Sad But Familiar Voices
October 30, 2011
In a previous post, I cited some examples of Christian life in the Middle East I found strange and hard to reconcile to my own experience. Two were to do especially with violence, one toward and one by Christians. At a certain point in my reading From the Holy Mountain, I was beginning to despair of ever really feeling at home with them, and thus (not that this is a bad thing) the book was relativizing my inherited beliefs. Luckily for my mental health, later in the memoir I race across a few stories that shot the narrative through with glorious light.
One such story is that of the Christian town of Kafr Bir’im near Nazareth. Dalrymple comes to the village of Safad and is welcomed by the married Marionite priest to have Turkish coffee while he tells him the story of what happened to Kafr Bir’im. Not long after everyone is getting situated, an old man comes in with a piece of paper with all sorts of dates and information relating to the story written on it, lest someone tell the story wrongly. (Enter sarcastic comment against the normal comparison of ‘modern history’ to ‘popular history’ here…)
On October 29th 1948, Haganah soldiers arrived in the village, who were received by the old men and priest with a white flag. The villagers gave them food and allowed them to occupy some houses for a little while. After 15 days, though, the villagers were told they must leave. They had to be five kilometers away from the village or they’ll be shot and killed. So it was in the cold of December they were forcefully evicted without shelter or aid from the village to live in caves or squat under trees, all without justification despite longstanding ‘friendly’ relations with Jews to this point. Several babies died from the exposure.
A twist in the story comes with the information that all 1,050 people of the town were given Israeli citizenship. When the Minister for Minorities arrived and saw them living under trees he ordered the Christians be given the homes of the nearby village Jish, which had been abandoned by fleeing Muslims. After 15 days, the minister said, they would be allowed back to their homes in Kafr Bir’im. There were even allowed a few men back into Bir’im to guard the houses and crops. But after six months, even these were ordered out of the village.
At this point, the village brought their concerns before the Israeli High Court.
The (Maronite!) priest here told Dalrymple:
“The people of Bir’im have never resorted to violence. We have always fought by law and by Christian principles.”
This story came as a surprise in this the last fifth of the book. It was as an oasis in a desert. I noticed immediately the casual matter-of-factness with which the Father indirectly said that ‘Christian principles’ would not allow his village to offer reaction with guns and violent retaliation. Sadly, the story continues all the way to an ironic post-apocalyptic end.
The people of Bir’im won the case. The court declared the evictions unjust and ordered them back to their village. Yet the very next day the Israeli army declared the area a military zone and they were once again forbidden from coming home. In the afternoon, by an aerial bombing, they destroyed Kafr Bir’im, the buildings with all their possessions, as the people watched from afar, as if at some bizarre fireworks show, on a hill subsequently named the ‘Crying Hill.’
Their fields were given to a new Jewish settlement and the town made into a National Park. The history of the town, and the fact that their real citizens were still alive and nearby, is erased from the public memory. Instead, signs draw attention to the ruins of a second temple synagogue near the center of town, yet the homes built by the people of Bir’im, are imagined as ancient ruins by the Israeli school children who come for field trips; a well dug by one who told the story was labeled instead as one built by a leader of the Jewish revolt circa 66AD.
Now, the villagers – at long last! – can visit their homes, but only if they pay the entrance fee and compete with tourists for a view. Fr. Suleiman laments:
“They say that once you let one Arab back, you admit that the others have rights too. That is why, despite everything, they dare not give us back what is ours. Israel says it is a democracy, and it is true. But it seems that for us Palestinians there is no justice.”
There are many more interesting details, and I strongly recommend you read this engrossing book for them and all the other stories.
Published Elsewhere
October 5, 2011
I was recently given the opportunity to write a piece on immigration for The Ekklesia Project. I approached it via contemporary folk music and classical mythology…I hope it works!
Unfamiliar Voices
September 11, 2011
One of the books I read over the summer was a travel memoir by William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain. In it, Dalrymple follows the footsteps of a Byzantine monk, John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist, who traveled through the Empire from Mt. Athos down to the Egyptian desert oasis Al Kharga. The book is a totally fascinating and engaging description of the very complex situation Christians are finding themselves in in the Middle East. Mostly it is a tale of the degeneration of Christianity in her historic home — an often tragic and brutal tale. Eerily, the book, written in 1997, already seems out of date. The situation is almost certainly more grim now.
The second part of From the Holy Mountain takes place in Turkey. After a brief respite in Syria, being at the time the most stable and safe home for Christians, Dalrymple moves onto Lebanon. The book to this point was unrelentingly strange to my world. Turkey, though officially a secular state, has systematically suppressed Christians there, including especially a physical and historic genocide of the Armenian Christians. By ‘historic’ I mean that the authorities literally travel around to towns and destroy any physical proof of Armenians: their churches, their homes, their graveyards, their monasteries. I found it very difficult to hear described. One thing I wasn’t expecting was for this memoir to challenge my pacifism. It doesn’t take any sacrifice on my part to say that I affirm a non-violent Kingdom here. Upon hearing these stories, perhaps for the first time in years, I became quite sympathetic to the felt need to defend oneself, one’s family, church, and home. Some monasteries that were taken over or destroyed had been there for well over a thousand years. A thousand. years.
In Lebanon, Dalrymple gives a brief history of the the Maronite eastern Rite Catholics. A shockingly bloodthirsty and cruel band of Maronite gangs had waged a long ‘civil war’ with other ethnic and religious groups in what is now Lebanon in an effort to defend what was seen as their own country — aided in no small part to a close relationship to the French. There is one particularly dark incident where Dalrymple is having a conversation with a certain Christian about the Maronite leader Samir Geagea. This man was comparing two towns, one Christian the other not:
“You can eat in Ehden, but make sure you sleep in Bsharre. Sleep in Ehden, and they will shoot you while you are asleep.’ [Bsharre was a town under the authority of Geagea. Dalrymple proceeds to question this man, listing many of the more gruesome crimes of Geagea, including the night murder of a Christian rival, the killing of women and children, a church bombing, and others.] “Geagea is a very honourable and very holy man,’ he said. ‘We are very proud of him in Bsharre…You must not believe what people say about Samir Geagea,’ said Ch’baat. ‘But you can hardly call him holy,’ [Dal.]
‘Certainly yes,’ he said, quite serious. ‘He went to mass every day and prayed by his bed every night. He had a church built wherever he was, where he fought. Every Christmas his troops expected money as a present, but instead he gave them prayer books and rosaries. Of course he went to confession ever week. He never went into battle without his cros. In his office, he always had a picture of the Virgin and a cross: never any picture of Che Guevara or anything like that.”
Another strange phenomenon was reported on multiple occasions. In some places in the Middle East there was a strange fusion of Christianity, Islam, and paganism that I found, to be perfectly honest, curious but repugnant. Apparently there are several churches, monasteries, and Mosques, where people of both faiths will come and pray to saints for healing, or for a job, to get pregnant, or for good weather. This is itself not too disconcerting, though it seems like it has potential problems. Far more troubling is that if the prayer is answered, that person will return with a goat or a sheep and the (Orthodox!) priest or Imam will sacrifice the animal in thanks to the saint! How strange! How utterly foreign to me, and foreign to the strong anti-sacrificial polemics of the Church fathers and New Testament.
I kept going over these sections in my mind. In the end, I found them impossible to understand. I couldn’t wrap my head around this man who praised Geagea, or this, well, gang leader, who could shoot a woman and child over 24 times one day, and go to Mass the next; or the animal sacrifice for saints. I was beginning to question myself strongly. In what ways has my Christian life been truly normative, and in what ways has it been exceptional? According to how I’ve been taught to understand the Gospels and the witness of the persecuted Church, even under severe pressure, the Church shouldn’t be reacting by taking up arms, but caring not about the risks, they should be testifying to another kingdom. Is that simply a position that one in my position can take? Or can it truly occur? Luckily for my sanity, I found several stories that filled me with joy and relief. Perhaps these Christians are not so strange after all?
Dead Shopping Malls
September 1, 2011
This is a longer version of an essay I originally wrote for The Living Church. I’m posting it here to contribute to James’s music series.
When the Grammy for “Best Album” was awarded to an alternative rock band from Canada for an album named The Suburbs over such mainstream acts as Eminem and Katy Perry, various electronic social webs were a flurry with outrage. Many people simply had never heard of them. This despite the fact that Arcade Fire is hardly a small band, regularly selling out very large venues and touring tirelessly. Critics claimed that the Grammy’s had lost touch with pop culture by making such a choice (a notable exception being Kanye West) – see for instance Steve Stoute’s letter to the Grammy’s. I take issue to this accusation. To be sure, Eminem is unquestionably more influential in the pop realm and more indicative of mainstream music in general, but Arcade Fire is among the most culturally aware bands now writing. Lady Gaga is a spectacle of contemporary culture but Arcade Fire is a mirror.
Their first record, Funeral, is a profound expression of unfettered youth, a polyphony of parts barely yet successfully held together by thunderous drums and a chorus of vocalists. It is considered universally to be a modern classic. The Suburbs, their third record (Neon Bible is the sophmore), is in many ways the negation of that record and a searching tale of the modern “Suburban” person. Their first two records abounded in movement, in running, in singing, The Suburbs struggles even to remember what movement was like (“Ready to Start” & “We Used to Wait”). Instead the “Modern Man” waits in a line, accepting with total passivity the hidden and pervasive authority of forces outside of their control. Suburbs are the erie realm of the endlessly flat “Sprawl” on the one hand, and the the rising peaks of “dead shopping malls” on the other. Such an oppressive space feels like “A City With No Children” in it, a space from which vigorous life has been drained, where there is “No Celebration” and where hours now are “wasted” and the “half-lit” nights are spent driving through the streets, recalling when friends used to listen to music together, grow their hair long and dream of getting out.
The album speaks of an exceeding aimlessness to life. Perhaps the suburbanite has a job, indeed perhaps they even have cars and a 70′s house, but there is no real life there. And this situation has been resigned to; there is no sense in which the narrator(s) show us any struggle against the powers, no anger, no zeal. This shows up sonically too. In previous records accompanying vocalists were infused in almost every song, but on The Suburbs they show up rarely and never have the effect of rallying the listeners. Likewise there is a near singleminded focus on the guitar which either drives a fuzzed and droning tempo or drifts listlessly above the chord structure, but the organs, pianos, violins and accordion that we’d become accustomed to are very rarely heard.
Does this sound nothing like a youth culture where there is endless stimulation but few job prospects? Where one might simultaneously be poor yet have several electronic devices and where college is still normed but where students remain skeptical that such education leads to a more prosperous future? Where kids live at home into their 30′s and change careers multiple times?
It is this uncomfortable clarity with which Arcade Fire sees contemporary youth culture that makes them so important. If what they say is true, then it poses the political and social question, to what extent are the politicians and the preachers adequately dealing with this widespread pessimism and skepticism.
An Unexpected Fourth of July Reflection
July 4, 2011
I was born in Milwaukee. But I only lived there ’till I was five, so my memories of it are vague and fleeting. When we moved, it was for my father to take up a senior pastor’s position in a small Wisconsin town, Boscobel. Which is, if I recall, the wild turkey hunting capital of the world. At the time, it was in many ways, an iconic small American town. We had an A&W, a Dairy Queen, a movie theatre with a single screen; it bordered the Wisconsin river, and a small creek ran through town and flooded every Spring. In it, I used to catch crayfish. One time a friend and I caught one about the size of a small lobster and were able to sell it to the local pet store. We had a single public elementary school and there wasn’t much of a public middle school, we just moved to the public high school building when we hit the 7th grade.
Some of my earliest memories are from the elementary school. In second grade, Mrs. Waters taught me math and in music class I learned the fifty states song, which I still know by heart. I was in children’s plays on a stage that was part of the gymnasium; they didn’t have a separate auditorium so all large events happened in the gym. In the fifth grade, I started band. I desperately wanted to be a percussionist but Mr. Barrens said I didn’t have any rhythm, so he recommended I take up the trumpet. Three years later I was his first chair trumpeter…and the drummer for his jazz band – the other percussionists were only good enough to bang on a bass drum at pep rallies.
I didn’t pursue sports for very long, so most of my memories from school revolve around band. In 7th and 8th grade, I would stay after school for at least an hour every day and bang away on the drum kit in the practice room. No doubt I sounded terrible and drove Mr. Barrens crazy, himself being quite an accomplished drummer. Some years later, after moving to Minnesota, Mr. Miller had to put up with me learning guitar. Lord knows I’m still terrible at that instrument. When state competitions came around, Mr. Barrens would give me special lessons so that I could play the highest level pieces. Mr. Miller even let me compete on the snare drum (I was his jazz drummer too). I’ve got more than a handful gold, silver and bronze medals from years of State competition. Music still plays an important part in my life, and I owe it to the public school system, to Mr. Barrens and Mr. Miller as well as to my choir director, Mrs. Halverson
During the summer, I would spend at least five days a week at the public swimming pool – my family had unlimited summer passes. I would hop on my bike and ride down the public roads, over public bridges (I told you that creek ran right through town) and spend countless hours there. It had a high dive, a low dive, and very few rules. By the end of my time in Boscobel I could do a pretty rad ganor and even a double front flip. It was the same public pool where I first learned to swim.
Just down the road was a huge public park with tennis courts, playgrounds, a hill that in winter was the town sledding hill and from which we launched fireworks every fourth of July, a grove of pine trees and freshly built public softball diamonds. It bumped right up against the public school running track, football field and baseball diamond. I played tee-ball on that diamond and little league at the new softball diamonds. When I wasn’t swimming, I was often at those diamonds. You see we had a very competitive public softball league and even though I was too young to play, my dad, a pentecostal pastor and volunteer fire fighter, played alongside all the town’s men – despite the fact that all that beer made us uncomfortable. So I would buy sodas and watch, or take my BMX with my buddy and jump the piles of dirt left from the construction. Town parades often ended here and sometimes we had big tractor pulls. But mostly I remember the softball and the bike jumping.
We never had much money. If it wasn’t for the frequent generosity of my grandfather, things could’ve been fairly rough. To help make ends meet, my mom ran a day care out of our parsonage. This was made easier because of the public WIC program that provides food and/or vouchers for those in need. You might say that, in an indirect way, the government helped to serve Boscobel Assemblies of God, since that faithful and lovely church couldn’t afford to pay my parents much.
In the winter, I still played with public water, but of the frozen variety. Just a couple blocks down from the house, across from the mysterious Catholic parish (we heard they had beer at their gatherings) was a public ice rink with a quaint little warming house where I would come in for a little respite from Wisconsin winters and frozen toes to buy a pack of Swiss Miss hot chocolate. The town kids and I left one half of the rink open for “free skaters” but as for us, we set up two oil barrels and played hockey. Sometimes a truck would come out to plow but when we were impatient, the kids and I would just bust out some shovels and clear the ice for ourselves. Those piles of snow sure did get hard. Some of the kids who had parents with a little money had helmets and pads, but most of us just needed a stick and some hockey skates. Once, a kid who often bullied me challenged me to a 1 on 1 game in which I resoundingly whomped him. Often, I would come home from school and skate until dinner time.
This pattern remained much the same when once we moved to Monticello, MN. Though the town was still larger than Boscobel, it still had the same small town feel. (Though many places I once knew as fields are now filled with big box stores) I still played in the school band and was in two musicals, Bye Bye Birdie and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I even gave sports another shot, joining the Cross Country team my junior year to spend more time with my close friend.
There was something of a shift, though, because the larger youth group, plus our newfound independence on account of our driver’s licenses meant that school had less the social role it once had, nevertheless I’ve always been a public school boy.
I hope by now a pattern is emerging. Time fails me to mention all the times, simply of those which I am able to remember, that public spaces and services have been there for me. My family has taken vacations to national parks; my wife and I too had WIC for a while and even now are a part of the state health care service for poor folk; I am in my senior year at the University of Minnesota – schooling which I will put to use in the Church; come Winter I’ll be taking public transportation to school; and I take my girls down to the public parks several times a week. In looking back, I find myself exceedingly grateful for all that the public has given me and enabled me to do.
The thing is, it has only been in the last few years that I’ve ever gotten into politics. Though now it seems odd, my dad was never very political, he certainly didn’t think any party was closest to God’s will for “this Christian nation.” And indeed, for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you anything about the politics of the towns I was raised in. Whatever anyone’s political inclinations, it was apparently taken simply for granted that a healthy town needed healthy public services. I shudder to think what my life would be like had there been multiple “private” swimming pools or parks charging admission like a golf course or something. Do you ever see poor people at a golf course? As much as I hear about it “not being government’s job” to provide health care, there aren’t any Churches prepared to provide insurance for my family. Instead, the egalitarian nature of public space meant that I swam and learned with kids who had lots more than our family. Yet, I never got the impression that anyone perceived my family as lazy or selfish, or my teachers as greedy and ungrateful, or that these were indulgent luxuries.
But the landscape seems to have changed. Now even the idea of public schooling is viewed either as some utilitarian good meant to be used in the service of private capital (which somehow will be for the greater social good) or a “bulky and inefficient luxury” that should probably be done away with in favor of “competitive” private schools. Do you ever see poor people at private schools? Or, at least at ones that don’t have huge funds available to meet minority quotas?
I mention schools so often because at my age it’s been one of the most significant and long lasting public institutions that I’ve been a part of. But as I’ve already made clear, the influence is much, much wider. I owe the very kind of existence I have to “big government.” In fact, I’d venture to say that taxes aren’t even something the public should be lucky to have out of me, as if it was ever mine in the first place. It’s more appropriate, I think, to consider taxes as something I never owned, because I’m not a self-made man.
So whatever else is true about the tragic and unfortunate affects of nationalism in the Church, and whatever can rightly be leveled against America and her war mongering expansionism for global capital, the threat of a dissolution of a public space, a recognized place where people of disparate ideologies and income brackets can work together toward a common, public good because of an honest assessment of our interdependence, frightens me as well. I may not be a patriot, and I won’t be singing any patriotic songs today, but I just might raise a glass to the Boscobel Public Swimming Pool.
We see develop rather quickly in the Church within the New Testament people, often ‘virgins and widows,’ who are ‘set apart’ for what we might call ‘full time ministry.’ (The terms are anachronistic to be sure, but just roll with me) So we see from a very early point a ‘mixed economy’ of forms of life in the Church. Some work and produce and give, and some ‘mend tents’ while still doing such ‘full time ministry,’ but is has always been deemed necessary to have a group of people dedicated to the life of the Church who are fully dependent on her life, but who alone can give a fuller expression to her life. We would be incomplete without the virgins and widows. The development of monasticism and the incredible importance of the religous throughout our history only testify all the more to this.
Though not quite as prominent as it once was (or so it seems to me anyway), it is not at all uncommon to see a Roman Catholic parish system, including schools and ministry to the poor, supported by small groups of monks and/or nuns (heck we could even include the celibate priesthood here).
Yet, despite this decline, there has been developing since at least the Jesus People Movement, communities of Protestants who in rough ways approximate this mixed economy of life. Anglicanism too has a small but not unimportant religious life – though we might pray for this to grow all the more. Among the developments has been the flowering of “new monasticism” and “intentional communities.”
If, as I have said, the fullness of the Church’s life requires a group of people set apart from “working life,” then I wonder if we ought to be trying to test whether new monastic and intentional communities could serve an analogous function as the religous within our parish structures. Maybe there would be only a few single parishes that could support such a group, but would it not be possible to imagine a relatively close group of parishes contribute together to support such a community for the sake of their own life? I don’t see why not. In fact I think this could be quite life-giving.
There are more than a few logistical questions that arise, but I have some ideas, and I imagine many others have some too. This is a topic I’d love to explore more here. So let’s tentatively consider this an ‘introductory’ post that could flower into more. These also could see some strong overlap with my continuing reflections on seminaries.
Status Update
June 22, 2011
Greetings Readers,
It’s been a slow summer for me, even though it started out with a bang with that epic beer post. I’ve been spending lots of time with my family and tons on house projects as well. It’s been very rewarding but it’s made for bad blogging. Rather soon I have a book review coming of Mark McIntosh’s intro to theology, which is a spectacular book; and I have a few other posts in the works.
(Here’s a look at the fence I’ve been building from an old deck.)
I’ve been reading +Arthur Michael Ramsey, Sergii Bulgakov and Flannery O’Connor for the most part, and have played around with the Latin of St. Augustine’s Confessions, book X.
In July, I’ll be attending the Ekklesia Gathering and am oh so very excited to meet Joey Aszterbaum, aka “The Charismanglican.”
In the Fall I’ll be beginning my Senior Project at the University of Minnesota examining the political theology of the Apostolic Fathers. Advanced Latin will be in Tacitus and Greek, Book I of Plato’s Republic. Hopefully I’ll be graduating in the Spring and will be applying to the MA at the University of Minnesota in the Fall, hoping to focus on the social thought of St. John Chrysostom.
At Church, I’ve become a Verger and an Acolyte trainer. Perhaps more importantly, in August or September I’ll be officially starting the discernment process for Holy Orders in the Episcopal diocese of Minnesota. Prayers are sought!
It’s a small readership we have, but a loyal and intelligent one. Peace to you this Summer.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
