Tim Keel's Blog

Dr. Brueggemann is Coming to Town

About a month ago Laci told me that she had heard Dr. Walter Brueggemann was going to be in town. Brueggemann is an extraordinary Old Testament scholar and theologian and at the same time uses words and ideas like a poet. I love reading his work. In September, Emergent hosted a theological gathering in Atlanta with Dr. Brueggemann as the featured speaker (you can listen to his talks here).

I was nervous going into this event. I have had the opportunity to listen to theological mentors before, thinkers whose writings have influenced me greatly. And I have been pretty disappointed on occasion. With Brueggemann the ante actually went up - he was better in person than even in his writings. He is totally accessible as well.

Village Presbyterian Church is hosting Dr. Brueggemann for three days, April 3-5. His presentation is titled, "Jeremiah, Jerusalem, and our Post 9/11 World." I heard him reference this material in Atlanta and my sense is it is not for the faint of heart. To find out more information about these lectures, which are open to the general public, click here.

An Easter Miracle

We had a wonderful Easter celebration yesterday morning. There really is something sacred about getting up that early in the morning to worship God and proclaim the mystery of the risen Christ.

My good friend Mike King was sitting across the aisle and a few rows back from my family. This was the first time my youngest son, Blaise, participated with us in worship, and the first time he has listened to me preach. I missed all of this but both Mike and Mimi told me he spent the better part of the worship service waving at me or otherwise trying to get my attention. He has been fascinated by Jesus this Easter season. Anyway, at some point during the message, Blaise escaped and moved back an aisle and decided to get in on the act himself. Mike snapped this shot of father and son "in action." Thanks for sending this to me, Mike.

Holy Saturday Vigil

It is a quiet night at the church tonight. We are observing a 12 hour prayer vigil through the night. It began at 6:00 p.m. and will conclude at 6:00 a.m. followed shortly thereafter by our sunrise Easter worship and pancake breakfast.

People have been quietly coming in and out of the church all night. I think a few folks are connecting at midnight to watch "The Passion of the Christ." I still haven't seen it, but will likely take some time later this week to sit down and watch it with Mimi. We did check out "Jesus of Nazareth" from the public library. Our kids were out of school yesterday and over the last two days we have been watching this telling of the Jesus story. For me, Robert Powell really is the iconic Jesus, even though he has blue eyes.

Sitting in the sanctuary in stillness tonight, meditatively reading through passages of Scripture, listening to chant or instrumental music, that stillness becomes heavy, weighted with the sacramental currency that feeds my soul. And though the stillness is heavy my soul becomes light and my body restful.

A couple of passages that nourished me tonight:

"I say to God, 'Be my Lord!'
Without you, nothing makes sense...

"The wise counsel God gives when I am awake
is confirmed by my sleeping heart...

"I'm happy from the inside out,
and from the outside in, I'm firmly formed...

"Now you've got my feet on the life path,
all radiant from the shining of your face."
- from Psalm 16 (the Message)

And again:

"I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, More than watchmen wait for the morning." - from Psalm 130 (TNIV)

Tennebrae Gathering, Good Friday 2005

 

Ashley Smith, Cigarettes and Grace

I just received the new issue of Time magazine. The last page of the magazine is always the "essay." This week's essay is by Andrew Sullivan and is titled, "When Grace Arrives Unannounced." It is a beautiful article about Brian Nichols and Ashley Smith and their dramatic encounter last week. I thought I would excerpt a few quotes that nourished me today.

We latch onto this story not just because it's a riveting end to a high-stakes manhunt. We find ourselves transfixed and uplifted by the sordid ordinariness of it all. He was an alleged rapist and murderer. She was tied up in a bathtub, clinging to the wreckage of a life that was barely afloat. One was a monster, the other a woman unable to care for her 5-year-old, looking for cigarettes in the dark. And out of that came something, well, beautiful. He saw his purpose: to serve God in prison, to turn his life around, even as it may have been saturated in the blood and pain of others. She saw hers: to make that happen. These people weren't saints. Grace arrives, unannounced, in lives that least expect or deserve it.

I say that as a believer. The crimes Nichols is suspected of are inexcusable. The serenity of Smith is close to inexplicable. But the message of the Gospels is that God works with the crooked timber of human failure. That was an exceptional moment of redemption. But every day we have smaller, calmer chances to turn another's life around, to serve, to listen. How often do we simply not see what is in front of us? How often do we believe that the world's evils--from terrorism to crime to emotional cruelty--are beyond our capacity to change? Or that there is no one in front of us whom we can serve? Smith and Nichols' story is a chastening reminder that we may be wrong.

There's a line in a Leonard Cohen song that has always stayed with me. It kept me going in a bleak moment in my life, when I thought, as we all sometimes do, that I couldn't see how good could come out of the dreck I had turned my life into. "Forget your perfect offering," Cohen advises. "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." Happy Easter.

A Little Out of the Bloop

Our kids are on Spring Break this week...so we packed up and headed to St. Louis for a couple of days away. Thanks to Priceline.com we stayed in a great hotel right next to the St. Louis Arch for next to nothing. It was fun to watch St. Louis prepping for the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament and its upcoming week-end in the spotlight. Go Hawks.

A little less entertaining was the arrival of the complete wrestling teams, family and fans of several universities competing for the national NCAA wrestling title, also in St. Louis. I woke up at 2:00 a.m. to loud, rhythmic Oklahoma State fans chanting: "Let's go, Okies...let's go Okies...let's go Okies, " to which several Minnesota fans replied, "Let's go Gophers..." I've never seen so many cauliflower ears, or cases of beer being carted into a hotel lobby for that matter. We escaped today just in time.

St. Louis is such a great place to spend a couple of days. We hit the arch. We did Union Station, complete with the carnival-like attraction of four trampolines, harnesses, and bungy cords. Following the best dining a food court can provide, multiple front and back flips 20 feet above a trampoline didn't seem so smart...but at the time I just couldn't resist. After five minutes of jumping I thought my lungs were going to explode. I was quickly reminded that my three-week battle with bronchitis was not behind me. It was further confirmed when the trampoline guru told me that I had just done the cardiovascular equivalent of a one-mile run. HACK.

The highlight had to be The City Museum, an old warehouse in the heart of downtown that has been rehabilitated and repurposed. Not only has the architectural space been reimagined, but everything in the place is previously used industrial materials. I've never been inside a structure that is so cool and creative as this place is. Their children's art center was amazing and has given me some cool ideas for how a community might engage children with practices and environments constructed to stimulate faith formation and expression around creativity. This environment, coupled with the physicality of the experience, was totally engaging. I only wished I had brought knee pads.

Almost Forgot to Say...

Happy 4th birthday, Blaise. I love you. And if possible, not so fast, okay? For anyone wondering, this face represents a state of being for this child. We named him Blaise. What did we expect?

 

"Blink"ing, Emotions and the Brain

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. I found it to be very interesting, though not as innovative and insightful as his previous title, The Tipping Point (in a not surprising but ironic twist Gladwell and his ideas have reached something of a tipping point in the public consciousness themselves). The highlight of Blink for me was chapter 6, "Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind Reading." In this chapter Gladwell talks about how human beings intuitively "read minds" and the very real consequences when they can't, as illustrated by Amadou Diallo and the four policemen who killed him in New York City in the late 90s.

Gladwell reports on the pioneering work of scientists Silvan Tomkins (who is now dead) and his pupil Paul Ekmman. Tomkins and Ekman mapped the human face (FACS: Facial Action Coding System) assigning emotions like anger, joy, disgust, and contempt to combinations of facial muscles (action units) working together to convey (and at times betray) what is happening on conscious and sub-conscious levels. Tomkins and Ekman slowly developed their facial muscles and developed the ability to create any emotional state on their face by manipulating those muscles. Gladwell states,

Ekman does not appear to have a particularly expressive face. He has the demeanor of a psychoanalyst, watchful and impassive, and his ability to transform his face so easily and quickly was astonishing...Ekman then began to layer one action unit (individual facial muscle) on top of another, in order to compose the more complicated facial expressions that we generally recognize as emotions. Happiness, for instance, is essentially A.U. (action unit) six and twelve - contracting the muscles that raise the cheek (orbicularis oculi, pars orbitalis) in combination with the zygomatic major, which pulls up the corners of the lips. Fear is A.U. one, two, and four, or, more fully, one, two, four, five, and twenty, with or without action units twenty-five, twenty-six or twenty-seven.

So, in effect, "mind reading" is simply a recognition of what we observe in people's faces over time. We see what happens on people's faces and "intuitively" know what is going on inside them. As relational beings we are conditioned by our experiences, relationships, and interactions from a very early age to recognize "intuitively" what is going on behind the curtain. That may seem obvious. It's not. And here's why: most of what happens occurs so spontaneously and quickly that our cognitive faculties don't have time to register and analyze what we've seen. This is what Gladwell is driving at in this book: we know before we "know." We think before we "think." And some of us are more intuitive and or better than others and reckoning with this reality (especially people who have had to survive in volatile environments). But this kind of knowing is also a skill that can be learned and developed with training.

One final highlight from this chapter that is fascinating: essentially Tomkins and Ekman began to discover that as they make these facial combinations to convey emotions, their emotions actually began to change to match their faces. The implications of this are amazing and beyond the scope of this post. Nevertheless I believe this to be extraordinary because I think we have always believed that the face is simply a blank canvas on which the emotions are displayed. What this information says is that we are far more physically and emotionally unified that we might have ever guessed. When the facial combination for anger was made the heart rate changed and the body began to change physiologically. Again, Gladwell:

We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

Which brings to the fact that as Christians in the Enlightenment west we have viewed the soul as the ghost in the machine. I am increasingly convinced (or at least curious about) the idea of the soul as an emergent property of the body and the mind (different than the brain). We are one unified whole. There is so much stuff out there being done on this that I can't even begin to keep up, but if you are interested you may want to check out Daniel Amen's book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life as well as his web-site where you can download audio interviews with him. This year Naomi Schwenke (Solomon's Porch-ite and graduate student in this field) and I are planning on doing a basic brain science discussion at the October Emergent Gathering in New Mexico and then again at the next national Emergent event. On a popular culture level, rent the Japanese anime flicks Ghost in the Shell I and II (uber-gnosticism at its most rampant) for a serious meditation on human identity, soul and whether one needs some kind of somatic host to be human. You think I'm kidding about this? Read WIRED.

Midrashing Chaim

I've mentioned that I took a two month sabbatical last summer. One fun part of the time was reconnecting with friends from pre-seminary and seminary days. My brother Mark and his wife Alix live in Sisters, Oregon, the same small central Oregon town where our friends Tim and Ann Kizziar live.

Mimi and I met Anne Morraine in the late eighties when we worked at Kanakuk and Kanakomo Kamps. After college Anne moved to Denver to get a degree in counseling at Denver Seminary. While there she met, then married Tim who later became a good friend of mine when Mimi and I moved to Denver to attend seminary ourselves. Tim was done with his degree by that time and had just planted a church. He also owned a business that helped me get through seminary: Student Window Cleaners. Yep, I washed my way through seminary. Not too many folks can navigate the challenges of being a friend and a boss, but with Tim it was never even an issue.

Just as we were preparing to move to Kansas City to start Jacob's Well Tim and Anne accepted a pastoring position in Oregon where Tim's father had been the pastor. That was in 1998. We had not seen them until this summer when we spent three weeks in Sisters. It was great to see the Kizziar family. Tim and I were social for a bit, and then following old habits, we snuck away into his study. I have always secretly envied Tim's remarkable ability to create amazing study space for himself. Our pattern had been to hole up for a bit and talk books.

It was in the midst of this discussion that he asked me, "Have you ever read Chaim Potok?" I had seen his name on several people's bookshelves over the years and had even had people recommend him to me on occasion, but I confessed that I hadn't. Tim got this look in his eye that I had seen before. Tim and Anne are incredibly generous people and before I knew what had happened he put two books into my hands and said, "Here. You will love these. Take them, my sabbatical gift to you." And that is what they were. I fell in love. I read My Name is Asher Lev followed by The Gift of Asher Lev. By the end of those books I was back in Kansas City and enthralled by the deep goodness of Potok's writing, the characters and the fascinating world they inhabit. I went to the used book store and found The Chosen and then its sequel The Promise. My friend Laci next lent me her copy of Davita's Harp, perhaps the saddest and most beautifully written of the five books I had consumed. It's hard to describe their impact on me.

Potok writes of Hasidic Jewish communities in New York City during the time surrounding World War II. He writes of the relationships between fathers and sons, and mothers and sons for that matter - families really - in a way doesn't mask the brokenness and pain that we inflict on one another but at the same time doesn't underplay the real power and love that exists in these most tender of places. Finally (though not in any kind of exhaustive sense), Potok writes of the struggle to be faithful to one's God in the context of a world that is rapidly changing. After five consecutive books I was exhausted and refreshed.

The reason I write this is that we have begun to resurrect Midrash at Jacob's Well. Midrash is a space that we create to interact with books, film, art (to name a few of the media we have used to stimulate learning) and dialogue about how these expressions of thought/creativity impact or influence our faith and our perceptions of the world/cosmos. There will be many different discussions in the coming months but I am responsible for one in April and I have decided to lead a conversation on Potok's book The Chosen. If you are interested, read it and plan on meeting to discuss it on Thursday evening, April 7 at 7:00 p.m., location to be announced later.

In the "Truth is Stranger Than Fiction" Category

Now that Kansas' very own serial killer has been captured and imprisoned BTK/Dennis Rader news items dominate local media coverage. The media has been all over the story that Rader was the president of his Lutheran church council.

When I opened my home-page this morning to the Kansas City Star, I was greeted by this headline:

Pastor visits BTK suspect in jail

I held my breath and clicked the link. All in all I think it's a weird article. Here's my favorite quote:

BTK had been wanted for eight killings for years, but when authorities announced Rader's arrest Saturday they alleged he also had committed two other murders, the latest in 1991.
For now, Rader remains president of Christ Lutheran Church Council, although he will eventually have to relinquish some church leadership positions, Clark said.

Hmmm...you think?