There are no coincidences

"Mt. Shuksan stands a mile above the Mt. Baker Highway." (Photo: University of Washington Libraries)

Annie Dillard is best known for writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which she explores the intersection of human, divine and nature in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia's Roanoke Valley.

This morning, two weeks after returning from the Pacific Northwest, I unwittingly discovered this passage from another of her writings:

"I came here to study hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea -- and to temper my spirit on their edges. ' Teach me thy ways, O Lord ' is, like all prayers, a rash one, and one I cannot but recommend. These mountains -- Mount Baker and the Sisters and Shuksan, the Canadian Coastal Range and the Olympics on the peninsula -- are surely the edge of the known and comprehended world ... That they bear their own unimaginable masses and weathers aloft, holding them up in the sky for anyone to see plain, makes them, as Chesterton said of the Eucharist, only the more mysterious by their very visibility and absence of secrecy."

(Taken from A Spiritual Field Guide: Meditations for the Outdoors, by Bernard Brady and Mark Neuzil.)

Seattle/Bellingham

Seattle skyline from the ferry deck at Bainbridge Island ... sps

Car show off Bellingham Bay ... sps

Chief coffee fetcher ... sps

Always look over your shoulder ... jmt

An hour on Mount Baker

These images taken within an hour of each other while driving up Mount Baker (Wash.) on a day in May. [Photos by steve 5.25.09]

Pentecost in the age of spirituality

It’s remarkable to me, sometimes, that so many choose to live the Christian life. Not because it’s too demanding. In fact, the modern church has probably packaged Christianity in ways less demanding than at any time in its history.

Rather, it’s remarkable people choose to live the Christian life because there are so many vocabulary words!

Think about the words we casually throw around in the church: Salvation … revelation … Epiphany … trinity … sacrament … atonement. And they’re not always big words. Sin. There’s a 5-cent word with a 10-dollar definition.

Learning the faith is often like studying a language that’s foreign to so many people. Even our weekly bulletins assume that worshipers have a working definition of such “common” terms as confession, assurance, tithe, offering and Eucharist.

I think that might be one reason why many people have dropped “organized religion” in favor of “spirituality.”

“Religion” is so many words, which translates into so many rules, which translates into too much work, or so the thinking seems to be.

“Religion” seems to have gone the way of gas-guzzling cars. Spirituality is “in.” It’s the new hybrid. Spirituality is the religious equivalent of “going green.” It even sounds better.

“Are you religious?” “No, but I’m spiritual.”

My sense is that spirituality appeals to some people because it seems safer, less demanding, and less confusing. Spirituality doesn’t remind them of the nun who used to break rulers over the back of their hands, or of the boring preacher who droned on and on Sunday after Sunday about who knows what. So people become bored or confused or tired, and they give up on the church. They leave their religious home and they declare themselves spiritual nomads.

I am quite certain that at least part of the appeal of being “spiritual” is that its seems freer than being religious. Spirituality seems liberating to those for whom the vocabulary of religion seems not only wooden, but perhaps disconcerting, even threatening. If being religious imposes an enormous weight upon a person, then spirituality might beckon them to trade in their heavy emotional baggage for a comfortable, lightweight new backpack.

I don’t intend to be critical of “spirituality.” To the contrary. But I see an irony in how we embrace the concept of being “spiritual” without being “religious.”

It’s not being religious that I wish to defend. I think Jesus wouldn’t often be very impressed with our religion and would call us out on how we use our religion to exclude those who are different from us, those whom we don’t like, those with whom we disagree, those whom it’s not convenient to be around.

When our religion divides us – and we have to admit it has – we can retreat to spirituality because it breaks the tension, it frees us to go our own way.

So where is the irony?

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. Without warning there was a sound … like a strong wind, gale force—no one could tell where it came from. Then, like a wildfire, the Holy Spirit spread through their ranks. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” (From the 2nd chapter of Acts)

The irony is that the Holy Spirit – spirituality – has never been seen as a retreat from the rest of the Christian life but has been at the very heart of it.

When words fail us – or worse, when they confound us – the Holy Spirit is present to us and allows us to hang in.

The curiosity of our day shouldn’t be those who claim to be spiritual but not religious. The curiosity of our day should be religion devoid of spirituality.

God has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit – which we celebrate on this Pentecost – because our faith can’t always be about our rational thinking, our words, our vocabulary. And that takes a lot for a preacher to admit.

A belated Happy Victoria Day

A former newsroom colleague, Bob McIntosh, was known frequently to say, "That's it, I'm moving to Canada." Unlike most Americans who issue the idle threat, he and his wife actually did. She wrote a great column about the experience for Minnesota Law & Politics magazine, and now Bob has begun a blog, The New Canadian: Stuff Americans should know about Canada ... and vice versa, I guess.

Pine away.

Debtors prison

Image © Anne Taintor, Inc.

"We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life ...

"Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.

"All this, we were assured, was a good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt, and they weren’t putting aside any of their income, but their finances looked fine once you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock portfolios. Oops."

Excerpted from yesterday's New York Times op-ed piece by Paul Krugman, which you can read here.

Another small press

I've previously mentioned a few of my favorite publishing houses: Arcadia Publishing, Phaidon, and Oxford's Very Short Introductions imprint.

I've come across another: Princeton Architectural Press. It publishes intriguing titles like The Wayfinding Handbook: Information Design for Public Places. This helps to answer the important existential questions: Where am I? What can I do here? Where can I go from here? How do I get out of here?

I used one of my quirky little finds, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, as the creative template for my final project in an Old Testament class.

Princeton Architectural Press majors in "fine books on architecture, design, photography, landscape and visual culture."

Of frogs and crickets

I tell people I live in a farmhouse, partly because it sounds romantic and bucolic, partly because it’s true. As for the romantic, a chorus of frogs is undulating in the key of A-flat as I write this, and the crickets are singing an antiphon over the top of them. The neighbor says coyotes have made a den on the far side of the field. It’s too early in the season to know whether the 20 acres will be corn or soybeans this year. Neither I nor the landowner actually works the soil; it’s leased to a nearby farmer. The landowner lives in the main house. My abode is a former granary, painted red with a metal roof and an interior made of knotty barn wood.

I’m sitting inside at a table with a lamp, and an old shortwave radio across the room is playing NPR. There’s a loft upstairs with a bed. The kitchen has a table and running water. Actually, it’s not quite as sparse as all that sounds, but it feels that way. The lamplight is dim. There’s no distraction of cable television. (There is a DVD player, on which to watch old episodes of Northern Exposure.) The mail never brings bad news, only advertising flyers and the county recycling newsletter. There’s nothing to demand my attention here except whatever book I’ve brought along.

I live here only part-time now. It’s a place whose purpose – and appeal – has modulated through stages of the nomadic existence of my 40s: first as a transitional home-away-from-home, then as a permanent home, then as a place to stay while I’m attending school over in the city. It has been a getaway for Ann and me. It has been a place for Jack and me to call home, a ground of stability to counter the instability in which we have occasionally lived.

I’m nostalgic about it all because our microeconomic downturn – not the country’s, but our family’s, during my current state of underemployment – may jeopardize our squatting rights here for the next year. The plan was to stay til the spring of ’10, when Jack and I each are done with school. It would be a fine place to hold a combined high school and seminary graduation party.

Who knows which way the wind may blow in days to come? Until it becomes clear, I’ll savor each measure of the amphibian symphony, each pitch of the crickets’ fury, each long shadow stretching across tilled dirt as the sun sets beyond the barn, giving way to the languishing chill of a spring evening and a luminous fresco of stars.

The way to end an argument

The more you learn, the more you come back to basic wisdom. Last year I came up with the seven standard answers that will get you through seminary (or, with minor adusting, probably most higher education). You can see the original post here.

I've discovered an addendum, the all-purpose conclusion to any detailed paper, the quintessential way to bring a detailed and thoughtful conversation to its close:

"These things must indeed always be beyond our comprehension, and yet the endeavor to understand them is the endless task of [fill in the blank]." (e.g. history, theology, science, etc.) *

So here's the updated list:

The Seven Answers (and a conclusion) to Get You Through Seminary
Context matters.
It's our eschatalogical hope.
We need a new paradigm.
That's evidence of our postmodern mileau.
We need to create space for ambiguity.
Everything is an interpretation.
It's not an either/or but a both/and.
These things must indeed always be beyond our comprehension, and yet the endeavor to understand them is our endless task.

* This was the final sentence in a broad, wide-ranging and complex Christological discussion in God Was In Christ, by D.M. Baillie.

Hard to say so long

I am sitting in what will soon be another relic of the economic downturn of '09: the Starbucks in Stillwater. It's frequently been called one of the most attractive Starbucks anywhere: large windows overlooking a historic main street, ornamental cornices and friezes around ceilings inlaid with latticed glass, five distinct gathering places (six in summer, when the brick-paved patio is filled with tables). In architectural terms, this isn't Coffee House Modern. It's more New Urbanist. To wit: this Starbucks is the first venture that has thrived in this downtown venue (aka the Grand Garage, an old filling station) for years.

Now I suppose it seems superficial to mourn the evinesence of a chain coffee house (this Starbucks location is to close Feb. 27), when friends -- including some of my own -- are being laid off. But everytime I walk in here I remember reading "The Great Good Place," a 1991 book by Ray Oldenburg. He sung the praises of third places, or "great good places," as the public places on neutral ground where people can gather and interact. In contrast to first places (home) and second places (work), third places allow people to put aside their concerns and simply enjoy the company and conversation around them. [Description courtesy of the Project for Public Spaces]

When I read Oldenburg's book 18 years ago, I lamented the U.S. had a dearth of third places, which had been so revered in Europe. Regardless of their corporate success in capitalizing on caffeine as the drug of choice for the millenial generation, Starbucks tapped into this sociological need. Certainly the coffee house is as much, or more, about civility and connection as it is about coffee.

Admittedly, I boycotted Starbucks' arrival in historic Stillwater. I was an aficionado of the locally owned Daily Grind (and fond of the late Dreamcoat Cafe, as well). Eventually, I succumbed. Perhaps it was the Tazo chai tea lattes. But it might be, too, that this became an office/living room/front porch away from home, inhabited by fellow travelers across an egalitarian spectrum (i.e. moms of preschoolers in the morning, city council members and downtown merchants at noon, students and preachers and writers in the afternoon, the young after school, and, yes, tourists on weekends.)

Rumor has it the lack of a drive-through at this location has doomed it to become a victim of Starbucks' latest recession. How fitting: a place that retains its civility precisely because it invites people to walk in and linger in shared, public space is excised from the corporate landscape because it can't cater to the moribund isolation of the suburbanized, American commuter.

Despite my personal whining about losing this small space of downtown Stillwater, which I admit reeks of the poutiness of privilege in the midst of real economic struggle, I do believe a societal loss is in the winds, be it at a coffee shop or any other place where the nourishment of the human soul is measured by profit margin.

That loss occurs at exactly the time we need it to be preserved, as the urban sociologist Oldenburg presciently observed:

“In the absence of informal public life, living becomes more expensive. Where the means and facilities for relaxation and leisure are not publicly shared, they become the objects of private ownership and consumption.”

And:

“What suburbia cries for are the means for people to gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably -- a ‘place on the corner,’ real life alternatives to television, easy escapes from the cabin fever of marriage and family life that do not necessitate getting into an automobile.”