Away from Trivial Grief

Posted on April 9, 2020 by awtraughber

The particularities of life during a worldwide pandemic have brought some fresh urgency to how many are articulating their faith during this season of Lent and Easter.  Yesterday I recorded my Easter message for school chapel; there’s really no way around acknowledging Our Current Moment.  But it’s interesting to see how so many are responding in so many different ways.

Matthew Loftus, a teacher and doctor in East Africa recently posted his reflections to Plough.  I feel like it strikes the right chord with not just a Christian response but a Christ-like response.  He starts by recounting a story about children and the loss of precious little things as a consequence of living in a politically volatile place.  He talks about the “small sorrows” and the “deeper griefs” of the moment.  Then he writes:

I am not afraid of dying, I don’t think; I know I’ll stand before Jesus and thank him that it was only by his blood that I made it. No, I am afraid of mass pandemonium, of my neighbors starving, of returning home to the food we’ve carefully stockpiled over the last few weeks and filling my belly while it all happens. I am afraid of supplies running out, of our hospital not being able to make payroll because of the unjust structures that do not adequately compensate our institution for the work that we do, of trying to intubate someone and then losing power. I am afraid of watching my colleagues die, of leaving any child without a father, or of simply making a wrong clinical decision that leads to someone’s death. I am afraid of what I will say to my wife in anger and frustration or how I might lash out at one of the nurses when someone we are caring for dies. I am afraid of telling my children that they must isolate themselves from other children, or that we do not know when they’ll see their grandparents again. I might even be afraid of having to tell my children that their Legos are gone forever.

From there he writes about the difficult life of Helen Roseveare, a mission hospital worker who remained faithful to God and to her post even as she was personally ravaged by rebellion and rejected by her students.  She connected her own suffering with the suffering of Jesus, with what the apostle Paul says of his own body “completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.”  Loftus adds:

What could be lacking in the sufferings of Christ? Only that which his hands and feet – us – have not yet experienced.

All of our griefs, big and small, fit into this. I think of Christ, sighing at unbelief and crying out in agony on the cross. He weeps at his friend’s tomb and gets exasperated by misunderstandings about yeast. He is betrayed by Peter but really saves his anger for a fig tree.

With the virus, for which we are woefully unprepared, flooding towards us in Kenya, I worry I have invested my life in this local healthcare project only to see it washed out in the end. I worry for the lives we will not save. And I still find it in my heart to worry about my son’s Legos.

Loftus concludes his own part of the reflection with this, something that can be a real struggle but also seems very true, Christ-like, amidst the posturing we all are too often guilty of:

Our ability to manage and live with grief depends on how much we are willing to identify with Christ. If we do not make ourselves vulnerable to the pains and sorrows of this world like he did, nor risk what we have for the sake of people who are hurting, then our griefs will be trivial indeed. The degree to which we are united with Christ – in spirit, in prayer, in suffering – is the degree to which he shares the burden of those sufferings with us.

There’s more in the piece definitely worth reading, including a closing quote from Bishop Ken Untener about stepping back and taking a long view.

May God bless your Maundy Thursday.

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Twenty Years Later . . .

Posted on April 7, 2020 by awtraughber

Twenty years ago, this teaser trailer was released:

It is difficult to imagine a world where the finished product of Peter Jackson and friends hasn’t been realized.  How odd to have a voice-over by someone not from the movie! How odd to see a trailer to this movie without Howard Shore’s score bringing it to life!  How odd to witness scenes from later movies in the trailer mostly promising the first!  How odd to hear so little dialogue from the most quoted movie series of my lifetime!  And yet here we are, twenty years later.

Here’s a short article from twenty years ago that The Guardian posted about the trailer.  It really was another world back then.

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Big Picture Warning

Posted on April 6, 2020 by awtraughber

As a single guy led by faith to live far from home, I often find myself trusting in the Big Picture more than others.  On the best of days I hope to live a life that more closely resembles the promise made by Jesus at the end of his encounter with the rich young ruler (though I am neither rich nor young nor a ruler).  The reality of Our Current Moment definitely call into question some of how we understand life in the Big Picture, and rightly so.  Ephraim Radner, who wrote another piece that I quoted a few days ago, has this to say about uncertainty and Our Current Moment:

Uncertainty is at the center of the Christian vocation. Uncertainty may not comprehensively describe that vocation, but it defines it in an essential way. Many Christians will and do reject this claim, I realize. “We know with certainty all that is important to know!” they will say. God is in control; God is good; God rewards the faithful; Jesus is Lord, and in him death and sin are defeated; the gates of Hell will not prevail against the church, and heaven awaits us. These are indeed Big Picture certainties. But the Big Picture isn’t all there is to God’s reality or to the Christian’s life. Small pictures are the bits that make up the Big Picture’s mosaic. In these little corners of reality, dark holes of uncertainty await the unwary, and teeming abysses of confusion stand ready to swallow the complacent. In the Time of the Virus, church leaders seem to be focusing mostly on the Big Picture. They shouldn’t; it’s evangelically irresponsible.

That last phrase is sobering: the idea of being “evangelically irresponsible.”  If nothing else, it points to an interesting dynamic in how we articulate concerns based on the given moment.  When things are going smoothly in life, we focus (perhaps) on the small stuff.  When things are chaotic, we focus on the big stuff.  Radner continues:

Who knows what will happen tomorrow? None of us do. The entire book of Ecclesiastes flows out of this truth (cf. 8:7), which hovers about the whole of the Old Testament. It finds a classic assertion in James, as he goes after the confident traders of his day (4:14): “You do not know about tomorrow. What, after all, is your life?” The failure to grasp this reality is embodied in the confident rich man, saving his piled riches in a barn, whom Jesus berates in the voice of God: “Fool! Your life will be taken this very night! And then who will possess what you have gathered?” (Lk. 12:20). Everything resonates here: our lives, our families, our labor, our pastimes, our homes, our savings, our predictive obsessions.

“Who knows what God will do?” Radner adds.  And then “Who knows where I will end up?”  Both are good and legitimate questions that should come to mind when we think about life and how it intersects the biblical story.  Then Radner weaves it all together:

It is, of course, the present that is underlined in all these realms of ignorance. Because we do not know tomorrow, we do not know God’s plans or even the depth of God’s character in planning. We do not know how it all adds up, we are stuck firmly in this one place where God has thrust us, stripped of organizing frameworks of meaning based on the plotting of the stars. “Today,” God seems to say, “take stock of today.”

And today is not an empty moment, nor one solely inhabited by the fears or anxieties of an opaque future. “Do not be anxious about tomorrow,” Jesus both warns and encourages his disciples. Instead, “seek the kingdom and its righteousness” (Matt. 6:31–34). To all the questions of “who knows?,” the Scriptures respond with concrete gifts. Who knows about tomorrow? James says, “Be humble.” Who knows if God will be merciful? The prophets all respond, “Therefore repent” (Joel 2). Who knows what will become of us? The Psalmist writes, “Remember who God is!” (Ps. 74:12ff.). Today, simply because God has given it to us, is filled with grace; and the service of this grace today is one whose forms are manifold and beautiful, shaped by the humbled, repentant heart that speaks of God’s great works. That service is our vocation in the midst of uncertainty.

Radner has more to say in the article about the questions of the Bible and our rejection of the Sabbath and how our own foolishness can be at play when we miss the particular gifts of today.  All of these are reasons for you to read the rest of the article.  Definitely something to ponder as we continue on in this sobering time.

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A Slice of Comedic Genius

Posted on April 4, 2020 by awtraughber

Over the last few days, the folks at the Ringer have been running a “greatest TV character of the century” poll.  While I didn’t take part, I was glad to see that Michael Scott from The Office took the top spot.  Even though he may not be my personal favorite, he is quite the creation (even if his character is rooted in the original British version).

The poll paired with what has been at least a soft-stop to most of the entertainment industry has had some nice side-effects, one being this interview with Mike Schur, who has done more to make me smile over the last few years than anyone in the industry.  A guiding force for The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99, and The Good Place, he’s also had a hand in creating (or maybe mid-wifing) a number of great characters.  The interview goes into some nice depth.  It also includes links to some classic NBC comedy moments both recent and classic.  Here’s a snippet from the interview:

Most comedies, I would say, are pretty lo-fi in terms of premise. They’re like a bunch of people hanging out somewhere in an office or in an apartment building in Manhattan. In that case, the discovery of the characters—you have some idea at the beginning. You can’t run a pilot without some idea of like, this is the funny one and this is the snarky one and this is the uptight one. But the characters are built brick by brick slowly by a large group of people over, hopefully, many, many years and hundreds of episodes. You have to know something about the world and something about the characters, it’s just what the ratio is at the beginning of the project.

And then:

The Office was being built off of the template from the British show, but there were only four characters who meant anything in the British show. There was David Brent and Gareth, Tim and Dawn, and everybody else was either a two-dimensional cipher or never got developed. When Greg [Daniels] brought the British version to America, he started with Michael Scott, Dwight Schrute, Jim Halpert, and Pam Beesly, and then filled that office with 20 other people. He had some idea of who Oscar was and who Phyllis was, but he very deliberately left them blank at the beginning because it was like, let’s do this organically. Let’s get a bunch of funny people in a room and pitch on, who are these people? What’s their personality trait? How do we learn about them?

At this point, Brooklyn 99 is the only show of Schur’s left airing currently.  I was a late-comer to that show, binging it in the months leading up to it’s move from Fox to NBC.  And I’m really glad I got on-board.  It hasn’t had some of the obvious character evolution that we got in The Office or Parks and Rec (and the whole point of The Good Place was character evolution, so it doesn’t really count).  But there’s just enough growth to feel like there’s some movement . . . and the jokes and running gags are some of the best out their (making it a little more like 30 Rock than anything else).

I enjoyed the article so much that it got me to watch the first episode of Cheers, a show I did not watch in its hey-day.  Great episode with a nice set of comic turns (all while having some appropriate gravitas.  It’s good to laugh, I think.  And it’s good to have a place where you know everybody’s name, even if you’re just in the audience.

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The Howling

Posted on April 3, 2020 by awtraughber

A song to end the first week of the fourth quarter.  It’s a Rich Mullins classic that you don’t hear that often unless you look for it.  I love the sense of drive in the song.

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Attending to Tears

Posted on April 2, 2020 by awtraughber

It’s been interesting to watch some of the theological reflection that’s been going on by the pastor-theologian branch of things in light of the coronavirus.  It is good to have people try and make sense of things.  I appreciated Wright’s look at lament from a few days ago.  I also appreciate today’s post by Hans Boersma about reflecting on the Passion of Jesus in the midst of our own struggles with Our Current Moment.  After acknowledging our culture’s intent to always avoid pain and suffering, he writes:

No, I am not calling for an inversion of the cultural ethos, suggesting that we maximize pain and minimize pleasure. The coronavirus is an evil. We rightly do what we can to stop its transmission, and we ought to plead with God for mercy. We should not take lightly the tears caused by suffering. I am not suggesting that we stop reflecting and deliberating on the virus that has taken hold of our lives. But in order to rightly understand our present sufferings, we must reflect upon Christ’s.

The Gospel reading for Passion Sunday includes the words, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). He is not the only one weeping at Lazarus’s death. Martha and Mary are weeping, as is the entire community that is trying to console them (11:31, 33). The story is full of people weeping in the pain of passion. The story of Lazarus is the story of our world—a world of sickness and death, along with the inevitable consequence of mourning and weeping.

And then he makes an interesting but necessary pivot, a pivot away from our contemporary understanding of the story of Lazarus and towards what the early church fathers thought about such a moment.  He continues:

We do well to attend to Jesus’s tears, for it is only by meditation upon his tears that we are able to process our own. Why does Jesus weep? The question is pressing because Jesus cannot possibly be weeping in the same way that Martha, Mary, and the bystanders are weeping. The narrative doesn’t allow us to think that Jesus is mourning the loss of his friend. He has travelled to Bethany with the precise aim of raising Lazarus from the dead (11:4, 11). Hippolytus of Rome adroitly observes: “He wept but did not mourn.”

Why, then, does Jesus weep? He weeps because he meditates upon our passion. Just as we are called to “weep with those who weep” (Rom.15:12), so Jesus weeps with those who weep. (In fact, Saint Augustine suggests that the reason Jesus weeps here is to teach us to weep; this must at least be part of the picture.) Jesus weeps with Martha and Mary, with the Jewish bystanders, and with a world struggling with illness, suffering, and death.

This is, for those paying attention, where Wright didn’t go in his piece earlier in the week, at least not as clearly as Boersma does here:

The church fathers were fond of saying that whatever our Lord did in his incarnation, he did “for our sake.” His weeping is no exception. Jesus weeps “on account of the people standing round” (11:42). That doesn’t mean his tears are fake. Quite the contrary, as we have seen. But it does mean that Jesus’s tears are infinitely dissimilar to ours. They are not tears of impotence. They are the tears of God. And when God weeps, we may be sure our passion is about to yield to resurrection.

The whole piece is worth a read.  It’s also a nice re-directing for those observing Lent or simply preparing in their own way for the celebration of Easter in the context of disconnect and sadness.  It’s a welcome challenge to some of our presuppositions about things.

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Walking without an Umbrella

Posted on March 31, 2020 by awtraughber

Tonight was the first time in a while that I went out for a walk without an umbrella.  We had a beautiful sunset, which was a nice way to wrap things up before classes start.  The rest of the day was a balance of meetings, recording lectures and devotionals, and doing other last-minute things to get ready for tomorrow.  It was a good way to end break, though.  And it was fine to go for a long walk without an umbrella.

The last half of the walk I played some Switchfoot.  It’s odd to think that the band is not part of my students’ musical background.  Turns out that switched happened three or four years ago.  I still play one of their songs, “The Blues,” for class.  The other song, that I’ve loved since hearing it at a Donald Miller conference many years ago, is “Restless.”  At the time I didn’t know of its roots in the vocabulary of Augustine.  Now it’s a song that taps into a couple of different streams of thought and feeling.

Here’s Jon Foreman, the band’s lead singer, doing a live version of the song a few days ago as a kind of encouragement during Our Current Moment.

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Lamentations

Posted on March 30, 2020 by awtraughber

TIME Magazine recently published a short piece by N. T. Wright about Our Current Moment.  The title says it so well:  Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It’s Not Supposed To.  “That’s not supposed to be true,” you might found yourself saying, as Christianity is supposed to have the answer for everything.  And it does, but not in the way that we often think.  Wright begins with context:

For many Christians, the coronavirus-induced limitations on life have arrived at the same time as Lent, the traditional season of doing without. But the sharp new regulations—no theater, schools shutting, virtual house arrest for us over-70s—make a mockery of our little Lenten disciplines. Doing without whiskey, or chocolate, is child’s play compared with not seeing friends or grandchildren, or going to the pub, the library or church.

There is a reason we normally try to meet in the flesh. There is a reason solitary confinement is such a severe punishment. And this Lent has no fixed Easter to look forward to. We can’t tick off the days. This is a stillness, not of rest, but of poised, anxious sorrow.

All of that, for most of us now, is confounded.  And it leaves us asking questions, questions we should always be asking but that get brushed to the side when life hums right along,  Wright continues:

Rationalists (including Christian rationalists) want explanations; Romantics (including Christian romantics) want to be given a sigh of relief. But perhaps what we need more than either is to recover the biblical tradition of lament. Lament is what happens when people ask, “Why?” and don’t get an answer. It’s where we get to when we move beyond our self-centered worry about our sins and failings and look more broadly at the suffering of the world.

There’s the word: lament.  We don’t use it often, and definitely don’t regularly visit the slender Old Testament book that shares its name.  But it’s there, a deep tradition rooted in history because it is rooted in the human experience.   And it’s not something we’re comfortable with, not sure about because we use those muscles rarely if ever.  And yet it’s right there in front of us.

At this point the Psalms, the Bible’s own hymnbook, come back into their own, just when some churches seem to have given them up. “Be gracious to me, Lord,” prays the sixth Psalm, “for I am languishing; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror.” “Why do you stand far off, O Lord?” asks the 10th Psalm plaintively. “Why do you hide yourself in time of trouble?” And so it goes on: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever?” (Psalm 13). And, all the more terrifying because Jesus himself quoted it in his agony on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22).

Wright ultimately points to moments in the biblical story where God is grieved and Jesus weeps and the Spirit groans, suggesting that “[t]he ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to recognize the One God in the tears of Jesus and the anguish of the Spirit.”  Wright concludes:

It is no part of the Christian vocation, then, to be able to explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain—and to lament instead. As the Spirit laments within us, so we become, even in our self-isolation, small shrines where the presence and healing love of God can dwell. And out of that there can emerge new possibilities, new acts of kindness, new scientific understanding, new hope. New wisdom for our leaders? Now there’s a thought.

Lament can be difficult, particularly for those who lead.  Even this morning, as our faculty and staff gathered to prepare for a month of online learning, it was easier to nudge towards the positive side of things.  That’s probably a big draw for how these last two Sunday mornings have gone in living-room churches across the country.  Lament, though, might ultimately be a doorway to humility, which should always be a welcome virtue and a step in the right direction.

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Streams of Loving and Learning

Posted on March 28, 2020 by awtraughber

I spent a chunk of my afternoon today working trying to get a better understanding of what the next week of teaching will look like for me.  I checked out the platform that I’ll most likely be using to record particular lectures.  I tried to get a bit ahead on setting up my digital classrooms.  And I did my best to massage what the original plan was with what Our Current Moment will now require of me.

The move to online life has been inevitable, warmly welcomed by most.  And rightly so.  Even I have to admit that it was nice catching up with friends and co-workers yesterday.  And it was personable because we were mostly, oddly, in one another’s homes.  Now the internet has subsumed family, school, and work life in much the same way that it gathered up music and sports and so many other aspects of our lives.

So those who call into question this new, supposedly temporary, way of living are right to, because the rest of us have jumped in head-first.  We won’t like it, of course.  Even as I type this churches all around the world have posted a second set of online Sunday services (with some of the larger variety probably going full-on live in the morning).  People of faith are at an interesting place right now as we have found our places of gathering closed while so many other busy, sometimes crowded places are busy and open.

One online piece that I’ve been meaning to post about but haven’t over these last few days is this piece by Ephraim Radner about live-streaming worship services.  Radner, a priest in the Episcopal church, has written a couple of books over the last few years that have been encouraging challenges for me (most notably A Time to Keep, which I blogged about a couple of years ago).  So his approach to critiquing the on-lining of church services is interesting, slightly shocking, but also wise in how it points to some genuine and deep concerns.  Even he admits (in the comments) that the essay’s content is “deliberately meant to be provocative, and hence should be taken with a grain of salt.”  He goes on to say:

My hope is only that we be clear about why we are doing it, be clear about what we are actually accomplishing, and be clear about what we are NOT accomplishing in all this. Cyber-witness and cyber-evangelism has had its real successes; it has connected with people (and not just young ones) who otherwise might not know about the life of Christ and the Gospel or the Scriptures. I think, however, that it has failed to build people up in the Body of Christ in a lasting way — “maturity” — (numbers seem to bear this out), something that requires other practices and kinds of witness, ones that are deeper and more rooted in the long shape of the Christian tradition, that has been through these kinds of difficult moments many, many, many, many times in the past. (It is good to see that some people are finally trying to educate themselves about some of these past gifts.) The Time of the Virus is exposing all kinds of things. One of them is our churches’, and more pertinently, our own superficial hearts, long untethered from these practices and insights. How we get them back and deploy them today is a real responsibility. My main point is that we take this responsibility seriously, and not skate through this time on the basis of the thinly examined tools that are closest at hand. I believe that God really is speaking to us, somehow and in ways that ought properly to render us fearful in the fullest sense, in this moment. It will take a long time to hear and discern exactly what He is saying and grasp why He would say it in this way. But we need to start now and find ways to learn; and not to move on too quickly as if we know how to respond and deal with this all. Faith sometimes finds itself revealed as real in the mid-day darkness. It is okay to linger there with awe and open hands; maybe even necessary. I think that too is a genuine Christian witness.

You don’t have to have read You Are What You Love to pick up on the importance of formation and deformation in our practices as Radner understands them here.  It’s the same, in some ways, as the question of online learning.  Definitely necessary at times, as in Our Current Moment, but in the best ways such learning should remind us of the deep practices of learning that can include but ultimately transcend style and fashion.  We should be thankful for what we have, but we would also do well to ask hard questions of it.

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The Day before the Doctor

Posted on March 26, 2020 by awtraughber

doctor and roseIt wasn’t until today that I realized that the US version of The Office and the rebooted version of Doctor Who came into the world at the same time (15 years ago this week).  The Office gets a lot more airplay, of course, but Who has its own intense fanbase.  So much so that Russell T Davies, the original NuWho showrunner, just released a prequel to the series and a sequel to the run’s first episode, “Rose.”  Rose, played by Billie Piper, is the first companion of the ninth Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston.  The pair worked together for one season.  The two met when the Nestene Consciousness attempted to use the Autons to take over the planet (ah, classic NuWho).  You can read “Doctor Who and the Time War” here.  It begins with a reflection by Davies before jumping mid-sentence into the moment of regeneration for the Ninth Doctor.

Then the story continues with this sequel to “Rose” also written by Davies titled “The Revenge of The Nestene.”  It’s a good time to be a fan of the Doctor.

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