Absurd Liturgy

I have been having a fun time this Lent giving things up. I know, that already sounds wrong; there is nothing about Lent that is supposed to be fun. It is supposed to be a journey of difficulty, pain, sorrow, and deep introspection. So I have already broken a rule by having fun. I guess I’ll have to go and confess this to God and pray for some kind of forgiveness. Good thing I’m not Catholic – who know what kind of absolution a priest can offer for that. The penance alone may be more that I can handle.

For those who know me and follow me on Facebook they already know what I have been doing. Each day of Lent I have been giving something up, but not what you think. I have been giving up those things that annoy me, those things that I might want to give up, or those things that are simply absurd. It is the best Lent ever! Here is the list of things I have given up for the first 12 days of Lent (that should be a song). I’m going to start with the day before (Shrove Tuesday) because it helps Ash Wednesday make sense:

 Shrove Tuesday: if you are going to fornicate today is the day to do it.

Ash Wednesday: today you can start to atone for all the fornicating you did yesterday. If you keep fornicating, then keep atoning – you have 40 pleasure-guilt days for this cycle of spirituality. You’re welcome.

2^nd day of Lent: No Valentines – that will be my sacrifice for the day

3^rd day of Lent: I am giving up paying bills

4^th day of Lent: I am giving up long drives

5^th day of Lent: I am giving up a French recording of the jazz standard Autumn Leaves (Les Feuilles Mortes); especially if it is sung by Andrea Bocelli

6^th day of Lent: Prune juice, I’m giving up prune juice.

7^th day of Lent: I am giving up resting. On the 7^th day of Lent I shall not rest.

8^th day of Lent: I am giving up oversleeping. It is a waste of precious time and induces much guilt.

9^th day of Lent: I am giving up all of the resolutions I have made at one point or another to change my life. Hail the status quo!

10^th day of Lent: I am giving up folding laundry while watching foreign films. It is to difficult to read the subtitles and fold at the same time.

11^th day of Lent: for all my musical peeps I am giving up scales, arpeggios, intonation, and rhythm. I am going to sound soooo good.

12^th day of Lent: I will not listen to 80s synth rock today.

Can you believe that I have done this for twelve days? Imagine what forty will look like. I did not put on there the Sundays. I implore people to take Sunday off as we all should (hooray Jesus!).

What I think is happening is what I would like to call a liturgy of the absurd™.

It has become a part of the popular Christian culture to approach Lent as a time to give something up like candy, television, or dog races (I will not race against dogs for 40 days). This loses a sense of what Lent was originally about. Yet instead of offering an old-man rant about kids these days and how back in our days we put sandpaper in our shoes so we could suffer for Lent, I am offering the absurd. Instead of giving up one thing for forty days I am giving up forty things, one a day, for forty days (excluding Sundays).

Full disclosure: I am not actually giving up any of the things I have listed; that would actually be absurd.

Full disclosure: I never planned this, it simply “happened”

You may ask me, “What is the point of your antics young man?” To be honest, I am not sure. There is something about the absurd that points to a truth that we may not notice when approaching it directly. Yet in reality I do not know. This is the neat thing about Lenten practices – you enter into them without fully knowing what you may be doing. You trust that God is going to lead you somewhere and that will be a different place than where you started.

Dare I suggest that God has a hand in my Lenten antics? Maybe.

Dare I suggest that I may grow through such a parody of liturgy? Maybe.

That is the thing about Lent and other pilgrimages. We take a chance a follow an idea, practice, or life that seems absurd hoping it will lead us to something better. Kind of like a bunch of people following someone who says he is the Son of God, something absurd, and hoping for something better than what they have now. So I’ll follow this path and see where it leads.

Maybe for today’s Lent I’ll give up being absurd.

The Pope, Some Hope, and a Whole Lot of "Meh"

The Pope has resigned. I have two reactions: meh and hope.

Meh – I’m not Catholic. The Pope does not have any power over me (nor does he have any actual power over anyone else, but a subtle reference to the classic movie Labyrinth never hurts). 

Sure, he is a very significant person who is the spokesperson for something like a billion Catholics worldwide thus representing a major aspect of Christianity, but he doesn’t speak for me or have direct influence over me. I am interested, but from the sidelines.

It is important to lift up such a reaction. People like to get excited about things for many reasons, but this is not something that I think Baptists (or other Protestants) should get excited about. If the Pope were resigning because he wanted to become a Baptist then I would be excited. If it were because he wanted to become a Baptist and join the church I am currently serving then I would be very, very excited. I may even wave the new member classes just for him! Yet that does not seem to be the case. Alas. In the meantime I still have to work on Sunday’s sermon, there are still people to visit, church work to do, the Gospel to share, and life will continue. So I say, “good for you Pope,” enjoy your retirement, get some rest, and I hope the transition goes well.

Hope – Like it or not the Pope’s resignation does effect me. Like it or not for many people he represents Christianity and those who are not Christian may lump me in with those who are weeping and wailing over the Pope’s resignation. Or for that matter when the Pope makes a proclamation some may assume that us Baptists are brought into that proclamation as well. I cannot control people’s perceptions and the office of the Pontiff influences many people’s perceptions of Christianity.

The direction the Pope sets can make or break ecumenical works. If John XXIII never set the groundwork for the Second Vatican Council then Catholics and Protestants may still be avoiding each other on the street. If Paul VI never took a stand against birth control with Humanae Vitae then questions and conversations around family planning and women’s rights may have gone in a very different direction (ah the joy of the hypothetical counterfactual).

Honestly I have not been a fan of Benedict XVI. I think he has spent more time closing windows that were opened via Vatican II than doing anything else. I think he has been circling his dogmatic wagons around a specific view and interpretation of doctrine giving some the impression that the Church is more of a fortress than a mystical communion. I wish him the best. As a person I cannot say anything bad about him, but as a Pope I am not sorry to see him go.

My hope is that the next Pope will listen to the sense of the faithful, the movement of the Holy Spirit, and consider opening up a few windows in the Church. Or at least use some Febreze^®.

Reviewing God's Pain

For the sake of some kind of self-promotion I have written a review of the previously mentioned book - God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse. Give a read (the review I mean) if you are maybe thinking about reading the book. Yet don't hate me if you do read the book because of my review and decide that you did not like the book at all. I absolve myself of any injury or harm you may receive in reading that book.

How is that for a really wussy recommendation?

The Sad Joke of Christianity

Christianity is one big joke! Kidding. Well, maybe.

I’ve been working my way through God in Pain: Inversion of Apocalypse by Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević. It is an interesting and engaging book where each author takes a different chapter. One of the premises of the book is that Žižek is an atheist and Gunjević is a priest. Oh… the famed believer and non-believer debate. Not really, but it still is a good book.

But let me get to the joke. In one section of the book Žižek describes the incarnation as a “joke” (178). Before you get up in arms you need to realize that for Žižek in a tragedy the actor represents the universal, but in a comedy the actor is the character portrayed, not a universal. For example:

            In the tragic an actor is portraying the idea of despair.

            In the comic the actor is portraying his or her interpretation of the fool.

 So if Christianity is tragic then Christ represents the universal aspect God being present in the world, the universal understanding of suffering at the cross, and perhaps the universal understanding of the resurrection. I don’t see a problem with such an approach. Some types of theology (like Liberation theology) claim that in the suffering of the cross God is connecting with the suffering of the world, i.e. the universal. Others look to the resurrection and find hope for all in places of despair. So there is something about the tragic, in Žižek’s understanding, that makes sense and maybe there is not a joke to Christianity.

Yet there is something about God being God on the cross and in the resurrection. In the drama of the cross we want Jesus to be more than every person, we want Jesus to be more than a universal representation of something, we want Jesus to be God. We want the actor to be the character, i.e. we want incarnation.

If this is the case than it is God who is suffering on the cross and it is God who celebrates the resurrection.

Žižek adds one more point concerning the comedy and the tragedy of Christianity. He states that the “comical” is the domain where the horror of a situation exceeds the confines of the tragic, and in that domain there is a certainty that a transcendent God will guarantee a happy, final outcome.

Funny, right?

Ok, so it is not a joke in the sense of a horse walking into a bar and the bartender saying, “why the long face.” Yet there is something about the comic/hopeful view of the event of the cross.

Here is where I fall. I think the comic is important but at the same time so is the tragic. We need the universal so we individually have a place to connect with the person of Christ. At the same time we need Christ to be God. Žižek seems to be forcing one reading/aspect of the incarnation to the detriment of the other.

Instead, the cross event is a tragic joke.

Christianity is a tragic joke. I don’t think a truer statement has ever been said.