passenger rail from georgia to tennessee

This article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press talks about a new bill in the Senate with bipartisan support (John Kerry, D-Mass and Johnny Isakson, R-Ga will sponsor the bill) that would create a high-speed rail corridor between Atlanta and D.C., and there seems to be a good chance that a spur off of that line will extend service to Chattanooga and potentially to Nashville.  Chattanooga’s Mayor Ron Littlefield’s quote about the project is extremely apropos given our current economic implosion: “‘There are arguments that could be made on where the corridor should go, but out of necessity, the country is going to be building a passenger rail system, and soon, because of where we are with energy,’ Mr. Littlefield said. ‘We can produce electricity with nuclear plants, and that takes us off our dependency from oil.’”  Not sure about the nuclear power aspect, but I completely agree that cars and planes do not represent a solid infrastructural base for the future of transportation.  If we want to get rid of our dependence on oil, decrease emissions, and so on, a good place to start is investing in transportation that can be run on alternative fuels.

John Winthrop and the Communion of Saints

We all know the story of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts and what they meant to do in the New World. There are generally two versions to this story.  In one version, the Puritans came to the New World in order to have freedom to practice their religion. However, once here, they forgot the golden rule and didn’t allow others to have the freedom to practice their religions.  So there was a bit of nastiness with the expulsion of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson and some other dissidents, but eventually we sorted it out and passed the First Amendment to the Constitution, and ever since religious liberty has been a great pillar of the American experience. The second version of the story, proposed by Perry Miller, is that the Puritans came to the New World on an errand, fleeing persecution yes, but primarily to set up a Reformed commonwealth that would serve as an example for the imitation of Reformed churches throughout Europe, terminating in the establishment of a fully reformed Protestant Christendom.  Miller pulls a couple of examples at random, including John Winthrop’s sermon that he gave aboard the Arbella, “A Modell of Christian Charity”, in order to substantiate this thesis.  This sermon is where we get the “city on a hill” motif that is so prominent in our social studies textbooks in elementary school.

Now, both of these interpretations have a degree of merit to them, and both of them have a certain explanatory power, but both of them fail for the same reason–they are origin stories.  We have an indefatigable urge to understand ourselves, and our intuition is to look for precedents in the past to explain the path we took to get to where we are as a culture.  We feel that in so understanding ourselves by reference to our history, we might be able either to draw upon the resources of the past as we try to figure out how to move ahead or to figure out where everything went wrong and how we might retrace our steps to fix the problem.  But in this task we necessarily misunderstand and distort the historical record, because we ask questions of it that past figures weren’t asking–that they couldn’t have asked–and so introduce our modern consciousness with its conceptual categories into the historical record.  I have just begun to ruminate upon the fact that to the extent that there is something like a ‘corporate mind’ in each period of history (and even this idea of dividing time into ‘periods of history’ is artificial, of course), that mind has continuities and discontinuities with what came before and after it, and that the continuities grow fewer as the eras studied get further apart.  So that to try to understand, say, the Puritans is a very difficult task indeed.

My sense is that the social context for Puritans was such that modern individualism would have been unthinkable for them.  While in some sense it is true that the Puritans made modernity possible (though of course not by themselves, and especially not simply through their writings), they were not themselves modern.  The chasm that we crossed as a culture to get from their age of kinship bonds and communitarian efforts like the joint stock company and the town corporation to our age of social dislocation and the autonomous self is enormous.  And much of what we consider natural and normative would be utterly foreign (and likely horrifying) to them.  And precisely for this reason, an encounter with the Puritans awakens something in us–is it loathing? admiration? both? And if we wrestle with the strangeness of these people, if we take them seriously instead of immediately classifying everything foreign in them as benighted and superceded, then the dominant idols of the age might be challenged and perhaps even displaced within us.  As Karl Barth once wrote: “As regards theology, also, we cannot be in the Church without taking as much responsibility for the theology of the past as for the theology of our present. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Schliermacher and all the rest are not dead, but living.  They still speak and demand a hearing as living voices, as surely as we know that they and we belong together in the Church….There is no past in the Church, so there is no past in theology” (Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 3).

In my last post, I wrote that the church must recover practices like hospitality that will enable to it embody the conviction that the ultimate beatitude for human beings is communion with God lived out in the fellowship of the saints.  For convictions never gain traction in our lives as mere thoughts, but only as they are expressed concretely in activity.  Thought longs for consummation in activity.  Activity incorporates thought into our being.  So as we think of God glorified in the communion of saints, and we perform practices that embody this thought, that thought becomes constitutive of who we are.  We become communal beings communing with God.  And here I think the encounter with the Puritans in their historical strangeness is helpful for us.  John Winthrop, in his sermon aboard the Arbella (which, for the record, has almost nothing to do with being a “city on hill”–the main point is that in the hardship of the new world, the Puritan community must be like the apostolic community, with each looking out for the welfare of the other), draws out the connection between the our earthly and heavenly communions:

*”For as of things which are turned with disaffection to each other, the ground of it is from a dissimilitude or arising from the contrary or different nature of the things themselves; for the ground of love is an apprehension of some resemblance in the things loved to that which affects it.  This is the cause why the Lord loves the creature, so far as it hath any of his image in it; he loves his elect because they are like himself, he beholds them in his beloved son.  So a mother loves her child, because she thoroughly conceives a resemblance of herself in it.  Thus it is between the members of Christ; each discerns, by the work of the Spirit, his own image and resemblance in another, and therefore cannot but love him as he loves himself.  Now when the soul, which is of a sociable nature, finds anything like to itself, it is like Adam when Eve was brought to him.”

The concrete practice of hospitality leads us to see the common image we share with the other, and the common image of the divine that we both instantiate.  Thus Winthrop helps us to see how we might be led from thought to practice to embodiment within a communal context.  He shows us that hospitality cannot be carried out merely on an individual level, since that would exhaust us, but it must be performed by the community of the church, not only so that each might bear the burden, but also so that the Spirit might be manifest in our midst.

 

* I modernized the spelling here.

Private Spaces and Hospitality

Something THW and I talk about frequently is the problem of Christianity and consumptive self.  The problem is not just that this peculiar fixture of Western culture–the detached, weightless, dissatisfied self that consumes not just products but other selves–manifests itself in the conspicuous consumption of a few wealthy Christians, but that consumption is part of what it means to be American, and therefore what it means to be a Christian American.  To some degree, the uneasy alliance between Christianity and consumerism has been with us from the beginning.  We are the first culture in history that attempted to wed together a democratic spirit, common sense reasoning, republican ideology, and orthodox Christianity.  But as Alexis de Tocqueville once astutely observed: “not only does democracy make ever man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart” (Democracy in America, II:106).  When communal bonds were stronger, this tendency internal to democracy and individualism was less pronounced in our culture.  But as Robert Bellah and others have anxiously noticed, technological, economic, and sociological trends in American culture have accelerated our isolation and brought to fruition what Tocqueville predicted would happen to us if a balance could not be struck.

One of the places that our consumption and our isolation are most pronounced is in the environments we build for ourselves. The automobile suburb was invented in America, and this is not an accident.  As Philip Bess has observed, the privacy and seclusion of the suburb “clearly appeal to some deeply ingrained American tendencies and desires” (Til We Have Built Jerusalem, 32).  Attention to the details of suburban existence reveals that this form of built environment is the most amenable to American autonomy. Here are a few ways in which this is so: 1) homes in suburbs are generally priced in such a way as to separate socio-economic classes from one another; 2) public space is kept to a minimum, thereby allowing individuals the highest degree of selectivity in who they will allow into their lives; 3) suburbs are built entirely around the automobile, the ultimate symbol of American liberation and technological mastery over nature; 4) houses in suburban neighborhoods can be sized to any dimension, thereby permitting (dare I say sanctioning) as much private consumption as the individuals living there are able to afford.

In a remarkable essay called “Democracy’s Private Spaces,” Bess makes the connection between the built environment and American autonomy by focusing on bathrooms–their size and number.  In recent residential construction, the number of bathrooms expected has ballooned, and so has their size.  Bess regards this phenomenon as an index of the autonomy of individuals in our culture: “Bigger and more luxurious bedroom and bathrooms seem to me just one physical manifestation of that shrinkage of the public realm happening reciprocally and in tandem with America’s true growth industry, the care and tending of the autonomous self.  Like the decline of the street and square as active public spaces–and the demise of the alley, the ubiquity of the driveway, the transformation of residential blocks, the relocation of domestic life to yards and family rooms at the rear of the house, and the creation of complex suburban roofs apparently intended to simulate small villages–the growing number and importance of domestic bathrooms and bedroom suites indicates another way we materialize in our built environment in our culture’s turn from the civic to the private” (Til We Have Built Jerusalem, 34).

It is possible, I am sure, that some will not see a problem with any of this. But I would be willing to make the argument that if you are a Christian, you ought to be very, very concerned by it. In fact, I would be willing to make the argument that if you are a Christian, you should take this progressive retreat into privacy as a sign that our culture has reached a terminal stage, and that something fairly radical must be done to avert disaster.  Not only the culture but the church is sick. The church is sick because it has become comfortable within this culture (which the late Pope John Paul II deemed “a culture of death”), and it must regain a sense of the purpose of human existence if it intends to recover.  Humanity’s ultimate beatitude is found in communion of God in the fellowship of the saints, and the church must recover practices that embody this conviction.  One central practice that must be recovered is a robust hospitality, which recognizes a distinction between the self and the other and yet respects and welcomes the other, and more–recognizes that the self is not complete until it has experienced fellowship with the other.   The retreat into the private has, paradoxically, made us homeless; in our deep loneliness we no longer know where we belong.  As Elizabeth Newman writes, “Instead of a fragmented and empty self…hospitality draws into a richer context where we must make sense of ourselves as ‘guests’ and ‘hosts,’ acknowledge our dependence on others, and learn to live with gratitude” (Untamed Hospitality, 38).  Hospitality begins to overcome our deeply held intuitions that we are independent, that our decisions affect only ourselves, and that these are a good things.  Obviously, from what I have written above, I think hospitality is easier to practice (though by no means easy) in traditional urban neighborhoods.  But not everyone lives or will live in a traditional urban neighborhoods.  So suburbanites must learn to make the special effort to be hospitable so that they too can overcome our national myth of the autonomous self.

On the Importance of Christianity as a Material Religion

Awhile back, THW wrote a post examining the theological significance of the fact that Jesus actually ate.  After the resurrection, to prove his physicality, his carnality, he eats roasted fish with disciples. His body was and is a real body, a tangible quantum, and his incarnation affirms that finitude is a good and proper thing. The limitations imposed upon us by our creatureliness are meant to be there–we are meant to eat and take joy in eating, we are meant to sleep and enjoy sleeping, and we are meant to cycle through seasons of rest and work.  And this also means that redemption is as much physical as it is spiritual.  The redemption wrought by Christ in his incarnation, life, cross, and resurrection is full-orbed. When he opens the scroll of Isaiah in Luke 4 and reads that he has come to break the yoke of the oppressed, he really means the physical yoke of the oppressed.  And it is the failure of Constantinian Christianity that it has spiritualized these missional impulses. It has spiritualized poverty to the extent that the “cultured despisers of religion” (who are regarded as the spiritually poor) have become the primary audience of Christianity’s gospel, and it has relegated concern for the poor to the “hyper-spiritual”–the religious orders in Catholicism, the Shane Claibornes and the William Booths in Protestantism.  But the spiritualization of salvation has had some unfortunate effects, not least of which is that it has opened Christians to the critique offered up by the “masters of suspicion” (Paul Ricoeur’s phrase) that Christianity, like other religions, is simply a projection onto the abstract of humanity’s greatest longings and fears.  It transposed humanity’s longing for rescue from temporal maladies onto the realm of the infinite.  This statement by Feuerbach is typical:

“Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires.  By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s hlep it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires” (Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Lecture XXX).

But this critique only addresses a kind of Christianity that has lost sight of the material dimension of salvation.  In our working, in our eating, in our dancing, in our playing, if are Christians, we are ushering the kingdom of God into the realm of the everyday.  And so obedience in everyday things becomes exceedingly important. Who we feed, how we talk to each other, how we build our cities–all of these things matter, because the kingdom of God is a physical thing, not an abstraction.  As THW said in her earlier post, “Dualism and docetism be damned. We worship a God who eats!”

Being physical.

Hello, it’s the gnome writing. I’m going to fill in for THW while she’s on her media fast, and I hope to post something at least every week.  I’ve been really busy with my program this week, so don’t hold me to the goal.  

This week I thought I’d reflect on an experience that THW and I had last week on the way to church. I am, unfortunately, afflicted with a skin condition known as psoriasis, which is an auto-immune disorder (meaning that my immune system attacks my skin, producing painful, itchy lesions in various places on my body).  The western treatments for the condition generally involve rubbing substances like coal tar on the lesions or absorbing UV rays in a tanning booth, but the more radical treatment that has been available for the past twenty years or so involves taking immunosuppresants of some variety.  While in seminary, I was placed on a regimen of cyclosporine, which is an immunosuppresant evidently derived from some kind of toxic mushroom harvested in Switzerland.  Because it is ingested orally, it is processed through your liver and can cause disfunction there and in your kidneys.  Thus, you can only be on the drug for a limited time.  While I was on the regimen, it worked like a charm, but of course as soon as I got off the drug, my condition came back with a vengeance. There are better drugs that have been developed for the treatment of auto-immune disorders like Enbrel and Humira, but these are incredibly expensive (on the order of $20k a year), and my not-so-hot student insurance wouldn’t cover them.  

So, after I got off the cyclosporine, I began looking into natural remedies, and after meeting with the nutritionist/pharmacologist at The People’s Pharmacy in Austin, I began a round of supplements designed to promote the health of my GI tract and brain chemistry.  As with all natural remedies, the treatment was not immediately effective but began demonstrating a long term beneficial effect.  But then we moved to Nashville, and I sort of began slacking off.  I ran out of various supplements and didn’t call the pharmacy to reorder them.  Then I just stopped taking them altogether.  So I started itching again.

This past Sunday, THW asked me about it on the way to church.  I got defensive, of course, even though I was clearly in the wrong.  It is my responsibility to take supplements. I need to take them in order to prevent psoriasis from completely taking over my body.  Not only for Tish’s sake either–I am never as miserable as when I am in the midst of an acute psoriasis flare-up.  So why was I neglecting to take care of myself?

I think that the answer to this question is that I am a crypto-gnostic.  For all that I believe in the materiality of the Christian faith, that the incarnation validates the body and the essential goodness and redeemability of creation, when I am busy I fall back into a pattern of thought and behavior that is basically dualistic and world-denying.  When my plate is full, as it is now, I perceive my body as a prison or, at best, a Cartesian res extensa that is being manipulated by my mind to perform the tasks that will facilitate an increase in knowledge or productivity.  My body is an inconvenience, a necessary evil, to be born because my mind must be situated in a place in order for it to have awareness of itself.  I find myself identifying with Jonathan Edwards’ truly repugnant idealist account of the interaction between mind and body in his essay “The Mind”:

“Therefore spirits cannot be in place in such a sense, that all within the given limits shall be where the spirit is, and all without such a circumspection where he is not; but in this sense only, that all created spirits have clearer and more strongly impressed ideas of things in one place than in another, or can produce effects here and not there; and as this place alters, so spirits move.  In spirits united to bodies, the spirit more strongly perceives things where the body is, and can there immediately produce effects, and in this sense the soul can be said to be in the same place where the body is; and this law is that we call the union between soul and body” (in A Jonathan Edwards Reader, eds. John Smith, Harry Stout, and Kenneth Minkema, p. 28).

When I get in this mode of thinking, all bodily tasks become burdens.  Working in the garden is transformed into an intolerable waste of time. Eating is transformed from a communal act cementing relationships into an act of personal subistence; food becomes fuel.  The difference between a healthy interaction with matter and an unhealthy one, I have determined, is my relationship to time. The more pressured and anxious I become about deadlines, productivity, and so on, the more likely I am to see my body and, in fact, the whole material world, as something to be tolerated rather than enjoyed.  The struggle for the rest of my life, perhaps, will be to temper the ambition to do all things, to be all things, to settle for good enough rather than the best, so that the kingdom of God may go forth in the stuff of my physical existence.  I covet your prayers in my attempts to live this out.

fast of a different sort.

We have the internet in our house for the first time since I was married (which means about 4 years).  It has been GREAT to read my sister’s and other friends’ blog and get election coverage without having to go to a coffee shop or the library. But it is starting to get out of control and I’m spending way too much time surfing.  This week I stayed up really late and basically read 1/4 of the internet (I think the other 3/4 are porn and online shopping) and I woke up groggy, cyber-hungover the next day knowing that I have a problem and must. stop. I don’t even know why I waste so much time surfing.  It has something to do, maybe, with boredom or loneliness, but I just never ever run out of terms to search for or links to follow.Not to be over dramatic, but it feels like taking hits of a drug, it feels like my will is on furlough and the glowing screen is seducing me like one of those fly zappers on a summer night. Can’t. Stop. Flying. Toward. It. Must. Have. The. Light. Must. zap. If anyone can explain this to me, please do.

So, by example of my greatly loved farmer friend and brother dear  S.H, I’m going on a fast from the internet for a while. Well, I’ll still be giving/receiving email, but I’m taking a break from pretty much everything else.  So I’ll be on hiatus for a few weeks, but so as not to disappoint my huge readership (or whatever), the gnome will be writing. He is learning all of these lovely things about life, God, food, ecology, and gardening and he will tell us about them.  He promises not to write 10,000 word treatises on obscure dead men on Nourish here. If you want those sorts of posts, you’ll find plenty here.  I can’t wait to find out what he has to say. 

I know I’m going to really miss being on line.  But hopefully I’ll learn to be more sane with the use of the web/net (which, I know, J and Nate, as Dr. Lewis says, are both means of entrapment).

Enjoy the gnome. I do.