Our Privilege -- an Irritable quote

People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

- Marilynne Robinson, from The Paris Review

You Did Everything Right -- an Irritable Review

Ellery's latest offering, You Did Everything Right, is something of a provisional work, a demo-cum-EP that was not originally conceived as a stand-alone product. In that sense it is less a coherent project than a collection of songs -- but oh! the songs.

The songs conjure an eclectic admixture of impressions, and allusions, of hints and allegations. There's a little Sarah McLachlan here, a little Become Me-era Indido Girls, but those are all too obvious. It's possible to hear hints of Coldplay or later U2, maybe some Aimee Mann or Steve Earl. I'll be damned if there isn't a little Linda Ronstandt in there, skulking about, hoping not to be noticed.

All of this to say that there's at once an ineffable familiarity and an undeniable freshness to these songs. This is probably Ellery's most mature work to date, which might go without saying but not all of us are graced by Time in the same dignified way. There is a grown-up sensuality here, more caress than climax, more subtly than outright seduction. These songs come to us unfolding slowly, languid and bittersweet, like old friends. We've moved beyond the fresh earnestness of "Song for Lovers" or the precocious wide-eyed wonder of "Long Coat On," which is not to diminish where those earlier offerings found us -- or left us.

But there is something almost approaching angst here, something more self-aware and less innocent. What we haven't left, and never want to leave, is Ellery's uncanny ability to conjure a whole life in a four-minute pop song, or weave a melody out of what would for others would be just an ostinato. Ellery's songs have never been pretentious but these are more relaxed and surefooted. They have nothing to prove, and much to offer. They are generous, like lovers.

Of course, there are things that give me pause: the curiously lo-fi toms and guitar sounds on "After", or the constant dangerous negotiation between distinctiveness and diction in Tasha's vocals. Any use of chimes skirts the edge of cliche, and it's hard not to fall on the other side.

But there are other moments that make any liabilities utterly forgiveable. These are small touches -- the delightfully jangly tambourine on "What I Need." And the Rhodes. Dear Lord, the Rhodes -- is that real? (Don't tell me.) The consistently artful and understated drumming. The use of ambience, of space, of delicate textures and evocative soundscapes. "After"'s plaintive harmonies (and it's good to hear Justin's voice). Proof that the electric guitar can sound good clean (or mostly so).

Or this:

Darling, don't be frightened
There are skies under your skin
In a wide array of white and gray
On wild winter winds.

There's a moment in the title track where the bottom drops out and Tasha is left suspended over almost nothing, vulnerable and naked, which she faces without flinching. And as the song unfolds from that moment, do we actually hear Tasha let her voice crack?

God, that's fetching.

Prodigal Son, part 2

It is true that some find, in the conversion experience, the impetus toward some measure of a better life. They get clean and sober. They find friends and stave off loneliness. They turn their lives around and become productive members of society. These improvements come in tangible terms that are not to be discounted.

The dark side of this dynamic is twofold: One, such improvements are often concomitant with a process in which such people are mainstreamed into an oppressive culture. Giving your heart to Jesus also means learning how to stop worrying and love the bomb. They gain an identity as part of a demographic or even a voting bloc but their true political agency is largely eviscerated.

Two, those whose lives do not manifest room for such "improvements" -- which I submit is the majority of American evangelicals -- must continually seek narrative satisfaction in the repetition structure I describe above. They must seek, in evangelical media and church programming, ways to inscribe themselves as sinners who can find absolution in the message of God's love and redemption. They must do this over and over again in Sisyphean [Sisyphusian? Sisyphal?] futility.

This mimics and mirrors the way in which capitalism continually constructs and then partially alleviates consumer desire until eventually it is the desire itself that we are after. We want the catharsis of wanting. We seek the pathos of seeking. There is an addictive element to this, but also a more deeply pathological dimension, hinted at in Fight Club, in which the narrator says of insomnia (which seems to be a trope for capitalist malaise), "nothing is real; everything is a copy of a copy of a copy." Everything solid melts into the air.

Evangelical spirituality freezes the religious subject at the point of conversion much as capitalism freezes the economic subject at the moment of desire. The religious identity must be continually performed in ritual and in narrative recapitulation just as our consumer identity must be continually performed in the act of consumption but also in the structuring of desire. Being defined in perpetuity as a "consumer" is not structurally different from being consistently defined as a "sinner saved by grace." These identity constructions are at the very least complementary, if not mutually reinforcing.

The "practical application" of much evangelical preaching and teaching -- The Purpose-Driven Life comes to mind here -- is therapeutic and generally serves to either assist us in gaining access to the mainstream of consumer culture (this is especially true of theologies of health and prosperity) or to bear up under the demands of such culture and mitigate its more damaging effects. This is roughly the argument Slavoj Zizek makes against self-help culture and many Americanized versions of eastern religion. In the ramped-up rhetoric of a first-century rabbi, we make our converts twice the sons and daughters of hell that we are.

N.T. Wright argues that the context of prodigal son parable is eschatological, that the original audience would have heard the parable not as much in terms of individual repentance but of the restoration of both houses of Israel. As much as Wright and I disagree on other things, I think he has a point here. But I'm not sure how helpful a socio-rhetorical analysis is in this case, and I think in our efforts to correct for modernist individualism we have a tendency to swing too far in the other direction.

If we are to recover this parable as something useful, if we are to channel its affective power into something truly life-giving, we must complete the circle. We must teach this parable not simply as a tender story of the possibility of homecoming, but of the sacred responsibility to become the weloming father. The narrative gap that we must close is not the prodigal son's empty place at the dinner table but the kenotic absence of God himself.

The human social matrix is our ecological home. We are adapted to the tribe much in the way whales are adapted to life in the pod, or crows to the murder. This is not to celebrate any particular form of tribal life nor is it to deny the need to consciously adapt to the available forms of social organization in the present. But the basic tribal impulse, the need for human interaction, is not one that we have had time to adapt out of, and I can't think of a good reason that we should.

Coming home, then, for whatever prodigals that there be, must mean coming into a welcoming human community. This does not need to be exclusively or specifically ecclesiastical. But we need, in various and varied forms, pockets of human solidarity performing the necessary political task of re-membering the disembodied capitalist subjects, seeking not merely retreat or sanctuary but genuine agency.

For far too long evangelicalism has offered simply the idea that God loves us. But this God only exists to the extent that such love is made manifest in genuine human contact. What we need is not a narrative transaction constantly repeated but a divine presence continually embodied. Those with ears to hear must become that presence, must bear the ring and the robe and order the feast to begin. Nothing less is salvific. The idea of God is not enough.

For what does it profit us to save souls and lose the whole world?

The Prodigal Son, part 1

Sundays when I was little our beleaguered mother -- single, in school, raising three kids -- put us on the church bus, put a roast in the crock pot, and settled in for a couple of hours of respite. She got a much-needed sabbath, we got some churchin'.

And churchin' we got, at some sort of rowdy revival church focused on soul-winning. It seems to me it might have been a Nazarene church, but I'm not really sure. We weren't Nazarene, but I don't think my mother was picky. They had a bus.

I don't remember much, except that for some reason I went forward. A lot. I vaguely remember the minister, on what was probably one of many trips to the altar by that point, being kind but mildly condescending. It's not that I blame him; who was this nerdy kid who kept coming forward? I'd been saved several times over by that point, like someone who places reservations at more than one restaurant, just in case. I'm not sure he knew what to do with me.

For my part, I think I probably took the invitation too literally. This is why I think it must have been a revivalistic church, heavy on the altar call, and I was easily swayed by the rhetoric. I was "suggestible," probably a good candidate for hypnosis, or a shamanic trance. I think that's one of the reasons I'm such a skeptic now, as a way of steeling myself against such suggestibility.

I hadn't really missed the point, however; I had simply over-identified with it, or over-internalized it. For it is precisely this repetition that lies at the heart of a lot of evangelical spirituality, and betrays both the vacuousness of evangelical soteriology and its parasitism upon capitalism -- and even this is redundant.

Our church recently did a series on the parables, spending two weeks on the Prodigal Son. It was handled well, with one week on the wayfaring brother and the second week on the grumpy, judgmental homebody. I have to admit I'm a bit of a sucker for this story, a sap for any parent/child story and easily surrendered to the catharsis of a homecoming tale. I'm suggestible, in other words.

It is hard to resist the affective power of this parable. In most tellings, the reader/hearer gains access to this power, gets enjoyment and release from this story, by closing the narrative gap and identifying with the role of the prodigal. To do this we code ourselves theologically as errant waifs in need of the loving embrace of our father-God, which is generously and lavishly granted in the narrative. Our minister, the second week, invited us to identify with the other brother, adjuring us to learn from the father's grace in receiving the prodigal.

But it is the first understanding, of ourselves as the prodigal, that is the mainstay of evangelical conversion. The narrative transaction of the evangelical conversion experience, which forms the frame in which Luke 15 is usually read, must be continually repeated in the life of the believer. Sermons, songs, various and varied aspects of the evangelical media machine -- most of these are designed, in some way, to get us narratively lost and found over and over again, that we might somehow continually relive the conversion event.

In a similar way, romantic comedies and love songs invite us to repeat and relive the experience of falling in love, or the pathos of breaking up. It is an empty parody of the Benedictine vow of conversatio, or perpetual conversion, the life-long process of becoming to which monks commit themselves. But this is not to let the Catholics off the hook, inasmuch as I wonder if this isn't also steeped in the perpetual sacrifice of the Eucharist. (Indeed, William Cavanaugh reads consumerism as a parody of the Eucharist, for which the remedy is a robust re-invigoration of eucharistic theology.)

My childhood appropriation of this dynamic, however much it might presage some of my instability regarding religion and the construction of identity, serves as a kind of living reductio ad asburdum of the need for repetition. For me this had to be literal, and it manifested in my going forward week after week. But my reaction differed from the norm in degree but not in kind -- in expression but not in essence.

[To be continued...]

Christmas

It is fashionable, this time of year, to bitch and moan that Christmas is not what it used to be, or what it is supposed to be, or has become in one way or another sullied and denigrated. There is a broad range of jeremiads on the topic, from complaints that Christmas is too commercial and consumer-oriented to hand-wringing over the excision of explicitly Christian content from our public celebrations of the season. Some even take exception to the use of "X-mas," complaining that Christ has been "X-ed out" of Christmas -- apparently unaware that the use of the Greek chi, or X, has been a shorthand for Christ in the Christian tradition since long before Macy's had a Santa Claus. One way or another, however, we are barraged with diatribes berating us for forgetting the "reason for the season."

The real reason for the season, however, is that it's so damn dark. The Christian holiday is piggybacked onto a melange of pagan celebrations, most of them having something to do with the winter solstice. Just on the other side of this longest night the sun slowly begins to reclaim its authority over the sky and our pagan ancestors found cause to celebrate. For some this becomes just more evidence of the "war on Christmas," and there are always those encouraging us to forgo trees, or the use of "yuletide," or Santa, because these accoutrements are tainted by their pagan lineage. The Puritans we will always have with us. (Actually, the Puritans went so far as to ban Christmas altogether, finding its worldliness irredeemable.)

The irony here is that the birth narratives themselves are probably constructed out of the raw material of pagan mythologies. That and some bad translating: in a key prophecy in Isaiah, the Greek Septuagint uses the word for "virgin" to translate a Hebrew word meaning "young woman." This is not linguistically untenable in a world where a young woman could reasonably be assumed to be virginal, but the original context probably refers to the prophet's wife, who -- without prying too much into the prophetic personal life -- was probably not a virgin. Either God can't read Hebrew, or, in the interest of narrating Jesus' life as a fulfillment of prophecy, somebody was a little eager.

Jesus doesn't even get born until later in the tradition. For Paul, Jesus seems to have been "declared the Son of God by the power of his resurrection" (Rom 1:4). The writer of Hebrews evinces a similar perspective. Mark's Gospel has Jesus declared the Son of God at his baptism, 'Son of God' being a royal or messianic designation. Only Luke and Matthew give us (somewhat conflicting) birth stories. John is bullish on pre-existence and incarnation but is silent about the actual birth, which almost seems a bit Gnostic but maybe he just didn't get the memo. At any rate, John's take on "only begotten" seems far more cosmic, and much less literal, than parthogenesis.

A cruder version of divine conception lay at the heart of Rome's etiology; mythical founders Remus and Romulus were the semidivine twin sons of a woman raped by Mars. The god Mithra was born in a cave at the winter solstice, attended by shepherds (which might explain a few things) but he was actually birthed from a rock, which seems a bit mundane (pun intended). As a mythological trope, virgin birth was not unheard of, and ancient kings -- who were often also gods -- were often assigned some kind of miraculous birth appropriate to figures of great importance.

The details are contested, of course; some take all such references to be mere copycats. The early church fathers, for whom such "signs and wonders" were exceptional but not, strictly speaking, impossible, regarded the similarities as Satanic counterfeits. The more modern C.S. Lewis cleverly argued that in Jesus, God made these mythological elements come literally true so that Christians could have bragging rights. My virgin-born savior can beat up your virgin-born savior.

The common Biblical trope for special nativities is to have a child born to a barren woman, like Hannah or Rachel, or to a woman beyond childbearing years, like Sarah -- but Luke used that one with John the Baptist, so he had to dig deeper into the collective unconscious to get Jesus into the world in something beyond the usual way. Suffice it to say that there's a strong hint of syncretism here, and those who would excise all things pagan from our midwinter celebrations might find themselves going all Thomas Jefferson on the Biblical text itself. There is no pristine, unadulterated Christmas. If anyone should be grousing about having their holiday hijacked, it's the pagans.

The consumerism angle hits a little closer to home. I am not a fan of capitalism. Pace the famous speech by Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) in Wall Street, greed is not good. It does not "work." It might be harnessed for brief moments of corporate glory but it is a lousy long-term strategy and it will destroy us. The invisible hand is giving us the finger right about now. Our current economic "crisis" comes down to a shortage, not of basic human needs or raw materials, but of credit -- something that is not, in a material sense, even real. Parts of the world struggle to have clean drinking water or basic health care; we've got our panties in a bunch because we can't get a car loan.

As strongly as I feel about this, as much as I believe that if a sustainable future exists, it is a post-capitalist future, this is not a problem with Christmas. Granted, there are ways in which the Christmas buying season might put a finer point on things, laying our contradictions bare (and nobody gets trampled in a Wal-Mart on, say, St. Patrick's Day), but the problems of capitalism are not limited to Christmas, nor is the commercialization of Christmas terribly new. Christmas, like truth, was never what it used to be.

So, if we filter out those elements that are not specific to Christmas, and the grumblings of those who think the entire world should validate their belief system, what are we left with?

In the midst of the darkest time of year, we string lights and decorate with shiny things. We pay attention to children. We give each other gifts. We think about the poor and the less fortunate, and while it would be better to do this all year, at least we do it. We throw more parties, and visit more relatives. We wish each other well on a regular basis. We invoke something called "Christmas spirit" as an excuse to momentarily shed our cynicism and look beyond our selfishness. We sing songs, and show a higher tolerance for jazz than at any other time of the year. We make cookies and drink eggnog. We make snow angels and write Christmas cards. We go to church and light candles and even the most skeptical of us are tempted to strain for a glimpse of the numinous.

Christmas makes it fashionable to talk about things like peace and love without getting strange looks. Christmas gives us the gumption to share our feelings with that person we've been admiring all year, or the fortitude to extend grace to that pain-in-the-ass down the hall. Christmas, for all of its saccharine sentimentality, for all of its sappy sitcom send-ups of A Christmas Carol, for all of its tendency to degenerate into an ideological battleground, encourages good things in us. Does it "work"? I don't know about that.

But it beats the hell out of greed.