Blogs, Blogs and Books

The term "blog" makes me giggle, or run through rhymes in my head (fog, frog, smog, bog, dog, flog, hog, slog...), and I would never dub myself a "blogger." But this is a blog, and I have others. Sometimes I write for Duke's Faith & Leadership - and they went "live" (that's the cool blog jargon, I believe) with one today on Inability and Leadership (my specialty); I love the very unleaderly title - "We do not know what to do..."

I also am running a non-blog blog - on heroes of the faith. Our Church is studying great heroes, and I send out emails raising questions and issues from their lives - so I use this other blog for a basic bio and some pix. Schweitzer, Bonhoeffer, Julian of Norwich, Gandhi, and Francis so far. Fun.

My favorite thing, actually has been on this blog, but probably nobody has noticed. I read - and most onlookers add "a lot..." My book budget is absurdly high and will force me to work 5 to 8 extra years at the end of my career to make up for the money lost. When I read something long or difficult, or a bit obscure, I write up little summaries - for some of you who might not get these books read. They are listed over there on the left - Hamlet's Blackberry (a wise reflection on technology), a new biography of Francis Asbury, a review of Bart Ehrman lamely speaking of evil, a Christian commentary on Leviticus (think about it...), a book on serpent imagery, one on women disciples of Jesus, etc. I hope you'll browse some of these and find them beneficial.

The other night one of my children laughed when I knew all the answers to my teenager's study sheet for medieval and Renaissance history. "Oh, daddy, you know so much useless information." And I do. And I would protest the notion that information must be useful. What a waste of a lovely fact or a delightful tidbit from history or art or literature or math - that it should be pressed into some use or another? It's just fun to know.

Or better: I like to think God appreciates it when we know things. God gave me, and you, a brain. Can I glorify God simply by using my brain, by thinking, knowing, remembering, reflecting, accumulating little facts and ruminating on truths that have no function except that they are intriguing, and must reside not only in my mind but even more clearly in the mind of God?

HAMLET'S BLACKBERRY AND REACHABILITY

The greatest peril to the life of faith is not skepticism, or secularism, or intellectual doubt or the confusion of options. My gravest worry is precisely what you are looking at right now: the wired screen. We are wired, constantly. For decades I could drive to another city alone, but now if I forget my cell I feel panicky; regularly I check email, and Facebook, receive and send texts… but never ask what it all means for how my brain is being reshaped, or how society is shifting inexorably in – well, in what direction?

I went to Brazil and left lots of contact options for people staying here – but why? “I’ve got to be reachable!” God must sigh, and say “Indeed, you’ve got to be reachable” – but if we are constantly peppered with titillating little Facebook posts or texts or emails or blogs or YouTubes or Netflixes (Netflices?), I suspect we flat out aren’t reachable by God. We can’t be with one another: we sit at dinner with a friend but reach for the screen in our pockets… If we can’t be with each other, how can we be with God?

Mandatory reading for any person who is wired, for any person who wants to connect with God, for anyone who harbors a sneaky suspicion we may be rambling rapidly downhill and out of control, is Williams Powers’s Hamlet’s Blackberry. Oddly I read this while I was reading Margaret Atwood’s ominous novel, Handmaid’s Tale, which imagines a society where selfhood is repressed, where freedom is no more… and it occurred to me that Powers is right in his analysis of all we are losing in our technologically-dominated way of life, unexamined, ever more wired and “reachable” – and hence unreachable by all that really matters.

Powers, like me, loves technology, and understands its many benefits; I’m in close contact with lots of people, and can find information quickly. But who are we becoming as a civilization? Powers’s analysis is accessible, funny, and profound. Free time is consumed by relating to dozens, maybe thousands of people via the screens we possess. But the price? “The more connected we are, the more we depend on the world outside ourselves to tell us how to think and live… We don’t turn inward.” What we lose is – depth.

Depth is what makes life fulfilling, and meaningful, but we become increasingly superficial. Home once was a safe haven, a refuge from the busy, frantic world – but now home is even more frantic, for at home we are never alone, and we are never just with our family or friends. We vanish into texts or Facebook, and do not sit and reflect, reminisce, or simply be with one another.

The costs in the workplace are estimated into tens of billions of dollars, as employees flit from email to email, lose focus, and frankly use work time answering personal emails and texts, and surfing sites. The greatest cost is to our sense of self. Powers suggests that our only philosophy now is “It’s good to be connected, it is bad to be disconnected.” “Out there” trumps “in here” every time, and most sadly, our sense of worth is now hinged to whether we receive communications – or not. “The digital medium is a source of constant confirmation that, yes, you do exist and you do matter. However, the external validation provided by incoming messages… is not as trustworthy or stable as the kind that comes from inside. We are forced to go back and ask, ‘Who’s read my post? Who’s paying attention to me now?’”

Powers calls this “needy outwardness,” a far cry from our ancestors’ ability to be alone, to enjoy solitude, to reflect, to become wise, to love, to be present to those with whom we really are present, and who ultimately matter. Do we prefer screens to real people? How might we be people of faith or goodness in such a wired world where we have to “check Facebook,” or can be interrupted by a mere phone vibration?

Powers rifles through history to excavate some ancient wisdom, from Socrates taking a walk outside the city walls (our need for some space, some distance, some down time away), to Seneca’s counsel that we find seclusion even in a crowd, from the advent or printing with Gutenberg and the virtues of private rumination, to Shakespeare’s feelings about little erasable tablets that were all the rage (and the virtues nowadays of jotting down our own thoughts instead of merely absorbing those of others). The chapter on Thoreau is stellar: Thoreau went into the woods to avoid “quiet desperation” in a world that just discovered the telegraph and train. He noted how “we become tools of our tools,” and the way that “when our inward life fails, we go more constantly to the post office” – to look hopefully for a telegraph message! How prophetic of our digital age! Thoreau wrote, by Walden pond, “The man who goes desperately back to the post office over and over to check for a telegraph message is a man who hasn’t heard from himself in a long while.”

Hamlet’s Blackberry includes some simple suggestions: observe an Internet Sabbath, an unconnected day each week. If you are with someone and they reach for their iPhone, simply say “Would you put it aside? I want to be with you.” Work with your hands out of doors; write – on paper, with a pen; cook, commit to two disconnected hours daily, go out and look up at the stars. Trust yourself; go deeply into yourself, or a great book – or the beautiful silence of the world.

I would say read a Bible, close your eyes and pray. The question God asks is, Are you reachable? By being perpetually reachable, we are unreachable – at least by what genuinely matters. The alternative is to wind up like the sorry citizens of Gilead in Handmaid’s Tale, our freedom and joy sacrificed on the altar of a thoughtless conformity to the digital wave.

CLERGY WHO HAVE LOST THEIR FAITH

While I can feel sympathy for clergy who have lost their faith, I do have a few questions for them, more for their professors in seminary, a handful for Daniel Dennett, and a couple of very basic ones for Solange de Santis. It was the journalist, de Santis, who has just now covered the publication of “Preachers Who Are Not Believers” in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, co-authored by Dennett. Five clergy are studied, and a high percentage of them silently carry an awful secret that would destroy their careers or families. Privately they nurse a shocking disbelief that causes them immense agony and loneliness. To one, God is a poetic human invention. For another, seminary “blew apart” his faith, when he realized there were diverse viewpoints about God. One discovered that what he learned about the historical origins of the Bible doesn’t fit what was taught in Sunday School. Another read a little, and stumbled upon the fact that there are variations in the ancient copies of the Bible, and he wonders if they picked the right one.

I know the loneliness and pain of the clergy, and hard questions that riddle the life of the soul. But I am totally puzzled by this report of de Santis, and these five clergy. Who trained these clergy in seminary? and have they done any reading since seminary? The questions they raise are old, and wisely reflected upon, and profoundly handled by our best (and even our middling) theologians. The Church has always known, for 2000 years, that there has always been diversity within Christianity – which is its beauty: God’s work isn’t a straitjacket, but God is flexible, and doesn’t mind being apprehended a bit differently by me and my neighbor, much less a Terra del Fuegian or a Russian Orthodox priest.

Sunday School has never done a brilliant job of probing historical origins; but Christianity has always known its historical origins, and its mixed heritage of beauty and embarrassment. We have always known there are variations in the earliest manuscripts we possess. But this is true of everything in history: we have divergent versions of the Gettysburg address, and Shakespeare’s plays; encounters between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra are notoriously difficult to specify with historical accuracy – but they certainly were tight. I have personally looked over hundreds of textual differences among early manuscripts, and can’t find a single one that raises the slightest question about the heart of what we believe Jesus said or did.

Bart Ehrman, who has sold more books in this zone than anybody else, acts as if historical questions and textual uncertainties have just been discovered, or that the Church has locked these truths away in secret vaults in order to prop up a bogus institution. But every great theologian in every century has known about, grappled with, and understood what these five clergy somehow missed in their education and reading. I feel for their ache, but I could have recommended a couple of books that could have resolved their intellectual dilemmas.

I’m a bit startled by the superficiality of de Santis’s review of Dennett. De Santis works for The Religion News Service, and their web site claims they are “devoted to unbiased coverage” of things religious. Were I reporter on any other subject, I would ask a question like “Who is this Daniel Dennett who has conducted this research?” or “Is five a decent sampling of clergy?” Five is admittedly a small number of people to interview, but you see immediately that the low number implies masses: we asked five, and Whoa! look what we found! What if we’d interviewed hundreds?

Dennett is indeed a social scientist, but if you simply Google him, you will discover he’s a social scientist with a pointed, hostile agenda when it comes to faith. He has written often, blasting faith, and hardly in the “just the facts, ma’am” vein. I never buy conspiracy theories. But Dennett is one of quite a few authors who have jumped on a runaway bandwagon, and now they feed off one another’s popularity. I stumbled upon de Santis’s article in my local paper’s “Faith” page; clearly the “faith” story we gobble up nowadays is the loss of faith. In a country where candidates for office pander to the religious sensitivities of voters, the bestselling books in America are Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Dennett’s own Breaking the Spell, Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great, and above all else, Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, in which the eminently learned Leigh Teabing unveils long hidden truths about the manufacture of the Bible, political maneuvering on the divinity of Christ, and a hush campaign about the sexuality of Jesus. The problem is The DaVinci Code is fiction, and much of what Teabing claims in the novel and movie is simply, historically, and verifiably (even to atheist historians) false (read more here!). And what is true in what these authors write is, as we have noted, old, utterly familiar to undergraduate religion students, regurgitated knowledge but cast in a sensationalist spin.

To me, de Santis might have done a bit of interviewing to understand Dennett’s sampling of five – not to find five others who would declare “I really do believe!” or “Profound theology is identical with Sunday School!” or “Doubting is evil,” but to inquire into Dennett’s agenda, and methods. Did the five clergy at some point miss something, and so instead of the implied deduction, that if even our clergy are hiding disbelief, why would those who rely upon them as guides believe? so how could there be a God? De Santis might have noticed the way texts and history and science are regarded as great friends of the vast majority of us in Christianity, not perilous foes to be feared and silenced.

Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and Ehrman are wrestling with a straw man, a simplistic, twisted version of Christianity only fools would believe. David Bentley Hart (whose Atheist Delusions humorously dismantles the absurdities of Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and Ehrman) wishes Christianity’s detractors “had the good manners to despise Christianity for what it actually is” instead of a silly, trivialized, watered down version no one has ever espoused – and so do I. We do not mind hard questions, or sharp critique, or even disbelief – but at least make your assault on whom we really are, and refuse to believe in the Christianity that has withstood the test of centuries, for we want to know more, to have any and all illusions dispelled.

Being disillusioned about God or what we may have been mistaught in Sunday School is always a good thing, for to be dis-illusioned is to shed illusions. Most critics of Christianity point to the problem of suffering, and conclude “If God is good, how can there be suffering?” But we have always known about suffering, and the Church has not only caused our share of it, but we have also shared with those who suffer: we see them up close, in hospitals and in shelters we operate, on the mission field and in orphanages, and we would not have anyone labor under the illusion that God fashions some sort of protective bubble around us, or is a rapidly functioning magical salve when something hurts. Our story is about a God who actually suffered, and suffers, and we miss the true God then if we never figure out how to pair up God and suffering, for they are very close, and that is our comfort and redemption.

Or the critics point to the great harm Christianity has done in history. Indeed, we are ready to confess every sin; but have atheists ushered in peace? Hitler loathed Christianity, and Stalin wasn’t exactly a pious man. Are the mockers of a made up Christianity getting organized around this world to alleviate human suffering?

I just returned from a mission trip to Brazil, where I spent time with someone Dennett didn’t interview, and would never understand. Marion Way grew up in South Carolina, and his childhood heroes were Methodist missionaries. He learned Portuguese and offered to try to help hurting people in Angola. A civil war erupted, and he was thrown in jail and beaten within an inch of his life. When they finally let him go, instead of scurrying to safety back in the United States, he asked “Where else do they speak Portuguese?” So he and his wife Anita went to Rio de Janeiro, to live in the poorest favella in the city – in 1962. They are still there, 48 years later, humble, working, feeding children, providing medical care and job training, and all because they believe in God.

But they would not even say much about their faith. This is the real issue: the five clergy Dennett listened to spoke of “my faith.” Have I lost my faith? Does my faith work? Marion Way would be a bit mystified by this thought. He is a person of deep faith, but for him the real reality is God. It is God who saves, God who is always there, God who motivates and loves, God who survives faith or unfaith or doubt or piety or viciousness or any other turn in the history of the world.

Marion Way would know what to do with these five clergy, and even with Dennett, Harris, Ehrman, Brown, and de Santis: he would do what he does with the Brazillian children. He would smile, and hug them, and offer them a bite to eat, and say a prayer for them.

JESUS AND JULY 4

My mood sours every July 4 - because the day set aside to recall the founding of our country is absurdly debased, and also because Jesus gets pinned on to the ugliest versions of patriotism. I just feel ill.

When our extended family is together on July 4, I attempt my annual reading aloud of the Declaration of Independence (something American families did for decades) - and even though my family is on the high end of an appreciation of history and tradition, this elicits impatient groans... It appears to me that July 4 is pretty much a day 1. to be off work, 2. to drink much beer (sales set records on this day!), and 3. wave flags and expostulate upon vapid caricatures of what America was actually created for.

The flag? The U.S. flag code stipulates that the flag is not to be worn, should not be draped over a car or truck, or used on any disposable items. Bikinis and beer mugs just don't seem very respectful to me...

Freedom of religion was a cardinal principle for the Founding Fathers - and no matter how much we try to rewrite history, the simple facts are that some of them were quite pious, and others took snide views of Christianity, Church and the clergy. But how loony is freedom of religion when it is trivialized into I will worship God any way I want to! - but how would God wish to be worshipped? Or freedom of religion becomes I'll just stay home and go swimming or sleep in or drive to the beach on a Sunday: just check the Church attendance registers for the Sunday closest to July 4 each year... Pathetic attendance, and many of the no-shows are the very people who trumpet the piety of the Founding Fathers and wistfully yearn for the day when America was "one nation under God," when Christianity reigned.

And the co-opting of Jesus onto Americana: the curiously popular painting of John McNaughton, depicting Jesus in the thick of American heroes (including some whose faith would be quite questionable...) illustrates the way we would cram Jesus into a little U.S.A. flag box and make him our own, when the real Jesus came for everybody, everywhere, and his mission didn't seem to be the spread of capitalism or the security of America or the heightening of a single country's prestige, but to lift up the downtrodden, to be a light to the nations (including America!); Jesus is more appalled than I am at the mean-spirited, divisive, absurdly angry emails that fly around, those that spew venom and feed on fear and our darkest side. I don't think the New Testament has Jesus declare "I came that you might get mad, that America might be great, and so that people who aren't doing so well might just try harder and get over it or go away."

When did the beautiful nation the Founding Fathers, who were highly educated, philosophically wise, and respectful people, conceived become a battleground of ideologies, ignorance in constant combat with ignorance, where the loudest, shrillest rancor wins the day? When did patriotism get whittled down to nothing more than anger, heady feelings about wars and weapons, and an edgy bias against people who are different? When did apathy become our true mood? and because we don't study, and care only about me and mine, little tasty sound-bytes suit and become the substitute for real political, social, and religious exploration and conversation?

I've been accused of being insufficiently patriotic by quite a few Christians - and this rankles me. I was born on an Air Force base, and my father flew in World War II.  Family vacations - when I was a child, and as I've raised my own children - have been to Washington, Boston, Valley Forge... and I am a voracious reader of American history. Not long after we returned from a trip that included a walk of the Freedom Trail in Boston, I heard a conservative defend President Bush, saying, "Never question the President, and if you do you aren't a patriot." Curious - for in Boston, colonists rose up against those who said you could never question authority. And not surprisingly, the conservatives who said "never question the President" are questioning the President constantly now that it's a Democrat in the White House. And they should! but they should also notice their own hypocrisy - and we all should recognize and appreciate the goodness of diverse viewpoints within a country where you can disagree without having to shoot one another.

Jesus - not the one swiped by liberals and conservatives in America, but the one who lived in Palestine among the poorest and mortified the powers that were - suggested we love our enemies, and touch the untouchables, and exhibit immense mercy, and live holy lives, not a cocky, prideful, prejudicial existence that feels superior only by criticizing somebody, anybody, blaming somebody, the President, anybody, waving flags while never bothering to get engaged in the real work of citizenship and community-building...

But I am rambling now. July 4 should be a lovely day of memory, history, recalling exalted ideals, and finding happy coincidences between what America was designed to be and what the Church might dream of achieving. July 4 might even be a day to show up at Church and worship God... what a radical notion!

CRASH HELMETS & INCLUSIVITY

So our sanctuary is undergoing 6 weeks of renovations - and I could only laugh out loud when I noticed all the warning signs posted at the entryways: "Danger: Hard Hat Area." Naturally I thought of Annie Dillard's often-quoted thought from Teaching a Stone to Talk: "I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, to be sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have any idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers... and lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense..."

We had to bring in scaffolding, circular saws, and scarily heavy . equipment to render our beautiful sanctuary risky. "Oh, it's dangerous now? How long before it's safe to go back in?" I noticed the subheading on the Danger: Hard Hat Area sign - which adds Authorized Personnel Only. "Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?" Psalm 24 inquires - and the reply, if authoritative for us today, would keep us all out permanently: "He who has clean hands and a pure heart."

And yet, at our denominational annual conference, we had a motion tabled - one about inclusivity. Nobody wants to talk about it: we are weary of the debate on how much inclusiveness is too much. Bizarre to me: it is precisely the necessity of clean hands and a pure heart that requires us to be utterly and uncompromisingly inclusive. Mine aren't clean or pure, and neither are yours - or anybody else's. Inside the building, the chemicals that catalyze the explosion are grace and mercy, which you never find outside a Church. So we realize what God requires, we realize we've whiffed embarrassingly - and that is precisely why we enter, trembling, hoping for mercy, needing nothing less than a transformative explosion of unseen power.

How inclusive then should we be? My small wisdom is this: if any one of us isn't welcome in Church, ever, for any reason, then none of us is ever welcome. God may wake up one day and be grossly offended we ever thought otherwise; God has already noticed, and is grieved - and wishes to strip the place, and us, down to the foundations and start over with us. Danger: Hard Hat Area.

ORDINATIONS AND LEADERSHIP
This is my year for out of the ordinary ordinations. I flew to Haiti to preach at the ordination of a young man in the community where our Church has a school, granary, and clinic. I think I actually ordained him (with no ecclesiastical authority whatsoever…): after intense questioning in Creole, to which the candidate responded “oui” to every hard question, I was asked to lay my hand on his head and pray. I said “I’m not a bishop,” but in this out of the way place it turned out I was probably the closest thing.

I flew to Liberia to preach at their conference’s ordination service. Ninety ordinands, and a higher number of degrees on the thermometer: immense zeal and a palpable humility on every face, and I felt a bit ashamed of the rock star status they seemed to afford me, whose annual salary may well exceed that of the entire bunch of 90.

I flew to Urbana, Illinois, to a Wesleyan district service where my colleague Kevin Wright was being ordained – and a couple of days later, I looked on my own denomination’s lining up of dozens at a time.

Surely I have some wise reflections from these diverse experiences, but I do not. I am simply in awe of the brute fact that one after another, in this milieu of cynicism and anti-institutional bias, people still put on heavy robes in the heat and line up to get hands laid on them. Each one of these people, in a moment of profound faith or quirky delusion, said Yes to what they thought was a call from God. Not one of them sized up the market, assessed their test results, and thought This is a clever way to prosper in today’s world. To inexplicable impulses skeptics would ridicule, they responded, underwent education and interrogation, and then got sent to places not as famous as Timbuktu to struggle, to try to pray and teach, to lay hands on the sick who quite often die despite the prayers, to people who yawn, who can be petty, who believe fitfully if at all – and then you get old and die doing this?

I am also struck of how little consonance there is between what I have witnessed and the kinds of things we talk about on when we think of the clergy profession nowadays - clergy "leadership" that is. Leadership is a thriving cottage industry, and I’m constantly invited to something or another where we can be sharper, smoother, more successful, to grow the Church, to glisten with administrative acumen, to raise endowments and corral postmodern people into church buildings equipped with snazzy technology.

But this kind of leadership mentality runs on a very different track from the real ecclesiastical processes, and the way people actually answer that mystical call within. When I said Yes, I will give pastoring a try, no one had spoken to me about Good to Great, and I would have laughed if someone had. I was swept up in a frenzy of faith, and wanted nothing more than to go be with some hurting people and pray for them, and to have the privilege of standing up and talking about amazing things I’d read in the Bible. At ordination, none – none! – of the questions are about leadership, or entrepeneurship, or visionary strategies.

I do not yet know what this dissonance means. I do recall an evaluation session of my congregation’s personnel committee. They were weighing my work, and that of my fellow clergy on staff. Rising to what they felt the denominational forms demanded of them, they were laboring over the “needs improvement in…” box; and it is never hard for laity to hatch such a list. In the thick of that endeavor, one woman felt a bit ruffled by this, and objected; in trying to affirm me and my colleagues, she said “Look, these people could have done most anything else for a living, and had an easier life, and made more money. Ministry, to me, looks really hard. I think we should simply consider the fact that God called them, and they said Yes, and we should thank them for doing so, and for being here with us.”

Now, that is no substitute for the real, necessary work of evaluation and professional improvement. But in Haiti, and Liberia, and Urbana, and Lake Junaluska, I watched people of all shapes, sizes, ages, backgrounds, walk slowly forward, kneel, have hands laid on their heads, and rise with smiles, or tears, with family beaming in curious pride, trudging away into the most uncertain future imagineable. Do they know the craft of leadership? Will they master Heifetz or Crouch or Maxwell or Peterson or the bloggers at faithandleadership.com and become wizards of ministry? I find myself uninterested in the answer to that question. I’m in some awe. A bunch of people whose faces I saw, and on whose heads I laid my feeble hands, had said “Oui” to whatever questions were asked of them – by the Church, but more importantly by God. I think all that is left to me is to thank them, or to thank God.

PREPARING TO SPEAK OF BEAUTY AND GOD

I've been preparing for a talk I’m giving on Monday, June 7, 7pm (to be repeated Wednesday, June 9, 11am) called Talking with God Using Beauty, our Brains, and the Bible. We will look at how Darwin, Monet, Mozart, Michelangelo, Einstein, Charlie Brown, Chopin, and Jewel help us to know God. It’s “multimedia,” meaning I’ve got power point images, and there will also be live music.

For a long time I’ve been reflecting on how we connect with God, and I mean beyond the usual suspects (like the Bible, praying, and worship). What about using our brains (and I don’t mean getting into the old reason vs. faith argument, but simply what we know, or what really smart people know…)? and what about beauty? I’ve written a book on preaching that will come out in a few months called The Beauty of the Word – and it seems to me that we do not think enough about beauty.

Is human achievement, and especially human creativity a gift of God’s Spirit? and if so how does that play out? and how do we wriggle our minds around the wonders of science, art, architecture and music and thereby grow closer to God? What is beauty, anyhow? Why is it so different from cute, sexy, handsome, pretty or "hot"? Rilke said "Beauty is the beginning of terror"... and there is something deep, profound, risky, life-giving about beauty.

If God is Beauty, if Psalm 27 says “One thing I will seek, to behold the beauty of the Lord,” and if even cynics about religion, Bible, prayer and God are moved by beauty, then beauty might be our hope, the only future to faith. What we have in Christianity truly is beautiful, and perhaps we can trust that? instead of striving so hard to be “relevant,” or to prop up traditional norms like the authority of Scripture or the grandeur of our institutions?

What strikes me as I prepare is recalling how awed I have been throughout my life by the things brilliant people who don’t believe in God have helped me understand about God! Darwin gets trashed by Christians, but his life work opened up new vistas, and far deeper explorations of God’s good creation; or I think about Michelangelo, who thought an artist needed to be holy – and yet Caravaggio, not noted for a squeaky clean character, kept up with Michelangelo. I think about the Peter Shaffer play (and the movie) Amadeus, where Salieri is incensed over the way Mozart seems to overhear the very voice of God, and Salieri is comparatively tone-deaf (despite his avowals of holiness). Can God co-opt people who aren’t believers, who aren’t interested in God at all, and use their genius to inspire and impress the rest of us?

How does God feel about music and art that are not “sacred”? Does God really prefer religious music? or religious books? I think of Karl Barth’s quip: what do the angels sing when they come before God’s throne to praise him? Bach, of course. But what do the angels sing when they are off by themselves? Mozart. Does God dig “secular” novels and movies? Might some of the religious pablum be dull even to God? Chopin doesn’t cheer my soul; instead he breaks my heart – but the sorrow his music taps helps me toward God.

These and other questions will occupy me this week in preparation, and on Monday (and Thursday) when I actually present. Let me know any thoughts or questions you might have…