I’m sitting in a lounge at the Charlotte airport right now. Pouring over notes for my presentation. I have acquired a digital camera so I plan on blogging and posting pics of the festival. This should be fun. I look forward to hearing the bands and speakers at the festival.
For the past couple of months I’ve gone back to my roots with a deeper appreciation. By roots I mean a black baptist/pentecostal faith and tradition. It is a different world (with some similarities) than the world of post-evangelical, missional, and emerging type churches that I’ve had the privilege of being a part of over the past couple of years. I still consider myself very much a part of this emerging church conversation/movement. But the issues are different in many ways. There are similar concerns but the way things play out are different.
Today, during intercessory prayer (yes, for you emergent haters I pray), I prayed with some of the mothers of my church. And I was prayed over and reminded of some things that had been spoken to me by elders in the church many years ago. I’ve recently joined the prayer team which has been a good reminder of the joys of waiting on the Lord in prayer. To press into what the ancient Celtic Christians called the ‘thin place’. That place where we encounter heaven in our midst or what the ancient Hebrews refer to as the Shekinah. And if you’ve ever prayed in a black church then you know what I’m talkin’ bout. God is not philosophical ground of being, a substance-less signifier, or simply an anthropomorphic concept writ large on the cosmos by humans to deal with and survive their contingent existence. What I meet in these prayer sessions reminds me of the days when I was a little boy growing up in Birmingham, Alabama watching my grandma on the front porch reading her bible and praying to God: the living God.
One of the gifts of the church is to offer space where we can corporately meet the living God together. To pray til someone has an unction, til the Spirit manifests, til someone finds healing and deliverance, til there is comfort for the pain of daily struggle. I’ve almost forgot about this gift of the church. I’m grateful to have stumbled upon it again. Thank the Lord for that.
As I walked out of the prayer session this morning I was reminded of the words of philosopher/scientist/mathematician Blaise Pascal:
“Fire. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, The God of Jacob. Not of the philosophers and intellectuals.… The God of Jesus Christ.”
This day in 1991 I went to basic training (boot camp) at a Naval Base in San Diego, CA. I remember leaving my mom at the bus station to head to the MEPS station in Montgomery, Al. I’ll never forget that first week (we called them P-days). We went an entire week with little to no sleep. I can still remember the exhaustion I felt. Marching in the hot sun, getting all of my hair cutoff, being yelled at, taking a shower with other men, and having my personal identity stripped down to nothingness. Today has me reflecting on my very brief military career.
My favorite part of that journey was where I would end up (I went to different Naval bases)…aboard a Trident ballistic submarine (USS Michigan SSBN-727, blue crew). I was a Navigation Electronics Technician (Nav ET). My job was to tell the nuclear warheads and the actual boat where it was located relative to its prospective target. I have alot of sea stories.
The most memorable one is when I received my dolphins (April 1993). The receiving of one’s dolphins was a major rite of passage in Submarine life. I was what they called a hot runner. I would receive my dolphins around what was called half-way nite on my first patrol.
I miss going through the Strait of Juan de Fuca and preparing to submerge or dive into the Pacific Ocean (Dive! Dive!). I miss when we would surface in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and have steel-beach parties on the back of the submarine…with no land for hundreds and hundreds miles. We’d swim in the middle of the ocean. An awesome experience. I wonder where the rest of the guys are.
What is that about? Have you ever had moments in your life when you are standing in the face of a major life choice and you have the ominous sense that one path could be mortal and the other choice will not be easy but very difficult? I know…a long question. I believe I’m on the edge of the very serious with God. I’m standing on the edge of a wave that could take me in one of two directions. One direction seems ominous the other difficult yet with the possibility of peace, healing, love, mercy, justice, and the in-breaking of sunshine at the end of the wave when it settles on the shore of my life.
In contemplation of these paths I sense God saying no to the ominous and a difficult yes to the other.
Avoiding the ominous and choosing the difficult yes to God will not be easy. It will probably be the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life. Pray for me.
Lord God,
I don’t want to kick against the goads. I want my life to give you glory. I want my life to be a gift to others. I don’t want to be on the receiving end of Your displeasure. Help me Lord God in this difficult hour! I pray that my brothers and my sisters will tarry with me. Amen. So be it!
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.
Beautiful, horrible; magical terrible,
Reason to laugh and smile,
Reason to cry yourself to sleep at night, start a fight.
Make up break up wrong or right.
Heaven for all it’s worth, can equally be hell right here on earth.
And no one really knows anything about it but everybody needs it.
We can’t live without it.
And that’s the way it goes, dark as day bright as night.
Just some other thing you might hear if you ask what love feels like:
And it feels like joy, and it feels like pain.
And it feels like sunshine, feels like rain.
An excuse for dieing, reason to live.
And if you don’t know that’s what love is…
Love is… - Mary J. Blige What love is
I look to the sky for deliverance…none comes
I look to my right and my left for deliverance…none comes
I take a trip inside my soul and no help comes
I live in a world of betrayal, broken hearts, and bruised souls
A world of oppression, devastation, and alienation
I stand in a crowd of dream killers and nay sayers
My heart and my world can’t take it anymore
Deliver us
Although the sky does not respond
My heart continues to direct its gaze up Above
Like Earth, Wind and Fire said back in the day
“Keep your head to the Sky”
The silence from Heaven is killin’ me
This is the dark night of my soul
God has takin’ leave
Deliver us
From the vampires of my soul
From my fatal cynical role
The bills, the debt, my credit, unscrupulous women
From my cubicle that’s really a prison
From fake folk who pretend to listen
Deliver us
Toward a better place for our souls
Toward destiny rather than fatalistic roles
Toward hope not despair
Toward friendship
Toward the heart of the One who’s presence
Where life true and whole dwells
.
Their music (Nina Simone, Mary J. Blige, and Lisa Gerrard) captures something I’ve been spending alot of time with: the blues. Not the genre itself but the sensibility. The sensibility that says we can possess a sense of the tragic nature of our existence while simaltaneously holding on to hopeful vision and living with a tearful smile. These artist, at this moment, capture for me this sensibility. Reading bell Hooks doesn’t help either. Her insightful reading of the text of the world has been a challenge and has also been a place of repentance and conversion for me.
Excerpt from her book Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics:
Since our society continues to be primarily a “Christian” culture masses of people continue to believe that god has ordained that women be subordinate to men in the domestic household. Even though masses of women have entered the work forces, even though many families are headed by women who are the sole breadwinners, the vision of domestic life which continues to dominate the nation’s imagination is one in which the logic of male domination is intact, whether men are present in the home or not. The wrong minded vision of feminist movement which implied it was anti-male carried with it the wrong minded assumption that all female space would necessarily be an environment where patriarchy and sexist thinking would be absent. Many women, even those involved in feminist politics, chose to believe this as well.
The more I listen to the prophetic feminine ‘other’ the more I recognize my need to repent from my lack of historical empathy towards real lives of women. Take Hilary Clinton for example. I was talking to my mom about the democratic primary race. She gave me a perspective I did not consider before. I was criticizing Senator Clinton for some of the comments she’s made over the past month or so regarding Senator Obama and his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. My mom said, “Hilary is bitter. She was told that she may have been the only hope for the Dems getting the White House in 08′. So, what did she do? She began to position herself politically by first running and winning the Senate seat in the state of New York. And she did exactly what the Dems wanted. She got into position. Then what happened next? Obama happened.” I am not a Clinton supporter and I still remain disappointed in the way she’s handled the so-called media-created controversy surrounding Rev. Wright. But I never considered this interpretation of her ‘bitterness’ and ‘defensive’ posture.
Anyways…I am sure that wasn’t a helpful rant but had to get that out there. However, these musings bring me to a moment of confession: I do not truly and faithfully listen to the voices of women. I have many sexist habits that God and my neighbors need to help me with. When I quote and recite authors they are mostly men. When I think of great leaders in history my default position is toward the masculine. I cut their voices off in my soul. I do not let their thoughts and pain enter into the internal orchestra of my mind. My sexist habits die hard. Who will deliver me from this sexist body of death?
So…I’m listening to these beautiful women now. Their music captures both the beauty and tragedy of the world. Themes of sacrifice, love, tragedy, redemption, hope, peace, sacredness, beauty, goodness, truth, purpose, and justice pervade. God is profoundly here. May I be here as well.
My soul brother Phil Sinitiere has started a series of posts that will be covering a recent interivew he had with author Jonthan Wilson-Hartgrove. Jonathan’s latest book, which I’m currently reading, is Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line.
I hope to give my thoughts on his book soon. Right now I’m reading mad books. Right now I’m captured by Tony Jones’ latest book The New Christians.
I plan on blogging on this soon. Plug: he has a section on me in his book. I plan on musing each ‘dispatch’ of the book over the next several days. I have been intending on posting something sooner but wanted to give his book more blog time. This is probably one of the best books I’ve read on the emerging church movement. Tony gives us several ‘dispatches’ on the ECM that are really basic characteristics. Stay tune…
*Historical note: this is my first blog post from my new laptop. I now see how folks can keep up in the blogosphere.
Anyways I’m here at the Kanuga Conference Center for the “Practicing Peace: Creative Responses to Violence”. I’ve sojourned here with my good friends Steve and Becky Knight. The conference speakers will be Helen Prejean, Jim Carroll, Walter Wink, June Wink, Mpho Tutu, and Bishop Charles Jenkins. The conference is being hosted by The Institute For Servant Leadership. Sister Helen Prejean is about to speak in few minutes…
More later. Busy week.
My name is Anthony Smith, and I live in Charlotte, N.C. I'm part of the Charlotte Emergent cohort group. I'll be speaking at Cornerstone Festival in Illinois, June 30-July 5. | kwesi on Wrestling with God’s mor… |
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