Tim Keel's Blog

More reflections on a Rule

Trying to get prepared last week for my sermon on hospitality, I went over to amazon.com looking for a specific book: Christine Pohl's book Making Room. Of course I found it, but then amazon.com does this nifty little trick where they recommend other titles that are either the same subject or genre. So I ended up taking three books home with me.

So, today's my day to do some reading. I'm actually home in bed today, trying to fight off a cold (stuffed head, scratchy throat, achy body). Rest and read.

One of the other books I purchased is called Radical Hospitality: Benedict's Way of Love, by Father Daniel Homan, OSB. So far, so good.

In our Sunday night worship gathering, I've been exploring the idea of a rule of life for the disciples at Jacob's Well to experiment with and try on. Listen to Fr. Homan's words about the idea of a Rule.

"The word rule is something of a problem for us. We automatically resist rules. It is a symptom of contemporary life. Try thinking about it this way: A rule is nothing more than a set of ideas to help you determine the kind of person you will be and the course of your life. These ideas will be the reason you form certain habits (exercising, paying your bills on time, eating toast in the morning, meditating, and so on).
We all have some sort of rule we live by, consciously or otherwise. Your own rule consists of the little things you do that shape your life. The desire for balance or inner calm, the yearning for a life that feels right: These are the reasons we live by some kind of collected wisdom. Your rule of life is nothing more than what you have determined is most important to seeking and maintaining a meaningful existence. Your rule is a collection of what you think matters: I must be faithful to my friends, I must exercise, I must save money, I must take a couple of hours each week to be alone, I must make time to be with the people I love.
Your rule is what makes your life worthwhile. It is an expression of how you are spending your energy. It indicates what you value most. Your rule is the glue that holds your life together. By your rule you make choices about how you will spend your time and resources, you make choices about how you will spend yourself."

As it relates to community life, he goes on to say, "In a monastery (or a church), where people come together as strangers from a wide variety of backgrounds, some sort of unifying system is necessary. That is the purpose of Benedict's Rule. The Rule in a monastery holds the place together. It is a central, organizing wisdom for monks who are trying to build a life together pointing toward God."

Time and work and life

Memorial Day weekend and getting an extra day off has me thinking about work...

Seems like our relationship to work isn't working out all that well. America is by far the most productive and exhausted nation on the earth. We work and consume, work and consume, then do it some more. Yet very few people I interact with are satisfied with the quality of their lives overall. Especially around the issue of work. Nothing like a recession to force the issue.

I read an article on my Google News feed a couple days ago that reported that the French are protesting the length of their careers. I'm sure I don't understand the politics of it all, but it seems that these people actually want to have some time at the end of their lives to spend their hard-earned pensions, not spend their whole lives working for them. Traveling almost anywhere in the world other than America, seeing the often more measured pace of life, pursuit of leisure, etc., causes one to reflect on our workaholism.

It seems that our view of time is the initial culprit. Time used to be a fairly plastic concept, determined seasonally and regionally. In a rural setting, days during harvest were longer, in the winter they were shorter. Sun goes down, people go to bed (of course I'm writing at 11:00 pm). Because communities were fairly isolated from one another and interactions intermittent, each community possessed its own rhythm based on the life-style and values of the community. It can be imagined the liturgical year and the agricultural year shaped most of how people interacted with themselves, each other, the environment, and God. Seasons of sowing, of waiting, of labor, of rest, of celebration. You can see this in a cursory reading of the Torah. So what changed?

A lot, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. The industrial revolution inaugurated a new god: standardized reality. While many things have been standardized, the two things that have had the most profound effect on our lives today have been the standardization of time and labor. As the country was transformed and expanded, railroad companies began to connect isolated communities via the rail lines (check out historian Stephen Ambrose's book, Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869). This forced communities to set their clocks, not to the rhythm and life of their own community, but to that of the larger world around them. Connection comes at a cost. People who travel to third world countries today are often baffled by the different relationship to time these people have. Chances are, the difference is their sense of time is defined locally (kairos), in ways that are generally more holistic and life-giving than our globalized, mechanized, and rational understanding of chronos. In this world, time does not serve us, we serve time. It is inflexible. But we bend and bend and bend to accomodate the almighty clock. Check out Jesus's take on inflexible time in Luke 6.

Back to work. The 19th century gave us the assembly line, in addition to an omnipresent clock (a function of Deism, perhaps?). On the assembly line, all work was standardized. The person didn't matter, as long as they could keep up with the clock and the product. No seasonality necessary. Rhythm was obliterated for production. Rather than working until the job was done and measuring quality, one worked a set number of hours and measured production. Only later was "quality control" added. Rather than working until the job was done and then rest, one could work all the time. We stopped measuring quality and began measuring hours. How much can we really and reasonably expect a human to work? 40 hours? 50 hours? 60 hours? (This question goes hand-in-hand with the mechanized view of the human body that has developed as well: man as machine.) When do they get vacation? How do we protect them from the dehumanizing effects of living in this way? Money! Which creates a greater need for products, which creates a greater need for work, which means companies have to pay their employees more to justify having no lives outside work, which forces them to raise prices, ad infinitum, ad nauseum...............................

Okay, this is already way too long. Final thought. We no longer live in an industrial age. We live in an information age. Fewer and fewer people are working on assembly lines and those who do are highly skilled usually. Why are we still counting hours? Would it be possible to define a job by the desired outcome (say, for example, harvesting a crop - who cares how many hours you work, you get it done - and when its over its over)? I know this raises a lot more questions than it answers. I'm not a Luddite, not do I think we should all be farmers. I do think we seriously have to consider how we are living our lives.

Go ahead and waste some time

Sometimes you just need to laugh, you know?

Homestarrunner, my current laugh of choice.

...like a heart attack...

More thoughts on stability

Go check out Scott Raymond's blog. Sco doesn't post all that often but when he does, it is always worth some of your time. This newest post takes on the idea of stability that we've been talking about as a church and develops it from the standpoint of the discipline of architecture, among those that I can recognize after an initial viewing.

I ran out of time talking on Sunday and didn't end up getting to share some thoughts on stability from Wil Derkse's book, The Rule of Benedict for Beginners: Spirituality for Daily Life.

Some thoughts from Derkse:

"The vow of stability deals with a maintained and steady commitment of action...a permanence of place. However, that did not mean that one could never 'get out.' There was nothing wrong with leaving the monastery for a time when that was necessary for the interest of the community or for the individual monk. The important thing was to be and to remain commmitted to the community and the abbey that one had chosen. Stability is therefore in the first place, and most obviously: to remain with your community and not walk away from the context you have chosen. But, there is, of course, far more to it than steadiness of place and faithfully remaining with the group. This is not about remaining steady though you are gritting your teeth because you have obligated yourself contractually or some other way, but rather because of the steadiness of the commitment you have given from your heart. From the heart, that needs to be maintained, patiently, also with disappointments and pain - which are unavoidable in any form of working or living together...Another word for the durability of which Benedict spoke is faithfulness. It is not static either - a vow once spoken and a fixed promise - but a movable virtue: a lifelong road in which your identity moves along with preparedness to stay with the other, and the others, even if they change (less beautiful, duller than before, getting sick, becoming difficult, etc.). Faithfulness can be very difficult...It is a natural inclination to concentrate on what is wrong, what cannot be done, where the other person will not budge, a fixation which easily leads to some form of 'walking away,' whether outwardly or inwardly. For it is, of course, quite possible to maintain outward stability, but to walk away inwardly, to actually be absent, though you remain among your brothers and sisters." (pp. 22-24)

Bugs

Thanks to Mike for the heads up...the little Jacob's Well blog ring is experiencing some technical difficulties. I guess no one is able to post replies/comments. Maybe it's is Movable Type problem. Anyway, we're on it.

Be the Center

One of my favorite worship songs is the one we do called, "Be the Center." I love the simplicity and sincerity of what is being said and the beautiful melody that accompanies it. When Michelle plays along with her penny whistle, I am transported.

I just received this paper by Brian McLaren on this very subject, that is, "Jesus at the Center." If you have the opportunity, download it and read over it.

Jesus at the Center

The non-reflective life, kind of...

For the last couple of weeks, and for the coming ones too, we have been talking about what it might mean for our community to develop a rule of life. However the pace of life I've been living couldn't be further from a pattern that I would ever want to live or have anyone else emulate. Busy. But good, too. Hmmm....

I've noticed over the last three months that this blog can sometimes be a measure of the health of my life and my schedule (or as my British friend calls it, "diary"). If I'm busy, then I don't have time to think, much less write. I've noticed my car and my lawn are other indicators of personal pace. When one is busy, only the non-negotiables (or values) remain. Thus I haven't written for a week.

But there are also good reasons why we get busy. Sometimes life happens, you know? This was one of those weeks. Too many good choices. Focus down for a few days and get after it. I think we tend to think our lives ought to be even. Dallas Willard, in regard to spiritual disciplines, says, "I spend more time addressing guilt over 'Quiet Times' than any other issue. So I try to help people see their lives in cycles of weeks instead of days. Quiet times as we have construed them do not work for most people. I suggest people set aside longer periods of time less frequently. We must have space for extended periods. Intensity in any discipline is so important. A shower ever few days is much more effective than a few small drips every day. One of the real marks of modernism is 'the clock.' People are so time-conscious, and everything is scheduled."

Maybe if we could learn to rest and play as hard as we work. Or at least as evenly (or rhythmically).

We have the Emergent Coordinating Group in Kansas City this week. This has been a really good thing for me, both the preparation and the actual gathering of people. Last week we spent the better part of the week trying to get our space in order, that is, have a place in our church that a bunch of people could work in for four days comfortably. Have you ever noticed that when you are going to have guests you can get three years of work done in a day or two?

Twisting the Oak

I went up to Gladstone today to see the Langford family. Everybody seems okay and really grateful. The second floor of the house had all the windows blown out, chunks of roofing tiles were missing, and there may be some structural damage on the front of their house.

After lunch, Jim and I climbed onto the roof and worked for awhile covering exposed parts of the sub-roof with plastic sheeting. Their house is fairly isolated, or at least it used to be. They are back from the road, under the cover of trees even though they sit quite a ways up on a hill. Working high on their house, we were able to see the path of this particular funnel, which decimated the sub-division across the street (the one in the picture to the left) and the house just below them.

Eventually, we walked down the hill and visited with the family whose house was destroyed. I walked through their home, or what was left of it, stunned, trying to figure how it was possible that certain things were able to be in places where they just shouldn't be. There was no roof - just a big hole and lots of blue sky. I've never seen anything like it. Power.

I've mentioned before that I love weather, that I am fascinated by storms and rain and the mystery of it all - there's something transcendent there for me. And when I've said that I've meant transcendence in the realm of the beautiful. But today I witnessed it's darkest side, or maybe darkest is the wrong adjective. I guess it's kind of hard to describe. For the most part, weather is neat, fascinating, etc. Even when it's dangerous it's contained and sterile...made for television. But today I saw transcendent terrifying and arbitrary. I saw the reality of people utterly helpless before something awe-ful. I think trying to understand God in all his splendor and shrouded-ness is akin to witnessing the power of creation unleashed, albeit in some very small and limited way. And I perceive what the psalmist may have been describing when he wrote

The voice of the LORD is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the LORD thunders over the mighty waters.
The voice of the LORD is powerful;
the voice of the LORD is majestic.
The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars;
the LORD breaks in pieces the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon skip like a calf,
Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of the LORD strikes
with flashes of lightning.
The voice of the LORD shakes the desert;
the LORD shakes the Desert of Kadesh.
The voice of the LORD twists the oaks
and strips the forests bare.
And in his temple all cry, "Glory!" Psalm 29:3-9

Dealing with Descartes

A couple of years ago, John Franke and Stan Grenz wrote a book that began to help evangelicals (and many others) to think about how we "do" theology. It is called Beyond Foundationalism: Shaping Theology in the Postmodern Context. It is a really good and challenging read.

Reading through DJ Chuang's blog the other day, I stumbled on a link to an article written by Rodney Clapp on this very subject. Clapp's paper, How Firm a Foundation: Can Evangelicals be Foundationalists?, is a really helpful essay giving an overview of foundationalism and whether or not there are epistemological alternatives to the foundational approach. Clapp has also written a book I've been wanting to get to for a while now, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society. Has anyone read this?