More Reading

Yes, still flat on my back. I've finished a six-day course of steroids (a prednisone taper, which I remember fondly from my days writing documentation for medical records software—we liked to show off how easy it was to code a macro that would prescribe the gradually decreasing dosage), and I can now stand up easily and remain sitting or standing for short periods of time with only occasional burst of relatively mild pain and a slowly increasing dull ache. Hm. I think I need to go back to the doctor.

In the meantime, I've been doing more reading, in addition to working on the outline for my next novel and playing World of Warcraft (my warlock on Argent Dawn, Dairon, is now 35th level, though my friends on that server are either off on different servers or engrossed in D&D Online right now). Irish Cream by Andrew Greeley was a pretty light read with little in the way of lasting impression, and I'd have to say the same for Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart, though that was a pleasantly amusing fantasy. Then today I finally broke down and read The Da Vinci Code, because I didn't want to see the movie without having read the book. Now I'm not sure I want to see the movie.

So, it was a good story. Even as I was snorting and occasionally yelling about grievous inaccuracies in historical and Biblical scholarship in the book, I kept turning the pages. I read the book in about 5 hours. I can't say it's hugely well-written: there are long sections of exposition, at least three places where characters respond to things that other characters have thought to themselves rather than spoken aloud, and one terribly inconsistent chapter (chapter 63, with the cars). But it kept me turning pages—all 454 of them—so I have to admit that the story was an effective thriller.

Of course, I had problems with it. This is not my first exposure to the elaborate Grail legend that proposes a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, leading to a bloodline traced down to the Merovingian kings. I don't believe it, but not because I cling to the idea that Jesus was a celibate. Heck, I know Peter (the "first Pope") was married, because Jesus healed his mother-in-law (Matt 8:14, Mark 1:30, Luke 4:38), and you can't have a mother-in-law without being married (and why would you want to?). As this book and many others have pointed out, if Jesus had not been married, that would have been strange enough that it would likely have received comment or explanation in our canonical gospels. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. I also know from the Bible and respectable Biblical scholarship that Jesus was hardly ascetic in other aspects of his life—eating and drinking, with whoever would share his table, was a significant part of his ministry, and he wasn't drinking grape juice. 

My problems with the whole Holy Grail—Mary Magdalene thing is twofold (there might be a third, but it's a relatively minor point):

1) According to Brown's version of the legend, Mary was pregnant at the time of the crucifixion and, with the help of Joseph of Arimathea (Jesus' uncle? where did that come from?), fled to France to protect her baby. Hm. Maybe. And yet Jesus' brother, James (Matt 13:55, Mark 6:3) held a position of leadership in the church after Jesus' death (Acts 1:14). The fact that there's a letter of James in the canonical New Testament indicates that his authority was respected, at least partly because of his blood relationship to Jesus. Same thing with Jude. So if the brothers of Jesus didn't flee, but used his spiritual and hereditary authority to take leadership in the Church, why would Jesus' wife and daughter flee rather than claim their own authority?

2) Speaking of Mary's own authority... By some accounts Mary Magdalene is the first witness to the Resurrection (I guess she didn't flee to Gaul until after that, anyway), and "the apostle to the Apostles" by virtue of being the one who told all the men that Jesus was risen (Matt 28:10, John 20:17–18). There's some evidence to suggest that her authority in the ancient church was, in fact, more considerable than any surviving records tell us, and was, in fact, suppressed by the expanding Roman church as it consolidated its power and spread its brand of orthodoxy. But that authority derives from her role as an apostle, not from a role as a wife and mother. The Grail legend, as Brown retells it, subverts her genuine spiritual authority into a consequence of her being Jesus' wife. If anything, the Grail legend as recounted by Brown actually supports the position of the Roman Catholic Church in granting authority to women only in subordinate roles. It continues to deny the spiritual authority of women.

3) The relatively minor one, but I'll mention it anyway. It strikes me as pretty darned Eurocentric to propose that the bloodline of Jesus and Mary linked up with a French royal line. Eurocentric and all pro-monarchy and stuff. That alone doesn't mean it's not true, but it does make me wonder about the political agenda of the people who came up with this stuff.

And quickly: 

• The tetragrammaton (YHWH) is derived from the androgyne name Jehovah? No, "Jehovah" is a clumsy Christian attempt to read the tetragrammaton with the vowels of "Adonai" superimposed on it.
• The Council of Nicea didn't introduce the idea of Jesus' divinity. The only question under debate at that Council was whether the Word that had incarnated in Jesus (the Logos mentioned in John 1:1) was equal with God or was simply the first of God's creations (the Arian position). Nobody at that time questioned that the more-or-less-divine Word had been incarnate in Jesus.
• To argue that the Nag Hammadi texts (and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which to my knowledge are all pre-Christian), all the gospels that were not incorporated into the canon, (a) were earlier than the gospels that were included in the canon, and (b) portray a more human Jesus, is just absurd. Reading those texts, it is often hard to recognize the Jesus they portray as remotely human. In fact, there were gnostic teachers who argued that Jesus was so pure and perfect that he didn't go to the bathroom. The Synoptic gospels we have in the canon (Matthew, Luke, and especially Mark) do a darned fine job of portraying a very human Jesus.
• And while he's busy touting the divine feminine, his one female character—who's supposed to be a great cryptographer, by the way—is pretty stupid and helpless through the whole thing, and her main purpose seems to be being reunited with her family and falling in love with the hero (who completely forgets about the other love of his life somewhere along the way). So much for the divine feminine.
• The discussion of phi was interesting. It makes me want a widescreen PowerBook. (The 1024 x 768 of my 12-inch PowerBook is only 1-1/3:1. The widescreen models are both 1.6:1, much closer to the Divine Proportion.)

So here's the thing. It seems to me that there are two threads that the author is trying to weave together, here. One is the Grail-Magdalene-Merovingian legend, and the other is the importance of the divine feminine. I actually think that those two themes work at cross purposes (no pun intended). He tries to argue that the church suppressed evidence of Jesus' humanity, including his marriage to Mary Magdalene—and he ends up turning Mary Magdalene into a Goddess. And, as I discussed before, he subverts Mary's spiritual authority by suggesting that her only claim to authority was as a wife and mother. I am sympathetic to the need to reclaim a sense of the divine feminine, as well as a more inclusive attitude to the role of women in religious life (but no, not a return to the hieros gamos, except insofar as an actual marriage can be holy, which I think is significant). But I think Brown errs in yoking that agenda to the Grail theory.

Art and Faith (and D&D?)

During the summer, I received a query from a woman who writes for religionlink.org, a site that offers tip sheets for reporters writing about religious topics. A few days ago, the little blurb we crafted about me went up on the site, and yesterday I got my first query from a reporter—a student writer at Brigham Young University. In response to her couple of timid questions, I ended up spilling out an essay I've been meaning to write for a long time. There are themes in here I first elucidated when I held "Coffee, Theology, and D&D" meetings with folks like David Noonan, Jeff Quick, and Johnny Wilson—meetings that resulted in some of the ideas about a Christian roleplaying game that I articulated on this site years ago. There are other themes that I've discussed with my wife over the years as she pursues her Ph.D. in spirituality and the arts. So this has been a long time coming... and after that big lead-up, it's probably going to seem a bit anti-climactic. Here it is, before I make it sound any more important than it is:

One of the things that appeals to me about Christian music is that I like songs that are about stuff that matters. Even though I grew up listening to the Beatles, a song like "I want to hold your hand" is a fine head-bopping sort of a song, but I don't find it particularly significant in its subject matter. Good Christian music points to the mysteries of life emerging from death, of hope arising out of suffering, of a small and flickering light unquenched by the vast darkness around it—in other words, it points to the cross and the heart of our faith. In fact, theologian Paul Tillich has argued that all good art is religious, in that it is an expression of an ultimate concern—an attempt to wrestle with real questions about the nature, purpose, and meaning of human existence.
There is plenty of bad Christian art out there—music, visual art, and games of all sorts that deals with Christian subjects but fails to really express any serious conviction about our existence. Lots of Christian music is filled with eempty platitudes that have little to do with the real struggles of real people trying to live faithful lives in our world. Lots of Christian art depicts hollow saints or an insipid savior without managing to communicate the power or significance of their lives. And lots of Christian games try to teach Bible verses or recreate Biblical stories without really saying anything about what it all means.
The flip side is that there's plenty of good art out there that does not treat explicitly with Christian themes. Here and there in the world of secular music are songs that say more about the ultimate meaning of the universe than any ten randomly-chosen CDs of Christian music. I think Tolkien did a better job conveying the Truth in the non-Christian world of The Lord of the Rings than Lewis did in his allegorical world of Narnia. 
It's my hope that some of my work falls into this category. Nobody would try to argue that Dungeons & Dragons is a Christian game, but I always try to reflect my values and my beliefs about the nature of existence in the material I write for it. I've got a fantasy novel coming out next summer that's all about forgiveness and redemption, though it never comes close to Christian allegory.
All that said, to talk about games as art is sometimes a stretch, and sometimes we all take games too seriously. Educational games are fine, whether they're teaching multiplication or Bible verses. But sometimes a game should be just a game. Is Tetris a Christian game or a secular game? No, it's a game. It's not art, and it's not making any kind of statement about human existence or anything else. You can debate all you like whether Christians have any business wasting their time on frivolous games (I had to give up Tetris for Lent during my senior year of college, or else I never would have finished my thesis), and you can certainly try to ensure that your frivolous games of choice at least don't encourage or replicate behavior you find reprehensible. But if you purge a video game of sex and violence and make it fit a storyline out of the Bible, that doesn't make it Christian. That makes it a game you hope to sell to Christians.

Grace

Last Sunday, my wife and her newly-formed liturgical dance troupe danced in a Methodist church in Bellevue—the church where one of the women in her troupe is an associate pastor. The dance was great. Every time I see my wife dance, I am struck by the palpable grace coming from her. It's an experience that merges the two senses of the word "grace" for me. 

Then came Communion. Oh. Problem. See, we Methodists often take Communion by intinction, which is to say taking a chunk of bread and dipping it into the cup (of grape juice), then partaking of the soggy body/blood combination. Which leaves me stuck. I can't eat the bread, obviously, so no dipping for me. In theory, I could just drink from the cup—except that, unless I'm the first person up there, there's an abundance of gluten-laden crumbs swimming around in the cup. So no Communion for me.

This made me very upset at first, as it had at the Renton UCC/Disciples church a couple weeks ago. And particularly since, as we went into the Great Thanksgiving, I turned to my wife and whispered, "Oh yeah, I am a Methodist!" The familiarity of the ritual was comforting. But then to be cut off from participation in it felt especially painful. So I sat there feeling sorry for myself yet again.

Then that grace thing happened. Our son had chosen a seat right up front and on the left side of the sanctuary. So we were right by the associate pastor, Crystal, as she was serving people on our side. I was watching her for a while, how she touched everyone who came up—laying her hand on the heads of children or gently touching the arms of adults—and called most everyone by name and was really present with them, serving them. And suddenly I was able to let go of my self-pity and accept the grace that God was offering me through the sacrament—without physically participating in the sacrament. We Methodists talk about sacraments (Communion and baptism) as means of grace, and I have always cherished the idea that God's grace can come to me through the bread and cup without any particular openness on my part, that I don't need to get myself in the right frame of mind or somehow make Communion a special experience for myself—God's grace flows through the sacrament whatever I do and whatever state I'm in. So this was the first time I had experienced that as a witness to the sacrament rather than a real participant. 

She carries a pearl
In perfect condition
What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings

Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things

Grace finds beauty
In everything

Check out "Grace" performed by U2 and by Nichole Nordeman .

Theological Musings

I've received more email in response to my "Am I still a believer?" essay than about just about anything else I've written, with the possible exception of Oriental Adventures. That's heartening somehow. I felt like I was really going out on a limb by including anything that personal and overtly religious on my site, but honestly my desire to write and post stuff like that was part of the reason I moved to the new site format in the first place. So hey, thanks to everyone that's written to me about it—thank you very much for your concern, your support, and just for taking the time to write.

We tried another new church this past Sunday—a joint UCC/Disciples congregation in Renton. It was really good. But for only the second or third time, the full implications of my recently-diagnosed gluten problem were driven painfully home to me. I was diagnosed with celiac sprue last October. As a vegetarian, that leaves me able to eat... pretty much nothing. So it's been hard. But realizing that I could no longer take Communion was very difficult. For a while we were going to a service at a Methodist church called "Coffee, Donuts, and God"—my son really liked it. But I think that the first time we were there on a Communion Sunday might also have been the last time we went, despite the pastor's willingness to accommodate my needs in whatever way I felt necessary. That was the first time it hit home.

Hey, Methodists only celebrate Communion once a month—or that's been my experience in most churches, anyway. So that's not too bad. But Disciples celebrate it weekly. I went (alone) to a different Disciples congregation last week, and hardly gave a second thought to the tray of tiny crumbs of bread as it went past. I'm not sure why it got me so much harder this week—maybe because it was a real loaf of bread going past me, untasted, down the pew, or maybe because I felt up to that point much more like a part of the body in that church, or maybe because I felt like I was being kept from the Feast. Our overall experience in this church was wonderful, and I'm sure we'll go back, maybe this next Sunday. But at some point, hopefully soon, I need to talk to the pastor about getting an alternative bread on to that plate before I have to pass it down the pew again.

Because that's a feast I want to be a part of.

[Note 9/4/2015: This is an experiment to see what happens if I copy a post from my old blog and try to time-stamp it with the original date.]

Am I Still a Believer?

I had a conversation in the kitchen at work the other day with one of our customer service reps. He had seen my presentation about Eberron at Wizards' Game Day a couple weeks ago and complemented me on it, so we're suddenly closer to a first-name basis, I guess. He said he'd heard I was a minister, or used to be. "Yeah, I used to be. I fled." That's my standard answer—sort of funny, deflecting the seriousness of the question. Yeah, there's this huge whole part of my life, from the time I got religion in college through three years of seminary and three more years as an ordained minister, and then I fled. Some people find that fascinating: a former minister now working at Wizards of the Coast writing Dungeons & Dragons books. It's a weird juxtaposition, sort of a living oxymoron, like a guy with a Ph.D. driving a garbage truck or something. Sure, it's curious. But those are not people that I'm particularly interested in talking with about the reasons I left ministry and the path that brought me where I am. Let them enjoy the living oxymoron and move on.
But this guy in customer service was coming at it from a different angle. "Are you still a believer?" he asked. He is, too—not a former minister, but a believer, a Christian, and someone who might want to go to seminary someday. See, now that's a whole different line of questioning. Unfortunately, I answered that with the same kind of ha-ha reply, something like "Yeah, more or less." And when Rich Baker showed up in the kitchen I quickly took the opportunity to mention something I'd been wanting to talk to him about. Not so much because I didn't want to talk about my spiritual path with a fellow believer, but because I didn't want to do that in the kitchen at work.

But man, that's not an easy conversation to have. Am I a believer? Hell, I don't know. I believe a lot of things—some of them fairly orthodox by the standards of twenty centuries of Christian theology, some of them much less so. Some of them I have pretty strong opinions about, maybe even convictions. Others I think I still believe but I haven't really tested them in a while to see if they're still actual beliefs or just lingering ideas. 

Example: My wife asked me a couple of weeks ago what I believe church is. My answer was something like this: I used to believe that church is a group of people called to live in the world as a colony of Heaven, a group patterned after the way relationships should be in God's new creation. I used to believe that church is a place where we celebrate the sacrament of Communion in anticipation of the great feast to which God will call us someday, gathered around a common table at which all are welcome to celebrate the grace that brings us together. Do I still believe that's what church is? I don't know. 

Those are pretty beliefs. That's a very attractive idea about what church is. But there's a big part of me that shakes my head sadly at the beliefs of a very naïve 20-year-old preaching his first sermon in his college church, talking about what he hoped church could be and what he dreamed his time in ministry would be about. There's a part of me that sheds bitter tears over my own experiences, and those of my friends, about what church actually is. The woman in my smaller church in Ohio who scowled at me from her pew every Sunday morning, shook her head as I preached, just never liked me and was glad to see me go. The Board of Ordained Ministry that heard my ambivalence about my sense of call and denied my wife her elder's ordination at the point in her life when she was most certain of her own call. The congregations who have shunned people for personal or dogmatic reasons, the well-meaning believers who still try to bar people from the Communion table, either as guests or as hosts. 

I haven't yet figured out how to relate my pretty beliefs to my bitter experience. I guess I haven't really taken the time to try. 

It's true, I fled ministry. With people who are closer friends, I'm willing to delve into some of the reasons I fled. Pretty much my standard answer has become that I'm just too much of an introvert to have been a successful minister. That is true, but it is only part of the whole truth. I am very much an introvert, and that did interfere with my success as a minister, and that makes me angry. I am angry that most of the ministers I know, and whose churches I visit now in an ongoing search for a new community to call home, are not like me, or at least they do not seem to be. They are very outgoing, dynamic people, able to negotiate awkward social situations and hospitals and funeral homes with ease, full of certainty and security and platitudes I never could believe. They are not mystics and contemplatives, and they are not introverts. 

I feel as though the deck was stacked against me from the beginning, like my Myers-Briggs profile indicated right off the bat that I would not be a successful minister. More importantly, I guess, I feel as though my ideas of church were just completely unrealistic, an impossible dream setting me up for failure and disappointment. I wanted ministry to be about spiritual growth and contemplation, I wanted church to be about experiencing the Reign of God in joyful anticipation, "a foretaste of the feast to come." It wasn't, and I fled the reality of what it was (which, in addition to the bitter things I already mentioned, included a great number of people who truly loved me and were very sad to see me go). And having fled the ministry that was not what I dreamed it would be, it seems that I also fled the dream of spiritual growth and contemplation, abandoned the hope of experiencing God's Reign in foretaste, and have resigned myself to accompanying my wife and son on an apparently never-ending quest to find a church where we can belong, feel at home, settle in and grow. 

It has been eight years since I fled ministry and Ohio. I've lived in Madison, in Berkeley, and now around Seattle, and still have not found a church I'm happy in. I guess that I'm still looking for a church that is a colony of Heaven, a community gathered to celebrate the feast of anticipation. 

Am I still a believer? I guess the real answer to that question varies from day to day, in direct correlation with how much hope I still have of ever finding that church. As I think more deeply about it, however, I realize that I am still convinced I will find it someday. Perhaps not a community called to be a colony of Heaven, perhaps not a community gathered to celebrate the feast in anticipation, but the actual feast in the realized Reign of God. I guess I've never been exactly sure what form that feast will take or what the Kingdom of Heaven really is, but I know that the promise is at the heart of what I do believe, the invitation still tugs at my soul and draws me back toward the life of the spirit. 

One of the things that reassures me in more doubtful times that I actually am still a Christian is that I frequently listen to Christian music. (That is easily a topic for a whole other long post.) Anyway, a playlist that frequently gets played from my iPod is this one [link will open the iTunes music store]—all about that invitation, that promise, and the home that awaits us. In these songs, I feel that tug at my soul, I hear the promise that God will not always be a distant and alien Presence whose voice as often comes from the whirlwind as in sheer silence, but will someday be, as God sometimes is even now, as close as my heartbeat, right at hand to wipe the tears from my eyes. 

I guess I am still a believer, and I'm frankly a little startled to realize how much I do still cling to that promise in the depths of my heart. Yes. Yes, I am.