Reformation Pilgrim

The church tradition in which I serve traces its roots back to John Calvin, the 16th-century Reformer. I had read bits and pieces of Calvin's life and work over the course of my theological studies. In anticipation of a seminar I'm teaching in July, I have the opportunity to read much more about him.

John Calvin: A Pilgrim's Life, by Herman J. Selderhuis (IVP Academic, 2009), is a biography of John Calvin. One of its characteristics (which the author invites us to view as an enticement rather than a liability) is that it tells Calvin's story using only primary source material about his life: such as letters to and from Calvin, introductions to his sermons and books, and documents from the church in Geneva. This selectivity of source material, combined with an informal writing style, makes the book much easier to read than an academic textbook.

Selderhuis invites us to view phases in Calvin's life through the lenses of one-word epithets: he could be viewed as "orphan," "preacher," "widower," and "sailor." Aided by this flexibility of metaphor, Selderhuis attempts to break down some of the stereotypes loaded upon Calvin by later Calvinist traditions.Though Selderhuis does not shy away from judging some of Calvin's (and Geneva's) actions in light of 21st-century worldviews, he confronts the reader with places where the record needs to be set straight. For instance, the caricature of Calvin as the despot of Reformation Geneva is belied by the conflicts between the church and the civil government in that city; and the reputation of Calvin as the strutting champion of "double predestination" requires correction in every generation. For the insights which Selderhuis mines from the source material, I appreciate his work.

The divisions between and within chapters, while always cued by intriguing one- or two-word titles, often left me with a sense of discontinuity. The book's declared aim of walking through Calvin's life according to his own letters may make this sort of zig-zagging unavoidable; a thematic biography of Calvin would make for a work radically different than this collection of vignettes. And at times Selderhuis' writing is so jocular as to seem flip, which felt jarring at times, given the seriousness with which he expects his readers to take the life of this famous Reformer.

These shortcomings did not, however, prevent me from learning much about Calvin's life and how it shaped (and was shaped by) the theological and ecclesiastical movements of his day. A Pilgrim's Life, as the subtitle suggests, takes seriously the fact that John Calvin--like all theologians, no matter how significant their work--was a human being in part guided and defined by his circumstances and relationships. Reforming the Church in our day requires, too, knowing ourselves and our place in God's eternity. Whether we shall be remembered five hundred years after our deaths is not up to us; but we can imitate Calvin's resolve to live as a pilgrim for Christ today.

~ emrys

This Is Not a Blog Post

"You shall not bow down to idols or worship them, for I, Yhwh your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of their parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments."
~ Exodus 20: 5-6

In my calling as student of scripture I find myself confronting paradoxes on a regular basis. The text from Exodus contributes to a paradox when we note that almost no two successive generations of Israelites were faithful to Yhwh; their history is a pendulum of back-and-forth commitment to God. How, then, can punishment or blessing be promised so categorically across generations?

Add to the paradoxes of scripture those of theology--the Incarnation and Trinity, to name the two catholic examples--and I find myself swimming in apparent contradictions.

You might imagine, then, how a book entitled Paradox (Margaret Cuonzo, MIT Press, 2014) caught my eye. Cuonzo offers, in a handbook-sized volume, a brief historical survey of classic paradoxes, various solutions to them, and intriguing descriptions of how paradoxes function in our world.

Paradox reads easily by virtue of its conversational style. As a 210-page book with such a sweeping trajectory must, it keeps the reader moving through Zeno, bald people with full heads of hair, bivalence versus excluded middles, and philosophy of science. The writing has the tone of a professor who has invited us over for lunch on a summer afternoon to chat about her favorite topics. Paradox is a friendly read.

This amicable flavor, however, does not neutralize the challenging character of the material. Cuonzo does not shy away from tackling the conundra of the Liar's Paradox, the Sorites Paradox, or whether scientific inquiry can actually prove anything. She also offers a helpful way of thinking about solutions to (or ways out of) paradoxes by drawing distinctions between typical approaches. In a mind-stretching effort, subjective probability is enlisted to produce an novel assessment of paradoxicality, by which we might determine which paradoxes are more paradoxical than others.

At these innovative junctures the work of Paradox shows its limitation. Subjective probability has its usefulness, I think, but the premise of a paradox is precisely that statements assembled together show inconsistency under the objective order of logic. Introducing subjectivity at the place where objectivity presents the challenge seems dodgy. I am not convinced that paradoxes, even with Cuonzo's rubric of subjective probability, can be ranked quantitatively. She has convinced me that their solution-types bear out qualitative differences, but numerically assessing paradoxicality is, I think, not especially helpful.

The book's real power is in showing that struggling with apparent paradoxes bears the fruit of important distinctions and, in the realm of science, further discovery. However we evaluate, categorize, or quantify paradoxes, it is in struggling with the seeming contradictions in life that we uncover our assumptions and discover new ways of thinking. The work of swimming through life's inconsistencies is some of the most important work of all. For the fascinating, challenging, and entertaining opportunity to learn this lesson, I am grateful for Cuonzo's work.

~ emrys

Socrates Must Die

I very rarely purchase a book because I see it advertised in a magazine. In fact, it has happened only three times in my life, and all of them in March of this year. I read the advert for Rebecca Newberger Goldstien's Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away (2014) and immediately got online to order my copy.

Goldstein is a fully-credentialed philosopher with a brilliant analytical style and a penchant for narrative. Plato at the Googleplex masterfully weaves together a full introduction to the work of Plato and a tantalizing rendering of what Plato would say to 21st century interviewers. I write "full introduction," because Goldstein writes in such a way that a reader who has never picked up a Platonic text can merge quickly into the stream of his thought, but also in such a way that readers familiar with the biographer of Socrates will learn something new. And they might even be challenged in ways even Plato himself did not imagine.

Every other chapter is a move deeper into scholarly--but often playful and always accessible--analysis of Plato and his Socrates in situ in the 5th-century B.C. The chapters between are imagined dialogues between Plato (magically transported to 21st-century America) and various characters: a media escort at the Googleplex, a thinly-disguised FoxNews interviewer, and two radically different child-rearing experts, to name a few. I found myself drawn in by Goldstein's dialogical style, alternately enjoying new ideas, laughing aloud, and knitting my brow at philosophical zingers.

In spite of the book's title, Goldstein does not spend much energy building a direct argument that philosophy won't go away. The arc and sweep of the book does that heavy lifting: the plausibility of her imagined interviews with Plato draws the reader out of the cavern of the mundane. We are carried gently into the realization that yes, pursuit of "the real-the beautiful-the good" is still the bedrock of human life and yes, those that don't grasp this truth are staring at the back of a cave.

The power of Goldstein's work is epitomized, for me, in one point made about half-way through the book. She gradually builds a persuasive case that Socrates' real offense--the real reason that the Athenians decided he must die--was declaring that being a good Athenian citizen did not make one truly virtuous. Many of us--even those who have never studied the works of Plato--have heard the assertion attributed to Socrates, "The unexamined life is not worth living." This phrase seems innocuous philosophical banter at best, navel-gazing trope at worst, if it stands alone. But in its context, where Goldstein places it like a gem in the perfect setting, the phrase is destabilizing and offensive.

I live in a nation whose government has been described as "a bad form of government but better than any other," which claim I am inclined to believe. And I believe that a life lived as a "patriot" in the United States may be much better than a life lived in loyalty to a good many other lesser things. But I also see patriotism too often conflated with virtue, the latter being something that requires exhaustive (and exhausting) examination and dialogue which do not privilege the assumptions of patriotism. Goldstein's masterful new dialogues of Plato brought me further into the light of our pursuit of "the real-the beautiful-the good." I take new zeal for the examination of life from her erosophy--her passionate pursuit of wisdom.

For anyone who is interested in Plato's work, who enjoys well-written dialogue, or who seeks wisdom with a passion, Plato at the Googleplex will be a rewarding experience.

~ emrys

Something Beautiful for God

One of the historical origins of the Presbyterian Church is the Reformed Church in Geneva Switzerland, begun in the middle of the 16th century by John Calvin and the Genevan Elders. On the crest of the hill in the old city of Geneva stands, to this day, the Church of Saint Peter, a massive stone edifice constructed by the Roman Catholics. Inside one can view all the apses and alcoves where the Roman Catholics had placed paintings and statues of saints for veneration. At the front of the sanctuary is a high vaulted ceiling which had been adorned with angels and a crucifix-still de rigeur in Roman Catholic sanctuaries worldwide.

But when the Roman Catholics were ousted from Geneva, Calvin and the Genevan Elders stripped St Peter's bare of all images and adornments. Since that time the sanctuary has presented only the stolid grey of cut stone to the entering worshiper: no votives, no statues, no gilding.

In October of this year I helped officiate at the wedding of a member of our congregation, Jordan, and his bride. They chose to celebrate the wedding at her home church, St James Roman Catholic Church in Johnson City, New York.

I had the pleasure of working with Father Joe O'Connor, an energetic young priest who returned to this, his former parish, at the bride's request. I had never before celebrated a wedding with a Catholic priest. In spite of the historic theological and sacramental disagreements between our branches of the Christian family tree, I had no compunction about doing so. In fact, it was refreshing to celebrate our common discipleship to the Lord Jesus Christ with a hybrid of liturgy. (The congregation was not quite so hybridized: apart from the members of the wedding party, almost all the Catholics sat on the left, and the Presbyterians sat on the right. But our voices were one in song and prayer.)

The verbal content of the Roman Catholic liturgy of the wedding allowed me to hear new chords in the symphony of our faith. I got to hear and speak different phrases than the typical patterns of the Reformed tradition. Behind and above all the words, however, I was struck by the worship space--perhaps in a way similar to how John Calvin, John Knox, and so many other Reformed pastors have been struck by this aspect of Roman Catholic tradition.

The sanctuary of St James is decadent, perhaps opulent (though I say this having seen much more wealth on the walls of Italian basilicas). I had a thought so frequently quoted that it's almost embarrassing to write again here: What if all the money that had gone into this sanctuary had gone into serving the poor and the needy?

Let's be clear: the sanctuary of Nineveh Pres has stained glass windows, chandeliers, embroidered paraments, and a brass cross and candlesticks. Unlike the Moravians, with whom I spent more than a few of my Sundays growing up, American Presbyterians do not believe in complete austerity of decor. There is a sense, in all but the most rigorous of iconoclast traditions, that our worship space should present something beautiful for God.

But a few hours in a Roman Catholic sanctuary returned me to an important question: with what kind of beauty is God pleased? In the letter to Timothy Paul rather bluntly instructs women to abandon all tools of physical beautification and to let their good deeds be their adornment. I think the same instruction could just as well go for men. And, by extension, for the Church. The brightest gilding on the Church is her pursuit of justice; the finest braid is her following Christ in every mundane detail of life. Her opulence should be found only in the lavish grace of Christ which she offers to the world. By doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God, the Church makes the most beautiful things for God.

I wonder if, even in our humble sanctuary in Nineveh, the smallest sum spent on physical adornment is not a distraction from the work that is the Lord's pride and joy.

~ emrys

Scattershots

Some shots from 2013, which have been hanging out on my desktop for too long.

First, my friend Don, whose journey to a community house for the disabled occupied much of my time and heart in 2011 and 2012. It was a journey filled with frustration and disappointment, but also filled with amazing graces from the Lord and divine appointments. Here he is, proud to be functioning well again:

 And the community with which he now lives, supported by two saints, husband and wife, who care for their charges 24/7:

 Two shots from the youth Game Nights at Nineveh: evenings filled with crazy games, good food, raucous fun, and of course the offer of the gospel of Jesus Christ:

 My Lovely, working on a painting project while Daddy does some woodworking at The Shop (with goggles in case the paint splashes):

 Lintel over the door of a former train station in Ithaca, New York. Uncle Jim tells me that a train used to run from Ithaca to the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, where I grew up. My grandmother used to ride the train direct to Bethlehem during her Cornell years. Now, if I wanted to ride the train to the Lehigh Valley, I would have to drive from Ithaca to Rochester (90 minutes), then take the train to Albany (a couple hours), then the train to Penn Station, NYC (an hour or more), then the train back west to Pennsylvania (90 minutes). Driving from Ithaca to the Lehigh Valley takes about three hours.

 Two shots of the bridge from Louisville, Kentucky across the Ohio River to Indiana, taken during one of my business trips to Luhville this year. Something about the blue light on the girders attracted my lens:

 Beans, rocks, beads, and salt, mixed together as a material illustration for Time for Children during worship. I can't remember exactly what I was illustrating, but I remember that the kids were not interested in eating this bean soup:

 Two pieces of hard evidence that as much as teenagers (and thirty-seven-year-olds) want to be considered adults, when placed in a room with building blocks, they will inevitably return to a child-like state:

~ emrys

All You Need Is . . . Justice

My regular interactions with retired pastors come with certain benefits. One of the minor benefits is early pickings from their shelves when they decide to simplify and disperse their personal libraries. I have long forgotten from whose library I harvested it, but I recently pulled from my shelves Joseph Fletcher's Moral Responsibility: Situation Ethics at Work. This compilation of lectures and essays was published in 1967, an era that now seems well bygone but whose legacy is very much a part of my generation's thinking.

I had heard the term "situation ethics" or "situational ethics" uttered in several fora; but the term was usually conjured only for the purposes of its summary dismissal rather than engagement and evaluation. As a result, the contents of Fletcher's book, as old as they are, broke new ground for me.

The gist of situation ethics is that the answer to any question about the rightness or wrongness of any action is "It depends." Fletcher's ethics envisages ethical maxims for guiding ethical thinking, but does not embrace absolute instructions for behavior that apply unconditionally. To take one overwrought example: the injunction not to kill other people is a good maxim for most of life; for a soldier on the battlefield, however, the greatest good may well result from taking the life of another person.

Here is the sine qua non of Fletcher's thinking: ethical decisions arise from weighing carefully what action in this situation will result in the greatest good.

This approach to ethics offers a credible response to a grand conundrum in Christian ethics, illustrated in the gospel according to John, chapter eight. The religious authorities bring to Jesus a woman caught in adultery. They ask Jesus if she should be stoned, as the law dictates. Jesus' response leads to the woman being forgiven and released without stoning. Jesus teaches his disciples to follow "a new commandment," to love another. Why is this commandment new? Because, as John 8 attests, it calls for something more nuanced and difficult than obeying the letter of a codified ethics. It calls for love.

Or, as Fletcher helpfully insists, it calls for justice. To rid the conversation of the fluffy connotations of our present use of the word "love," he presses use of the term "justice," making a cogent argument why love and justice are really the same thing. The ethical mandate of Christians, then, is in every decision to do that which will bring about the greatest justice for all.

My eyes were opened to the problem of absolutist ethics by Fletcher's insight that "rules are designed to minimize obligation." That is to say, the game of "following the rules" is a game of "how much must I do to pass," or not to get in trouble. The ethic of justice--and Jesus--is about pursuing justice for all those affected by our actions. Checking off my daily list that I have not killed anyone today is much easier than asking whether my decisions furthered the life and prosperity of those around me. Situation ethics are difficult. They're not for those who want to stay out of trouble; they're for those who--to borrow a phrase from the Salvation Army--want to do the most good.

This reflection demanded by situation ethics is what Fletcher calls "moral responsibility." Rather than moral correctness (right or wrong), his ethics calls for individuals to live in justice-seeking (moral) ability to respond (responsibility) to the needs of the social world in which we live. I find this description of the moral and ethical dimensions of life corresponds better to what I see in the life and teachings of Jesus than much of the conversation in the air. For this fundamental re-focusing of the Christian life I believe that Fletcher's ideas are indispensable.

His discussions in this book have two weaknesses. First, Fletcher ignores the self-sacrificial element of Jesus' life and teachings. There are some passages which smack of triumphalism, as if the world will never abuse those who seek justice, or that seeking broad justice will be as profitable (in worldly terms) to the individual as not. I wonder if Fletcher's 1967 work is not still basking in a generational optimism that humanity can cure all of its own ills if it just gets everybody on the same page. One of the central teachings of Jesus, embodied in the end of his life, is that living well will require sacrifice, often of our most valuable possessions. An ethics that does not take sacrifice into account is, in my view, deficient.

Second, Fletcher's discussion seems limited to the individual. In what may again be a symptom of his times, Moral Responsibility describes ethical decision-making as happening in a vacuum. In my brief experience, the maze of the world is too convoluted, the possibilities of our society too vast, and the human heart too deceptive for individuals to develop ethics of justice. Another benefit I glean from colleagues older and wiser than I is intentional reflection on the dilemmas of my life and the lives of which I am a part. It may be possible to follow an ethical code alone; without a community of support and accountability I do not think that any of us can make decisions in pursuit of justice.

I also believe that all justice is rooted in the person and work of Jesus Christ. His spirit living in us makes possible self-sacrificing pursuit of the good. Only his presence makes following him possible. But with his spirit, justice will grow out of us.

Fletcher's work has sparked an interest in me to read more current works on Christian ethics. I hope that someday I'll have a chance to do so.
~ emrys

Africa Bound!

In February four members of the congregation I serve, along with two other folks from neighboring congregations, will travel with me to Ethiopia. Our presbytery (local grouping of congregations in our denomination) has a seventeen-year relationship with several congregations of western Ethiopia, in which we send delegations back and forth across The Pond every two to three years. It's our turn, so the delegation from upstate New York will spend seventeen days visiting church leadership and congregations in the region around Dembi Dollo, Ethiopia.

Our involvement with our Ethiopian brothers and sisters has had two foci: First, to pray for and support the church leadership there. The Church is growing in Ethiopia, so much so that she has difficultly training enough pastors to serve in all the congregations. So we do what we can to equip the leadership for its task of cultivating congregations on the rise. Second, we have supported the Ethiopian Rural Education Project. After the Communist government of the 1980s destroyed all rural schools (and church buildings), rural Ethiopians from the 1990s to the present have had difficulty obtaining education for their children, especially at the younger ages before students are eligible to move to the cities for government-supported schooling. So we have been involved in an ongoing effort to design, distribute, and implement curricula that provides literacy and numeracy for five- to ten-year-old children, in their native tongue.

When we meet with our brothers and sisters in February, we will discover how we can help with the needs of the Church and the furthering of education there. I also hope that we will discover how the Ethiopian Church lives out its faith, and allow that discovery to be instructive to us. The Church there continues to pray for us regularly; I hope that we may receive even more tangible encouragement from them on our visit.

While we are there, the Church in Dembi Dollo will be celebrating the 95th anniversary of Presbyterian missionaries coming to Ethiopia. We have heard news of many missionaries and church groups with Ethiopian affiliations who plan to be present for the event, so I expect we shall experience a grand and lively party!

We crave your prayers for the journey: that God would give us grace in the many details, joy in the experience, servant attitudes in our time there, and safety throughout. If you would remember us to the Lord, we will be blessed. If the Spirit moves you to it, you may also contribute to our financial need: we need to raise about $6,400 amongst the group to provide for our needs while there. Checks may be made out to: "Susquehanna Valley Presbytery--EPT," with "Ethiopia Trip 2014" on the memo line. They may be sent to: Ethiopian Partnership Team--SVP, PO Box 87, Nineveh, NY 13813.

~ emrys

Festivals of Booths

A.J. Jacobs, in his (hilarious and insightful) book The Year of Living Biblically, describes trying to obey the scriptural injunction to spend a week of each year living in a booth made with one's own hands. He lives in a Manhattan apartment, so a bit of marital drama unfolds when he fills up the living room with two-by-fours, nails, and canvas for his booth.

Our household does not take that injunction literally, but I think we begin to approximate the spirit of it when we celebrate the pilgrim character of our lives by constructing a chair-and-blanket fort in the living room:

I say "we," but should be clear that Gwendolyn and I did this project, fueled with the excitement of sleeping inside it that night. (Mommy stuck to the comfort of the bed upstairs.)

L'Chaim!
~ emrys

Out of the Depths of Vietnam

I hear many things on NPR that cause me to exclaim to myself, "I need to read more about that!" By the time the next radio story has finished, however, I have remembered that my reading list is backed up until 2035 and I really don't have that much disposable income. So I make myself content with what light NPR has shed on the subject and get on with my day. Except this once.

In Lent of this year an NPR show did an interview with John Borling, author of Taps on the Walls: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton (Master Wings Publishing, 2013). Borling was an Air Force pilot shot down during the Vietnam War and kept in the prison camps in Hanoi for almost seven years. The way he kept sane in that largely solitary experience of wretched imprisonment was to compose poetry (mentally and orally) and communicate it to his POW neighbors through a code of tapping on the walls.

I heard the radio story, got home, and ordered the book online.

I only surmise what drove me to buy this one. First was the fact that my dad wrote his own book about Vietnam from a physician's perspective, and something about a POW's poetic meditations gave me a sense that I would be connecting with a piece of my dad's history. Second was the intriguing thought of poetry composed orally and memorized over years, then recorded only after returning home. Third was the thought of poetry composed in prison, as a defence against what might happen to the soul in a place like the Hanoi Hilton.

In rare exception to the usual patterns of my life, my impulsive decision to buy was richly rewarded. Borling's poetry is fascinating. Some poems stir the soul with their verbal mastery, and could have been composed by a man sipping margueritas in San Diego; "First Light Flight," a proper sonnet, begins, "Pale golden talons stir the eastern sky / Another fledgling day departs the hills," offering a genius dance of aerial and avian metaphor. That sample comes from the lighter material about the pilot's passion.

From the "dark and bitter stuff" come works like "Hanoi Epitaph," which draw the listener (poetry must be read aloud) into a cold and vacuous place where "The years have passed, the many Decembers / And no one knows and no one remembers / The sound of your voice, your face, or your name." It is difficult not to go back and read it (aloud) again, and sink deeper into the void that so many of us are blessed never to have known. These words draw us into the repugnant mystery of what it must be like to live alone in a cold concrete cell for more than six years.

Some pieces read like lyrics to rock songs; others with the half-smile twang of a country ballad. Borling's work runs the gamut of styles, structures, and content. Much of it is not "good" (I put the word intentionally in quotation marks) from a technical perspective; but oral composition and memorization in a North Vietnamese prison tends to soften my critical standards. The epic poem that closes the book tried my endurance--but then again, I was forewarned by the introduction, and by the end of the book I felt dedicated enough to Borling to see it through. He warns his readers about the abundance of pilots' jargon and provides a glossary at the end to assist the land-lubbers like myself. Nonetheless, in the more well-constructed poems I found it possible to read through the strange acronyms and let the sounds work where comprehension could not--to good effect.

The ink of erudition has been spilled across many the page of Vietnam War history; the finest film producers have applied their craft to that era of America's story. But Borling has, I think, found a unique niche well worth exploring: the poetry that comes from a special kind of suffering. I have been enriched by his work and willingness, at last, to share the versified distillation of his experience.

~ emrys

The Perfect Favor

I have been to several weddings. And I have crossed a point in my work at which the number of weddings at which I have officiated exceeds the number I have attended simply as a guest. I have, by virtue of these, acquired my share of wedding favors.

I have also, several times, found an empty miniature bubble bottle lurking in a box long unpacked. I have found, in the bottom of long-neglected drawers, little plastic leaves, moons, and doves etched with the names of bride and groom. I have discovered that the durability and significance of wedding favors is far exceeded by the cost that goes into selecting and purchasing them.

At the reception for the couple that I most recently joined in matrimony, we guests found at our seats a small piece of parchment paper rolled up and tied with a simple orange ribbon. Upon unfurling the scroll I found this favor:

This favor has extra flavor for me, as the husband of a cancer survivor. But had the cause been feeding the hungry, providing clean water for underdeveloped villages, or supporting AIDS education in plagued areas, the favor would have been just as sweet. We enjoyed a fine meal, good dancing, and the warmth of two families celebrating the union of their own. The last thing I need is a small piece of plastic to be lost the next day in the whirlwind of my life. The world needs a bigger favor, too. This one, I think, will endure.

~ emrys