no eschaton, no End Time™, because we live in an eternal present. We live in the first year of the plague, with thousands dead and dying. We see the faces and we hear the names of our Black neighbors being killed. We see evil and hate of white supremacy arising from our government and our fellow American. Death, illness, suffering, and evil surround us. There is nowhere to hide. Halloween cannot hide us. These horrors have no mask.

Christianity points to eternal life, which is a hopeful thing. But in the clutches of respiratory failure and gunshot wounds and chokeholds, eternal life isn’t usually the main concern to a loved one or to a physician or nurse. It’s the loss of life, and sorrow, and justice – or lack thereof. And if we don’t say their names, if we don’t protect the vulnerable, if we don’t stand up against unkindness and evil, then what is the Gospel?

The narcissistic conceit of white evangelicalism is the selfishness of salvation and the “free will” that provides it and justifies all subsequent action. There can be no communal day of remembrance for all in evangelicalism. It is too selfish for that. There can be no All Saints Day, because white evangelicalism hoards sainthood for itself. This is the horror of this time, the selfishness and turning inward that is real sin.

On this weekend, during this season of autumn when all things fall and decay before the stillness of winter returns, we must gather together alone for all health in our distanced ways to remember, to mourn, to lament, and to console. As human beings, as mortals, as people who wonder or doubt if God is real or faithful or incarnate or possible or impossible, we can gather together – somehow – to remember our dead. We can remember that the dead are never dead, that the dead are never gone. That the dead haunt us and visit us and form us. They appear when we least expect it and they are gone when we need them most.

Alone, we gather. We gather like fallen leaves our memories and we share them – if only to ourselves. We are falling. The plague races through the world afresh. We cannot be with our dying like before. But our dead will always be with us. We hope our God will be with us, with our loved ones. This is the terror and reassurance of All Hallow’s Eve, when the dead rattle our certainties and expectations. This is the terror and reassurance of All Saints Day, when the dead rattle our certainties and expectations. We tremble and mourn. This is what it means to encounter the holy, the unknowable known.

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“This” and The Trauma of Easter – Plague Epistle X

2020-04-12T13:00:00.000-04:00

When we incorporate this virus into our daily rhythms and our children and grandchildren learn this time of human history, how do we explain it? Shall we accept the antiseptic term “COVID-19” or shall we call this something beyond that, something akin to The Black Plague? What shall we name it? How shall we tell it? How do we talk about all of this “afterward”? How shall we understand all of this? What even is “This”?

The question, the problem of “This” is the problem of giving name and memory and narrative to something so disruptive and global that it shakes our very understanding of the world and our place and role within it. “This” is the feeble attempt to unify “these” events and actions and people. There is no distant “that” or “those”. What is happening to us is all too intimate for such othering, no matter our prejudices.

Easter is for when we read and share the story’s end of the traumatic event of Jesus’ execution. In the midst of this plague, we have lived and died through Lent, we have shouted through the bad faith of Palm Sunday, we have betrayed our own on Maundy Thursday, we have abandoned our friend and neighbor on Good Friday, and we have sat still alone in our homes on Holy Saturday. Now, after all that we have gone through and lost and learned, there is again the story of a great, cataclysmic upheaval.

In Matthew’s gospel, with a great earthquake an angel rolls away the stone as the women approach the tomb. The Roman guards faint. The angel tells the women to not fear, that Jesus has been raised, to see where Jesus had been laid, and to tell the disciples he will meet them in Galilee. In fear and joy, the women run to tell the disciples and suddenly they meet Jesus, who repeats the commands of the angel. And scene. The gospel ends.

But this is one canonical Easter story of four. This is not the resurrection of Mark’s earliest manuscripts, where the women see a single angel and leave afraid, telling no one – or later Mark, where Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, gives the disciples new authority and ascends. This is not Luke’s two angels, the Road to Emmaus, and the ascension. This is not John’s lengthy resurrection and tidy resolution between Jesus and his disciples. Each gospel resolves the trauma in a unique way. And we hold these irresolvable stories of Easter along with our own.

Easter is an answer that can never be explained fully and can never be without tension. We retell the story because we cannot resolve the trauma of it. It is and remains overwhelming, something unbelievable, and yet… We cannot ever forget the radicality of Easter and its disruption of our senses and of our selves. Objectively, it can never be fully conveyed. Objectively, it can never be fully understood. Easter, like all trauma, can only ultimately approached subjectively.

Subjectively, we remember and we re-member and we memorialize what we have experienced. We create to make sense of what we have experienced, what we have heard and learned. We create the Via Dolorosa. We create the Holy Sepulchre. We create the Stations of the Cross. We create gospels. We create a liturgical calendar. We create because we have lost and we seek to fill the void however we can with personal and communal meanings.

How now do we make a monument for our plague’s vast reach and extent? Where do we build our monuments? At the hospitals? At the graves? In the neighborhoods through which it tore most fiercely? Online? Everywhere and nowhere. How do we list the countless names of the dead? Everyone and no one. A plague cannot be encapsulated. A single stone cannot be fixed in place. This is not Downtown Manhattan with its two watery chasms and thousands of chiseled names. This is something different.

There are four canonical gospel accounts of what happened to Jesus and those who knew him. They remain in conflict and tension. There is no complete harmony. To force harmony is to deny the irresolution and our inability to contain and fully explain the story, the Gospel. We will always be unsatisfied and that is the point. And we must find ways to move forward. Some ways are gracious. Others, less so.

Deductive and hegemonic mansplaining distastefully dehumanizes the rawness of what has occurred, what continues to occur, and shall be passed down. Passion means “suffering”. Both the Passion and the Resurrection is traumatic. And trauma is a subjective, deeply intimate encounter as is its self-reflection.

We cannot allow the powerful and the selfish to name This, to tell This, to make This real. We remain always at risk of gaslighting, of forgetting, of selectively remembering, of ignoring what is happening, what happened, of how it happened. There can never be one “official” overarching, grand narrative of This. This is not theirs. This is all of ours and This must remain so.

Our monuments, our documents, our stories are necessary and complex ways of speaking to ourselves and each other through time and place. We must tell these stories for our own survival and our identities, so that the disinformation and propaganda of capitalism and nationalism and fascism do not make This of and for their own. If we are to have any Good News, either that of the Gospel or for our survival through this plague, we must make these stories and memories our own, against those who would use their power to shape This and this warming world in their own image.

Who ever speaks of Easter during the 1918 Pandemic? Who remembers? Where are those memorials and monuments and sermons about that century-old plague that ravaged the world? What was Easter in 1918, during the War To End All Wars, during The Great War? What shall we say about This Easter and every Easter after until we, ourselves, are forgotten and become a part of history? How shall we re-member when we were alone together? How shall those after us remember us and This?

Kopf/Kristus, by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

“Did not Christ appear to you.”

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Encountering Death on Good Friday – Plague Epistle IX

2020-04-10T18:25:00.000-04:00

And with that, Jesus dies. Death surrounds us like we have never experienced and Good Friday strikes right to the heart. The single event of the Crucifixion overturned everything in the disciples’ lives. The communal event of this plague has overturned everything in our lives. Death does not become. It always is. Today of all days is the Day of Death. Let it be what it is.

We read stories of the sick dying alone, their loved ones unable to be with them during their last moments. Bodies have overwhelmed the morgues here in New York City. The dead are carefully wrapped in white shrouds and laid in refrigerated trucks. Funerals cannot be held. The process of grieving is upturned when the soil cannot be.

Each Good Friday, I write about abandonment and isolation. It’s my thing. It is not that I write despairingly, but that I always stare despair at its faceless face. I confront it and I am in relation to it. So far, I have had the luxury of distance reading the story of Good Friday. This year, the sorrow is real and overwhelming. Writing is real labor. It requires a kind of imagination, observation, perception, and conveyance that has taken on a new weight and effort. That bright darkness of death is louder, heavier.

We read the gospels, the psalms, the epistles and we read them for comfort and hope. And we take for granted their writing and transmission. As readers, we receive these texts and what’s more, we use them, we make them our own in our hearts and minds. These texts we keep returning to are relational.

Our encounter with death is just that: relational. We forget that we are in relation to death. And Good Friday for the Christian is the apex of that relation to and with death – except for their ultimate own. Because the death of Jesus never ends. We relate to it each and every year. There is repetition, but it is never quite the same. It is definitely not the same this year.

It’s not just a matter of confronting death. We confront the inevitability of our own death, the death of our loved ones, the death of a country, an idea, our ways of life. Death is oppositional, dialectical to life, yes. But when we confront Jesus on the Cross or Jesus confronts us, we encounter and experience an uncomfortable relationship with us and death – even the possibility of the suffering and death of God.

In abstraction and theory, the stakes are low. In earlier years, it is perhaps easier to pass through Good Friday to Easter. We gloss the pain and trauma and horror of death to pursue the promise of resurrection. We can posit the God-Man suffering, the disciples fleeing, the Romans gloating. This year, that is harder. Because the death of people is magnified. People are dying this very moment.

The laziness of Good Friday is to flip forward past that darkest Saturday to Easter Sunday. Some may call this laziness “expectation”. In earlier years we have been reassured. But if we ignore or lessen the suffering of the dying and the attending medical personnel and the loved ones separated for everyone’s basic survival, then we drain Good Friday of its importance.

Death is with us. And lingering death, at that. Death on a ventilator – or the lack of one. Do not let this day end easily. Hold tight, because it is holding tight to us. Do not despair. Today is the day we look death in its eyeless eye. And together we work to move the bodies to a place of rest and silence.

Descent from the Cross, Max Beckmann, 1917

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Enjoy the Silence – Plague Epistle VIII

2020-04-10T02:05:23.000-04:00

I’m so exhausted from quarantine parenting that I can’t gather my thoughts for Maundy Thursday, the seventy-fifth anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s Martyrdom, Good Friday, or the article I got approval to write on remote worship. I’m just tired. Everything in me is tired.

I have never really focused on contemplative silence. I don’t consider myself a contemplative, but the silence that accompanies grief and exhaustion is with me, now. I welcome it. I’ve been listening to old episodes of the excellent podcast Encountering Silence and have been reflecting how I fit among them. My city has gone silent out of necessity. As I lay in bed this morning being silent, I heard a mourning dove outside my window. It was the first time in my thirteen years in Brooklyn that I had heard one like that.

This Holy Week is very tiring. It is the most isolated one I have ever had. There is so much work to do, so much to write about. And yet, it has given me the opportunity to realize how much I appreciate and need the silence that comes with grief and exhaustion. The silence of a stripped altar of a locked church. The silence that comes with the gallows of a martyred saint. The silence that comes with a distant community in one’s own city. The silence that comes with washed feet. The silence that comes with a heavy heart, mind, and soul. The silence that is cut by yet another ambulance racing along the BQE. This silence is an apophatic one. It is the silence of the wilderness. And it is mine.

Kinda had to end it on this.

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Betray All Palm Sunday – Plague Epistle VII

2020-04-05T18:44:03.000-04:00

So begins Holy Week in April, the cruelest month, in the midst of our creeping, wheezing plague. And today, Palm Sunday, is when we begin our collective betrayal of the Son of Man. Who else shall be betrayed?

Today, we read in Matthew’s gospel the Liturgy of the Palms of how Jesus fulfills Jewish prophecy by telling his disciples to commit grand theft colt. As Jesus enters upon the donkey’s colt, people get excited and throw down cloaks and palm fronds. The rest of Jerusalem freaks out about this. It’s upsetting, indeed.

I’ve always been more upset about how quickly these zealots turn on Jesus within only a few days, a little earlier than for COVID-19 symptoms to show. The crowd will want him crucified. All supporters of Jesus have betrayed him or socially distanced themselves. It’s not that I’m mad at them. It’s that, to quote Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” We always betray Jesus. In some way, every Palm Sunday and every other day. We abandon him and what he demands of us.

Jesus is the plague-ridden, he is the stranger. Jesus is the poor, the hungry, the lonely, the incarcerated. This is the collective indictment upon us. Palm Sunday embarrasses me because it shines the harsh light upon us breaking the Two Greatest Commandments. The story of Palm Sunday demonstrates that we, to put it mildly, are not always our best selves. We are all too human in need of forgiveness, divine or otherwise.

Some betrayals are more immediately dangerous and treacherous than others. Since weeks ago, each and every church building should be closed. If they are not, those congregations, those pastors, those pew-fillers betray us and each other. The politicians who enable this betrayal betray us. They literally put countless lives at risk and lengthen the time of this plague upon our houses. We have seen it time and again over the last thirty days. Even Fort Worth, Texas had to write new guidelines specifically preventing church services because evangelicals are spreading the contagion by worshiping together. This is not collective and individual foolishness. This is the narcissistic subversion of our collective goals to flatten the curve, to literally save lives. Such conduct is selfish and deadly.

Our other reading from Matthew is the Last Supper, where Jesus is betrayed more succinctly by one of his own, within his own community. “Surely not I, Rabbi?” says Judas. Oh, surely not. How dangerous would that be for everyone, the people who trust you?

Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell is reserved for traitors: Judas Iscariot, Brutus, Satan. Living in New York City, I have long said that high-end real estate developers deserve that lowest circle: they betray and destroy local communities by destroying buildings to build for the highest bidder. They are far and few in between, but the damage they wreak is immense, seismic, and long-lasting. That’s the thing about living detached from one’s community: we affect each other in more ways, invisible ways than we can ever know. Flagrantly going to church during a pandemic and risking bringing home the virus to one’s loved ones and those most vulnerable is its own kind of treachery.

Ultimately, we are called to forgive. Jesus taught that even up to when he was nailed on a cross and left to die. That is one of the hardest things for me: to forgive those who have acted and continue to act atrociously and selfishly before and during this plague that continues to burn like wildfire. I really don’t know if I can or if I will. It is my personal failing.

And we must never forget. Never. Because each year, we remember and retell the story of a man riding on a colt, the deafening sound of “Hosannah! Hosannah!” resounding off the buildings. If we forget, then those responsible will never be held to account. And it’s only a matter of time until it happens all over again and we betray ourselves.

Palm Trees on Fire

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My Brooklyn Friday – Plague Epistle VI

2020-04-04T14:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the first day this plague overran my mental defenses. I sat in my chair for long spells staring. Time languished and curdled with disuse. I felt like I was waiting for something that would not leave. I heard church bells as I looked for my car, only to find that it had been towed because of road repair while this city of over 8 million has been sheltering in place. I tricked our son into doing a handful of subtraction questions, and that was school for the day. A friend texted me with the kind word that I desperately needed, but I was too distracted by the world to write back. I kept thinking of “A Death in Venice” and how everything just lingers, saturated by plague and stillness. Ambulance sirens are like new cracks in pane glass. I thought of the paradox of helping people most by staying home away. I looked at my art supplies stacked above a book of theology and below a book on understanding grief. I spent much of the day reading “A Visit From the Goon Squad”. I am not sleeping well. America does not understand how bad it will be soon in their communities and reading about it prevents nothing. When we all left the apartment for the first time in nine days, I wore a face mask with a print of paisleys. My wife has a mask with a print of unlit matchsticks all in ordered rows. I warned our six-year-old son not to remove or touch his mask, not even to show his nose. We ordered pizza and zeppole for dinner. Today, it may rain.

Our empty sidewalks and intersection.

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Writing through Plague – Plague Epistle V

2020-03-30T14:00:00.000-04:00

If there is one thing to do to pass one’s time isolated during plague, it’s writing. Writing is merely the act of the controlled trembling of one’s hands. No one can tell your if hands are shaking or not. You have to keep moving in place. The anxiety and fear of becoming infected, of the social state of one’s surroundings, of the present and future. If you keep writing, then it’s something to do, a way to keep busy. It’s a kind of controlled pacing back and forth that hides bad handwriting or a need for spellchecking. And there’s the unexpected amount of time available.

What is it about plague that compels us to write about it? Albert Camus’ The Plague, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mendel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Homer’s Iliad, Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, The Book of Exodus, Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year. So much literature about such testing times, when the character of individuals and society is laid bare.

There is something unique and concretizing about an invisible, inhuman threat that forces us to consider our humanity and society in explicit ways. It’s not just because our mortality is more noticeable. It’s that our choices to be human and act humanely are all the more required. Who are we? How shall we act? How do we understand this?

Passover is coming and we will read the Ten Plagues in Exodus with fresh eyes. I can’t remember any other plagues in the Hebrew Bible, though I’m sure there are. It’s easier to point to the Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations (all poems, by the way) for not feeling alone in times of suffering. I don’t think even The Book of Revelation has an actual plague. How do we translate for now what was written then? We still adjust our eyes to our new, freshly disinfected lenses.

Now, there’s a flurry of online documentation and reflection, from Coronavirus Diary at The American Conservative to The Point‘s Quarantine Journal to countless personal Twitter and Facebook dispatches. We have to write about it. I have to write about it. We have to get it out of us. It’s a balm and relief to write.

My suffering city shudders and coughs and I do not risk going outside. I’ve not left the house in days. Our nation’s president has abandoned New York City out of petulant spite. I feel helpless, yet the most active thing I can do is stay at home, to act like I am infected to prevent others from getting infected. I worry and grieve for the poor, the first-responders, the medical professionals who are at highest risk for contagion.

The humanities have been pilloried and starved these last few decades and in the name of partisan economics and ideology have been stripped of their status and support. But in this time of plague it is the arts and humanities that must convey and translate the unspeakable horror we are experiencing. This includes good, honest, solid religious writing.

We cannot endure any longer evangelical magical thinking or pastoral bromides or the insipid bibliomancy of proof-texting. The insufficiency and weakness of that writing will fall like chaff if we meet it with solid biblical exegesis, theological hermeneutics, and humble observation. We need religious writing that embraces the complexities and unknowability and doubt that we are experiencing. If we are to write about faith and God and action and community, then we require an honesty and truth in our writers and their writings against so many lies and propaganda and escapist dogmatism.

It is an awful time to be a writer. The times are truly awful and they are getting worse. And in our homes we can write and we can spend time to write well. We can offer comfort and meaning. We can offer fictive escape. In our isolation, we can offer something shared.

At the very least, we can keep ourselves distracted – if only for a short while – with the tapping of keyboards and the whispering of pens as we put our hearts and minds and souls on the page with shaking hands.

What are you writing? How do you do it?

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Feeding the American Moloch – Plague Epistle IV

2020-03-25T20:17:38.000-04:00

Beware Republicans and their devotion to that child-devouring idol, Moloch! I am reading First Things‘ R.R. Reno, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Glenn Beck, and other conservative luminaries recommend abandoning the elderly to the plague to preserve their American way of life. How much more blatantly can such soulless imperialism devour human flesh and frailty? Shall these awful, sanctimonious men urge us to abandon those million New Yorkers alone and let them rot? Or instead of watching them gasp their last in their beds, ought we slough them off coughing into the East and Hudson Rivers, their bodies floating and bloating past Wall Street, down beneath the Statue of Liberty?

My horror concretizes in Ginsberg’s vision of the American Moloch.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
from “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg.

This is the true nature of modern American conservatism: the life of the dollar at the expense of humanity, itself. Did the Romans even sink so low?

“Moloch,” by Lynd Ward (1980)

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The Time is Out of Joint – Plague Epistle III

2020-03-23T14:00:00.000-04:00

It’s hard to believe that only two weeks ago, today, Brooklyn identified its first two COVID-19 cases. Now, to prevent further outbreak, all of New York City is to remain at home. We are an epicenter of a global pandemic. Two weeks seem now so long ago. It seems like a different, unrecoverable time entirely. The virus can take up to two weeks to show symptoms. Where were we two weeks ago? Who were we?

Writing about time can be disorienting. I experience it even as I write this now. My words teeter dangerously on abstraction, esoteric concepts, and jargon that do little for anyone. Instead, I need to concentrate on what is happening to us, happening among us.

What happens when our memory, individual and collective, is disrupted by the disruption of time? Is this what breeds nostalgia or amnesia or a forgetting of those most vulnerable, of those most in need? Perhaps. I think such disruptions reorient us toward other kinds of time, as well.

Desire is a kind of plotting of time. We cast forth what we seek and where it lands, well, we work out what to do within the length of time until we reach it. We desire things to happen at a certain time. The Greek kind of time “kairos” is about the fullness of time, opportune time. And this theological “kairotic” time is our observation of when God acts in the fullness of time. In our event of crisis, we desire God not just to act, but we desire to see God act. We become anxious when we do not see what we want.

At this point, it is difficult to see anything in the future except the spread of infection. We must be careful in our treatment of our expectations as much as in our self-preservation and in the lives of our neighbors. We live in difficult times. We must not make things more difficult than they already are. Immediately, we must take care of and support each other as best we can, as safely as we can. It has been time to act. But how best to act when?

“The time is out of joint,” says Hamlet. So, too, is ours. As we retreat into our homes, our internal clocks wobble. Personal and professional calendars fray, as well as nerves. Time stretches and becomes tenuous. There will seem no end to this. Even as we occupy ourselves, our routines are tremendously uprooted and derailed. We require new understandings of time to gain our bearings, to move forward.

We watch helplessly as disease evades us. It seems the only thing we can recover immediately, with no time to lose, is the ability to carefully consider how now we shall live, because our lives depend on it. In our desire to see the Hand of God act, it we who must act as God’s hands in love and in time.

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Little Liturgies for Cramped Spaces – Plague Epistle II

2020-03-21T14:15:00.000-04:00

For our collective safety against COVID-19, we now embrace social distancing and turn inward to cloister ourselves for an indeterminate amount of time. At the very least, our traditional and casual bonds of community and when and how we interact are being suspended. In fact, at a deep, societal level our use of time is now completely disrupted. It is genuinely disruptive and unnerving. Collectively, we hesitate, unable to expect what will happen to us, our loved ones, our communities, our world.

Yet against this anxiety and the chaos of uncertainty, we can create something set apart and meaningful, the very qualities of the holy and sacred. In the forms of ritual and liturgy, we can create new, miniature kinds of time. These practices can be productive, reflective, and flourishing and can create for ourselves expectation – if only that expectation is the reassuring recurrence of something familiar we have created. As we create and shape these practices, they then shape us to prepare for a future we cannot yet envision.

As we determine how we will spend these long hours and many days, our daily routines now become more our deliberate management of how we move through each day and less something of mere habit. Within these routines, we can focus on particular reflective moments when we pause, consider who we and our loved ones are and take stock in what we are doing, alone and together. Now in this time of uncertainty is the opportunity to recapture the power and agency of the ancient practices of ritual and liturgy.

Ritual, a meaningfully repeated performed practice, is a word that can seem distant, reserved for the esoteric or the eccentric tics of the obsessive-compulsive. But really, rituals are small reminders about who we are. They are our reflections in our actions. Each of us has rituals within our daily routines. A daily coffee made a particular way. A quick examination of one’s bag before leaving the house. Reading a book before we go to sleep. We perform rituals so readily and nonchalantly that we ignore how important they are to and for us. They are our special spaces.

Liturgies are more determined things, the “stuff” in ritual’s form. They are the sequence of meaningful words and actions commonly found in formal rituals, often most visible in church services. They are creations for a community. They are things to be performed and shared together. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. As long as we keep the structure, we can change the contents of a liturgy to suit our particular needs. Liturgies are special forms of created time.

In our new, restricted spaces we can create new space and time with rituals of “micro-liturgies”. Micro-liturgies are bespoke collections of meaningful words and activities created and ordered for meaningful interaction. Rituals help us focus. Liturgies help us create order. They keep us from distractions, from obsessively reading the news, from letting our thoughts get out of control. In this time of disorder, let us find new ways to spend our time not distracting ourselves, but engaging each other in meaningful ways.

When ritual is performed and liturgy created, there is the construction of new, certain time within this age of uncertainty. COVID-19 is invisible, but we can see each other gather together here in our particular space or online. We may not know when COVID-19 is at our door, but we know what comes next in the liturgy. We know we can perform this ritual again.

The regularity and anticipation of ritual is a reassuring thing to look forward to. Ritual and liturgy can remain fresh and alive. These are liturgies of our creativity, our own devices. We set them aside and tailor them for where we are and who we are. But when we create something for ourselves, we have focused power over our circumstances even if only for these few minutes, this one evening. And this is what is holy and sacred.

Often, the best rituals are the organic ones, the ones that are intimately created and shared. To share in this creation means that it is remembered and performed together. We see in person and online the ritual in our neighbor, in our family member, and friend as we, ourselves, perform it. We create something new and shared. We take the time to learn it, to practice it. It is the movement of our bodies and the sound of our voices. We embody and share what is important, what becomes essential. We learn to perform it a particular way and we work out the kinks. We allow flexibility, error, and the unexpected and we are gracious to each other and ourselves.

Belief in God is not required to do this. What we create through our hands together is what we set apart and make distinct. We create the holy and sacred. In ritual, we create a place and space for mystery. Creating mystery for ourselves has a power that uncertainty from the outside cannot overcome. Yes, illness is coming, but we are here together, even if we are cloistered in our small homes. We can create something for ourselves from ourselves. When illness, sorrow, and death enter our lives, we already have our created structures to face it. If or when we want God to be acknowledged, we can adjust our liturgies as appropriate and necessary. Our ritual will be performed again.

Such intimate creativity requires new vulnerability – yet another risk in a time when we take every precaution for self-preservation. In sharing this vulnerability, new solidarity is found in the creation of the form that is strengthened through the repetition that is ritual. Repetition of micro-liturgies is a kind of spiral forward through time. This is continued praxis of relating to each other through meaningful word and deed. We affect each other. It is impossible to not be affected.

To create liturgy is a kind of power, a sort of ability that most people are unaware that they already possess. Creating liturgy can be a restful, restorative power, creating a small world where sickness and suffering can be encountered and addressed. So often we are caught off guard by the turmoils of life and so easily derailed by disruptions to our routines and expectations. But our liturgies can be safeguards against this. They are things to look forward to, practices to be refined and reconsidered.

What does a micro-liturgy look like? It looks like what people gathering together make it. It requires planning of what and when it will be performed. Maybe after a meal or the most tedious or most stressful time of the day. It begins with an opportunity to leave tumultuous time and enter not a chosen time, but a time chosen, a time of the ritual. It requires agreeing upon who will take on which parts and when. Micro-liturgies are a kind of stone soup: everyone brings something their own, something meaningful to add to it.

This micro-liturgy begins with a kind of attenuation, a call away from disorder and uncertainty. Perhaps, it begins with a poem, a favorite book passage, or merely a calm word of encouragement or love. In responding by listening, we demonstrate that we hear this call. We begin this way and can begin to move forward in our created time. We bring actions and symbols that inspire and give us comfort, those things that reassure us and those things we would like to remember outside our ritual space. Micro-liturgies have a shared activity, perhaps telling stories or drawing or singing, even a small game. Whatever your intimate community finds strength and growth in doing together, add these things.

Micro-liturgies create short times of silence for reflection, mourning, rest, prayer, whatever is needed at that time that day. We remember aloud and in silence those people, things, places, and events that are important to us. Then we reach the part in our little liturgy when we acknowledge the end of our ritual for this time. Our special time together is ending, but only for now and only in the liturgy. We remain with each other in our hearts and minds until we meet again. We acknowledge aloud the end of our time and we say our goodbyes. Perhaps, a sign of peace is given to each other.

We now reenter the tumultuous time and space of our greater, chaotic world. That world was waiting for our return. It is the world in which we live, the one that feels like it is collapsing. We have not ignored, abandoned, or denied it. We have only turned our focus for a short, ordered time. We have found community, strength, and hopefully a moment of peace. Perhaps, it is enough if only until the next time we gather. Liturgy can only survive if it is repeated. It is the stuff of ritual. Ritual must be repeated to become ritual. In order for our ritual to continue, we must look forward – if only to the next time we gather to perform it, together.

We must create these healthy, self-created, self-sustaining rituals and liturgies of constructive repetition so that we do not succumb to a chaotic, downward spiral of despair. We find ourselves waiting for when sickness comes into our lives and for the time afterward when we must determine how our lives must change. In this time of transition, while we wait, we can create new practices.

Though this part comes first, I am saying it last because it is so important: to create rituals of micro-liturgies in this fraught time when we are together alone, we must prepare the place we are to meet. One of the few things we can anticipate now is where our ritual will take place for us. It may be a kitchen table or a living room or a laptop camera, but let us make cleaning and preparing where this ritual takes place part of the ritual. It is a way in itself of preparing for the time and place we share, even remotely.

Micro-liturgies do not change the ravages of this virus or the turmoil it is wreaking on our lives, communities, and countries. Micro-liturgies do not stop suffering and death. Micro-liturgies do not provide any solutions to our current global crisis. Micro-liturgies do not stop this pandemic or cure the sick. They are not meant to. It’s not part of our ritual. It’s not part of liturgy. Micro-liturgies are ways to intimately relate in this time of anxiety and sorrow. They are what we make them for each other and ourselves again and again and again until they have fulfilled their purpose through the end.

The latest in liturgical spaces.

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Alone Together – Plague Epistle I

2020-03-20T13:00:00.000-04:00

I am in Brooklyn, New York and I am writing a bleak theology while cloistered with the rest of my city. I do not know what these epistles, these letters, these dispatches are to become. But I am writing them, because they give me relief and we are alone together in this time of real uncertainty. Some will find them edifying, others despairing. If you don’t like them, read someone else.

How does one think theologically in the midst of catastrophe? This is a function of these Plague Epistles. What is faith in these dark times? How does community – especially religious community – function when it physically cannot take place? What do we we do when death is at our door and suffering in our midst? These are theological themes that are always in the shadows and the corners of our lives. Now, we live unexpectedly in a time of shadow, feeling like we are cornered.

Is it accurate to call COVID-19 a plague? I’m not sure. Though it’s not plague, per se, it is a fast and relentless illness that affects all of us deeply. It is certainly correct to use the term to capture the miasmic spirit of the time. This plague is not merely about the pandemic, but about the effects it has on the individuals and society affected by the pandemic, itself.

The City that Never Sleeps has forced itself to slow down in ways never attempted before. COVID-19 is forcing a complete reassessment of how we live life here. New cases are identified every day here. I can only report what it is like here in this major metropolis. I can’t imagine what it is like in the rest of America, where people have real space between each other and still cannot escape infection.

Here, we share an implicit understanding that the proximal fabric of our lives and fates are tightly interwoven. We cannot ignore, dismiss, or abandon each other. To do so is at our literal peril. The body politic is real and alive and about to get hit hard. As Albert Camus captured so well in his novel, La Peste, the plague is not just about the rampant infection, but what about what individuals do in that time of affliction and crisis. Who are we in this time and how shall we live?

Over the past few days, we have acquired extra supplies, storing them in our little apartment as we can. It is difficult to determine how much we should have. There is an end date, an eschaton of sorts, but how far is the horizon? During a plague, time takes on a new pallor. Time seems to linger. Along with it we are sealed and what can we do but wait and keep ourselves occupied as best we see fit.

For us introverts, social distancing does not seem like a big deal, at the moment. Though I understand that it will relationally affect others more deeply. In this city of 8.4 million people, it is very difficult to not be within six feet of another person at some time during the day, even if you don’t directly, physically interact with them. It is easier as we have restricted our movement. We do our best and wash our hands. We take walks into open areas and keep our distance. We gauge our proximity. We share a knowing look.

Like most religious communities, my church, St. Lydia’s, has gone entirely online, though I have not had the opportunity to participate. Regular social media dispatches and dialogue among us are edifying. In a later epistle, I will write about how I think our church model creates a robust kind of community for these times of isolation. Because we are praxis-oriented and are not primarily reliant upon a single leader to carry the weight, I think that gives us an opportunity to share the loads more evenly.

There is much to read. We have lots of time to read. The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament is ripe with readings and analogies for this time. Job, Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah, Isaiah, the Psalms, etc., etc. Everything is terrible. And still we keep going. We find social distancing in the gospels, when Jesus is tempted in the Wilderness and when he tries to escape the pressing crowds, the Desert Fathers, the intentional, cloistered communities of monks and nuns. And still we keep going.

We read about Martin Luther during The Black Plague, Paul Tillich during World War I, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer against the Nazis. We read about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. We are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. We read about each other online. We share our stories, our fears, our lives.

Theologically, there is much to chew on, with plenty of time to chew on it. I dare say that my bleak theology is tailored for this time. I write about catastrophe and difficult circumstances in existential and cultural terms. And here we are. Post-punk romanticism was a luxury of a distant time. My theology now directly grapples with our very real norms. My counterweight to joy is real and articulate. There is no escapism here. There is no escape.

Our theological questions must be more careful and considered than ever before. Many wrong, harmful, hateful answers abound. Where is God in all of this? It is a difficult question to parse and answer. For me, my first answer is apophatic: “What is God not?” Because questions of location, of social distance, of proximity, of agency, of viability naturally follow.

More immediately, we must be concerned with our neighbor, because that is who is suffering. Our focus must be on suffering, on those suffering, on our own suffering. We must be there for those who are suffering as best we can, even from so far away. Do for others as we would have others do for us. We must share with each other that we, that our neighbor, our community, are not alone. Rather, we are alone together.

This is not to be despairing. This is to reaffirm that we are alone, but we do not have to be lonely. We have solitude, but our isolation does not have to be absolute. Being cloistered is not being cut off. It is being intentionally communal. Now, more than ever, we walk the delicate line between despair and hope. Bleak theology makes this line more clear. This line is real and it best to explore how to walk it. This is what I do. This is what I write.

Even if we believe that God is with us, we are still alone together. For a time we are hermits. Let us be hermetic. The time of preparation is suddenly past and we are left wanting. We now live in the desert, hunkered down in our caves. Light your candle, but save your wick and wax.

The Brooklyn Promenade and Brooklyn Bridge

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Remember The White Rose. Fight Fascism.

2020-02-22T23:20:53.000-05:00

Today in 1943 at 5:00 pm, Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst were beheaded by the Nazis for their activities with The White Rose non-violent resistance movement. It would be over two more years before the Nazis were defeated. Yet again, fascism is on the rise. In our frustrating and frustrated struggle against evil, we have the opportunity and duty to reach back to the writings of those who resisted before us. The White Rose is a model for our present age.

Hans and Sophie Scholl

The White Rose was a university student group in Munich, informed by Christian theology, Eastern and Western philosophy, and great works of literature spanning from the Greeks through Goethe. It was grounded in the humanities in a time when every thought and action was governed by the inhumane Nazi state. They found their duty to act in their faith in God and humanity. In a series of six mimeographed pamphlets, they appealed to the conscience of their fellow Germans to resist. They actively shamed their country-people for their complicity in the Nazis’ atrocities against humanity.

But our present “state” is the dictatorship of evil. “Oh, we’ve known that for a long time,” I hear you object, “and it isn’t necessary to bring that to our attention again.” But, I ask you, if you know that, why do you not bestir yourselves, why do you allow these men who are in power to rob you step by step, openly and in secret, of one domain of your rights after another, until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanized state system presided over by criminals and drunks? Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse that you forget it is your right – or rather, your moral duty – to eliminate this system?
The White Rose, Pamphlet 3.

The members knew the atrocities taking place in their midst: the murder of the Jews, the brutal conquest against the people of the world, the forced march of Germans to certain death at the front, the suppression of freedom and free speech. They also understood that their actions against their government’s machine could only do so much. They did what they could: they wrote and they shared their writings. They spoke out at their own risk, knowing the best they could do was the spur their fellow Germans to resist.

We are not at the point of 1943, but we are in a time similar to that of a decade prior, when the NSDAP first took real power: Nationalism rears its ugly head against the rest of the world. Grievances are manufactured and blame is assigned. Rights and freedoms are constantly and consistently eroded. Executive power and fiat, especially after the Senate trial, appears unchecked. Disinformation and propaganda flow freely. Armed paramilitary groups who’ve sworn fealty to a demagogic leader flaunt their strength and intimidation. Minorities and marginalized peoples fret about their safety. People are wary of speaking out, of speaking truth to power.

In these dark times, it is fashionable to laud the life and actions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. American Christians like to muse about a “Bonhoeffer Moment”, when individuals will become convicted to act extraordinarily through faith in the face of tyranny. In the last three years there has been a constant cascade of opportunities for such “moments”. And still the Reichskirche that is most white evangelicals remains firmly in support of Trump, his personality and policies. Those white evangelicals who publicly stand up to Trump and his church are quickly pilloried with accusations of disloyalty and ungodliness.

Trumpist apologist Eric Metaxas has done insufferable damage warping the martyred pastor into the image of the American Evangelical, a palatable distortion for those who could not possibly see in their own mirrors and admit their own fascist theology and ethics. Such romantic appeals to Bonhoeffer is cheap grace, indeed. In identifying with Bonhoeffer in his persecution and perseverance, they bestow grace upon themselves. The mass market appeal (and American Evangelical Christianity is always about The Market) of Bonhoeffer has transformed him into such kitsch. Let us let Bonhoeffer rest, even if the printing presses of Metaxas’s powerhouse publisher, Thomas Nelson, will not. Bonhoeffer is not the only writer in our quiver against fascism. The direct narrative and swift message of The White Rose are not so easily twisted by fascist disinformation.

With the echoes of The White Rose in our ears, we must ask ourselves what would we do in 1943? Our romanticism and hagiographies should not blind us to the real risks and consequences of violence and arrest. Bonhoeffer will be arrested in April, almost two months after the Scholls are executed. They did not live to see the end of fascist rule in their country. We may not, either. What do we do in 2020? Can we watch Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, Resistance, or any other film or documentary about ordinary people fighting the Third Reich without a new, sharp terror in our racing hearts?

Fighting against an inhuman State and our fellow humans who have transformed themselves into the inhumane should give us pause. They are still our neighbors. Everything is at stake as we resist their inhumane actions and appeal to the humanity of their hearts and minds. We will lose many things and we will remember what and who we have lost. We will create monuments to what we have lost and what was gained through our loss. As we deliberate in our hearts, minds, and hands about how we shall live out our faith at the edge of ruin, let us keep close the memory of and living monument to The White Rose.

Geschwister-Scholl-Platz

The individual who follows Jesus’ teachings understands the perils of aligning with the inhuman State. The Two Greatest Commandments require each of us to resist the tyrannical apparatus of the State and those that aid and abet it. To love our neighbor as ourselves is to defend and aid the oppressed, however we can. Sophie Scholl did what she could with the means she had in the time and place she found herself. It is not yet 1943. When it is, what will we do? Will we love our neighbor as ourselves? What shall we do? What shall you do? What shall I do?

“Sophie Scholl: The Final Days” is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

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The Eternal Return

2020-02-02T14:36:21.000-05:00

(The Gay Science, s. 341, Friedrich Nietzsche)

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A Theological Take on Good Omens: A Prologue

2019-06-06T13:00:26.000-04:00

In the beginning… God reveals to us, in the voice of Frances McDormand, that we are wrong. Specifically, we are wrong about beginnings and we are wrong about time. And if there are fundamental things that we as a species are obsessed about they are when and how things start and how and why things work. Those answers – or at least the belief that we are on the trail for those answers – provide an existential reassurance that life does continue to be worth living. And this is what Good Omens is about: the ineffable (God’s word here, not mine) power and humor of being wrong at the end of the world.

Good Omens is that rare phenomenon where the storytellers understand so well their relationships to certain Big Ideas that they ably weave a deft narrative within and without such that we, the audience, find ourselves thinking about our own relationships to those Big Ideas. What make Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett masters is that they take these Big Ideas and show us that we had already been thinking about them for some time, but never knew quite how to form them or get them in front of us. This is what Literature does: make evident for us parts and aspects of ourselves and our world in ways we could not do on our own. It’s what makes the Bible still worth reading even in an age when certain people would seek to tell you what that ragged book definitively means and make you suffer for it.

Expending a considerable amount of resources, theologians wrestle with the topic of God. We are arguably different from religious studies scholars in that we work with the understanding that a) we (usually) have (our own) skin in this Game and/or b) our relationships to the topic is ultimately subjective. Religious studies arguably enjoys a more distantiated, objective vantage point toward the topic. Biblical scholars inhabit their own distinct world and there can be overlap with theologians. Some theologians are doctrinaire. Others are more ambivalent. Theologians don’t often agree. But we do all admit to a particular kind of framework for our work, much like a writer or a physicist learns to construct something to be shown.

To be formally-trained theologically means to be taught to posit and appreciate a particular kind of world about the divine and the human. It’s a world with various structures and narratives, rules and mechanisms, individuals and societies, and certain immutables and agencies. And then we are taught to not only talk about them (theology, after all, is “god-talk”), but also to labor to change the world. While every individual thinks about such things at some point, there is a (for better or for worse) a particular guild for those who go to school for it.

When Neil Gaiman writes about religions and the religious, a certain kind of theologian (me) grins a wry smile. Coming from the literary world, Gaiman understands how myth and myths work, how gods and mortals function and interact. How things are, how things are to be and how things are explained. Sandman, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and Norse Mythology are merely the heavy-hitters. Gaiman gets it. We can trust him. He knows how to create a particular kind of framework. He has ably constructed something to be shown.

For me, watching Good Omens, like when I read it so long ago, gives me that same absurdist pleasure I felt and found when I watched and read as a youth Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and Monty Python. I devoured these irreverent, madcap authors and worlds. And now, as a theologian formed by the writers, I feel like an insider, watching intently with popcorn what Gaiman is going to do to with things I’ve spent too much time reflecting and agonizing upon. Because theology is about stories – just certain kinds of stories. And when you catch yourself still thinking about a story after you’ve read or seen it, well, that’s a good story, indeed. Because now you’re a part of it and it is now your own.

It’s my hope to give my take on these six episodes of Good Omens, to tease out some of the ideas and history behind this story about the end of the world. Because along with a great story about Ultimate Things™, Good Omens has a fair amount of actual history and theology woven in it and presents very real and serious questions that are worth asking about various structures and narratives, rules and mechanisms, individuals and societies, and certain immutables and agencies. All theology is autobiographical. Some theologies are about how we react to the theologies we encounter. Good Omens is one such theological tale. Then again, I could be wrong.

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Reading Kierkegaard after Christchurch

2019-03-17T17:23:05.000-04:00

Collectively, globally, humanly, we are experiencing a heightened awareness of our despair. I, along with millions of others, was rendered speechless with horror and lamentation. Fifty (so far) Muslim worshippers murdered and countless others injured by a white supremacist, a white man who has exchanged his humanity for the desolation of the inhumane. On the other side of the earth, I despair, but nothing like those who have suffered this attack, who have lost loved ones in this murderous spree. I do not know that actual despair, myself. I can only lament as I can in solidarity with the mourners.

Kierkegaard says that the possibility to despair sets all of us apart from the animal world. It is an advantage. Humanity is distinct to have the capacity and ability to experience despair, because despair requires a kind of self and self-relation and the self is spirit. To have the possibility of despair, to understand despair “in the abstract”, writes Kierkegaard, is “a merit” to us. Animals, as far as we know, do not have that capacity, that merit. I would add that our possibility to despair so much is partly because the animal world does not have the capacity for human cruelty and human hate and human destruction. Animals don’t have the capacity for the cruelty of the murderer and his kind.

The possibility of despair is luxuriously abstract. Yes, let us understand ourselves in safety and reading The Sickness Unto Death in a comfortable chair, enjoying a quiet moment with tea on a rainy morning. Let us enjoy the merit of our possibility to despair and reflect upon it, ourselves. Let us even put down our book and thoughtfully stare out the rain-streaked window and think about such things. Our wet window is so far away, so possibly different from the mosque windows smashed by terrified worshipers seeking escape from a murderous white supremacist.

Kierkegaard writes that to be in actual despair is “the greatest misfortune and misery”. He calls it, in a word, “ruin”. The actuality of despair is very real and very apparent right now, especially because of our interconnected, online world. In Christchurch, we see and hear ruin. We lament over the ruin we cannot imagine, but a ruin that is very, very real, right before our eyes. Because of a white man’s hate, lives are ruined. Each of us experiences our own despair, but to witness such hatred and experience such despair on such a horrific scale is impossible to fathom. In relating to ourselves and each other, we discern our insufficiency to comprehend and handle such events, such reflection with ourselves and others.

Despair is not misfortune (though to be in despair is to be in the greatest misfortune and misery). Despair is an imbalance in the relation of the spirit, of the self, to itself. “Despair is an aspect of the spirit”. It is something of the eternal, because the self is eternal. Thus, it is timeless, it is outside of time, as is the possible. One cannot be rid of despair anymore than one can be rid of oneself. And yet, the possibility of despair and the actuality of despair come together in the horror of murders in the mosques. Even to write philosophically, to write philosophically about this cruelty seems clinically disinterested – when, in truth, we must remain painfully interested, because it is about our humanity, ourselves.

In all of this, is important to realize and understand that Kierkegaard is writing in mid-nineteenth century Denmark, within a particular understanding of Christianity. He is writing out of his Christian experience and context, over against the Danish State Church, the Copenhagen bourgeoisie, and Hegelian philosophy. He is writing to a very particular, small audience compared to who read him today. When Kierkegaard delineates the various kinds and categories of despair, he is writing with the goal of explaining despair in Christian and non-Christian terms.

It is necessary to say that because the horror and despair of Christchurch can only be read so far within Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is ultimately writing about a qualitative distinction about Christian despair, a despair that does not consider a religiously-pluralistic world. He is writing for comfortable Danish Christians who refuse to acknowledge or are ignorant of the ultimate agony of life. And existentialists like Camus took what they liked from what they read of Kierkegaard and took it their own very valid and useful directions.

Reading Kierkegaard in a religiously-pluralistic world has real and important limits. Kierkegaard is writing ultimately about despair within and in relation to the Christian. Kierkegaard, writing about his own religion’s, his Christianity’s relationship to despair ultimately cannot write about Muslim despair because he is writing ultimately about the qualitative relationship of despairing individual to the Christian understanding of God. When he writes in this section that the Christian has advantage over “natural man” it is because of the particular kind of awareness of despair. “To be cured of despair is the Christian’s blessedness.” The Christian is blessed because of the Christian’s relation to despair in relation to the “power” that grounds the relation of the self to itself. Kierkegaard is writing within a particular understanding of relating.

But how shall the Christian act in relation to the despair of their Islamic neighbor? In humility and lovingkindness as however it is desired and desires to be received. Be there for them in their despair, for despair is eternal and universal, no matter how we understand its origin or solution. How shall the Christian act toward other Christians? As Najeeba Syeed urges, talk to them about Islamophobia. It is a primary responsibility of each Christian in relation to themselves, the world, and their God to fight hate against one’s neighbor – especially Islamophobia. To do otherwise is to inflict more and perpetuate despair upon individuals. White supremacy, as I will argue later, is its own kind of despair, but it is a kind of despair that is packed into the despair that is an aspect of Christendom.

I had struggled to write about this section, “The Possibility and Actuality of Despair”. I didn’t know how to tackle Kierkegaard’s argument about the Christian’s understanding of despair in respect to the non-Christian’s. Christchurch made it all the more important to write about despair, our collective despair, but almost as importantly, I was pushed to rethink and reframe despair. I was humbled to not delineate despair for others and to, instead, mourn alongside the actual despair with the ummah, with families, with individuals cut down as they worship Allah.

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Self Establishment.

2019-03-12T14:19:49.000-04:00

It’s a bit breathtaking that our reflection on the self was all about a single, introductory paragraph. And yet already we already have a better understanding of what Kierkegaard understands the self to be, or at least be about. Most often, we think about ourselves relating to other people, the external world of ourselves. Society, family, the government, our friends, our neighbors, strangers. These are all external things. But we don’t think so much about how we relate to ourselves, it seems to be second nature. We want to think of ourselves as individuals, single, complete, unified being. But we don’t take the time and especially effort to delve into ourselves as a process and development of constant re-encounter.

There exists an internal interplay about our selves that gets us out of the idea that the self cannot change. Fatalism and predestination are not part of the equation. In fact, the self is always changing. It has built-in the capacity to change because it is inherently relational. The self has an internal freedom to it and that freedom is always relational, if ultimately to the relationality within and of ourselves. We have the capacity to change because of the simple fact that we are relational. We are self-relational. Constantly. It never stops. Because it can’t. It’s a bit dizzying, actually, all this constant relating.

But how does it all start? If my self is constantly relating to my self, then where and when and who was my starting point? Biologically, it seems like the wrong question to ask: At conception? At birth? At consciousness? At self-consciousness? It can’t be pinpointed and it ought not to be. This is about the self as spirit. We’re not talking about spiritual bodies or bodies with spirits. At the risk of seeming to fall into the outdated and dangerous Cartesian “mind-body” duality, let’s affirm that we are talking about the self. And we will see that we are not as Cartesian as we appear.

Each of us is already in flux. We can only recall our earliest selves in relation to who we are becoming now. Even our earliest selves recalled are not our earliest been or became. There is no first-self known, an ur-self known having become. Each of us is always already having become in relation to ourselves. Dizzy, yet? Exactly.

We are in motion. We are breathing. We are becoming. What to do with ourselves? How do we bear, how do we put up with ourselves? Well, it comes down to a question of direction in relation. Do we understand ourselves to be solely in relation to ourselves or is there something outside ourselves that grounds us in relation to ourselves and itself? Will we go toward ourselves or try to escape? Either way, we’re still in despair. But are there better kinds of despair than others?

Kierkegaard states that either we are established by ourselves or we are established by something else, some other “power” he calls it. No matter what, we are derived. But if the self is self-established, then there would only be the question of wanting to be free of oneself, of the despair of the inability to escape oneself, because one is sick of oneself. There would never be any possibility of “equilibrium” and rest. The self would constantly careen relationally back and forth in an overwhelming and chaotic feedback loop of a self-destructive narcissistic solipsism of ever-deeper despair. That escalated quickly!

But if the self is established by something else, by some other power, then the self in relation to itself is able to relate to and with something else. There is an establishment beyond the self that provides a foundation, something to relate to, something to get outside of one’s self to get back into oneself. From this there is the second form of authentic despair: wanting in despair to be oneself. Through relating to that which is outside of ourselves, we desire to become ourselves. We dread not being ourselves. We anguish that we become who we do not want to become. We don’t feel like ourselves and we despair.

So Kierkegaard establishes at the end of his first section that there is something external, foundational, and wholly relational to the self. Not an object, but a “power.” And he gives away right from the beginning the definition of the self free from despair:

This then is the formula which describes the state of the self when despair is completely eradicated: in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it.

We are not self-caused and not self-made, not self-become. But what, but could we do about it? Can we be free from despair? In all honesty, do we really want to be? To steal from another Melancholy Dane, “To become or not to become? That is the question.”

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Don’t Hold Your Breath.

2019-03-07T15:00:23.000-05:00

Yesterday was a big day. Let’s do a breathing exercise to help us calm down. It will help us with what’s next. Let’s take a deep breath. Lent is about slowing down, being more reflective, becoming more self-reflective. Let’s take another breath. Good. Breathing is essential. The Latin word for breath is spiritus, but spiritus means so much more. Even though there is always too much empty talk about spirit, let us talk about spirit, because I want to clear the air about some things before we get started – except we’ve already started. Because we’re already breathing. Exhale. Inhale. See? We’re already doing this. Keep breathing.

What is a human being? Kierkegaard says that the human being is spirit. It’s not that we are spiritual beings, but that the self, itself, is spirit. Wait. What? Keep breathing. Set aside your thoughts about what is “spiritual”, about being “spiritual creatures”, or that we have “spirituality”. That someone can be “spiritual, but not religious.” This is not about that. This isn’t about feeling the divine, about having a pleasurable, transcendent encounter with God. All that is a big, red herring. This is something else. This is about ourselves as spirit. Keep breathing.

“Spirit is the self,” writes Kierkegaard. Okay. We kind of understand, but not really. Now, keep breathing and watch closely and see if you can see what he does:

“The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation’s relating to itself.”

Woah! Wait. What? Did your breath catch for a moment? Are you still breathing? Good. You are breathing. Keep breathing. Think of the self as breathing, as spirit. You are breathing. You exhale. You inhale. Think of the self as exhale, inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale inhale. Exhale inhale exhale inhale. Good. This is you. This is the self. It is about the relation of exhale and inhale. Think of exhale, of breathing out, as all about the infinite, the eternal, freedom. Think of inhale, of breathing in, as all about the finite, the temporal, necessity. Exhale out into limitlessness. Inhale until you can’t breathe in anymore. Good. Now, you’re getting it. See? You’re already breathing. Keep breathing.

Kierkegaard is saying that a human being is the synthesis of exhale, inhale. “The synthesis is a relation between two terms.” We’re breathing, but the self is not the merely the juxtaposition of a breath out and a breath in. “Looked at in this way, a human being is not yet a self.” And it’s not the action of breathing out and breathing in. The self is not the relation of exhaling and inhaling. Stay with me! You can do this. Keep breathing and concentrate on your breathing. Okay. You are breathing and thinking about your breathing. While you are breathing, you are relating to your breathing. You, spirit, are relating to your breathing.

Now watch your breathing and watch what I do: Your breathing, your exhaling and inhaling is a relation which relates to your breathing. Your breathing is not the relation, but the relation’s relating to itself. You’re a little confused, but you’re starting to get it. Go back up to where Kierkegaard says “Spirit is the self” and read down to here again. Let yourself read about your self again. There. You just did it. You’re still doing it. The relation of yourself is relating to your self. Keep breathing.

You are a human being. You are not a static object. You are spirit. You are the relation of your self relating to your self. You are encountering yourself. You continue to encounter yourself. Spirit is self-encounter. This is the developing activity of self-encounter over and over again. This is you as spirit. Spirit is the self. See, this isn’t what you’ve thought of as “spiritual” or “spirituality”. This is something else. This is something different, because this is the self, itself. This is your self, yourself.

Okay, let’s take a deep breath and shake it all out. Phew! That was exhausting! Who knew being a self, becoming a self was so involved?! Becoming a self can be hard work! And yet at the same time, it is as natural and automatic as breathing. But thinking about yourself is hard work – if you ever really, really think about your self at all.

I think that’s enough of a workout for today. Feel a little raw, a little more self-aware? Can you still feel your breathing in your chest? Yeah, it’s different now, isn’t it? Well, that’s the self for you. You just can’t get away from yourself, even if you try. We’ll pick up tomorrow where we left off. Take it easy for the rest of the day. Ha! Who am I kidding? No, you can’t. Especially not now. You’re more self-aware, now. You’re stuck with yourself.

Oh. By the way… Remember that if you stop breathing, you die.

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The Truly Horrifying Thing

2019-03-06T16:00:46.000-05:00

Again, it is Ash Wednesday, the first day of the slow season of Lent. The beginning of our meandering trek toward Passion Week, that Christological culmination, full of dashed hopes and bewildering absurdity. Today, we allow ourselves to be told and dare to tell ourselves that we are mortal and are going to die. And we are strangely reassured.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

And we feel the smear of oily, gritty, black ash just above our eyes. The deaths and dyings of loved ones and strangers and everyone in between is our cloud of witnesses. And stepping back out into the street, we see, we experience for one single day of the entire year a community of people who have chosen to be visibly marked with the cross of death. In our solitude, we are not alone.

All earthly suffering is encompassed within this trajectory between the dust of creation and the dust of death. But all suffering, all sickness, all sorrow is not “the sickness unto death.” What seems to be the worst – the worst we can experience, the worst we can endure of hardship and pain and loneliness and cruelty, the worst we can see the least of these suffering – there is something even more awful.

If there’s one thing you can say about mankind / There’s nothing kind about man.

What could be worse than this worldly suffering?! Kierkegaard writes in his Introduction that “Christianity has discovered in its turn a misery that humanity as such does not know exists. This misery is the sickness unto death. What the natural man counts terrible, when it is all added up and he can think of no remainder, all this the Christian treats as a joke.” What could this misery be when there is so much misery in the world?

In the midst of the horrors committed by Trumpist Evangelicalism, Southern Baptist patriarchy, and Roman Catholic priests, why would we want to even consider something more horrific than that? Because those evils are atrocities of Christendom. No, there is something more horrifying than all of these horrors. And Christianity is all too painfully aware of it. “The natural man,” says Kierkegaard, “has no knowledge of what is truly horrifying, yet is not exempt from shrinking in horror. No, he shrinks in horror from what is not horrifying.”

What is this truly horrifying thing? What is this sickness unto death that we cannot endure, yet must look upon and seek to understand? It is despair. Is is the sickness of our Age. It is the sickness that dwells within our culture, our churches, our politics. It is the sickness within our selves.

For the season of Lent, we are going to journey into our own Infernos, with the Melancholy Dane as our gloomy guide. Each reading will be about a section of The Sickness Unto Death. We will gaze at the abyss of despair within ourselves. We will come to better terms with living with the kinds of despair that each of us carry within us. In the Wilderness, we will learn better ourselves, who we are, who are becoming. We will learn to live with this existential terror within us, within our spirits. “Only the Christian knows,” writes Kierkegaard, “what is meant by the sickness unto death.”

In the meantime, the press of the ash and dust of death is our salve for this day. The words of our mortality provide reassurance. Today, we receive the mark of creation, death, and the hope of salvation. We receive the mark of the human condition – even while we suffer the sickness unto death, even while we live in despair. We step out from safety into the Wasteland to discover the depths of ourselves. This is the way. This is the way. This is the way.

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Prepare for Despair!

2019-03-05T14:00:25.000-05:00

New York City is fat with the pastries that are the harbingers of Lent. Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s Polish jelly-filled pączki, Danish cream-filled fastelavnsbolle at Ole & Steen at Union Square, zeppole in my Italian Carroll Gardens, Shrove Tuesday pancakes dripping with syrup in so many Protestant churches. I will eat them all. I will eat the decadence of every Christian culinary tradition. Cream and flaky dough and the singing sweetness sinks into my gums. The heart races. The punch and wave of stickiness seeping into my body. My eyes widen. We celebrate. We bake for each other. We eat together. We share the best places to go.

Seeking out the best places for pre-Lenten perfection is a personal joy. I make my annual pączki pilgrimage this very morning, before they’re all sold out. I am alive with sugar. My skin almost sparks. It’s Requiem for a Dream in my mouth. These are not desserts. Eat them anytime, because they are so fleeting. Lent is coming. Eat it all. Eat it, immediately. Have another. Don’t wait. Have another. Have too much. Don’t stop. Don’t stop yourself. I can’t stop myself. Be in the moment. Live in the moment. Live immediately. Live in the now. While we can.

Today is the hyperday before Lent, the slowest season of the Christian year. Many people understand it as a time of self-denial, a time to “give up” something of significance or distraction. Maybe social media or sweets or meat. And then with Easter comes the resurrection of old habits. My Twitter has risen! Our Twitter has risen, indeed! Some people will take on a new habit outside of oneself, to make an extra effort to recycle or help a neighbor (and who is our neighbor?).

Perhaps, the habit will stick beyond Lent. There is a desire connect to something beyond ourselves, to experience God, something felt to be “spiritual”. Increasingly, people say they’re “spiritual, but not religious.” But what is spiritual to them but that immediate aesthetic, that unmitigated bodily feeling of connection with the divine?

I am here to tell you that it is all sickness and that such spirituality is equivalent to our engorging on the sweets of this single day before everything turns to ash. Such “spirituality” is the Mardi Gras of the spirit, the Fat Tuesday of the self. Such a spiritual person is the person in self-denial. Such a spiritual person is the person in denial of their self. And in denying themselves, such people are in despair. They live in despair and they do not know it. They are self-deceiving. They deceive themselves.

But the reality is that whether we consider ourselves “spiritual” or religious or even irreligious, each and every one of us lives in despair. We all live in what Kierkegaard calls “the sickness unto death”, this thing called despair. Despair is an essential part of the human condition. It separates us from the animals. It is what makes us all too human. Deny this truth and your are in despair. Affirm the truth of your despair and your triumph is your self-awareness of the individual and collective despair that is part of being human.

My Lenten discipline this year is to write through Kierkegaard’s great work on despair, The Sickness Unto Death. It is a book for atheist and Christian, alike. It is one of the foundational influences of Existentialism. It is an essential resource for theologians, philosophers, and psychologists, alike. I believe that much of our personal, social, religious, political, and cultural anguish comes from our refusal, our inability, and our ignorance of the despair that is a part of us and the despair that we are a part of. Despair is the sickness into death. We are dying, but we are not dead. As we will discover, despair does not kill us. But it is what drives us toward self-destruction.

What is required of us is a particular kind of self-reflection, a slow turning inward into who we are and who we are becoming. We must understand ourselves as spirit, but not in the decadence of aesthetic spirituality. Spirituality will not save you. Spirituality is your narcissism at all costs in order to drown out the anxiety of your being, of your becoming. Spirituality is the lie, the narcotic of good-feeling. Spirituality is self-betrayal. Spirituality is the denial of self, because it refuses to see and understand the self as self-relating. Spirituality is about living in the now. If we are to speak about the spirit, we must reject the toxicity of spirituality, that sugar hangover of the day before.

Binge upon yourself, today. Consume every pastry. Enjoy the ephemeral, the spiritual, that saccharine connection with the sweetness of life. For tomorrow we will be reminded we are from dust and to dust we shall return. And everything in our mouths will taste of ash.

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The Eternal Return

2019-02-02T17:10:04.000-05:00

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“Everything is Bonzer!” (Parts 1 and 2) – The Good Place Review

2018-10-04T17:48:15.000-04:00

[WARNING: These reviews contain spoilers and nerdy philosophical/theological references.]

The first season of The Good Place begins with death. Or more specifically, it begins with the beginning of the Afterlife in what seems to be Paradise for the ethically elite. The second season begins with Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, a reboot into one’s own personal hell that gets repeated over eight hundred times. The third season opens not with reincarnation, but with the experience of near-death, which triggers radical, existential self-examination that leads toward the pursuit of becoming a better person. Things go downhill from there.

Radical conversion is a heralded part of American culture. It’s part of the immigrant “rags to riches” narrative, the story of transforming completely from who and how one was in the Old World to becoming someone self-made and better in the New. The concept is well-worn in religious terms, as well. The word “conversion” comes from the Latin convertere meaning “to turn completely”. Paul and the Four Evangelists of the New Testament often use the Greek word metanoia, a “changing of the mind” to describe a transformation of the self toward God. We see the personal conversion experience as essential in evangelical Christianity and Alcoholics Anonymous. In our culture’s arts and letters, it is rampant. The only thing we love more than a great conversion story is a conversion story full of failure. “Try again,” wrote Samuel Beckett. “Fail again. Fail better.”

Back on Earth, our show’s conversion stories full with failure begin now. Last season, we watched Eleanor stare shopping-cart death in the face until Michael pulls her to safety. Immediately, she has a conversion experience, realizing that she should become a better person. Finding it difficult, she backslides to her old ways. In Season Three, we see Chidi avert death-by-air-conditioner. He goes to Simone, the neurobiologist, for help and after experiencing natural science’s use of data analysis, thinks that all he has to do is to decide to be more decisive. Yet, reflecting upon his direct decisions, he takes as his fault the indirect contribution to others’ pain and suffering. Chidi backslides to his indecisiveness. Tahani’s conversion experience is to rid herself of all material possessions and celebrity connections, joining a Buddhist monastery in Tibet. There she is found by a VICE-like reporter and, backsliding, she later shills to a packed audience her book, Getting out of the Spotlight about “shedding your need for validation from others.” After Jason is freed from the safe, he converts to a life free from crime, wanting to become a top dance crew. After losing competition after competition, he, too, backslides.

Each of our human’s accidental deaths, byproducts of their way of being their most human and authentic selves, are played out by virtue of each life lived up to that moment. When Michael surreptitiously, yet directly interacts with the moments of their demise, he prevents them from becoming themselves actually into death. The Michael ex Machina establishes a supernatural trajectory for a new kind of flourishing that is established by their near-death experiences. In result, the four humans gain new agency and, in reflection about the specific moments of the possibility of their ends, they search for new meaning to become better people. Instead, they become new selves that fail in new ways. The very human failure to convert, to change their minds entirely and live consistently differently as better people, comes at the expense of their averted ends. They are all too human.

As the four return to their old ways, Michael sees that his interfering work has failed, much like how his scheme to torture them ultimately failed. On Earth, they unexpectedly become worse individually whereas before they unexpectedly become better together. Against the rules of The Judge, Michael deceives the frog-loving Doorman to let him return to Earth and again influence the life trajectories of our four humans. He’s just going to nudge Eleanor and Chidi together. Just nudgey-nudge, against Janet’s warnings. As a Sam-bartender, he sows the seed in Eleanor of “what do we owe other people?” As an badly-accented Aussie librarian, he tells Chidi the secret to get out of his head is to help someone else. As a fellow shyster, he plants guilt in Tahani and for Jason, as a talent scout, he offers a chance to start a dance crew in Australia. Instead of human conversion, we have otherworldly intervention. It’s Touched by an Angel, Quantum Leap, and Highway to Heaven. It’s the insipid God Friended Me. The list of television shows go on and on. Except where those lives got better, on The Good Place, these lives get worse and all the more human and therefore better.

Like all sitcoms, The Good Place is a sitcom about moral anxiety. Aristophanes, Western Civilization’s greatest sitcom writer ever, robed these anxieties in the clothing of the day. The anxieties of gender and war in Lysistrata, of national identity and purpose in The Frogs, of government and society in The Birds. What to do and how to do it? How did we get here and where do we go from here? And all with a knowing laugh and a bittersweet taste on clucking of tongues. In Aristophanes, people rarely die, but they remain stuck living with the dread of Athenian life as the Spartans march ever closer.

The Good Place succeeds because it wraps in clever writing and absurdist antics our foundational questions and conversations about identity, desire, and choice. But it has tackled these questions through the lens of formal philosophy within the safe space of eternity. Its hook is that everyone is already dead. So, everything is about being and nothing is about time. That’s enough to catch our attention, but what keeps us watching is that The Good Place takes as its premise up front the shared notion of ultimate (and arguably timeless) concerns and goes from there. What are we doing and how do we do it? To state the obvious absence in this series, God is never considered or mentioned in these questions.

Opposed to before when he worked entirely with philosophers, through his relationship with Simone, Chidi now adds natural science and data analysis of the brain. During all of this, he latches on to the idea that “we choose to be good because of our bonds to other people” and he wants to pursue understanding that shared bond of near-death through a combination of philosophy and natural science. We can guess that, as a moral philosopher, Chidi’s deep understanding of the philosophy of science from before Aristotle through at least Thomas Kuhn is not that strong. But this new twist offers us something very Platonic at St. John’s University: the first two seasons of the show were arguably in a world of forms and we are now in the material world. Science and the scientific method is the language of this world, not abstract thought and ideas. As The Doorman warns, Michael has no power here.

And neither does Trevor, the new fifth member of the group. Trevor and Michael must act as competing demon and angel to affect in only human ways human lives. All of this occurs under the negligent eye of the partially impartial Gen, The Judge. But is this cosmos all that it seems? Are the four really on Earth or is it something beyond The Bad and Good Places? Where does that Bridge at the beginning of the episode really lead to? The bad puns and accents are alive and well in this Australia. Is it really The Land Down Under or is it a Hell all its own? What extra layer has Gen added to this all too human comedy? Third time’s the charm, I guess. But I’m not converted, yet.

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On September 11th, Ritual, and Radiohead.

2018-09-11T15:29:59.000-04:00

Today is the seventeenth anniversary of when aircraft knives cut through the cool, blue sky into the fabric of our lives. It always happened this morning. It always is like it was yesterday. Such is life after trauma. Such is life after trauma. I keep saying that. I keep hearing myself say that, as I am laboring to metabolize my memory, to get to somewhere beyond my experience. I look at myself from outside myself. There is distance between us, myself and I. At least, that’s what I’m going for. Yet my experience can only fold into who I am. It is a part of me. I can’t get away. I don’t want to get away. Don’t leave me. Leave me alone.

Ritual is a kind of performative container, a sphere around and conduit attached to a series of actions that is repeated, the meanings reinterpreted through time and space. Rituals relieve us of re-creating entire worlds and understandings for ourselves. The container, the movements are already well-worn for us. Sometimes, we can abandon our faiths in God or each other, but we will return to the rituals that surrounded ourselves with them. We have the word “habit” for our rituals we find most banal. The force and gravity of monuments, such as they are, resist, they combat the force of habit. I won’t even acknowledge the banality of its shorthand date, my September 11, 2001 resists such banality.

Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” has always served as my monument toward (and it is always toward) this day. In the wake of traumatic events, we tend to create bespoke monuments to anchor ourselves to our experiences. Tethers offer range and limits. They keep us close, if only close enough. This song is my tether. It keeps me from running off in despair.

The lyrics are like the Revelation of John of Patmos. It is a revealed story of a future told in retrospect. The vision is fantastical, impossible, nonsensical. the vision is intensely personal, hopeful, and permanently resolute. The story can be told in past tense because of the safety to share it.

I jumped in the river, what did I see? I think of the billowing clouds of smoke and concrete and ash billowing across the harbor, the myriad ferries and boats gathering people to take them to safety. I think of the people jumping from the Towers, the Towers at the junction of the Hudson and East Rivers. They can only fall to the street below. They cannot fly over the river, except this one person. This person plunges into the churning Hudson and sinks.

Black-eyed angels swam with me. Bruised, ethereal creatures accompany this person below the surface of the waves. They are messengers. They are ministers. They hover around this person in the water, their wings undeterred by the current. This person is not alone.

A moon full of stars and astral cars. Under the water there is the soft-lighted moon, who manifests impossible, cosmic physics. The heavens are within her. Vehicles shuttle people through the vacuum of space here in the ocean. The R and W trains, the A and C trains. They fly and they arrive on time. There is wonder. Space and water, they are beyond the raging earth above.

And all the figures I used to see. Every shape and outline, everything of their entire life up to this moment. Every memory is present. All life in New York City is here, every bodega cat, every other skyscraper, every summer evening and every morning coffee. Their life unspools before them, the most habitual and ordinary.

All my lovers were there with me. Every partner of desire, love, and heartbreak is present. The remnants of every date. Every one-night stand. Every divorce. They are not alone. They were gone, but they are here, in the water, under the water. They have gathered for this moment. The intensity of intimacy made manifest.

All my past and futures. The singular thread of experience, of a lived-life is present and every possible trajectory from the point of the present is observed. Everything action and event of an individual’s life before them. Every apartment move and every taxi ride. Every little moment of city life.

And we all went to Heaven in a little row boat. Everyone who has shared this intimacy, this experience of life, this heightened awareness of self and other, fit into a tiny skiff to row from bathos to the sky. There is an escape from the murky waters, from the raging fires, from the cool air, from the falling concrete. From every element, there is escape. There is release from New York City, the only true release: to above it.

There was nothing to fear, nothing to doubt. There is no anxiety or uncertainty. The frisson of Gotham is gone. All is resolved. And is this not what the vision of Heaven is about? This utopian dream of assured present and future? The Towers have fallen, one after the other. Everyone else is left behind with the anxieties that come with war and death.

And the verses are repeated. A ritual is begun. The memory is pressed into the wax. We will listen to the song again until… what… exhaustion? Relief? Something not yet come. Such is memory and memorialization.

And yet the video above is so different from the lyrics. The lyrics proclaim an alternative vision beyond jumping into the water from what we watch. The lyrics proclaim a hope not made manifest before our eyes. The diver swims down to the ruins of a world lost to the elements and the animals. And the diver finds their home and remains until finally… well, that part of the song is without words.

What we see and what we hear and what we believe are often different from each other. And our rituals are a way of combining our senses and imaginations for something toward… what? A future? A past? A self? A community? Yes, all of this and more for the eternal present in each of our lives. We are always now. And for some of us in the rituals we have inherited and created, we take part in relating to ourselves, each other, and our God seeking to make sense of it all. This is church. This is prayer. This is lamentation. But there are many moments when ourselves, each other, our God, these events to not make sense. There is only now. And so we comfort ourselves and each other, as best we can, as best we know how, and hope and believe that there is a God that comforts us, too.

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