Ireland: Who Said That?

They are everywhere. All around me. Every where I go, restaurants, along the roads, airports, trains and train stations, stores, bathrooms, cafes, taxis, B&B and buses. And they are all English! Blessed, beautiful English. Blessed, beautiful English WORDS. (Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.) And the best ones have an Irish accent!!

I can’t help but notice that the Irish seem to celebrate their writers and give homage to the written word. Little rhymes or quotes from literature kept winking at me from unlikely places. Above the seats on trains, at train stations, on the doors to restaurants. Some made me wonder if Dr. Seuss was Irish: “The seats are not for feet.” Or “Going to the game? Take the train!” But mostly the quotes caught me off guard and were in places I didn’t expect with no apparent context. Wrapped around a kiosk in Drogehda I read:

“You’ll never see the man again, who sat across from you,

better to look away.”*

and in the train:

“There was really nothing else to say

it was an awkward silence

I read the back of someone’s paper

I stared out the window.*

At first I thought it was just in Dublin, to attract tourists to the Writers Museum (exhibits @ Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Yeats, and Brendan Behan), the James Joyce Museum or the birthplace of George Bernard Shaw. But even as I left Dublin, I kept noticing these little epigraphs. As if Ireland was calling out, “have you read the works of our sons yet?” Upon hearing that C.S. Lewis, who was Irish, has been one of the most significant authors to me personally, an endearing Irish couple, during one of the breaks at the conference in Belfast, emphatically recommended that I read the Irish poet John O’Donoghue (which I intend to do, once I’ve finished the ten other books I’m in the middle of!). There are many more Irish writers that will join that list.

The Re-Emergent conference afforded another onslaught of words:

From Phyllis Tickle, a living religious encyclopedia, who used no notes and whose words went from her brain, through her larynx, and gushed out of her mouth at a freakish speed, I heard more than just the live rendition of her book, The Great Emergence. Words to put things into perspective, place ourselves in history and paint the grand scheme of things. Some disturbing words, some mind-boggling ones:

“There are over 39,600 distinguishable denominations (not religions, but Christian denominations!).”

“We still have to answer the question, “What is a human being?”

“A big part of this new spirituality is happening in virtual space...with about 70 million people whose only religious experience is on the net in one of the 800 virtual churches.”

and bingo: “If you reduce God to a proposition that you can articulate, you just lost God!”

Samir Selmonovic’s words drew water, when he illustrated Miroslav Wolf’s stages of Embrace (Exclusion and Embrace) through a story of the exclusion and embrace from his own Muslim family, after his spiritual journey led him to follow Christ. That story can be found in his book, It’s Really All About God. Some of his words that stuck:

“When I left Islam to become a Jesus follower, I had many adjustments to make.. I started to become bitter, because the “Christians” made no adjustments from their culture to become Jesus followers.”

“The Emperor might be naked, but he has a very nice body...”

“Bible study is like a marriage: sometimes you are angry at the text, sometimes you don’t want to talk to it for a while, sometimes you make up again.”

Dave Tomlinson had an English accent when he said, “If you don’t have doubt, you don’t have faith; you have certainty and fundamentalism.”

Beki Bateson, who I’ve quoted the most since I’ve been back:

“The kingdom of God is where Faith, Art and Justice intersect.”

As Christ followers, we should be “creating just spaces.”

“How do we move from injustice to justice? Exactly where we stand!”

“Art can help people imagine an alternative future and inspire them to actively move toward it.”

Kester Brewen’s words would also make a good lecture for the tv series “Lost.”

“the world is exploding in strangeness and it is causing us stress!”

conflict is “the failure to properly engage the other...”

...”God is much stranger than that.”

“...penetrated by the marvelous....”

“You are not a gadget”

That evening at the Black Box, IKON wove words together around the theme of choice... recited homespun words, gave us words to say in unison:

“We have been caught between

one thing and another

We have had to choose

between sister doubt

and her uncertain brother.”

And then the words exploded with melody and rhythm and voltage, when first Vince Anderson and then Foy Vance took the stage. Foy Vance’s words were funny, melancholic, perceptive, personal and Irish. Being transported by his phenomenal music, they were often deeply affecting. By the end of his concert, he, like a pied piper, had corralled us all into the much smaller foyer singing these words over and over again as one big unpracticed choir,

“When I need to get home, you’re my guiding light, you’re my guiding light.”

The next day after the closing session and some time eating and conversing at Common Grounds cafe, I had the unexpected opportunity to hear words from the first and only female Justice on Britain’s supreme court, The Lady Hale of Richmond at the MacDermott lecture in the Great Hall at Queen’s University. Her words were about the pursuit of justice and the complexity of applying the law in discrimination cases.

“I’m here to talk about the neglected virtue: Equality.”

“At the current pace, it will take 75 years to close the gender pay gap.”

“...the Human Rights model is better than Anti-discrimination laws...”

As rich and delicious, moving and challenging, informative and thought provoking all of these words were, the words that left a truly indelible impression on me were spoken outside of the context of the Re-Emergent conference altogether. The words that, though I never wrote them down, keep grabbing my attention, purring their way into my stream of thought, like a cat who wants to be stroked, were spoken in what at first seemed to be a parenthetical adventure, a detour from the charted route. Words born out of a truly Irish experience, which I would like to tell you about in my next blog entry.

*(Can anyone tell me who the above quotes are from?)

A Sneetch Breach?

During the final session of the Re-Emergent conference in Belfast last week, an attending Sociologist from America tossed out a question that had arisen out of the conversations he had been having with different ones of us. It was a question of motive, or rather propulsion: Were those of us who are setting sail for new shores, experimenting with new forms, daring the rapids of a new theology, and willing to take only the most portable and flexible of “tents and gear” with us... were we being “pushed out or called out” of the community of believers we once belonged to? Are we following an Abrahamic call into a new country? Or are we fleeing for our lives, dwelling in caves and among the heathen, as when David fled from Saul? Are we Emergents stomping off in a huff, because they didn’t play our song at the party? Or do we really hear the call of the wild to venture into the unknown terrain of the next great era? I must have caught the question as it went out into the room, because I took it with me to the Dublin Airport in the wee hours on Friday: “Am I a starless Sneetch who got thrown out of the Frankfurter party?”

With enough coffee in my system I am able to turn my attention toward this question in the hour or so I have before I board my flight back to Germany. My answer is clear as a bell: both /and & neither/ nor! What is at work in me, a calling to or vision for what could be, is clashing with the construct of church as it has existed throughout the modern era. I am not being pushed out of a system that I actually want to be a part of, a sneetch moping along the beech and jumping at the first chance to let McMonkey McBean paste a star on my belly. Rather, I simply could not ignore the signs and sounds of a faulty transmission. The cogs of the gears of church are not meshing smoothly along, but are jamming up making a painfully loud and irritating grating noise.

When I was about 13 I flew down to Miami during spring break to meet my dad who had sailed down to Florida on our Dutch sloop. He was there with his momentary motorcycle chick girlfriend and the three of us drove back to DC with her BMW bike and his 1969 blue VW bus (you know, the one with the oval windows at the top along the sides?). I got to switch up between the two. The bus made it until Richmond, Virginia and then the clutch gave out. A credit to VW, we drove the whole last two hours without it! All was well as long as we were on the highway, but every time we had to down shift, things got ugly. A grating gearshift is easily one of the most irksome sounds there are, right up there with fingernails on the chalkboard and my children’s incessant use of the “M” word!

Cars have clutches for a reason, and if it’s not working you are going to destroy your transmission by continuing to shift without it. Even I know that! Phyllis Tickle observes in The Great Emergence, that the grinding is not simply a friction between cultures, or faith traditions or even generations, but that it belongs in an even broader context. Tickle contends that we are in a transitional period of the kind that come around every 500 years, and skipping back through time, she lands on each one of these great transitions, like boulders sticking out of the river of history, to summarize how each has sent that river off in a new direction. The cogs that are now grinding out such a cacophony are of the modern era transitioning into the next era, in many places without a clutch, and this shift is being called, “The Great Emergence.”

There are some, like the charming Danish pastors I got to spend time with, who see this coming, embrace it and are trying to ease their traditional, Modern-era congregations through it by wisely and sensitively engaging the clutch as they attempt to shift to a higher gear. But many of us were neither in the drivers seat of our previous congregations, nor was there someone there who shared these sensibilities. I think some of us, who have opted out of the modern church construct altogether, jumped ship, so to speak, because we found ourselves in a setting (local congregation, denomination, para-church organization, Academia) where there was no clutch, or we ourselves were not in a position to engage it. At first we did take it personally, and indeed such a shift gives rise to much personal conflict and friction, of which we have certainly had our share. But discovering testimonies world wide of others who were experiencing or observing the same grinding of gears, helped us to put our experience into a larger context. Also the observation that alone in our small town of a quarter million people, we know of scores of congregations that are struggling with leadership, vision, control and trust issues leaving many, many disillusioned and wounded.

So, have we been pushed out or called out of the congregations in which we once worked and worshiped and wept? Yes. We have. And... No. We haven’t. We have chosen to pull off to the side of the road and have a look under the hood. We are trying to distinguish or name the interference, describe the clogs on the gear of the new era, and see if we can get the vehicle operating again without completely ruining the transmission. Many of us recognize that we are a part of this new era, but still want to engage with the best part of our faith tradition, all the while remaining as flexible, light weight and transient as possible.