Burning from Beginning to End with Scott Cairns

10 October 201810 October 2018 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

Photo by Fredrick Kearney Jr on Unsplash

It’s all here. Beginnings and endings. Heaven and hell. Divine intentions and bodily appetites. That’s what you get with the poet Scott Cairns. Look for the kitchen sink. I’m sure it’s in there, too.

Recently I came back for a season to Philokalia: New & Selected Poems, Cairns’ 2002 collection. It’s as rich and evocative as I remembered. Nobody captures the sensuality of angels brushing the earth and women brushing their hair like Cairns. He’s going to linger on the moment, as all good poets do. After all, “So little to be done, and so much time.” (67)

Let’s start at the creation. Actually before. In ‘The Beginning of the World’ Cairns gives us audience with the Lover who hungers for a Beloved prior to anything coming into view:

God’s general availability, His brooding peckishness, an appetite and predilection—even before invention—to invent, to give vent, an all but unsuspected longing for desire followed by the eventual arrival of desire’s deep hum, its thrumming escalation and upward flight into the dome’s aperture, already open and voluble and without warning giving voice. (121)

Then, let’s go to the apocalypse—‘The End of Heaven and the End of Hell’ in a 12-part poem titled ‘Disciplinary Treatises.’ The destination turns out to be the same no matter how you’ve lived. We lose the “feeble fretwork” of this age and we become ourselves.

And that long record of our choices—your

every choice—is itself the final

body, the eternal dress. And, of course,

there extends before us finally a measure

we can recognize. We see His Face

and see ourselves, and flee. And shame—old

familiar—will sustain that flight unchecked,

or the Ghost, forgotten just now—merest

spark at the center—will flare, bid us turn

and flame unto a last consuming light:

His light, our light, caught at last together

as a single brilliance, extravagant,

compounding awful glories as we burn. (132)

Scott Cairns

Like Jamie Quatro, whose novel Fire Sermon earlier this year mined the quarry of desires, carnal and spiritual, Cairns is not afraid of burning. He knows the impossibility of staying on the surface. Even when he pretends, as in the poem ‘Taking Off Our Clothes,’ “that there is no such thing/as metaphor,” he fails. “[T]his could all/be happening in Kansas,” he says, and yet his proposed simple encounter with a lover becomes, despite itself, transcendent.

Cairns has now created a body of work that stands among the best of any Christian poet. His range is impressive, from the quotidian to the esoteric. And the depth of his study shows through, sometimes lightly, often with surprising depth. As when he investigates the Greek word nous, showing why it is more than mind and describes it thus:

Dormant in its roaring cave,

the heart’s intellective appetite grows dim,

unless you find a way to wake it. (26)

And then he goes on to suggest an exercise to do just that.

I spend many mornings with a Scott Cairns poem. His collection Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life, which I reviewed earlier, is a great introduction to the Christian spiritual tradition. Philokalia is a great introduction to the poet himself. And so much more.

In Praise of Bad Writing: David Bentley Hart’s New Testament

3 October 20186 October 2018 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The New Testament, as translated by the influential Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, is bad. But that’s what makes it such a good read for Christians who need their settled understandings tweaked.

Hart’s new translation doesn’t strive for literary heights. He has an ear for beautiful language, something that comes through in all of his writing. But here he aims for reproducing the feel and flavor of the original Greek texts and, sad to say, for all their influence, most of the original authors were not great writers.

Hart allows that Luke and Hebrews show some elevated style, but don’t get him started on John, the author of Revelation. In Hart’s translation, the sea of fire in Revelation 19:20 becomes a marsh. An accompanying note contains a bit of uncharacteristic Hart-ian understatement: “In very antique usage (Homer, for instance), the term [translated as marsh] could be used as a poetic trope for the sea; but John does not give the impression of being someone possessed of a classical education.” (527)

If the marsh of fire sounds unusual, that’s kind of the point. Hart says, “I would hope my translation would succeed, in many places, in making the familiar strange, novel, and perhaps newly compelling.” (xvii) Of course, sometimes it only succeeds in making the familiar obscure, as when Hart turns Paul’s prayer in Philippians 1:9 for love overflowing “with knowledge and full insight” [NRSV] into love that abounds “in full knowledge and in all percipience.” Glad we cleared that up.

A “Concluding Scientific Postscript” helps explain some of the rationale for Hart’s approach. Here you learn why ‘gehenna,’ often translated as ‘hell,’ has become the ‘Vale of Hinnom’ and why ‘eternity’ becomes, in places, “that Age.” You also learn why the prologue to John is so difficult to render in English and what you can lose when you do.

Hart himself does not recommend his translation for liturgical use. He knows it’s odd. But he has aimed to communicate the strangeness and urgency of the early Christian community. Hart knows the environment from which these texts emerge—the complex era of the Roman imperial age in which Jewish and Greek ideas were producing radical new religious movements. And he feels, behind the imprecise and breathless texts of the early Church, the energy of converts eager to share a life-changing message at all costs.

David Bentley Hart

Sure, he’s got his ongoing interests and projects that he brings to his work. Every translator does and Hart is far more upfront about his than most. That didn’t stop N.T. Wright from slagging Hart’s translation in a January Christian Century review. “[Hart’s] two main claims (to be “literal” and “undogmatic”) are not borne out,” the prolific former Bishop of Durham notes, “and the promise of displaying the strangeness of early Christian life disappears behind different kinds of strangeness”—a strangeness that Wright attributes to Hart’s theological agenda of anti-Augustinianism and universalism.

Watching the resulting Wright-Hart dust-up has entertained many theologians who know that Hart has never met an intellectual dispute that he couldn’t milk for spectacle. During the brief heyday of the New Atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, Hart wrote the most gleeful Christian apology I ever read—a book whose title betrayed its consistent tone: Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.

In 2012 Wright published his own New Testament translation, and following the Christian Century review, Hart has now taken to accompanying his defense of his translation with an attack on Wright’s as “the single worst translation ever done of the New Testament.” In a recent interview with Jason Micheli on the Crackers and Grape Juice podcast he denounced Wright’s habit of “writing down to the common Christian, whom he apparently thinks is a four-year-old recovering from a concussion.”

With his intemperate exuberance and keen intellect, Hart resembles no one more than the Apostle Paul, who once told a church, (as Hart translates it in Galatians 5:12), “Would that they who are causing you agitation might just castrate themselves!” It’s the language of people who have been converted into a new Kingdom.

“This extremism is not merely an occasional hyperbolic presence in the texts or an infrequent intonation sounded only in their most urgent moments; it is their entire cultural and spiritual atmosphere. The New Testament emerges from a cosmos ruled by malign celestial principalities (conquered by Christ but powerful to the end) and torn between spirit and flesh (the one, according to Paul, longing for God, the other opposing him utterly). There are no comfortable medians in these latitudes, no areas of shade. Everything is cast in the harsh light of a final judgment that is both absolute and terrifyingly imminent. In regard to all these texts, the qualified, moderate, commonsense interpretation is always false.” (xxvii)

If you see that in Hart’s translation, he will feel he has done his job. However bad it seems.

A Quick Reminder of Why Wesley Still Matters

24 June 201824 June 2018 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

John Wesley

John Wesley has been claimed by so many different heirs and used to so many and varied ends that it is refreshing to have someone like Hal Knight come along and point us back to the source. John Wesley: Optimist of Grace, his new entry in the Cascade Companions series designed for nonspecialist readers, comes along just as the United Methodist Church is wrestling with what it means to be faithful to Wesleyan tradition in the 21st century. Knight, who is a professor of Wesleyan Studies at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, is not going to take sides in that conversation, but he is going to point out why Wesley still matters.

In 10 brief chapters and a conclusion, Knight offers a biography of Wesley that is oriented toward his developing thought in relation to other movements of the 18th century, particularly Moravian and Calvinist strains. Knight traces Wesley from his early (and lifelong) understanding of salvation as holiness of heart and life to his 1738 discovery of the knowledge of God’s love as gift and power, which became the engine of his later work.

We go with John and his brother, Charles, to Georgia. We travel with him to Bavaria to learn from the Moravians. And we glimpse his extraordinary ministry of preaching and writing throughout Britain. But Knight keeps the focus on the controversies that fired him, the sermons and writings that revealed his deepening theology, and the Methodist apparatus he developed to support that theology.

The Wesley that emerges is not the rigorous obsessive we sometimes imagine from his journals, but a man truly fired by a notion of God’s love. Wesley, in Knight’s telling, even has a warmth that keeps him in relationship with others, like George Whitfield, who could have been styled fierce opponents.

Dr. Hal Knight

In the end, Knight chooses to highlight how Wesley could challenge Americans of our day. In opposition to those who think that Christian salvation “is solely about our post-mortem destiny,” Wesley insists “it is about receiving a new life in the present, one that lasts through all eternity.” (141) American spirituality, so prone to the belief that “there is a wonderful self inside of us waiting to be actualized,” could use a dose of Wesley’s realism about the human condition and the way “salvation comes from outside of ourselves, as a free gift of God, given through the cross of Jesus Christ and actualized in our lives by the Holy Spirit.” (142) And Wesley’s focus on the need for accountable community and spiritual discipline could upend “the pervasive privatization of religion in American culture.” (143)

Talking about these things is a much better goal than trying to draw Wesley into the denominational anxieties of the largest Methodist body that traces back to him. Wherever the UMC goes, it will need to come back to Wesley’s genius if it is once again to be about “spreading scriptural holiness throughout the land.” That holiness is an appealing goal in Knight’s retelling. And the book itself whets one’s appetite to know what has been and what will be.

Cascade Books provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. You can buy this book through Amazon and support this site:

Letter to My Haitian Neighbor As You Leave Town

22 June 201822 June 2018 / alejojoyner / 2 Comments

I saw you yesterday pulling on a frayed nylon cord to tie down the mattresses on the roof of your car. You’re leaving town and we never got to say ‘hello.’

I’ve seen you in the Food Lion and the Wal-mart and I’ve been tempted to try to speak. But my high school French, which I would use to approximate your Creole, always comes out as rusty Spanish—the language I’m used to breaking out in talking to my immigrant neighbors. I know. Haiti is a long way from Mexico in so many ways, but I’m sometimes laughably limited. I also order in Spanish at the Chinese restaurant.

So, no, we haven’t said ‘hello.’

And now you’re leaving.

I imagine that it has been a strange sojourn for you here in this small town. Traveling to this rural peninsula in Virginia to work on farms and in chicken processing plants must have seemed a hopeful opportunity after the earthquake in 2010. Our government gave you Temporary Protected Status to allow Haiti to recover and now it has revoked that authorization, giving you until next summer to go home.

photo by Kaique Rocha via Pexels

Our town changed when the Haitian community came. Oh, not in the ways some politicians say. You didn’t run down the town. You occupied buildings that would have remained vacant. You didn’t ruin the economy. You kept Dollar General and our legendary five-and-dime humming. You opened a Caribbean market on the square. You began a church. You filled jobs when the poultry farms expanded. Crime didn’t spike. The town police say we have one of the lowest crime rates in the state.

So, even though we never got to know one another, I felt like our town was better with you here. I wish we’d gotten to share stories. It is not good for people sharing the same land to be ignorant of each other’s deepest hopes and needs. We need to see each other’s humanity.

The Bible I preach from tells us to love the sojourner because we were once sojourners [Deuteronomy 10:19]. A wandering Aramean was our ancestor. [Deut. 26:5] We will always share something with the immigrant.

These are hard times for immigrants in my country. Most of us found our way here from someplace else, but we have begun to believe that ‘foreign’ means ‘threatening.’ We talk about immigrants as criminal, predatory, and dangerous. We use verbs like “infest” to describe your actions. Our fear leads us to closing our eyes to the gifts you bring and the people you are. Our fear leads us to cruelty. Unfathomable cruelty.

This week we couldn’t close our eyes because we couldn’t close our ears. The sounds of children being torn from their parents to be caged in old Wal-marts converted into warehouses couldn’t be ignored. Something is broken, not only in our immigration system, but in our spirits as well. And the most vulnerable, as always, suffer the consequences.

Your story is not so loud. You came quietly and you are leaving just as quietly. If I had not passed you yesterday, I would not have known. I would just notice slowly that the town was changing again. The malanga and plantains would disappear from the shelves. I would notice fewer people walking around town and wonder where they’d gone. There won’t be crying children on the news when you leave. Just more silence.

Like much of rural America, our silence is growing as our population is declining. Each year in our county there are more deaths than births. The most common narrative for our young people is that they leave for college or job opportunities elsewhere and they don’t come back. The result is a spiritual crisis of confidence. You interrupted our stories of decline. You helped us understand that we are not dead. But we live by being connected.

Yes, we need border control. We need an immigration reform that makes sense—that keeps people and businesses from having to live in a furtive secret economy. And if you have the opportunity to return to your home after it has recovered from a devastating disaster (something that I don’t believe has really happened in Haiti), of course, that is a good thing.

But I will miss you. You reminded me that our stereotypes of what we are can be challenged. That we could be something different. Something more.

I watched your car as it bumped out of the dirt driveway and onto the road, the edges of the mattresses flopping over the rooftop. The back right wheel lacked a hubcap and there was a worrying squeal coming from the engine. I wondered where you were headed. I wondered if you would make it safely.

I wondered where we were headed, too.

Thanks to Yossi Klein Halevi and his Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor for the inspiration for this letter.

Squinting Through This Latent, Bleak Obscurity with Scott Cairns

24 February 20188 March 2018 / alejojoyner / 1 Comment

photo by Christopher Campbell via Unsplash

“Just now, we squint to see the Image through

this latent, bleak obscurity. One day, we’ll see the Image—

as Himself—gleaming from each face.

Just now, I puzzle through a range

of incoherencies; but on that day,

the scattered fragments will cohere.”

If you don’t recognize 1 Corinthians 13 in this translation, perhaps that good. Our hearing of that passage in the context of many a moony marriage ceremony has ruined our ears. Eros has something to do with God, but Paul was after so much more.

The poet Scott Cairns gets that. He has spent a career exploring the mystical dimensions of love in its human and divine expressions, sometimes in the hideaway Orthodox monasteries that lure adventurous pilgrims and usually in the company of dusty Greek texts. When he translates the ancients, as he does in the collection Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life[Paraclete Press, 2007], he is dipping his hand into a deep current of faith and prayer. The result is verse, poetry at its best, that takes texts from Christian history that many consider impenetrable and renders them luminous.

Take this body- and life-affirming fragment from Irenaeus:

“The tender flesh itself

will be found one day

—quite surprisingly—

to be capable of receiving,

and yes, full

capable of embracing

the searing energies of God.

Go figure. Fear not.” (5)

Or a meditation on ‘His Image Recovered’ by Athanasius:

“Here, belovéd numbskulls, is a little picture: You gather,

one presumes, what must be done when a portrait on a panel

becomes obscured—maybe even lost—to external stain.

The artist does not discard the panel, though the subject must return

to sit for it again, whereupon the likeness is etched once more upon

the same material. As He tells us in the Gospel, I came

to seek and to save that which was lost—our faces, say.” (15)

But don’t expect all roads to lead to clarity or enlightenment. Cairns invites us to pause with words as well. One word he leaves untranslated when it arises—nous. He explains in the introduction that “it is the center of the human person, where mind and matter meet most profoundly, and where the human person is mystically united to others and to God.” (xiii-xiv)

Scott Cairns

The nous is the place from which Cairns has been seeking to live and he finds good companions in this volume. You would expect the passionate, hot-blooded saints like Gregory of Nyssa, Catherine of Siena, Richard Rolle of Hampole, Julian of Norwich, and Thérèse of Lisieux. But Cairns mines the works of the more cool-headed and detached as well — Basil the Great, Meister Eckhart, and Gertrude of Helfta. Besides learning some great names, the reader is likely to be seduced into seeking out more from the wealth of Christian tradition.

Love’s Immensity has been sitting with my morning reading for a couple of years now. I’m returning it to the shelf, but I expect it to be back. Beauty never really fades from memory. Nor does true love as Paul would have it:

“In all of this, both now and ever,

faith and hope and love abide, these

sacred three, but the greatest of these (you surely

must have guessed) is love.” (4)

The Power Asks Us to Consider #WeToo: A Review

23 January 2018 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

photo by Nathan McBride via Unsplash

Naomi Alderman’s provocative new book, The Power, is more simply described without the definite article. Power, and how it infuses human relationships, particularly gender relationships, hums though this book like an electric current. And just like that current, it can turn fearsome and deadly in an instant.

The Power is an acknowledged heir to Margaret Atwood’s recently-rediscovered The Handmaid’s Tale, right down to its bright red cover. Atwood’s dystopian feminist novel imagines a world where a neo-Puritan patriarchy has descended on America. Alderman reverses the dynamic, depicting a future where young women have suddenly developed a new muscle, called a skein, that allows them to deliver an electric charge through their bodies. Suddenly women have the kind of physical dominance that men have historically presumed and the effects ripple through .

Four characters provide different windows on the world created by the newly electrified women (and rattled men). Roxy is the daughter of a London crime boss who avenges her mother’s death and powers her way to become the head of the family business, now as the leader of a cartel smuggling Glitter, a drug that enhances the electrical capacity of women. Tunde is a Nigerian man who chronicles the rising tide of empowered women and the male resistance. Margot is a US politician who uses the power like a sheathed knife, rising to the top circles of the government.

Allie, an orphaned Southern girl, takes, for my money, the most interesting journey. Gifted with healing abilities and guided by an ambivalent mystical voice, Allie develops an alter ego as Mother Eve, a charismatic religious figure who reinterprets Christian theology from a female perspective.

This Eve speaks in the language of the Bible but it is a Scripture that turns old patriarchal readings inside out. For this Eve, the tree is not an Edenic image of women’s downfall, but the symbol of The Power itself, branching upward, “the outline of a living thing straining outward, sending its fine tendrils a little further, and a little further yet.” (3) When Allie is installed as an advisor to the queen of a woman-dominated breakaway state in Moldova, she occupies a chapel filled with enameled paintings of female saints and Eve herself “receiving the message from the Heavens and extending her hand filled with lightning.” (252)

Eve knows the old stories about kings taking daughters to slave in the palace. (Samuel’s warning to Israel about the dangers of a king from 1 Samuel 8 serve as a preface to the book.) But Eve uses the stories to praise female leadership. But then Eve/Allie struggles with dark temptations as she assumes ever more exalted status.

Like Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, this book has a frame that adds another dimension to the read. The Power begins and ends with an exchange of letters between a male author seeking the advice of more connected and experienced writer named Naomi. Neil Adam Armon (an anagram of Naomi Alderman) has written a fictionalized history of the period right before The Cataclysm, a event in the distant path that led to the world of female dominance. This history constitutes the bulk of The Power and it is fascinating to see the woman writer push back agains a history that challenges her preferred narrative.

Naomi Alderman

Alderman develops this thought experiment with great thoroughness. The Power is not a fantasy of wish fulfillment nor does she describe a utopia. The ripple effects in religion, in politics, in relationships, and in culture are varied and unpredictable. Women struggle to understand how to use this new power, how to reveal it, how to control it, how to hide it. Men conform, submit, resist, and curdle. It’s not a pretty sight.

But in the end the book does what all good science fiction does—it puts our own time in sharp relief and forces us to grapple with the unsaid and the un-dealt-with. The effect of The Power is to ask its reading audience, men and women, to consider what is essential and what is merely a distortion caused by power relationships. In an era when the nakedness of power and retrograde gender relationships are both celebrated and resisted in novel ways, this book, with all its brutality, gets your attention. It warns that if we don’t find ways to see one another, in all our potency and vulnerability, we will always be playing with the third rail—the one that has the power to kill.

As a pastor, I am also brought back to the role that feminist biblical interpretation has played in my own traning. Much of Mother Eve’s reimagining of religion finds its roots in work done in the 70s and 80s in Christian seminaries. Like the feminist scholars who helped form me, Eve challenges what counts as orthodoxy and questions whether the male language and imagery of the tradition is essential or merely patriarchal accretion.

FOOTNOTE – Alderman is also behind the popular fitness app “Zombies, Run!” I’ve been using this for the past couple of years to get me motivated. She’s a great storyteller in that format, too, and there’s even an episode that includes Margaret Atwood checking in from post-Zombie apocalypse Toronto. The story, and the sound of hungry zoms breathing down your neck, will keep you moving!

Love Stinks (But it Also Wins): A Delayed Review of Rob Bell

12 January 2018 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

photo by Javier Ramos via Unsplash

The problem with love is it’s easy to sentimentalize. O heck, there are many problems with love, sentimentalizing being the least of them. Love distorts our vision. Love lets us down. Love keeps us in relationships we should have left. Love is a knife to the heart and a passionate madness. Yes, love is a many splendored thing, but let’s be honest: Sometimes, to quote the J. Geils Band, love stinks.

The problem with Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell is not that the title is wrong. Christian theology is all about love winning. I high-fived Bishop James Swanson mid-sermon on the floor of the Virginia Annual Conference last summer right after he said roughly that.

The thing is: we’re not the best judges of love.

41SJcK3PlDL I’m a little late to the game on Love Wins. It has been seven years since Bell made a splash with this book which challenges the idea that sinners will suffer consciously and eternally in a literal hell unless they find Jesus. This was the book that led to infamous John Piper tweet which said simply, “Farewell, Rob Bell.” And the following year Rob Bell had said farewell—to the large Mars Hill Church he had pastored in Michigan, in part because of the fallout from his flirtation with universalism.

Bell landed on his feet under the wing of Oprah, who was enamored with Rob’s follow-up book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God. Becoming a celebrity spiritual guide only confirmed the suspicions of those who see Bell as a theological lightweight. But it’s unfair to measure a man by his Nielsen ratings.

Let’s measure by the book. And Love Wins does speak to an honest hunger among us to know a God of love. Bell wants to give a lot of windows on that question. He uses biblical examples like the parable of the prodigal son and the plight of the rich young ruler. He pokes holes in the otherworldly theology behind an old, evangelical picture of a cross straddling a chasm between the darkened ‘here’ and the gleaming ‘there.’ He celebrates the kitchen floor conversion of a man who found God in the midst of smoking pot. There are many ways Jesus can meet us, he concludes.

What Bell doesn’t do is to spend a lot of time describing who this Jesus is and how the Christian tradition has talked about the work of atonement. “Not his job or his point,” you might say. He obviously wants to talk about how Jesus’s story is the story of love. “The love of God for every single one of us,” Bell says on the first page. “It is a stunning, beautiful, expansive love, and it is for everybody, everywhere.” (vii)

True, that. But it’s also a stunning, beautiful, specific love that finds its expression in the Christian story centered on a crucified Jesus. That’s the story that lights up all those other stories that Bell brings to the table.

Arguing about hell is like judging a car by one ball bearing. Whether you like it or not doesn’t help understand how the thing works. And you’ll never understand the piece without comprehending the whole.

Rob Bell, Religion News Service

Which is not to say that Bell is wrong about hell. In his afterword he points the way to C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce which is pretty great read and which offers a plausible rendering of what hell is within the tradition. But the tradition holds the key, tends the light, and marvels at God’s love, which is unlike any of those loves we celebrate in our culture.

And to get a little lyrical about it: We see it as compassion—this willingness of God to go to the far country, to restore the divine image in the works of clay. We call it love—the greatest love—but it has a character altogether different from any kind of love we know. Our pale reflections are tinged by fear and grief and pain, sentimentality and need and failure.

But what is this love which is just doing its work—not out of necessity but out of some grand unicity—its beauty of a piece with its eternal wholeness? It is love because God is reconciling all things to Godself in Jesus Christ. Of course, we experience this as love—of the unmerited kind that so captivates us and makes for tender parables of prodigal sons restored and dead children brought back to life. But Christ is just doing his job. ‘Today and tomorrow I am with you and on the third day I’m in Jerusalem.’

This is the mundane job of the divine—to knit together what is wounded and to blaze a trail where there is no way. But it comes with purely superfluous flourishes—touches that are in no way required. A tear at the tomb of a friend. The sensual pleasure of bathing in nard. The intimacy of a mother and child. Bread passed around a table and a shared cup.

Is it any wonder we reduce it all to love winning? Rob Bell has the same instincts.

God, love, God, love: The Winn Collier Interview Concludes (3 of 3)

21 December 2017 / alejojoyner / 1 Comment

In previous segments of this interview with Winn Collier we talked small towns, small churches, and his use of letters to tell the story of Granby Presbyterian Church, the fictional congregation at the heart of Collier’s new book. Love Big. Be Well.:Letters to a Small-Town Church is a big-hearted, hopeful book that celebrates what Christian community can be. My review of the book is accessible through the title link above.

In this segment we talk about the book, the recent Texas church shooting, and the rhythm of writing:

I was reminded of [Marilynne Robinson’s] Gilead as I read your book. When your preacher, Jonas, starts talking of the virtues of blessing, it reminded me of the story in Gilead of trying to baptize the cats and just the importance of blessing. They’re both very human stories and a very human vision of what life in a community of faith is all about.

How do you connect that to how God works in the world? I’m thinking about Karl Barth who said, “You can’t speak about God by talking about man in a loud voice,” but in a sense, you are kind of pointing that direction through human relationships.

Again I go back to Incarnation. In the world I grew up in there was a grand separation between God and the rest of the world. The culture and the creation and all these things really, they were just functional they had nothing to do with God’s revelation to us. I was overwhelmed and saved by sacramental theology and so I reject that. But I am aware that it’s possible, if you never name God, then our human mind really can forget God.

Jonas, in Love Big. Be Well., talks about how his job as a pastor is to stand within the community Sunday after Sunday and point to God and to speak the words of God and to speak the word love and speak ‘God, love, God, love’ into the world. And that’s how I see it. I think that’s fundamentally my job.

I think that’s what a small church, or every church, should do—to stand in the middle of this community, to be enmeshed within it, just as Jesus was, not separate from it, not trying to draw these huge dividing lines, but to say, “We are here. We are immersed. It is messy. It’s wheat and tares. We’re going to be here. We’re going to claim the love and presence of God in the world.”

That’s a destabilizing factor because I think God is a disruptive reality. If the church forgets its mission to be the presence of God and not just a vague idea of God as we define it but the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ…If we don’t speak that presence into the world then we are abandoning our identity and our calling and ultimately, we are abandoning the possibility for the depth of healing and redemption that God is inviting us to bring into the world.

So it definitely is not just, in a loud voice, saying all our ideas. But it’s also not divorced in any way. It is manifest through or built through friendships and dinners and work and all the things that make up human existence because that’s how God has chosen to reveal himself.

We’re talking in the week after the shooting in Texas in a small church. I was doing some writing this morning to the churches here on the Shore about church security and struggling with what that means and trying to come to terms with what it means to be vulnerable, which is part of our call as a community. Do you have any reflections in light of that event about what small churches mean?

I’ll tell you one thing I love: I love the way the community of Sutherland Springs, even ones who were not part of that church on a Sunday rhythm, seemed to see that church as very much part of who they were and their identity together. I think that’s potent.

My hunch is that in Granby (the fictional town of the book), Jonas would have had a couple people who really wanted to make sure the next Sunday they had their fire arms to use. I think Jonas would have resisted that with everything within him simply because we are peculiar people who are here to proclaim God. And to proclaim God means to lay down your life and it’s very hard to simultaneously say you’re going to lay down your life and at the first trouble pick up a weapon.

“To proclaim God means to lay down your life and it’s very hard to simultaneously say you’re going to lay down your life and at the first trouble pick up a weapon.”

At the same time, I think Jonas is kind of befuddled about some of these things. He’s not a consistent pacifist but in his heart he is. So, I think he would struggle with that like all of us are in knowing where is wisdom and where is the prophetic voice. But at the same time, I think he would just keep bringing it back to Jesus and what does it mean to be a people of Jesus and trust it in the long work.

That’s well put because I think the struggle I’ve had this week is allowing the gunman and the incident to determine the field on which we play and the kind of things we talk about and it’s so easy to do because it seems like an easy fix to just say, “Well, if we just had a good guy with a gun at the door, it wouldn’t happen.”

Yeah, and this is for every Christian and every church, but if we can hold on to the fact that we are resurrection people and that death is our enemy but is not our final enemy, then there actually are things worse than dying. If we can release that stranglehold on our heart then it opens up a lot of possibilities. As long as our self-protection is the ultimate god to us and God will never be God then we are ultimately going to make grave errors.

Well how are you finding ways to keep writing a part of your life these days? This is me being curious about how you fit it all in.

I have a weekly rhythm and Monday is set aside as my creative day so anything like writing, sometimes other things, but that’s my day. Most of this book I actually wrote on sabbatical two and a half years ago. I wasn’t planning to finish it but I just knew I wanted to write every day and have that as one of my main practices and it ended up happening.

I’m actually working on a biography now and I’m finding it much more difficult because the kind of research that has to happen is of a different level. I am actually in this precise moment feeling more anxiety about that because that’s basically the time I have. The rest of my time is given to church and family. So, every once in a while, if there’s a week here or there where I don’t have to preach or other things are less pressing I’ll slip in some extra time but I am definitely wondering how this is going to work.

I know that struggle when you’re trying to be precise about some things, like you’d have to do with a research-oriented book, coming back to it after you’ve gone away from it for a while. It’s so much uploading of information again just to get to the point where you can write again.

Yeah that’s right!

photo by Peter Feghali via Unsplash

Anything else about the book that you would particularly like folks to know?

I would be really pleased if people read this book and felt more hopeful. Because I feel like we’re in a time that’s devoid of hope.

Winn Collier is the pastor of All Souls Church in Charlottesville. You can access his blog at winncollier.com.

Heartlands Best Reads of 2017:#5 The Crucifixion

15 December 2017 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

Fleming Rutledge is having a long-overdue moment in the wake of her 2015 book, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. I finally finished it in 2017, qualifying it for this list, and gushed about it in my review, (which you can access through the title link in the previous sentence).

Rutledge sees her book as an exercise of religious imagination, drawing together biblical and theological images of the atonement and exploring their significance. “The principal purpose of this book,” she says, “will be to strengthen the reader’s surmise that the cross of Jesus is an unrepeatable event that calls all religion into question and establishes an altogether new foundation for faith, life, and a human future.” (2)

I credit this book with drawing me back to a love of theology, primarily because Fleming doesn’t insist that such a pursuit be done at the expense of beauty and literature. In fact, she insists on such things.

This is my top theological recommendation these days. Solid, comprehensive, generous, and insightful. With the occasional quote from Flannery O’Conner, Dostoevsky, and MLK. An easy pick.

The Greatness of the Small: A Review of Love Big. Be Well.

14 December 201718 February 2018 / alejojoyner / 3 Comments

When Amy Quitman writes a letter to the unknown pastor that the Pastoral Search Committee hopes to call to their Presbyterian church in the small town of Granby, she includes an invitation that would set the hearts of potential candidates like me aflutter:

We want theology, but we want the kind that will pierce our soul or prompt tears or leave us sitting in a calm silence, the kind that will put us smack-dab in the middle of the story, the kind that will work well with a bit of Billy Collins or Mary Karr now and then. Oh, and we like a good guffaw. I’ll be up-front with you: we don’t trust a pastor who never laughs. (5)

Jonas McAnn, unhappily stationed in a cubicle as an insurance company employee, answers the invite, as you might expect he would. After all, his folder of potential church profiles and questionnaires is sitting beneath a stack of books that includes the likes of John Irving and Karl Barth. Burned by his previous pastorates, Jonas is tired of plans, programs, and church growth strategies. A lover of beauty, he is looking for an opportunity to be a pastor:

“Lots of churches don’t actually want a pastor,” he writes back to Granby Presbyterian. “They want a leadership coach or a fundraising executive or a consultant to mastermind a strategic takeover (often performed under the moniker of evangelism or missional engagement)…Too much pastoral leadership literature recirculates anxious efforts to make the church significant or influential or up-to-date, as if they need to harangue the church into becoming something. I think my job is to remind the church that she already is something. Can we settle down and be who we are, where we are?” (12-13)

The epistolary match-making works and soon Jonas is moving his family to the mountains of Virginia.

Winn Collier’s Love Big. Be Well.: Letters to a Small-Town Church [William B. Eerdman’s, 2017] is a gentle, human love story that begins with these two letters and continues with many more. It is a novel that has big things to say yet finds its transcendence by staying close to home. For instance, when the church plans for a new eucharistic table, two members suggest using trees from the church property and Jonas reports:

Now, every Sunday, we receive grace around a table intricately woven into our story, our place. It’s true that a church in Seattle could feast at this table, but it’s also true that it wouldn’t mean nearly as much to them. Particulars matter. Stories matter. Places matter. (130)

There’s more than a little Wendell Berry in Collier’s small town characters. They value the small, the local, the sustainable. And they celebrate the elemental gifts of long-lived community.

Pastor Jonas is continually directing his congregation’s focus to interactions that could be easily overlooked, such as the significance of a BBQ dinner with friends or breakfast at Stu’s with the Order of the Roasted Bean. “Showing up, doing the work, being together–that’s our liturgy,” Jonas writes to his congregation. “And it matters.” (99)

As a denominational official in The United Methodist Church who works with many pastors and programs, I appreciate Collier’s empathetic portrayal of a small church and its clergy leader. Explicitly and implicitly, those who labor in small churches are often told that they don’t measure up–that they need to be more than they are. Jonas pushes back:

When religious experts suggest an identity update, the whole proposal amounts, in my book, to nothing more than a grand slogan and a fresh coat of paint. We could try to re-envision ourselves as a community center or a social advocacy firm if we want to wrench ourselves trying to fit into someone else’s clothes. But look, we are the church. We’re incompetent at most endeavors, but the Spirit has gifted us with divine energy to live into a simple and straightforward vocation. Gathered at Jesus’s table, we feast on true life and then disperse into our run-of-the-mill lives as witnesses to the Kingdom of this Jesus who loves the whole world. The world needs more of who we are, not less. (26)

Winn Collier

Rural churches and pastors are having a hard time of it these days. The letters that Jonas writes to his parishioners are a tonic for weary souls seeking to be faithful with what always seems like less. Shining through Jonas’s words are those of the author, who shares his art and wisdom as the pastor of All Souls Church in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Winn also writes regularly on his self-titled blog.)

Without calling attention to itself, Collier’s writing delves deeply into questions of prayer, baptism, and the nature and mission of the Church–all sprinkled with humor, quotes from literary and theological greats, and a lot of love.

Jonas McAnn is the kind of pastor I want to have and strive to be. Winn Collier is the kind of writer we all need for such a time as this.

Check out my interview with Winn Collier.