Like Braided Hair

Family News

Dear Friends,

Leslie and I want to inform you that I have been offered a post teaching English at my high school alma mater Pine Forge Academy (a boarding school near Pottstown, PA). Thus, we are relocating temporarily. The prayer is that grad school will bring us back to Atlanta fall of next year. In the meantime, this is the opportunity that has presented itself. So we go in faith.

It all happened in a matter of 2 weeks, which is why we haven't had the chance for proper goodbyes. We solicit your prayers and positive thoughts. It's not always easy to go home again. This is the table that nourished me through adolescence (but I am a very different person now). This also happens to be the place where both of Leslie's parents grew up, so there is family left in the area. It will be exciting for the children to spend time with their remaining great-grand.

We look forward to connecting with old friends and friends we have come to know and love at a distance. We will also sorely miss you we are leaving behind. Pray with us that it won't be long. God bless. Until next time...

In the adventure,
Melvin, Leslie, Jaya, Kari & Melvin 4.0

Free Association: Janet Jackson, High School, Coincidence, Theology & Friendship

I heard from a friend today
And she said you were in town
Suddenly the memories
Came back to me in my mind...
-Janet Jackson, "Again"

I've been on a real Janet Jackson fetish this week. I watched Poetic Justice late Monday night, and I've been intoxicated sense. Watching old and new videos on YouTube. Remembering my gratitude for her help in puberty. Lamenting her obvious shift in trajectory from Rhythm Nation to The Velvet Rope. Wondering about the trauma that might have precipitated such a dramatic detour.

How can I be strong I've asked myself
Time and time I've said
That I'll never fall in love with you again

My love affair with Janet was primarily middle and high school. So it only stands to reason that last night I should stumble into someone else online whom I've loved deeply since then. It's amazing how such coincidences occur.

This person too was instrumental in my emergence from childhood. She was one of my campus mothers/big sisters in high school. Campus kinship was tremendously important to my intensely relational personality, being away from home at such a formative time in life.

Well, life has led us down similar yet incongruent paths (to draw upon a HS algebra expression). We both live lives on terms other than those we were raised to define as "right". The difference is that she still affirms intellectually the rightness of the SDA message; I do not. More accurately, I no longer view "rightness" as a thing to be pursued.

A wounded heart you gave,
My soul you took away
Good intentions you had many,
I know you did

A conversation with this friend about 5 years ago at my buddies' ordination (curiously enough, back on our old HS campus) was one of the impeti that propelled me toward the Emergent conversation. One of the questions I was asking at the time was "What keeps people so intellectually loyal to a religious system that isn't compelling enough to keep them committed to the actual practice of it?" Such pseudo-fidelity is puzzling to me.

I come from a place that hurts,
and God knows how I've cried
And I never want to return
Never fall again

So she and I spoke last night...

So here we are alone again,
Didn't think it'd come to this

...and because the conversation natural went this direction, I was quite honest about all the theological questioning she had stirred in me (probably to a fault). I shared that since our conversation I had deconstructed much of what we had been raised to believe...

I've come too close to happiness,
To have it swept away

...(not that Adventism isn't a valid path, but it surely isn't the last or definitive word on things). I shared furthermore that I do not believe that her choices to live contrary to her stated doctrinal beliefs are solely indicative of some great moral deficit in her, though she freely expresses such self-indictment. She responded to me like I were the anti-Christ.

Don't think I could take the pain
Never fall again

Well, as fate might have it, this morning I awoke to an e-mail that linked me to this post by Peter Rollins which articulates so well what I was feeling last night:

People who label themselves as ‘backsliders’ [are of particular concern to me]. Here the individual, whether they have left the church or not, are still under the sway of that evangelical [or fundamentalist] worldview and thus any positive step forward is still thought of negatively.

The choice to leave is made within the confines of the evangelical system itself and is thus understood within that system. In this way the explicit rejection of it is implicitly an affirmation of it (I reject it not because it is wrong but because I am wrong). The result is that the majority of people who see themselves as ‘backsliders’ will either return to the group they left or continue to define themselves in opposition to it.

The real choice to be made is thus not between staying or going from a particular church. Rather it is a meta-choice concerning whether I continue to interact with the linguistic system that sustains the church or step into an unknown space outside that linguistic system.

I wish I knew what I might say that would free my friend from believing that it's just her...

Kinda late in the game
And my heart is in your hands

...and open her eyes to the fact that the sheer number of people like her (myself included) who wind up in the same place for very different reasons would suggest that its not just total depravity creating the disconnect. But Adventism does its denominationalism work well (the passing on of language, culture and judgement). I've found that even for former Adventists, some who even consider themselves atheist, its a struggle to comprehend or articulate the world in terms other than those given them by their fundamentalist upbringing. What a horrendous prison?

Don't you stand there and then tell me
You love me
Then leave again

This singular reality would foster great resentment in me, absent the grace and forgiveness I've learned in the way of Jesus. But with it, I think I'm okay, and hopefully resurrected enough to be a good friend.

'Cause I'm falling in love with you again

Nutrition for the Soul... from an SDA Kitchen No Less

Back in August I posted a rather sad review of the junk (self-interested, superficial, escapist, etc.) food served up from many pulpits week after week. Well, its easy to deconstruct what doesn't nourish, particularly if it no longer tastes like anything to you. The more difficult part is to begin to reconstruct something that's better. (I think the whole local, organic, sustainable foods movement serves as an instructive metaphor.)

A friend of mine, Ryan Bell, is (in my humble opinion) reconstructing a thing of beauty. I encourage you to check him out. His ministry is missional, it's contextual, it's prophetic. I'm really diggin' his fall series on Jesus' Journey to Jerusalem (beginning 3 Sept), taken from the New Testament gospel of Mark; it's real kingdom-come stuff. And should you visit his blog, pay attention to the types of things he's involved in.


Who Would've Thunk It?

I have a confession to make. I have started doing something that I never thought I would. It's nothing 'bad'... really. Although I have recently been tempted to take up a pipe after driving a friend's car full of the fragrance of cured pipe-weed (I love that smell). No, nothing 'bad'. I've just become a contributing writer for a decidedly SDA blog.

Now if you are not SDA or haven't known me very long, you may not get exactly how ironic this is. But rest assured, it is.

The good thing is that no one is expecting me to write on exclusively SDA themes, which is a good thing. I don't think I would know how. As I shared with the moderator, Marcel, who invited me:

I don't usually write about being Adventist and don''t have an authentic Adventist sensibility about much of anything anymore. As I went back to read what I had written that might have ever caught your attention, I marveled at how all themes spiritual seemed to come together in my blogging at that particular moment in August. I imagine my contribution to Re-inventing the Wheel (clever name btw) might be so sparse as to not warrant posting. Not to mention the fact that I struggle to maintain any type of vibrant connection with a local Adventist congregation these days. I would be afraid that my comments on a blog for Adventists by Adventists might not be sufficiently grounded in daily Adventist struggles.

He said that was exactly why he was inviting me to join. So my first post was about Poker (an Adventist no-no) as a springboard toward a better metaphor for life. Check it out.

(The above picture, by the way, use to hang in my grandfather's basement. It's strange how the oddest things can bring back the fondest memories :-)

Malnutrition

Today I attended a church service at a pretty prominent church. Sadly, it was for the most part a voyeristic exercise to begin with. I did not expect much. Still, my heart broke as I listened to the sermon. I would wither away of malnutrition and be of no good to anyone if I had to eat that each week. When did the 'gospel' become so empty and self-interested?

Do we really believe that trials come to take our "praise [(in this case, a verbal affirmation of God's goodness)] to another level?" Did the Human One set us free simply so we could sing and shout about how we've overcome? I mean no condescension. It just hurts me to hear and know how many people are trying their best to live in that, because that's what they've been taught God wants from us.

...on being Seventh-day Adventist

As a member of the Emergent growing, generative friendship, I am learning to appreciate fully the church in all its forms, which can be most difficult when it comes to Seventh-day Adventism, my home, because I know its faults. "But God gives more grace."

Last night I had an enlightening conversation with a fellow SDA who is quite close to me. It was yet another variation on a conversation I have had many times before. It generally goes something like this. The person I'm talking with quietly or jokingly expresses some discontent with Adventism, never harshly, mind you, but almost like one would speak of someone who might be within ear shot. It's the kind of criticism one could easily explain away if they had to. At some point, I'll commiserate by deconstructing the very thing that’s got them sore, and before I know it, I find my conversation partner defending the faith from me as if I meant it harm. It's uncanny how predictable it can be.

Knowing that despite my hopes and efforts to the contrary my recollections are apt to be rife with bias and woefully reductionistic, in recounting what happened last night I will only seek to recall my own offenses. My primary offense last night went something like this, "If the hope of God is to reconcile the whole world unto Godself, embracing the entire earth in God's resurrection (basically, what it means to be 'missional'), then I struggle to see how all our calculating of prophetic times and interpreting ourselves to be the (definite article) "remnant" spoken of throughout scripture and figured prominently in the imagery of Daniel and Revelations, who against all odds remain true to God, gets us there." Now, of course, I was hardly so eloquent or coherent. And, mind you, my deconstruction was in response to some things about the SDA dynamic my conversation partner (in jest) just didn't want to be bothered with anymore. Nonetheless, this statement changed the tide of our conversation. [Read More!] Perhaps it was too incisive.

No more sympathetic exchange. From that point on I was expected to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what it was I meant. I hate that. Adversarial (in the legal sense) conversations never accomplish much good. Nonetheless the same enculturation I was in the mist of deconstructing makes it very difficult to back down from a hermeneutical, apologetic challenge. So I pressed on. At some point I brought up how missionally problematic the SDA sense of identity is (Rev. 12:17), substantiated primarily upon some hyper-contextual shenanigans, misappropriating certain New Testament phrases like "the testimony of Jesus Christ" and "the spirit of prophesy" (undoubtedly my second offense).

It was then that something unexpected happened. My dialogue partner, who is a generation more mature than I, confessed that, although she considered such phrases very much indicative of the SDA church, she didn't see them as the exclusive expression thereof. This surprised me because she, consistent with most those of her generation who were raised in the SDA church and now hold the positions of power, is very pro-Adventist, and such an adjudication is not the party line. My conversation partner went on to rationalize that her position was the difference between being a literalist and taking a more reasoned approached. By way of example, she suggested that literalists have a hard time differentiating individuals from the institutions Adventists believe are indicted in eschatological prophecy.

For the first time in my life, I felt compassion for literalists. It became apparent to me that literalism was the only consistent way one could expect to interpret biblical prophecy. And how could one avoid literalism with all the emphasis put on prophetic time calculation and 'precise' reading of scripture distinctive to Adventist doctrine (Daniel's 2300 Days Prophecy, its postulates and corollaries)? Absent literalism, how could one expect for the millions of Adventists in the world to be 'reasoned' in the same way about the same things? Whereas some variation in interpretation is to be expected, free-spiritedness (an open interpretation of scripture) is not prized in a cultural homogeny (like Adventism) whose identity is predicated upon (biblical) accuracy and (doctrinal) distinctives: "I am, because you're not."

All of this again raises a question for me—that I expressed last night (possibly offense number 3)—that I have wrestled with for a few years now. At what point is it disingenuous for me to claim to be SDA when I have deconstructed/reconstructed or flat out disagree with much, if not most, of what is distinctively SDA? I truly want to honor the best intuitions of my denominational tradition, which birthed and nurtured my theological imagination for so many years, even though in integrity I must critique much of its teachings and practice. For years now I have always confessed up front when people start asking me what I believe—and what they really mean is what do Adventists believe—that I am not the best example of Adventist theology. At most, I now consider myself a "post-Remnant Seventh-day Adventist". I am totally through with believing that what sets me right with God at the same time makes everybody who is otherwise committed suspect.

Which brings me to a new nagging question. What are the effects of living out of this hermeneutical dualism that my dialogue partner describes as exemplary of the more reasoned approach to dogma—this striving to maintain distinction between individuals and their aggregate institutions that Adventists believe are indicted by scriptural prophecy? It's a continuation of the whole "God hates the sin but loves the sinner" motif. I believe his mantra has for too long blinded us to any possibility of joining God in the redemption of God's good world. The most we could ever hope to accomplish believing this is to save individuals out of world before it all crashes and burns.

Thus, as night follows day, so it follows that the SDA church as an institution as well as its individual members have been and remain largely complicit in some of the greatest injustices perpetrated in the earth. And why shouldn't that be the case? For as much as individual members may cultivate reasoned and nuanced beliefs for sanity sake, the institutional constructs are allowed to remain the same—in misbegotten honor of God who changes not—whether or not they accomplish anything for the good of God's creation.

God doesn't change (if we hear that as a statement God makes of himself) because God is inerrant. Such infallibility does not transfer to us or our constructs, systems or institutions just because we claim God. As creatures of a Creator God who is always creating and whose creations are always evolving, our expectation should be the need for continual re-formation, I would think. Thus, the reoccurring need to deconstruct in order to reconstruct based on what we understand more fully today than we did yesterday. What I continue to wonder is: Can I do this and in integrity to self and in fairness to the group still call myself Adventist?