by Ben Howard
Time is, in a very real sense, a trap.
Contrary to constant proclamations and reminders about the need to stay “in the moment” or to “live in the present,” reality stubbornly presents us with no real alternative.
We are always here. We are always in the now and for good or ill there is no escape from this context.
In his book Eating the Dinosaur Chuck Klosterman includes an essay about time travel. As part of his exploration into this narrative conceit he discusses his own metaphor for the way time operates. He describes time as a train with one person hanging off the front and another hanging off the back. The person hanging off the front is constantly laying down the piece of track to be used in the next moment, while the person hanging off the back is picking up the track that's just been used.
Both past and future exist only as mental constructs. Presents gone and presents still to come.
And that constant movement, that constant shift from moment to moment, from now to now, it pulls a trick on us all.
If you ever want an object lesson on why predicting the future is a stupid endeavor just listen to political podcasts from two years ago. Or a year ago. Or even six months ago.
There is no hilarity like a full-throated and certain prediction of an impending Mitt Romney presidency. Nor is there anything as cringe-worthy as a haughty assurance that Congress would never force a government shutdown or hearing it described as almost inevitable that President Obama will pass gun control legislation, or at the very least, immigration reform.
Of course it's not the fault of the pundits. They are working on a deadline and they get neither the aid of hindsight or enough time for reflection before they're asked to explain what all this “means” and tell a waiting public how everything will work out. It is their job to know the future before it happens. And it's a job that's beyond us all.
It's not fair to judge the words of the past in the reality of the present. Time is a trap.
Last week World Vision USA announced it would hire employees in same-sex marriages. Support flooded the internet, but outrage flooded it even more. Eventually money spoke and the decision was reversed. The narrative has been repeated ad nauseum.
Many people have written about the reasons for these decisions and what symbolic meaning we can take both from the policy change and its subsequent reversal. You should read them, they are interesting and instructive. This essay is not about those decisions or that symbolic meaning.
This essay is about why you will forget it.
They say time heals all wounds. This is true. This is true, sort of.
As time moves on, our memories blur. Hurts become less painful and joys become less pleasurable. And while we can say that time is healing these hurts, these cuts and bumps and bruises, it's not entirely accurate. It's rather that we assimilate them. They become a part of us and change us ever so slightly. The jagged edge of immediacy is smoothed out and we are left with a new configuration of ourselves, but one we have already become familiarized with during the slow healing process. We change, but we do not realize we are changing.
In one month, two months, six months, a year, no one will recall the World Vision controversy into which we've invested so much over the last two weeks. It will be little more than an anecdote, a footnote to the debate over gay marriage and the culture war raging within Christianity.
It will have entirely lost its symbolic place as either the death knell of evangelicalism (or its resurgence depending on your perspective). I invite you to revisit these blogs and tweets and Facebook posts a year from now; they will seem myopic and over-blown. It will feel like they exist in a different world.
This is not to say that it meant nothing. The fights were real and so was the hurt. The betrayal was true. But in time the wounds will no longer be as fresh, they may even “heal,” but they will leave slightly different people in their wake.
And this is the real trauma. It's not the death of a movement or the mass exodus of millennials. It's only slightly about gay marriage and equal rights.
The real trauma is that this will exist as one more jagged little paper cut. One more scarred-over battle-wound leaving us increasingly desensitized, increasingly prepared for combat, increasingly on the lookout for enemies from without and within.
In time, this will be yet another moment that affects us and changes us ever so slightly. So slightly that we don't even realize it as we become hard and cynical, as we begin once again to view “other” as synonymous with “enemy.”
Look out, it's a trap.
Ben
Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual
living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop
Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can
follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.
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by Lyndsey Graves
IT'S FAT THURSDAY
HAVE A DONUT
“Cute joke,” I thought. “Weird that someone happened to bring donuts on the same day the boss bought us lunch.” Fat Thursday. Teehee. I skipped the donuts in favor of the lunch brownies.
Maybe an hour later, one of my coworkers wandered over to my desk. I looked up from my student-worker-spreadsheeting, wondering if perhaps she had something more urgent or less stultifying for me to do.
“Hey, did you get a donut?”
“No, not yet…”
“You should have one. It’s Fat Thursday.”
No wry smile. Just a statement of fact. I obviously looked confused, because she continued: “Have you heard of Fat Thursday?”
No, I hadn’t, so she explained to me how Fat Thursday is the day you eat all the stuff you’re not supposed to have after Lent starts on Ash Wednesday.
I have no idea why she had it all right except for which day is actually fat. I am also curious if the others in the office were aware of the strangeness. Perhaps they were; perhaps they, like me, were simply feigning ignorance out of politeness (she did bring us donuts, after all). In any case, it was a bizarre experience for someone who’s always been The Christian Girl to have this tradition explained to me [somewhat incorrectly] by a relative stranger.
I tell this story because it really, really bothered me.
What bothered me is not that she had the day wrong, but that I felt so startled to encounter someone whose life is, presumably, not dominated by religion. I, who live in the heart of the secularized Northeast, still somehow forgot that some Americans just live their lives, doing all kinds of things like going to work and having families, with only a casual connection to a sort of garbled Christianity. They have no real interest in the nitpicky details of it, give no thought to the questions that occupy my days. It bothers me immensely that this struck me as odd.
The obvious moral of this story is that I need to get out more. There’s almost no one in my life right now who isn’t immersed in Christianity and churches. At the moment, there’s only so much I can do to change that, as I live among other theology students in the full-time boot camp that is graduate school. I certainly wish I got out more, out beyond the insular walls of this program; I worry that I will emerge a few years from now, a thoroughly academified creature, even more oblivious than I’ve always been to things that aren’t books or my own Deep Thoughts. Oblivious to things like donuts and sports and workplaces with spreadsheets and ergonomic staplers. Or even worse, I worry that I’ll only be able to interpret donuts and sports and staplers through Augustine and Marx, like my high school science teacher who could only speak in football analogies. Only, mine will be more boring and obscure.
But just getting out more won’t solve everything. I could find ways to “stay relevant”, treating my academic interests and my religion like a nerdy hobby, useful on trivia night. I might manage to make myself cool, but I’d be pretending that the things to which I’ve devoted this season of my life aren’t actually all that important, and I wouldn’t really be getting to the heart of the “relevance” matter anyway.
This faith can be a complicated thing; there will always be more to wonder at, more to learn, more to theorize over. But it is also a simple thing, and the simplest parts are those that will always baffle us most - and that will always transform us best. That is why I, who go to church twice a week and spend the entire remainder of my time reading and writing about theology, need the gospel preached to me over and over again just as desperately as anyone. The more I think I’ve learned, the more I find myself needing to be repeatedly reminded what is the heart of the most basic story I know, the truth that is love that grounds all I know to be true and lovely. God is big. I am small. Be holy. God is with us. We are daughters and sons. We are one body. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
All my theories and sociology and language games are self-congratulatory nonsense if I do not live my life by the gospel of Jesus Christ - the gospel I have learned again and again, at 3 and at 13 and at 18 and now, at 23. What’s more - as much as I love the traditions, the history, the doctrines, and wrestling with tricky conversations - they become only so much clutter if others don’t see Jesus through them. It is already hard enough for us to communicate with “The Outside”; the word “Christian” carries so many connotations, misconceptions, triggers of old wounds, confusion and disdain for those who are not familiar with Christ and his church. I know Christians, they’re the people who eat donuts on Fat Thursday.
I take great pleasure in talking about my pet social issues, my favorite communication theory, and the meaning and method of this or that liturgical tradition, and I certainly believe that these are worthwhile things to talk about. But if I do so without an eye towards the simple things, then all I am really inviting others into is a worship of feminism, or Marshall McLuhan, or the church calendar for the church calendar’s sake - donuts and magic forehead-dirt. I don’t want to do that. I want to invite people to know the God who inspires my love for these things. I want to feast and fast with the joy of one who knows my own finitude and God’s infinity. I want to embrace feminism with the hope and the compassion of one who has been set free. I want my life to testify to the epic behind the donuts.
Lyndsey
lives in Boston, MA where she is pursuing her Master's in Theological
Studies at Boston University. She enjoys Community, Mad Men and Beauty
and the Beast and her spirit animal is a sloth. She would like to know
if this is some kind of interactive theater art piece. You can follow her on Twitter @lyndseygraves and you can find more of her writing at her blog To Be Honest.
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"I'm the kind of guy who laughs at a funeral.
Can't understand what I mean?
Well, you soon will."
by Ben Howard
I am not a serious human being. I can say that with some certainty because in the last two days I've tweeted extensively on my war against the sun and why sharks are jerks. I've also openly besmirched Winnie the Pooh and gone on long rampages against the great nation of Canada.
My not-serious bona fides are beyond questioning.
However, I operate in a world of serious people and serious minds having serious thoughts. They confront issues of poverty and race, they fight against oppression and abuse, they work towards equality and justice, and they are right to be serious about this work.
Meanwhile I recently hosted a podcast with extensive jokes about syphilis and just spent an evening trying to write in the voice of Dr. Seuss.
Don't get me wrong, I care deeply about justice and spend a lot of time thinking about matters of oppression. These thoughts continually cycle within my mind and have slowly, but surely become embodied in my day-to-day practice. Yet despite this intellectual endeavor, I cannot, for the life of me, stay serious.
And you know what, that's okay. That's who I am, it's how I process things.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In this world there is a myth that only serious people are confronting the weighty matters. It's as if a stern demeanor and dour words are prerequisites to join the exclusive club of "People Who Care About Things."
This club bared its social media claws during the recent hype surrounding the royal birth. Many went out of there way to "Jesus Juke" conversations about the royal baby, pointing out that the really important baby was born 2000 years ago and was named Jesus. Others highlighted the thousands of other babies born into abject poverty on the same day without nearly as much media attention.
Meanwhile, I spent the day making jokes about how Prince William was no Henry VIII. I'm just not a serious person.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sometimes I feel guilty about not taking more things seriously. Like when a friend tells me that she's pregnant and doesn't know what to do and my first reaction is to make a joke, or when a different friend tells me he has cancer and my first response is to try and make him laugh.
This isn't the preferred response among "People Who Care About Things" and that's why I feel guilty. I feel like I should have something profound or solemn or reassuring to say. I feel like I'm supposed to ask if I should pray for them or if I should hold their hand and sing a hymn.
But I don't. I make jokes.
I don't make jokes to deny the gravity of the situation. I make them to lighten the mood, to take the edge off and to make everyone involved a little more comfortable. I make them because if I was them I would want to laugh.
More than that, humor allows me perspective on a situation. It allows for the objective distance to analyze and engage without being consumed by the emotions of the event. In essence, it allows me to encounter something seriously.
This is the way I interact with the world. It is neither more nor less valid than any other way of responding. Serious people need to take things seriously. This is good and this is healthy. Sad people need to be sad. Happy people need to be happy. And not-so-serious people, well, we need to make jokes about bad sci-fi movies and flying sharks.
Peace,
Ben
Ben
Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual
living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop
Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can
follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.
You might also like:
by Ben Howard
It's no secret to readers of this blog that I'm a bit of a hopeless romantic. I'm a sucker for romantic comedies and I even caught the Bachelorette bug for the last half of one season (Let's all have a moment of silence for Jef with One F). So when my friend Joanna sent me a link to the blog/experiment 40 Days of Dating it took me about five minutes to become completely addicted.
The concept behind the experiment is relatively simple. Two friends, New York-based graphic designers Jessica Walsh and Timothy Goodman, have issues with relationships. In order to sort through these issues they decide to date each other for forty days. They see each other every day, go on three dates a week, and go to see a couples therapist together once a week. At the end of each day they fill out a questionnaire reflecting on what they did that day and what they learned.
So far this probably reads like the pitch for a revamped version of When Harry Met Sally and that's true, sort of. I was initially fascinated by the mere "Will they or won't they" facet of the experiment. I'd read through the questionnaire and try to decide if one of the two was falling for the other, or, hopefully, that they were both falling for each other.
However, as I've continued reading through the days (Day 16 posted today), I've become fixated on a completely different aspect of the experiment. I'm continually fascinated by 40 Days of Dating because it highlights, perhaps inadvertently, how two people can have wildly different responses and interpretations to the same event. When you read the questionnaires, it puts in stark relief how deeply these dueling interpretations of events are shaped by perspective and context.
It's not that Jessica and Timothy have wildly diverging interpretations of events, but they do focus on different aspects and see differing significance in the same tiny situations. For instance, there is the Bread Pudding Incident on Day Ten. Jessica and Timothy attend a Knicks game together and during the evening they buy bread pudding which Tim eats by himself.
In Tim's point of view this is all that occurs. He wanted the pudding and he ate it. However, Jessica sees this incident as something slightly more. She says that "Tim is not very good at sharing." This small event, which Tim views as meaningless, has meaning to Jessica. There are other similarly small incidents like this, as well as larger fights and disagreements which really underline this divide in the way that people view the same reality.
I find this all so interesting because I think it magnifies the importance of communication, and on a grander scale, community in general. Communication is essential to understanding the experience of the other even if we're experiencing the same events. The concept that one view of reality is the objective view, or the true view, is deeply narcissistic and problematic. We need to listen to ourselves and learn from experiences, but we also need to listen closely to those closest to us to learn from theirs.
This is obvious in romantic relationships, but it's also true in wider communal interactions. For instance, there has been so much conversation is recent weeks about issues of race and justice. The easiest way to undermine these conversations, to shut down dialogue, is to assume that the experience of white middle to upper class Americans is the experience of all. It is impossible for us to inhabit the context of another person and experience the world as they do. What we can do, what we must do, is communicate openly and honestly. This means we must listen, but it also means we must share.
It may sound strange to extrapolate from a rom-com style blog experiment to deeper, far more entrenched problems like race relations, but I don't think it's that far of a step. Relationships are the bedrock of our society, whether they be romantic, personal, or civic. Open lines of communication are essential whether you're trying to heal the worlds problems or just date for forty days without killing each other.
Peace,
Ben
*All images are from the website 40 Days of Dating.*
Ben
Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual
living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop
Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can
follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.
You might also like:
by Ben Howard
On Saturday night comedian Louis C.K. hosted Saturday Night Live. One of the first sketches merged the concept of C.K.'s offbeat show "Louie" with the recent interest in Abraham Lincoln. In the re-imagined show C.K. plays Lincoln as a disrespected, hated individual who openly jokes about the fact that someone is probably going to kill him because half the country hates him. In the opening sequence, C.K. as Lincoln tries to have a conversation with a recently freed slave at a bar. He asked him how it feels to be emancipated only to have the freed slave, played by Kenan Thompson, explain that his life isn't much better because his new job is shoveling manure into a cart.
I bring up this sketch because it highlights an important point to remember the day before an election. The perspective we have today, the opinion we hold today, is not always the right one. Lincoln was the most hated man in America during his time as President. He was viewed as divisive and a threat to the union. It is only in the light of history that he is regarded as one the greatest Presidents because this was not the case during his lifetime.
In college I majored in history and I'm really glad that I did. It's not the most employable of degrees, but it teaches you how to think and process concepts. It also teaches you about perspective. It takes time to properly assess how policy decisions ran their course or how foreign policy decisions worked out. It takes time to realize that Lincoln was great or that Hoover and Truman weren't incompetent.
I'm not saying that Barack Obama is secretly a fantastic president, but I'm saying that we don't have enough perspective to really judge that yet. I'm not saying that Mitt Romney would be a good president either. I'm saying election day changes nothing in the light of history because popularity does not correlate to presidential success. Just ask George H.W. Bush who won his first election in a massive landslide.
One other note about perspective. This is not the most contentious political environment in United States history. Please remember that in 1804 Vice-President Aaron Burr shot and killed former Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton. That's the equivalent of Joe Biden shooting and killing Hank Paulson. We are less contentious than this.
Also, remember that in 1856 Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor by Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Oh yeah, then we had a civil war.
If you think instead that political dirty tricks are at an all-time high, please recall that in 1968 Richard Nixon secretly sabotaged Lyndon Johnson's efforts at peace in Vietnam to ensure that Johnson's Vice-President Hubert Humphrey would not defeat him in the election. Nixon later admitted these actions himself.
If the worst we have is name-calling, a few hurt feelings, and a general air of disrespect then by historical standards we are doing pretty good.
Now, I wish that everyone could be like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie who, after receiving criticism for touring hurricane damaged parts of his state with President Obama, tweeted: "Today I'm touring NJ with President Obama. Yes, he's a Democrat, and I'm
a Republican. We're also adults, and this is how adults behave."
We need to have this sense of perspective in our churches and our religion too. Perspective is one of the things that keeps us humble. It reminds us that even if we're 100% convinced that we're right in the moment, it's still possible to be wrong.
Perspective about Christian history reminds us that there has never been a perfect church. It reminds us that our stylized imaginations about perfection and prestige have never actually played out in reality. It reminds us that even powerful Christian thinkers like Augustine and Peter Abelard had weaknesses that today we would consider damning. It reminds us that thinkers like Origen were once viewed as heretics.
It reminds us that asserting that "The church has always said..." is probably a false statement. It gives us the freedom to try out new things and question old things because the past is no longer an idol of The Best We've Ever Been, but is instead a snapshot of Something We Once Were.
We always need more perspective whether in politics, religion or simply in our everyday life. We need to know our context and we need to try and exaggerate less and hold our judgments more. It's a difficult lesson to learn. It's too easy to be tricked by our proximity to events.
So I ask you to remember this on the day before the election. No matter what rhetoric you hear, this is probably not the most important election in history. Neither of the candidates will likely be the best or worst presidents of all time. More than likely they'll be in a range around slightly below average to slightly above average.
Take a deep breath. Vote if you feel like you should. And remember that it'll probably be okay.
Peace,
Ben
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can follow Ben on Twitter @BenHoward87
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