IVP - Strangely Dim - October 2009 Archives

An All Hallows Reflection on the Blood

By Christa Countryman.

It's pretty common for my roommate and I to spend time together, but recently we mixed things up a bit by spending a some time together in the ER. We should probably have been a little more serious, but really, in the last week of October, after seeing someone's hands (well, mine) covered in blood and bandages, how could a person not think, Hey! Halloween costume!

Well, maybe you wouldn't, but I did. While we were waiting for the nurse to administer my tetanus shot, I said to my roommate, "How about dressing up as a bloody victim?" She laughed.

To give you a little context, since you may not know that much about me, let me explain why this might have been funny. I have not willingly dressed up for anything, Halloween or otherwise, since I was quite young. One minor exception could be the midnight showing of this summer's Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince. Given that I was surrounded by very convincing Harrys, Ginny Weasleys, various Irishmen and Hogwarts students (some of whom were my friends), my rugby shirt and jeans hardly seemed to count as dress-up. Most days I just want to be comfortable and inconspicuous. But at the hospital I was just the opposite, covered in blood as I was. I was trying pretty hard not to think about it too much, and laughing about it made it easier.

Which is why, with Halloween looming on the horizon, my mind went the direction it did. I've always thought Halloween was a rather bizarre holiday, and I really don't celebrate it at all. I didn't know until I was in graduate school that there was a counter-holiday for the church, Reformation Day, and a special feast day for the church, All Saints Day, that coincide with Halloween. Truth be told, the first time someone said they were dressing up on Reformation Day as a great theologian of the church, I couldn't help thinking that this had to be a made-up holiday, that they were just trying to make an excuse to dress up or to do something evangelistic on a pagan holiday, that they were joking. But that seems to be what Halloween is for--not just dressing up, and not scaring away monsters (at least, not as such), but for putting a pretty face on an ugly problem.

Consider: Reformation Day is a celebration of the most remarkable fissure of the church in the history of the Christian faith. Reformations in doctrine, faith and practice certainly were in order, but this necessity is cause for grief. Whenever a church splits, the death of that unity (on all levels of nuance) is grievous.

All Saints Day (followed, notably, by All Souls Day) is a bit more positive in the sense that the church honors all saints, past and present, canonized or not. The two holidays are not just an ecclesiological shout-out to announce, "Hey--we've got dead folks, too!" It's a time to remember those faithful martyrs and beloved dead who have gone before, who were steadfast in extraordinary circumstances, and who set an example in service to the Lord that is worthy of recognition and aspiration. It is, I think, a time for the church to remember, collectively and as individual members, that we have been called out of darkness into light; that we, being in sin, are wounded, but the blood of Jesus, his wounds, have made our healing possible.

Once we accept this, we can see that there is much cause to celebrate in even a fissure as remarkable as the Reformation. Positive changes occurred in both the Catholic church and the Protestant manifestations of Christian practice as a result of the Reformation, including centuries of vigorous theology. There are saints and souls on both sides of this historical divide, and the work of healing continues, even today.

I guess thinking of the confluence of these holidays feels to me like a little trip to the ER on the eve of an important event. Here we are, on the cusp of November, about two months away from Christmas, when we, the body of Christ entire, will celebrate his advent and birth. We are now moving on into a season of waiting and a celebration of the hope we now have because of Christ's life and (come Easter) his death and resurrection. I hope you will forgive this very imperfect connection, but a brief season during which we acknowledge our wounds before we celebrate their healing seems highly appropriate. Physical wounds are difficult to ignore (the blood makes it pretty hard, sometimes). Likewise, the heavy necessity of Christ's innocent blood to heal our spiritual wounds should be present in our minds and hearts, even as we prepare to celebrate his coming.

So, Happy Halloween, and Reformation Day, and All Saints Day, and All Souls Day, everyone! Have fun, and revel in the continual mystery of faith: the now but not yet, the eternal intermingled with the temporal, the uncommon beauty of the coming winter, the adorable little scary goblins begging for treats.

There once was a girl who missed blogging . . .

Hello Strangely Dim friends! I've missed you. And I've missed your brilliant reflections and coments. And I've missed my fellow bloggers. I've also missed my space heater.

In honor of Dave's walk down memory lane through our limerick fun, I thought it would be fitting to try to convey my grief over missing you and my joy at being back through that same timeless, witty yet poignant rhyme form (though I'll have to use a different first line than the title of this post. What, after all, rhymes with "blogging"?? Slogging? You see the problem.):

Good readers, I want you to know
I've missed your bright comments, your glow.
I cried for a while
I missed your great style
and my heart was filled with much woe.

But joy fills my heart up today
and beams out like a soft sunny ray (which, I might add, we haven't seen here in a while)
Yes, I can't wait to read
your own rhymes, for I need
to know what you all have to say!


Okay, readers, it's your turn: Let us know how you've been in a limericky comment!

Spam Attack, and Lisa's Back

Two events coincided this morning:

1. Lisa Rieck, our esteemed fellow blogger, returned to the office from some well-deserved time off.

B. Strangely Dim was besieged by spammers.

I don't link the two, except that one of the spam attacks was on a post from shortly after Lisa's birthday last year, which yielded the following multiple-contributor adventure in limericks.

From Tait Chamberlain, former intern:

There once was a woman named Lisa
Who just like the Tower of Pisa
despite all her faults
such as half-tilted vaults
was loved just like Mother Theresa

There once was a poem about "Rieck"
whose poetry some thought did reek
But the rest they knew better
He'd been forced to a fetter
for the rhymings were awe-ful-ly bleak

***

From Dave:

There once was a woman named Lisa
whose bank card was branded with Visa.
She enjoys when she thinks just as much as hot drinks
Her Secretary of State's name is Condaleeza.

There once was a last name of "Rieck"
Whose pronunciation was quite a trick.
Pick one vowel or the other, but if I had my druthers,
With the family's first names I would stick.

***

From Lisa:

There once was a guy folks called Chamberlain
Who interned until others came for him
They needed his skills;
They paid him in bills
And their workplace was never the same again.

You may have heard of our friend Zimmerman

Once a year he'd take pretzels and simmer them

In chocolate so sweet,

And then offer the treat

To his friends--whose waists weren't any trimmer then.

I knew of a fellow named Tait.

New macros he liked to create.

When he set a decree

British us would all flee,

Leaving books in a much cleaner state.

IVP has an editor, Dave,

Who works hard in an effort to save

An author's good name.

Dave will increase their fame

As each day on their book he does slave

 

***

Feel free to contribute your own limerick, in celebration of today's strange convergence of events. Keep it clean; that's all we ask.

 

There once was a genre called "limerick"

That plagued the strange-witted and dimly quick.

To rhyme stringy surnames--

Both his-names and her-names--

Proved not to be everyone's bailywick.

 

What Genesis Has Made Us

Of all the books in the Bible, I'd say that Genesis has the most capacity to capture the imagination. Genesis features countless stories that get stuck in little kids' heads--Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, Abraham and Sarah, Lot and Sodom, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Jacob and Laban, Joseph and his brothers, Joseph and Pharaoh. All these stories are on every short list for inclusion in every picture Bible ever approved for publication.

But Genesis has proven that it's not just for kids. It's Genesis that keeps the debate raging over whether we emerged out of a primordial soup or were formed by God from the dust of the earth, and whether our planet is thousands or billions of years old. It's Genesis that keeps literary critics interested in the Bible, as they trace back contemporary gender, ethnic and power dynamics to this constitutional epic. Journalists, comedians, artists, musicians, poets, scientists and politicians alike look to Genesis to stimulate their imagination. We are, in a sense, what Genesis has made us.

Of course, all this appropriation of Genesis doesn't mean that everyone reads it the same way; there are seemingly infinite interpretations and biases that Genesis can support. One of the most recent is Robert Crumb's graphic treatment, The Book of Genesis Illustrated. Crumb, an early innovator in underground comix who made his mark with irreverent humor and bodacious body parts (including the notorious Fritz the Cat), has shown his genius in later works both autobiographical and philosophical. R. Crumb's graphic Genesis is generating buzz from the New Yorker to UCLA's Hammer Museum as a shockingly comprehensive and sophisticated interpretation of the first book of the Scriptures.

Crumb grew up a practicing Catholic but left the faith at age sixteen. His participation in the drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s is a reflection of his broader appropriation of the Zeitgeist; his art from that era was cutely anarchic and hedonistic, displaying a sort of existentialism that is more fully acknowledged in his later illustrated introduction to Franz Kafka. His 1978 marriage to Aline Kominsky led to a more focused exploration of Jewish spirituality and worldview, which comes through in Genesis Illustrated.

Crumb is a man of his time, and his interpretation of Genesis is a reflection of that reality. For him, Genesis's God is an angry old man, committing deicide against polytheistic traditions even as he's portrayed creating the world in six days. Genesis is a chronicle of women nurturing the divine feminine in secret while men rule and wreck the world. Genesis is a statement on the way the world works, and a call to humility that's given expression fully and finally in Joseph's merciful treatment of his brothers at the moment of their reconciliation. For all its declarations of the origin of humankind and its Creator, Crumb's Genesis is a treatise on how to live well after God.

Crumb is entitled to his opinion, of course, and while orthodox Christians may find his work unpalatable, his interpretation will take its place at the table with other serious considerations of what Genesis means. That's a good thing: a book as ambitious as Genesis, with as much capacity to capture and shape our imagination, rewards multiple readings and broad conversation. One might argue that God himself invites us to look beyond the God of Genesis. After all, there's plenty more Bible where that came from, and to live well we would benefit from looking similarly toward the God of the exodus, the exile, the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, the Pentecost, the kingdom come.

Shane Claiborne Swiped My Credit Card

I'm still processing a seminal event I attended this weekend, Jopa Productions' Christianity 21 conference in idyllic Edina, Minnesota. I'm sure people are blogging this week about the event, but you can also get a sense of the conference by reading the Twitter feed, which is organized under the hashtag #C21. The event was noteworthy for any number of reasons, but three stand out for me:

• This was the first major event organized by Jopa, newly founded by fellow architects of Emergent Village, Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt.
• This national Christian conference on leadership gave the stage exclusively to women, with the audience equally balanced between men and women.
• My first snow of the season came early, even by Minnesota standards.

The conference was equal parts reunion and showcase. Both were a draw for me. I got to catch up with a number of people I don't often get the opportunity to see, including Mark Van Steenwyk, who blogs at The Jesus Manifesto, and who gave me a recipe for pumpkin spice syrup for homemade lattes. Laci Scott reminded me of my early Emergent misadventures with yoga in dress socks. Anthony Smith and I endured unapologetically dirty dishes as we noshed over a buffet breakfast. I watched Doug Pagitt negotiate better food service from a hotel that was crowded with Christian hippies and bearded collies. Spencer Burke and I talked about a conference I didn't even go to. Mark Scandrette and I joked around about narcissism and comic books. Mike Stavlund and I bonded over haiku and other writing styles. And Shane Claiborne, notorious anticapitalist (or something like that), swiped my credit card so that I could gain entry to the event. For whatever reason, that makes me laugh.

Beyond the reunion, I was introduced to some prodigious thinkers and practitioners. Nadia Bolz-Weber, who blogs as the Sarcastic Lutheran and whom I'm a nerdy fan of, facilitated a great conversation with Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence. Julie Clawson represented Likewise Books well as she discussed Everyday Justice. Alise Barrymore, a pastor-scholar from the south side of Chicago, brought the house to its feet as she talked about growing down. Jenell Paris addressed the thorny issue of how important we should consider our sexuality, with implications for how we talk about homosexuality and Christianity together. Mimi Haddad asserted the equality of women to men in the eyes of God, a sentiment that pretty much everyone in the room shared but which needed to be said, and it was said eloquently, nonetheless. Debbie Blue celebrated the incarnation with a meditation on roadkill, which sounds gross (and is no way to lead into lunch) but was brilliant. Alyce McKenzie had a running theme of returning the products of our culture--self-sufficiency and self-absorption among them--in exchange for the values of the kingdom of God. On and on and on the speakers went, with perhaps the focal point coming from Lauren Winner, who forecasted what she hopes will be the twenty-one things people think of a hundred years from now when they think of Christians.

I can't imagine that everyone agreed with everything, but it was fun, and it was substantive, and it was seminal. And I got a killer syrup recipe out of it. And be warned, Shane Claiborne: I will be watching my credit card invoice carefully, and if anything looks hinky, I'm coming for you.