Why?

In order to use a new version of WordPress which is more spiffier.

From now on it will be here.

This old blog will stay put for archival purposes.

See them here: Red Brick Church Gallery

Big day: Red Brick Church Festival. Bouncy house, with auxilliary slide, is rented and inflated. A thousand cubic feet of chili are warming downstairs in the kitchen. Tables, chairs, and balloons have been placed out in the parking lot. Everywhere, festoonery.

The neighbors begin to arrive, and poke around the food table. Kids want to get their shoes off and bounce.

It takes ten or fifteen minutes to walk down to the Projects–just to see if some kids are waiting for an invitation.

Down in the Projects there are childrens’ voices, but the echoes among the brick buildings are deceptive. Where are they?

Aha. Five kids, one girl and four boys. The girl I have met before. Her name is Destiny. (Is that a good name to give to a kid who lives in the Projects?) She tells me that they have been waiting for someone to take them up to the festival. (Why? They know where it is and wander freely and unsupervised all over the place.)

Will I take them?

A mother leans out the door and gives me a suspicious look.

Hi. I am from the Red Brick Church.

OK. You may have my children, then.

(The residual credibility of the Church in places like this is remarkable. For some reason, they decide to trust me. And so it goes: I am from the Red Brick Church; give me your kids for the day. No further questions.)

One of the boys, a round-faced guy, grabs my elbow with both his hands. “I’m walking with him,” he says, with emphasis on the last word. He says it again in a different direction.

Another boy, the same age but skinny and cornrowed, stands in front of me and stares me down.

“I could tackle you.” He is serious.

I stare back. “I doubt it.”

He stands his ground: “I’m almost as tall as you.” He is a good two feet shorter.

“No, you’re not. Want to go up to the church and have some fun?”

“OK.”

His name is Jonavan, but he prefers to be called JV, but prefers even more to be called J, and prefers most of all to be called V.

The littlest of the boys tries to take an unsportsmanslike shortcut through the park and head me off. I outrun him. Triumph!

“Man, you’re fast. How did you get to be so fast?” Someone mentions a cousin they know who is faster.

They walk with me, and yell at neighbors we pass, and talk about what cats sneak up onto what roofs. They tell me where they go to school. They keep stopping to deal with shoelaces.

And then, privileged information. They show me the best shortcut in the hood, between two houses, past a mud puddle and some garbage. These five, they initiate me into some neighborhood savior faire. They give the gift of their trust, their banter, their abrupt questions. Are you a pastor? Where’s your car? What’s for lunch?

Periodically the boy with the round face hangs on my elbow.

We walk all together in a straggly group, crunching the leaves as loud as we can.

I also have exactly 47 pictures sent to me by a Midtowner. Some of these are nearly works of art; especially the pumpkins on the pew. I will show you some of them soon.

Speaking of art, last night was the big hootenanny at the Dayton Art Institute. 800 people came. The DAI is one of the coolest places in the region, both for its collection and (I confess) even more so for its architecture.

After the necessary formalites of playing the concert, I got to see the Egyptian exhibit.

Most of the items were well over 3000 years old. Many looked as if they were made yesterday. They have a real mummy still wrapped up. What struck me was the elaborate system of ritual and art (statuary, sarcophagusses, spells) surrounding death. It appears as if the Egyptians did nothing but prepare for death. By their own standards, they did so zealously and thoroughly.

Their understanding of life was such that the main purpose was to spend it getting ready for death and beyond. It was worth any effort whatsoever to be properly prepared for death. An unprepared death (by which they meant, one without the proper prayers and rituals) was the worst tragedy they could imagine.

Questions for discussion:

1. Did they ever do any living?

2. Does an obsession with death lead to a cheapening of life?

3. Sound like anyone you know?

You can stream the lecture with Real Audio. You will have to wade through exactly twelve and a half minutes of blah blah before NT gets started. Give him a listen.

Click here.

Bad? Why bad? Worse than you?

They’re just bad, I was told. That’s all.

Listen. The kid who told me this–the kid who thinks the Project kids are bad–this good kid lives in a neighborhood that many of you…(how to say this?)…that the more sheltered among you would never visit. You would be scared if you went there. To the good kid’s house, I mean.

Now, if you have been to real Projects, on the order of Cabrini Green in Chicago, the Projects in Springfield will seem to you less threatening than merely cute. Perhaps even homey.

But Projects they are. I have been told that they are rank with crack.

They are set back from the road and down an embankment. Really they are almost in a large depression, one might say. They are two-story row houses, six of them in a row, and four or five rows in all.

I went down there because I had nine leftover invitations to the neighborhood festival next Saturday. Since we are renting an inflatable bouncy house, I want lots and lots of kids there. My own children helped me pass out the invitations along our usual streets, and they were cheerful, industrious, and beautiful about it.

They do not know that they are supposed to be scared of black men with cornrows.

So they aren’t.

But since I had never visited the Projects, and had heard that the kids were bad, I left my own kids at the Red Brick Church this time. Call it cowardice. Call it parenting.

Oddly, wondrously, some of the Project kids already knew about the festival. Others learned about the imminent bouncy house and ran in three directions to spread the news. This brought more kids outside. Three, five, eight of them. Some had huge mustaches of dried snot. They were all eager to grab invitations and pass them out. Just like my own children.

One of them called out to a young man in the parking lot, who responded with the finger and got in his car. Laughs all around.

Roctober Thoughts:

The Demerits have now miraculously raised enough bux to buy the drones portion of the uilleann pipes. My hope is to play chanter and drones by Christmas. I am aware that pipers as a species are, on the whole, deplorable. I embark on this piping adventure primarily to help these guys learn social skills.

Our gig was a blast. Good crowd, complete with spontaneous Irish dancing by Melanie. The weird part was playing Faure and Chausson all afternoon and then doing Bile Them Cabbage Down at night.

Even as I type, the
Worldview Weekend is a-happ’nin’ over at the college. I am uneasy about this event. Go ahead and check out the site, take their “worldview test”, and see what kind of creepy socialist you turn out to be.

And then see how much money you will need to pay them to get your worldview cranked back into shape.

This appears to be as much about far-right Republican politics as about the way of Jesus.

You would think the Kingdom of God is primarily a matter of defeating secular liberals and defending our white middle class way of life from outsiders…

(…see previous two posts.)

Addendum: I took the test and answered with complete honesty. I scored 35% and am thus labeled (and dismissed) as a secular humanist worldview thinker.

Post-Addendum: After which, I went back and took it again, trying to discern what answer the questioner was looking for, and always answering “strongly” for or against whatever good or bad statement was presented. (Isn’t it wonderful that a biblical worldview is comprised only of strong affirmations and denials? Don’t you hate ambiguity?) Interestingly, I not only scored very high ("strong biblical worldview thinker” or some such) but received an ACTUAL BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW EMAIL CERTIFICATE that I may print out (it is suggested to do so on “beautiful parchment paper") and display.

Read it and weep, boys and girls:

Checkitout…

…the vineyard, the press, the plants and wall and tower…

Their sense of belonging (a good thing) escalated into a sense of ownership by right of conquest (a bad thing).

How is it possible to belong, and yet remain somehow mindful that this is not ours? Or, how is it possible to belong to a community without believing that the community belongs to us?

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf writes in “Exclusion and Embrace” that old Abraham is the father of all who must belong and not belong. He left his home and wandered so that he could have a better loyalty than to his ancient tribalism.

Volf suggests that tribalism leads to exclusion and violence. If there is no higher loyalty than to the tribe (or culture, or institution, or church), then whatever threatens the tribe is the enemy, and all measures against the enemy are justifiable. All is justifiable in the name of the tribe and its boundary maintenance.

This is why the vineyard workers could do what they did. The owner’s agents threatened their growing sense of ownership. At all costs they had to be excluded…

…all of which is the opposite kind of fruit than was supposed to be produced from the vineyard. The Isaiah version of the story spells it out clearly enough: the desired fruit was justice, and instead there was injustice and cries of wretchedness.

Injustice and cries of wretchedness are precisely the fruit of tribalism. If there is no higher loyalty than to the tribe, all threats must be excluded at all costs.

Too much belonging, in the wrong sense, makes us too willing to harvest the fruit of injustice and cries of wretchedness.

Notice the way of Jesus. There is an intense belonging to his culture–weddings, history, festivals–and to his friends–hikes and boating mishaps and all sorts of adventures together–and yet he could hold them all at a distance when they would invite him to belong to them in a way that betrayed his highest loyalty:

Shall we call down fire?

We heard some guy preaching and we told him to shut up.

Get away, you dumb kids.

We belong without owning, for the sake of the fruit of justice.