The God Who Outgrew Itself

Sermon delivered at the UNMC on August 15, 2004. See also the associated pastoral prayer.

“You Universalists,” said J. M. Pullman around 1900, “have squatted on the biggest word in the English language. Now the world is beginning to want that big word, and you Universalists must improve the property, or move off the premises.”

At the time, the great tension within the Universalist movement was whether, and to what extent, Universalism would be a Christian faith. Brainard Gibbons asked this very question in 1949:

“Is Universalism a Christian denomination, or is it something more, a truly universal religion? This issue [he continued] is the most vital Universalism has ever faced, for Christianity and this larger Universalism are irreconcilable. A momentous decision must be made, and soon! Unless Universalism stands for something distinctive and affirmative, it falls in[to] indistinguishable, negative nothingness—neither loved nor hated, just ignored!”

Deconstructing my own pretension.

I can be pretentious sometimes. This comes as a great shock to you, I know.

This pretension takes several forms. Sometimes it’s the subject matter. Even though my enthusiasm for Gustav Klimt and W.A. Mozart is genuine, it’s undeniably pretensious. The important thing to remember is that I do this from a broad and honest love of all these things.

(Sometimes, I mention things just to sound classier, but when I do, I usually just make up a name, to avoid being disrespectful of genuine artists and thinkers by using them for such selfish purposes. Jorge Federico del Campo, the late Bolivian poet, often did much the same thing.)

Just as often, though, my pretentiousness is in the way I express my interests. I make no apologies for this, either. I try to speak and write well, and I do make an effort for rid my speaking, writing, and manner of unnecessary pretension — as much as I can and still expess what I mean to. I am precise to communicate, not merely to be stuck-up: As a faithful minister of the Gospel of Strunk and White I try not to use more words than I need to and mean to.

Still, I often fail at this, because I have a love for the elegant turn of phrase. Witness:

WHAT I SAID: It has come to my attention that a number of people I’ve never met are reading my LiveJournal. (18 words, counting the contraction as one and “LiveJournal” as one)
WHAT I COULD HAVE SAID: Strangers read this. (3 words)

WHAT I SAID: There’s a good piece in the New Yorker about Arthur Rimbaud. For all you uncultured people out there, he was an important poet. (23 words, plus the patronizing air and the fact that anyone pretending to like Rimbaud is pretentious to start with)
WHAT I COULD HAVE SAID: Check out Rimbaud. (3 words)

WHAT WE SAID:
Me: So it’s not just me being ignorant?
My Friend: Well, that probably makes it worse. (13 words)
WHAT WE COULD HAVE SAID:
Me: Not just me ignorant?
My Friend: Not just. (6 words)

Incidentally, I don’t think my friend is pretentious. Maybe if he knew more about classical music, he could be.

And that’s really the heart of it: I may be pretentious, but I do my level best to do it in an accessible sort of way. I’m like a doctor or a cop in that ideally, I work myself out of a job. If people were smarter, better educated, more cultured, more artistic, I wouldn’t have to be pretentious. I could focus on being self-absorbed. Wah.

Reposted from the old site: Tuesday, December 16th, 2003

A poem for New Year’s

[Untitled]

I work so hard on a cathedral of ice
that only my breath gives me hints of cold
My sweat freezes in whole drops
From hot-chocolate pillows
you see ice drip down my face
and don’t see coming cathedrals, like I do
Have you lived, who make snowballs
with gloves, and never
have felt the burning snow?

I run every morning under wet
boughs that curtsy their leaf-tips
onto my brow
On my cheeks appear drops of Polynesian seas
to jewel my ruddiness
All of my hopes are in puddle-reflections
but your eyes are up
and you don’t see yourself
in puddles

You see me walk barefoot
down the street
This asphalt-gold, clear as glass, burns my sole
What better salve than grass and dew
and new-felt fleeting injury?
You wear shoes on liberating
summer days so hot
that I take a shower and as soon as I am dry
I am sweating a good sweat again

I destroy my pile of raked leaves, quick:
before the wind can spread them again
and ruin my chance to fall into sweet
crunch. Do you trust in the solace
of underfoot crackles?
Unperturbed is your pile
—are all your things
that make no sound and have no smell
that never crunch or die

Reposted from the old site: Thursday, January 1, 2004

Equanimity.

Much of the time I feel like we never quite make up for the wrong we do. That’s why we all need, and by Grace attain, fullness outside the self. I’ve been looking for it in the wrong places: in the fleeting fulfillment of my own perceived needs and desires, and not in the palpable, sustaining Spirit that I used to see through the people I loved that left me so much in awe.

Those needs and desires are real, of course, and to dismiss them altogether is to set any hoped-for transformation up for failure. I still have fears, concerns, insecurities, hurts, and Things I Want to Talk About. But as long as I’m trying to be a little less self-involved, I’ll skip those: They’ll wait for me, or disappear.

In speaking with MKM over lunch last week, she suggested that I try letting go and stop grasping at imaginary threads of control. Now, equanimity has never been my strength. A part of me yearns always to act, to change, to be just a little better, until I claw my way to happiness—but so far it’s mostly just given me bloody knuckles.

I need to give up on earning impossible redemption and throw myself at the feet of Grace. I am in no position to ask forgiveness from anyone. All there is left is the openness of surrender.

I miss the honesty and fire that submission gave me. I miss being humbled by the simple goodness of people. I miss offering my gratitude in the guise of generosity. I want to be subject to people again. I want that to be my prime delight. Acceptance—of responsibility, of circumstances, of my own smallness—is the only way I see to exist geniunely.

This is a lesson I need every once in a while. How to make it stick?

Reposted from the old site: Friday, July 29th, 2005

The First Entry.

Each journal entry carries the hope of being the first of many and the burden of prior false starts, as though regularity alone were a virtue, as though every sentence and every entry were justified only if it were followed by another.

I’ve never excelled at writing entries regularly. My last was 380 days ago, or so. This is partly from malaise, partly from business and an easy distractibility, partly from a fear of the banal. Some people write appealing words about their daily lives; I write better thematically. The chronological element is not series of events, but the evolving salience of competing and complementary themes.

I do feel a need to write more, but it doesn’t flow. I want to do lots of things here: I want to make a list of my failings, and talk about them, not as an exercise in masochism, but to understand them. I want to think about the people I know, and why my relationships with them seem so basically unsatisfying at times. I want to get my fingers back into practice doing good, honest writing that doesn’t have all those extra, superfluous, unnecessary, gratuitous, redundant, unneeded words that slide into my academic writing, despite a professed commitment to writing Strunkian prose.

So, a metaentry to exorcise hopes and burdens.

Reposted from the old site: Thursday, January 18th, 2007