Lucifer Jones

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Loving God More Than Loving Me

After Cobb, where? Well, to Lucifer Jones. But that may not be until I'm in my 50s at this rate. I'm going to have to be done with a great number of family/community/political work before I can get too deeply into those matters. Getting and spending requires focus, and I don't have all that right now. Nevertheless, I was asked if I love God more than myself or my family? Hmmm...

The priesthood has a very difficult task, which is to reconcile their interpretations of the divine with their understanding of human needs. How do you dumb down the Infinite and put human beings into the middle of it such that their core moral values are lined up with what any priest or Church says is God's Will? Very difficult indeed, especially when human knowledge ebbs and flows.

If you take it as a given that God is indeed Infinite, then you have embodied in the mind of God, all the laws of the Universe - the very order of everything, whether or not we humans are able to understand it. God is purpose. God is the purpose of the universe. God is the source of human capacity to understand the Universe, such as we can, such as it is. So loving God is a difficult proposition. Unless you anthropomorphize God, you cannot 'love' God in anyway like you would love a human being.

Of all the jobs the priesthood has, invoking God's name to call the people to worship seems like the easiest. What is entailed in worship... ah there's the rub. If one worships God by serving his purposes, there are certainly different abilities of humans to do so which other humans (and presumeably God) is aware. If God's purpose, as described by The New Covenant of Jesus, is transparent to humanity, then it is very unlikely that you could fool humans and decieve God at the same time. In other words, since we are commanded to love our neighbor, we could not love them falsely. Our neighbors would be able to correctly percieve our love with the same facility as God would judge our love of them. This is a very key thing. If love was embodied in the gift of a red rose, then it is important that God gave us all equal facilities to see that the rose was indeed red. Otherwise how could we spread the Gospel? My entire point here is that I am asserting that human beings must have the same facility for interpretation of love and good and evil as God would have. We couldn't arrive at different conclusions; this is utterly fundamental and the meaning of the Tree of Knowledge which kicks off Genesis. We do know.

But certainly the love we owe God is different than the love we owe each other. Certainly we should demonstrate it in different ways. Isn't much of human love in the form of mercantilist self-sacrifice? We give to others out of our pockets, out of our own expense. We take time from our own lives and give it to others as an expression of love. But surely God doesn't need anything from our pockets. God doesn't need our time. He owns time, he is time.

Here's where it gets ambiguous.

I am not an evangelist, but I clearly understand that it serves the Church to give glory and honor to God in your earthly works. By loving your neighbor, by doing the God-given red rose, you are showing the kind of universally understood love that God and humans understand. Is that showing the love of God if you don't say so? If you anonymously donate a million dollars to the victims of a tsunami, is it less worthy in the eyes of God if you don't send it in an envelope that says 'In the name of Jesus, only Son of the Father'?

Are we to be evangelists at all times? Are we press flacks for the God Corporation? Does God need marketing? Is prayer answered if silent?

I have concluded that we know implicitly when we are serving God and when we are not, whether or not there is a Church or a priest involved. It only takes a moment's reflection - it must be something very close to our biology, the very idea of God spontaneous within us. If indeed we all have souls, then our understanding of good and evil must be like our understanding of fear, hunger, laughter and music.

At this point in my life I have answered some questions about being selfish, in terms of knowing what I need to maintain my own integrity and spirit. The same things that keep my head up are about my existentials. Am I being the kind of person worthy of my powers and abilities? Do I have enough power and ability to achieve the kinds of goals I wish to pursue? Are those goals worthwhile? These are introspective questions against my own soul and the value of my life. I try to be conservative and pay attention to those things that I might change and I shape my ambition to get in position. I am moving towards doing greater things with and for my neighbors, to improve things. If I'm not, then all the writing I've done at Cobb is empty sophistry and matters not whether nobody reads it but God.

So I will make the selfish and perhaps self-serving statement that God does indeed understand and bless my purposes. I do so without the assistance of the priesthood, which in fact I'd rather have and will most assuredly seek later in life. My love for myself is conditional upon my ability to achieve those goals and discipline myself to their noble purposes, but I defend myself at the expense of a more communitarian altruism. I'm not handing out red roses to everyone I meet, but engineering a Rose Bowl, and to the extent that I am not loving my neighbor on a daily basis in my garrett, I hope to compensate for with the size of my ultimate gift - or die trying.

I am aware that this is the cop-out of every tyrant, God understands me. I'll have a better explanation when I actually do become Lucifer Jones.

To Act Against Reason

OK now I'm going to revert. The reason is because in about 90 seconds, on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Father Richard John Neuhaus has not only clarified the entire context of Benedict's Regenberg Lecture, but demolished a fallacy I thought Christians in America have obsessed over for years.

The kernel of this axiom asserted by the Pope is this:

To act against reason is to act against the nature of God.

And Neuhaus continues..

That religion and particularly Christianity presents itself on the basis of reasonable truth claims that are to be engaged and to be presented as persuasively as possible in a reasonable manner. His lecture at the Regensberg University was directed chiefly against ideological secularists on the one hand who want to radically divide faith and reason and directed against Christian thinkers who want to assert a kind of pure Biblical Christianity against the great achievement which is the synthesis of Greek philosphy and revealed truth. So those were the primary audiences. Along the way, and this is what got all the news attention, he asked the question whether or not there is not a fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam on precisely this point. Whether Islam's understaning of God who is a god who is disengaged from what we mean by reason. A god who is radically sovereign, radically transcendent and whose will is exactly what he declares his will to be no matter how arbitrary or capricious. That Allah could even command that you worship idols and you would be obliged to worship idols.

So he is asking a question whether there is a difference and is it an insurmountable difference...between the Christian understanding, that as the first verse of the prologue to the Gospel of John says: en arche en logos in the Greek. In the beginning was the logos, in the beginning was the word, and logos means also reason, and therefore there could be no place in religion, in authentic religion, Christian, Islamic or other for the use of violence.

That was the question he was posing. And of course unfortunately, the response, the reaction of much of the Islamic world simply confirmed the worst of the possible answers to that question. Namely, you say we're violent and we'll kill you for saying we're violent. This I think means that this statement in Regensberg, will in retrospect be looked back upon as a benchmark in which certainly in the most important statement by a world figure since 9/11 with regard to what may be the biggest single question facing Western civilization in the next century. And it turns out finally to be a theological and philosophical question about the nature of God.

Just wow. I came out of college as one of those ideological secularists (thanks to Ayn Rand), which I remained until I came to understand religion as a fundamental civilizing pedagogy thanks to Ishmael Reed. At that point I claimed polytheism in order to embrace the multiple sources of moral agency across human history. I did so not realizing that the theology of Christianity had resolved this (or even addressed it). Nevertheless, later in reading Cornel West's "American Evasion of Philosophy", I came to recognize the nexus of what he calls 'Emersonian Theocidy' and agreed that some very fundamental ideas about God and America were self-reinfocing, and thus began a new level of patriotism. But Neuhaus cites the opening of the Gospel of John, one of the only passages of the Bible that I've ever really made an attempt to memorize. And yet in all that memorization, I failed to understand the implications. I have to say this is truly a remarkable day for me in faith because for so many years I have been engaged in debate about faith vs reason.

This is fabulous and timely. I wonder what it is I need to do to be able to get to this kind of theology on a regular basis. I'm completely jazzed. For me it goes back to what I've been asserting, and by doing so thinking I have been angling away from Christianity as preached here. Here's the best way I put it before:

The priesthood has a very difficult task, which is to reconcile their interpretations of the divine with their understanding of human needs. How do you dumb down the Infinite and put human beings into the middle of it such that their core moral values are lined up with what any priest or Church says is God's Will? Very difficult indeed, especially when human knowledge ebbs and flows.

If you take it as a given that God is indeed Infinite, then you have embodied in the mind of God, all the laws of the Universe - the very order of everything, whether or not we humans are able to understand it. God is purpose. God is the purpose of the universe. God is the source of human capacity to understand the Universe, such as we can, such as it is. So loving God is a difficult proposition. Unless you anthropomorphize God, you cannot 'love' God in anyway like you would love a human being.

Of all the jobs the priesthood has, invoking God's name to call the people to worship seems like the easiest. What is entailed in worship... ah there's the rub. If one worships God by serving his purposes, there are certainly different abilities of humans to do so which other humans (and presumeably God) is aware. If God's purpose, as described by The New Covenant of Jesus, is transparent to humanity, then it is very unlikely that you could fool humans and decieve God at the same time. In other words, since we are commanded to love our neighbor, we could not love them falsely. Our neighbors would be able to correctly percieve our love with the same facility as God would judge our love of them. This is a very key thing. If love was embodied in the gift of a red rose, then it is important that God gave us all equal facilities to see that the rose was indeed red. Otherwise how could we spread the Gospel? My entire point here is that I am asserting that human beings must have the same facility for interpretation of love and good and evil as God would have. We couldn't arrive at different conclusions; this is utterly fundamental and the meaning of the Tree of Knowledge which kicks off Genesis. We do know.

Neuhaus also says the enemy is Jihadism, and he recommend some books. This is absolutely amazing stuff. The synthesis of Greek philosophy and revealed truth is a fundamental element of modern Christianity. I should know this, but I've never heard it said that way. The implications are enormous, but most importantly and most directly Neuhaus is dead on with regard to what Benedict has put out there. Where muslim clerics stand on this is going to be telling for a long time to come. This, plus a better understanding to the two streams of Jihadism, the Salafist and the Khomenist will go a long way in determining the proper shape of this ideological conflict.

But do you think it will stop Lefties from blaming everything on Bush? Hmmm.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Why Black Men Don't Church

It turns out that my topic has been switched. Instead of talking about black male myths, I'll be talking about something akin to a black male fact, which I can only come at from a personal angle. This fact? Black men ain't at church on Sunday, at least not with the frequency and regularity of black women.

I can only speculate as to why, but I'll give you several semi-serious reasons and excuses that black men like me have difficulties with being in church every Sunday.

The Personal Reasons
These are the reasons I think I share with a lot of brothers, some of them admittedly trifling, but I'm telling you honestly what goes through a mind that's in bed on a Sunday morning.

You Can't Preach
My number one reason for avoiding church is the low quality of the oration of some of the preachers out there. How many times have I heard ministers drone on and on about Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus and how we must make our own transformations and leave our prior lives behind? How many times have I heard ministers talk about their own temptations and how they were worthless sinners and skirt chasers and how all us men are dogs like they used to be? How many times have I had to sit through the junior minister stumbling or the guest pastor from out of town.

It's My Money
Yeah that's right, and guess what? God doesn't need my money. The Church needs my money. They've always needed my money and they've always tried to convince me that God wants me to give it to them. I've been praying to Jesus since I was 8 years old and never once has He told me, "can you help a brotha out?" I understand that I owe something to my less fortunate brothers, but I'll be damned (I guess so) before I give it to a minister who drives a better car than me. I don't mind supporting ministries, but I've got my priorities.

It's My Day Off
A brother works hard all week long. Now if I could go to Church at 10am and be done at 11am, I'd be fine. But you know and I know some ministers act like we have nothing else to do all day Sunday. OK I understand that you slaved over a hot desk working on that sermon all week and you just can't wait to rock our worlds with your message, but uhm... some of us are just checking in.

Church is Just Church
And I've got options. Now I could envision one day, perhaps after I have paid my debt to society and get out of jail and don't have a job or any friends or anyone who trusts me, I will be in church all the time. I'll come on Sunday, and I'll hang around and eat all the cookies, and I'll stare lovingly at the homely single women in their 40s, and I'll be back for Bible Study. And I'll come on the day we read to the shut-ins, and I'll volunteer to drive the church bus. I'll always help put away the chairs in the parish hall and I'll straighten out all the fliers on the bulletin board. But until then I actually do have a busy life to enjoy that centers around my family and community, not church. I got places to go and things to do.

The Sectarian Reasons
I've got some sectarian reasons too. See I grew up going to Catholic School and was confirmed Episcopalian. So although I have also gone deep into the black protestant tradition, me and evangelicals have issues. These have become a great deal more important to me than I ever thought they'd be, and it's somewhat surprising to me that I feel them with some passionate depth. The first two are very important, the others.. well I'm just being partisan and persnickety.

Spontaneaity vs Tradition
One of the deepest spiritual moments in my life came to me as I visited the cathedral in Milan, Il Duomo. I was just in time for morning chapel service which was being held behind the main altar. Being a kid of Vatican II, I could only vaguely understand the words of the traditional Latin mass. But structurally I knew everything that was going on. And I felt immediately and intimately connected to a tradition hundreds of years old in a massive church halfway around the world.

We all know that Jesus said that when two or three are gathered together in prayer that He would be in our midst. So anywhere and everywhere can be 'church', including a park bench or the little storefront. But what makes church extraordinary is the service, the Mass, the Rite. I want ritual and reverence. I want my religion to be old time, unchanging and static against the unpredictability of this world. When I walk in the door I want to know exactly what to expect. I want to know all the songs, all the words, all the movements. I want a calendar that says this is the second Sunday of Advent, this is the Bible verse and lesson for this week.

I can get this in the Black Church, and AME does it well, but straight black Anglican does it best. And I am pleased to see conservative Africans in the Anglican Church making their presense known and felt, but I'm getting off on a tangent. Most black churches, however tend to be much more spontaneous.

No Communion
There are people who really do get spiritual sustenance from hearing the music or the preaching. I don't know how they do it. I am renewed without fail, without fail I say, by recieving the sacrament of His precious body and blood. Without the Eucharist, church is just a bunch of people. I'm sorry.

Alter Call
I have been to some extraordinary services in which the minister has such a loving and empathetic presence that you just want him to touch you. It's something you can tell within the first few paragraphs of their sermons. And when they wind up, you cannot wait to get up front and get a taste of God's power flowing through him. I particularly remember one like this at St. Paul's AME in Cambridge, MA and the woman who ministers at Church of the Advent in LA on Adams Blvd. But some ministers simply cannot swing it. They just never hit the right note and it sounds like begging. That's embarassing.

Revving up the Spirit
Have you ever sat in Church and it's hot and nobody is really catching the spirit and the minister just won't quit? I mean this is just like a hiphop concert and the dude on stage is telling me to make some noise. No brother, I came here for you to deliver your words unto me. Not for me to stroke your ego by making some noise. Sorry but I'm not jumping up and down for you.

Golf
Need I say more?

The Single Man's Reasons
Church is society too. When I was single my reasons for going to church, and not going to church were different than they are now. I think you'll find some of these resonating with you. But let's make it explicit. I'm talking about going to black churches in search of black women. There are reasons to go, and there are reasons to stay away.

The Soul Patrol
You all know what happens the first time you go to church with your new girl. You're a visitor. Stand up. Oh you're a nice looking young man, we hope to see you again. Then they process you. You get the forms and the schedule and scrutiny. Everybody is after your soul. Is this going to be your new church home? You know we can use a stand-up brother like yourself. You don't drink alcohol do you?

Then if you come back a second time, you all must be serious. People start hinting at marriage and telling you about her old boyfriend. Plus you know that your girl is subjecting you to all this to pull you in. It's part of the grand scheme. Basically, you can't 'just' go to church. Because if your girl and your church aren't both a match, it's downhill.

Talent / No Talent
Now I'm going to admit it and you might as well admit it too. If you don't have a girl, church can be a pretty good place to find one. Especially if there's a wedding or it's Easter or some special occasion. In the Cobb MBA Program (master of babe acquisition), Rule 23 states:

If you have to go to church on a babe hunt, don't go on an ordinary Sunday. All you'll find on an ordinary Sunday are Church Girls. They have no life and they will suck you into their emptiness. Go on Easter, go at Christmas, go to weddings. That's when the Church Girls can convince their more interesting girlfriends that *you* are going to be there. Don't disappoint them.

It only takes a minute to fall in love. But it takes less than that to know when there is no talent. I mean we pretend that there are possibilities but some churches just... well I think you know how blunt is the brunt of my implication.

I Was Out Really Late Last Night
So the 8:00 service is out of the question. So I lay down and stare at the cieling as it spins. Hmm. Maybe 10:30 service. And then you start trying to remember which church has an 11:00 service. Then maybe you can come in late.. then.. nevermind, the game is on. Sunday is the day God gave man to lie around in his underwear before he has to go back to work. Thanks God. Are we cool?

The Rebel Period
All of us go through a rebel period. If we don't, then we are only half the men we might otherwise be. The rebel period is generally characterized by a severe haircut and/or attitude which is entirely inappropriate for church. For some of us, that attitude is called Atheism and the rebel period lasts all of our lives. We know it and we don't pretend otherwise. We're bad men and we jaust ain't going to church. Period.

I Wasn't Out Really Late Last Night
Meaning I scored. And I'm not about to push this lovely young lady out of my bed. So don't even ask me what I'm doing this morning, OK?