Lenten churches: recovering the voice of the dead dog

We live in a time when it is simply difficult to hear the voice of God. When teaching on prayer in my Theology courses, students will often mention that one of the largest hindrances to deep prayer is that they cannot hear or discern God’s voice.  ”Why pray to silence?” is what they will intimate and that is a fair question indeed.  As I have mentioned in the past few blog postings on Lenten practices, this is a season to enter into the difficult and challenging questions that we too often ignore during the “ordinary time” of our lives.  Perhaps it is time to embrace the challenge we have with not hearing God in our lives nor seeing God in our churches.  Perhaps this Lenten season we need to embrace this question and see where it will take us.  For my part, I think that many churches and faith communities have effectively silenced the voice of God in their midst and chosen to continue practices of traditionalism that never encounter the transcendent and transformational nature of God in Christ.  You can see it in the congregations on Sunday morning – weary men and women sitting in their pews, mouthing the songs and listening for something… anything…. between the guitar chords and sermon anecdotes that will snap them out of their respective rut, slight depression, momentary malaise, infinite distractions and into something deeper and more abiding than the cultural immediacy bound in experiences devoid of relationships and meaning.

So how does a congregation let alone an individual hear God today?

To begin, we acknowledge that God can and does speak in a manifold of ways that are at once profound, mysterious, and at times mundane.  In agreeing with Paul Tillich (surprise!), Karl Barth stated that “God may speak to us through Russian communism or a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub or a dead dog” (Church Dogmatics p.60).  What God can do is unlimited and far be it for us to limit or presuppose the form of God’s speaking to us.

So in this we must be ready for the dead dog to speak as well.

One tenet that is deep in the Wesleyan tradition is the importance of letting our experience speak and become a tuning fork that picks up the resonance of God’s voice.  However, this gets troubling for some.   When human experience is correlated with (for lack of a better phrase) “the knowledge of God”, the question arises of “who is leading whom” – how do we know if we are hearing the voice of God or merely our own damaged longings or the din and clang of culture?

On method of discerning God’s voice and then moving what we hear into practice in our lives is to correlate multiple ways in which God speaks as Barth suggests (yet also cautions about as will be seen) and is underscored in theologies of David Tracey and Paul Tillich as well as the practical theologies of Stephen Pattison and David Browning.  A correlational method of discernment begins with a focus on what individuals and congregations “want and need” and then articulating a theology that responds to and fulfills those wants and needs in a constant conversation with the Christian tradition and the world in which it is being called.  The correlation model attempts to find a better way of making the Christian faith meaningful and relevant both to the congregation and to the culture at large.  Better specifically than the traditional model of “finding out what God says” and then “applying” it to specific human situations.  Such a traditional approach is seen as dictatorial and restrictive, allowing no room for human meaning and response, and, more importantly, ignoring the complex web of reality which human beings already inhabit, and into which the theologian is attempting to speak the knowledge of God.  In A Fundamental Practical Theology (FPT), theologian Don Browning responds to this perceived deficiency by detailing a thorough practice-to-theory-to-practice model of doing theology within three specific local congregations.  This is not new in Browning since this call to reflection and practice was taken up long ago by Karl Barth and Paul Tillich.

Browning suggests that religious communities carry a sense of tradition, or “group memory” that often serves to balance the corrosive effects of modern Western individualism.  They are in this sense, carriers of a crucial “practical wisdom”.  He writes:

…Western societies are desperate to find ways to make shared and workable decisions about the common good and the common life.  The twin realities of modernity and liberalism have worked against the maintenance of shared traditions, social narratives, and communal identities.  When it comes time to decide an issue about the common good, shared assumptive worlds are so fragmented that struggle, often unproductive, invariably ensues. … [After bouncing between the two poles of blind custom or purely theoretical theology], we now have returned to the category of the practical in search of a shared praxis that will enable us to either reconstruct tradition or learn to exercise our practical wisdom without it.  These seem to be the two basic choices. In each case – the exercise of practical wisdom with or without tradition – the debate is over competing images of what is variously called practical wisdom, practical reason, or phronēsis. (FPT p.3-4)

Browning elaborates on this idea of tradition by contrasting a “popular” view of theology with what has actually developed in contemporary theological circles.  He notes that too many academics, “theology” is a mysterious and arcane discipline, and to speak of such a thing as “practical theology” conjures up echoes of “practical astrology” or “practical alchemy”.  This is because theology still holds for many the image of grey-bearded, bald-headed Scholastics (guilty as charged) arguing seemingly divine deductive minutia from indisputable metaphysical first principles – basically the stuff few if any people in the pews or narthex let alone streets and alleyways care one hoot about.  More recently however, theology has been articulated as a systematic reflection on the historical self-understanding of a particular religious tradition, a reflection that wrestles with expressions of faith that involve the language of myth, story, symbol, and metaphor.

This move toward a narrative and imaginative theology after H. Richard Neibuhr and others acknowledges that theology is done in fluidity, in movement and change, through stories and aesthetics found in ‘true fiction’ of the arts that make truth claims that cannot be reduced to mere doctrine yet still change and transform lives. This is the space of the early Christian mystics like Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, the various desert fathers and mothers of the 5th century who found God in the wilderness rather than the institutions, the aesthetics of Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollack, the gothically redemptive worlds created by Flannery O’ Conner, Cormac McCarthy, Ray Bradbury, and Frederick Buechner, and the music of John Cage, John Coltrane, Theolonius Monk, Nick Cave, Tom Waits, the Beatles and yes, even U2.

Browning notes by way of contrast the neo-orthodox theology of Karl Barth, which, while more contemporary than the Scholastics, still involves the authoritative model of God’s self-disclosure to a receptive (what Browning sees as “passive”) Christian church.  Browning makes this point:

Although contemporary theology is less rationalistic, it may not seem less apodictic, impractical, and unrelated to the average person.  A theologian as recent as Karl Barth saw theology as the systematic interpretation of God’s self-disclosure to the Christian church.  There was no role for human understanding, action, or practice in the construal of God’s self-disclosure.  In this view, theology is practical only by applying God’s revelation as directly and purely as possible to the concrete situations of life.  The theologian moves from revelation to the human, from theory to practice, and from revealed knowledge to the application (italics mine). (FPT p.5)

Notice that the term “revelation” is fused to the terms “apodictic” (incontrovertibly true), “theory”, “impractical” and “unrelated to the average person”.  It is placed in direct opposition to human understanding, action, and practice.

Browning elaborates on his disagreement with Karl Barth by observing along with hermeneutical writers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer that the theologian does not approach God, Scripture, and the historic witness of the church like an empty slate or a Lockean tabula rasa, waiting to be plugged in to a concrete situation like some kind of announcing angel.  We are rather already situated within a specific time and culture, bringing to the texts and practices of our faith a whole complex of often unquestioned assumptions. He uses the term theory-laden to describe these assumptions and practices, pointing out that

We are so embedded in our practices, take them so much for granted, and view them as so natural and self-evident that we never take time to abstract the theory from the practice and look at it as something in itself. (FPT p.6)

This changes when a religious community hits a crisis of some kind.  Now it begins to ask questions about its practices which seem to be failing.  This is what I believe Lent calls us to experience regularly whether we want to or not – a divinely appointed disruption and crisis of faith that calls to bear all our previous methods and traditions and asks “Is God still speaking in all of this?” In such divinely appointed times like Lent the community re-examines the texts and events that constitute the source of the norms and ideals that guide its practices, questioning its own inherited tradition and normative sources in light of the questions engendered by the crisis.  When we are called to look deep and long into the how and why we do what we do and ask if we are really hearing the voice of God in our time, this can become very unsettling and put us, to riff on Cat Stevens’ song title, “on the road to find out” where God is truly are work and what is required of us to participate and listen anew.  Here the decision is often made whether to find new possibilities and interpretations from within the tradition, or break with the past and look for answers outside of traditional boundaries.  Browning notes that traditional or “confessionally oriented” communities may stop here, while more critically oriented groups may go on to devise various tests for the practical adequacy of these new meanings.  Finally, these new meanings and practices are implemented and continue until the next crisis, whereupon the whole process begins again.  To use Browning’s methodology, the movement is from a crisis of present theory-laden practice to a retrieval of normative theory-laden practice to the creation of a more critically held theory-laden practice.

This past week I was witness to a church in such a season of crisis.  Many folks clamoring for a return to ‘the ways things have been’ and using terms like ‘in the decades past’ recalling some romantic yesteryear in some nostalgic golden time that was predictable, did not require new ways of being, did not cost a change in the way of things.  What people wanted was certainty, that everything was going to be ‘as it had always been’, and not one mention was made as to how this return to a romantic past was brought forward in a spirit of prayer, fasting and supplication.  Sometimes what we want is not the (re)new thing… sometimes we want what makes us comfortable through a conformation to a human way of understanding.  The funny thing is is that God rarely offers comfort through conformities…

So are we listening to the dead dog this Lenten season? Are we attending to the divinely appointed crisis of this Lenten season and considering anew what we have accepted as normative in our faith practices and now willing to submit to the possibility of transformation and renewable that will ultimately cost us our certainty and offer us faith in exchange?

As a way of alter call to listening to the dead dog in our time, I will leave the last words to the no-so dead dog of Tom Waits, newly minted Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and prophetic carnival leader in our time.  His song “Come On Up To The House” is a benediction worth listening to and the video is a beautiful example of form, text and content blending and transforming each other:

Come on up to the house
The world is not my home
I’m just a passin thru
Come on up to the house

There’s no light in the tunnel
No irons in the fire
Come on up to the house
And your singin lead soprano
In a junkman’s choir
You gotta come on up to the house

Does life seem nasty, brutish and short
Come on up to the house
The seas are stormy
And you can’t find no port
Come on up to the house

There’s nothin in the world
that you can’t do
you gotta come on up to the house
and you been whipped by the forces
that are inside you
come on up to the house
well you’re high on top
of your mountain of woe
come on up to the house
well you know you should surrender
but you can’t let go
you gotta come on up to the house