Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

What does it mean to worship? And where to do it?

For us the activity of worship has become a private affair. Even some agnostics don’t seem to mind that people go about their Sunday mornings engaged in acts of worship, as it occurs comfortably behind closed doors. Occasionally religion spills out into the public space as, in the example of some Christians who fight to keep public monuments of religious significance (the ten commandments, or statues of the cross) in the public space (a courthouse, city center, etc.) in America, or Muslims women who strive to wear the burqa in France. We tend to agree with this relegation of the religious to the private sphere, and often acknowledge it in practice, going about our daily work with only perhaps a furtive prayer or generic expression of virtue, but nothing so peculiar as to strike a secular co-worker as an explicitly religious expression.

This division of life into two spheres – public and private – and the further relegation of the religious life to the private sphere has roots in various thinkers and writers across the modern period, but this is a division that is ultimately incompatible from a Christian point of view. Christian worship is, as one theologian (Bernd Wannenwetsch of Oxford University) has recently put it, a Political act: to acknowledge God as the one creator and ruler over everything relativizes every human form of government, and has profound ethical implications in every sphere of life. This fact was perhaps more obvious in the early church as there was a well-worn precedent for “private” religious worship. Rome was relatively tolerant of religious diversity in its empire, provided that worship was relegated to the private space. As long as one’s personal religion remained private, the public space was open for some occasional deference to imperial religion and the state gods which was required for citizenship.

What was remarkable about early Christians is that they refused what was an otherwise comfortable settlement for many other cults of the day. They recognized that the sort of worship that their relationship with the Creator invited them to participate in was wholly encompassing, and as a result, as Wannenwesch puts it, “martyrdom was inevitable, since the ekklesia [church or ‘Christian community’] was bound from the beginning to celebrate ‘political worship’. (148)” Their worship of Jesus blocked their worship of the emperor and the gods, and martyred they were.

There is a sense in which contemporary Christian worship today does not always express the fullness of this reality, but at some point it becomes inevitable. The God we celebrate as being incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ, does not desire a convenient sort of settled relationship, the sort of tepid hug you share with a distant acquaintance. Rather, we are invited into a relationship best represented by a full-on embrace. We are given the gift of life with all its fullness, and this gift is best affirmed by a whole-hearted worship which does not fail to shape all the other dimensions of our lives, private and public. Christian faith transgresses and subverts these boundaries, and invites us away from lifestyles of fragmentation to a daily experience of wholeness.

Jeremy Kidwell

Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

I’m an unrepentant lover of good food. There is nothing better than a pungent combination of spices and the beautiful color of fresh produce to enliven the senses and transport you away from a busy stressful day. More recently, I’ve taken this appreciation to the next level, cooking meals from scratch for guests, and I’ve found that it can be quite fun to make a full day of it. This usually starts with a morning cup of coffee, reading through cookbooks while trying to think of how best to accommodate the tastes of my guests. Then I walk up the hill to pull together as many of the ingredients as I can for the meal at a Saturday farmer’s market. In years past, we’ve enjoyed growing our own ingredients fresh in a garden, taking advantage of the opportunity to grow vegetables that are cheaper, tastier, more fun, and far more socially responsible. For larger meals my wife and I have also discovered that it can be quite fun to plan out seating arrangements, placing complementary personalities next to one another and bringing together friends that we know will enjoy one another’s company. This all culminates, of course, in the meal itself, and I can recall several that stick in my mind as a transcendent moment of bliss. Just the right combination of people, place, conversation, and flavors, can really create a permanently lasting memory.

All of this experience flows into my appreciation of the practice of hospitality, which can be as enlivening and satisfying for hosts as it is for guests. But one element of hospitality is a challenge to get used to: its gratuitous nature. I come from frugal roots, and the idea of buying the more expensive of several options (i.e. better ingredients) much less being “extravagant” runs against my nature.

Of great help for me in getting over these less hospitable reflexes was the Danish film, “Babette’s Feast,” based on the story by Isak Dinesen. In it, Babette, a French refugee (and as we come to discover later – a gourmet French chef) arrives in a small Dutch Protestant community looking to escape the revolutionary violence in France and find work as a housekeeper. Some years later she wins the lottery, and much to the surprise of her employers, rather than return home with the money, she asks if she can cook them – now her closest friends – a “real French dinner.” Concerned as Babette returns with a wide variety of exotic and expensive ingredients that an endorsement of such luxury will be unrighteous, the sisters agree with the other invited guests that they will take no pleasure in the meal.

Yet one surprise guest, a general from the Queen’s court, is unaware of their plans and cannot restrain his delight over the course of the meal. His enthusiasm for the banquet is so eloquent that by dessert the meal becomes the site of a remarkable transformation. Long-held resentments and arguments among the diners begin to dissolve and former enemies make peace as their dining experience elevates everyone. These Dutch protestants are reminded that Jesus was the ultimate lover of gratuitous hospitality over good food. A blissful meal serves as a reminder that he extends the ultimate invitation.

In fact, my favourite of Jesus’ meals happens after he is resurrected from the dead. The disciples are heartbroken upon Jesus’ death, and they go out fishing together. After a fruitless night of fishing, Jesus stands on the beach and shouts for them to try fishing on the other side of the boat. They are so overwhelmed with the net now full of  fish that Peter jumps into the sea and swims ashore, while the others gather the fish and paddle the boat back in. When they land, they find that Jesus has already prepared a place for them to have a meal together, and they have breakfast together (John 21:15).

I’m particularly fond of preparing breakfast for guests, and so I can appreciate all the attention that went into Jesus’ greeting of Peter and the other disciples. He gathered driftwood to make a fire to cook the fish (which he knew would be on the way), brought fresh bread as a side, and perhaps rolled up some logs, or laid out blankets for them all to sit on. He prepared a space, and then invited them to eat with him.

Jesus’ breakfast, though simple, is as gratuitous as Babette’s feast. He may have dazzled his guests with a net full of fish rather than with the intricacies of French cooking, yet his’ is also a free hospitality. His meal around a charcoal fire was rustic and unadorned, but it was gratuitous nonetheless. And it is here that the challenge of hospitality arrives bigger for the guests than for the hosts, because this gift is freely offered, yet must be received.

Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

In one of my favorite books, The Beloved Community, Charles Marsh examines the spirituality of the American civil rights movement. He suggests in particular that a simple notion of just being still (or hanging out) was a crucial part of the heart of the movement. An extended passage is worth quoting:

Nonetheless, the incarnational ethic also encouraged student volunteers and SNCC staff members simply to be present with each other and with the poor. Being a ‘revolutionary,’ somebody once said during a staff meeting, meant learning how to act out of the deepest silence. As an enfleshened church, SNCC displayed a remarkable capacity to anchor itself in particular neighbourhoods and accommodate its disciplines to local needs. Yet as a “free-floating monastic community,” SNCC also made time for reverie and solitude and for rituals that were refreshingly unproductive. A certain kind of contemplative discipline was an important predisposition in building community and enabling trust.

This is an important but often overlooked point. It is easy to forget that so much of a civil rights life involved sitting around freedom houses, community centres, and front porches with no immediate plan of action. The discipline of waiting required uncommon patience even as it sustained humility and perspective, resisting the cultural paradigm of efficiency. SNCC’s genius was its ability to demonstrate to black southerners the strategies available to social progress within an unhurried and sometimes languorous emotional environment. As such, a condition for achieving beloved community was a certain kind of stillness in a nation of frenetic activity and noisy distractions, learning to move at a different pace.

(Charles Marsh, Beloved Community, 92-93)

As I’m daily confronted by social issues and acutely feel their urgency, my inactivity often feels supremely unrighteous. Crises swirl around human society like swarms of flies, and I often assume that we must respond with equally frenzied activism. But as Marsh and reminds us, my intuition has been trained by approaches which see the world through action-filtering glasses. Urgent actions abound, yet exhortations towards stillness and silence are rare: “Be still before the LORD, and wait patiently for him; do not fret over those who prosper in their way, over those who carry out evil devices.” (Ps 37:7).

As Ben pointed out in another Wondering Fair article, this spirituality is also connected with Jesus’ apparent disconnection from ordinary time. The gospel narratives often leave out domestic details, and offer instead a distillation of Jesus’ dramatic words and actions. However, it is worth remembering that these words are often spoken in very ordinary contexts: sitting on a hill eating with some friends (Matthew 5, 14:15), visiting a friend’s house (Matt 8:14; 17:25; Mark 1:29; 2:1; 3:20; 9:33), grocery shopping (John 4:8), getting a drink of water (John 4:7). This is hardly the sort of fast-paced regime-toppling action that would impress a contemporary activist or Hollywood filmmaker.

Along with Ben, I want to suggest that it is in moments of silence and prayer that we find the opportunity to be changed; to pray, confess, and repent. Further, it is in extended ordinary moments shared with our neighbours, as Marsh suggests, that we can experience and express a different kind of deeper, inefficient, serene love.

Jeremy Kidwell

Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

Not long ago, Stanley Fish (professor of Humanities at Florida International University and public intellectual) took an opportunity to respond to critics who thought that a recent Coen brothers’ film, “True Grit,” “was dull and uninspiring.” In a reflection titled, “Narrative and the Grace of God” he defends the more muted narrative in this film, which lacks some of the flash or melodrama that moviegoers might wish for. Fish comments:

That’s right; there is an evenness to the new movie’s treatment of its events that frustrates Gagliasso’s desire for something climactic and defining. In the movie Gagliasso wanted to see — in fact the original “True Grit” — we are told something about the nature of heroism and virtue and the relationship between the two. In the movie we have just been gifted with, there is no relationship between the two; heroism, of a physical kind, is displayed by almost everyone, “good” and “bad” alike, and the universe seems at best indifferent, and at worst hostile, to its exercise.

Turning to the book which inspired both the original film (starring John Wayne), and its recent remake, Fish sketches a discussion of grace and meaning, and he notes,

There are no easy homiletics here, no direct line drawing from the way things seem to have turned out to the way they ultimately are. While worldly outcomes and the universe’s moral structure no doubt come together in the perspective of eternity, in the eyes of mortals they are entirely disjunct… In the novel and in the Coens’ film it is always like that: things happen, usually bad things (people are hanged, robbed, cheated, shot, knifed, bashed over the head and bitten by snakes), but they don’t have any meaning, except the meaning that you had better not expect much in this life because the brute irrationality of it all is always waiting to smack you in the face.

Fish’s comments on heroism, grasped from the teeth of the absurdity, are certainly not new. If anything, he represents one of the best versions of a long conversation in modern nihilism which includes Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Camus. The thinking goes: In this world, filled with strife, heroism is not to be pursued in the context of one’s contingency as a creature made by God, but rather in a radical rejection of theological structures of meaning. One should accept instead that this world is filled with absurdity. The true hero accepts this, forges his or her own way, and creates meaning in the midst of the chaos which threatens to overwhelm human society.

While one can appreciate threads that run through this way of thinking – the honesty to not accept the naïve optimism of a secular humanism that grasps at a religious faith emptied of meaning, the affirmation of the wholeness and physical integrity of persons in the midst of adversity, and a recognition that the sublime lies just under the surface of our ordinary experience – one must also note that these are intricately tied to nihilistic understandings of the world and the heroic paradigm that accompanies it (other contemporary examples might be, Fight Club, The Quiet Man, and American Beauty, perhaps). In a world without meaning, we must accept what we find, and make the most of it.

But this is not the only, or even the most obvious, way to read the world. If we sense that there is meaning to be found in human relationships, then it may be more sensible to affirm that this is because we are created, and that this world, though occasionally baffling, is not absurd, but beautiful, and filled with life and intentionality. Situations of violence, cruelty, and strife do not stand out as the norm, but rather stand out in such sharp relied because they contrast what we expect of the ordered regularity of creation. Human violence and injustice appal us not because we are naïve, but because it goes against the grain of the created universe. The world seems absurd if we try to narrate its movements without God, or worse still with a distorted image of who God is.

Jeremy Kidwell