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One New Book for the Preacher
Liz Goodman
Monterey United Church of Christ, Monterey, Massachusetts
IwD. C:،YÉ1,eV ة١It Spooks: Living In Response to an Unheard Call (L’،1١wdCt,١ SC: Shehei’50 Publishing Collective), 2015.
Now that I live back in a small town, I hnd what I miss most about city living is public transportation. Riding Boston’s “T” always made for good people watching and better still, eavesdiopping. Even when I couldn’t catch the larger context of what was being talked about, even when I couldn’t understand the language, it was often compelling, enlightening. That was my experience in reading It Spooks: Living in Response to an Unheard Call. I was eavesdropping on a conversation that was strange, sometimes amusing (if unintentionally so), and ultimately enlightening. It Spooks is, as described on the cover, “a book of visual, poetic and written responses to a paper by John D. Caputo,” who is a philosopher of religion. Recently retired, he spent most of his career at Syracuse university, a deconstructionist a la Jacques Dmrida. AssiujIi, ؛e^ak^s apartiehgion with pleasm e and a sense of urg;ncy.
our best interests, a God that should not be taken as having existence but being of insistence. Actually, to sum up his theology, he would likely say (has indeed said), “God doesn’t exist; God insists.” But the real beneht to be found in It Spooks comes less of his contribution than of the larger conversation it calls foith of the aitists and writers who contributed to this book—a book of various typefaces and graphic tricks, of prints of paintings and ait installations, of song lyrics, letters, essays, and poems. Thiity-hve such people responded, most of them young, white, straight, American, and emerging from evangelical and oithodox PiOtestantism, more than a few once homeschooled and then further educated at Christian colleges and now hnding themselves amidst a world that calls much of that upbringing into question. With no editors mentioned, the piOvenance of the book feels mysterious, but this is doubtless pait of the book’s mission (if a book can be said to have a mission). To deny some central authoritative voice, to dodge the demand that there be a source to decide what’s legitimate, this project means to work outside all authoritative and authorizing frames, to chase down the tnith that is always outpacing US and that, were we ever to catch it, would be evidence against itself as true. The effoit, overall, hits its mark, if unevenly. Some contributors are more “qualibed ” for the task than others, which I say knowing to hold in question the whole notion of “qualihcations”—professors, priests, a stay-at-home mom, a “monkette,” among others, are all called on here. Some are more capable of meeting its high intellectual and aitistic demands, which I also note knowing that this is pait of the point. For more than a few, the effoit is great indeed, involves passionate struggle to come to terms with the self, paiticulaily as it apparently falls shoit of some oithodox ideal—the saved soul, the pure, the good. The young women seem most to feel crashed under this ideal.
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For 11;1)0ا؛1؟ ١’؛1ا1’؛11إا ١)؛ إدا ,10٢ﻻ Garbers, who writes,;AltrrghIdidn’tfe^anyone
and family, I filled journals documenting obsession and tortured attraction…And of those journals, which are from “when I knew everything about the life of faith,” she writes, “They are wrought with self-hatred as I narrate my inability to embody the call to whichI believe 1’m responding….” Anotheryoungwoman, Carrie Borchardt, presents pages thatactuallylooktohave been photocopied from her journal. In one entry, she writes, “When I cannot name the It which bids me back and back again, I feel powerless, unidentified, unnamed. But when I try to box it in with any parameters, I find it bears no weight to me….I reflect on… how for years I stifled my doubts with reverence and how life itself had to strip me of my pride of sureness before I dared ask the Other who It was and what Its shadowy motives are….” But not all entries are so confessional. Indeed, most aren’t. Tad DeLay, in the entry he entitled “Oithodoxy’s Anxiety and Ideas that Fail,” brings a cooler head to the task and evoked in me less sympathy but a dose of appreciation. He claims his chapter is “a piotest against ideas that fail,” and he begins with Caputo’s (elsewhere) challenge, that “the stronger and louder you shout your confessional faith… the more insecure you piOve yourself to be.” More pointedly still to the likes of US preachers, DeLay writes, “If your theology preaches easily, there is always the chance that you are underestimating your hearer’s capacity to hear.” Brian McLaren, whose chapter comes later on, would take it further. As to the question of whether Caputo’s “spooky, haunted message [will] preach in a typical local church,” he claims, “It won’t.” And yet, he writes, “It is exactly what needs to be preached for a growing number of people in a growing number of churches.” It’s with this suspicion that I recommend It Spooks as one new book for the preacher. If you’re like me, then you’re at home in the mainline church, and you’re comfoitable with our liberal oithodoxy, our theology of the CIOSS, our redeemer who loves to save and saves to love, and our concept of sin as social and structural more than as personal failing. So it might be worthwhile to hear these other voices, younger voices who came of age as Christians when the religious right was dominant and fomenting anxieties that I, as a member of both Generation X and the United Church of Christ, can barely relate to. Not so for many Millennials, I regret to learn. What once-church-goers there are among that generation may largely have dropped church in order simply to survive, in order to cope with the world as it actually is. I feel very sorry for the countless people who are trying to fit into an ideology whose strictures are too strict, are cutting off the breath of life. The loss of that is a loss of self, which I think some of the contributions reveal: a couple of writers, searching for themselves in the aftermath of an ideological upbringing, could hardly find anything beyond themselves. There is, I hate to say, a bit of naval-gazing in It Spooks. But it all called to my mind the tradition of foot binding in China. When small feet were an aesthetic ideal, many gills were subjected to having their feet bound, which stunted growth. Past a ceitain point in their development, you could unbind the foot, but it would never grow in. Those gills would never walk light. They would ceilainty never ran free. Is this the case when the human imagination is bound’? Is this the case when faith is constilcted at precisely the time when it’s meant to glow’?
Journal for Preachers
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If so, then orthodox PiOtestantism is guilty of something far worse than irritating self-righteousness. Yet there is an opportunity here, because another thing all the contributors to It Spooks have in common is an apparent desire to be taken seriously, which is something that should delight US preachers. If we hnd any such people in our pews on any given Sunday morning, we need not dumb down the gospel. Indeed, we must not simplify the message in an assumption that most people aren’t listening anyway and those who are can’t handle the raw, strange, wild God that the Bible as a whole testihes to and that history unfolding reveals and chases after. No, instead, we can be frrll-throated in whatever of God has haunted US all week. If it has kept US awake at night, it will surely keep congregants awake on Sunday morning, might even propel them, hopeftrl, curious, into the week ahead.
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