A Soul Pornographer

I just picked up a book shared by virtual friend Bruce Reyes Chow, Moderator for PC(USA) and local pastor/geek guy. It's called Insights From the Underside: An Intergenerational Conversation of Ministers, and while I'm going to post a review here in the future, I couldn't wait to share this gem from the Foreword by Rodger Nishioka:

It seems to me that much of what we are struggling with in ministry today is the dominant narrative of the romantic hermeneutic that tells us every single moment of ministry ... Is to be both productive and fulfilling and dramatic and life-changing. It simply is not nor can it be true. The challenge is to keep on keepin' on and to not subscribe to the romantic notions of ministry that surround us and ultimately disable us.

I'll pause here for full disclosure and admit that I come from a faith tradition that is steeped in the dominant narrative of which Dr. Nishioka speaks: The Pentecostal movement of the 20th Century was built on signs and wonders. Of the Assembly of God's Four Cardinal Doctrines, three refer to the productive, fulfilling, dramatic and life-changing (Salvation, as defined, is more a theological construct, something believed more than experienced). It isn't such a harmful thing, to believe in the demonstrable power of God in the life of the church -- and if I thought it were, I suppose this ordained minister from the AG would have found a different peg from which to hang my ministerial stole by now.

What I do think is dangerous, however, is the hyper-spirituality that can be cultivated from the notion that every moment in life should be saturated with climactic transcendence. I realize even as I write this that I am skating on thin ice, and I'm appropriately discomforted by the line I'm attempting to draw.   Perhaps a crude and deceptively simplistic comparison will help.

Hyper-spirituality is a kind of pornography of the soul.  It's the tendency to  kick down the door and demand to experience the fullness of God with the proverbial (or literal, in some cases) click of the button: the right song, the right chord, the right mood lighting, the right crowd, etc.  The healthy compulsion for increased intimacy with our Creator becomes perverted in the nature of the pursuit, becoming more about meeting the demands of the worshipper than in becoming immersed in the object of worship's affection. 

This is the mystery of worship and sexuality: that we are made whole by giving up what we sense is already ours.  My body, my personhood, my will are brought low in honor of the Other as a prerequisite to true intimacy.  One can't experience intimacy without trust, and one can't trust without taking the path of serving and becoming less.  We are given life by giving it up, and are freed to be identified and cherished without holding anything back for ourselves.

The etymology of the term pornography is "a catalog of prostitutes."  In much the same way friends are asking how seemingly unrelated activities contribute to the corrupt global sex trade, I am beginning to ask how I might be a Soul Pornographer -- an unwitting contributor to prurient self-interested consumers flippantly approaching the Holy for a spiritual fix; a pimp for nothing-deities of self-help or emotionally-overflowing yet spiritually empty exercises in self-gratification.  In what ways do I communicate quick, easy access to the marriage bed when a healthier perspective might admit that worship, like sex, begins with the routine motions of daily life?

I'm not much for the common prescriptions in dealing with pornography, which is usually something along the lines of "shame on you, shame on your sexuality, pray harder and stay away from porn."  Such approaches contribute to the vicious cycle of shame, guilt, personal diminishment and seeking out secret and ultimately unhealthy expression.  Instead, I encourage the guilt-ridden to experience the power of confession, forgiveness and community on the path of re-engaging healthy life patterns and appropriate relationships.  The same can be said of Soul Pornography: let's recognize the bright light of Christ's love surrounding us, inviting us out of the dark corners of addiction to hyper-spirituality, re-learning how to love and be loved, rejecting shortcuts to intimacy and discovering the depths and thrills of God's sacred love hidden like breadcrumbs in the mundane as we keep on keepin' on the path toward fulfillment.

Image Courtesy of xxxchurch.com.

RE-THINKING OBJECTIVITY

On the cusp of another New Year, a theme is emerging from the Seedbed of Imagination made fertile by the fallen ideologies of passing paradigms. That is to say, personal transformation requires a lot of grace and life taking a big fat dump on us once in a while.

My oldest son and I were talking the other day about how plants are so important to us because they take our poop and turn it into food. I know a couple of corners had to be cut to arrive at this conclusion, but bear in mind the kid is three years old.

We all can stand to remember where our food comes from and meditate for a hot minute on the way beauty emerges from less tasteful circumstances.

People from my world are addicted to superficiality. We prefer big new chain grocery stores to cruddy local markets, chemically-greened lawns to pulling weeds, leather interiors on our inefficient modes of transportation to the sights and smells of Muni, Fung-Shui'd empty living rooms to the messiness of cramped and crammed community, celebrity gossip to the real-life stories of less lovely neighbors and less-resources neighborhoods.

I like the idea of emergence precisely because embedded in the term is this imagery of decomposition. It's more than the rummage sale of Phyllis Tickle's Great Emergence -- it's the compost pile of the catholic Church's sordid love affair with anything not sourced in our beautiful Savior. We experience all these little deaths: the end of a project, a career, a dream, a relationship; and through these crises the lens through which we experience God and people and stuff shifts. This is what's common to us all, and cuts through the artifice of titles, position, and status -- that whether your name is Tickle, Jones, Pagitt, Scandrette or O'Hara, you're emerging from the death of Self and into the convergence of our story with the story of God.

In the new year, as balls and bombs drop, may we escape the illusion of superficial beauty and walk--no, run! --away from the slumbering suburbs and chic gentrified urban hamlets, let's buy local, let's ride our bikes and ride our trains, let's allow strange people into our imperfect living rooms and lives, let's read to kids in the neighborhoods we're too afraid to move into, and through it all, let's run into the arms of Shalom's very embodiment, Jesus who loved us and gave himself for us.

Or how about simply this: what if we treated Jesus less like a charm on our bracelets and more like our Rabbi, our Master Teacher? Would we be any different after a year of re-learning from Jesus what it means to be human?