Pristly Goth Election V-Log

2004 post on why I don't vote

Book Review: Holy Terror by Mel White

Over at Priestly Goth, I have posted a review of Mel White's, Holy Terror: Lies the Christian Right tell us us to deny Gay equality.  Take a look.

More Thoughts on Abundance: Privilege edition

Thinking some More with Busted Stuff at SOGO Media about Abundance. Now wondering about the place of privilege in our conversation about abundance and anxiety and church (or is it American Christian congregations).

Abundant Life and Anxiety: Conversation w/ Tripp Hudgins

This is my first You Tube video and I created in conversation with Tripp Hudgins video Busted Suff, part of SOGO Media .  Tripp's Busted Stuff video is here

Silence

I've been listening and doing.  There is so much going on.  So, many voices.  It takes time to attend to what is around one.  Through social and other media through our virtual worlds, everything is around us.
I feel the pressure to speak.  We all are speaking all the time. Do we stop.  Do we hear.

Everyone seems convinced we are in crisis and we must all do and speak and act all the time... or else... What?  Or else the other will oppress us.  We will fail. We will fall into darkness and chaos.

Funny isn't our speech, our action sending us into a chaos where we see the other (the other political party, the other candidate, the other religion, the other...) as The threat to our identity, our freedom, our ability to be who we are.

Aren't we already in a chaos of free speech, of identities, have we not already descended into the spiral...

Perhaps we need to learn how not to speak, how not to act, how not to be concerned?

Perhaps we need to silence, ourselves, our fears, our identities, that we may attend to what is.  Silence so that we may find ourselves.

In silence perhaps we can find a less anxious way forward.  Perhaps we can envision a way forward that isn't dependent upon the halls of power, but is found in supporting our angency on the ground in our neighborhoods, outside of the paths of corporations, the State and Employers.

In silence, perhaps, we can find tactics of resistance based in the life, the abundant life, the Lord of life offers us in Jesus Christ.

I don't know, I'm too anxious still, too distracted by all the noise, fear, and anxiety to hear the call of an other way.

Credit, Money, and Perception (Or the Emperor is Nude)

As "scandals" continue to pop up in the global finance and banking system, I'm amazed that no one that  I know of is asking fundamental questions concerning our current economic system.  We talk regulation, we talk fines, and reigning in the system, but we aren't asking why the system was prone to fail as it did, and to continue to produce these scandals.  We also don't ask why so many bankers and financiers have little or no sense of wrong doing, and or have a sense that things that appear unfair and unethical to those of us outside are okay because it is the way things are done.

What I think we should be asking is how we got to this point, and remember what our money is and isn't now and how that is and isn't different than what money was before the 20th century.   My understanding of past and current finance system is limited, and this is a sketch based on the limited study based in my historical studies of Europe and the states in the 19th and 20th centuries.  I welcome any misperceptions or inaccuracy's.

On some level money is and always has been about perception.  Currency only has meaning we all agree to give it.  In other words a basis all finance is a fiction we agree will be real, and always has been.  Now it is usually a fiction backed by a power, ie. a State.  For instance when Jesus of Nazareth is asked about the payment of Taxes, he points to the one who backs it, The Roman emperor.  Money in the Roman empire and most monarchy's was the coin stamped with the authority of the monarch.  Money then in some sense has always been linked to authority and power.  Thus Jesus' witty saying "Render to Ceasar that which is Ceasars, and to God that which is God's".

However, before the widespread use of paper currency, most money was actually made from something valuable and rare, such as precious metals. (Across cultures and across time their have been other systems of exchange and economy, but they do not form the background of our current system and crisis). With the wide spread use of paper currency it generally was in some way still tied to precious metals.  The relationship was complex, and in some ways arbitrary, but still said perception was backed by something actual (gold or silver).  Certain policies around backing paper money with gold were opposed in the late 19th and early 20th century, William Jennings Bryan's populist "Cross of Gold" speech is an example of this opposition.  Eventually, our currency was no longer tied to the value of precious metal.  (The issue here is that even the value of Gold or silver wasn't constant, and things like the California Gold Rush could effect the value of a precious metal when such new large sources of the precious metal were found.)  The populist sense of this is that a currency backed by gold only benefited the wealthy, those who controlled the reserves of gold - sound familiar.

For a variety of reasons (relevant to this discussion but to many to address in this post) currency was loosed from anything real, and the value of a currency became tied to the perceived value it had relative to other currency, specifically the value of currencies became tied to the American dollar.  Basically, as I see it this means that our current financial system is entirely tied to perceptions of the strength of economies relative to each other and more importantly the perceived strength of the economy of the United States (or now also the European Union, and possibly also China).  There is nothing to back our currency but perception and power (that this would produce an ethical and moral fluid and an ethically compromised culture should not be surprising).

Add to this the growth of the availability and necessity of "credit".  "Credit" is nothing more than the perceived ability of one party to repay money one may be loaned.  Partly based on past record of repayment or default.  It has little to do though with one's actual financial stability if one had chosen to not borrow any money.  According to the system if one hasn't borrowed money one has no "credit".  I'm aware of this particular nuance in relation to the no nearly extinct practice that church provided houses ("parsonages" or "rectories") to their clergy.  At one time a pastor could spend his (at the time they would have been he) entire life living in church provided housing having payed nothing and upon retirement be able to purchase a house without a problem.  As "credit" became a more universal means of determining financial stability (not savings, etc.) clergy began to find it difficult to get even a modest loan upon their retirement.  This is the main reason churches began to rethink such provision and began to provide housing allowances that clergy would then use to pay a mortgage on a house that would be bought by the pastor when he came to the church and which would be sold by the pastor on the pastors moving to a new church.  Through this the pastor would be perceived to have the ability to pay back a loan buy having had many mortgages over time and a record of repaying those loans.

Our current system then is almost entirely based on the perceptions of the powerful, and our trust in those who back this system of perception of value and stability.  Debt seems less real in such a system, especially when the system perceives an unlimited amount of growth and sells that perception to the public (as is much of what was going on in the various booms of the past 20 years or so.)

If our entire economic system is only founded on our perceptions of what is of value, and who can be trusted, then why wouldn't those in charge of that system seek to manipulate those perceptions?  After all as long as what is perceived is shared by all it actually matters little how that perception, that "confidence", is produced.   If all is perception, it is not far from saying there is no truth in the system. Add to this that our system has always been about what the powerful back as having perceived value for their own purposes,it is not surprising that the powerful continue to do use the system to their advantage especially when the system is not set in such away that there is nothing hard to back up the monetary fiction of confidence.  In a sense, our financial system is the most post-modern thing to have been produced in late-capitalism, of the 21st century.  Our economic system is all simulacra, without anything real to back it up. We are hesitantly coming to the realization that this isn't sustainable.  We are seeing that we need truth, and not just perceived value and confidence.  Even so we are still afraid to say it: "The Emperor (of all our hopes for prosperity and progress), has no clothes".

Enter the Mystery: A sermon on Maundy Thursday for the Three Days

Over the next three days we are in the midst of the great Mysteries of our faith.  Mystery not in the sense of something to find out like a detective using deductive logic, Nor even mystery as something that can’t be understood intellectually, but mystery in the sense of something mystical, something that needs our contemplation, something that in our contemplation of it transforms us and the world.  Or in other words we here in this three day liturgy come face to face with our salvation.  We should be prepared to not be the same, we should prepare to die and rise again, to new life.

What are these mysteries: Tonight we recall the mystery of the Eucharist. On the night before he was betrayed,  Jesus takes the Passover meal and transforms it.  We celebrate the Passover, and like the Hebrews, being freed from Egypt we eat the lamb and in bread and wine.  We also recall the mystery of transformation, as we pass through darkness; we come to touch something of how the disciples were thrown into confusion on that night.  God offer’s himself in Jesus Christ to us and the world by becoming human and ultimately undergoing suffering and death on the Cross; we who are Christ’s have the heavenly food that is Christ himself, we are never far from that night, the joy, the confusion and the life of Christ.  Freedom can be scary, freedom can mean dying to a way of life that is familiar and safe.

Thus, we will sit and contemplate the mystery of the cross and the suffering of Christ, the passion.  In this we are not only there with the woman and apostle at the Cross distraught and Christ death, but we celebrate that through the Cross and Christ’s suffering God enters into and transforms suffering.  Because of this mystery we freed from Sin and Death.  Here there is a bit of a puzzle, we face something odd, for it is not only that there was a dark time, but God overcame it, Rather God in Jesus Christ enters death, actually dies.  And not only dies, but dies as a criminal, a criminal, a terrorist, King of the Jews, that is someone who threatened the imperial rule over Palestine.  God in Jesus Christ becomes the outcast. On the Cross God in Jesus Christ takes upon himself all the oppression, the suffering, injustice and sin of the World.  But even as we contemplate this mystery we are not left with death, for The Cross has meaning only if Jesus was raised from the dead.  One man 2000 years ago in a backwater of the Roman Empire being crucified, makes no difference; many other Jews of Jesus’ age were so crucified.  The cross becomes meaning full in that God acted; God chose the weak and despised things of this world as the means of our transformation and salvation.  The Resurrection oddly enough tells us that God in Jesus Christ actually suffered, and retains the marks of his suffering. God doesn’t come ultimately with Shock and Awe (as he did in Egypt) bringing death, but undergoes death to free from death.  And so an implement of execution and torture becomes an object of beauty and contemplation, and we honor the Cross, we bow to what God has done in that one moment, for in the Cross there is life already even in death.

And then we come to our Passover in the Easter vigil, as we and Christ Passover from death to life, to True life, Resurrected life.  Yet in Resurrection we never leave the Cross or the works of God throughout history that Jesus fulfilled on the Cross. The Resurrection only has meaning in the cross and death of Jesus.  The resurrection shows us that the way of the cross is the path to transformation, the dying does lead to life, that God can transform our suffering.  God has indeed begun the transformation of the world.  In the Easter Vigil we know that though it may often look like evil and death and injustice still reign, God is transforming the whole cosmos, and we who have come to believe in the Cross and Christ Jesus Raised from the dead participate in that transformation. In our contemplation of Christ passing from death into life, we find our own path as we die to ourselves and take up our cross that we may continually find Resurrection.  There is then a responsibility in all this contemplation, for we become the locus of God’s saving transforming work in this world.  We are the ones who know the mystery and have experienced it and we are to be open to God’s ongoing transforming work in the world.  The world should be different because we who contemplate and celebrate these mysteries also live out these mysteries in the world in our daily lives by the power of the Spirit.  We who have gone through the waters of baptism and died and been raised to life in the waters of Baptism, are to live into this new life, growing ever more into the age that is to come.

Yet this too is a mystery for we don’t always live this way, we still struggle with these mysteries, we still need to come back to this moment when God beat down death and injustice by suffering injustice and death.

Ultimately this mystery is one of Love, a costly love, a love we are called to participate in a love we are to share with each other and the world.  This Love is shown in service, in washing of the feet.  Washing the feet is a symbol of this way of the cross and of practicing resurrection.  In this act of having our feet washed and washing each other’s feet we come to know in our bodies the love of God, for ourselves and for all.  We symbolically show God’s love to each other in an act that isn’t comfortable, and which is awkward.  Peter found it uncomfortable and awkward.  We do this that we may learn what it means to be like Christ in the world.  In foot washing we enter into the mystery of the Three Days, so that we may carry this mystery with us into the world in service to Christ and the world.  We let our feet be washed and wash other’s feet, so that we may remember in our bodies the Love of God and the way of the Cross.  The servant is not greater than the master; we take up towel with Christ, and walk to Calvary and are raised again to new life.  So, come and symbolically enter into the way of God’s transformation, and learn to be a servant like Christ in your body. Come and feel the love of God in your body.