OK Go’s This Too Shall Pass video. I defy you to peel your eyes off of this.
And as a Lenten gift, I promise not to over-spiritualize this song for you AT ALL. Though I am biting my lip because look at that title -- it’s just asking to be combed for its spiritual application! Especially in light of my recent posts! I’m going to find a corner and breathe through it while you enjoy the video.
Yesterday I finished up the first third of The Orthodox Heretic, the section titled ‘Beyond Belief,’ and it is in that space where I still find myself – somewhere beyond belief. Many of the parables (at least in this section) are reworked from other stories you may already be familiar with, but it’s like looking through a kaleidoscope two clicks to the left of the typical story. Still recognizable, but with a twist. Lots of turning the story on its head so that you see God or faith in him through a different lens. As nice as it is to read a different perspective on Christianity, I still feel like I’m not quite clever enough to really get it.
I had this problem with Fundamentalism as well; church leaders would get up and preach from the Bible lots of things that wouldn’t sit well with me, but I didn’t feel like I could argue with them because I didn’t have a seminary degree, hell, I’ve never read the Bible all the way through, so who was I to tell them they were wrong? And I couldn’t usually articulate why they were wrong, I just knew it didn’t feel right, and asking questions only ever got me in trouble. It’s safe to say that I left a lot of Sunday and Wednesday evenings feeling stupid and frustrated and confused. I could never pray hard enough, or sing loud enough to understand or really believe in it all. The more altars I fervently prayed before, the louder I sang, and the more I pushed to personally experience God the way everyone around me seemed to be able to, the more silent the heavens.
While I definitely don’t have the same sense of ‘wrong’ inside when I read these parables, I do have the same sense of still not somehow being enough for all this God and faith stuff. I don’t get it. I can’t wrap my brain around how renouncing my faith equals finding the deepest faith. I have been in aggressive renounce now for quite awhile, and while I do feel better on several levels, I don’t feel like anything that looks, or smells, or quacks like faith in God exists, let alone goes any deeper than before. I don’t understand how to affirm God by denouncing his place (an idea Pete Rollins quotes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer). I feel like the minute I stopped believing that Jesus could make my life better was the minute I started healing. It was the minute things started changing in my life in a positive, healthy way. I don’t know how to reconcile that with faith in anything other than myself because it wasn’t Jesus, it was me. Believe me, I am still dealing with some Fundamentalist residue that reminds me to tread lightly here so as not to lose any hope of salvation for a moment of blasphemy, but this is how it looks from where I’m standing. And if God IS being more affirmed by all this, then he’s still not telling me about it.
Clearly, my critiques of this book are not going to be clean-cut, academic, or even very linear. They’re going to be messy, and sloppy, and emotional because this is what my spirituality, or journey towards spirituality, or whatever it is, looks like right now. Also, I feel like I should mention that even though this book may seem as if it is the bane of my spiritual existence, I’d highly recommend it to anyone, especially Christians.
Because, at least for the duration of Lent this site is already perilously close to a Peter Rollins stalking site, I thought I’d mention the I Believe in the Insurrection Tour happening this spring. There are only a few dates for this, and attending will likely require you to travel several hours crossing several state lines.
As I continue to do my Lenten readings in The Orthodox Heretic, I find myself growing increasingly irritated. Which may actually be a good sign, a sign of growth or movement or change…I dunno. But it’s pissing me off. Which is probably also a good thing, but I’ve been so pissed off with faith and God and religion for so long that I’m getting bored being mad even though I can’t seem to be anything else. Maybe it’s just that I’m in the collection of parables in the book called ‘Beyond Belief’ which seems to be where I live most of the time anyway, and I’m itching to move past it? Or perhaps something is rooting its way to the surface? Something I think I’m totally over, when in reality I’m not so much? Whatever the hell it is, it’s annoying the crap out of me. And it’s making me weepy. And punchy. And a little more volatile than usual. Posting in the middle of these feelings may end up being regrettable, but I am tired of trying to make faith seem nice and good and right when it rarely feels that way to me. And if I haven’t made it clear enough yet, this is a rough moment. All of this also explains why I’ve titled this I (Might) Believe in the Insurrection. Because maybe I don’t. Maybe I won’t think there’s anything worth fighting for. I’m still going to drive 5 plus hours to get myself to one of these events though.
Check out the website and GET YOURSELF TO THE NEAREST INSURRECTION!
The task today does not lie in some naive attempt to return to the early church. The church before Constantine. The church before Platonic philosophy. The church before Paul. The church before… For these moves fail to bring us back far enough.
Rather we must call a new army of agitators into being. Dissidents courageous enough to return to the event that gave birth to the early church. A new breed of individuals brave enough to turn back so as to advance.
Through a provocative cocktail of incendiary theology, haunting soundscapes and musical lament Peter Rollins and friends will offer an invitation to set forth on this perilous return. A return that will strip everything from us, incinerate everything we hold dear and inaugurate a new year zero.
In short, this Easter Rollins and friends set out to remind us that belief in the event of Resurrection means nothing less than participation in an Insurrection…
16th March, Belfast
31st March, Austin
1st April, Birmingham
2nd April, Atlanta
3rd April, Nashville
5th April, Charlotte
6th April, Washington DC
7th April, Boston
9th April, Grand Rapids
11th April, GreenwichInformation concerning venues and times will be posted in the coming months.
Joining Peter will be the poet/singer songwriter Pádraig Ô Tuama and the artist/DJ Jonny McEwen. Pádraig will be launching his first solo album Hymns to Swear By on this tour and has previously contributed to the ikon album Dubh. He has been the artist in residence for Corrymeela and is a published poet. Jonny specializes in developing immersive ambient soundscapes and creative audio montage. His latest album is entitled Fractured, broken and Beautiful. He is also an accomplished painter whose works can be found in many significant public and private collections.
Warning… this tour involves the use of strong language and ideas that may be unsuitable for those easily offended.
The paragraphs above were taken from Peter’s blog.
Last night I stayed up really late. I thought it was because I wasn’t tired, but as I get further into today I realize that I was really just trying to put off the coming of today. Which I know doesn’t make any real sense. But today is the beginning of Lent, and day one for me of reading The Orthodox Heretic. My plan is to do the daily readings in the morning before I’m wound up or tired from the events of the day, and thus far, I’ve stuck to that plan. For some reason I’ve decided to read the book first and the supplemental Lenten readings last. This morning I reread the introduction as well as the first story.
I have been trying to shrug off the heaviness I feel today, but I can’t fully escape it. I blame it on not getting enough rest. I blame it on carbs. I blame it on the weather. I blame it on anything to satiate the weight of the moment. Really though? I’m scared. I am terrified. I can’t quite articulate the ‘of what’ part yet, but I’ve felt it before. I felt it 8 months ago when I picked up and promptly put this book down the first time. I’ve felt it when I’ve read or heard other thinkers re-imagine Christianity. And as much as I’ve felt those brushes with freedom, those moments of finally being able to take full deep breaths, finding those moments of home for my soul, those moments have always been followed with a feeling of sadness or fear that isn’t only mental or emotional, but for me very physical. I feel a very physical weight that is almost a presence. Something as tangible as it is elusive. I am carrying it again today.
Part of me has labeled this already, has given it an origin, a quick problem for me to solve. Those are never the answers. Those are never the resolutions. They are the distractions. They keep me from doing the work, from finding the source. Lent this year will be as physical for me as it is mental, emotional, or spiritual. I’m not really sure why this component is important, but I can’t seem to get away from it.
There is still time to order the book from Paraclete Press to participate in this Lenten practice.
Lent. The Lenten Season. It starts tomorrow (Ash Wednesday, February 17th). I didn’t grow up in a faith that paid much attention to the liturgical calendar, so I have this ideal in my head of this season. It is one in which we deprive ourselves of something (usually food related) in order to relate to suffering of some kind, whether it be the suffering of Christ leading up to his crucifixion, or the suffering of other Christians around the world who do not enjoy the religious freedom we take for granted, or even to remind us of our own possible eternal suffering had we decided not to follow Christ culminating in a great sense of piety and deep gratitude for Easter Sunday and the Day of Pentecost. But even though I’ve been “practicing” Lent for the last several years, it has only ever served to make me realize just exactly how deeply confused and angry about faith I am on the inside. One year I gave up Lent for Lent, but since my confusion and anger and hurt wasn’t about Lent itself, that act didn’t relieve me as I hoped it might.
I’ve had this book on my nightstand for roughly 8 months or so. It’s called The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales by Peter Rollins. I was excited to order it, I was excited to get it in the mail, I was excited to read it, and then I read the introduction and the scaffolding holding up the loose frame of what I thought had to be my faith folded under the weight of it. I was stunned. My excitement hasn’t disappeared, in fact it was so powerful that I put the book on my shelf and haven’t touched it since. And for once I’m not being sarcastic. In my attempt to figure out faith, and God, and religion I have had to shelve things for awhile in order to heal or rest or figure out what exactly I am really seeking. I’ve had brushes with new ways to think about faith that absolutely feel like home for my soul, but at the end of the day I am still too bound by what or how I think I’m supposed to believe, and my redemptive imagination isn’t strong enough to reconcile the two. The introduction to this book was one of those places that felt like home.
A few weeks ago, I came across an invitation to read The Orthodox Heretic one chapter a day during Lent. I signed up to do it just before I remembered how deeply I’d felt the damn introduction! (The introduction. Those pages at the front of the book that most people skip. Yeah.) I was stunned. I was speechless -- which I know, isn’t a stretch for an introvert -- but the level of comfort was paralyzing. I have come a long way out of the anger and expectations I’ve carried under years of fundamentalist belief, but I still have no idea what to do when I come across something that makes so much sense to me it feels like I’ve been trying to verbalize the same thing for as long as I can remember, and so I typically freeze. I freeze because I don’t want to replace one fundamentalism for another, and the muscle memory that tells me to do that is still strong. It is however, loosing its grip.
Because the book is seven stories short, Pete Rollins and Paraclete Press are offering supplemental chapters when you purchase the book from Paraclete’s website. (Your order confirmation page will contain a link to the supplemental stories.) Once you order the book the 7 extra parables will be available to you immediately, so you can start with this Lenten practice right away, giving your book time to travel.
(For all my Portuguese-speaking readers, these subtitles are for you! Ahem. I couldn’t figure out how to embed the videos found here and at theooze.tv)
I know I’ve posted a couple of Pete Rollins-themed things already, and you can count on at least one more because I plan to write either about this experience as a whole, or about the parable that had the most impact on me. Or possibly both. Or I’ll post every day about it and never shut up about it and turn this site into some kind of weird Christian celebrity stalking site. That last part is pretty doubtful, but never say never, right?
Thanks to Paraclete Press for the supplemental parables. If you aren’t doing something else for Lent already, order the book and join me. Or let me know what it is that you do during this season -- how is it meaningful to you? -- do you do it out of guilty habit or do you look forward to it each year? -- maybe you’ve never celebrated it?
As if Dr. King’s LIFE wasn’t enough for the Inspirational Insanity Department, this video was created by The Gregory Brothers.
And for those of you who still think history is dead, check out John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill throwing down some beats.
Patty Griffin Up to the Mountain
I went up to the mountain
Because you asked me to
Up over the clouds
To where the sky was blue
I could see all around me
Everywhere
I could see all around me
EverywhereSometimes I feel like
I’ve never been nothing but tired
And I’ll be walking
Till the day I expire
Sometimes I lay down
No more can I do
But then I go on again
Because you ask me toSome days I look down
Afraid I will fall
And though the sun shines
I see nothing at all
Then I hear your sweet voice, oh
Oh, come and then go, come and then go
Telling me softly
You love me soThe peaceful valley
Just over the mountain
The peaceful valley
Few come to know
I may never get there
Ever in this lifetime
But sooner or later
It’s there I will go
Sooner or later
It’s there I will go
Happy birthday Dr. King. Thank you. Thank you for going to the mountain. That mountain is still there, but it is considerably smaller than when you last saw it. For those of us dedicated to climbing mountains of injustice, you remain a source of incredible strength and inspiration. I hope you’re enjoying the Peaceful Valley.
