Against the Stream

Bloggus Redivivus

For the most part, Against the Stream has been dormant for the past several months. Sometimes life gets in the way, and other obligations intervene. However, there's a lot going on in the world of theology, ethics, and other areas of concern to me, and I feel like it's time to bring the blog out of hibernation. So stay tuned for more blog posts in the coming days.

The Bannermen

 

When I'm not writing and teaching, or blogging on religion and society, or playing video games, or Dungeons & Dragons, the other thing I like is music. For years I've been struggling to get to an acceptable level of proficiency on the guitar, but my first and best instrument has always been drums. So, with that in mind, I thought I'd let my blogging public in on the news that I've just joined the Chicago indy-rock band The Bannermen, which is particularly exciting for me as I was already a fan of their music.

So I thought I'd celebrate the occasion by posting a couple of Bannermen tunes, and in keeping with the themes of this blog, I chose two with religious themes. Above is a tune called "I Am My Own God," which is as cool an anthem of protest atheism as I've ever heard. And below, also tying in my comic nerd interests, is "Thor."

 

(That, by the way, is not me on the drums, but the very fine Matt Wilhelm, who is moving on to other things).

You can check out more Bannermen stuff at Reverb Nation.

The Santa Barbara Shootings and Nerd Misogyny

 

The shootings that took place in Santa Barbara last week, motivated to all appearances by the shooter's sense that he had in some way been denied his "rights" to sexual access to beautiful women, have led to some renewed reflection on the problem of misogyny among, for lack of a better term, the nerd society.

I've written about this before, but like a bad penny the issue keeps turning up, and for a simple reason: Misogyny is an inescapable part of American society, and thus an inescapable of fact of geek culture. Rooting out misogyny from geek culture is part and parcel of rooting it out of American society as a whole. But this requires, to begin with, an honest assessment of how we've gotten to where we are and why geeks, who to all external appearances should be among the more open and accepting groups in society, so often remain bastions of the worst attitudes towards women.

Before proceeding, I should probably note that it's not at all clear to me that the shooter, Eliot Roger, was a "geek" in the most fulsome definition of that word. By that I mean I have no idea if he was the science fiction loving, gaming, comic-book reading kind of guy that usually gets associated with the term. But what is clear from his psychopathically ranting murder/suicide video, is that he shared a self-perception that is common within geekdom -- that of the isolated, socially awkward, girl-repellent social outcast. His words attest to his belief that he had been "unfairly" denied his "right" to have sex with "hot women," and that therefore he was going to make those women pay with their lives.

This is a point that feminist authors have been making for some time with reference to a particular subset of guy-dom, namely the "nice guy." The "nice guy" is the opposite of the asshole jock. He hangs around the margins of the pods of attractive girls in high school, looking for the opportunity to ingratiate himself, to become a shoulder to cry on, a friend in need, on the premise that, when the asshole jock finally breaks the hot girl's heart, the "nice guy" will be there to pick up the pieces, and, by coincidence, get laid.

The problem, as has been pointed out elsewhere, with the "nice guy" trope, is that the "nice guy" is actually not really any nicer than the asshole jock. He's just pursuing a different strategy toward the same goal. What's more, because he views himself as, well, a nice guy, the fact that he never seems to be able to make any headway on the dating/relationship/sex front is doubly frustrating, since he can't understand why women would continue to date those "asshole jocks" who keep breaking their hearts when there is a "nice guy" like him standing there just waiting to treat them right.

If I sound like I'm speaking from experience, that's because I am. Growing up, I found myself involuntarily cast in the "nice guy" role. And, like most "nice guys," I tried to play it according to the script. Hang around, be there when needed, offer the crying shoulder, and wait for the scales to fall from their eyes! Of course, this never happened, because life doesn't operate according to a script, and human beings are much, much more complicated than that.

None of what I'm saying here should be construed to imply that most of the time, "nice guys" aren't actually genuinely nice. They are! Most of us geeky guys, who played Dungeons & Dragons on the weekends instead of going to keggers, who played in the marching band, and collected comics, really were genuinely nice most of the time. But we kept bumping up against the barrier between our own expectations of how things were "supposed" to work, and how they actually shook out in real life.

This, I think, is what is behind the conversation about the sense of "entitlement" that nice guys seem to have with regard to how women should treat them. That entitled attitude comes from the fact that we really don't have many alternative scripts that tell us how love, romance, and sex are "supposed" to work. Strange as it may sound, we need a more compelling narrative about love to explain what it is and how to get it than the one that we've been offered for most of the past several decades. Growing up, the movies I watched repeatedly told this story to me: Be the nice guy, hang around, and eventually she'll come around. Through your presence and friendship as a "nice guy" eventually love will come to you.

And it's not just our romantic comedies. To the degree that, particularly for males these days, pornography defines an element in their sexual initiation, they are told that sex is about easy, instant access, that women will willingly get naked for any random plumber or pizza delivery guy, and then that guy gets to do and say incredibly nasty things to her in the context of what is supposed to be a loving act. The pornification of sex is an element in this as well, but porn, like romantic comedy, is a fiction, a fantasy, that tells a story that bears little resemblance to how actual human lives operate. And, to be clear, we need some kind of story to construct our lives.

Human beings are creatures that organize our lives according to narratives. We see ourselves as the stars of our own movie, otherwise known as our lives. Our story, like most, has a plot. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but most importantly, it has a central conflict to be overcome. As teenagers, many of us wrote the script of our lives according to the tropes of romantic comedy, and what the romantic comedies we watched told us that being a "nice guy" (which, by the way, is not the same thing as simply being a nice guy), would eventually pay sexual dividends. And if it didn't, then clearly the problem was with the women we were being "nice" to, not with us.

Here's how Arthur Chu puts the problem:

We (male) nerds grow up force-fed this script. Lusting after women “out of our league” was what we did. And those unattainable hot girls would always inevitably reject us because they didn’t understand our intellectual interest in science fiction and comic books and would instead date asshole jocks. This was inevitable, and our only hope was to be unyieldingly persistent until we “earned” a chance with these women by “being there” for them until they saw the error of their ways. (The thought of just looking for women who shared our interests was a foreign one, since it took a while for the media to decide female geeks existed. The Big Bang Theory didn’t add Amy and Bernadette to its main cast until Season 4, in 2010.)

This is, to put it mildly, a problematic attitude to grow up with. Fixating on a woman from afar and then refusing to give up when she acts like she’s not interested is, generally, something that ends badly for everyone involved. But it’s a narrative that nerds and nerd media kept repeating.

Something of the same dynamic is behind the reaction to the term "friend zone," which some feminist writers have criticized as suggesting that same brand of entitlement -- the idea that our "proper place" is in the I dunno, "sex zone"? and we are being unfairly treated if we find ourselves cast into the outer darkness of the "friend zone."

Truthfully, I have less of an issue with this phrase, because I think it's more of an ironic way of describing unrequited attraction, something that's felt all the time by both men and women, who can just as easily find themselves cast into the friendzone as men can. Nevertheless, to the extent that the dwellers in the friendzone stay there because they're waiting for their chance to break into the, I'm just going to go with "sex zone," it recapitulates the same dynamic as the "nice guy" problem.

To an extent, these issues are connected to the larger problem that all adolescents face, namely figuring out how to move into adulthood as a relatively well-adjusted human being capable of carrying on mature and sustainable relationships. When you're fifteen, it's not like there is an intuitive process by which you learn to enter into romantic and sexual adulthood. Most of us sort of lurch there by fits and starts. And if you are one of those who feels forced to stand on the outside, looking in at people who seem to belong to a club that you can't figure out the password for, it can be a very frustrating experience. And I suspect that this was at the origins of Eliot Rodger's ultimately uncontrollable rage.

Arthur Chu again:

The overall problem is one of a culture where instead of seeing women as, you know, people, protagonists of their own stories just like we are of ours, men are taught that women are things to “earn,” to “win.” That if we try hard enough and persist long enough, we’ll get the girl in the end. Like life is a video game and women, like money and status, are just part of the reward we get for doing well.

So what happens to nerdy guys who keep finding out that the princess they were promised is always in another castle? When they “do everything right,” they get good grades, they get a decent job, and that wife they were promised in the package deal doesn’t arrive? When the persistent passive-aggressive Nice Guy act fails, do they step it up to elaborate Steve-Urkel-esque stalking and stunts? Do they try elaborate Revenge of the Nerds-style ruses? Do they tap into their inner John Galt and try blatant, violent rape?

For most of us, we eventually work our way through that process of growing up. We learn some degree of self-acceptance. We find people who genuinely care for us for who we are. But for many others, the frustration that comes from living a life that doesn't fit the romance "script" can be turned in one of two ways.

For a lot of us, it gets turned inward. For my part, a lot of my adolescence, and even into my twenties, was spent asking what it was that was wrong with me that women wouldn't date me. Ultimately, I got over myself at least enough to realize that until I was able to accept myself for who I was, no one else would either. But that's a hard lesson to learn when you're young, and truthfully, it's an ongoing process.

For others, it gets turned outward, to misogyny. Here what happens is that men assume that the problem isn't with them, but with women. So instead of accepting themselves for who they are, and accepting the women around them for who they are, they construct an image of a woman that would serve their needs -- a "hot chick," whom they can dominate and insult, and who will at the same time fulfill all of their nerdy fantasies (Slave Leia bikini, for example) -- but who has no independent identity of her own. A lot of the conversation about geek misogyny that has been going on the last few years has dealt with this problem. Having failed at being a "nice guy," the misogynist nerd becomes a dickhead, throwing around insults and objectifying women at Cons or insisting that women can't play, or are "fake geeks." Or they play out some creepy fantasy in the context of their favorite video or table top RPG. 

Whatever the deeper pathologies were that motivated the Santa Barbara shooter, what he shared with those other geek guys was the sense of social isolation and sexual frustration that is sadly common among awkward teenage boys. Instead of growing the fuck up and adjusting his unrealistic expectations, and instead of turning in on himself, he projected his rage outward, with devastating results.

Until we begin to tell better stories about love, romance, and sex, stories that realistically convey what it means to meet someone, fall for them, and care for them, in one way or another this kind of problem will continue to replicate itself. And within the geek community, all of us recovering "nice guys" need to go out of our way to be genuinely nice guys, setting an example, and seeking to do what we can to make geekdom a safe space for all people, men and women, who just want to enjoy the same things as well do.

Just last week, I downloaded the recent movie, The Gamers: Hands of Fate. It's the latest in a series of low budget movies made by and for gamers, and compared to its two predecessors, it is a great leap forward in storytelling, both about gamers, but also about gender in gaming. The first two movies featured, respectively, a "princess" who needed to be rescued by a valiant adventuring team, and a novice "gamer girl" who turns out to be both a capable role player and an excellent min-maxer when it comes to creating a character for herself. (The second movie also features a male character role playing a woman, with all of the complications that entails).

The third movie, however, addresses the problem of geek misogyny head-on, and in multiple ways. It subverts the traditional rom-com "girl hates guy, guy pursues girl, girl falls for guy by the end" trope in multiple ways, and provides a number of strong models for women in gaming. Significantly, from the beginning  it also explicitly calls into question the whole "women are prizes to be won" trope in fantasy literature.

In a subplot in the extended edition of the movie (available on Youtube), the gamer girl from the second movie, and her gamemaster boyfriend have a Three's Company style misunderstanding in which she believes that he's going to ask her to marry him at GenCon. When it turns out that he was only going to ask her to don a slave Leia bikini, and that he can't imagine marrying her because he didn't "win" her, she is understandably outraged. He then has to try to make things right:

 

Meanwhile, the "beardface" dude who is trying to win a date with the "hot" gamer by triumphing at a collectible card game comes to learn that there are a lot of things more important than "winning the girl."

These are the kinds of stories we need to begin to tell, first to undermine those stories that lead to unrealistic expectations about how men and women can and should relate to one another, but also to pave the way for stories that can allow for a more genuine kind of relationship, one that can be realistically modeled in the real world, in which men and women come together over mutual loves and interests, and allow attraction to take them where it will. It won't solve the problem of unrequited affection, but it will at least move the conversation to how to appropriately deal with it.

Until we learn to write a new script for our lives, we're not going to be able to aid in overcoming the problems of misogyny, either within the geek subculture, or within society at large.

On Doubting You're Still a Christian

 

Micah Murray writes a provocative post today about wondering whether he really wants to continue to call himself a Christian. He writes:

Christians always tell me stuff about unity in Christ, how we’re all one family in God, how there’s room for disagreement. I get that.

At the same time, it seems that many Christians are reading the same Bible, using with the same words, and coming to opposite conclusions. At what point is that not even the same religion anymore?

I believe God is love. But all too often, Christians pay lip service to a God of love while also arguing for theology that makes God an asshole. ...

These are not peripheral issues. They get to the very nature of the God we worship, the Jesus we follow. And when your version of God is not only slightly different, but fundamentally opposite from my version of God, are we really in the same religion?

These aren’t rhetorical questions. I really don’t know.

There’s only one Gospel, but it seems that many Christians preach another gospel I don’t recognize anymore. Sometimes I feel like I’m caught between “What does it matter as long as Christ is preached?” and “If anyone preaches any other gospel, let him be accursed.”

If “Christian” is such a broad word that includes all this, what use is the word at all anymore?

I have to admit, he's got a good point. The key problem I have with Christianity is that the word seems, in the larger cultural context that we inhabit, to define the religion of those who follow Asshole God, and that's a problem for me, because I don't worship Asshole God.

Like Micah, I'm very clear in my own mind at least that God exists, and that God is in some unique way revealed in the life and death of Jesus Christ, and that Christ's resurrection is the sign and symbol of our renewed relationship with the God who loves us and created us. I believe, in brief, in Grace.

But, far too often, Christianity seems to be a religion devoid of Grace. In fact, it often seems to be the antidote for Grace -- Anti-Grace -- Grace Kryptonite. And I have a hard time identifying myself with a religion that does such a good job acting as its own refutation. Nietzsche was not in the slightest degree wrong when he suggested Christians are the best argument against Christianity. What he actually said was "“I might believe in the Redeemer if his followers looked more redeemed.” And not looking redeemed is something that Christians excel at.

This has been on my mind particularly over the past week, as my inital blazing hot rage against World Vision's reversal of its new policy allowing for married gay and lesbian employees under pressure from conservative Christians focused itself on the underlying culprits. As Tony Jones, Rachel Held Evans,  and others have reported, the pressure put on World Vision was enormous, and really took aim at World Vision's core mission of helping poor children and their communities around the world by threatening its major sources of funding. One can hardly blame World Vision for retreating under the circumstances, much as I wish they had stood their ground. But the real villain in the story is the asshole followers of Asshole God.

And so here I am, not for the first time in my life, wondering just how it is that I can continue to call myself a Christian, despite believing in the God that Christianity claims to profess. As I noted in an argument with a Christian who was determinedly arguing in the most absurd ways against any acceptance of same sex marriage at all, every time I hear a Christian come out against marriage equality, I become a little more atheist.

But, here's the rub: My atheism is directed toward the Asshole God that these people who call themselves Christian claim to profess. And I will gladly and loudly profess my disbelief in that God. It bears no resemblance to the God I worship. The problem is that that God is all over the place in Christianity. It's difficult to escape, which is why I periodically contemplate dropping the label altogether.

But the thing is, regardless of the label, one thing remains the case, and it's the thing that keeps me holding on to the idea of Christianity, and the name of Christian, in spite of myself, and that is this: I recognize that I'm an asshole too, and that the only thing that really is capable of helping me is, not an 
Asshole God, but rather the God of Grace that I see manifested in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

It's Grace that keeps me a Christian in spite of myself. But believe me, a great many days it's a very near thing.

The Consolation of Catholicism

Richard Rodriguez, via Andrew Sullivan's blog:

The Catholic Church assumes it is the nature of men and women to fail. You can be a sinner and remain a Catholic. You must consider yourself a sinner to remain a good Catholic. Bohemians and poets from Protestant climes gravitate toward the romance of Catholic countries or Catholic cities or Catholic parts of cities – wherever tragedy hangs its shingle; wherever tragedy holds sway. Everyone knows that Catholics run better restaurants than Protestants.

Life is hard. Flesh is weak. Consolation is in order. Lapses are allowed for. Catholics have better architecture and sunnier plazas and an easier virtue and are warmer to the touch. At its best, Catholicism is all-forgiving,”

There is always, even for this lapsed-Catholic-cum-Protestant, a feeling that Catholicism is inexorable, inevitable, and inescapable.

Breaking Through Autism with Disney

 

In the New York Times Magazine Ron Suskind tells the story of how he learned to communicate with his son with the aid of Disney movies:

When Owen was 3, his comprehension of spoken words collapsed. That’s clear from every test. But now it seems that as he watched each Disney movie again and again, he was collecting and logging sounds and rhythms, multitrack. Speech, of course, has its own subtle musicality; most of us, focusing on the words and their meanings, don’t hear it. But that’s all he heard for years, words as intonation and cadence, their meanings inscrutable. It was like someone memorizing an Akira Kurosawa movie without knowing Japanese. Then it seems he was slowly learning Japanese — or, rather, spoken English — by using the exaggerated facial expressions of the animated characters, the situations they were in, the way they interacted to help define all those mysterious sounds. That’s what we start to assume; after all, that’s the way babies learn to speak. But this is slightly different because of the way he committed these vast swaths of source material, dozens of Disney movies, to memory. These are stored sounds wecan now help him contextualize, with jumping, twirling, sweating, joyous expression...

Taking on the personality of Iago, the parrot from Alladin, he was able to talk to Owen about how he felt:

Owen’s sitting on his bed, flipping through a Disney book; he can’t read, of course, but he likes to look at the pictures. The mission is to reach around the banister into his closet and grab his puppet of Iago, the parrot from “Aladdin” and one of his favorite characters. He has been doing lots of Iago echolalia, easy to identify because the character is voiced by Gilbert Gottfried, who talks like a busted Cuisinart. Once Iago’s in hand, I gently pull the bedspread from the foot of Owen’s bed onto the floor. He doesn’t look up. It takes four minutes for Iago and me to make it safely under the bedspread.

Now crawl, snail-slow, along the side of the bed to its midpoint. Fine.

I freeze here for a minute, trying to figure out my opening line; four or five sentences dance about, auditioning.

Then, a thought: Be Iago. What would Iago say? I push the puppet up from the covers. “So, Owen, how ya doin’?” I say, doing my best Gilbert Gottfried. “I mean, how does it feel to be you?!” I can see him turn toward Iago. It’s as if he is bumping into an old friend. “I’m not happy. I don’t have friends. I can’t understand what people say.” I have not heard this voice, natural and easy, with the traditional rhythm of common speech, since he was 2. I’m talking to my son for the first time in five years.

It is a very moving story, I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Theological Facial Hair

Reposting this for hilariousness. For my part, I'd happily regrow my guru goatee, but for the time being I'll simply cultivate my post-evangelical stubble.

Misogyny, Gaming, and Nerd Culture

It's been a bad couple of weeks for geeks on the misogyny front. As Alyssa Rosenberg has been reporting at ThinkProgress, an obnoxiously vocal subset of the gamer nerd subculture has decided to put their hatred of women on full display.

Exhibit A: The misogynist ranting at Anita Sarkeesian over her Kickstarter project on "Gaming Tropes vs. Women." Click the link if you want some samples of what was said on her site and in response to her Youtube promotional video. In addition to the sexism, you get bonus anti-Semitism and malicious pranksterism, as apparently seeking to shame her into silence wasn't enough, her detractors also decided to flag her videos as terrorism. As the Escapist article says:

On top of those beauties, there's the usual threats of violence and rape, as well as organized efforts to have Sarkeesian's YouTube videos flagged as terrorism and her Kickstarter project defunded. YouTube comments are, by and large, where the lowest common denominator goes to slum it for a while, so people posting awful things is hardly unusual. What is unusual, is the sheer depth of hatred on display. If the aim of the outrage was to prove that the gaming community doesn't have a lingering problem with women, well ... good job, guys.

Exhibit B: The Lara Croft rape mechanic. Apparently the newest iteration of the venerable Tomb Raider series will depict a scene in which Lara Croft is at risk of being raped, and what happens depends on how the player handles the encounter. As Alyssa describes in detail, there are just so many layers of wrong to this: From the failure of imagination it represents as a narrative devices, to the failure to empathy it displays, to the way in which it plays into stereotypical male fantasies of being the "rescuer" of the helpless woman.

Add to this the reaction to Alyssa's initial report, in which some of her comnentators cheered the possibility of actually allowing Croft to be raped in game and the whole spectacle is simply too odious for words. As Alyssa notes in her open letter to these commentators:

Is it entertaining to you to see this powerful woman reduced in some way, made vulnerable to something whether you’re the person enforcing her powerlessness or not? Because if that’s the case, really, what are you so frightened of? Lara Croft is not some sort of proof that men have been replaced as adventurers, or that men are unnecessary. To paraphrase Orson Scott Card’s Piggies talking about their desire to participate in the full life of the universe alongside humanity, feminism is not about being there first, about rendering men irrelevant. It’s about being there, too. I’d think that needing to see Lara Croft, or any other strong woman, made vulnerable isn’t pushback against misandry, the unicorn of oppressions. It’s evidence of fear, proof of John Scalzi’s theory that relying on patriarchy is really playing the game of life on the easiest setting rather than being willing to collaborate, and in some cases compete. If that’s what you really want, to be spared the presence of women in your lives because you find us threatening and upsetting, you may be able to find a way to do that, for a little while longer. But I don’t think it’s going to last. You can’t put all of us in whatever it is you perceive to be our places. There are too many of us. And whether you want to acknowledge it or not, there are a lot of men who will tell you that having women is a value add to their lives, not a painful surrendering of territory. You can fight for whatever barren rock you want to make your last stand on. But why not check out what men and women are building together? If you like what you see, then welcome.

Exhibit C: The degradation of female gamers. Again, via Alyssa, whose reporting on this has been stellar, Aisha Tylor's account of her treatment as a woman who loves to game, and the men who don't believe she's a gamer.

What all of this adds up to is a serious round of shame for the gaming community in particular, and male geek culture in general. Because this really extends far beyond video gaming. This extends to tabletop gaming as well, it extends to ComicCon, and the whole convention culture of booth babes and the casual denigration of women.

This is a problem of long standing in the predominantly male world of geekdom. There have always been girl geeks, and there have always been men around willing to marginalize them and objectify them for reasons that I've never been able to fully comprehend. Maybe it's simply that, marginalized as guy geeks often are, they look for someone that they feel powerful enough to marginalize in turn (woe betide the guy geek who tries to do that to any of the female gamers I know, though; they'll definitely get more than they bargained for), maybe its insecurity and social awkwardness, which are not unheard of among the nerd clan. But whatever the root causes, it's damaging to the individuals who perpetrate it as well as their targets, and its damaging to geek culture at large.

For my entire life, I've wondered why there aren't more women involved in the hobbies I enjoy: Gaming, science fiction, comic books, etc. The truth is, I've been fortunate to have met some wonderful female friends over the years in those pursuits, but the norm and expectation always seems to be that they're rarities in a male subculture. Examples such as those I've cited above offer some reasons why that persists.

A dear friend of mine recently revealed to me that she was a gamer of long standing, something that I had never known because I had never bothered to ask. Why hadn't I asked, she wanted to know. I told her quite honestly because it was rare to come across a woman who liked to game, and so I defaulted to the assumption that she didn't. Of course, coming out as a gamer of a certain kind always feels like a bit of a risk anyway, but if I had asked her if she'd like to play, it would have led to some very enjoyable conversations, and maybe even a game or two.

When we begin to get out of the gendered rut that geek culture has surrendered to, there are some new possibilties for the deepening of the entire subculture and widening its appeal. The last decade has seen some genuine progress on that front, but much more remains to be done. But the examples of the last few weeks can damage years of careful bridge building and door opening. 

And of course, there are examples of strong, self-reliant, powerful women within the geek community, who deserve to be lifted up as alternatives to pop cultural garbage, as illustrated here (apologies for the amount of skin, but it serves to make a point):

Badass woman-warriors are easily better role-models than much of what pass for cultural icons today.

Just because geek culture has a reputation for appealing to adolescent boys doesn't mean that we're required to act like adolescents.

Sighs Too Deep For Words

Tracie Giesbrecht at The Emergent Village Voice attempts to answer Tony Jones' query about prayer. The problem, she says, is that it's a hard question to answer "yes" or "no" to:

The closest practice I have to prayer now is maybe more akin to meditation…but I don’t think those serious about meditation would concur.

I tend to quiet myself down, quiet the voices in my mind, try to detach from the details of my life and open my heart to love (I’m hoping it’s open to Love). It’s more listening than talking, but not listening for words. It’s pushing back the debris and noise of my life connecting with my own essential spirit and trying to align it with a higher, more loving, more mystical, more joyful, lighter, deeper, Most Beautiful Spirit.

If I’m troubled about something or asked to pray for someone else who is troubled I sit before God, Most Beautiful Spirit, and hold the situation, the feelings, the person, open. I try to hold it open with faith and sense the beauty and peace and comfort available. I try to see God in the situation. Sometimes I say words. If I do they’re very few. “Bring hope.” “Bring comfort.” “Let them feel your love.” “Lord have mercy.”

If the trouble is my own situation, or one that closely affects me, I sometimes tumble out a bunch of words. It feels like panic. It doesn’t feel like faith. It feels like digression. So I try again to be quiet, to sense God, to feel Love, to hold onto faith for goodness to prevail and if it doesn’t, for Comfort to come in the midst of grief.

Praying words in personal prayers feels manipulative to me these days.  I lack so much confidence in my ability to know what would be good (“God help me get that job” etc) that any words I say to that effect ring hollow. It also feels more like incantation to believe that my words could steer events. I haven’t been able to reconcile praying for outcomes. I would if I felt incredibly compelled to do that. I’d say that’s happened a handful of times – at most.

Joining in corporate prayer is very intimate (it used to be we prayed with anyone and everyone). I have a very hard time in evangelical settings being open to praying with people. That’s when I most feel like my activities of communion with God are definitely not prayers at all, because what they are doing, I no longer do.

I admit that I feel much the same way. To say that I "pray" in the way most people mean the term sounds very alien to me. Of course, I have prayed in that way, and sometimes still do, but often for me to say that I am praying  means something far more inchoate than the idea that I attempt to verbally express a set of thoughts directed toward God.

And really, I'm not sure that's what prayer needs to be. As I recently said to a friend, when I pray for something, it's as much an expression of my emotional or psychological state as it is a set of words that exist either in my mind or on my lips. I think that this is at least in part what Paul means when he talks about the Spirit interceding with "sighs too deep for words" -- that prayer sometimes, and perhaps sometimes at its most profound, takes us beyond the need to express ourselves in any verbal way, and simply allows us to lift our cares to God. To try to express what those cares are or what I want God to do with them does feel, as Tracie puts it, "manipulative."

At the same time, I do occasionally lead worship, and this does involve verbal forms of prayer, and when I pray in those settings, I do try and allow the Spirit to move through me verbally to express the cares of the congregation and allow us to lift all of our cares before God. So in that sense, I most certainly do pray in the traditional sense. But in my private prayer life, it is almost entirely a matter of just quietly meditating on the problems or the blessing that I carry, and without thought, seeking to express my need or my gratitude.

In the end, I agree strongly with Annie Lamont's comment that she really only has two kinds of prayer: "Thank you, thank you thank you!" and "Help, help, help!" So often, those seem to be the only prayers of which I'm capable, or which are required.

Born in the 70s

In honor of his upcoming appointment to go hear Rush in concert, Tony Jones has started a series of posts on growing up in the 1970s, which was a strange, strange decade in which to live. Today, Tony posts on one of the bizzare public service films we were made to watch when we were kids:

It’s from 1974. The plot is basically this: A kid can’t get a seat on the bus, so he asks to get off, whereupon he dies in a snowbank. Cause of death: no one was nice to him.

Watch it below, in two parts, and tell me if you can believe that they showed this to 3rd graders.

You can watch it at Tony's site, but it does make me feel a bit inspired to post myself on what it means to be Generation X. I'll have to give this some thought.