What is the greatest cultural contribution of the American South? I know what I'd nominate:

Sweet tea.

Goodness how I love living in Texas because of the sweet tea. And when I say sweet tea I mean sweet. Very sweet.

I hate traveling outside of the South and going into restaurants and asking, "Do you have sweet tea?" The servers look at you and say, "No, but there is sweetener on the table."

Huh? Sweeter on the table, are you kidding me?

But you know what? Sweet tea is spreading. More and more, I'm finding it outside of the South. I used to never ask as the answer was sure to be no. But sweet tea is getting around, so it never hurts to ask when outside of the South.

Some people have seen the light.

Prayer is a hard thing for me get my head around. And so while I have a hard time getting my head around everything Tertullian says below, I find much of it eloquent, powerful and true:

Prayer is the one thing that can conquer God...

Its only skill is to call people back from the gates of death, give strength to the weak, heal the sick, exorcise the possessed, open prison doors, free the innocent from their chains. Prayer cleanses from sin, drives away temptations, stamps out persecutions, comforts the fainthearted, gives new strength to the courageous, brings travelers safely home, calms the waves, bemuses robbers, feeds the poor, overrules the rich, lifts up the fallen, supports the faltering, sustains those who stand firm.

All the angels pray. Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they come from their barns and caves they look up to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. The birds too rise and lift themselves up to heaven: they open out their wings, instead of hands, in the form of a cross, and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.

With much gratitude to Tara, let me point you to this remarkable essay--"Rethinking Service"--by Samuel Wells. Please read the whole thing.

In the essay Wells argues that when we think that our most pressing problems are human mortality and limitation this distorts Christian mission and service. In light of that, Wells suggests that perhaps our deeper problem isn't mortality but isolation:

Most educated people in our culture assume the fundamental human problem is mortality, specifically, and human limitation, more generally. But here is my argument. What if it turned out that the fundamental human problem was not mortality after all? What if it turned out that all along the fundamental human problem was isolation? What do I mean by this? If the fundamental human problem is isolation, then the solutions we are looking for do not lie in the laboratory or the hospital or the frontiers of human knowledge or experience. Instead the solutions lie in things we already have—most of all, in one another.

Wells goes on to suggest that if isolation is our deepest problem, the real ache at the root of our sadness and suffering, then Christian mission shifts in an important way. Wells describes this by contrasting the words "for" and "with." If human limitation is the fundamental problem we are always trying to fix things. We do things "for" people. But, Wells argues, doing things "for" others doesn't get at the root issue of isolation.

It seems that the word that epitomizes being an admirable person, the word that sums up the spirit of Christianity, is “for.” We cook “for,” we buy presents “for,” we offer charity “for,” all to say we lay ourselves down “for.” But there is a problem here. All these gestures are generous, and kind, and in some cases sacrificial and noble. They are good gestures, warm-hearted, admirable gestures. But somehow they don’t go to the heart of the problem. You give your father the gift, and the chasm still lies between you. You wear yourself out in showing hospitality, but you have never actually had the conversation with your loved ones. You make fine gestures of charity, but the poor are still strangers to you. “For” is a fine word, but it does not dismantle resentment, it does not overcome misunderstanding, it does not deal with alienation, it does not overcome isolation. 

What to do? After examining how God is "with" us, rather than doing things "for" us, Wells suggests that we shift mission and service from "for" to "with." What overcomes isolation is being "with" others. And being "with" rather than doing "for" radically alters what Christian mission should look like. This makes "with," in Wells' opinion, the most important word in the bible:

We have stumbled upon the most important word in the Bible—the word that describes the heart of God and the nature of God’s purpose and destiny for us. And that word is “with.” That is what God was in the very beginning; that is what God sought to instill in the creation of all things, that is what God was looking for in making the covenant with Israel, that is what God coming among us in Jesus was all about, that is what the sending of the Holy Spirit meant, that is what our destiny in the company of God will look like. It is all in that little word “with.” God’s whole life and action and purpose are shaped to be “with” us.

In a lot of ways, “with” is harder than “for.” You can do “for” without a conversation, without a real relationship, without a genuine shaping of your life to accommodate and incorporate the other...What makes attempts at Christmas charity seem a little hollow is not that they are not genuine and helpful and kind but that what isolated and grieving and impoverished people usually need is not gifts or money but the faithful presence with them of someone who really cares about them as a person. It is the “with” they desperately want, and the “for” on its own (whether it is food, presents, or money) cannot make up for the lack of that “with.”

Read the whole essay. Share it widely. It's really one of the best things I've read in a long, long time.

In Chapter 41 of The Rule of St. Benedict--"The Times for the Brother's Meals"--we read about how the Abbot should set mealtimes throughout the year. Sometimes the meal is adjusted around work in the summer. Sometimes it is adjusted around available daylight in the summer ("Let Vespers be celebrated early enough so that there is no need for a lamp while eating"). And sometimes meals are shifted (and fasting encouraged) depending upon where you are in the liturgical year.

In every season the Abbot is making these decisions to create a healthy atmosphere. And Benedict describes the goal of all this in an interesting way:

⁵[The Abbot] should so regulate and arrange all matters that souls may be saved and the brothers may go about their activities without justifiable grumbling.

Simply from a leadership perspective this is interesting. Certain aspects of leadership should be invisible. The Abbot is to so arrange the day that those arrangements don't become the focus. They simply support and facilitate the work.

But from a spiritual perspective what is interesting is how Benedict describes the setting of mealtimes as something that might save souls. Really? Eating lunch at noon or mid-afternoon can save souls?

In psychology there is research on what are called "hassles." We tend to think that emotional well-being is mainly affected by major life events, the big bad things that can happen to us. Job loss, divorce, bereavement. But research has found that small daily hassles, particularly if they accumulate, can be just as powerful a predictor of well-being. For example, a long, grinding commute doesn't seem to be a life tragedy. But day after day that commute can grind you down, dramatically affecting your emotional health. Chronic work stress has the same effect. Which is why, after all, we call it "the grind." It's a million little things and no one big thing that wears us down. If you look back at your last bad day odds are it wasn't bad because you got bad news. It was bad because the hassles started early and never let up. Car wouldn't start. You forgot an appointment. Computer wouldn't boot. Printer is out of ink. Kids need something for a school project due tomorrow. You lock your keys in the car. You broke your favorite coffee mug. There's a long line at the store. You got to work but realized you left something you needed back home. You forgot your phone charger. You lost a contact lens.

Little things are little, but they are important.

So Benedict says to the Abbots: pay attention to the little things. Little things are spiritually important. Souls might we saved or lost depending upon the grind of those little things.

One of the interesting tensions in the Old Testament are the mixed messages you get about kings. Are kings good or bad? At times the Old Testament reads like monarchist propaganda. At others times the OT reads like subversive, anti-monarchist literature.

Consider, for example, a theme at emerges late in the book of Judges. After recounting the heroic deeds of various judges the book begins, starting in 17.6, to sound the note "In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit." What follows are stories of social and moral dissolution, culminating in the horrific story in Chapter 19 and subsequent civil war. After all these tales of social chaos the book ends on the same note, "In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit." The suggestion seems to be that Israel needs a king and that without a king all hell breaks loose.

In 1 Samuel the people finally do clamor for a king. And based on the book of Judges this seems like a good move. And yet, this desire for a king is described by God as a sort of failure, a rejection of God as king:

1 Samuel 8.6-7
But when the people said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king."

The Lord goes on to direct Samuel to warn the people about kings. Kings will, God says, reign over you and claim their rights. Basically, kings are oppressors. Samuel goes on to give this stern warning:

“This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.” 

Kings look pretty bad in this account. Not much like the social and moral saviors the book of Judges leads you to believe.

Consider also the mixed reputation of Solomon in the Old Testament. Is Solomon a good king or a bad king? I expect most Christians would say that Solomon was a good king, given how wise he was. But the report is mixed. Yes, in 1 Kings 3 we get the famous story of Solomon asking for wisdom and his request being granted. That makes Solomon look like a very good king. Solomon also builds the temple. That looks like a good thing as well.

And yet, 1 Kings 11 goes on to recount Solomon's descent into idolatry:

1 Kings 11.1-10
King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.” Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been. He followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Sidonians, and Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. So Solomon did evil in the eyes of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely, as David his father had done.

On a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the detestable god of Moab, and for Molek the detestable god of the Ammonites. He did the same for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and offered sacrifices to their gods. The Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart had turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice. Although he had forbidden Solomon to follow other gods, Solomon did not keep the Lord’s command. 

Many OT scholars believe that Samuel's predictions about oppressive kings begins with the reign of Solomon. But you can also make a case that it began with David who took the wife of Uriah and had him killed. Basically, the kings of Israel recreate the bondage of Pharaoh in Egypt.

I don't have any big summative statement to make about all this, just the observation that the legacy of kings in the OT is very mixed. My gut reading is that while on one level there is a pro-monarchy slant to the OT there is, at key locations, subversive stories that undermine the royalist narrative and propaganda. Taken as a whole, as I read the OT, kings come off as pretty corrupt. Which is a pretty remarkable achievement for the OT given how powered elites would have wanted to shape the national narrative. Some of that effort is inscribed on the pages of the OT but it appears that the "view from below" successfully challenged the monarchist plotline. 

I was reading the book of Jeremiah the other day and came across this passage:

Jeremiah 18.16 (NASV)
To make their land a desolation,
An object of perpetual hissing;
Everyone who passes by it will be astonished
And shake his head.

Not every translation has the word "hissing" in the text. The NIV renders the passage this way:

Their land will be an object of horror
and of lasting scorn;
all who pass by will be appalled
and will shake their heads. 

In translations like the NIV the physical act of hissing is replaced with something more psychological, a feeling of scorn. 

The word "hissing" isn't overly common in the OT. Most of the references are in Jeremiah (18.6, 19.8, 25.9, 25.18, 29.18, 51.37). As hinted at by the NIV, the most common interpretation of hissing is that it was an act of derision. But I wonder if this psychological interpretation of hissing is missing something about the concrete act of making an actual hissing noise.

I ask because in one of my study bibles I found the following in the note to Jeremiah 18.16:

Hissing: in some ancient Near Eastern cultures hissing was not only a sign of derision but a magical means of keeping demons away; people hissed in order to ward off danger, like whistling in a cemetery.

In light of this, I've taken up hissing as a part of my practice in resisting the Principalities and Powers. I'm now hissing in meetings, in stores, in political discussions.

True, it's all a bit distracting to co-workers, friends and family, but spiritual warfare is spiritual warfare.

If you've read a good deal in theology you've heard the phrase "the church is a whore, but she is our mother."

If you haven't heard this phrase, well, I bet the title of this post really grabbed your attention. 

The quote is often attributed to St. Augustine though, as best I can tell, this is a mistaken attribution. The better source seems to be Dorothy Day. Dorothy once wrote:

“As to the Church, where else shall we go, except to the Bride of Christ, one flesh with Christ? Though she is a harlot at times, she is our Mother.”

Not exactly the oft-cited quote, but close.

Can anyone offer illumination on the source of the exact quote? Or should we assume the quote comes from Day, albeit modified?

The whore imagery of the quote has some issues. I've written a bit about this imagery in the bible. My main problem with the image is that when sexual promiscuity is being discussed men are the better exemplars. For example, in a recent meta-analysis examining gender differences in sexuality Peterson and Hyde noted that, while the genders aren't as different as we might think, men do tend to be more promiscuous. Their conclusion:

Despite the small gender differences found in this meta-analysis, the results indicate that men typically report more sexual behaviors and more permissive sexual attitudes than women. In particular, the current study indicated that men are more likely than women to report casual sex and permissive attitudes toward casual sex.¹

Those issues noted, people use the quote "the church is a whore, but she is our mother" to express their ambivalent feelings about the church. The fact is that many of us have love/hate relationships with our churches, our faith communities and our faith traditions.

On the one hand, the quote expresses harsh prophetic critique. The church has often been faithless, hypocritical, corrupt, unjust, abusive, intolerant, and violent.

And yet, on the other hand, the church brought many of us to Jesus. And still does. And for that gift we are grateful.

---

^{1. Petersen, J. L., & Hyde, J. (2010). A meta-analytic review of research on gender differences in sexuality, 1993–2007. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 21-38.}

In the cross Jesus triumphed over the spiritual forces of evil, winning the decisive victory over the principalities and powers. In Colossians 2.15 this victory is described using distinctive military imagery.

NIV
And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. 

The phrase "public spectacle" refers to the victory parade of a conquering Caesar or King returning to the capital city displaying the spoils and prisoners of war before a cheering and adoring citizenry. On the cross Jesus is leading just such a victory parade, displaying the disarmed "powers and authorities" and making "a public spectacle of them." Some other translations that try to bring out this meaning in Col. 2.15:

CEV
There Christ defeated all powers and forces. He let the whole world see them being led away as prisoners when he celebrated his victory.

Good News
And on that cross Christ freed himself from the power of the spiritual rulers and authorities; he made a public spectacle of them by leading them as captives in his victory procession.

The Voice
He disarmed those who once ruled over us—those who had overpowered us. Like captives of war, He put them on display to the world to show His victory over them by means of the cross. 

What is startling about this sort of language is how, from all appearances, it is Jesus, nailed to the cross, who is the one being publicly shamed, defeated and humiliated by Imperial Rome.

And yet, Col. 2.15 posits a crazy, insane and stunning reversal. On the cross Jesus makes a "public spectacle" of Rome. On the cross Jesus is shaming, disarming, humiliating and defeating the principalities and powers, taking them as captives in war.

Addressing the bullying in our schools, or anywhere for that matter, is a huge passion of mine. In my post The Gospel According to Lady Gaga I wrote about the death of Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14 year old who committed suicide because of bullying. Thinking about kids like Jamey I wrote:

This is what I think. I think every Christ-following church should start talking to their youth groups, saying unambiguously: We want you to be a wall of protection for kids like Jamey. Seek out and protect--emotionally and socially--every weird, weak, nerdy, lonely, queer kid at your school. We don't care if they are a goth, or a druggy, or a queer. Doesn't matter. Protect these kids. Churches should train their youth groups to be angels of protection, teaching them to find these kids and say, "Hey, I love you. Jesus loves you. So no one's going to bully you. Not on my watch. Come sit with me at lunch." That's what I think. I think every Christ-following church should start Guardian Angel programs like this, teaching their kids to stick up for kids like Jamey. Not with violence. But with welcome and solidarity. Because it's hard to bully a group. So let's welcome these kids into a halo of protection and friendship.

For those interested in this issue, friend of the blog Josh Barkey wanted to get the word out about a Kickstarter campaign for the short film LOCKER 212. LOCKER 212 is "a movie that tells the story of a high school bully who's in for a surprising revelation when he gets his wallflower-victim caught up in a conflict with school authority. It's an exploration of how making real, human connections with our most lost and hurting kids can help us alleviate the bullying and violence that have plagued our schools."    

Having dealt with the proper amount of food in Chapter 39, in Chapter 40 of The Rule of St. Benedict Benedict turns to the issue of "The Proper Amount of Drink."

Benedict wants the monks to refrain from wine. This was, apparently, the ideal of the earliest monastic communities. But Benedict recognizes he's fighting a losing battle. The monks want their wine. And so he accommodates them in a charming passage:

⁶We read that monks should not drink wine at all, but since the monks of our day cannot be convinced of this, let us at least agree to drink moderately, and not to the point of excess.

Given the contentious nature of alcohol consumption in Protestant Christianity in America Benedict's advice seems very wise. We aren't all going to agree on this issue, so "let us at least agree to drink moderately, and not to the point of excess."

Incidentally, this is one of the great failures of Protestant Christianity, a failure to teach young people how to drink moderately. Young Christian people, growing up in conservative homes, are exposed to only two models of alcohol consumption: teetotaling (the church model) versus binge drinking (the cultural model). Christian teens just aren't exposed to models of responsible drinking, where you get a pint or share a bottle of wine and have a nice long conversation with friends. Where do Christian teens see that model in church or on TV/movies? It's a model Europeans know very well, but is all but unknown to conservative Christian youth in the USA.

I have long been a fan of David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" commencement address at Kenyon college. That address has now been made into a wonderful short film:


THIS IS WATER - By David Foster Wallace from The Glossary on Vimeo.

Readers of Unclean might recall the hot water the "This Is Water" speech got me in with my church. In a sermon I delivered at my church I read the part of Wallace's speech which included the line:

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. 

Well, who knew the word "crap" would be so upsetting? A bunch of people at church freaked. Freaked. I got letters in the mail. Complaints were made to the church leaders. And I was put on "sermon time out" to let the fire die down.

Though, to be fair, this was the same sermon where I used the fly in the urinal illustration. So...I guess there were a few things to get upset about.

Which is to say....BEST SERMON EVER!!!!!!

Regular readers know that I've started taking to wearing overalls. Last week at the Pepperdine lectures my friend Mark Love was kidding me about not bringing my overalls to Malibu.

Let me tell you, they were in my hand. But my suitcase was too full. And I figured that the vision of me walking around in overalls on the Pepperdine campus might have pushed people a bit too far. I'm already working the long hair and tattoo. If I added wearing overalls I'm 100% confident the campus police would have picked me up. For no crime other than looking extraordinarily bizarre.

But now that I'm back home I was in overalls all day today. Good to be back in my ugly town. I fit right in here.

Why am I wearing overalls? What's the allure?

Here's what I think is going on.

As regular readers know I'm a bit of a Civil Rights movement freak. Along with David and Jennifer Dillman I've taken ACU students on a Freedom Ride through the south. I'm met Freedom Riders James Zwerg and Bernard Lafayette. Lafayette was also a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement and a founding member of SNCC. I've sang freedom songs with Hollis Watkins (video proof here), leader of Freedom Summer in Mississippi. I've walked the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma and sat at the dining room table of Martin Luther King, Jr..

I'm a bit of a nut when it comes to this stuff. The Civil Rights activists are heroes of mine. I go to them and the history of the movement over and over again for inspiration.

And when you look at pictures of the Civil Rights activists from the '50s and '60s guess what they are wearing, particularly the activists who walked the dusty roads of Mississippi during Freedom Summer?

You guessed it.

Overalls.

I think Jana is convinced that I'm wearing overalls because I want to look like a Civil Rights worker from the 1960s. I disagree, of course, because that would be ridiculous. But then again...I am a bit ridiculous.

(Last week in a store I came across one of those plaques that have an inspirational saying on them for your home of office. I usually don't like the sayings, but this one caught my attention:

Imperfection is beauty,
madness is genius.
and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous
than absolutely boring.

That's me. Absolutely ridiculous. But never boring.

BTW, I believe that quote is from Marilyn Monroe. And I think it's sort of awesome (and ridiculous) that I just quoted her as a fount of wisdom. It's a strange world.)

But getting back to Jana, there is a bit of truth in what she thinks. I've so immersed myself in the '50s and '60s, often idealistically, I've internalized the aesthetic from this era. I love it. The fashion. The furniture. The decor. Jana can tell you, if I walk into a retro 1950s diner I'll just about have a heart attack.

Why were those Freedom Summer kids wearing overalls? Some were just rural kids from the Deep South. But many of the city kids took to wearing overalls because as they walked from shack to shack during those hot and dangerous Mississippi days they found that if they were wearing overalls the rural folk were more welcoming, more at ease. And so many of the workers began wearing overalls to help with their voter registration efforts.

There is little doubt that all those photos of my heroes wearing overalls has affected me. Those overalls have an aura about them, a halo of heroism. Those Civil Rights workers have made me come to believe, I think unconsciously, that overalls are just really, really cool.

And so I wear them. Even if that makes me look a bit ridiculous.

Preach it, Marilyn Monroe, preach it.

Many of you have emailed me pointing to the remarks of kidnapping survivor Elizabeth Smart, who recently spoke at a Johns Hopkins University human trafficking forum. Rachel has a post up right now about Elizabeth's presentation.

Reflecting on her experience of rape by her abductor, and on why many victims stay with their abusers, Elizabeth made a connection with the Christian purity culture. Specifically, Elizabeth noted that, because of the sexual abuse she endured, she “felt so dirty and so filthy,” ruining her for the rest of her life. Such feelings create an inhibition to return to the world where you will be marked and known as "damaged goods." Who would want you--who would marry you--if you escaped or left?

In making this connection Elizabeth describes hearing a lecture as a young person on abstinence where sex was compared to chewing gum. From the Christian Science Monitor article:

“I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I'm that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.' And that's how easy it is to feel like you no longer have worth, you no longer have value," Smart said. "Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value."

Again, many of you have pointed me to Elizabeth's remarks because in my book Unclean I give some psychological insight as to how the Christian purity culture produces this experience of "damaged goods." And the analysis in Unclean also provides a start on answering Rachel's question at the end of her post:

So what’s the alternative? How can we teach young people to value the sacredness of sex and the importance of responsibility without resorting to shame-based, fear-based tactics? 

As I argue in Unclean, I think the first step here is attending to how we metaphorically frame sexual sin, particularly for females. I recently summarized all this in a recent post.

...

Why is the Christian purity culture so toxic and shaming? Where does the feeling of "damaged goods" come from? Why do females carry the weight of this experience more than males?

And what might we do to change all this?

The answers have to do with the psychology of purity.

At root, purity is a food-attribution system, a suite of psychological processes that help us make judgments about whether or not it is safe or healthy to eat something.

One aspect of purity psychology is how we make contamination appraisals. The psychologist Paul Rozin has been a pioneer in naming and describing these appraisals. And one of these appraisals is the judgment of permanence.

To illustrate this Rozin will put, say, a cockroach in a glass of juice and swish it around. He then removes the bug and offers the juice for participants to drink. They, of course, refuse. That's to be expected. But then the interesting part of the experiment begins. Rozin goes on to sterilize the juice in front of the watching participant. He then makes another offer. Participants continue to refuse. This despite knowing, at a rational level, that the juice has been sanitized. So why refuse? Because at the affective level a judgment of contamination continues to dominate. The juice is judged as unclean. Despite all efforts to purify, sanitize, or rehabilitate.

Rozin's demo illustrates the attribution of permanence, which is a key part of purity psychology. The judgment appears to be "once contaminated, always contaminated." The implication here is that contamination--a loss of purity--is a catastrophic judgment creating a state that cannot be rehabilitated. The foodstuff is, as we say, ruined. And if ruined it's only fit for the trash.

As I discuss in Unclean, what happens when we structure parts of our moral experience with the metaphor of purity is that we import the psychology of contamination into our moral and spiritual lives. That is, we start to use the attribution of permanence (along with other purity appraisals I talk about in Unclean) when thinking about moral failure and sin. A loss of purity is understood to be permanent and is unable to be rehabilitated because, well, that's the way purity works.

Now what is peculiar about all this is that we use the purity metaphor in an uneven manner. Most sins don't get the purity metaphor. True, generally understood sin is understood to be a purity violation. But particular sins aren't typically viewed as a purity issue. Most sins are framed, metaphorically, as mistakes or errors, as performance failures. Another common metaphor here is sin as a form of stumbling or falling. What is important to note about these metaphors--performance failures and stumbling--is that these metaphors aren't catastrophic in nature. That is, they can be easily rehabilitated. If you make a mistake you try again. If you stumble and fall you get back up. Inherent in the logic of the metaphor is an obvious route to rehabilitation.

But not so with the purity metaphor. When the sin is framed as a purity violation the damage that is done is total and unable to be rehabilitated. A purity violation creates a state of irreversible ruin.

And with that in mind let's ask ourselves, what sin categories are almost exclusively regulated by purity metaphors in our churches?

Answer: sexual sins, the loss of virginity in particular.

Think about it. I bet most of us would say that the sin most Americans are guility of is materialism. I bet most of us would even say that materialism is the sin most killing the church. And yet, when did you ever hear a talk about "materialism purity"? Beyond never hearing such a talk, the phrase "materialism purity" just sounds weird. And try tacking "purity" onto any other sin. Fill in the blank: "__________ purity." Can you think of any sin--except "sexual purity"--that works in the blank, that doesn't sound weird when framed as a purity violation?

The point is, we treat sexual sins and the loss of virginity very differently from other sins, as a class of sin unto itself. And how do we make that happen? We accomplish this by framing these sins almost exclusively with purity metaphors. And in doing so we recruit a psychological system built upon a food-aversion system, a system driven by disgust, revulsion, and nausea. But instead of directing these feelings toward food we are now directing the feelings of disgust, revulsion and nausea toward human beings. More, we teach our children to internalize and direct these feelings toward themselves.

And I think we can sharpen this point even more.

Based upon my experience, I would argue that male sexual sin isn't generally framed as a purity violation. The loss of male virginity still gets the performance failure metaphor. If a boy losses his virginity it's a mistake, a stumbling. Consequently, this is something he can easily rehabilitate. He's not damaged goods. He can simply resolve to do better going forward. How is this so easy for him? Because his sexuality is being regulated by a performance metaphor.

By contrast, and this is the heart of of the matter, the loss of female virginity is almost exclusively regulated by the purity metaphor. For females the loss of virginity is a bit more than a performance failure. It's a loss of purity that, because of the way purity works, is catastrophic and beyond rehabilitation. And because of this she's got no way to move forward, metaphorically speaking. The game's over. And thus she reaches the only conclusion the purity metaphor makes available to her: She's damaged goods. And all the emotions related to that judgment of contamination rush forward as she internalizes all the shame, disgust, revulsion and nausea.

This is the psychology that makes the Christian purity culture so toxic.

But this analysis also suggests a way forward, a way to attenuate the damage done by purity cultures by consciously attending to the way we metaphorically frame sexuality for both men and women.

...

Be sure to check out the Elizabeth Smart Foundation.

While at Pepperdine I got to have a great conversation with Mark Moore, CEO and Founder of MANA Nutrition.

I wrote about MANA last fall when the Manabago came to visit ACU. MANA Nutrition is an organization that makes and provides RUTF--Ready to Use Therapeutic Food--which is designed specifically to treat kids diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition (SAM). RUTF is  fortified peanut butter that is given over a six- to eight-week period (three MANA packets a day) to bring a SAM child back from the brink of death.

To help raise awareness about MANA, RUTF, and SAM Alex Cox and Mark Slagle got in a 1971 Winnebego--affectionately named the Manabego--to tour the country. Alex, Mark and Manabego visited ACU last fall and allowed my boys and I to go inside and check out their sweet ride.

Unfortunately, at Pepperdine Mark informed me that, later in the trip, the Manabego blew up. Right outside the Pepperdine campus. Footage below.

Undaunted, Mark and Alex continued their tour, hitchhiking to each stop to keep spreading the word.

And there is more. Mark and Alex have now started a company--Good Spread. Good Spread works with a "buy one, give one" model. Buy a packet of Good Spread peanut butter for yourself or your family and you buy a packet of MANA for SAM child.

The Good Spread story, along with footage of the Manabego explosion:


The Good Spread Story from Good Spread on Vimeo.

I had a great time at the Pepperdine lectures last week. It was humbling getting to meet so many of you who read the blog. It was an honor to talk and visit with you.

While at the lectures I had some free time on Wednesday morning, so I took the recommendation of Dana (offered in one of her comments here) to drive north from Malibu to Ventura to check out the San Buenaventura Mission. I love old churches and have never visited a Spanish mission. So that's what I did with my free time at Pepperdine. While most people went to the beach or hiked in the hills and canyons, I drove north to visit a historic mission.

I arrived around 9:30 in the morning. The gate to the garden was open so I went in. I was alone, had the place to myself.

It was a beautiful little Moorish garden with a fountain in the middle. Sitting there listening to the birds and the water I noted that the door to the church was also open. So I wandered in to look around.

The chapel was empty. It was dark, with the morning sunlight cutting paths through the air. I could still smell the incense from the morning Mass. I went down to the front where there was a large crucifix on the wall.

After lighting a candle for a friend, I sat on the front row.

The old kneeler creaked loudly in the silent space, with a big echoing knock when it hit the floor. I knelt and took out my prayer book for morning prayers.

As I prayed--moving through the psalms, the collects, the readings, the Lord's Prayer--I kept looking up at the figure of Jesus looking down at me.

I noticed his knees, a distinctive feature of the chapel crucifix of San Buenaventura Mission. You expect to see blood associated with the Five Sacred Wounds, the wounds to Jesus' hands, feet and side. Those along with the blood from the Crown of Thorns. But the body of Christ on the cross at San Buenaventura Mission has two more distinctive wounds--bloodied knees. These would be the wounds associated with Jesus' three falls, three of the Stations of the Cross.

I finished the prayers in the prayer book, but didn't want to leave. I was alone in the chapel and wanted to linger. Wanted to keep smelling the incense and watch the morning sunlight come through the windows. I wanted to keep looking up at the crucifix. So I keep kneeling.

I took out my prayer beads. I used the beads to repeatedly pray the ancient prayer "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner."

As I kept coming back to the word "mercy" I started to weep. I wasn't sure where the tears were coming from. Maybe I was tired. Maybe it was the place. Maybe I'm a sentimental fool.

But what slowly welled up inside of me was this acute sense of my sin. My vanity, selfishness, rivalries, envies, judgments, insecurities, impatience, pride. It all got pulled to the surface. This vision of who I am and how this isn't who I want to be.

And so I wept, and prayed for mercy. While the figure with the bloodied knees looked down upon me.

Chapter 39 of The Rule of St. Benedict deals with "The Proper Amount of Food." Benedict asks that there be enough food provided for the monks and that there be diversity of food so that tastes might be accommodated. The rule governing food isn't extreme asceticism but, rather, the avoidance of overindulgence. As Benedict summarizes:

⁸For nothing is so inconsistent with the life of any Christian as overindulgence.

As I ponder this I wonder if this isn't one of the great weaknesses of Christianity in the modern world. To not put too fine a point on it, I don't ever recall hearing a sermon about gluttony in my life. And if you are like me you regularly struggle with over eating.

And the issue here really is less about self-mortification than about acquiring basic skills of self-mastery across the craving, appetitive spectrum, from the physical to the psychological. I believe this is a part of what fasting, from anything, is all about.

How much of church life is aimed at helping Christians gain rudimentary levels of self-control and self-mastery? And can much be accomplished by way of spiritual formation if these basic skills of self-denial aren't in place?

Think about it. How much self-mastery is involved, say, in forgiving others or loving enemies or spending time with difficult people? How much self-mastery is involved, say, in listening rather than talking, in taking take the last place, in stooping to serve?

And if those are the high hurtles of self-overcoming, how much are we practicing, on a day to day basis, on much smaller challenges?

In yesterday's post I talked about cherem in the Old Testament. Cherem was the command in various books of the OT for the Israelites to kill all living things within a conquered city, all men, women, children and livestock. As I noted in yesterday's post, cherem was a form of sacrifice, a holocaust, a burnt offering to God.

[Note: holocaust means "burnt offering."]

As we all know, the cherem texts are some of the most difficult texts in the bible. They make God look like a genocidal monster. Which is why I offered a different, non-violent reading of those texts in yesterday's post.

For today, however, I'd like to make a comment about cherem and annihilationism.

Annihilationism is the view that hell isn't eternal conscious torment but is, rather, the destruction/annihilation of the wicked on Judgment Day. That is, the fire of God doesn't torture/burn people in hell forever and ever. Rather, the fire of God consumes and destroys the wicked. The wicked cease to exist--that is their punishment--and don't enjoy the blessings of eternal life.

While I do think annihilationism is a better view than eternal conscious torment, I have a few, pretty big, objections about annihilationism. And the biggest one is this:

Annihilationism is cherem.

And this isn't hyperbole on my part. I'm not trying to provoke. Defenders of annihilationism themselves point to cherem in the OT as a model for how to understand God's "consuming fire."

Annihilationism is cherem. Annihilationism is holocaust.

And that's why I recoil with a bit of horror at annihilationism. Really? I think. Holocaust is your view of God? The most monstrous texts in all of the bible are the texts you want to build your theology around?

For my part, as regular readers know, I believe in the ultimate victory of God's love--a love that will involve judgment and a moral reckoning. I take the hell passages very, very seriously. I also believe in holocaust.

But this holocaust is the holocaust the Christian mystics spoke about: The holocaust of God's love. This is the purifying and refining fire of God, the holocaust of God's love that consumes sin.

As I argued in yesterday's post, the practices of cherem were judged when the prophets began to reject the holocaust tradition. Or, rather, when the prophets began to radically reinterpret the burnt offering tradition. A reinterpretation that culminates in Jesus. God wants a holocaust of the heart. That is the burnt offering that God desires. That is the holocaust that God will bring upon us.

A holocaust that consumes sin, not human beings.

I've been teaching through the entire bible in my class out at the prison, starting at the beginning with the book of Genesis. A few weeks ago we got to the book of Joshua.

Joshua is a hard book. It's basically a story of war and conquest, of the tribes of Israel entering the Promised Land and eradicating and displacing the peoples living in the land.

And throughout the story we encounter the practices related to cherem.

Cherem (also spelled herem) refers to the wholesale destruction of all living things--men, women, children and animals--that God commands when the Israelites captured a city. The word occurs 21 times in the Old Testament and most of those, eight references, occur in the book of Joshua.

It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that the cherem texts are the most difficult texts in the bible and that their existence in the bible may be the single greatest reason why people come to reject the bible and the faiths built upon it.

So what are we to make of the cherem texts?

I've no great answers, but I'd like to share some thoughts on how the cherem texts might be read non-violently.

Yes, you read the right. This is a post about how to read the cherem texts non-violently.

To set the stage I'd like to suggest that cherem should be viewed as a part of a theodicy, as a way Israel explained exile to herself. Most scholars believe that Joshua was written during the exile, as a part of the Deuteronomist stream in the OT (along with other sources like the Priestly, Yahwist and Elohist). And if that seems to be a bit too historical-critical for your tastes, Joshua is aware of the Divided Kingdom (e.g., both Judah and Israel are mentioned in 11.21, a distinction that would only make sense after the Divided Kingdom), the fracturing of the Davidic dynasty, which eventually culminated in exile.

So how is Joshua a theodicy? Well, the author of Joshua looks back and describes how Israel, at least at the beginning, had an absolute hostility toward idolatry. In the book of Joshua this hostility--of which cherem is the most extreme example--is a religious, ideological, and national ideal.

So the ideal was for Israel to have extreme antipathy toward their pagan neighbors and the gods they worshiped. Trouble is, the book of Joshua ends on an ambivalent note as Joshua predicts that, after his death, Israel's hostility toward false gods will fade and that they would, eventually, turn from Yahweh to idols. Joshua's prediction at the end of the book:

Joshua 24.19-20
Joshua said to the people, “You are not able to serve the Lord. He is a holy God; he is a jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion and your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you, after he has been good to you.” 

The people, of course, object to Joshua's prediction. Still, after all those cherem texts an ambivalent note is struck at the end of the story and, given the hindsight of exile, Joshua's words are found to be prescient. The people don't keep up the antipathy toward foreign gods--an antipathy embodied in the cherem commands--and they turn away from God. And as Joshua promised, exile soon followed.

The point here is that cherem is working within a theodicy. Specifically, if Israel would have kept up her antipathy toward idolatry--of which cherem played a part--then exile wouldn't have happened.

But Joshua is more than an explanation about the origins of exile. Joshua is also viewed as a sermon, a sermon being preached to a people living in exile among false and foreign gods. And it's message seems to be crystal clear: Remember Joshua and the cherem! Be like Joshua and show unwavering hostility to these foreign gods you are living with!

That is how the story tends to be interpreted, an interpretation that leans toward rather than away from religious violence. But I'd like to flip that interpretation on its head.

Okay, with all that as background let's move into my argument.

I'd like to start by suggesting that cherem was a logical outworking of the Levitical purity tradition. Cherem wasn't just warfare. Cherem was a form of religious sacrifice, a holocaust in particular. Cherem was a burnt offering for God.

[Note: holocaust means "burnt offering" or "a sacrifice consumed by fire."]

Why is cherem the logical outworking of the Levitical purity tradition? As I describe in Unclean the purity, holiness, and sacrificial impulse of the Levitical tradition sets in motion a process of dehumanization. To be a holy people "set apart" creates an ingroup/outgroup psychology that eventually leads toward outgroup hostility. Cherem--killing outgroup members because they are impure and unclean--is simply the endpoint of that trajectory. The purity/holiness impulse logically leads to violence. Basically, holocausts lead to Holocausts: the sacrificial logic of Leviticus leads to cherem.

Cherem--eradicating the pagans, offering them up as burnt offerings--was an act of purification.

Having noted the connection between cherem and the Levitical tradition we can now turn toward a non-violent reading of the cherem texts. To do this there are two moves we need to make.

The first move is this. If cherem represents the logical outworking of the Levitical tradition--how the pursuit of purity will eventually manifest in scapegoating violence--then we need to note that the Levitical tradition comes under criticism within the biblical narrative. The bible is a story that turns against itself in interesting ways, often beating modern skeptics to the punch.  Any reading of the cherem texts needs to take note of the fact that the prophets and parts of the Wisdom tradition strongly criticize the Levitical tradition of which cherem is a part. According to these texts God isn't pleased with holocausts. Burnt offerings, and I'm arguing that we should see cherem as a burnt offering, are not desired by God:

Hosea 6.6
For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.

Psalm 40.6
Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—but my ears you have opened—burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. 

My point here is that the bible gets there first, beats modern readers to the punch in criticizing cherem. Though burnt offerings are a part of the OT, their theological significance is also strongly questioned and rejected. I think this affects how we read the cherem passages. There is a stream of biblical material that argues that God doesn't desire or require burnt offerings like cherem. And as I argue in Unclean, in the gospels I think Jesus aligns himself with this stream of material in his teaching that God "desires mercy, not sacrifice."

Noting all this is important, but it doesn't yet get us to a non-violent reading. Let's move on to the final observation that gets us there.

Recall again that Joshua was written during the exile. And as I described above many have read Joshua as a sort of cautionary tale for those living in exile among foreign gods. The message many presume Joshua is preaching is that during exile Israel should follow the example of Joshua showing a cherem-like hostility toward idolatry and their pagan oppressors. Basically, Joshua, with its stories of cherem and military conquest, is a heroic story to inspire religious zealotry.

But I wonder if that understanding is correct.

Having recently read the book of Joshua I was struck by the following: Cherem doesn't work. That seems to be one of the take home points of the book.

Cherem, as a burnt offering, had the practical goal of keeping Israel pure and separate from false gods. One way to accomplish this purification, obviously, was the eradication of pagan neighbors and their idols. It's hard to be tempted into idolatry if those idol-worshipers no longer exist.

But at the end of the book Joshua predicts failure. And the reader in exile knows Joshua was right. Cherem didn't work, it didn't lead to the purification of Israel. How come?

For two reasons. First, as the book of Joshua makes clear Israel couldn't kill everybody. A cherem-inspired strategy of "kill them all" just wasn't practicable. And Joshua makes that clear. Israel wasn't able to make herself pure and "set apart" by violently eradicating paganism in the land. Israel couldn't use violence to religiously isolate herself in the world. Cherem couldn't create a social quarantine. At the end of the day, Israel was going to have to live with and among pagans and foreign gods.

And what outcome does Joshua predict about how that's going to work out? He predicts failure and eventual exile. Which is exactly what happens.

And I believe this failure at the end of the story creates a deep ambivalence about the practices of cherem read about earlier in the story.

Basically, the ending of Joshua suggests the following interpretation: Israel's real problem, its deep problem, is a heart problem. It's not a pagan neighbor problem.

Joshua seems, at the end of the book, to accept living with and among pagan neighbors as a given, as an ongoing reality, as an inevitability that violence won't ever change. Purity via social quarantine just isn't possible. It's as if Joshua is saying, "Killing our neighbors isn't going to protect or purify us. We are our own worst enemy." At the end of the story Joshua seems to  argue that what is needed are hearts devoted to God, not pagan cities devoted (cherem) to God. As Hosea 6.6 states, what is needed are not holocausts but "acknowledgement of God." And on that score Israel fails.

Is this a plausible reading of Joshua? Is Joshua a story about the failure of cherem? I think so. To see this let's try to get inside the head of the Jewish reader reading Joshua in exile.

To start, we must imagine the murderous hate many of the Jews felt toward their captors and oppressors. See Psalm 137.1-4, 8-9:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How can we sing the songs of the Lord
while in a foreign land?

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

We can imagine how this hate fed a violent desire to kill and eradicate the pagans, to practice cherem upon them. (A hate, we might add, that the Jews felt toward the Romans in the NT. And Jesus speaks into that hate the very un-cherem-like sermon of "Love your enemies and turn the other cheek.")

Now imagine handing the book of Joshua to these hate-filled people, a people itching to kill the pagans and dash their babies against the rocks. What do you think they would take away from the book of Joshua? That cherem is a good idea? Or a bad idea?

Yes, cherem is in the book. Which, given a superficial reading, suggests that Joshua is pro-cherem and, thus, a book that fans the flames of religious violence.

But that reading fails to take into consideration the failure at the end of the book. A failure that produced the exile the reader is now experiencing. And I wonder, by the end of the book, would the hate-filled reader really walk away with the view that the solution to Israel's exile problem was more cherem? Or would the reader come to see and accept the conclusion of Joshua, that living with and among pagans is inevitable, and that faithfulness to Yahweh, with and among pagans, rather than violence, is the only way to holiness.

Basically, cherem and holocausts didn't prevent exile.

But, ironically, "acknowledgement of God" while living with the pagans would have.

And if that's so, what's the final lesson of Joshua?

Imagine internalizing that message in exile among the pagans. 

Food for thought.

What does it mean to give your life away in order to give life to others? What does it mean to say that love is sacrificial, a taking up the cross, a form of self-denial?

In trying to puzzle this out I've meditated a great deal on this quote from Arthur McGill:

The way of Jesus is the way of self-expenditure.

Is that hyperbole? Dysfunctional? Is it suicidal? A thirst for martyrdom?

I don't think so, but I do think there is a martyrological sensibility to all this. This is what I think:

Love is the  allocation of our dying.

Life is a finite resource always slipping away. Every minute that passes is a passing of life, a movement toward death. Every moment we are being expended and used up.

But we have some choices in how we are expended. We can allocate our dying. We can specify the times and places of our dying.

My point here is that, because life is a finite resource, giving ourselves to others is a very real sort of sacrifice. It's not suicidal or dysfunctional, but it is sort of martyrological in that I am literally dying the minutes I spend with you. To be with you--to love you--is to die a little bit. A sacrificial giving of my life to you.

When we think of "giving our lives away" our minds tend to jump to big, dramatic gestures. And it can be that sort of thing. In crisis situations people do act heroically, giving their lives in a big single action to save others. But I wonder if the difference here is more quantitative rather than qualitative, a matter of degree rather than of kind. Because to love other people in small but tangible ways over a lifetime is a way of dying. But a slower, drip, drip rather than a big splash.

Which is to say that I do think there is something sacrificial and martyr-like in giving small gifts of love to each other. Love is a sacrifice, an expenditure.

Love is a beautiful way to live, which means that love is, in the final analysis, a beautiful way to die.

Since posting yesterday about One Voice for Change, I've had a few conversations about the pragmatics of advocacy in the church.

Should you wait and play the long game? Or take a stand right here and right now, no matter how inconvenient the timing?

Idealism and pragmatism always seem to come into conflict. And what is sad about that is that it pits allies against each other. What to do? I left this comment in the thread to yesterday's post:

People have to do what they think is right. And that might mean playing the long game, tilling the soil and preparing the next generation where a harvest will be reaped. Others will see this as a bright moral line in the sand, a tangible form of injustice and that Jesus's call isn't to "effectiveness" or "growth" but to death in suffering for others.

And all that just describes the conflict between the people who agree with each other. Let alone the people who disagree.

The point being, we just have to trust that God will work through it all. Do what you think is right, but extend mercy. As I told a person involved with One Voice for Change, when it is all said and done we are all, no matter where we end up on the issue, going to have to forgive each other, over and over and over. Forgiving seventy-times-seven.

No one gets out of this without some damage to relationships. Even if you try to do nothing, as doing nothing creates conflict with those who want to so something.

We will hurt each other. No escaping that. And the only answer for that eventuality is mercy.

If you are a member of the Churches of Christ, and attending any of our lectureships during the year, let me introduce the One Voice for Change movement.

Over the last few years the Churches of Christ have made great progress in moving toward gender justice and equity. And yet, more progress can be made.

Given that the Churches of Christ have a free church structure, with each local church governing itself, the bible lectureships hosted by our universities are important places to have critical cross-congregation dialogue, advocate for change, and shape our collective imaginations. And lectures such as the Pepperdine Lectures and the ACU lectures have made great strides in including the voices of women.

To date, however, women have not been invited to give a Keynote sermon at our lectureships. One Voice for Change is a movement seeking to change that, a year long effort to request that women be invited to participate in the Keynote sermons at our lectureships.

Thus, this year, 2013, will be a year of conversation, advocacy and prayer.

If you are attending the Pepperdine Lectures next week look those wearing a One Voice for Change button to jump start conversation and networking. And wear a button yourself if you find a friend handing them out so that you can show support and catalyze conversation.

And beyond that show of support, engage in prayerful conversation with members of your local congregation, expressing your desire to see a woman Keynote at our lectures, and also for women to preach in your own local congregation.

And you can Tweet out or Facebook a link to One Voice for Change. Feel free to use whatever social media you have to say you would be supportive of woman delivering Keynotes at our lectureships.

You can follow One Voice for Change on Twitter.

And you can pray. Pray that the Churches of Christ come to fully embrace a Restoration vision of the Acts 2 church:

Acts 2.17
"In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy..."

After next week One Voice for Change be looking for prayer and conversation at the upcoming lectures at Abilene Christian University in September.

If you aren't attending a lectureship this year you can start following the One Voice for Change website to participate in other forms of advocacy. I'll try to keep you updated as well.

And a final important note about advocacy efforts and your prayers. First, remember that our lectureship directors do not have the power to make these invitations. Invitations are in the hands of university leadership and Boards of Trustees.

[Note from Mike Cope, Pepperdine's Lectureship Director: Andy Benton's father passed away last night, and he requests an increased measure of sensitivity for Andy next week. Condolences to the Benton family.]

That said, the most important form of advocacy is with your local congregation.  For two reasons. First, while universities can lead they also follow and respond to their congregational constituencies. So work at the local level is crucial. Second, and more importantly, the broader vision isn't for our lectureships but for gender equity in the church.

May the Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.

During the meals the monks were to keep silence while a reader read from the Bible. In Chapter 38 of The Rule of St. Benedict this practice is described along with how the listening brothers should attend to the reading of the Word during meals:

⁵Let there be complete silence. No whispering, no speaking--only the reader's voice should be heard there. ⁶The brothers should by turn serve one another's needs as they eat and drink, so that no one need ask for anything. ⁷If, however, anything is required, it should be requested by an audible signal of some kind rather than by speech.

If you've ever dined with contemplative monastic communities you'll have noted that they actually don't use many audible signals but use, instead, signs and gestures to get the salt passed. By using signs complete silence can be maintained.

Some random thoughts about this passage:

I've been a part of a few silent mealtimes, but never one where silence was maintained while the Bible was read aloud. I wonder how many silent retreats employ this practice? That is, it seems to me that many contemplative retreats emphasize silence but do they fill that silence with the Word? Then again, I haven't been on many silent retreats. Anyone see this practice--reading the Bible during mealtimes--employed?

The closest thing I regularly experience with this attending to the reading of the Word is Lectio Divina, called "dwelling in the Word" at my church. When we dwell in the Word we read a passage from the bible three times, with silence between each reading. After the third reading we then share what we heard in the reading of God's Word.

Finally, one of the things that caught my attention in the passage above was Verse 6: "The brothers should by turn serve one another's needs as they eat and drink, so that no one need ask for anything."

I waited tables during college and grad school. And the mark of good service was anticipation. I'm bringing a refill before you even ask, before you even know you need a refill. A good server is anticipating the needs of the guests. Benedict wants this anticipation because if you anticipate you don't have to ask, don't have to talk and break the silence. But beyond silence, learning to anticipate the needs of others is a profoundly formative practice.

Last fall when I was blogging through Rob Bell's book Love Wins I wrote a post about the relationship between freedom and love and how freedom and love play out in the debate between conditionalism and universalism.

As many noted when Love Wins came out, Bell appears to be espousing conditionalism rather than universalism. That is, love wins for Bell because God respects human freedom, not because everyone, eventually, is reconciled to God.

C.S. Lewis believed in conditionalism and famously phrased the notion this way: The doors of hell are locked, but they are locked from the inside. We banish ourselves from heaven, not God. The idea here is that God never forecloses on salvation. Not now, not ever. But humans, exercising their freedom, can turn away from God and keep turning away. Perhaps for eternity.

[Addendum to original post:
A couple of readers in the comments have said that the view Lewis and Bell are espousing is not called "conditionalism." "Separationism" may be a better term, but I've not heard that term widely used. "Conditionalism" according to readers properly names the view known as "conditional mortality," an idea often associated with annihilationism. For my part, I've used, perhaps improperly, the word "conditionalism" to describe C.S. Lewis' and Bell's view that heaven is available if you open the door.]

Here are selections from Love Wins where Bell is walking through his conditionalistic vision of "love winning":

If we want hell,
if we want heaven,
they are ours.
That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced.
It always leaves room for the other to decide.
God says yes,
we can have what we want,
because love wins.

...

Now back to that original question: "Does God get what God wants?" is a good question, an interesting question, an important question that gives us much to discuss.

But there's a better question, one we can answer...It's not "Does God get what God wants?"
but
"Do we get what we want?"
And the answer to that is a resounding, affirming, sure and positive yes.
Yes, we get what we want.
God is that loving.

If we want isolation, despair, and the right to be our own god, God graciously grants us that option. If we insist on using our God-given power and strength to make the world in our own image, God allows us that freedom; we have the kind of license to that. If we want nothing to do with light, hope, love, grace, and peace, God respects that desire on our part, and we are given a life free from any of those realities. The more we want nothing to do with all God is, the more distance and space are created. If we want nothing to do with love, we are given a reality free from love.

What follows is largely taken from my post last fall, as I've recently revisited this material in preparation for my classes on Love Wins for the Pepperdine Lectureship. The specific issue I'd like to assess in Bell's vision, and with conditionalism generally, is the regulating notion that love requires freedom. Love wins for Bell, not because we all get to heaven, but because we all get what we want. Love wins because love allows us freedom. So even if someone is separated from God, perhaps for all eternity, that is a win for love. Because you are getting what you want.

You don't want God and walk away.
God allows this.
So love wins.

Let's think about that. Love, according to Bell (and others like N.T. Wright and C.S. Lewis), allows people to walk away from God. More, Love allows people to keep walking. Toward what? Away from "light, hope, love, grace, and peace." So Bell asks us to imagine Love allowing people to walk deeper into darkness, despair, hate, revenge, and violence. To get a sense of this imagine the horrors, depravity and bestiality of war. And then keep multiplying that. We imagine Love allowing people to walk deeper and deeper into that?

The question all this raises is if a loving God would allow that decent into madness to happen.

The response, I'm guessing, comes back to the issue of freedom. What, it might be asked, am I suggesting? That God thwart our choices and corral us, against our will, into heaven? That seems to be the key idea driving Bell's position: Love requires freedom. This is how love "wins." As Bell says, "That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide."

It's at this point I'd like to push back with a little psychology, because I think the notion of freedom at work in conditionalism is flawed.

At root, our psychological experience of freedom is comprised of two things: 1) Self-authorship/ownership and 2) Choice/caring congruence.

We feel free when we "own" our decisions and actions. When I scratch my nose I feel that I "own" (i.e., willed) the entire action. This sense of ownership helps create a feeling of self-authorship. I am writing, with my decisions, the story of my life.

We know this experience of "ownership" is a feeling because there are situations when this feeling can become suspended. Hypnosis and disassociation are examples. In such cases my motor cortex is activated--I'm doing things--but I don't feel the actions are "mine."

The second part of the feeling of freedom involves choice/caring congruence. When our choices align with what we want or care about we feel a sense of inner harmony and freedom. I'm doing what I want to do. Harry Frankfurt calls this volitional unanimity. Everything within me "agrees." Desire, choice and behavior are aligned.

Feelings of "unfreedom" occur when we are forced, say, at the point of a gun, to do something that is misaligned with what we care about. We are doing something we don't want to do. The point-of-a-gun example seems obvious enough when we think of external compulsion. But the compulsions can be internal as well. Psychosis, compulsions and addictions are all examples of states where people feel internally overthrown. But these are really just extreme example of what Paul describes in Romans 7, doing things we don't really want to do. Paul describes this lack of volitional harmony as being "wretched." It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel free. We feel internally betrayed and coerced, "against our will" as it were.

All this describes our inner experience of freedom.  Freedom--call it free will or voluntary behavior--is the experience of self-authorship and inner unanimity.

Let's now go back to Bell's statement: "That's how love works. It can't be forced, manipulated, or coerced. It always leaves room for the other to decide." As it stands, this assessment is totally non-controversial. Love doesn't put a gun to your head. Love doesn't force, manipulate, or coerce.

In short, God wants our choices to be voluntary. God wants us to "own" the decision. God wants us to "want" the decision.

But here's the critical issue at this point, an issue Bell and other conditionalists overlook. As we've just noted, more than mere choice is involved in creating the experience of freedom. For a feeling of freedom to exist we need choice/caring congruence.

Suddenly, this freedom thing is looking a bit more complicated. Freedom isn't simply the absence of external coercion. Freedom is about getting our choices to align with our affections and desires. God abandoning us to our choices isn't freedom. It's a lack of coercion, to be sure. But that's a very thin view of freedom, love and choice.

Let me try to illustrate this by taking on a sacred cow.

You often hear preachers say, "Love is a choice." This is wrong. Love is fundamentally about caring. To be clear, I'm not saying that love is a fleeting feeling. I'm saying that love is a deeply rooted affection.

What is remarkable is that everyone knows this already. So it's a testimony to how strange things have become that I have to spend words convincing people to stop and note how very strange and inhuman is the "love is a choice" formulation. Just think of someone you love (I've got my sons in my mind) and ask yourself: What best describes your experience of love toward these people? Choice? Or a deeply rooted affection?

I don't know about you, but I don't wake up and "choose" to love my sons. No, I wake up and feel a deeply rooted affection.

To be sure, those affections affect my choices and decisions. And that's going to be my final point in all this. Caring drives choice. I make loving choices because I care about my boys. I don't choose to care about my boys so that I can make loving choices. That's backward.

[Interlude:

How did the "love is a choice" meme become so ascendent and popular among preachers? Here's my best guess:

The "love is a choice" meme gained prominence among preachers as they were trying to preach the centrality of covenant and promise-keeping in the face of marital infidelity where people were justifying their actions with statements like "I just don't love him/her anymore." And by this people meant, "I don't 'feel' in love with him/her anymore." To push back on that argument preachers started to respond with,"Love isn't a feeling. It's a choice." And what they meant was that feelings of affection ebb and flow, but a commitment gets you through the low periods. This is true, but we should get clear about what is actually going on.

What the preachers tend to miss is that you have to care about commitments for the "love is a choice" encouragement to work. Because if I don't care about my commitments or keeping my promises you have very little leverage with me on this score. Again, this is my root point. Caring is what grants us volitional traction. If you don't care about something I can't use it to sway your choices.

In short, what the "love is a choice" encouragement is doing is this: "I know you don't care about him/her right now. But you should care about the promise you made before witnesses. You should care about your integrity. You should care about what God thinks." And so on. The hope here is, because caring has evaporated for the spouse, that caring can be found elsewhere--in God, the kids, the commitment, the extended family, personal integrity/reputation. But at the end of the day you've got to find caring somewhere. Because if you can find that caring and bring it to the front you can affect the choice. You can say stuff like, "Okay, you don't love him/her. But think about the kids." You try to fish for some alternative/backup location of caring to give the marriage time to heal and for spousal affections/caring to reemerge.

The point is, I understand the whole "love is a choice" idea and what it's trying to do--shifting caring from the spouse to the promise--but we shouldn't think "love is a choice" is good psychology. "Love is a choice" isn't psychology, it's a rhetorical strategy and it should not be used to guide us in thinking about human freedom.]

Given what I've sketched above, let's return to the view of freedom at the root of Love Wins and conditionalism. What's the problem with Bell's view of love and freedom in Love Wins?

On the one hand, the notion that Love isn't going to force or coerce anyone into heaven is perfectly true. I totally agree. But there's something problematic if this is all we mean by "freedom," God just leaving us to our choices. Again, freedom isn't just about choices. Freedom about something deeper and more complex. Freedom has to be about what we care about. Freedom has to be about love.

I think Augustine was pointing to this when he said that all our little loves are shadowy and incomplete until they fully rest in the Love of God. "Our hearts are restless," he famously wrote, "until they rest in Thee." Our affections are broken and scattered. Our loves are all pointed in the wrong direction. And due to that disarray our choices become sinful and self-defeating.

With our affections broken our choices are broken.

Here the deep problem with conditionalism comes into view. If our affections are disordered there is no way we can "chose our way" toward God. Something deep within us is confused and disoriented. We want the wrong things. So if God wants us to turn toward the Kingdom God can't just abandon us to our choices. God can't just step back and say, "I love you. And because I love you I will step back to grant you freedom." That's a recipe for disaster. Because freedom isn't about the absence of external pressure or force. Freedom, rather, is about getting our choices aligned with our affections. But if we want the wrong things to begin with how are we to make good choices?

The point is, love isn't going to win if God just steps back to abandon us to our choices. There might be a "win" in there somewhere, but it's not a winning God would want. Love doesn't win if all we have are choices running amok because of our disordered affections. No, love really wins only when God begins to work at a deeper level, when Love begins to work with our loves. Love moves our loves toward Love. Our desires and affections have to change before our choices begin to move. And that requires positive action on God's part. Not the Divine withdrawal and passivity that Bell imagines in Love Wins.

And I'd also like to make the point that this healing of affections is generally going to be a very slow process. Because Bell's right on this point: God isn't going to overthrow or coerce our affections, internally or externally. God can't just change our affections overnight without that being experienced as a volitional assault upon us. These are psychic structures rooted deep, deep within our identity. These are psychic glaciers that are going to have to move at a glacial pace.

But they can move, even if slowly. And the slow pace allows us to preserve our inner sense of self-authorship and unanimity.

Which brings us to one the reasons why I prefer universalism to conditionalism. Conditionalism suggests that God abandons us to our disordered affections and the predictable volitional mess that soon follows. Universalism, by contrast, confesses that God loves us and will not abandon us, that freedom isn't about a lack of coercion. A lack of coercion is not what sets us free. What sets us free is having our affections healed. Freedom happens when our loves come to rest in Love. And where conditionalism envisions God's abandonment, universalism envisions God's tireless and eternal involvement in bringing this healing to completion. It is a vision of Love healing the loves of my life--bringing order, unanimity, and harmony.

Bringing freedom.

That is when Love truly wins.