After Christmas, from For the Time Being, W.H. Auden

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes –

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school. There are enough

Leftovers to do, warmed up, for the rest of the week –

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully –

To love all our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,

Begging though to remain his disobedient servant,

The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought

Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now

Be very far off. But, for the time being, here we all are…

To those who have seen

The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,

The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.

For the innocent children who whispered so excitedly

Outside the locked door where they knew the presents to be

Grew up when it opened.

As we close the books on 2004, and not a moment too soon, it's clear that, as far as the culture goes, this year belonged to Mel Gibson's mammoth hit (“The Passion of the Christ”). Its prurient and interminable wallow in the Crucifixion, to the point where Jesus' actual teachings become mere passing footnotes to the sumptuously depicted mutilation of his flesh, is as representative of our time as "Godspell" was of terminal-stage hippiedom 30 years ago. The Gibson conflation of religion with violence reflects the universal order of the day — whether the verbal fisticuffs of the culture war within America… or, far more lethally, the savagery of the actual war that radical Islam brought to our doorstep on 9/11.

"The Passion" is a one-size-fits-all touchstone, it seems. It didn't just excite and anger a lot of moviegoers in our own country but also broke box-office records abroad, including in the Middle East. Most Arab governments censor films that depict prophets (Jesus included), even banning recent benign Hollywood products like the Jim Carrey vehicle "Bruce Almighty" and the animated musical "Prince of Egypt." But an exception was made for Mr. Gibson's blood fest nearly everywhere. It was seen in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Among the satisfied customers last spring was Yasser Arafat, who called the film "moving and historical"…

Arafat's animus was clear enough; an aide said at the time that he likened Jesus' suffering, as depicted in "The Passion," to that of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel.

“Open Theism,” by Martin E. Marty, Sightings, 11/29/04

Weary of sighting controversies over abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, values, morals, blues, and reds, Sightings this week turns its scope on a rare, genuinely theological conflict within the evangelical quarter.  Evangelicalism's in-house critics regularly scold fellow-believers for talking a good line about interest in theology, but then showing little actual interest.  Witness the thousands of evangelical bookstores whose self-help wares outnumber the few on theology.

A cheering counter-sign is a worthy argument covered, with scrupulous fairness and not a hint of condescension, by a secular-elite journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education (November 26).  Burton Bollag looks in and asks: "Can God See the Future?  Some evangelical scholars are taking worldly heat for suggesting that divine knowledge has its limits."  Unfortunately, there has been a too-ready resort to force by the "God-doesn't-change" school, accompanied by charges of heresy and dismissal of at least one "God-changes" witness.  And there have been votes in the Evangelical Theological Society censuring the experimental party.

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among brothers and sisters,

To make music in the heart.

-Howard Thurman

My colleague Clarke Wells once offered this as his “Prayer at New Year”:

I send no wish to the Impossible

Or prayer to Maybe, Perhaps;

No promise birthing pretense, despair,

Or Longing that sighs like a wrack.

In a world mad with our choosing

The warfare this year will glare,

Mornings will turn to darkness

And most will be worse for the wear.

So I wish you simply endurance:

Luck among the mines and snares,

Respite for some shining at table,

Less pain than you’re able to bear.

With this an occasional glance

Into each other’s eyes that care,

A minimum of broken lances

And a heart still able to swear.

There were many things about 2004 that make such a minimalist hope and wish for the New Year as “a heart still able to swear,” something of an accomplishment. But I would invite you to aim a little higher than that in 2005, and to start off that higher purpose with a look back at 2004 while it is winding down. But not just any look back.

-Anyone can look back at 2004 and draw up a list of the top religious news stories as the news media reported them. There was the religious factor in the election, Mel Gibson’s movie release, “The Passion of the Christ,” and the worldwide increase in religious fundamentalism militaristic activities tied to death and violence. And these are very real stories from 2004. I even ask other religionists who practice or dabble in “public theology,” theological reflection upon public and cultural issues, to give me their lists of the most important religious stories of 2004. Here is a sampling:

[BAS: I wrote this to some of my colleagues across the country: As I am writing my sermon for this Sunday, "The Top Religion News Stories of 2004," it occurred to me to inquire of you the following: What are the top religious news stories of 2004 that the general media missed? I trust the media, as wide ranging in perspectives as it is. But, I realize that the range of perspective is not complete, or anywhere near adequate; especially when it comes to religion, both institutionally and in terms of the religious impulse in human nature. To me, on this last part, no form of media I have encountered understands it; see Frank Kermode's work on hermeneutics to understand why this is so, he says it so much better than I can. Therefore, the media is a poor resource for the really revolutionary and transformative aspects of homo religios. But, like me, you are on the front lines of transformation, and view culture and history from a perspective that no media type has. Therefore, an inquiry to you: What are the top religious news stories of 2004 that the general media missed? Here are some responses:]

For me, the biggest story are the absence of the progressive religious voices in the mainstream media...this year and every year.  My work is devoted to changing that...

The Reverend Debra W. Haffner
Director
Religious Institute on Sexual Morality Justice, and Healing
304 Main Avenue, # 335
Norwalk, CT  06851

As the "Greatest Generation" dies off I think the media has missed the story of those who were conscientious objectors to WWII. Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Jehovah's Witness, and Unitarians served in alternate Civilian Public Service during the war. Along the way they set new standards for mental health care and gave their all to the country despite enormous prejudice against their conscientious stand. Today more than ever I think their sacrifice and contribution needs to be noted.

Richmond, IN

But I wonder if the growth of broad-based interfaith organizing is also an under-reported story.  I see little of it in the news, though Jubilee Interfaith, with which my church is involved, has had an impact in New Jersey and its activities have been reported in NJ newspapers.  There are such groups around the country and this is a time for growth for them, reflecting a need of religious people to work together for the commonweal of their communities in spite of differences in faith and on social policy.

Orange, New Jersey

Charley Honey, GR Press: “…I have found that abortion continues to be a huge issue, pre-eminent really, for a great number of Catholics and Protestants alike. Stem-cell research is also of great concern because it potentially involves destroying fetuses as well as other murky moral issues. Euthanasia sometimes gets included in that bundle of life issues and, with some strongly pro-life folks, the death penalty as well. Gay marriage is also huge but you know that. Beyond that, I just see a general concern (shared by yours truly) that we're on a serious moral decline as reflected in increased violence, gratuitous sexuality and creeping brutishness evinced primarily in the entertainment media (TV, movies, music and the Internet) but also just sort of bleeding throughout the warp and woof of society.”

John Bolt at Calvin Theological Seminary:

1.  They still don't get it. In general, I think the biggest story in the US is the failure of secularists, especially among the cultural and media elites, including the academy, to grasp the fact that religion is not going to die once people get sophisticated and enlightened.  Whatever the exaggerations about the election, one thing is clear, Americans remain rather religious--because their religion is voluntarist, I would argue---and their religion is important to them.  This in spite of vigorous efforts to denude the public square.  It is amazing and all the reductionist analyses can't get at the inner religious impulse that will not die.  That, I think is for me a top item.

2. Related to that is the remarkable story, just out, of Antony Flew's renunciation of his atheism.  Granted, he is hardly a full blown member now of the evangelical born again right wing conspiracy, BUT, it is an incredible story that must send some shock waves through Oxbridge as well as Beacon Hill and New Haven.

3.  The death of Theo Van Gogh is starting to awaken Dutchmen at least, if not the rest of Europe yet, to the reality that European laissez-faire pluralism is not going to assimilate Islam.   Again this is also related to # 1.

4.  Two deaths of bad people:  1. Yasser Arafat, the last remaining fully respectable terrorist.  Maybe even the fashionable salons of Paris and New York will come to terms with the horrors that their radical chic has perpetuated for the Palestinian people.  2. Jacques Derrida, the postmodernist whose death may or may not be a fact, depending on how YOU read the text.   Will postmodernism face its own internal destructive incoherence?

5.  The incredible growth of the Christian church in Africa and China.

6.  The failure of the United Nations to condemn the butchery of the Sudanese authorities in Darfur.   This is unbelievable active proof of the UN's abject failure to make even modest pronouncements about moral evil. Is it time for the free people of the world to unite in a meaningful world assembly?  How can one possible give credence to a body that picks Libya and Iran as part of its human rights commission?

7.  The growing acceptance of bioengineering.  Californians approving stem cell research carte blanche, the discovery of the "god-gene" (really, what does this prove except human hubris; we can chemically produce faith and religious vision in people; and take it away!)

* * * * *

Here are my responses to what others see as the top religious news stories of 2004:

1) The religious impulse does not die and cannot be extinguished either by secularists or religionists themselves! I agree with John Bolt, but would state it this way instead. People still seek for, long for, and yearn for an experience of transcendence, a something more; in theological language, they seek a connection to God, to bridge the separation that characterizes existence. I arrive at this observation anecdotally, and can point to no cultural trends or demographic analyses to justify it. I couldn’t use the tools of cultural analyses anyway, because it is not something that those who wield those tools see. That was the point of including in this morning’s readings the article by Martin Marty, retired professor at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and our best known and deepest thinking public theologian. He saw in 2004 a confrontation in understanding the religious impulse that all of the mainstream media outlets could not see.

But, I see the religious impulse all around us all the time. It’s one of the reasons I continue to teach our newcomer’s class, ROOTS. It is where the religious impulse is evident in its most raw and vital form, not intentionally shaped and developed in relationship to a religious community aimed at deepening its capacities and sensitivities as this one is.

At this time in history the culture and its media cannot understand or even see the religious impulse or its outward manifestations. Here are the various ways the culture reduces the religious impulse to something it can understand:

1) Religion is morality. Therefore, if we ask what “moral values” guided people in the election for example, we will have found out what their religion is (instead of what is really found out, what their politics are!).

2) Religion is a particular gene.

3) Religion is about the gender of your life partner. Religion is about what you would do when faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Religion is about what you would do if life-supports were the only thing keeping your mother alive and in a perpetual vegetative state.

4) Religion is what our courts determine it to be, so that our government can properly support and not suppress it.

5) Even to religionists themselves, religion is reduced to something it is not. Religion is political. Therefore you are a certain kind of “religious person” because you hold certain political stances, belong to a particular party, vote a certain way, and/or favor certain social policies. Right and left, which used to be political directions, now designate religion.

Yet, people still seek for, long for, and yearn for, that is, they seek an experience of transcendence, a something more; in theological language, they seek a connection to God, to bridge the separation that characterizes existence. But what has happened to this religious impulse is the number two story of 2004.

2) The outward manifestations of this inward religious impulse have largely become enculturated. The religious impulse within human being is neither understood nor invigorated, developed, shaped, and deepened in our current culture. Yet, religious institutions have become engulfed by cultural forms of expression: contemporary services, “modern” Bible translations, use of video, rock ‘n roll instruments and musical arrangements, a “Dear Abby” Jesus (WWJD) and an insistence that religion is about “real life solutions” to reinvigorate marriage, reduce financial debt, and rescue teenagers from angst. Religion no longer stands in a prophetic relationship to culture because cultural forms have swallowed it up! And in our time, cultural forms of expression have all become forms of entertainment. Thus, religion, swallowed up by culture, takes that form, too. And what most characterizes entertainment in our time is glorified, idealized, and stylized combat; a conflict that is falsely generated and in which one is never really certain whether the conflict is real or not. We are a “Crossfire” culture, so much so that the paradigm of new reporting today is what most depicts or heightens conflict. But even “fake” conflict generates within the self the emotions of conflict, which heighten the most basic part of our brain and physiology and direct us to pay attention. We read our world through conflict in part because the culture’s outlets for presenting that world to us, do so through a paradigm of conflict. In the latter part of the 19^{th and early part of the 20th centuries people looked to the ways religions could cooperate and participate in conversational exchange. Now, all that seems to be highlighted is the conflict between various religious viewpoints, which diminishes the real affectional bonds that exist between peoples of different faiths. But, the culture likes and shows conflict, and religion, having been swallowed up by culture, participates in its own consumption!}

Religion has become completely enculturated, completely swallowed up in the forms and forces of culture, and is only seen as a distinctive version of conflict. It’s why Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” was such a forceful event in 2004. It played to the most base part of human nature: The allure of voyeuristic violence, an atonement that can be viewed with popcorn in the soft sway back chairs of the local cinema or in the private comfort of your own easy chair at your “home theater,” and a religious perspective that just needs to be “believed-in” but doesn’t require changing anything about the way one lives one’s life and treats one’s neighbor. The complete consumerist, spectator sport is now a religion completely enculturated. Even conflict portrayed on a screen is redemptive.

Fundamentalism conquered the orthodox theological tradition making it a prisoner of culture.  Marxism and Romanticism conquered the liberal theological tradition making it a prisoner of culture. Liberal and orthodox theological traditions are both completely enculturated. Therefore, the only manifestations of the religious impulse that are seen are those pertaining to conflict, and other manifestations are either made into a conflict so as to be seen, or remain invisible to the culture’s eyes.

3) The result is the inability to see expressions of the Spirit as revealing something deep and essential in human nature and existence: the “connective tissue” of creation and human life throughout its enormous, “post Tower of Babel” diversity. And without considering the breadth of expression of the human religious impulse, its manifestations will continue to be unseen or distorted into conflict. Therefore, for 2005, I would say that our task is to continue to walk a path towards a deeper understanding of the religious impulse in human being and existence within our particular historical and cultural condition.

And the best way I have found to express the nature of that religious impulse is to say that when it is excited and invigorated, when it rises from its dogmatic slumbers, when it is engaged despite the noise and distraction of culture, it yields an experience of creation’s all encompassing unity whose divine aspiration and aim is found in the phrase, “a love for all souls.”

AMEN.