Comments on Elizaphanian
I live in the Southeast region of the United States of America. This part of my country is known as the Bible belt referring to the large percentage of the population that consider themselves Christians. Sadly however Christianity has been used more as a set of rules here in the Southeast instead of a path to a greater understanding of God and our purpose and our path. Jim Kuntsler is fond of saying that the Southeast of America will go to hell in a hand basket post peak oil because of the religious fanatics in this region. Some days I believe he’s got it all wrong and other days I hear things that scare me and make me think he’s right- Pat Robertson blaming hurricane Katrina on the behavior of drunks on Bourbon Street New Orleans for example. Some days though I run across items like this post of yours and I have hope not only in the future of the human race but in the ability of Christianity to help shape our future in positive way.
Thank You.
Hey Aaron - thanks for the feedback, and also for the link from your blog (if life hadn't been difficult the last few days I'd have sent you a proper response). My belief is that there are many more 'sane' Christians than fundamentalist - and the coming time of trial will expose that truth to the world. We live by hope.
I really find this stuff interesting. I haven't had the time to work out the details of how our culture will collapse, but I'm prettu sure it will, in the coming decades. I have decided to do what I can, which is to work at the problem as a theologian. You'll find the results at my blog. (Chek the key posts in the margin). I'm only halfway thorugh, yet, though. Thanks for the insgihts!
There is a great synchronicity for me in this message.
1. I have a friend who has recently come out of a year long depression in which Peak Oil featured prominantly, he is now highly energised in the direction of sustainability.
2. I read The prophetic imagination 3 months ago, was very excited about it but couln't find an outlet.
Your article is holy glue.
Prominant questions for me include,
1.How do we connect meaningfully with the disenfranchised. This is after many years and decades of having such language integral to the culture (here in South Africa at least). I was part of a fellowship for 6 years in Soweto, and yet I do not feel like I have answered this question. I have not transcended the problem of affluence.
2. What does the worship that sustains hope mean? I am very very motivted to find alternative wineskins for all this truth, but feel at a loss to do it. I have been an active musician for almost 30 years, and I have lots of ideas about music, worship, and alternative consciousness, and yet I cannot find an expression approaching what you are describing.
As Van Morrison said, "Rave on John Donne, rave on, rave on, rave on..."
With respect to 1. I don't think there are any global answers, the answers have to be local. With regard to 2. I'm not sure that we need 'new wineskins'. To my point of view the eucharist is precisely the worship that sustains hope - it's what it has always done, even where christians were being murdered for their points of view - but the question of how to do the eucharist is key. Best of luck!
Sam - yes, these answers need to be local.
Regards the wineskins - your view is an interesting one. I swim in evangelical waters, and there is no eucharist to speak of, no liturgy. There are habits and rituals, but there is no crafting out of "the work of the people".
As an artist I feel that to create is to co-labour with G-d. New Wineskins is a near obsession for me.
You seem to be pretty prolific, at least theologically - isnt all this writing and thinking about new wineskins?
I'm trying to get to grips with your caution about creating new structures.
I'm not sure that I am cautious about creating 'new structures' - it's just that I think the eucharist is a) the essential thing about maintaining the Christian life (it IS the new covenant etc), and b) the creativity can be applied in the how not the what. There seems to be an infinite variety of ways in which to celebrate the eucharist, within a certain framework - and I think the framework is something that enables creativity, rather than stifling it (in the same way that a canvas enables an artist to paint, it doesn't stifle the urge to paint). Given what you say about your background, you may not be familiar with this quotation from Dom Gregory Dix: "At the heart of it all is the Eucharistic action, a thing of an absolute simplicity—the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as they were first done with their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with His friends on the night before he died. . . .He had told his friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning “for the [remembrance] of Him,” and they have done it always since.
Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for a famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren women; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of Saint Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancti Dei—the holy common people of God. "
Thanks Sam - I love the breadth, the incarnate "wastefullness" of these words. I have not seen them before.
I agree with you about frameworks within which there are infinite possiblities. When we discuss wineskins, or structures which can hold truth, its somewhat relative as to what defines a structure. (Rhetorically then), for example, the Eucharist done twice may be done for 2 completely different sets of people. So is it the same old structure or something new?
I guess the same question for me is if I compose a song using the well worn C and G chords, is it a new song or is it a rehash of an old form? The argument is aesthetic, but it applies to the whole of life, and how we choose to live it.
Often simplicity can carry with it geat wells of newness, and complexity say nothing much at all. I'm always back and forth between these extremes; something drives me onwards as an artist.
Thoimas Moore pointed out in his talk on Creativity that the obsession with the novel is a relatively new fashion. Up until even 100 years ago the most brillinat minds did not consider "newness" a thing to be grasped.
I am trying to work out whether my drive towards the new is a Kingdom pattern or not.
Thanks again for your input,
Nic
vi) articulate a vision of hope, a promised land, on the other side of Peak Oil, which will sustain us through the transition period in the wilderness;
great post..id really love to hear your plans for preparing and life in the promised land
blessings sonia
Still working on them - but my 'let us be human' material has most - click on the 'my peak oil posts' link top right.
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