(Ir)religiosity

In honor of his birthday this past Saturday, here is one of my favorite poems from one of my favorite poets.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

– William Butler Yeats

I finally got around to picking up a copy of N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope and I’m almost done.  His deconstruction of the typical concept of heaven as something “up there,” or, as I’ve said, an orgy of eternal bliss, really resonates with me.  Instead of some sort of physical place that persons are transported to after death, heaven, according to Wright, is the ultimate culmination of God’s process of restoration and recreation, a process that began with the Resurrection.  I like that.

I am a little unsure about the cosmological implications of his argument and how some of these things work practically, especially viz. his assertion of actual, physical, bodily resurrection.  He makes it clear that everything, at least in his opinion, hinges upon this.  I’m not so sure.  But that does not at all negate the usefulness of his questioning and reformulating some traditional Christians ideals.  Personally, I think the questioning and re-appropriating can be done without insisting on some of the supposition that he does.  But that’s a different post.

Like I said, the case that Wright makes boldly denounces some of the themes and elements that the Christian Right has latched onto over the last 20-30 years, things like the rapture, the second coming (though Wright plays with that a bit, rather than simply rejecting it), dispensationalism — all those sort of Left Behind Type things.  This is great and I think it needs to be done.  In many ways I’m willing to go even further than Wright does by jettisoning some of these concepts altogether. Read the rest of this entry »

I ran across this quote yesterday:

“As a virtue solidarity becomes a way of life.  It becomes the new way of living out ‘the love your neighbor as yourself’ that up to now has been interpreted as giving out of largesse. Given the network of oppressive structures in our world today that so control and dominate the vast majority of human beings, the only way we can continue to claim the centrality of love of neighbor for Christians is to redefine what it means and what it demands for us.  Solidarity, then, becomes the new way of understanding and living out this commandment of the gospel.”

–Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz in Mujerista Theology

Interesting.  I’ve often been troubled by the common practice of giving — like the rich religious leaders in the gospel — and showing solidarity out of one’s abundance and excess.  I just wonder what that means when there is no cost, no sacrifice, and no real personal change.  Naturally, my next thought is to ask whether the giving and the solidarity are really authentic or simply cheap gimmicks to appease a guilty conscience either individual or collective.

The irony here of course is that I am often feel that I am doing exactly that; and I then have to ask myself: do I really care for the well-being of the Other?  Am I genuinely invested in acknowledging the mark of the divine that rests in my neighbor?  That’s tough.