christ-followers, clever things and a closing

I am not a Christ-follower.

I am not a follower of God in the Way of Jesus.

I'll just be a Christian, and let the liberals raise their eyebrows at my gumption and the conservatives assume I'm a gold-star daily Bible reader.

Because frankly these titles are little more than linguistic tight ropes, coded language for a club of former conservative evangelicals eager to distance themselves from their past selves but not quite willing to join forces with the aging, stodgy mainliners.

I am not a pacifist.

Not because I think the New Testament supports the use of widespread violence for war, retaliation or the whole I poke-your-eye-out and you-poke-out-mine ethic.

I don't consider myself a pacifist (or aggressive nonviolence advocate, etc) because I'm not sure if Jesus was nonviolent so much as he was a realist, a pragmatist who realized that if he incited a nation of poor, oppressed people to violently revolt, they wouldn't have a prayer, not even with the Son of God on their side.

I don't consider myself a pacifist because too many who do spend so much time talking about war and never consider how often we hit our children to teach them not to hit each other.

I do not consider myself a pacifist because I cannot see the world in absolutes any more.

I am not a spiritual memoirist. And anyone under 40 writing a "memoir" should rightfully be viewed as a shill with a pen, remembering a life half-lived, sketching their life's story under the noon sun with dilated eyes.

I am tired of your clever theology, and of mine, substituting the intricacies of words for the delicacy of a life nursing spiritual wounds of others. Flashpan theologians turning a phrase instead of turning toward the needs of the world with soiled hands.

Where are the Will D. Campbells and Frederick Buechners of my generation while the Donald Millers and (INSERT UNDER 30 WRITER HERE) line the bookshelves?

They are tending to the wounds of a bleeding world, forcing holy breath into an asphyxiating Earth in a million small ways, in the every day care of the spiritually broken, the common man or woman whose life has gotten away from them, the frustratingly homeless and the simple-minded, armchair theologian who writes the lonely ballad of longed-for community.

I am tired of writing as a commodity, cannibalizing the story of my life, to fashion a product for market.

I deeply appreciate all of you who have read this blog with any semblance of regularity, who have commented, who have argued and who have challenged my thoughts. Now, I am embarking on another part of my journey, one that might lead me away from writing for a time, as I am at the beginning of the discernment process of ordination in the Episcopal church.

Thank you all for reading for the past two years. I am a different, better person for having written all these thoughts, a better person for knowing that you read them, and a better person for hearing your responses.

the fundamentalist challenge (to CC Bloggers, liberal Christians, and progressive thinkers)

One of my favorite, and most unconventional, religious studies scholars, David Harrington Watt, is working on a new book which I am eager to read. It's tentatively titled, Anti-fundamentalism: A Brief History, and it explores the history of anti-fundamentalist discourse beginning in 1922 and ending in the present.

I cannot think of a more poignant, more important and more challenging book for academics and liberal Christians to read. If it is anything like his paper on the subject, the book will likely argue that the term "fundamentalist" is a way of marginalizing and dismissing conservative, religious beliefs without nuance, texture or critical thought. It probably will argue that the word "fundamentalist" should only be used in its historical context to describe the turn-of-the-20th century movement that ended around the time of the Scopes Trial. And that its use to describe other conservative religious movements (at least in the U.S. and European cultures) not only is wrong but appropriates the characteristics of a primarily white Christian movement to other religious and cultures that have their own unique contexts. The book likely will point out that "fundamentalist" has become an excused stereotype that thrives in academic circles, the very places where other marginalizing stereotypes are condemned in the strongest of terms.

Ever since I was introduced to Watt's impressive work by my adviser Marian Ronan, I have taken a closer look at how I use the word "fundamentalist," and have found myself guilty of its harmful misuse. I once loved to call myself a "recovering fundamentalist," explicitly comparing it to the sickness and disease of alcoholism.

So, I have done my best to attempt to excise the word from my vocabulary, except where historically appropriate.

I now issue the challenge to you all: to the Christian Century Blog Network, to all liberal Christians who stumble upon this blog and all progressive thinkers who read this. Can we engage with conservative, literalist, rigid thought without marginalizing it or dismissing it as "fundamentalist"? Can we take ideas seriously with which we vigorously disagree? If we can't, exactly how progressive are we then?

there are no answers

There is only the search for the answers.

That's basically the thesis of a column I wrote for the local newspaper's (Daily Republic, Fairfield, CA) Pastor's Perspective column in August.

Since writing is so sparse these days, I figured I'd share it here:

The more I see of the world, the more my questions about God seem to multiply.

For a long time, I hoped that the answers would eventually catch up with the questions.

However, I have begun to realize that perhaps I’ve gotten it backwards. I come to God seeking answers, demanding an explanation to the vast evil and limitless suffering in the world. Perhaps, though, God isn’t the answer, but the question at the heart of all our questions.

When I turn to the Bible for answers, for a salve for sorrow, I am typically disappointed with this ancient, beautiful book that confounds as much as it guides. But when I read these sacred stories not to seek a litany of solutions, but to listen to the lives of my spiritual ancestors who have brooded over these same unanswerable questions, I begin to find salvation.

When Jacob wrestles with God in that bitter battle in the night, Jacob, gasping in pain from his dislocated hip, desperately begs for an answer to the disorienting experience. He asks for his attacker’s name, as if he needs reassurance that this Being is God and not something more sinister.

Jacob does not get an answer. Instead, he gets something better – the painful, life-altering experience of seeing God face-to-face and fighting God hand-to-hand.

Job, the unfortunate pawn in a game of cosmic chess between God and the Adversary, demands an answer from God for the brutalizing, unjust misfortune that has befallen him.

God never gives Job a straight answer, either. Rather, Job encounters the deepest mysteries of God and finds himself stunned into silence.

The Christian faith itself was forged out of a like-minded question erupting from the fragments of a crushed soul.

On the cross, Jesus cries, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”

For two millennia, Christians have been trying to sort out a satisfactory answer to this fundamental question of why a loving God must kill his only son to save the children of God.

When it comes to questions of faith, Jesus teaches that if I seek I will find. But, honestly, I have sought and have not found, asked and not received the answers to the questions that gnawed at my soul.

What I have discovered, however, is that the seeking is better than the finding, and that if I think I have found an answer, it most often leads to more seeking.

In fact, knowing the answers to my questions would simply shortcut the path of faith, diverting me to a paved road without a pothole. Sure, it might be quicker and would bypass the chance of becoming truly lost in the terrifying dark nights, the plague of poison oak, the thorns and brambles piercing my body. But I would also miss that moment when the forest opens up so magnificently to a flower-filled meadow guarding a glacial lake that the only possible response is silence.

And, in that moment there is a divine unity, where my silence and the silence of God can align and I no longer need an answer, though I might still want one.

So, if you know the answers, please don’t tell me.

I don’t want to know.

I’d rather wait for the forest to clear again.

David Henson is a stay-at-home dad attempting to discern whether that voice he hears is God calling him to be an Episcopal priest or if it is the residual echo of his two children calling for him all-day long. He is a member of Grace Episcopal Church, an alumni of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and writes the blog, Unorthodoxology.

pulled

Lately, I have felt parts of my identity slipping away, as if some thief in the night has stolen into my room, peeked into my dreams and pocketed the most important pieces of me.

Ever since I was a little boy, I have dreamed of being a writer. I wrote my first story in the first grade, my first short story in the third grade and my first attempt at a novel in the fifth. On my hard drive, I have a 164-page thesis for which my master's advisers have encouraged me to find a publisher because the writing is so vibrant and the research is completely original and doctoral quality (so they said). In another folder, I have three chapters written on a book of spirituality and in still another three chapters to a novel that burns at my soul ever three or four months.

In my closet, I have piles and piles of newspapers with my byline, the cream of the hundreds of hundreds of stories that I have written.

Yes, there is a part of me that dreams of seeing my name on the spine of a book. When I worked in bookstore right out of college, I used to run my fingers along the space of the "H" shelf where I envisioned my book one day sitting. But what thrills me most is the feeling of words pouring out of my fingers, fueling my heart and stirring my soul with troubled, but healing waters. I love to write. It is the only way I know to pray, to live.

But lately, I feel as if that dream has been stolen. I feel pulled to the page several times a day, but am always, quickly, pulled away from it. I long for those afternoons in which I could lovingly toil over a paragraph, loose my mind in my own stories and feel that rush of a well-crafted piece that begins with a bang and ends with a bow.

My writing time now goes to parenting two toddlers, preparing for my wonderful wife's re-entry to the workforce this week and generally housecleaning and cooking. And as much as I long for the days of luxurious writing, I would not trade it in for the time I have with my children, the rare opportunity to get lost again in the imaginary worlds of childhood that fostered my own love of stories and writing, to dance with unabashed joy on the top of the couch with a child whose whole body vibrates with unbridled joy, the chance to understand love in depths unfathomable, that love that rearranges life and touches every fiber of spirit and being.

I am also feeling myself pulled toward ordained ministry in the Episcopal church, that merry band of liturgical rebels, a move that seems to surprise no one but myself. So much of my time is spent in a reflective state rather than a actively writing state when I have a down moment.

But of all these three things, the pull toward my children and wife is the strongest, the most magnetic, the most meaningful and the most rewarding. Seeing the stress on my wife unfurl before a homecooked meal at the end of the day is better than a book on the shelf. Seeing my son dance in his room with Christopher Robin or eat a green bean straight from our vegetable garden is better than seeing my name in print. Having my newborn's coos draw my thoughts to his newly formed smile is better than people knowing who I am.

I don't say this as a theodicy of sorts to justify this simple life. It has become constitutive part of my life, of my soul, of my identity.

That thief that stole my life in the night left behind something much better.

why i am not blogging

Because it is time to listen.

fathers day: demigods and demons

President Obama's message for Fathers Day mirrors the dominant discourse surrounding dads in American culture.

His message for this day honoring fathers is that dads, by and large, suck. They ignore their children. They don't help rear them. They don't play and interact with their children. They simply plant the seed and do nothing more for forever. They are fools or miscreants. 

Obama's Fathers Day message is appalling, and I hope it's not indicative of how he parents, berating bad behavior while ignoring the good. Instead of talking about the legions of fathers who help around the house, who lavish their children with love, or who work 60 hours a week on meager wages just to put food on the table, he singles out the worst of fathers and holds them up as representative of us all on Fathers Day.

It's no wonder so many fathers feel like they don't do well enough by their children, a feeling, at least in some cases, that isn't reflected by their children. 

Obama's message is mirrored by a series of ads I've seen around the East Bay, at bus stops and on billboard advertisements. It says, "Remember to be a father today," and pictures a dad playing with his child. 

Imagine an advertisement to remind women with children to be mothers. Imagine a president telling mothers on Mothers Day to be better parents. 

To our cultural imagination, the thought is unfathomable. A mother is a mother is a mother. She who gives birth automatically is a great mother. She who gave life is naturally nurturing, kind and unselfish. She isn't a perfect parent, but her role, once she gives birth, becomes a constituitive, inseparable part of her identity. It is unfair to her, because it denies her fallibility, her right to make a mistake, to be crabby with her kids and to wish, even for a moment, that she had a different kind of life.

It's the idealized Victorian woman, repackaged for modern America. Instead of corsets, it's nursing bras. Instead of vacuum cleaners, it's strollers. The cult of motherhood, of hearth and home, that makes demigods of mothers. 

Meanwhile, dads are demonized. 

Our cultural issues with our parents are channeled toward father figures, and it is assumed that no father, prior to the feminist movement, ever had an active hand in rearing their children. And that only feminist men will rock their children to sleep.

As most of you know, I'm a stay-at-home dad. Most of the time, when I'm out with Brendan, I'll get comments to the effect that it is sooooo great that a dad is spending time with his son and that his mother must really appreciate the time off. Most of the dads I know -- even the ones that work -- resent this comment, because it assumes that such time is rare. 

The message of both Mothers and Fathers days should be about praise, about remembering the good parts of parenting, celebrating those moments when both you and your children were in harmony. Because those memories are the ones that will get both parents through another year, through spit-up and tantrums.

Splitting up Mothers and Fathers days, too, might be a mistake. It assumes that each has its own gendered, segregated roles in the family. 

I, for one, would much rather celebrate Parents Day. 

Or better yet, Family Day. 

Because it's only when all people in the family -- mother, father and children -- as part of a whole that the whole thing can even approach working dysfunction.

Bush and the Middle East: Was Bush Right?

Here's a question, just for kicks, from someone who dislikes the Bush legacy as much as any Democrat, liberal, progressive, etc.

Is the democratic uprising in Iran, after years of suppression, a vindication of Bush's aim to go into Iraq in order to destabilize the region and plant seeds of democracy, American style? 

Is the Bush Doctrine coming true?

:)