The sonnet comes as naturally as ordinary speech to poet Judith Goldhaber. I’ve enjoyed her versified retellings of classic fables in the book Sonnets from Aesop, illustrated with charming Chagall-like paintings by her husband Gerson. This YouTube video shows the Oakland Symphony Chorus performing “The Power of Light” from the musical “Falling Through a Hole in the Air: The Incredible Journey of Stephen Hawking” (book and lyrics by Judith Goldhaber, music by Carl Pennypacker). Judith is the lady with dazzling red hair who is standing behind the famous physicist. Here are the lyrics:
The Power of Light
i.
To touch the heart of a star,
To feel the ground of being in the boundless,
The edge of space,
The edge of time,
The edge of eternity…
CHORUS:
Feel the power of light
Feel the depth of the night,
Long is the journey to our distant home,
Worlds spin ‘round us but we’re still alone,
Darkness, silence, and the end so far,
Who will speak to us and tell us where we are?
And then…
Comets and candles,
Starlight and diamonds,
Glimmer and glitter and glisten and gleam,
Torches and campfires,
Lanterns and moonlight,
Showery arrows that shine in our dreams —
Moon in a halo
Shedding your luster
Bathing the earth
In your luminous glow…
Carry me
O carry me higher
Carry me,
O carry me further
Carry me upward
Carry me into the light!
ii.
Feel the power of light
Feel the depth of the night
Now we’re moving toward that distant star
Towards the mystery of who we are,
When we’ll reach it we can never know
The path is dark but now we see the way to go
Lit by…
Prisms and rainbows
Opals and sunbeams,
Crimson and orange and yellow and green,
Fountains of color,
Flashes of fire,
Indigo, violet, and ultramarine.
Light more radiant than the sun and moon
Grant us now the eyes to see!
Carry us, O carry us homewards,
Carry us, O carry us starwards,
Carry us Godwards,
Into the source of the light!
Read more of Judith’s poetry at WinningWriters.com (here and here).
Author Archives: Jendi Reiter
God’s Wrath, Christ’s Peace, and the Culture Wars
Catholic theologian James Alison’s essay “Wrath and the gay question: on not being afraid, and its ecclesial shape” is not only the best explanation of the Atonement I’ve seen in a long while, but also represents (to my mind) a more helpful direction for gay-affirming Christians than merely hunting for proof-texts that support our position and explaining away those that don’t.
Alison contends that human societies constantly seek self-definition by scapegoating outsiders. When Christ, the only completely innocent person, voluntarily assumed the scapegoat role, he exposed the sinfulness of that entire system. Never again could we in good faith believe that spiritual purity depended on exclusion. If community must be founded on sacrifice, Christ was the sacrificial victim and the entire human race became a single community, united by our responsibility for his death and by his equal love for us all. Yet Alison also finds fault with the liberal “many flavors” approach to gays in the church, saying we need to emphasize not the diversity of human lifestyles but our universal brother- and sisterhood.
Some highlights (boldface emphasis mine):
I want to bring into polite adult discussion something which is not normally allowed there, but is relegated to the backroom of fundamentalist discourse, where its misuse is a mirror image of its exclusion from enlightened discourse.Read the whole article here.
In enlightened discourse, there is of course, no “wrath” in any theological or anthropological sense. There is progress, and development, and of course, on the way there is conflict. Conflict is shown as something painful, but necessary, steps on the way towards the next phase. No omelettes without breaking eggs, and similar sentiments. In fundamentalist discourse, that conflict and those “steps on the way to the next phase” are personally and cosmically significant, and victory and defeat in them are part of the mysterious workings of a divinity, certainly something far greater and more important than anything the “wise” and “enlightened” of this generation could know about. Part of the attraction of fundamentalist discourse, and this fundamentalism can be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Marxist, or secularist, is the way it allows partially self-selecting “outsiders” from mainstream culture (and we’re all such partially self-selecting “outsiders” now) to see themselves as secret “insiders” with a direct line in to What’s Really Going On.
For the Enlightened, it is perfectly obvious that there is no violence in God, if there is a God at all; while for the fundamentalist, the violence is always associated with God, directly, or through those charged with interpreting “His” (and it usually is His) message. In fact, without the violence there would be no sign of God’s activity in the world, which effectively means, there would be no God. What I would like to do is rescue the notion of wrath by attempting to show how there is indeed no violence in God, but that the phenomenon which religious language has described as “wrath” is very real, and worth taking seriously. Not only that, but it is rather important for our contemporary ability to live the Gospel that we overcome the schism between the enlightened and the fundamentalist, two positions which are, in my view, very much enemy twins, by recovering a sense of the anthropological effect in our midst of the covenant of peace to which the Scriptures refer (Isaiah 54, 10; Ezekiel 34, 25 & 37, 26). By recovering, if you like, the ecclesial shape of Christ making his covenant for us and enabling us not to be afraid.
There seems to be something odd going on when the same person, Jesus, both promises his followers:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. (John 14, 27)
And yet says:
Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. (Mt 10, 34-36; cf. Luke 12, 51)
****
Jesus does warn that the effect of his mission is going to be to produce wrath, in the passage I have already quoted to you. And in fact, he then gives himself to the sacrificial mechanism in a way which the Gospel writers point to as being the way proper to the great High Priest, and he becomes the lamb of sacrifice. In fact, he reverses the normal human sacrificial system which started with human sacrifice and then is later modified to work with animal substitutes. Jesus, by contrast, substitutes himself for the lamb, portions of whose body were handed out to the priests; and thus by putting a human back at the centre of the sacrificial system, he reveals it for what it is: a murder.
Now here is the curious thing. It looks for all the world as though Jesus is simply fitting into the ancient world’s views about sacrifice and wrath. But in fact, he is doing exactly the reverse. Because he is giving himself to this being murdered, and he has done nothing wrong, he brings about an entirely new way to be free from wrath. This is not the way we saw with Achan, where the temporary freedom from wrath comes with the outbreak of unanimous violence which creates singleness of heart among the group. What Jesus has done by substituting himself for the victim at the centre of the lynch sacrifice is to make it possible for those who perceive his innocence, to realise what it is in which they have been involved (and agreeing to drink his blood presupposes a recognition of this complicity). These then begin to have their identity given them not by the group over against the victim, but by the self-giving victim who is undoing the unanimity of the group. This means that from then on they never again have to be involved in sacrifices, sacrificial mechanisms and all the games of “wrath” which every culture throws up. They will be learning to walk away from all that, undergoing being given the peace that the world does not give.
So, there is no wrath at all in what Jesus is doing. He understands perfectly well that there is no wrath in the Father, and yet that “wrath” is a very real anthropological reality, whose cup he will drink to its dregs. His Passion consists, in fact, of his moving slowly, obediently, and deliberately into the place of shame, the place of wrath, and doing so freely and without provoking it. However, from the perspective of the wrathful, that is, of all of us run by the mechanisms of identity building, peace building, unanimity building “over against” another, Jesus has done something terrible. Exactly as he warned. He has plunged us into irresoluble wrath. Because he has made it impossible for us ever really to believe in what we are doing when we sacrifice, when we shore up our social belonging against some other. All our desperate attempts to continue doing that are revealed to be what they are: just so much angry frustration, going nowhere at all, spinning the wheels of futility.
The reason is this: the moment we perceive that the one occupying the central space in our system of creating and shoring up meaning is actually innocent, actually gave himself to be in that space, then all our sacred mechanisms for shoring up law and order, sacred differences and so forth, are revealed to be the fruits of an enormous self-deception. The whole world of the sacred totters, tumbles, and falls if we see that this human being is just like us. He came to occupy the place of the sacrificial victim entirely freely, voluntarily, and without any taint of being “run” by, or beholden to, the sacrificial system. That is, he is one who was without sin. This human being was doing something for us even while we were so locked into a sacrificial way of thinking and behaviour that we couldn’t possibly have understood what he was doing for us, let alone asked him to do it. The world of the sacred totters and falls because when we see someone who is like us doing that for us, and realise what has been done, the shape that our realisation takes is our moving away from ever being involved in such things again.
Now what is terrible about this is that it makes it impossible for us really to bring about with a good conscience any of the sacred resolutions, the sacrificial decisions which brought us, and bring all societies, comparative peace and order. The game is up. And so human desire, rivalry, competition, which had previously been kept in some sort of check by a system of prohibitions, rituals, sacrifices and myths, lest human groups collapse in perpetual and irresoluble mutual vengeance, can no longer be controlled in this way. This is the sense in which Jesus’ coming brings not peace to the earth, but a sword and division. All the sacred structures which hold groups together start to collapse, because desire has been unleashed. So the sacred bonds within families are weakened, different generations will be run by different worlds, give their loyalty to different and incompatible causes,
the pattern of desire constantly shifting. All in fact will be afloat on a sea of wrath, because the traditional means to curb wrath, the creation by sacrifice of spaces of temporary peace within the group, has been undone forever. The only alternative is to undergo the forgiveness which comes from the lamb, and start to find oneself recreated from within by a peace which is not from this world, and involves learning how to resist the evil one by not resisting evil. This means: you effectively resist, have no part in, the structures and flows of desire which are synonymous with the prince of this world, that is to say with the world of wrath, only by refusing to acquire an identity over against evil-done-to you.
Would Jesus Discriminate?
The website “Would Jesus Discriminate?” offers a provocative new take on some familiar Bible stories. Using textual and historical analysis of the original Greek text, the authors claim that certain New Testament episodes are really about gay characters, such as the eunuch baptized by Philip in the book of Acts. I’m cautiously enthusiastic about this project. I’d like to believe that there are positive stories about gay people and relationships in the Bible, but there are two things that make me hesitate. First, I don’t have the scholarly background to know how plausible these readings are. Second, it would be a shame if we went overboard and read a sexual component into all stories of intimate friendship (e.g. David and Jonathan), as our pop-Freudian suspicious culture is wont to do. Anyhow, click the billboards on their site and let me know what you think.
Philip Nikolayev: “Ideers”
Bash’um hard with a hunk o’ lard, cowboy,
when they come ‘ere to seduce our sons and daughters,
the only sons and daughters we have,
with their damn ideers. They think ideers
are worth somethin’ like a Bushel O’Pork
per each. Trahahahaha. They eschew
the feelin’s of patriotism, peals of chivalry
‘n’ private property like. So what does we care
to preserve them as a subspecies? Bein’ ourselves
of solid as rock good local stock
‘n’ rooted in these very hills that we cultivate,
bein’ so local that the mind races over
aeons of banjo-tinklin’ memory of roots
like echoes in the prairied valley, being
precisely that kinda stock, honest blue grass treadin’,
we’re buyin’ none of that Uruguay political correctness.
None, I be tellin’ ya m’s’ladies!
We automatic’ly
put that subspecies under suspicion, zitwere.
The shmuck (pardon me, Sir, me
umbilical vernacular) hadta be tryin’ to
spray us around wi’ hi’ curlture.
He said he be a-dribblin’ learnin’ into our heads
wi’ like critical thinkin’ routines.
But without shittn’ y’uns, I muss hereinafter d’claire
his reasonin’ ta be sorely wrong an’ fallaiches.
In fact, it is beyond fallaiches. Whatever.
Y’uns havin’ troubles hearin’ or somethin’? We been
on this land for gwerk knows how many a century,
from eras immemorable, and we know,
havin’ built these here barns and infrastructure,
we know without prejudice
and in good shape ‘n’ hope ‘n’ faith ‘n’ all
of mind and body like, we know
exact what the heck it cost to keep
the streets of our polity clean,
Partridge and Dingleberry Rock Village Plaza,
positively speakin’ straight narrow clean.
I do repeat, straight narrow clean,
of all yum culturevultures with all yum
cloggin’ dog’s doo an’ piece o’shit ideers.
(Philip was my classmate at Harvard in the 1990s, but despite that early disadvantage in life, he is now the proud editor of Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics and the author of several poetry books including Letters from Aldenderry, from which “Ideers” is reprinted by permission. Visit his MySpace page here.)
Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment Defeated in Massachusetts
This just in from Stanley Rosenberg, our state senator for Northampton:
“Knowing of your interest regarding the proposed Marriage Amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution, I am writing to provide an update on the Constitutional Convention held today, June 14th 2007.
“I am pleased to report that at this the 18th Constitutional Convention meeting on the question of same-sex marriage, the members present and voting defeated the proposed amendment by a vote of 151-45. This means that the amendment will not advance to the November 2008 ballot.
“This is a significant victory for the civil rights of the gay and lesbian community. When the debate began 18 Conventions ago, there were only a couple dozen people in the Legislature that believed that Civil Unions or Same-Sex Marriages should be allowed. Over the years, as a result of the public debate and deep reflection, that number grew to 151. This is truly a reflection of the shifting views not only of the Legislators but also of their constituents. This is a great victory also for the Supreme Judicial Court which had the wisdom and courage to declare that our Constitution requires equal protection for all, for more than a thousand religious leaders who stood with same-sex couples, for the 10s of thousands of constituents across the Commonwealth who spoke out in support of the gay community, and for the more than 9 thousand same-sex couples who have solemnized – through marriage – their commitment and love for each other.”
Christian Wiman on Illness, Love, and Rediscovering Faith
This beautiful essay from Christian Wiman, editor of the venerable journal Poetry, describes how falling in love and diagnosis with a fatal illness revitalized both his poetry and his faith. Wiman writes:
If I look back on the things I have written in the past two decades, it’s clear to me not only how thoroughly the forms and language of Christianity have shaped my imagination, but also how deep and persistent my existential anxiety has been. I don’t know whether this is all attributable to the century into which I was born, some genetic glitch, or a late reverberation of the Fall of Man. What I do know is that I have not been at ease in this world.
Poetry, for me, has always been bound up with this unease, fueled by contingency toward forms that will transcend it, as involved with silence as it is with sound. I don’t have much sympathy for the Arnoldian notion of poetry replacing religion. It seems not simply quaint but dangerous to make that assumption, even implicitly, perhaps especially implicitly. I do think, though, that poetry is how religious feeling has survived in me. Partly this is because I have at times experienced in the writing of a poem some access to a power that feels greater than I am, and it seems reductive, even somehow a deep betrayal, to attribute that power merely to the unconscious or to the dynamism of language itself. But also, if I look back on the poems I’ve written in the past two decades, it almost seems as if the one constant is God. Or, rather, His absence….
four years ago, after making poetry the central purpose of my life for almost two decades, I stopped writing. Partly this was a conscious decision. I told myself that I had exhausted one way of writing, and I do think there was truth in that. The deeper truth, though, is that I myself was exhausted. To believe that being conscious means primarily being conscious of loss, to find life authentic only in the apprehension of death, is to pitch your tent at the edge of an abyss, “and when you gaze long into the abyss,” Nietzsche says, “the abyss also gazes into you.” I blinked.
Wiman came alive again when he fell in love and got married, but then, on his 39th birthday, was diagnosed with a rare and incurable cancer of the blood.
If I had gotten the diagnosis some years earlier — and it seems weirdly providential that I didn’t, since I had symptoms and went to several doctors about them — I’m not sure I would have reacted very strongly. It would have seemed a fatalistic confirmation of everything I had always thought about existence, and my response, I think, would have been equally fatalistic. It would have been the bearable oblivion of despair, not the unbearable, and therefore galvanizing, pain of particular grief. In those early days after the diagnosis, when we mostly just sat on the couch and cried, I alone was dying, but we were mourning very much together. And what we were mourning was not my death, exactly, but the death of the life we had imagined with each other.
Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That’s exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be. That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm. What I remember of that Sunday, though, and of the Sundays that immediately followed, is less the services themselves than the walks we took afterwards, and less the specifics of the conversations we had about God, always about God, than the moments of silent, and what felt like sacred, attentiveness those conversations led to: an iron sky and the lake so calm it seemed thickened; the El blasting past with its rain of sparks and brief, lost faces; the broad leaves and white blooms of a catalpa on our street, Grace Street, and under the tree a seethe of something that was just barely still a bird, quick with life beyond its own.
I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called “hope toward God.”
Read the whole essay in The American Scholar here.
“Lonely Tier” and “Flash” by Conway
Here are some new poems by “Conway,” a prisoner at a supermax facility in central California who’s serving 25-to-life under the state’s three-strikes law for receiving stolen goods. In his May 2 letter, he writes that he was recently relocated to a new cell block whose yard has a much-appreciated view of the outside world:
“I have moved to another place and the cages we get to go to for yard for four hours two or sometimes three times a week, are in perfect view of the entrance road to this facility, so we get to see cars trucks and motorcycles drive in and out and there are these trees along the outside perimeter that are shedding these seeds when the wind blows, thousands of little paper flowers searching for a home to grow roots, a very nice change of scenery from being behind the wall for so long. I saw a woman ride by the other day on a bicycle and wrote a poem about her, not sure if you would approve though, kind of racy :)”
Lonely Tier
Each night I sleep on this stony bed
passing me by, is a world in my stead
with the sounds of defiance corrupting our day
encroaching that compliance along the way
this cave made daily being dug so deep
hungry and craving we wander and weep
a concrete tomb constructed by tears
secreted from waves of trembling fears
it flows through those gates of wrath
on the golden coast it reaps this path
for a tear is an indestructible thing
the brilliance in there can make angels sing
But, when it’s reaped with bad intent
that lonely tier breeds wicked sentiment
a tear falls in the wind blows back to me again
as forgiveness for my sin
returns to me as a priceless gem…
********
Flash
She was bent in half as she rode
peddling fast our sublime sweet dream
time flew past under white garments seen
flashing the hint of something in-between
at the speed unattainable you’d need
to ever accomplish that deed.
But, we all watched her blast
furtive glances traded as she passed
Those in the know, enjoyed the show
igniting our memory of those
fires down below, shaped right
on desire’s one handlebar.
Who is that lucky star
who opens that locket
shared in the pocket compared
behind curious door, while garments mingle
tumbled wreckless on carpeted floor.
Always seeking release
or a little more pleased
as those others teased, so much
wished for just a little touch
offered in a flash…
Reminder: Massachusetts Vote on Gay Marriage June 14
Just a reminder to readers of this blog who live in Massachusetts and support gay marriage: The state legislature will vote this Thursday, June 14, on whether to place a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on the November 2008 ballot. Now is the time to call or email your state senator and representative, and if you live near Boston, join the MassEquality demonstrations at the Statehouse.
This vote has important ramifications beyond the gay community. Allowing majority rule to restrict the civil rights of a minority is contrary to the spirit of the Bill of Rights. It’s cheap and easy for people with nothing at stake to cast a symbolic vote that disproportionately burdens a few. What authorizes us, the straight majority, to wield this power? As Christians, can we really say it’s our duty to collude with Caesar to correct what some of us consider the sinfulness of another’s private life?
Gay people are not going to form straight families because we’ve taken away their rights. Instead, they and their children will go through life crises without the basic security that we take for granted: a partner at their bedside in the hospital, child custody and visitation, the ability to make medical decisions for loved ones. How has a single straight marriage been saved by inflicting this legal limbo on our neighbors? Read some Massachusetts couples’ stories here.
Bishop Schori Interviewed by Bill Moyers
The PBS program Bill Moyers Journal yesterday interviewed Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA and the first woman to lead a national Anglican church. Schori is an interesting figure. As the interview shows, her background as an oceanographer gives her an appreciation of the diversity of God’s creation. Science also shapes her historical awareness that tradition and expert opinion always evolve in response to new data, and that somehow the enterprise (be it science or religion) can continue through change without losing legitimacy. Moyers’ leading questions got on my nerves; he persisted in framing the issues as us-versus-them, seeming not to hear Schori’s primary emphasis on reconciliation, coexistence and patience.
The transcript and video are both available on the site, along with background material on the conflict over homosexuality in the church. I may be asking too much from television, but I wish the cultural issues didn’t always upstage the theological ones in coverage of the Anglican schism. Apart from her brave stance on gays’ and women’s equality, what does Bishop Schori believe about God, Jesus, the atonement, grace, salvation…you know, those things that were actually important enough to have more than six Bible verses written about them? What are the different positions on these topics within the Anglican Communion, and how do those divisions track the pro-gay/anti-gay split, or not?
Some quotes from Bishop Schori:
“The incredible wonder of God’s creation and the incredible diversity of God’s creation. Things that come in different sizes and colors and shapes and body forms are all part of that incredible diversity of creation that’s present below the waters where we never even see them. And the Psalms tell us that God delights in that.
“My faith journey has been, as a scientist, about discovering the wonder of creation. That there– there’s a prayer that we, in the Episcopal Church use after baptism that prays that the newly baptized may receive the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works. The kind of work that I did as a scientist was a piece of that, just a small piece.”
****
“Religion is at its best, I think, an invitation into relationship. It’s not necessarily a set of instructions for how you deal with every challenging person you run across in the world. It has that at its depth, but it– does not give one permission to say, “This person is out, and this one’s okay and acceptable.” And I– it continually invites us into a larger understanding of that relationship.”
****
“I do believe [homosexuality is] a moral issue because it’s about how we love our neighbor. It’s about how we live in relationship to God and our neighbors. When I look at other instances in church history, when we’ve been faced with something similar– the history in this country over the– over slavery. The church in the north . Much of it came to a different conclusion than the church in the south– about the morality of slavery.
“And neither side was comfortable with the breadth of understanding that could include the other. In practice, the Episcopal Church didn’t kick out the Confederate part of the church. They kept calling the roll during the Civil War, and when the war was over, they welcomed them back. But in the– in the heat of the moment it’s pretty tough to live with that kind of breadth that can include a position that seems so radically opposed.”
****
[On the Christian tradition’s difficulty in affirming sexuality:] “I think part of it’s our Greek heritage. You know, our tendency toward dualism, that– you know, one part of a human being or a male human being– exemplifies spirit and– a female human being is somehow lesser and– demonstrates the flesh. “With our long-development of an anthropology that says that heterosexual male is a normative human being. We’re– we’ve only begun in the last 150 years to really question that.
“And I believe that the wrestling with the place of women in leadership, particularly in public leadership, is directly related to the same kind of issue over the position of gay and lesbian people in leadership, in public leadership.”
Abandoned by Liberalism
Today’s post from Hugo Schwyzer perfectly describes both the ethical strengths and the one great spiritual weakness of liberal mainline churches. I’d only add that the needs he describes are in no way limited to teens. The church in question is All Saints Pasadena in California.
This flagship church of American Anglican liberalism is very, very good at encouraging individual exploration. We are very good at raising awareness of suffering in the broader world. We are very, very good at teaching young people how to ask the right theological questions. We are very, very good at instilling suspicion of any person or institution who cllaims to have The One True Answer. We are, most of the time, pretty good at loving kids “where they’re at” instead of where we think they should be.
But we liberal Episcopalians are often not so good at helping kids to come to certainties. Too often, when a young person in pain asks “where is God when I need Him?”, the institutional response is to say “Ah, my child, that’s an excellent question, one asked by many people over the centuries. We invite you to pray and reflect on God in His Mystery and His Apparent Absence, and know that we support you as you wrestle with the Great Dilemma of Faith.” We’re really good, we Episcopalians, at encouraging a process of discernment. (Heck, is there any word we love more than “process”?) We revel in “acknowledging dichotomies” and “appreciating uncertainty” and “holding apparent contradictions in simultaneous tension”. This is great, heady stuff, but it isn’t really helpful to a teen wrestling with the suicide of a friend, an eating disorder, the decision to terminate a pregnancy, their parents’ divorce.
What I try to do in my youth ministry — and what I see at least a few folks trying to do as well — is fuse an evangelical passion for Jesus as Savior and Best of Friends with an appreciation for theological pluralism. In other words, Jesus may not the be the Only Way, but to live in relationship with Him is certainly One Way, and I am unashamed to proclaim that for me, He has turned out to be the Best Way. It’s healthy and right and good to ackonwledge a multiplicity of equally wonderful choices, but at some point (particularly in a time of great existential crisis) it’s helpful to make one choice.
We all know Frost’s poem about the road less traveled. Too often among my fellow liberal Anglicans, I sense a real delight in remaining permanently stuck at the crossroads. One of the penchants I really dislike among some of my friends is the tendency to see the refusal to make any theological commitments as evidence of great wisdom. Some elevate “analysis paralysis” to the level of a high virtue. That’s fine for adults, but it’s not helpful for most teenagers, who, despite their natural suspicion towards authority, really need at least some certainties, even if the primary certainty that a good youth leader can provide is that they are loved.
When you’re a child, you take the path your parents tell you to take. When you’re a teen, it is right and good to become aware of options, of choices — and the church ought to point out that other choices exist. But after we acknowledge that there are other paths, perhaps just as worthy and good as ours (the ocean refuses no river, after all), we need to say definitively: this is our path. This is our way. And we will walk this path with you.