If I Ever Feel Better

A lot of activity, very little progress - that seems to summarise my life right now.  Work is piling up with endless redrafts of the same documents and meetings and dinners and networking sessions to spare.  On the plus side, I’m gradually becoming accustomed to the almost daily experience of walking into a room full of strangers and making my presence felt.  On the negative side, I’m feeling pretty stressed.

But I know I made a choice to take on something that seemed out of my comfort zone for the simple reason that it would eventually fall within the zone.  And at only two months in, it’s hardly a bust.

At least I have the pleasures of good music, good books, good friends and lengthy phone conversations with my girl on the other side of the world.

That, in a short post, is Dave’s life circa May 1.

As if keeping up two blogs wasn’t work enough, I’ve been asked to start a regular column over Popmatters’ Re:Print blog. As insider in the Australian book industry (cough), I will be sharing my insights over at Upside-down Notes . My first post was about the Australia 2020 summit that begins today and seems like a bit of a wank. Of course, as an industry insider (cough), I wasn’t invited.

Sometimes the moment something great enters your life, it can be on the way out.  Sometimes you don’t what you’ve got until four weeks before it’s gone.

This morning at the airport I watched my brand-new girlfriend walk through security, headed for home in Canada.

I’m figuring that what international air travel takes away, international air travel can bring back.

An old church pastor of mine used to argue that new initiatives and experiments should only every come from “a place of strength”.  Too often, disaffected people try new things out of frustration and desperation and the new things crumble under that weight.

There’s a flipside to that coin.  When things are going well, that’s when really radical changes will never happen - because people have too much to lose.

At the aforementioned pastor’s instigation, back in 2006, I sounded out a range of people about a possible new church plant to get out into places we weren’t getting and to people we weren’t reaching.  The general response was that this was a fantastic idea, but not for them individually.  They were too committed to the current structure.  They were involved in something else that was going well.  They would have to leave things behind.

The same kind of reaction happened last night when Andy pitched a new, emerging-style church plant.  Some people were thrilled, others struck by what this would mean for them.  Unlike the last example, this is not just an academic idea, this will happen and it will split the church.

Things have been going well at our church and I think that’s half the problem.  If the current model isn’t failing you, it’s hard to see why it needs to change.  But it’s not about us, it’s about the people who don’t fit the current model.  It’s for people who would never set foot inside our little church, no matter how many candles and topical sermons and mellow rock songs we give them.

Maybe we need to see that failure before we are willing to try something new.

I finally got around to seeing Be Kind Rewind last night and it warmed by heart more than I expected.  For some reason it’s not getting a lot of critical love, but I know several people who are fans.  Maybe it has the makings of a cult hit?  Who knows.

Honestly, it’s not a very well constructed or written film.  Bits of it feel clunky and, for such a good cast, the acting felt a bit off in places.  But how can you not love a film about hopeless losers revitalising a community through home-made remakes?  It’s got everything a good crowd-pleasing movie needs.

You can’t, that’s what.

It can’t be terribly long after accepting Christianity that every believer is hit with the second biggest challenge of our faith - the silence, or at least quietness, of God.

In fact, it may well be the biggest challenge.  After all, Job (from the book of the same name) lost everything and had a generally sucky time of it, but at least God showed up at the end to reassure him that it was all under control.  Smaller pains and struggles can be harder to deal with than large when there’s no sense that Our Father is even noticing.

I’ve been thinking recently how major movements in Christianity are partly driven by a desire to solve this problem.

Happy-clappy Pentecostalism strikes me as a wilfull ignorance of the problem.  We decide to see God’s hand in everything and attribute every good emotion we feel to His Spirit.  You can feel him, right?  You know you can.

At the other end of the spectrum, dry evangelicalism is a kind of fatalist acceptance.  Reduce God to theological concepts, and He’s all but stripped of personality.  His Word is reduced to words on paper.  How can you expect personal attention from a God who is so far removed from you?  Jesus died for your sins - and you still want TLC?

And sadly, my favoured “emerging” brand of Christianity can be just another kind of fatalism. Focus enough on Jesus as a radical, 1st century Jewish moral teacher who announced the imminent Kingdom of God and he’s suddenly not someone you can really know personally.  No more than you can know Che Guevara or Martin Luther King Jr, I guess.

So many writers and bloggers I read are focused on this new world that we’re supposed to be part of - caring for the sick and the lost and the needy.  A hardcore social justice Christian guy I know has expressed a lot of disdain for the typical “Jesus wants YOU” self-focused message he hears in a lot of churches.  He’s all about the Kingdom of God and God’s plan to save all of mankind.  In a picture like that, individuals get a little bit swamped.

In my selfish way, I wonder what’s in it for me in this particular Kingdom.  It’s a world where God wants to end global poverty but isn’t so worried about individuals.  A typical distant leader, if you will.  It’s hugely indulgent of me as an affluent Westerner to prize my own emotional needs over those of the rest of the planet, but I’m a hugely self-indulgent guy.  I write a blog, after all.

And the God I read about in this book I’ve got on my shelf does care about individuals.  He’s spent time with prophets and leaders and reassured them when they get down.  He’s spent time on Earth as a regular guy who eats with ordinary people and has friends and praises the sister who sits and listens over the one who runs around making food and cleaning.

I’m not quite prepared to give up that image of God just yet.  Because if that part of the story isn’t true, then I’m not so sure that the rest of it means jack.

A nice definition of futility would be tonight in Coles when my “trainee” checkout dude used a plastic bag as a temporary store for my groceries before placing them back in my reusable green bag - and then disposed of the plastic bag.

If there’s one thing that annoys me about the Emerging Church movement out of the States, it’s how many preachers and writers and bloggers crap on about U2.  Now I like late-80s-early-90s U2 quite a bit, but I’ve got to say their later output isn’t really up to that standard.  I suspect it’s simply that U2 are famous, so you know people will get your references, and because Bono is a Christian who says critical things about the church and goes on about poverty.  I’m not sure that’s enough to deserve all the praise.

There are a few other candidates for minor EC sainthood but each has problems - Sufjan Stevens is a bit too off-beat and still not that well known, Kanye has a tendency to say ludicrous things that piss everyone off.  So U2 it remains.

Andy and I have decided enough is enough.  As leading lights of the EC in Australia (cough), we’ve decided that Nick Cave will be our preferred musical poster boy.  He’s a local, he’s become a Christian while still singing songs that scare small children and their parents, and he’s completely impossible to get a proper handle on.  What more could we ask for?  So Saint Nick it is.

Oops - that’s already taken, isn’t it?

In a month plagued by panic
Attacks the like I rarely see
I’ve found a strange comfort
In free verse

Last night I watched Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion documentary and I guess it was what you’d expect.  Dawkins writes well (his evolution books are good reads) and his public presentation is also impressive.  He has such a reasonable, likeable demeanour and his documentary is so well constructed, it must be easy to miss what a load of bullshit it mostly is.

The substance of his argument is as follows: religion makes you not think for yourself, not thinking for yourself means blindly following authority, blindly following authority leads to suicide bombings.

A small problem with this is that - especially for a humanist - Dawkins has surprisingly little faith in humanity, or at least the segment that follow religion.  It’s as if he believes the moment that someone believes, they actually switch off all critical faculties.  He’s never experienced religious faith, so he doesn’t understand it.  And he is more than willing to attribute all the bad in human nature to religion and retain all the good for rational belief.  As if every religious believer is one sermon away from jihad and every free-thinker is protected from evil acts by their superior critical faculties.

He’s quite disingenuous too: the way he interviews a fundamentalist Muslim, who converted from Judaism, and acts surprised that he doesn’t understand Dawkins’ viewpoint is barely believable.  His interview with the poor, oppressed atheists of Colorado really had me reaching for the tissues - the way they “furtively” met out on the balcony of someone’s house sure brought home the point.

And his arguments are often fluffy as hell.  One scene shows a Catholic procession and he says something like “It looks pretty harmless, but isn’t it just the start of a slippery slope to strapping on a backpack full of explosives?”  Ah yes, the old “slippery slope” - a scientifically credible argument verified by rigorous experimental data!

It made me imagine a YouTube response, in which the narrator shows a science lab, with nice women and men in white coats.  “It all looks pretty harmless,” he says, “but isn’t this just the start of a slippery slope to destroying millions of innocent lives in a Fascist eugenics experiment?”

I’m not sure how Dawkins’ plans to rid the world of religion.  The widespread teaching of evolution and enlightenment philosophy doesn’t seem to have killed it.  Banning it hasn’t worked in the countries where it’s been tried.  The problem is that it’s perpetuated by everyday people, rather than simply institutions - and short of Maoist-style “re-education” of all religious elements, I’m not sure how you’d do it.  Dawkins would have to recoil at the idea of a new Inquisition, to weed out “un-scientific” thinkers.

Wouldn’t he?