post-evangelical

I recently read “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time” by Marcus Borg, and it was like coming home. Borg reads the Bible in a “historical-metaphorical” way, rather than literally, and manages to find great meaning and power in it without saying that it’s God’s instruction-book for our lives. What to do with the Bible has been one of the major challenges in my faith venture in the last several years – I didn’t take it literally, so I didn’t know how to, as Borg says, use another framework to “take it seriously”. The method that Borg offers makes sense to me, and actually made me feel like the Bible might have something to offer for the first time in a long time.

One of the things I also realized was that Borg often stated that the theological interpretation he was advancing was accepted by most mainline churches, and it made me miss my mainline roots. Ecclesiax is an amazing community, and I can’t imagine going to church anywhere else right now, but ideologically, I feel like the United Church is my home. Which is interesting, because while I’ve always had great affection for the United Church, there was definitely a period in my time when I thought that many of the positions I now long for were dead wrong. And this, coupled with all of this buzz about “Christian hipsters” (see my last post) has made me think about the fact that I truly in a “post-evangelical” space (an interesting realization, since even at my most “Christian”, if you want to call it that, I never really wore the term evangelical completely comfortably).

I am also uncomfortable with the term “post-evangelical”, though, because it suggests that I am at some higher stage of growth that evangelical Christians, and I don’t like saying that. I used to think that I was right and people who thought the way I now do were wrong. My experiences, study, and self-examination have led me to another point of view, but I don’t want to fall into the same trap, and consider that I was initially mistaken, and NOW I am “right”. I know that there are people of the faith who will start praying for my soul when they read these words, but I am becoming more and more comfortable without certainties as time goes on. I don’t know if that’s “growth”, but it’s “change”, and it feels right.

Christian hipsters - el Maggie jumps into the fray

I recently came across the blog post “are you a Christian hipster” by Brett McCracken, a guy who is apparently writing a book on the concept of Christian cool. I thought that his description would be all about suburban evangelical kids with nice hair and cool cars, so I was quite surprised that he’s actually talking about the “emergent” end of the spectrum – apparently Christian hipsters don’t like contemporary Christian music and do like Henri Nouwen. There are hundreds of responses to the blog post, ranging from “Hey, I’m a Christian hipster – good for me” to “uh, you’re just describing most mainline denominations” to “Christians should never strive to be hip”.

While I think that the author’s idea is to explore the relationship between the church and popular culture, I also found that he kind of missed out on the roots of what he deems the “Christian hipster” movement. I am not completely sure, from his writing, where he’s coming from, but it seems that he is suggesting that Christian hipsters are doing various “cool” and “edgy” things in an attempt to mimic mainstream hipster culture (as embodied in the skinny-jeans-wearing rebels of today) within a Christian context. This, to me, misses the point.

Many of the “hipsters” I know come from an evangelical background, but have not found themselves at home in either the evangelical movement or Christian pop culture. For many people at Ecclesiax, at least, this journey began with a dissatisfaction with the sanitization of the church and the unwillingness to embrace doubt or accept darkness as part of life. From there, it moves into exploring alternative ways that Christian communities have interacted with each other and with God, and claiming what is relevant to the community in question. As such, the practices that seem edgy from an evangelical point of view are often ones that are practiced in mainline churches, or were popular in other periods of history.

So, yes, there are questions to be asked – why are young protestants moving away from the evangelical church and into a, in some ways, more “catholic” mode of worship? How comfortably can Christianity and popular culture co-exist (but this is only worth exploring if both “Christian pop culture” and the interactions of secular pop culture and Church are considered)? The more established churches would do well to consider why the hipsters McCracken is examining are becoming more prevalent, but to consider them as Christians that just want to be cool is selling short what could be a fruitful dialogue between different branches of the faith.

Over-Achievers Anonymous

I want to foster meaningful relationships, practice my hobbies and develop new ones, weigh ten pounds less than whatever I weigh at any given moment, cook all locally organic food from scratch, read books that will teach me more about the world, and excel at my work. For some reason, I can’t quite pull that off. So, I end up feeling vaguely guilty when I am sitting on the couch eating canned soup for supper.

And it’s not just me – I’ve had this conversation with multiple friends recently – when I summed it up as I have at the beginning of this post, one of my girlfriends said “Get out of my head!” – that’s exactly the way she feels too. So here we are, a bunch of over-educated thirty-somethings paralyzed by the weight of the expectations we put on ourselves. And what we expect out of ourselves isn’t bad. It’s good to want to be creative and to want to care about our footprint on the earth and our physical health, so it’s hard to break out of the pattern.

On the other hand, though, we just can’t achieve everything that we want to. And while I don’t want to make it an excuse for spending every night of my life sitting on the couch eating canned soup, I’ve been trying to give myself grace for the times when I can’t achieve everything – maybe sometimes I need to give up the organic meal or adding another workout into my weekly schedule to spend time with friends, or get a bit of quilting done.

I also try to acknowledge the little steps that I have taken – I am not eating all local organic food cooked from scratch, but we’ve moved to eating about 90% local organic meat, and trying to make sure there are homemade soups and stews in the freezer at all times. It’s a good step. I am not learning any new hobbies, but I am finding a few that I like and trying to make time to keep them up.

Another way to get over the guilt associated with falling short of your over-achiever expectations is to honestly examine how much of those expectations really come from ego. Yes, it’s good to be fit and well-rounded and competent at work, but do I want these things so that people will look at me and see how good I am at keeping all the balls in the air? If I examine my motivations, and they aren’t as pure as they might seem on the surface, this also helps to let go.

I am a long way from being a recovered over-achiever (though going to law school was great for putting things in perspective . . . I’ve managed to find a profession where I am slightly less type-A than most of the other type-As, so I look positively slackerly at times . . .), but I am trying to keep a balance, and giving myself grace to accept that I am only one person with only so many hours in the day.

plus ca change . . .

I recently read Three Nights in Havana, a book ostensibly about Trudeau’s state visit to Cuba in 1976, but more generally about the Cold War, the Cuban revolution, the personalities of both Trudeau and Castro, and Canada-Cuba relations. In reading that book I learned that the FLQ was socialist (which makes sense, considering the time, but I’d never made that connection before) and that anti-Castro Cubans bombed Canadian government buildings. Missing out on the height of the cold war (I was a blissfully ignorant child regarding the significance of the wall coming down, even if I am old enough to vaguely remember it happening), it had never really struck me how much uncertainty people lived with for the whole period after WWII until the late 80s. And it made me realize that in every era there has been some kind of uncertainty and upheaval. I think it’s easy for our generation to feel like the “post 9/11 era” is completely uncharted territory. And, in some ways, it is – but I guess what I realized is that every generation has faced its own challenges and its own uncharted territory. In a way, it is the uncertainty of the situation that links us with history, and I find that oddly comforting. Maybe the world that we know it is coming to an end, but maybe the world that we know is always coming to an end and every day a new one, in some ways better and in some ways worse, is being born to take its place.

reserved Obama-mania

Like millions of people around the world, I watched Obama’s inauguration yesterday and, like millions of people around the world, kinda wished he could be our guy. I am generally not given to being more interested in American politics than our own – unlike many people I know, I passed over the Biden/Palin debate to watch our own leadership candidates duke it out. Obama is exciting, though. Not only is he the first black president of the United States, which is amazing when you think of how recently black Americans actually got their civil rights, but he’s also a visionary who seems ready to lead his country in the current challenging times, and to give them a sense of identity and pride.

And so I watched the inauguration with excitement yesterday but, while I have a bit of charismatic leader-envy, there were elements that reminded me how different America and Canada are, and made me happy that I belong to this relatively boring and laid-back nation.

The first thing that struck me (and many of my colleagues have also mentioned it) was the overt Christian-ness of the whole process. While Obama did point out in his speech that Americans are of all beliefs, they still had Rick Warren give his very Christian prayer, leaving no question that American is one nation “under God”. The religious background of most Canadian leaders is a non-issue – I hear that Ignatieff is Orthodox. Who knew? And who cares? We let our leaders’ personal beliefs quietly affect their convictions, and judge them by their actions more than their affiliations. I like this – it gives more room for people from diverse backgrounds to truly feel like they belong.

The other thing that I have always found odd, and noticed again during yesterday’s ceremony, is the role of the First Lady. Both Michele Obama and Biden’s wife held the Bible when their husbands were sworn in. While it is true that the role of President of the United States is going to affect a person’s spouse profoundly, it still made me think of the way that churches expect pastors wives to find their own fulfillment in supporting their husband’s vocation (see my rant on this subject here ). I like our method better, where the wife of the P.M. generally does whatever she does (lawyer, full-time mother, hippie/debutante), and while it’s probably not good form to get drunk with the Rolling Stones, she is more or less left alone.

I feel like Obama is going to be a defining voice in our generation, and I will be watching him from up here in the North, but as much as I would love to have a leader whose speeches make me cry (ahem . . . in the good way . . .) I would not trade our pomp-free ways for all the inaugural balls in the world.

Tuesday Afternoon Philosophy

“I need to figure out what I believe in metaphysically and morally, and how the two are related. That’s the essence of a spiritual identity.” This thought wandered through my head while I was trying to get to sleep the other night. Not as bad as my brain adding to my to-do list for work the next day, but also not as conducive to drifting off as thoughts of summer vacation. It might just have been my mind processing the philosophy of a character in the book I was reading, or I might to be onto something. So the first step in answering this question is to probe the premise – is there a link between morals and metaphysics – and is that, indeed, where the crux of spirituality lies?

Is it possible to have a moral system without it being linked to your understanding of the nature of the universe and your place in it? It seems to me the answer to this is no. At least, I can’t think of any examples – even if you don’t believe there is a God with a will who is pleased by some things and displeased by others, to even have a sense that there is “right” and “wrong”, you have to have an idea of how your actions fit into your larger context . . . and I don’t see how that can be done without an idea of what that larger context is. Even pure moral relativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Alright, so if there’s a link – so what? If I figure out where my morality comes from, will I know what I think about the nature of God? Or if I figure out what I think the nature of God is, will it guide me in right living? If I believe something is inherently good or bad (or that there is no inherent good or bad), that belief must come from some measurement of utility, that seems it would come from my understanding of being. It seems a bit harder to make the link in the other direction, though – in any worldview in which there isn’t some kind of anthropomorphic god, how do we take cues from the nature of the universe to shape our action?

This is twisting my head, and I don’t think I’ve yet figured out if it’s useful or not. I guess that’s why I am a lawyer, and not a metaphysician (or metaphysicist, which sounds much cooler, if you ask me . . .).

feminist rant #84

I resent that I have to be careful. I resent that I have always felt uncomfortable walking home from the Transitway late at night, and that those twinges have been confirmed as something more than paranoia by the news reports of a sexual assault (in mid-day) on the path between the mall and my street. And I resent that our government no longer funds Status of Women Canada, because it considers that women have obtained equality. No man that I know worries about how they’re going to get safely home in Ottawa.