Book Notes: Proper Confidence


Lesslie Newbigin’s Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship is a must-read for Christians and others who perceive the sterility of the fundamentalism-relativism debate over the possibility of religious truth, but don’t know where to turn for a third option.

Newbigin (1909-1998) was an internationally renowned British missionary, pastor, and scholar. He began as a village evangelist in India, and eventually held such positions as bishop of the Church of South India and associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches. Because he spent so many years sharing the gospel in cultures that were unencumbered by Western philosophical baggage, Newbigin was in a privileged position to perceive our contemporary post-Enlightenment assumptions about knowledge and certainty as merely one ideology among many, open to challenge. He belonged to that rare breed of theologians who not only had genuinely original ideas, but expressed them with clarity and verve.


Proper Confidence is a slim volume (105 pages) that expresses more concisely the ideas in Newbigin’s best-selling The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Though at times repetitive and dense, this latter book is also a treasure that belongs on every Christian apologist’s bookshelf. 

Newbigin sees a fundamental divide running through Western thought from the Greco-Roman period to the present day. Is ultimate reality impersonal, such that we must maintain a detached perspective in order to know the truth, or is it personal, requiring us to risk involvement in the story that God is telling? There is no neutral perspective from which one can prove the superiority of either option. Rather, which option we choose will itself determine our standards of proof in religious matters.

The gospel shocked the Greco-Roman world because it merged two realms that classical thought had kept separate. Truth was identified with universal, timeless principles. The logos, like the dharma in Eastern thought, “referred to the ultimate impersonal entity which was at the heart of all coherence in the cosmos.” (p.4) How could the logos be identified with something as radically contingent as the life and death of a particular man, Jesus, in human history?

At this point, says Newbigin, the hearer has only two choices. Retain the classical worldview, which has also become the post-Enlightenment worldview, with all its dualisms (fact/value, objective/subjective, reason/faith). Or “listen to those who tell the story, and perhaps (indeed above all)…witness the cruel death of those who would rather face the lions in the circus than disavow this belief. If that course is pursued, then the very meaning of the word logos and the whole edifice of thought of which it is the keystone have to be taken down and rebuilt on this new foundation, this new arche. The language of Scripture, the evangelist announces, will be either the cornerstone or the stone of stumbling; it cannot be merely one of the building blocks in the whole structure of thought.” (p.5)

If we believe that reliable knowledge is best obtained through logical discovery of universal facts — an epistemology that puts us totally in control — then it would be absurd to take up this invitation. However, if we’re open to the idea that knowledge depends on an act of trust, then confidence in the gospel witnesses may lead us to confidence in God.


What is obvious and important at this stage is that the acceptance of the biblical tradition as a starting point for thought constituted a radical break with the classical tradition, whether in its Platonic or Aristotelian form. To put it crudely, in the latter form we begin by asking questions, and we formulate these questions on the basis of our experience of the world. In this enterprise we are in control of operations. We decide which questions to ask, and these decisions necessarily condition the nature of the answers. This is the procedure with which we are familiar in the work of the natural sciences. The things we desire to understand are not active players in the game of learning; they are inert and must submit to our questioning. The resulting “knowledge” is our achievement and our possession.

But there is another kind of knowing which, in many languages, is designated by a different word. It is the kind of knowing that we seek in our relations with other people. In this kind of knowing we are not in full control. We may ask questions, but we must also answer the questions put by the other. We can only come to know others in the measure in which they are willing to share. The resulting knowledge is not simply our own achievement; it is also the gift of others. And even in the mutual relations of ordinary human beings, it is never complete. There are always further depths of knowledge that only long friendship and mutual trust can reach, if indeed they can be reached at all.

There is a radical break between these two kinds of knowing: the knowing often associated with the natural sciences and the knowing involved in personal relations. We experience this radical break, for example, when someone about whom we have been talking unexpectedly comes into the room. We can discuss an absent person in a manner that leaves us in full control of the discussion. But if the person comes into the room, we must either break off the discussion or change into a different mode of talking.

This is a proper analogy of the break involved in the move from the classical to the Christian way of understanding the world. If, so to say, the Idea of the Good has actually entered the room and spoken, we have to stop our former discussion and listen. (pp.10-11)

How does this choice between two philosophies affect us today? Newbigin sees both liberals and fundamentalists as mistakenly clinging to concepts of proof and certainty that belong to the “impersonal” worldview. The former throw out all the aspects of the Christian story that can’t be reconciled with modern science or proven according to the ideal of mathematics, that is, without reference to the personal commitments or situation of the thinker. Their fundamentalist opponents tacitly concede this notion of truth, but tie themselves in knots trying to show that the Bible and Christian doctrine measure up to these standards.

In three chapters titled “Faith as the Way to Knowledge,” “Doubt as the Way to Certainty,” and “Certainty as the Way to Nihilism,” Newbigin surveys how Western theology and philosophy slipped away from the incarnational, personal approach to knowledge embodied in the gospel, and how the quest for certainty failed.

In the 13th century, reacting to the influence of Muslim rationalist philosophers like Averroes, St. Thomas Aquinas introduced a fateful two-tier scheme of truths that could be known by reason alone, and truths that required special revelation from God. It was inevitable, as scientific discoveries in the so-called secular realm progressed, that the truths of faith would come to occupy second-class status as private sentiments. Moreover, if there were a truth-seeking method that functioned apart from God, why would we need another method? “If philosophy has to be called in to underpin that knowledge of God which (it is claimed) comes by revelation; if, in other words, the religious experience of those apprenticed to the tradition which has its foundation in the biblical narrative is not itself a sufficient ground for certainty, so that other, more reliable grounds are to be sought; it follows that those other grounds must be completely reliable….But they are not.” (p.19) Science and philosophy constantly overturned old proofs with new arguments and evidence, leading 17th-century Europe into a crisis of skepticism.

In this climate, Descartes proposed to establish religious certainty on a foundation of radical doubt, reversing St. Augustine’s dictum that “I believe in order to understand.” That statement offends us today because Augustine seems to be begging the question. How can he find truth if he’s already chosen the conclusion he wants to reach? Heirs of the Cartesian worldview, we assume that the thinking subject is the only active participant, and everything else is just data. But really, how could we expect an impersonal method to give us knowledge of the God of the Bible, who is a supremely personal God? The God of the philosophers, by definition, can’t walk into the room and tell us something we couldn’t have figured out for ourselves. Newbigin’s insight is that the Cartesian epistemology, no less than the Augustinian, predetermines the types of answers that will be considered legitimate.

In retrospect, it wasn’t inevitable that Descartes chose abstract thought as the bedrock of our knowledge of reality. He could have said “I love, therefore I am” or “I act, therefore I am”. “By isolating the thinking mind as though it existed apart from its embodiment in a whole person and thus apart from the whole human and cosmic history to which that person belongs, Descartes opened up a huge gap between the world of thought and the world of material things and historical happenings.” (p.22) This mind-body dualism, long rejected by science, persists today in popular thought about religion and ethics, from the liberal church’s scorning theology in favor of political and charitable work, to John Rawls’ attempt to define a just society based on procedural values alone (the famous “veil of ignorance“).

By making doubt seem morally and philosophically superior to faith, Newbigin argues, Enlightenment thought ultimately led us into an impasse where no knowledge seems reliable:

The phrases “blind faith” and “honest doubt” have become the most common of currency. Both faith and doubt can be honest or blind, but one does not hear of “blind doubt” or of “honest faith.” Yet the fashion of thought which gives priority to doubt over faith in the whole adventure of knowing is absurd. Both faith and doubt are necessary elements in this adventure.  One does not learn anything except by believing something, and — conversely — if one doubts everything one learns nothing. On the other hand, believing everything uncritically is the road to disaster. The faculty of doubt is essential. But as I have argued, rational doubt always rests on faith and not vice versa. The relation between the two cannot be reversed. Knowing always begins with the opening of our minds and our senses to the great reality which is around us and which sustains us, and it always depends on this from beginning to end. (p.25)
It was left to Nietzsche to pull the thread that unraveled the Enlightenment’s sweater. Rational criticism rests on beliefs which themselves are open to criticism by the same method. The “eternal truths of reason” depend on uncriticized axioms which are the product of particular historical and personal developments. If truth is defined as that which cannot be logically deconstructed, there is no truth, just competing expressions of the will to power. Hence the postmodern skepticism and emotionalism in which we now find ourselves.


The Christian epistemology sketched by Newbigin perfectly matches the Christian understanding of sin, grace and human nature. That is why conservative Christians who claim to possess Enlightenment-style infallibility about religious doctrine are also misguided.


If we are to use the word “certainty” here, then it is not the certainty of Descartes. It is the kind of certainty expressed in such words as those of the Scriptures: “I know whom I have believed, and I am sure that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me” (2 Tim. 1:12). Note here two features of this kind of assurance which distinguish it from the ideal of certainty we have inherited from the Age of Reason. In the first place, the locus of confidence (if one may put it so) is not in the competence of our own knowing, but in the faithfulness and reliability of the one who is known….Secondly, the phrase “until that day” reminds us that this is not a claim to possess final truth but to be on the way that leads to the fullness of truth….(p.67)

When we speak of God’s self-revelation, we are certainly speaking of more than information and even invitation: we are speaking of reconciliation, of atonement, and of salvation. Our discussion so far has assumed that we are, so to speak, competent to undertake the search for truth — this has been the unquestioned assumption of modernity….The call, so often heard in ringing tones, to “follow truth at all costs,” assumes that we are so made that we know what it is that we are seeking and that we shall recognize it when we find it. Here we have to come to that part of the whole Christian tradition against which the Age of Reason most strenuously took up arms. At the heart of the story of the ministry of Jesus as interpreted by the Fourth Evangelist, there occurs an encounter between Jesus and those of his hearers who had believed in him. It is reported that he said, “If you continue in my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31). Here we seem to have a direct reversal of one of the axioms of modernity, namely, that freedom of inquiry, freedom to think and speak and publish, is the way — the only way — to the truth. Jesus appears to reverse this. Truth is not a fruit of freedom; it is the precondition for freedom. It is not surprising that it was these words of Jesus which (according to the Fourth Gospel) precipitated an attempt to kill him….

We are not honest inquirers seeking the truth. We are alienated from truth and are enemies of it. We are by nature idolaters, constructing images of truth shaped by our own desires. This was demonstrated once and for all when Truth became incarnate, present to us in the actual being and life of the man Jesus, and when our response to this truth incarnate, a response including all the representatives of the best of human culture at that time and place, was to seek to destroy it. (pp.68-69)

Newbigin’s insight helps explain why the liberal churches have been so eager to water down the doctrines of the incarnation, the atonement, and original sin. For all the political self-flagellation that goes on in liberal sermons about the ethics of Jesus, our central idol — our own moral competence — remains intact. Virtue is within our reach as long as we make more material sacrifices. The modernist worldview attacks the gospel miracles, ostensibly to defend the obvious benefits of science and free inquiry, but really because facing the radical corruption of human nature is intolerable unless we place an equally radical confidence in God’s grace.

The conflict between the Bible and the Enlightenment is only secondarily about Darwin versus Genesis and all the other issues in the “culture wars”. It is about truth-as-propositions versus truth-as-story. At the beginning of the modern era, we decided that universal principles discovered by reason were more reliable than the particular historical narrative which the Bible records and which it calls us to continue. Now that those principles no longer look so universal, we doubt the possibility of all knowledge. The church’s task is not to justify the Bible story according to modernist principles, but to make our lives witnesses to Christian truth in action.


The business of the church is to tell and to embody a story, the story of God’s mighty acts in creation and redemption and of God’s promises concerning what will be in the end. The church affirms the truth of this story by celebrating it, interpreting it, and enacting it in the life of the contemporary world. It has no other way of affirming its truth. If it supposes that its truth can be authenticated by reference to some allegedly more reliable truth claim, such as those offered by the philosophy of religion, then it has implicitly denied the truth by which it lives. In this sense, the church shares the postmodernists’ replacement of eternal truths with a story. But there is a profound difference between the two. For the postmodernists, there are many stories, but no overarching truth by which they can be assessed. They are simply stories. The church’s affirmation is that the story it tells, embodies, and enacts is the true story and that others are to be evaluated by reference to it. (p.76)

Newbigin calls on fundamentalists to abandon their fear of error, their reification of the Bible as a set of objective “facts” whose authority stands or falls together.


At every point in the story of the transmission of biblical material from the original text to today we are dealing with the interaction of men and women with God. At every point, human judgment and human fallibility are involved, as they are involved in every attempt we make today to act faithfully in new situations. The idea that at a certain point in this long story a line was drawn before which everything is divine word and after which everything is human judgment is absurd…. (p.86)

The manner in which Jesus makes the Father known is not in infallible, unrevisable, irreformable statements. He did not write a book which would have served forever as the unquestionable and irreformable statement of the truth about God. He formed a community of friends and shared his life with them. He left it to them it be his witnesses, and — as we know — their witness has come to us in varied forms; we know about very few of the words and deeds of Jesus with the kind of certainty Descartes identified with reliable knowledge. To wish that it were otherwise is to depart from the manner in which God has chosen to make himself known. The doctrine of verbal inerrancy is a direct denial of the way in which God has chosen to make himself known to us as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. (p.89)

Whether one accepts or rejects the gospel, then, the quest for truth is never without personal risk. Both liberals and fundamentalists have tried and failed to establish perspective-independent knowledge. If anyone has such knowledge, it would be God alone. Ultimately, the search for truth depends on trust that ultimate reality wants to be known by us. The story of God’s self-giving love in Christ is the best story we’ve found to base that trust upon.

Saving Jesus (Episode 8): Passion and Compassion


The theme of this week’s Saving Jesus class was “Jesus’ ministry of compassion”, but the most fruitful part of the class was the discussion period, when our minister asked us to talk about the greatest acts of compassion we’d experienced or witnessed. This invitation was met with a silent, reflective period that gave rise to a further question: why was it so hard to come up with examples of spectacular compassion? Probably because true compassion doesn’t call attention to itself. Jesus had some harsh words for the Pharisees who made a big show of their alms-giving.

Com-passion literally means “together-suffering”; the central fact for you in this moment is the other person’s pain, not your need to be a helper or even your unselfish impulse to solve her problems. In its purest form, it means gratuitously descending into a place of suffering and helplessness, simply in order to be present with someone else who didn’t choose to be in that same place.

Jesus’ ministry of compassion, then, can be seen to go beyond the earthly works of mercy that were the sole focus of this week’s video. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16, KJV)

This series is at its best when it reminds us of the difference between God’s kingdom and Caesar’s. One of the obstacles to compassion is our fear of powerlessness. As one of the class participants said, we’re afraid to acknowledge the other’s suffering because it reminds us of our own. In a situation of oppression, moreover, compassion looks like a luxury we can’t afford. On the DVD, Prof. Luther Smith argued that Jesus gave oppressed people the key to a spiritual power greater than any political force that was exercised against them. Whatever their worldly situation, they always had the freedom to wield God’s power of love, by seeing the oppressor as a fellow human being even when calling him to account for his sins.

For a modern-day, psychologically nuanced and safe model of compassion in abusive relationships, I recommend the Boundaries series by Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, and the book Don’t Forgive Too Soon by Dennis, Sheila & Matthew Linn. Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance explores the interplay of compassion for self and others from a Buddhist perspective, but Christians will recognize many points of commonality.

I’ll be absent from next week’s class (no doubt to the delight of my minister) because I’ll be attending a reading of this book, but will try to borrow the DVD after hours so I can find out “Who Killed Jesus?” (Hint: It wasn’t Kristin Shepard.)

Update on the Human Condition

Two quotes today that sum up my current philosophy of life. The first is from Catholic blogger Cacciaguida‘s review of “Breach“, the new movie about FBI agent/Russian spy Robert Hanssen:


The world is not in fact divided between the pure and the impure (or take any other matched set of a virtue and its corresponding vice): it’s made up of impure people who acknowledge the obligations of purity and try to meet them, and impure people who don’t.
The second comes from the blog of award-winning poet and fiction writer Sally Bellerose, talking about what she’s learned from her experience of chronic illness (her own ulcerative colitis and her father’s dementia):


People need to feel safe.  I sure do. Who wants to be reminded that we are soft-skinned vulnerable creatures? For security sake we need to feel in control of our environment and our selves. All kinds of conditions threaten that control. What could be more basic than the need to feel safe in our bodies? That we are born dependent can’t be denied, but a few years after birth, control of bodily function is a given for most people. Disease, disability, any condition that takes away that baseline of corporal control is a kind of body betrayal to the person affected and an unsolicited reminder to the well and the unwell that humans are vulnerable and that (forgive the very bad pun) ‘shit happens’. But things do go wrong. All bodies refuse to work as desired at some time or other. As humans, we don’t want to be confronted with the fact that no amount of research, medical break-through, or new technology is going to keep our bodies from eventually breaking down.

We are at risk, some more than others, but not just four year-olds getting spanked for a situation beyond her control, or old folks with a confirmed diagnosis, all of us, at one time or another. Most people are not happy to be reminded of their own frailty. I think most chronic illness, but especially conditions like UC, which exposes the messiness of life, scare people because they are forced to consider their own tenuous bodies. People who are well want to believe that disease happens to other people, other people who have somehow lost control, older people or people with less access to care, people unlike themselves.

But it’s not just UC that people fear. My real life dad has Alzheimer’s. I write, sometimes, about a demented dad. People often ask, “How do you feel about exposing your father in print?” They mean, “How could you possibly disrespect your dad by portraying his dementia?” For expedience and self protection I lean on the, “I write fiction,” answer. I really “feel” that dad suffers from an extreme of a universal condition. All people in the real and imagined world are a bit doddering. Our minds, like our bodies, just don’t always do what we want them to do. This is not news to anyone with an iota of self awareness. No one escapes this human condition. If you think you are never weak-minded, you are, at the least, in jeopardy of being a bore.

Say you won a Pulitzer in Literature at 30, and died in a car crash at 32; some part of you died mentally frail. You may have been successful at keeping your fragility from your editors, publishers, and readers, but something in you was teetering and foolish. Like failures of our GI tracts, whether in a big way as happens with UC or in a more contained and only occasional way, as happens with an intestinal virus, all our systems fail all of us, in greater and lesser ways.
It’s to Sally’s credit that she can make this sound like good news. Which, in a strange sort of way, it is.

Louis MacNeice: “Wolves”


I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped 
   handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles 
   of sand
Flushed by the children’s bedtime, level with 
   the shore.

The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not 
   want
To be always stressing either its flux or its 
   permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and 
   laughter.

The Rise of the Anti-Love Song


I’m addicted to the ’80s station on my XM satellite radio, which (like so many of my vices these days) I justify as research for my novel. The combination of too-happy beats and kinky, alienated lyrics never fails to provoke my creativity. Also in the name of research, today I switched to the ’90s station to refresh my memory of what bands my Generation-Y heroine might have enjoyed.

As I listened to the lyrics of Jennifer Paige’s hit “Crush“, it seemed to me that I was hearing something new, a genre that really only took off in the 1990s and beyond: the feminist anti-love song. Not a breakup song (like “I Will Survive”), but a girl bragging about her lack of emotional investment in a relationship she still intends to enjoy. Jennifer sings:


It’s raising my adrenaline
You’re banging on a heart of tin
Please don’t make too much of it baby
You say the word “forevermore”
That’s not what I’m looking for
All I can commit to is “maybe”

So let it be what it’ll be
Don’t make a fuss and get crazy over you and me
Here’s what I’ll do
I’ll pay loose
Run like we have a day with destiny

It’s just a little crush (crush)
Not like I faint every time we touch
It’s just some little thing (crush)
Not like everything I do depends on you

Other popular examples are Britney Spears’ “Oops! I Did It Again”, and Destiny’s Child’s “Independent Women”. In the latter song, from the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack, the trio challenges their potential mates:


Question: Tell me what you think about me
I buy my own diamonds and I buy my own rings
Only ring your cell-y when I’m feelin lonely
When it’s all over please get up and leave

Despite the hundreds of hours I’ve spent rediscovering the guilty pleasures of Belinda Carlisle and Laura Branigan, the only analogous song from the ’80s that I can think of is the Eurythmics’ “I Need a Man,” which is a little different because it sounds like it’s being sung by an experienced older woman, not a teen girl. And even there, you can tell that Annie Lennox really needs that man. She’s not taunting him that he’s slightly less important than her new shoes.

So, gentle reader, am I right — is this a new way of being a girl? What does it mean? Is it possible that we’ll be looking back on the decade of Madonna’s cone-shaped bra and saying how innocent it all was?

Poet “Conway” Reflects on Isolation and Fellowship in Prison


Here are some more excerpts from my recent correspondence with “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.

Dec. 7, 2006


This young black man down the tier. He’s been ostracized by his folk, has been asking me for help in his songs he’s been writing, and a story — it’s very ghetto murder rampage story gangsters in the hood and what not but his songs have some serious merit — he sang two of them to me in the cages, I’m not the one to judge but I see the talent in his words, so I gave him my opinion and offered a direction. He said it helped him take it into another direction he hadn’t realized.

Isn’t it funny how talking with another creative person can give you a new perspective on your own creativity?

The odd thing is in here we are totally segregated and then separated by cages (dog kennels) but I get a chance to converse with characters I would never even speak to on the mainline or in society, it is such a severe microcosm of the world and we’re all out there in our boxers + shirts and state issued tennis shoes, no pretentious clothes or jewelry just personality, and everyone is in search of conversation respectfully. Oh there are the few that are forever hateful, or just broken husks of humanity, but the cops don’t allow them out too often to disrupt the congeniality of the cages if that sounds absurd, it probably would to the outside observer, but I’m starting to enjoy freezin in my boxers in the rain and meeting all these crooks 🙂

The cold thing is I’m not sure if they are aware of the monsters they are creating in these dungeons. It’s hard to watch a man you’ve conversed with and related with, all of a sudden break down, and it reminds me of a scenario, of a scene I saw on TV.

These guys were trying to let this leopard out of a cage it was in the back of a truck they apparently took it on this journey to set it loose after capture. They pulled a string from inside the cab of the truck and it opened the cage the cat leapt out and jumped into the cab with the driver and attacked him. At first you think how ungrateful this belligerent cat is trying to maul his savior. And then you got to realize that cat has probably sat behind those steel bars, or mesh seething, wishing it could lash out at this miserable person who kept it trapped, and when the time comes for its freedom its only thought is revenge, before it even thinks to run, get away from this place.

It’s kind of like that with these guys, they keep them locked in cages, constantly pestering, belittling, making these madmen, and their parole date comes they open the gate and say Go! but they are still behind the fence, so the only ones to lash out at are the unexpecting, unprepared sheep wending their way home after a day’s work in the office, factory or whatever job they use to survive. “The vicious circle” and then the cops point and say See! You need me! Perpetual perpetrators….


Any rage I told you about the “poop stain” [guy] they sprayed him out of his cell with pepper spray after he threw his feces/urine concoction on cops then gave him a tune up in the rotunda, and disappeared. Now they got a guy who kicks his door or did kick his door till he got the “tension cage”. He’s quiet now (somewhat) — he keeps trying to talk to us in the cages they took his shoes so he’s barefoot on the cold concrete. I know he’s suffering but man he tortured us for weeks & weeks before they extracted him I still despise him for putting me throughthat but he tries to catch my eye and it seems he’s pleading with his eyes for someone anyone to talk to him. I know I’m probably out of line to ignore him but we all have decided he’s on the shine for a while — I know I’m probably going to have to be the one to break it down and give him some conversation but not yet, I guess I’m not as compassionate as I’d like to be….


OK now as for you sending books yes please it would be greatly appreciated they allow me to receive 5 books per month….The guy I traded the drawing for Anna Karenina got it from amazon.com — oh you won’t believe this but I just traded that book for Inferno by Dante Alegheri very good book. That guy I traded just ordered The Count of Monte Christo and Cyrano de Bergerac”. I can’t wait to read those when he’s done 🙂  The only thing is we have to tear the books only 50 pages at a time go under the door so we can fish them to each other with lines we spin out of boxer waist band threat so the books even though the binding is ruined then are cherished (if that makes sense at all).



Conway enclosed some poems in this letter, from which I’ve selected the ones below:


Shadow

Artificial lights create shadows
   as the sun’s jealous presence beckons
lingering with dark fingers
   into the cracks of Hell.

Fire flickers and peeks for intruders
   leading even blindness to warmth
see everything must feed
   death be the need for life.

Flame needs fuel, “destruction”
   another tool of life’s construction
cast about on the silhouettes
   of our passing desire to breathe.

Whether we acknowledge complicity
   our signature still lingers
regardless acceptance
   the dying is buying all.
(No matter how big or small.)

So this flickering flame burns brightly
   as the moon turns tightly
around earth’s wrist, giving a twist
   on the sun’s revolution.

How long till tension becomes too tight
   and space reverses in flight
taking back terrific energy spent
   while we all went about our way.

Tomorrow or today it must happen
   we all become the shadow
darkness wins from the sins of living
   how long will your shadow last?


      ********

Kicker

The sonic boom reverberating
in the dayroom echoed in my head
as he kicked the door.

Oh how I wanted to take off his foot
stop his complaining
one day it’s this, the next it’s that
constantly wanting more.

We all were filled with rage
as he stormed about his cage
making a scene, it was his usual routine
until the day they finally got sore.

They came for him that day
filled his cell with pepper spray
good riddance for that I thought,
I smiled as he choked and coughed
wishing him gone
I despised him to the very core.

They dragged him out limp
chained behind his back
trailing the triangle
held by a dozen green suited goons
the ones we all abhor.

They pushed him into the cage
in the dayroom on center stage
and hung the chain from the top
He was begging for them to stop
but it was too late now
This time he’d learn his lesson
His arms were lifted chained
behind his back as he complained
The sight was sorry to be sure.

He couldn’t sit he couldn’t stand
His position was bent over
it was called the tension cage
He cried within moments, I laughed
you see he wasn’t kicking anymore.

After the first hour there
I then became aware
he was sobbing, but repressed
trying to hold it in I guessed
I started to identify
with the plight he had in store.

They left him there till morning
after breakfast and I felt dread
he wasn’t even fed
or, curled up on his concrete bed
Just sagging on the chain crimp
in the dayroom sobbing softly limp
it was pitiful and mean
The worst treatment I’d ever seen
just because he kicked the stupid steel door.

Finally they came in
unchained him from the bars within
as his arms came down he cried
They walked him back to his cell bent over and tied
as he sobbed for he couldn’t stand
but they pulled his purple hand and arms
backward to be uncuffed
and stuffed them through the trayslot in the door.

We all watched and listened
till we all felt a little sickened
what a nasty trick to pull
they hurt that sorry fool
more than I could ever want
it was such a wretched stunt
I wake at night sometimes
and wonder how it could be
what if they did that to me
could I take the pain
or would they break my brain
and then one day it happened
as I looked out my window
out the back of my prison cell
I thought oh they can all go to hell
I ran as hard as I could
But before I reached my destination
I stuck out my foot in desperation
I kicked the door…

Jeff Walt: “The Life You Want”


Everywhere you look you see it:
running by each morning in Spandex,
resting in a hammock sipping tea

most afternoons. From chic magazines,
you cut a Humvee, a log cabin in Montana,
and a sleek, bronzed body.

Your sorrows grow faster than your garden.
The peonies understand serenity better—
you resent their beauty, their quiet knowledge.

Anxiety a dog that always needs walking.
Envy builds a hive in your head. So you read
self-help books, repeat the angelic affirmations.

Then forget it all
standing in line at Wal-Mart, wanting to kill the clerk
because she’s slow, hating the guy in front of you

for buying so much stuff, pissed
because they haven’t discovered a way
to squeeze enlightenment into your shampoo;

because you can’t order it off a drive-thru menu,
get it SuperSized. You’ve seen the life you want pulling fruit
from its orchard, losing weight and making friends,

humming sweetly on the other side of the hedge—
giving freely what you can’t understand. How?
and Why not me? rotting like bruised apples inside your head.


Visit Jeff’s blog here for more great poems and literary links.

Who’s Making Us Stupid?


The other night I rented the film Idiocracy, a satire by Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge that appeared in theaters last year for about two seconds, probably because its critique of the mass media hits too close to home. It’s about an average guy who awakens from a government cryogenics experiment to discover that in the year 2505, the human race has become unutterably stupid because all the educated yuppies stopped having babies while the trailer-trash and ghetto gangstas bred like rabbits.

The humans of the future water their crops with Gatorade because advertisers have told them that water is only for toilets. Television now only has two channels, the Violence Channel (featuring the hit show “Ow! My Balls!”) and the Masturbation Channel. Porn is everywhere (Starbucks offers a “Gentleman’s full-body latte”). If this doesn’t sound too different from today, well, you can understand why the entertainment industry gave this film minimal promotion.

Most Hollywood movies that use broader social/cultural problems as the backdrop for their characters’ storyline are written as if the resolution of the individual conflict means that the systemic problem has also gone away. Think of all the Cinderella stories about one talented individual’s escape from the ghetto (e.g. Good Will Hunting), the endless crop of heroic-teacher movies (Coach Carter, Freedom Writers) or the environmentalist critique of suburbia in the nearly-brilliant Over the Hedge. Idiocracy rejects this individualist escapism, another reason it was less popular than its wit deserved. The two unfrozen people from 2005 may make things better for their cretinous brethren in the short-term, but their three children don’t stand a chance against their idiot buddy’s thirty-two. The gene pool is still doomed.

I do think this film is worth seeing, but I also found its worldview troubling in some ways. I’m sure its creators took pains to avoid seeming too racist (the ratio of morons is about 70% hillbilly to 30% ghetto). My beef with the film is that decadence isn’t only an IQ issue, it’s a values issue. Are the lower classes stupider, or do they simply have fewer resources to shield them from the effects of society-wide pathologies? The non-breeding elites, after all, own the media companies that brought us gangsta rap and Geraldo. They become lawyers for the porn industry or write memos telling our president how to evade the Geneva Convention. Being “smart” doesn’t make them wise. The elites can distract themselves from their despair by hoarding more stuff; the poor throw bricks through their own windows.


I’ll leave the last word to the inestimable Garret Keizer, from his book Help: The Original Human Dilemma:


Conservative sociologists and the spawn of conservative think tanks speak of “the culture of poverty.”…What, pray tell, is a culture of poverty? I would guess that it is one of waste, ignorance, substance abuse, petty squabbling, random violence, sexual irresponsibility, shabby child rearing, and a sweet tooth for scandal. I would guess it is a culture with no meaningful conception of the future and no ability whatsoever to know the proper value of anything….

In short, I assume that a culture of poverty would look exactly like the dominant culture of America, which more and more resembles that of a tenement or a trailer park. Lu Ann called Peggy Sue a slut. Monica gave Billy a blow job. The poor are with us always because the poor are us….

I grew up during the building boom in housing projects. We had simultaneously declared war on poverty in America and war on the peasantry in Vietnam. I can remember overhearing the barber shop diatribes on what “those people” down in the city had done, how the spendthrift federal government had moved them out of the slums into brand-new apartments where they lost no time yanking out the faucets and the doorknobs and anything else they could pry loose to sell, probably to get money for liquor and dope. You could not help people like that.

Thus I was taught that a culture of poverty is one in which you trash a place that isn’t even yours and sell whatever you can for a quick buck. In other words, you behave like a coal company in Kentucky. Or like the present administration wants to behave in Alaska. When Republicans say that theirs is the true party of the disadvantaged, I have no trouble keeping a straight face. (pp.204-05)

Amherst’s Episcopal Church Declares Wedding Moratorium


Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst, MA has come up with a creative way to affirm GLBT rights without defying the denomination’s ban on same-sex marriage rites. From today’s Daily Hampshire Gazette (subscription required):


Declaring a “holy fast,” Grace Episcopal Church has decided to stop performing all wedding ceremonies because its bishops bar the blessing of same-sex unions.

“We are called to join the fast that our homosexual brothers and sisters in Christ have had to observe all their lives,” said the church’s rector, the Rev. Robert Hirschfeld, in his sermon Sunday.

The worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is a part, has been splitting apart over this issue and the election of a gay bishop. Hirschfeld said that he knows of no other church that has taken the step of abstaining from all weddings.

“Gays and lesbians are the church, as much, if not more, as I am a straight white man,” he said in his sermon. “But this sacrament, and the grace it is meant to convey, is not available to them.”

The reaction of members of the congregation was largely positive at discussions with Hirschfeld after Sunday’s two services. Some members expressed concern that the move might be polarizing,  while others said they regretted that people who grew up in the church can’t get married there….

Hirschfeld said he was asked at the deathbed of Victoria White, a Northampton lesbian who died recently, if it would be all right to have her funeral at Grace Church. “The question had poignancy for me,” he said. “We are here for all people.”

Gay and lesbian couples “always feel their relationship is less than holy” when they are denied the right to marry, he said.

“I can no longer hold together my own integrity as a priest who has made vows to minister faithfully the sacraments of the reconciling love of Christ, if indeed to perform such sacrament means deeper, more wrenching, more agonizing tearing of the body of Christ which I am called to support and nourish,” Hirschfeld said in his sermon….

“I invite us to join in solidarity, no a better word is in communion, with those persons who have been fasting and walking in the desert their whole lives, not by choice, but because the church has forced them to,” Hirschfeld said.

Grace Episcopal’s solution strikes me as an especially Christian, nonviolent way to take a stand. Leadership through sacrifice, rather than through defiance of authority, is a powerful and peaceful witness. Hirschfeld’s entire sermon is online here.

Saving Jesus (Episode 7): Thy Kingdom Come


The most recent installment of Saving Jesus, which was about the “kingdom of God,” opened my eyes to the political dimension of the Lord’s Prayer. We say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” and then ask God to meet our personal needs for food, shelter, and physical and spiritual security. I’d always pictured the two halves of the prayer interacting thus: We ask God for those protections, but ultimately accept whatever He sends us —
His will, not ours. And yet we still ask, because we are humble enough to admit that we’re still mortal men and women who need to worry about these survival basics, not angels who can spend all their time (do angels have time?) praising God.

On last week’s DVD, retired bishop John Shelby Spong suggested an additional reading. This prayer was important to the early church, facing persecution and trying to cling to its commitment to nonviolence. Those Christians would have prayed that they’d have what they needed to survive from day to day, and not falter, till they brought about the kingdom, till God’s will was done on earth as it was in heaven.

This reminded me of something the pastor at the evangelical church said in a recent sermon. (I’m not ready to call it my evangelical church, but they’re starting to grow on me….) Forgiveness, he said, is how God sweeps flat the obstacles in our soul so that the winds of the Holy Spirit can blow freely through us. Without detracting from the utter gratuitousness of the gift, it’s comforting to think that God gets something out of the deal as well. We’re set free from sin so that we can be what God wanted us to be, not just for ourselves but for the benefit of the whole world. What God does for me, He does in some sense for everybody’s sake.

Also on the DVD, theologian John Dominic Crossan further demonstrated how the language we use to describe Jesus was a direct political rebuke, really a satire, of the divine titles that Caesar Augustus claimed. To a first-century hearer, “Jesus is God” would have meant that the God I believe in looks like Jesus, not Caesar. He’s a God who brings about peace by doing justice, not through violent conquest. According to Crossan, “Was Jesus divine or not” is a phony question. The real question was “Is Jesus God or is Caesar God?” In other words, which side are you on?

While I actually think the Incarnation is deeply important to our understanding of salvation, I welcome Crossan’s additional gloss on the topic. The strength of this DVD series is its restoration of the historical and political meanings of the gospel; I only wish they didn’t feel the need to play those meanings off against traditional theological and personal ones in an either-or kind of way. N.T. Wright does a much better job integrating the two. Still, half a loaf, etc.

Crossan’s summary of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom is as follows: God has inaugurated a new era, but we are called to actualize His promises in how we treat each other. It can’t happen without God, but it also can’t happen without us. As a solution to those endless “faith vs. works, free will vs. sovereignty” debates, I like this just fine.