Tombs For Gods Who Once Spoke

Temples, churches, mosques,
you great piles of stones
gathered against entropy,
the fruits of hard labour,
gathering moss in the rain and
reaching, always reaching
high to poke the underbelly
of heaven.
In all my travels, in all
the steps I’ve climbed
and candle-lit interiors,
heavy with incense and ghee,
I’ve bowed into,
in all the reverent silent spaces
I’ve hushed through,
I’ve heard only this:
‘We are a people who once knew something,
who once understood and had revelation.
And in high excitement
at our divine selection and elevated status
we built these tombs for
the gods who once spoke,
and have since heard
nothing.’

A friend of mine is travelling, and got me thinking about some of the ‘holy places’ I have visited across the world… many of which just have that sense of a room that someone has just left. And sometimes I wonder that’s what temple-building does. God just doesn’t like enclosed spaces; I guess she’s claustrophobic.

Whilst doing some sessions at St John’s College in Durham recently, the question of what community is was raised. There’s a whole lot of talk about ‘living in community’ and ‘faith communities’ and going out to plant ‘missional communities’ – but whilst a lot is written about what faith and mission may be, there seems to be a tacit understanding of community, and the word is often used without much thought – something I’ll admit I’m guilty of too.

Community is, at its most basic, people sharing something in common. This ‘life together’ might be geographical – sharing the same place – or tied to some other interest, like a local club or society. The strength of community is proportional to the importance of the thing held in common.

Christian community is, however, called to be something different. Where community draws people into commonality around a shared place or interest, Christianity draws people around…an absence. At the centre is an ascended, transformed, disappeared figure.

Let’s be clear about this: as Christians we do not gather around Christ. Though we may metaphorically talk about Christ being present with us, this is not physically true. Remember: it could have been. Jesus appeaered in flesh and blood after the resurrection, and shared life with his followers for a short period of time. There is no reason why this could not have continued, but it didn’t: Jesus left.

The Zizekian understanding of this – which I think fails to deal with the post-resurrection appearances properly – is that on the cross God really did die: we are left to take responsibility for our actions in the absence of a Big Other, and this draws us into community.

I’d want to modify that in the light of the resurrection: God has not died, but has chosen to be paradoxically present-absent, and thus chosen to leave us to gather around an absence. Why? Because it is only by gathering around absence that we begin to care for the other.

Communities that form around a present commons tend to work to protect and enclose that commons. This is the history of priestly religion: we gather in the holy temple because this is where our special common grail is. What is distinctive about Christian community is that it gathers around this paradoxically present absence. The resurrection thus entitles us to hope, to faith in the Big Other, but denies us the opportunity to collapse this into an enclosed religion that simply serves those on the inside. It is the absence – the divine ‘black hole’ as it were – that creates the gravity around which we gather, but with nothing at the centre we cannot enclose it, and are thus urged on by the present/absent spirit of Christ to serving those who are other.

To be honest, I think this is something that has been very rarely modelled as it is too challenging. It requires us to be the true atheists – to live as if there were no God – and thus to be the god that the other requires.

Picture: Steve Collins, from Vaux's season on Dirt...

Emerging/Retreating [1] | Emerging/Retreating [2] | Emerging/Retreating [3]

In the comments on the previous post Acetate Monkey asked ‘How did Vaux wind up?’ Resisting the temptation to explain all the ways that Vaux wound people up, I thought I’d post the section of the book that deals a little with that… with another encouragement to go buy it too!

All acts of worship are essentially acts of spiritual cartography. Given that we are destined to see through a glass darkly, our gatherings can only be a representation of a greater reality that we hope for. Our liturgies, our services, our songs, our multimedia offerings are no more than maps of a territory that we have faith we will one day walk in person. We scribble their contours and note down symbols, plotting our bearings and smoothing the folds. But the permanent danger of our institutions is to begin to confuse the map for reality, and worship our particular representation as physically ‘true’.

As any walker or driver will tell you, maps are dead documents as soon as they are printed. (They are bound to be: the most up-to-date and accurate map imaginable would have to represent itself as soon as it was created, which it obviously cannot do until the created thing is present to be represented.) This doesn’t render maps useless, but it does mean that, unless we are prepared to dispense with them and rework them on a regular basis, we are destined to view the world through the eyes of an interesting historic document, but one which bears little relation to the ground it purports to represent.

This was precisely the reason why, after ten years, we decided to put the public face of Vaux, the community I helped establish, to the sword. To many people on the outside it seemed like a strange decision: what we were doing was still ‘successful’. But for those of us on the inside, we knew that the maps that we were using were becoming increasingly dysfunctional and unrepresentative.

We had created a set of practices to fit the topology of our faith, but the ground had now changed. We could either soldier on – with the likely result that someone would get hurt or burn out – or decide that the maps had to go. ‘You can’t stop!’ was one message we had from people outside of Vaux who had never actually been; but that they took encouragement from the fact that something like what we did existed, despite never actually coming themselves, was simply not reason enough to continue. We made the decision, met twice more – once for a public ‘burning of the maps’, and once more for a wake where we celebrated the life that had been – and that was it. We left the building.

Of course, the fantastic hope of the Christian faith is that that is never it. Our story is based on the death and resurrection of Christ – yet we appear so afraid to ever allow things to die.

What I have always been hugely proud of in Vaux was the courage that people showed to go through with this death. I feel that it was a timely one, and that if we had continued with public expressions then the imperfections in our relationships would have grown to irreparable fissures. That never happened, and we are all still in very regular contact, looking for what the next TAZ might be.

I strongly believe that while the Church has an eternal dimension, our manifestations of church should retain a deliberately temporal one. While maintaining healthy networked relationships with fellow-believers, the public expressions of our faith will emerge and spring up in marvellous ways to temporarily liberate a space or time, but will then disappear before they can petrify and harden.

[Looking back for some pictures took me (inevitably) to Steve Collins' excellent archive Small Fire. If you've not had a nose, it's brilliant!]

Emerging/Retreating [1] | Emerging/Retreating [2]

I’m glad Jonny has posted some of his thoughts and responses to these posts on his site, and Andrew Jones has some great thoughts too, backed up by a range of pieces he’s written around the issues here too.

As I set out in a long comment on Jonny’s blog, I’m not convinced that his critique is fair, mostly because I don’t think what I’m trying to do here is bashing institutions. The simply summary is this: having picked up on a trajectory that seemed to be leading away from institutional forms of faith in the 90′s and 00′s, I now feel that that trajectory has changed, and is leading back towards institutional forms. No value judgement intended.

I do want to draw in one more theme which I explore in ‘Other’ (which comes highly recommended by Pete Rollins, Brian Maclaren, Phyllis Tickle, Shane Claiborne… ) which is to do with how institutions can become damaging – and what we should do to try to counteract that.

First of all – I completely agree with Jonny when he says:

“There is plenty of research around that suggest that if you have a local church in your community it will be full of people who make life better giving themselves away on behalf of others in the community, getting involved in soup runs, parent associations, prison visiting – generally all round kind and caring people.”

Churches are full of good people. I’ve very very rarely met anyone who is not likeable or well-meaning or sincere about what they are doing. But I tend to find out these things about people after the service, over a drink or a meal. Why? Because when people begin to inhabit the framework of the institution they change.

I’ll use sermons as an example. I have rarely met anyone who thinks sermons are a good idea. They can be amusing and enjoyable and informative, but on the whole everyone I speak to considers them anachronistic and ineffective in terms of education or enrichment. Yet sermons remain. Why? Because the aggregated effect of small amounts of inertia and uncertainty about how changes could be made can lead to a huge amount of corporate inertia.

The slowness of the body to respond to environmental changes can be a good thing, but it can also be a huge disadvantage. One only need look at the difficulties in negotiating a climate deal in Copenhage that everyone individually agreed needed to happen to appreciate this.

We are communal people. We like to gather, to have community. And institutions – incorporations of our values and shared goals – are an inevitable part of life. I am not arguing here – contrary to Jonny’s interpretation – for a life beyond institutions, as we both know this is not possible. I am arguing for a new approach to corporate life though, at whatever zoom level you might take: small local groups and beyond.

One might use the Jubilee principle of regular, deliberate reorganisation as a spring board into this. What I’ve tried to do in the book is to look at how our attempts at permanence – and institutions tend to be about ensuring longevity – lead to various sorts of violence as structures and boundaries ossify. I then go on to argue that for a faith centred on death and resurrection we should be far less afraid of letting our church structures die and be reborn before they begin to be damaging and draining.

As I write in the book:

I strongly believe that while the Church has an eternal dimension, our manifestations of church should retain a deliberately temporal one. While maintaining healthy networked relationships with fellow-believers, the public expressions of our faith will emerge and spring up in marvellous ways to temporarily liberate a space or time, but will then disappear before they can petrify and harden.

In other words, I’m not arguing that relationships should be short-lived, nor that institutions – some formalising of these relationships around a shared goal or project – should not exist. Rather, I sincerely believe that while relationships are maintained in the informal work of eating and sharing lives together, the structures that form around them should be regularly deconstructed, and this will probably require the move away from full-time professionalised clergy.

Jesus’ ministry lasted 3 years. Was it ineffective? No. It was a TAZ, an intensification of life for all involved. And we should be glad that it wasn’t permanent – because surely a divine Jesus could have stayed around for ever? He knew that that would lead to violence. It always does.

So my concern about the move back towards more formal institutions and more ‘hard’ forms of leadership is that in opting for a more secure structure by becoming ordained, people are prolonging the current manifestation of an institution that – looking at the comments here – has caused a great deal of pain and frustration. Perhaps that’s romantic tosh, but remember: Jesus could have, but didn’t become a Pharisee.

[Related series: Leadership and Emergence where I look at the problem of leadership within an emergent system.]

A very interesting post popped up on the theology site ‘An Und Fur Sich’ yesterday, which was a quick critique posted by Brad Johnson, after his investigation into the movement prompted by ‘a mixture of morbid and genuine curiosity.’ His single perspective was to read Pete Rollins’ books, and his comments spring basically out of that, but the most interesting aspect was his opening remark that:

The Emergent Church is a marketing phenomenon – a means of remaining “hip” and “edgy,” – and thus essentially another form of evangelistic seeker-sensitivity.

Johnson goes on to say:

For [the Emerging Church] it is well and good to question and/or doubt the faith, because these questions and doubts can be shown ultimately to affirm Christianity. [...] This, it seems to me, is the strongest form of marketability: when even the aversion to marketability (e.g., self-deprecation) is itself a strongly ironic form of pure marketability.

A couple of things I’d like to point out in response to this. Firstly, Johnson titled his post ‘Giving the Emergent Church its Due,’ but I think given the limited scope of his reading and research, he has not done anything like this.

Secondly though, I think he is a) complete right and b) completely wrong.

He is completely right in that much of what carries the label ‘emerging church’ is a straightforward marketing ploy by churches who are simply keen to attract younger members without actually changing the core of their beliefs or practices.

However, he is also completely wrong, in that the manifestations of ‘emerging church’ that have become the popular face of the movement are, I believe a distorted simulacrum of the much more radical theological model that Pete (and others) have been writing about.

This presents a problem: if the practice is never going to live up to the theory, which is at fault?

Finally, I think Johnson, though right to identify the marketing phenomenon, doesn’t do enough to argue that this is a particularly ‘emerging church’ problem. Personally, I think we are so heavily steeped in consumer capitalism that any attempt at change or re-formation is going to be afflicted by a marketing mindset (check this site out, for an example of the double-bind). Which is why my thinking for a possible next book is veering towards a synthesis of the twin failures of Communism and Christianity. It’s only out of the ashes of both that I think we might see a genuinely different movement.

Reading material for the train/ferry/bus etc. on the way up/down was this month’s Prospect, which contained an article from some old Blairites challenging Brown to move away from top-down centralised governance to a more liberal bottom-up approach:

Labour politicians too often see a social problem—obesity, children at risk on the internet or declining interest in high culture—and make two assumptions: first, that the problem is amenable to a policy solution; and second, that this solution ought to involve the establishment of a council, commission or task force. But many of the issues facing modern society are too complex and too cultural for such a wooden approach.

Coming back I’ve just received an email from an organization struggling from within over whether they should be taking one or the other approach, and many of the discussions we had on Iona related to the same issue.

In other words, the debate continues to rage, and usually follows the same line: those in power want to preserve power structures because, from their perspective, it’s the only way to get things done, while those outside those structures see the world very differently and realise things aren’t working as well as those in power think they are.

I’ve been into this in detail in the book, but, to summarise: power and leadership are about facilitating communication or, in the governance situation, creating environments within which the best possible outcomes for people are likely to emerge. You can’t legislate for decency, but you can create the kinds of frameworks within which people are more likely to be decent to one another.

I think this is the tricky situation which both our Labour government and certain wings of the church find themselves: they feel so threatened by some external power (terrorism / biblical liberalism) that they panic and want to legislate hard in an attempt to protect us. I currently feel that I’d rather enjoy freedom and decent human rights / civil liberties and be blown up a free man, than be safely cocooned in a tight-assed, Orwellian world.

Technorati: Liberal | Prospect

It’s in ‘Politics, Theology and Faith-Based Organisations’, and you can read more about it in the doc attached below.

For those interested in exploring this further, I highly recommend listening to this episode of the fantastic BBC programme ‘In Our Time’, which discusses the Nicene Creed. What’s fascinating is how this statement of faith was actually itself a set of statements designed to allow certain Bishops to ‘sign up’ to the view of faith Constantine wanted. It was ‘delicate theology and robust politics.’

As such, it too is couched in politically loaded language, and thus, as the contributors point out, a creed that helped move Christianity from a religion of peace, to one of war and power; from a ‘sea of boats all moving on their own tacks generally toward belief in Jesus, to one mothership, which demanded this creed as a boarding pass.

As you may know, the council was called in part to deal with the ‘Arian Heresy’, and Arius himself became a figure of hate in the Church. He died in a public toilet as his bowels exploded, and the church later set up a statue of him on that site, encouraging people to piss and shit on him. Nice touch that. Just what Jesus would have done.