Poets and Poems: Dan Rattelle and “The Commonwealth”

Poet Dan Rattelle reminds us that there is more to the idea of “place” than geographic location. In The Commonwealth, a chapbook of 20 engaging and easily accessible poems, Rattelle accept and explores the broad definition of place – a living, breathing idea that embraces community, memory, people, family, friends, and the natural environment. In this broader sense, place becomes self-definition and self-identity. 

I read these poems and was prompted to do a count. Over the course of a lifetime, I’ve lived in 15 dwellings in six communities, which, compared to some, is only a faint echo of the famous rootlessness of post-World War II America. Yet if you asked me where my home was, my first thought is always New Orleans, where I spent almost all my growing-up years and where I often joined my mother’s large and extensive family rambling over the landscape. Yet I haven’t physically lived there in almost half a century.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Surrounded

After Acts 4:23-31

Surrounded by evil

and destruction,

the people gathered 

together, seeking

the safety of oneness

and the safety of the rock,

as the nations gathered

around, raging, plotting,

assembling as a force,

a force for obliteration.

Surrounded, until

the voice rose together

a unity, a oneness,

together in assurance,

together in deliverance.

Photograph by Tim Marshall via Unsplash. Used with permission.

the words went up

After Acts 4:23-31

The words went up,

a psalm, a song,

voices together

creating a current

moving through

and upward,

the words seeking 

protection, seeking

safety, seeking 

healing, seeking

boldness, seeking 

signs, seeking

the abolition of evil.

The words went up,

and the place was

shaken.

Photograph by Pedro Lima via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“In Search of the Common Good” by Jake Meador

A general consensus exists among Americans, including church-going Americans, that the “church” in America is in serious decline. The mainline Protestant denominations are a shadow of what they once were; the Catholic Church is beset by both declining attendance and the clergy scandals. Evangelical churches seem to be holding their own, but there’s little growth. 

In society at large, civility is dying. The federal government lurches from budget crisis to budget crisis because of deep and widening political divisions. Supreme Court nominations have become occasions for grotesque political theater. Society seems drowning in opioid addiction. Movies and popular television drown us in profanity, gratuitous sex, and political correctness. The news media has forgotten how to report news and instead offers up political opinion barely masquerading as news. 

The two developments – the decline in the church and the decline in society – are connected.Jake Meador, editor-in-chief of Mere Orthodoxy and vice president of the Davenant Institute, points to the failure of modern liberalism as the cause. It’s certainly true for the decline of society and it’s at least a significant factor in the decline of the church as well. So what do we do?

In Search of the Common Good: Christian Fidelity in a Fractured World is Meador’s answer to that question. He doesn’t advocate throwing our hands up in surrender and hiding out in our various bubbles. Instead, he looks at how the Christian community might respond, and that’s whom he’s talking to here.

He looks first at the problem – the decline of the church and common life in America. He considers what problems for achieving community exist with the loss of meaning, wonder, and good work. He shifts to a look at what community practices might have application to the problem – the Sabbath (and the chief end of man; look at your Westminster Catechism); community; and work. And then he projects the promise, including how all this might work with political doctrine and civil virtue.

Jake Meador

Meador has made a reasoned, considered argument, and he’s largely right (although non-Christians might object to that). I have two minor quibbles. First, in any discussion on this topic, too much of a reliance upon news media reports and opinion columnists can undercut an argument. The media have become a serious part of the problem of America’s decline. Second, and this is really minor, quoting an anthropologist about what jobs could disappear that no one would mind losing may be a case of “Sir, you might look in the mirror first.”

Still, these are minor issues. Meador makes a good argument. He presents good ideas and possibilities. And he’s made an important contribution to the discussion that’s just not getting underway among Christians. In Search of the Common Good is well worth our time to read, ponder, and determine what we might do to reinvent and restore community.

Top photograph by Mario Purisic via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Church questions

After John 17: 20-23

What is more beautiful:

the stained glass

or the light

that shines through it?

What is more important:

the stained glass

or the light

that filters through it?

Can we see the light

without the stained glass,

or can we understand the glass

without the light?

Are we the stained glass

that filters the light, that

allows the beauty of the light

to be seen, to be known?

Photograph by Michael Fruehmann viaUnsplash. Used with permission.

Oneness

After John 17:20-23

They will know who

we are, by our love;

we know and understand

that, we have for a long time. 

But there’s more: 

they will know where

we come from, by our oneness,

our unity, our wholeness. 

Because that oneness stands as 

the signpost, they reach past

to the one who erected

the sign. They do know who

we are by our love, and 

they know where we come from

by our oneness.

Photograph by Annie Spratt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A community

After II Corinthians 2:5-11

What is this body, this

community, this group, we

collectively call

the church, the meeting,

the collective, the way.

It is a oneness from many,

assembled expectantly

and unexpectantly but

together as a oneness.

I consider the person in the pew

to my side, the person in front

of me, the person behind me, as

they consider me, and I tell myself

this is with whom I will spend

eternity.

Photograph by Judson Hintze via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Community of Four – For a Week

The church had never quite had a short-term mission team like this one.

A chemist. A retired engineer. And a PR guy / writer.

Our assignment: An eight-day trip to Eastern Europe, with a whirlwind itinerary: Budapest, Prague, Dresden, Brno, and back to Budapest. We were to interview missionaries, to help with their support-raising efforts; film the world of the mission underway across cities in Eastern Europe; do a short film to help with fundraising to buy a permanent building for the mission in Budapest. And prepare a series of reports that could be used by the mission agency back in the United States.

None of us had been to Eastern Europe before.

The retired engineer – Jack – manned the video camera. I was the writer and interviewer. The chemist – Steve – was the gaffer, trip manager, equipment manager, and general factotum.

We trained for months – studied, planned, discussed, and met. We practiced interviewing missionaries. We pored over maps and some of the history and background of the places we would be visiting and the people we would be meeting. We also spent time getting to know each other. And somewhere in that time the team became a small community.

Once we landed in Budapest, we would have a fourth member of the team – Gary, one of the permanent missionaries. He would be our guide, chauffeur, teacher, answerer of questions, hotel finder, translator, and church and mission office locator (a sort of human MapQuest).

The mission in Budapest was enthusiastic, we were enthusiastic, and our home church coordinator was enthusiastic. The national mission agency and our own church missions committee were less enthusiastic. We were different. They had never heard of such a team before. Was this more of a vacation than a “real mission trip?” A communications team? Really?

Still, we flew to Budapest. We were waiting for our baggage at the Budapest airport when we learned our overscheduled itinerary had just been thrown out the window. Erfurt in Germany had been added as an itinerary stop, about three to four hours from Dresden (and we drove like Americans, not Germans).

Gary, our driver, slipped right into our little community as if he’d been there all along. He explained what we might see along the roadsides and near border crossings in the two countries with legalized prostitution (he was right). He got us through back streets in the dark of night to find our hotels. As we approached one border crossing, he told us to remove our jackets and throw them across the camera equipment, to discourage confiscation by the border guards.

Four countries, eight days. On our way to Dresden, we stopped for dinner at a restaurant in the Sudeten Mountains, where no one spoke English and all conversation stopped when we walked in. (The menu was, fortunately, in Czech and German; my college German was sufficient to figure out what we could eat.)

We were in cities and suburbs, large towns and small. We filmed interviews with almost 20 missionaries. We filmed the building in Budapest the mission hoped to buy. I wrote story and after story. We ate tomatoes together for breakfast, and had a lunch at the McDonalds in Chemnitz, Germany. We walked down Wenceslas Square together in Prague, and across the Charles Bridge.

Our little community worked. We carried each other’s bags and equipment. We became something of a cohesive news crew, especially when we found ourselves right in the middle of the biggest news story in Europe – the murder of 16 people at a high school in Erfurt. It was at that school and the small church nearby whose pastor was ministering to the bereaved families where we met the Holy Spirit.

Most of the writing and film editing work happened after we were home. Did our community succeed at its task?

Missionaries were helped with support, and their video reports sent to their home churches and supporters. The video for the hoped-for mission building in Budapest succeeded in helping raise the needed funds. The people working in the mission were encouraged.

And we, our little band of three plus one, were changed. Forever.

Over at The High Calling, a community linkup has been posted for the theme of the power of community. If you have a story about community, or even just want to read what others have to say, please visit The High Calling.

Photograph of Budapest traffic by Mick Lissone via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Slow Church: We Are Not the Same

The Apostle Paul wrote 14 or 15 epistles to various churches (the precise depends upon the author of Hebrews, believed to be Paul but never explicitly stated as in the other letters). Some were in Asia Minor, some in Greece, and one was in Rome itself. And while the letters are consistent in themes and ideas, they are also different.

Each of the churches was in a distinct community. While koine Greek might have been the primary lingua franca of the empire, and Paul used a similar governance model wherever he established churches, the fact is that the churches existed in specific communities. Some had issues with the prevailing paganism and centers of idol worship. The community at Corinth had to deal with a culture of extremely lax sexual mores, and how those mores were coming into the church.

And beyond Paul, the book of Revelation begins with short addresses to seven churches, each of which had a specific defining characteristic.

Yes, similarities existed. But each church was itself a specific community, being equipped to reach out to the specific community it lived within.

“After Jesus’ death and resurrection,” write Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove in Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, “his disciples dispersed throughout the world and planted churches that were manifestations of Christ’s body in their particular places.” How could they not be? Some of the cities were old, older than the Roman Empire. Some had been planted by the empire as cities for their retired soldiers. And one was the heart of the empire, with all of its wealth, power, sophistication and brutality.

The churches had the same purpose; but the purpose had to be implemented in different communities.

Do we believe that church model that works for one community in suburban Chicago and one in Los Angeles will work just as effectively in Little Rock or St. Louis or New York?

Have we become so mesmerized with technology that we think that “sites” (a central church radiating out its worship services by video and webcast to smaller church groups in a metropolitan area) will work as well in New Orleans as it does in Nashville and Cleveland?

Have we been misled into believing that America is such a homogenized culture that everything works the same everywhere?

The authors of Slow Church refer to this as McDonaldization, the church model franchised everywhere regardless of whether it fits the community or not. They give credit for the idea and concept of McDonaldization to John Drane, author of The McDonaldization of the Church, who says that “while Christians should try to learn from the success and failures of other churches, we shouldn’t copy them.”

The church is in the local community for a reason. Paul didn’t start with an empire-wide concept of what the church should be.

Which may be a major reason why Christianity was so successful in the Roman Empire.

Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow”

A barbershop in a small town is less about the cutting of hair and more about community, one of those places where people (usually men) congregate to talk, observe, and plan hunting trips. Or that’s what barbershops used to be.

And “used to be” is what is at the heart of Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, originally published in 2000. Jayber Crow is a barber in the town of Port William, Kentucky, the place around which so many of Berry’s stories and novels center. Port William is a “used to be” place, a town in decline as economics and what we consider progress passes it by, its life gradually siphoned away.

Jayber is telling his story, and the town’s story, from the perspective of old age. He was left orphaned at a very young age by his parents succumbing to influenza; he’s taken in by an elderly couple, and it is there that he begins to fall in love with the place he lives in. Orphaned again after their deaths, he’s sent to an orphanage and a bible college. And while he should have ended up in ministry or working in a city, he doesn’t. The pull toward the place of his youth is too strong. Along the way he’s picked up barbering skills, and so he returns to Port William. And people remember him, remember the orphaned boy.

When he’s telling his story, he’s an old man, retired from barbering, officially at least. The state regulatory authorities have cited his shop for numerous violations, even if it’s in the same place and Jayber doing the same things he’s done for almost half a century. But he tells his story, his story of community and place and people – and the woman he falls in love with, the woman he cannot have because to do so would violate all of what place and community are about. He never speaks of his love, but, in a small town, some things people just know.

The novel encompasses most if not all of Berry’s beliefs and philosophy about land, agriculture, progress (including interstate highways), faith, and community. In the hands of a lesser writer, the story would have degenerated into ideological diatribe. In Berry’s hands, it doesn’t. He maintains a tight control, even over what he most wants to say.

Jayber Crow is a novel about many things, and about one thing, the idea that place, history, and memory are what bind people to each other, and to loosen those binds is to unravel something much larger that a small town. It is also a novel of love and redemption, and how redemption is inseparable from place and community. 

An Important Discussion about the Church

Last weekend, I was suffering a combination bad head cold/allergic reaction to the Valentine’s Day flowers I bought for my wife. (No, the lesson was not stop buying flowers for Valentine’s Day. Rather than inflict my sneezing/coughing/hacking/misery on our church, I chose to miss church. Instead, I would watch the livestream of the 9:45 service.

Except the livestream worked for all of about five seconds, and then stopped. The livestreaming system wasn’t working, and I watched the “visitor numbers” fluctuate from five to eight to eleven and then back down as online visitors began to figure out the same thing.

While it would have been nice for someone like me, being sick, or someone who wasn’t able to travel to church, I realized something. Livestreaming, even when it works, is not the next best thing to being there. You can watch a church service, but you can’t participate. This is likely at least one of the issues I have with so-called online churches, and churches that use videostreaming as they embrace the “sites” concept. Something is missing, something important.

Yesterday, Marcus Goodyear posted an article at his blog, Good Word Editing, entitled “The Uncertain Future of Traditional Faith Communities.” And he put his finger on what’s missing – community. But he raises more fundamental issues that the problem the problems of livestreaming.

The American church today is losing both its knowledge and community roles, and what does that mean? Marcus says it’s already lost the knowledge role, and it’s losing the community role.

I left a comment on the post. Before the community role began to change, the church, or a significant and influential part of it, began moving away from the knowledge role and embracing a personal experience role. Like most major changes, it happened incrementally. But at some point, many churches – and I am speaking of those in what we would call the evangelical tradition – began to move away from teaching the Bible. The focus became something else.

This subject needs – demands – a broader and continuing discussion. People are experiencing the problems of the church, and there are a lot of books being written, but the discussion seems to have been largely left to the experts – theologians, pastors, theological academics.

This is one of those subjects too important to be left to the experts. The church itself needs to engage.

Read Marcus’s article, and let me know what you think.

Photograph: Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.