O Radiant Dawn

For December 21 (Solstice)

“O Radiant Dawn, splendor of eternal light and Sun of justice,
shine on those lost in darknes –
come to enlighten us.”

O Key of David

For December 20

“O Key of David and Sceptre of the House of Israel,
what you open none can shut –
come and lead us out of darkness.”

O Root of Jesse

For December 19

“O Root of Jesse, Standard of the nations and of kings;
whom the whole world implores –
come and deliver us.”

O Adonai

For December 18

“O Adonai, ruler of the house of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the burning bush –
come and redeem us.”

O Wisdom

For December 17

“O Wisdom, uttered by the mouth of the Most High,
and reaching to the ends of the earth –
Come and teach us the way of prudence.”

Adios.

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for
Georgia Lee?

Tom Waits wrote this haunting song about a young African-American girl who was found dead not terribly far from the Waits household some time in the 1990s. The girl had gone missing, but for whatever reason – institutional racism is a good suspect – the media did not give her case much attention, and consequently, no search parties formed, no neighborhoods pulled together, and nobody found Georgia Lee until it was too late.

This song speaks very powerfully into my life. When I first heard it, the lyrics evoked memories from my childhood – memories that stick with me to this day – of my sister Sharee’s death. The sacred story in the family is that Sharee went to a party, something mysterious occurred, and the next day her naked body, mauled by dogs, was found on a lawn in a nearby town. The true story echoes this except in the following detail: the “mystery” surrounding that night involved Sharee overdosing and dying at the party. I have spoken with someone who was at that party the night Sharee died, and he told me that some bikers dumped the body on that lawn, because they didn’t know what else to do. Calling the police was not an option, given the nature of some things that were happening at that party.

To this day, my mother either doesn’t know these details, or she refuses to believe them. I’m not sure which, and I don’t intend to dredge the story up with her. The “mystery” of that party has been a bone of contention between her and my surviving sister, Desiree for years.

Desiree and Sharee were very close, not only because they were sisters, but also because they both lived through the trauma of living through the horror of their father’s schizophrenia and suicide, through the disorientation of my mother’s remarriage to my father, and through his suicide. Desiree – Desi, as we called her – began anesthetizing herself with drugs when her own father died, and drew more heavily on the pharmaceutical relief they provided more and more over the years, as she lived through further tragedies. The deaths I mentioned were the tip of the iceberg: Desi lost friends to overdose and suicide, she lost my aunt and my cousin, her long-time boyfriend Robert, and a little over a year ago, she lost Tom, whom she claimed was her soul mate. She leaned on drugs to dull the pain of those losses for almost forty years.

A few weeks ago, Desi’s pain came to an end. While making cookies for me with our mom, Desi fell on the floor and never got up again. We don’t know whether she had a heart attack, a stroke, or whether her body just finally screamed, “Enough!” The coroner’s report is forthcoming.

The comforting bit of news that comes with my sister’s death is that, for the last two weeks of her life, she had actually managed to get off the drugs, to get out of the basement to church meetings, to outpatient care, and to normal activities with new-found friends. She was baking cookies for me, for Christ’s sake! This is very comforting on the one hand, but on the other hand it really highlights the tragedy that was her life and the potential that was wasted with all those years of hiding from the pain.

When I first heard that Tom Waits song, I heard him singing about Sharee. Today I hear him singing, “Why wasn’t God there for Desiree?” In so many ways, Desi wasn’t that different from Georgia Lee. Even though she was 52 when she died, Desi was still a little girl – the same age she was when her dad killed himself, maybe the same age she was when they found Sharee – too young to be out on the street, running away from this world, not noticed until it was already too late.

Cold was the night, hard was the ground
They found her in a small grove of trees
Lonesome was the place where Georgia was found
She’s too young to be out
On the street.

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for
Georgia Lee?

Ida said she couldn’t keep Georgia
From dropping out of school
I was doing the best that I could
But she kept runnin away from this world
These children are so hard to raise good

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for
Georgia Lee?

Close your eyes and count to ten
I will got and hid but then
Be sure to find me. I want you to find me
And we’ll play all over
We will play all over again

There’s a toad in the witch grass
There’s a crow in the corn
Wild flowers on a cross by the road
And somewhere a baby is crying
For her mom
As the hills turn from green back
To gold

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there for
Georgia Lee?

I miss you, Des.

Tikkun Olam

Heschel – or at least his ideas of guilt versus responsibility – have been on my mind lately.  It was serendipity that led me to this wee blog post this morning.

http://crossxroads.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/abraham-j-heschel/

Effin’ it up

Yep.  I effed it up.  Some who read this – some who know me personally – might or might not agree with my self-assessment here, but I think that I tend to listen more than I tend to give advice.  When somebody is telling me a story about something painful or traumatic, I will sympathize and I might even empathize, sometimes going so far as to tell a story about myself, where I had an experience similar to what you were just describing.  Only rarely do I offer actual advice.

Last night, just before I went to bed, I went against my usual m.o.   I had run across a website where somebody was expressing pain over a traumatic experience the author’s close family member had encountered.  I don’t know – the story touched me, so I decided to respond in a way that seemed like it would speak to the situation.

The trouble was that – for whatever reason – while I was reading this story, I failed to see the final paragraph.  That last paragraph completely changed the meaning of the posting, so my response was totally inappropriate.  When the original poster saw it, there was some backlash.  Some uncharitable words were written, some assumptions made, but considering the ham-handedness of my own response, I can hardly place blame.

I won’t disclose what the story was about and I won’t say anything more about how I responded.  Instead I’d like to post a quote from John Chrysostom which expresses what I would have liked to have said, but didn’t.

That you have sustained a severe blow, and that the weapon directed from above has been planted in a vital part all will readily admit, and none even of the most rigid moralists will deny it; but since they who are stricken with sorrow ought not to spend their whole time in mourning and tears, but to make good provision also for the healing of their wounds, lest, if they be neglected their tears should aggravate the wound, and the fire of their sorrow become inflamed, it is agood thing to listen to words of consolation, and restraining for a brief season at least the fountain of your tears to surrender yourself to those who endeavour to console you.

A new old look at the Great Commission

Steve over at Khanya posted this excellent (and for me, timely) message from the Orthodox bishops regarding the importance of proclaiming the Good News over proselytizing.   The first speaks of liberation, the second of oppression.  Maybe I overstate that, but maybe not.  In any case, I’m glad to see the statement.

Pot=kettle=black

I’ve put a lot of attention into the latest book I’ve read.  Maybe my focus on this text is ill-advised, since the class I’m reading it for is available only as a credit/no-credit course.  Still, this book keeps speaking to me even days after I’ve finished it.

The book is called Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope by David Tracy.  I won’t go into the full content of the book.  If you’re interested, see the link above.  It’s expensive for a paperback, but the content is dense – there’s a lot crammed into the small packaging.

One of the things that’s jumped out of the page and landed in my brain is a statement Tracy makes in the book about the argument between theists and scientific non-theists (my language, not his).  He talks about argument as an interruption of the flow of conversation.  Tracy doesn’t mean interruption in a negative sense.  Interruption in this case is about argument – a process that helps us distance ourselves from the conversation in order to employ various methods and explanations in order to make ourselves clear.  Argument, Tracy maintains, is sometimes necessary for real conversation.

The reason I’ve been thinking so much about this is because I’ve spent too much time of late trawling around various websites, many of which are maintained by atheists, anti-theists, and anti-Christians.  I don’t have too much of a problem with any of those folks believing what they believe.  I’d certainly never try to force them to believe what I believe.  Apart from that being a rather fascist thing to attempt, it simply wouldn’t even work.  It’s none of my business, really, how God speaks or doesn’t speak to others, or even whether others believe (fundamentalist arguments about the Great Commission notwithstanding).  No, the problem I have with some of the websites I’ve run across is this ironic insistence that theism is untrue (or a blatant lie, as some of them say) – ironic because they are completely unwilling to entertain the possibility that they are wrong.  That’s the functional definition of fundamentalism, isn’t it?

Anyway, many of these sites insist that theism (usually Christianity in particular) is foolish, because science “has disproven” the truth-claims of the great religions.  I put “has disproven” in quotes, not only because that’s the verbatim language many atheists use in order to make their claim, but also simply to stress the grammatical use of the perfect tense:  this disproving has taken place in the past and has continuing effects into the present.  In other words, the matter is settled.

This strikes me as bizarre, given how much acid many of these folks fling at fundamentalist Christians (to whose tribe I do not happen to belong), because “fundies” tend to say things like, “It’s in the Bible.  I believe it.  End of story.”  Pot, may I introduce Kettle?  Kettle, Pot.  I’m sure you have much to discuss.

Back to Tracy.  Tracy studies hermeneutics – interpretations.  The title of the book points to the fact that there are many ways/numerous methods of interpreting texts (not just written texts, but also experiences as texts), and his point is that humans are always interpreting, whether they realize it or not.  This also goes for scientists.  Scientists often like to claim that they base their conclusions purely on objective data, but as Tracy makes clear, the data themselves are laden with interpretations and are built on certain presuppositions.  It’s interesting to note how what’s perceived as law in astrophysics may completely contradict what quantum physicists know as law.  Everything is…ambiguous.

Tracy isn’t saying that we should or even could just throw up our hands and say that all interpretation is futile.  He points to Luther and says that it would have been very unsatisfying had Luther made his proclamation, “Here I stand; I can do no other…but if it really bothers you, I’ll move.”  But what bothers Tracy, and I guess what’s been bugging me about some of these websites, is the refusal on the part of strict scientists to acknowledge the interpretive aspect of their discipline, as if they are the only ones with Real Truth (TM), and to disagree with them means that you’re a complete dumb-ass, and a deluded one at that.

Many of the atheist websites I’ve looked at call upon Reason to make their Truth claims.  This is an Enlightenment worldview (not that it’s inherently wrong, but it’s a hermeneutic).  Tracy writes, “The Enlightenment both freed us from the weight of certain oppressive traditions and taught us, as Kant insisted, the we must dare to think for ourselves.  But as the dialectic of the Enlightenment unfolded, it became trapped in ever narrower models of what could count as truth and what could count as free action, namely, purely autonomous action.  The once emancipatory concepts of the Enlightenment, as Adorno suggested, became mere categories.”

He later adds, “Scientism has pretensions to a mode of inquiry that tries to deny its own hermeneutic character and mask its own historicity so that it might claim ahistorical certainty.”  That’s the problem.  Again, if atheists want to use science to come to conclusions about the validity of religion, that’s fine.  It just perturbs me to see them claim that their interpretations are the only true interpretations.  I had never thought of it this way, but Tracy calls this “a Whig history on the triumph of the final scientific method or the ultimate explanatory theory.”  “Whig history” seems a very good term to describe the attitude.

I’m prattling now and I have “real” work to do, but this topic has been under my skin for the last couple of days, and has really put me in a bit of a funk.  Now that it’s off my chest, I feel a little better and can get on with life.  Which for me right now – unfortunately – means writing a paper on a Friday night.