Politicizing Gabby Giffords

By all accounts Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is a remarkable woman: A respected, conciliatory colleague in the contentious House of Representatives long before the tragic shooting in Tucson; a hardworking politician deeply committed to the concerns of her constituents (which is why she was in a suburban parking lot that fateful Saturday morning); a supportive spouse; a faithful friend.

It was impossible not to be moved by the genuine outpouring of affection for Giffords on Tuesday evening before the President’s state of the union address, and on Wednesday as she delivered her letter of resignation to Speaker Boehner and a full house in the House. On both sides of the aisle the tears flowed.

I don’t question the motives of any of those paying tribute to Giffords. I take their expressions of gratitude for Gifford’s friendship, their claims about her character and service as sincere and heartfelt.

And yet.

There’s something about the way we tend to treat people with certain illnesses or infirmities. How we canonize them (is Gabby Giffords really “the brightest star Congress has ever seen?” What does that even mean?). How we patronize them, even infantilize them. How we sometimes regard them as objects (rather than subjects) onto which we project any number of our own feelings: pity, guilt, fear.

Certainly Giffords’s recovery from the shooting has been something of a medical miracle. She’s obviously tenacious, focused, optimistic, and magnanimous. (She has also, unlike many of her fellow Americans, had access to top-notch health care). But she’s not superhuman. Does our need for tidy, inspirational scripts — innocent victim becomes national hero – deprive people like Giffords of the capacity to be what seems more believably human: by turns tenacious and wavering, focused and fearful, optimistic and anxious, magnanimous and selfish? Have we burdened her with expectations that serve our needs more than her own?

And if Giffords can bring together Democrats and Republicans who unanimously praise her as an example to follow, a model of political magnanimity to emulate, why don’t they just do that — follow her example, model her magnanimity? Even while meaning what they say about Giffords, their subsequent actions (back to squabbling about taxes, tearing down opponents) reveal them to be the masters of doubletalk who continually leave us weary and cynical about all things political.

And we’re back to Gabby being unintentionally used as a prop, as a way to garner goodwill. But the politicians’s walk doesn’t match their talk. And the very human Giffords, whose gait is unsteady and whose speech still unsure, but whose witness profoundly affected all who worked with her, has left the building.

 

The Truthiness of Newt

“It’s not that I’m a good debater. It’s that I articulate the deepest felt values of the American people.”   

Newt Gingrich

The swift and surprising rise of Newt Gingrich in the estimation of South Carolina’s primary voters is not explained by a sudden persuasiveness in his position on, say, Hamiltonian statism. Electoral politics being what they are – tear down, dumb down everywhere you go – it isn’t likely that even his most fervent supporters could articulate Gingrich’s nuanced views on a range of policy matters.

But it doesn’t matter. Nuance is never rewarded in politics. In the long, drawn-out season of primaries and caucuses, nuance — subtlety, shading, refinement — is not only unnecessary but anathema to victory. (Which seems counterintuitive and just plain wrong since, the deep flaws of this phase of the process notwithstanding, there’s plenty of time to get wonky and technical and specific about any number of important issues — all those town hall meetings and homey sitdowns in diners and such.

No, Newt won because he has a rhetorical style suited for the mean-spirited times in which we live. Bombastic, grandiose (by his own admission), ever put-upon, Gingrich never blushes when he spins incredulous tales of victimhood; his is a red face of self-righteous indignation.

He’s famously impossible to work with. His narcissism is legendary. While he addresses the tricky matters of his infidelity and multiple marriages with the language of confession and forgiveness, he seems more than happy to sermonize on the supposed moral frailties of others.

He exploits the fears and resentments of the voters he courts. In parts of South Carolina, as in other parts of the nation, blasting cultural and media “elites” — as Gingrich did in his Saturday night victory speech — is a cheap and disingenuous way to score political points. And the adoring crowds don’t seem to sense how easily they’ve been manipulated.

But this oratory does nothing to articulate a vision, encourage honest reflection, heal divisions, instill hope. Despite his own faux-modest assessment, it isn’t the “felt values of the American people” that Newt gives voice to. It turns out that what many Americans want is someone who will articulate their deepest hatreds. Gingrich is more than willing and capable.

And then there’s the Racialized Politics of Newt:

I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, to go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.

The hubris is breathtaking, the ignorance stunning. And the political momentum gained by remarks like this both chilling and dispiriting.

But this is the world of “truthiness” that Gingrich inhabits. A world where facts aren’t allowed to interfere with the way he believes things to be. (One truth here, in fact, is that there are many millions more whites than blacks who receive food stamps).

All this — and only this — for many long months to come because this will sustain the resentment of those schooled in the cynical one-sidedness of journalists and pundits for whom every policy or position of “the other side” is reflexively derided as gross incompetence or calculated evil. (Can’t the critics just make up their minds? Is President Obama completely clueless or gleefully plotting the ruin of the republic?)

For all the big, breezy, bombast of the grandiose Gingrich his is a politics of smallness. And there is little of the truth in it.

 

2011 in Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 38,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 14 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

 

The Gospel According to Zephaniah (and Tom Waits)

A post I wrote for the Slow Church blog:

Zephaniah 3:8-13

“On that day you shall not be put to shame because of all the deeds by which you have rebelled against me” (Zeph. 3:11).

“There’s no eye for an eye, there’s no tooth for a tooth. I saw Judas Iscariot carrying  John Wilkes Booth.” (Tom Waits, “Down There by the Train”)

We live in a score-keeping, tit-for-tat world. We thrive on retribution in our politics, our entertainment, our personal (and often petty) dramas. We live by the law of karma—or at least we secretly wish karma to be true: goodness sown reaps goodness and evil, we hope, will be repaid for evil. (We find karma especially appealing when pondering the actions of all the people we don’t like).

And then there’s the gospel.

In the reign of God, says Jesus, a wayward, disobedient son is welcomed home – no questions asked – by his loving, patient father; laborers who show up at the end of the day receive the same wages as the hard-working early birds; a woman caught in adultery is given a blessing instead of a curse.

Everything about this just seems wrong. Where’s the justice, the basic fairness that makes the world tolerable, navigable, predictable? But then our own lives come into view: We work hard and can’t seem to catch a break. The greedy prosper. The lazy do, too. What is this world coming to?

To read the rest click here.

 

 

The Logic of the Incarnation

It’s my turn to write the lectionary reflections at bLOGOS on the website of The Ekklesia Project:

Christmas
Luke 2:1-14; John 1:1-14

“The Ancient of Days has become an infant.”
John Chrysostom, 4^th century

On Christmas Eve we read Luke’s dramatic account of the birth of Jesus. On the first Sunday of Christmas (or, as it happens this year, Christmas Day) we read the prologue from John’s gospel. At first glance these texts seem to offer two very different perspectives on the coming of Christ into our world: Luke’s is earthy and political, conveying the historical contingencies (and palpable dangers) that attended the first Advent; John’s is meditative and philosophical, written in academic Greek, locating the “Word made flesh” not in the provincial politics of first-century Palestine but boldly and unapologetically in the sweeping history of the cosmos.

But despite the differences there is, I suggest, an affinity, a necessary and even urgent correspondence, between these two traditional Christmas narratives. And perhaps especially this year, as liturgically we read and hear them only hours apart, this affinity is worthy of deeper exploration.

In Luke, we glimpse what the tyranny of the imperium romanum meant for its subjects, especially those on the margins of empire geographically, ethnically, and religiously. In verses 1 through 5 it is clear that the events leading up to Jesus’ birth were no picnic – nothing like the familiar, beatific stuff of greeting-card sentimentality. Rather, despots and oligarchs populate the scene and the treacherous journey to the stable – labor pains upon labor pains – includes refugees on the run, authorities asking for papers, and risky border crossings.

To read the rest click here.

Image above: Holy Family by Christina Saj, mixed media on canvas, 24″ x 24″ 2010 – collection of Central Presbyterian Church Atlanta GA
www.christinasaj.com

 

It’s Not About the Baby

I’ve never liked the phrase “Jesus is the reason for the season.”

It’s fine with me when people write “Xmas” instead of “Christmas.”

I think the “war on Christmas” is falsely-hyped nonsense. (Same for Rick Perry’s politically expedient “war on religion” — which, thankfully, he appears to be losing).

It’s hard to square the militancy and sheer meanness of those who insist on keeping Christ in Christmas with the Prince of Peace and the celebration of his birth. Are these the same people who have made competitive shopping the forerunning ritual of the feast of the nativity?

Three thoughts:

1. It’s not about the baby. Almost none of the appointed texts for Advent (four weeks worth of Old and New Testament, Psalms, and Gospel) deal with the manger stuff. They are stark and bleak (though not without hope). And when we do get to the infancy narratives we find danger and foreboding: a family on the run, authorities asking for papers, risky border crossings.

When Luke has Mary testify to what Jesus’ life (and death) will mean, it has little to do with cradles and creches and Christmas angels, and everything to do with raw power and the vulnerable poor: “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

The Christ of Christmas turns everything upside down and knocks everything sideways (like tables in the Temple and our own safe, soft, sentimental faith).

2. It’s not about family values. Create and savor all the family holiday traditions you want — the eating and drinking, the fun and games — it’s all good. But don’t confuse family togetherness (which is usually more imagined than actual) with the good news of the Incarnation: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”

The Christ of Christmas hardly endorses the agenda of Focus on the Family. In the Church, baptism trumps biology, and thank God for that.

3. It’s not even about Christmas. Easter is the Church’s primary feast, the festival on which hangs “the hopes and fears of all the years.” The feast of the nativity was a minor observance in the Christian year until the mid-nineteenth century when savvy merchants figured out how to exploit it for commercial gain. (Clement Moore’s popular poem also contributed to the American mythology of Christmas: St. Nicholas morphed into Santa, and reindeer, stockings, and sugar plums entered the story).

The Christ mass, by contrast, is “the feast of Nicene dogma” and the Christ of Christmas is the second person of the Trinity, the Logos of God made flesh. But you probably won’t see that on a Christmas card this year (or any year).

For all the preachiness of these three points, I hope there is also a grace-filled word of encouragement in their essentials: The Jesus who comes into the world naked, homeless, and vulnerable is the Christ who comes to each of us in our own places of godforsakenness. And we know this not because of the cradle but because of the cross. The journey to Bethlehem, the risky birth in a barn, the flight to Egypt — these are not mere Christmas-pageant moments in a perpetually-adolescent faith; rather they are reminders of the historical dangers, the sheer contingency on which a mature, disciplined faith must rest: into a world of violence, fear, and misery, God came.

The put-upon silliness of American civil piety notwithstanding, God continues to come, and violence, fear, and misery will not have the last word.

_________________________________________________________________

These reflections were adapted from a post I wrote last year.

 

The Scandal of the Incarnation

On Gaudete Sunday – the third week in Advent when we are invited to rejoice (“gaudete” in Latin) – we think about Mary and her Magnificat and the scandal of teenage motherhood and we light a pink candle and I think about this gem of a poem by James Wright called “Trouble”:

Leering across Pearl Street,
Crum Anderson yipped:
“Hey Pugh!
I see your sister
Been rid bareback.
She swallow a watermelon?
Fred Gordon! Fred Gordon! Fred Gordon!”
Wayya mean? She can get fat, can’t she?”

Fat? Willow and lonesome Roberta, running
Alone down Pearl Street in the rain the last time
I ever saw her, smiling a smile
Crum Anderson will never know,
Wondering at her body.

Sixteen years, and
All that time she thought she was nothing
But skin and bones.

 

The Advent We Hope For: A Modest Proposal

Whenever I attend Catholic mass during Advent, as I did last weekend, I’m always struck by how it is simply assumed — how it’s a liturgical . . . no . . . an ontological given — that Christmas is no where yet in sight.

I realize that many Protestants are thought to envy Catholic liturgy and the facility with which it is “performed” by both priest and people (and I’ll admit to a little of this), but I happened to attend St. Brendan on the Second Sunday of Awkward (as the good-humored Father reminded the faithful): they were still struggling through the newly-mandated changes in the mass.

But they got, always get, Advent right — the scriptures and prayers, of course; the music, especially; and, just as important, the mood.

Why is it so hard for most non-Catholics to really embrace this season fully? We give it a wink and a nod, observing a kind of pseudo-Advent, even as our Christmas celebrations — ecclesial, civic, and familial, are in full-swing. I have complained about this so many times for so many years that I’m sick of myself on this one. I mean it. I gotta get over it. Mainline Methodists observing Advent for real, for keeps, for the duration? Never gonna happen.

It can seem like so much liturgical snobbery to beat this dead horse year after year.

“You’re a purist,” clergy friends tell me, “and congregational life is messy.”

“If I don’t let the choir sing the Christmas Cantata on the second or third Sunday of Advent there’ll be hell to pay. I could lose my job.”

“Celebrate the youth Christmas party on December 27th? You’re joking, right?”

I know these concerns. I do. Full disclosure: my spouse is a UMC pastor who does his best to lead his congregation into the riches of Advent but who, like most clergy, has inherited deeply cherished, fiercely preserved ”traditions” that make it impossible to really succeed.

But here’s what else I know. Most people in the pews are up for the challenge — the mystery, the drama, the strange satisfactions — of Advent. Not all of them. Some of them will refuse, resist, raise a fuss. But they’re the ones who complain about anything seemingly new or different! Am I right? (And why do we assume that what we do in worship gets put to a vote? Even the subtle, passive-aggressive ”voting” by withholding money or snubbing the pastor or whatever – acts usually tolerated with a kind of silent, ulcer-inducing fury. Pastors make themselves sick worrying if worship is “liked.” Liturgy by popular opinion, majority rule. So Protestant. But I digress).

I’ve had the opportunity to talk about Advent and the Christian year to all kinds of Christians in all kinds of churches. In my experience, lay people are interested in church history and liturgical practice (and sacramental theology and biblical interpretation and Christian doctrine and on and on). They sense the poverty of worship when so much of it mimics the banal culture around them. They long for beauty. They’re game for change.

And this is not just a liturgical matter. Our jumping the gun on Christmas before Advent is even properly underway is regrettable not so much because it violates a hard and fast rule regarding liturgical propriety but because it robs us of the gift of inhabiting fully a season of deep and necessary paradox – a lack in the life of faith that many church-goers feel keenly.

Judgment and hope are the hallmarks of Advent. Not fire-and-brimstone, God’ll-get-you condemnation nor pie-in-the-sky, cross-your-fingers optimism; rather, the judgment necessary to set right a world gone awry, to bring justice to those long-denied it, to scatter the proud and bring down the powerful and lift up the lowly (Lk 1:51-52). Our hope is that this judgment will do its redemptive work and that all of creation might share in the new life made possible by its refining fire (Malachi 3:2). The Advent scriptures heighten our awareness of these stark realities; they remind us that we are called to wait and watch, not passively, but with the expectation that the inbreaking reign of God can come like a thief in the night (another Advent theme): the thief who comes not to steal but to give us all good things.

This is the Advent that ordinary Christians long for, I believe. And so three modest suggestions for recovering (or discovering) this season in all its fullness:

1. We can’t talk about Advent only in Advent. Habituating worshipers to the rhythms of the church calendar requires a year-long (years-long) attentiveness, regular reminders that we occupy time differently, ongoing catechesis about the patterns and practices that shape Christian identity. This truth can be taught in a variety of ways (studies, sermons, and all the rest), even as worshipers embody its reality Sunday after Sunday. But it’s not absorbed by osmosis; intentionality is key.

2. Make changes slowly but resolutely. Decide long before Advent (and invite congregational reflection on) what the shape of the season will be. Maybe you’ll resolve to learn the Advent hymns you never sing; maybe you’ll organize a December study that goes deep into the Advent lections. Hopefully blowout Christmas celebrations will be saved for the twelve-day-long Christmas season.

3. Maintain a sense of humor. There really is nothing quite so obnoxious as a know-it-all who insists on liturgical correctness at the expense of harmony and goodwill. The journey out of our cultural accommodations in Christian worship is an arduous trek that takes time (see suggestion number two); not being so hard on ourselves can lighten the load and bring others along.

In fact it might be — if we’re willing to give these and other suggestions a try — that we can say, with the Psalmist on the third Sunday of Advent: “May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.”

Amen to that.

 

An Advent of Doubt and Struggle

A post I wrote this week for American Public Media’s OnBeing blog:

Advent is my kind of season.

Not the pseudo-Advent of most Christian piety (liturgically-correct texts and hymns on the Sundays of the season and full-on Christmas hoopla all the other days). No, not that Advent but this one: the ancient, autumnal interval of darkness and foreboding with its achy uncertainty blanketing landscapes both inner and outer. This Advent offers room for doubt and struggle; it grants permission to rest in — rather than to resolve — the tensions and paradoxes, the sometimes maddening contradictions that shape the life of discipleship.

We read the appointed texts for the Sundays of Advent and they are startling in their bleakness, their familiarity inuring us to meanings inscrutable, ominous, perilous. (Unless we subscribe to the Left Behind school of hermeneutics, in which liturgical Advent doesn’t exist and these texts are never bad news for us).

To read the rest click here.

 

Thanksgiving, Inc.

This is a twice-baked post (not a half-baked one, I hope), reworked from a couple of earlier Thanksgiving reflections. Nutritional value may vary.

* * * * *

I blame the Food Channel.

Those perfectly roasted turkeys, exotic side dishes (pomegranate in your cornbread stuffing, anyone?), gorgeously-set tables. I’m a sucker for it myself. I want my bird to look just like Bobby Flay’s.

The TV versions of the flawless Thanksgiving (beautiful food, beautiful people around the table) conspire with their print media counterparts (page after glossy page of home-and-hearth goodness) to seduce us with an impeccable, impossible ideal.

As we prepare this week to achieve culinary perfection and familial bliss (and to be disappointed yet again; why do we do this to ourselves?), it’s worth thinking about what is often hidden from view on TV, in the magazines, and in the American industrial food system itself:

1. Those cheap turkeys we’re able to buy at the grocery chain stores actually come at a considerable cost that someone else pays, namely, the low-wage workers who process thousands of birds a day in dirty, dangerous conditions. If those low-wage workers are undocumented, they may be rounded up in an anti-immigration raid, but that will probably be quietly orchestrated between executives at the processing plant and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. This will ensure that a “message” is sent to “illegals” everywhere, but the valuable production of cheap, industrial meat will not be meaningfully disrupted. (See Food, Inc. for the chilling, heartbreaking reality of this phenomenon).

2. The big-breasted chickens and turkeys we’ve come to expect are engineered to be that way: they are overfed corn (not their natural sustenance) to dramatically accelerate the growing process. They are kept in cramped, dark “houses” where, under the stress of their own grotesque body weight, their small legs collapse and they spend their remaining days lying and squirming in their own excrement. We may joke that we can’t get up from the table after gorging on turkey and all the trimmings; the animals we’re eating likely couldn’t move much either.

3. We’ll be consuming lots of petroleum with our Thanksgiving meal – as we do every day – since the average distance our food travels from farm to plate is 1500 miles. Oil company executives will have a lot to be thankful for.

There’s plenty more bad news, but the point is not to pile on the gloom nor to be demoralized by guilt or despair. The point, rather, is to learn how to reclaim Thanksgiving (and all our eating) as an agricultural act.

The point also is to eat with a sense of the sacramental. In the holy yet thoroughly mundane meal that Christians share — the Eucharist (in Greek, “thanksgiving”) – we feast at Creation’s table, finding ourselves linked to all the world and especially to those creatures — human and non-human — who suffer and are exploited for our gain. The Eucharist is always justice in the midst of injustice, sharing in the midst of accumulation and hoarding, communal conviviality in the midst of private pain and loneliness.

To be grateful for the gifts that sustain and enrich our lives is to take responsibility for our own habits that unwittingly deny the intrinsic goodness of the Earth and those who dwell in it. This repentance — literally the changing of our minds and hearts — might mean paying more for a humanely-grown turkey or advocating for an equitable farm/food bill or mentoring a child caught in the cycle of bad nutrition, obesity, or other serious health concerns.

It also ought to mean that we protest loudly the mistreatment of immigrants, especially in Alabama, who have been intimidated by cruel legislation and who feel forced to leave their homes for an uncertain future. (That these hard workers pick the produce we need for our Thanksgiving feasts — sweet potatoes for your pies and casseroles? — is an absurd irony of our fear-driven electoral politics).

Whatever it looks like for each of us, this repentant gratitude is the joyful work of true thanksgiving. The Eucharist — a counterpolitics to all that is distorted in our views on food and feasting, on strangers in our midst — teaches us how to eat and how to live eucharistically, this day and every day.