Invisible Cities

Given that I write a lot of book reviews these days, I feel the need to state that this is Not a review of Invisible Cities. It is, nonetheless, personal lit-crit or a commentary on interesting themes that I noticed in the story. It may seem odd for a theology blog to engage this particular story, but I assure you it fits well with many of my past themes. 

This book, however, is what I consider to be an important work of literary art. I believe genuine art must be flexible enough to never be pinned down by one person’s interpretations, so my hope is to not discourage further engagement with the story, but rather the opposite.

As a brief synopsis, Invisible Cities is set in a fictional time and place with real historical characters: Genghis Kahn holding captive the renowned explorer Marco Polo with plans of executing him. Yet there is a catch to Polo’s captivity in that so long as Polo can keep Kahn fascinated with telling him detailed stories about all these cities that Kahn has conquered, though never bothered to visit, then Kahn will never get around to killing him. Thus, Polo tries to endlessly keep the stories going. Though Kahn is never quite sure whether he is being told the truth or not, it works. Khan is captivated by his descriptive stories of exploration.

At face value this entire book can look like a wonderful use of language moving interchangeably between poetry and prose with lots of ingenious word plays, and it definitely is, but it is also more.

There is a moment late in the book where Polo is traversing the countryside pastures, set between the cities, and Polo stops to exclaim that the pastures all look the same. But a shepherd nearby condemns Polo’s blindness to its wonderful differences. This pointedly sets juxtapose what Polo had been pointing out to Kahn about the cities. So, what I see is a possible counternarrative being brewed by Calvino calling forth sight to what the world has become blind to.

To borrow from another book to help make this point, in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, the character Jayber is reflecting on his own invisible hometown and says, “Thousands of leaders of our state, nation, entire administrations, corporate board meetings, university sessions, synods and councils of the church have come and gone without hearing the name Port Williams. And how many such invisible, nameless, powerless little places are there in this world? All the world, as a matter of fact, is a mosaic of little places invisible to the powers that be. And in the eyes of the powers that be all of these invisible places do not add up to a visible place. They add up to words and numbers.” (p.139).

For me, this sums up what Calvino is at least indirectly pointing toward with Kahn's faulty understanding of place. To what degree he might have actually been saying this I cannot say. But if nothing else, Invisible Cities does seem to be a long meditation on difference; specifically difference among those who refuse to ever discover it. Those who cannot see it, power being especially guilty of this, mark all its conquests as being contained by a one-dimensional sameness to be enumerated among its own possessions. It is colonization and colonization is the work of control by creating sameness, but it does so with the consequences of eradicating beauty, choking life and robbing the world of its meaning. 

Yet in the process of this book, Calvino may just be recovering the language that undoes such spells of contentment to this. 

Samaritan Cookbook Review

I once unwittingly wondered why people still bought cookbooks when most recipes were available online. My aunt responded by saying that a good cookbook should be just as much a cultural experience as it is about preparing food because they belong together. To only get a recipe does not contribute to that. From that moment on I had the utmost respect and love for a cookbook that was also capable of drawing its reader into the experience of the people and place it is from.

For most of human history food and its preparation has been a thing of community that belongs to its land and knows it familiarly. Until the dawn of industrialized agriculture, commercial grocery, fast-food and tv-dinners (the real war on family and culture), everyone gathered to take part in growing food, food preparation, eating and even the lost art of conversation which all contributed to the fullness of its social dimension.

My point in opening a book review like this is that the “Samaritan Cookbook” captures this. The Samaritans have long been a people who remained close to their food, land and each other. Most people only know them from the Biblical instance when Jesus responds to the question of “Who is my neighbor?” with the parable of the “Good Samaritan.” To call them “good” was actually scandalizing to its original hearers as the Samaritans at that time were the hated/ostracized remnants out of the northern kingdom of Israel.

However, as this cookbook shows the Samaritans never ceased to be in that place nor did their Jewish way of life ever come to an end: religiously, culturally or dietarily. That they never left the land is very significant toward the heritage of these recipes as their hand has a long history in Middle Eastern cuisine. These recipes have been collected and handed down over many generations, but this is the first time that this specific collection has been translated into English.

As I have been making my way through these recipes, I have noticed familiar Mediterranean flavors, but I am finding a unique fluidity and simplicity in their ingredients and preparation that does not always exist in other cookbooks from these regions. Yet, their simple combinations never lack for taste or nourishment and to me this simplicity tells of their way of life and community. So, I recommend Samaritan Cookbook: A Culinary Odyssey from the Ancient Israelites to the Modern Mediterranean as a learning experience about the Samaritan people through their stories and food.

(I received this book for free from Speakeasy in exchange for an honest review.)

The Mystery of Suffering and the Meaning of God: A Review

(Disclosure: I received this book for free from Speakeasy in exchange for my honest review.)

The Mystery of Suffering and the Meaning of God was written by retired Rabbi Anson Hugh Laytner as an autobiographical sketch and reflection on his life and theology. The book begins with one of the most fascinating interpretations of Job I have ever read in which Job becomes a text that deconstructs and dispels the theodicies of its day.

This creates the launching point for Anson to tell about a long series of tragedies that profoundly marred his life and devastated him in a Job like way, though the wisdom of his wife and friends that pop up in his stories and foot notes are thankfully far more helpful than Job’s. Nevertheless, these tragedies undid much of what he could believe about God and led to his deconstruction of theodicies and reconstruction of how he perceived God, evil, life, loss and hope. He could no longer justify a world where God is a micromanager that allows, as he says, fatalism to replace faith and acquiescence replace acceptance. I would describe this wrestling and new reframing as something of a semiotic shift in his life.

So, if (like me) you go into this book thinking you are going to get a historically faithful rabbinic interpretation on suffering, think again, because that it is precisely what he is protesting against, though towards the end it does show up in his reworking. I will say, however, that it is faithful to the Jewish tradition that follows the path of wisdom over and against offering tidy answers to what is really this mystery of life that we have a choiceless residence in.   

Subsequent to this, what I found most interesting is without stating it as such Anson moves towards an apophatic view of God in which the affirmations about God must be exchanged for the negations of God because the uncreated Creator ultimately is incomprehensible. Making our affirmations about God the central way of “knowing” God, as he more or less shows, leads to an arrogant synthesis between what is knowable and unknowable and even seems to hinder our spiritual growth.

However, some of my cons about this book, of course, come from my own Christian tradition. While the Christian perspective is given voice both positively and negatively (for good reason), it is not really faithful to the Christian view of suffering pre-reformation and fundamentalism. Look no further than how Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor interpret Christ’s suffering, human suffering and death to see the drastic difference, though present Christianity may be more to blame for this than Anson. Yet, the thin understanding of this theology may also stem from his move toward finding hope in something of a Unitarian ideology, which is not to say that religions and cultures have nothing to learn from each other, but in my experience when we attempt to reconcile the differing views of God from one religion to the next as all holding the rightness of our picking and choosing about God, it invariably ends up with mistakes of a farsighted nature about what each religion is really saying.

With that said, I never felt he was being shallow or flighty in his working through any of this. In fact the level of honesty and humility with which he writes about his pain, skepticisms and frustrations on to the final chapters that give way to his very inclusive hopefulness makes him a refreshing a voice. More to the point, love, for him, is the highest moral truth and the foundation of our interconnectedness that forms out of a chaotic universe; it is the one place Anson says he experiences God’s presence the most.  To conclude, his reflection has a way of making his audience of any faith, or none, struggle right along with him, but the insightfulness that emerges from it, I should think, will not make this book a waste of anyone’s time.

Christians and Sabbath

Come to me and I will give you rest (Matt 11:28)

So today’s post is actually me working through a response to a friend, but I thought it would make for interesting food for thought especially if I get input or well thought out rebuttal from my reader(s). The question  actually came out of a long dialogue about Torah/Law and what Christians should be following, but towards the end our conversation became focused on Sabbath rest. The actual question he left me with was not as simple as “Should Christians obey the Sabbath?” but rather pointedly posed like, “Since Sabbath is a 'commandment' don’t you think it grieves God that Christians do not follow the Sabbath?” 

My thoughts on Torah and Sabbath have been main themes in many of my posts over the years, but I did need to stop and be thoughtful about this response. I believe the Torah was never an arbitrary set of rules for Israel to follow, but in many ways were there to set Israel apart and stand in support of what creation was supposed to be in the midst of a world “hell-bent” on undoing itself.

Sabbath was no different in this regard as it was an economic practice that stopped the practice of making 24/7 producers out of people which is a caustic exploitation of life for the personal gain of a Pharaoh. After the Hebrews got out from under the thumb of such a ruler and allow God to lead them, they find a God who does not need them to produce endlessly, but rather rest in the truth that people are woven into the fabric of the cosmos as reflections of its Creator and participators in the unfolding work of creation.

So, do I think it grieves God that Christians do not obey the Sabbath? No, or at least no more than it grieved God that the Hebrew slaves were not "obeying" it prior to leaving Egypt. What I think grieves God is social structures and economic systems that make people into slaves of production and debt and stops each of us from being what we were meant to be: a people at rest in God’s rest that can embody a neighborly economy and culture.[1]  When we are at rest, we are at peace and can thus give rest and peace not just to ourselves and homes, but to our neighbors and to the larger extent our world.

Because we do not live in such a culture it is not realistic to believe that everyone can participate in Sabbath rest and they are by no means grieving God, but the world of economic inequalities that requires this of anyone, especially weighing down those struggling to live, does live at odds with God. So as Christians if you can participate in the rest that gives rest to others, then by all means do it. But, it is because the nature of acquisition has created an environment that erodes the human essence that becomes the reason that we stand against it. Now this is not just a "social justice" diatribe but is what it means to live in communion with God. Thus we now “work” toward NOT participating in the old ways of greed and exploitation but participate in the new creation where God is provider and the needs of each other are more important than our greed. 

So I will end with this, commandments always need the context of God's Spirit living within the human ethos otherwise they become something to entrap each other with, which is the opposite of their function.

[1] While I don’t believe I quoted anyone directly this whole line of thinking is heavily influenced by Walter Brueggemann and Terence Fretheim. And yes, this dovetails nicely with my last post.

Jesus, Good News, Then There’s What We Have

A few weeks ago I saw something that startled me as I was getting ready for church. I turned on the tv and Joel Osteen was on. Believe it or not that’s not what startled me; I’ll get to the startling part momentarily. My kids began to ask me why I am not a big fan of Joel, so in trying to help them understand I said, well let’s listen to him and as it comes up I will tell you what I disagree with. After his opening monologue and misinformed confession about the Bible, his message then followed something like this:

God wants you to succeed in life and He has a destiny set up for you! And good news, God is in control of it and has carefully orchestrated the good and the bad; nothing randomly ever happens! Not just the good is purposely put there, but also the bad from your (proverbial) “closed doors” to someone doing you wrong, to betrayal, but it is all strategically placed there by God to work for your good! Negative circumstances and negative people are just pawns in the hand of God and they cannot stand in your way! God will use those pawns to push you forward into your destiny! [1]

At this point I had to shut it off because I had more to discuss with my kids than I even anticipated like why each one of them were pawns that God was using to get me somewhere, preferably someplace wealthier. They looked horrified, but I felt pretty good about where this whole thing was going.

Okay, what I was really thinking was do I talk to them about freewill vs. determinism and what is in our realm of personal responsibility? Or why this does not logically work out if this is true of what God does for everybody? Or perhaps I should do damage control on why God is not a monster that propelled the Jews into concentration camps for their “destiny,” or explain that this whole message is a self-centered and self-maximizing look at the world that comes at the expense of others.

Then the startling moment hit me, this is not Christianity at all, it is capitalism. It was startling not just because Osteen is viewed by billions of impressionable people every week, but because capitalism in Christian clothing has been more pervasive than I noticed. And it is not just in the health, wealth and prosperity teachings, but also in the practice of our wealthy consumer industries made up of Christian advertisement, high selling worship music, theologically flawed and shallow books, merchandise and teaching sets of endless promises that it can never live up to and some that shouldn’t even be for sale in the first place (Acts 8:18-20).

Now this is not to say that economics and Christianity should be separate, but rather all the scriptural concern about Sabbath, Jubilee, caring for the underclass and God forgiving our debts as we forgive our debtors carries its own economic practices that stand decisively against western capitalism. Capitalism requires greed from its consumers to sustain itself to the point that it would be catastrophic if the majority became satisfied with their current possessions. This in part is why advertisers set out to make you feel inadequate or left out for not owning their product, or they go the direction of nurturing our giving into impulsive desires and cravings. In doing this it has linked itself directly to human desire.

However, in reality if the (roughly) 60% of Americans that claimed Christianity stood against greed and were content with what they had thereby restraining themselves from buying in excess (food, homes, cars, clothes, shoes, endless electronic devices and service plans etc…) we could bankrupt the economy in under a year. So to my point, the modern Christian industries (especially televangelists) participate in and perpetuate this by simple fact that we are a big help to the economy.

What undergirds such economics (and Osteen sermons) is an ideology in which one can and should pursue their ideas of affluence, comfort and freedom without any discernment over the desire itself. But this is opposite to the way of the cross; the way of dying to a self enslaved to desires and passions of the flesh. This is exactly why Christian life is formed with the help of ascetic practices, primarily having periods of concentrated abstinence from what entangles us (food, sex, or binge consumption of most kinds).

Nevertheless, just as capitalist economics is directly linked to fulfilling our desires, so is the particular brand of Christian teaching that floods the Church and media in which God becomes some sugar daddy in the sky that is there to make sure your desires are met in exchange for loyalty, but that is Mammon not YHWH.

Christianity is about communion with God in such a way that the desires of upward mobility get sent packing so that our life can be found in God. Then we become sustained by God instead of our desires, which are really just an attempt to ease the pain of our brokenness and mortality. Yet, we must hold despair and hope together.  We are to remain sober and attentive to the very real anguish that impairs our world, but we also tell a new story that stands against our present despair by living an ethical economic practice that values each other, our ecology and all of life.

As I was saying in a recent post on church as a microcosm, church is the coming together of heaven and earth in its liturgy through the “holy mysteries” of sacrament revealing this New World. As Alexander Schmemann observes, “The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ‘ascend to heaven’ where Christ ascended… For there in heaven they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when, after this ‘liturgy of ascension,’ they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light of ‘joy and peace’ of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses… In church today, we so often find the old world, not Christ and His Kingdom. We do not realize that we never get anywhere because we never leave any place behind.”[2] 

Thus, if you walk into a church that reflects the world you are walking away from, though they may put on an impressive show of music, self-help catch phrases and “you” centered messages, they are still a wasteland of death that have really not done the work of dying to the old world or to self and therefore have no way of discipling others in any Christlike way. Ultimately we are looking for hope in all the wrong places and it forsakes the way of Love and stands against our transcendent Creator. So if your church does not bear witness to a new hope and new world and well a Christlike God, then it might be time to find a new church.

 [1] Somewhat paraphrased, but here's a link to the message #762 titled "It's a Setup".

[2] Alexander Schmemann. For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Press) p. 28.

Land: Ownership to Stewardship (A Poem)

I was born between two trees at the intersection of heaven and earth.

There is a grace and virgin space between self-awareness and self-forgetfulness

Where all that I see belongs to the mystery I do not see at all.

I feel the untouched point in being and nonbeing

Where paradise breathed in is promptly expelled

Yet surrounded by the hell of greed and violence of a possessed people
Who possess what does not belong to them.

Midwives who have forgotten their place

In the space contained by the one who gave us generous belonging.

From the moment earth’s belly swelled

Humans of humus were luminous but still indigenous of dirt.

This dirt stands by as we make her property

And forgivingly takes us back when we fail for the last time.

Someday her silence will break of how she was loved

And how she was not loved at all

And we will only reap deep regret of the harm

We refused to look and see for fear we’d need to change.

For we lived against the grain of love and trust,

As hope was raptured into storehouses

Hoping excessively for ourselves, optimistic

Against the nameless one naming all

Who will mend all the small things well to make all things right. 

Church as Microcosm: Where Heaven and Earth Meet Prt. 2

Emmaus Icon

After writing the first part of this several months back, I finally present its conclusion (I’m sure you were waiting on the edge of your seat). Previously, I was talking about how the church is quite literally structured as the “created order” set right with God. If you don’t have time read it (here) I did this by initially looking at how the Church (especially Orthodox and old Catholic) are structured similar to the tabernacle, architecturally and otherwise, revealing the togetherness of God’s present Kingdom and Earth. But now I want to fill out this microcosmic picture by looking at what it means for the church to be liturgical and sacramental in this context.

To put it succinctly the Church is the icon of the Kingdom of God and we are participating in the life of God reconciling humankind to Himself. Thus we further reflect that through confession, participating in the Eucharist/Communion and finally reconciling with each other. In doing this we return to bearing God’s image.

As God’s image bearers we occupy a unique space at the intersection of Heaven and Earth. Anyone who has been really captivated by Divine Liturgy perceives this as the true reality because Liturgy itself is an embarking on this journey back towards this destination. The doxology opens by announcing our destination toward the blessed “Kingdom of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit now and ever and unto the ages of ages” and the people affirm it with “Amen”. While we mostly talk about this in “symbolic” terms, there is a real movement happening with the Church moving from the “old creation” into the “new creation” within the prayer service. Think of liturgy, matins and vespers as Divine performance art and then some.

As Alexander Schmemann said, “In ‘this world’ there is no alter and the temple has been destroyed.  For the only altar is Christ Himself, His humanity which He has assumed and deified and made the temple of God, the altar of His presence. And Christ ascended into heaven. The altar thus is the sign that in Christ we have been given access to heaven, that the Church is the passage to heaven, the entrance to the heavenly sanctuary, and that only by entering, by ascending to heaven does the Church fulfill herself, become what she is.”[1] This entrance into the new creation, (while it begins in our Baptism) is the Eucharist, not in “physical symbols of spiritual realities”, but in coexistence of Spirit and matter. Now her members become re-membered in what they eat, the Eucharist, and the consubstantiation of God in us is where the healing process begins and where the vertical reconnects with the horizontal. Without going through every part of church and service, the eternal and present presence of God, hidden and manifest, is central to everything happening in the services.

Thus, Church as the microcosm of creation is not really a hard concept, but its meaning and transformative nature is found in the substance of liturgy. Why do I go to the work of saying all this? Because our attentiveness to this participation is also important since we are remembering and living in the story of our journey into Chrstlikeness as-well-as experiencing and becoming God’s grace and forgiveness in the earth as we too become the bread broken and wine poured out. Becoming a people of this rhythm happens here. Church is the starting point of participating in the concrete reality of the Kingdom of God with us.

[1] Alexander Schmemann. For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Press) p. 31.