11 January 2011: Muezzin

It is some time in the early morning in KL. Its at least two hours past three a.m., and I know this because Abigail still thinks its the afternoon back home, and convincing her otherwise has occupied us for most of the night. After heroic efforts by Leah to sooth her to sleep, in a desperate ploy, I began chanting the Salve Regina and other hodge-podge melodies, which seemed to go on unto eternity before I finally heard her soft breathing confirm that she had bought the argument.

Unable to provide myself the same solace, I crept past the sleeping household to our balcony here on the 19th-floor of the Gardens Hotel and Residence atop the KL Megamall. As I settle down, I am greeted by the voices of a half-dozen muezzin, calling the Muslims of KL to their morning prayers. I glance down and see the domes of the mosques illuminated among the neon and the street lights. I see too several Hindu temples bustling with worshippers come to prepare for the day. Ironic: I have been singing to put to sleep, even as they are singing to summon to wakefulness.

Last night, my family’s friend Adam, a local Malay they met working at the mall and subsequently adopted as their own, shared that across the world, the singing of the muezzin never ceases. As one time zone closes its prayers, the next one begins. Our world is wrapped in so many words addressed to God under so many names and in so many beautiful ways. It is a strange honor to have joined them in this particular moment, lifting up my daughter as they undoubtedly lift up theirs.

Our own monks chant the hours in Latin, in Greek, in Syriac, and in countless other languages across the globe. Our babel runs counterpunctually to the single Arabic strain bidding all to come and submit themselves to God. I wonder what it would like in our own churches if the Angelus bells still rang out across the fields, in places of work, perhaps over the internet or twitter, calling Christians to return to the Lord their God, what our faith could be if we shared the burden of the religious and also entered into their joy. I cannot speak for everyone - but I pray for that blessing for myself, and thank my daughter’s restlessness for granting me the grace to begin today.

10 January 2011: Corruption

Local wisdom/secret for dealing with the traffic "polis": always keep an RM50- note with your driver's license in case your car happens to go faster than the speed limit!

10 January 2011: Foundations

At the foundation of the KL Megamall lies a temple. In their rush to capitalize on Asia’s hunger for American styles, products, and inanity, the intrepid entrepreneurs bulldozed the old sacred space of the Hindus to erect one of their own. And then, so the story goes, bad things began to happen. Accidents, setbacks, and financial losses compounded like a gathering of spirits to stir the long-forgotten superstitions of the pioneers of tomorrow, and finally, they came to grips with the truth that without the old temple, the body of the new one would remain without a soul. And so they invested large sums of money to rebuild the shrine. It sits there to this day, the residence of a holy woman whose hair falls to the floor, and who reportedly blesses weary pilgrims who know how to walk against the grain of highway traffic and not be harmed.



When we arrived, its gates were locked, while the wind howled down the gaping maw of the blind mouth of the megamall parking garage. Light shines in the darkness, and darkness cannot quite overcome it - and so the darkness pays lip service to light, preferring to let the world be filled with its own forgetfulness, and so believe in neither. And the temple at the mall’s foundation sits, packed like dynamite, waiting for the world to remember light, and so spark the fuse that can topple Nebuchadnezzer’s golden statue, as its powder keg is filled with the peaceful power of prayers, petitions, and watchful waiting protest. And I felt the whispering of the darkness in the passing of a luxury car, a few inches from where I stood in contemplation. And the darkness is afraid.

9 January 2011: Over Kabul

I did not sleep during the second leg of our journey Eastward out of London towards KL. Between tending a thrashing Abigail, reading David Mitchell’s excellent novel Ghostwritten, and trying not to contract cabin fever, there was no time. At about the half-way point of the flight, I glanced up at the hanging monitor which kept tabs on our progress, and noticed the icon of our plane located directly between Tehran and Kabul. That’s Tehran, Iran, and Kabul, Afghanistan - capitol cities of countries with whom we are either at war, or may very well be soon.

Such a surreal moment became more so when, a few hours later, the monitor reported that we were almost directly above Kabul. Some 40,000 feet above, to be sure. But still, above. Somewhere down below, American soldiers and Islamic freedom fighters waged their long and brutal conflict among the rugged rocks and innocent lives of the mountains. And just above them, I sipped a rum and coke and read a novel and gazed down into the abyss.

It is a humbling and terrifying thing to come so close to war, and yet remain so impossibly distant. As far as we could count, we were among a very small minority of Americans on our flight, so we seemed an unlikely candidate for a rocket attack. We were guests on an Islamic airline, headed for a Muslim country, flying over Muslim lands where my people and their people were busy killing one another.

We continued our flight, chasing the edge of the sunrise as it fled before us into Pakistan, India, and across the Bay of Bengal. I will probably never come so close to warfare in my lifetime again. I think of the psalmist thinking about a table laid in the presence of his enemies, and fearing no evil. I wonder for whom this table has been laid, for while I long to be friend to all, my Passport names me foe in these parts. Terrifying. And humbling.

Dispatches from the Other Side of Earth

After extending Christmas vacation into the realm of blogging for the sake of being present to my family and to my candidacy for ordained ministry in the ELCA (I received a positive endorsement decision this past week!), During the World will now be resumed from the opposite side of the world as my family and I visit my wife's mother's family in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia! While I plan to take advantage of every moment the next two weeks will afford to explore this strange new world outside the safety of our Western Christian bubble (Malaysia is officially a Muslim country, and is home to a staggering and inspiring mosaic of religious diversity among the disparate ethnicities and cultures which comprise its inhabitants), I do hope to reflect on my experiences via postings here. (Pending imminent jet-lag upon our return, I hope regular blogging will recommence with the onset of the Spring semester at LTSS).


Upon landing, Leah's step-dad, Chris, who was called here on business for the year, greeted us and took us for a ride on the "KLIA Ekspres," a high speed bullet train connecting the airport to the capitol.


Our first glimpse of KL, along with its world-famous Petronas Towers through the tropical haze and the blur of the swiftly passing countryside. Can't wait to discover all the city has to offer!

With Eliza in Third-World America

A few years ago, en route to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, I drove past an inconspicuous dirt road indicating that atop the hill to my left lay a town called Abiquiu. Noting that I was several hours early, I indulged my adventurous side and drove my Subaru up through the reddened dust and gravel, past a one-room post office, upwards in the direction of the noon day sun. Cresting the slope, I found myself smack dab in the middle of a town square, surrounded on all sides by stucco buildings, a crumbling mission-style church, and a bar sporting a half-burned out neon sign. I remember feeling that God, sitting in the heavenly sandbox of capricious providence, scooped up a 19th-century Mexican pueblo and plopped it here in the midst of 21st century America. The sensation of having traveled back in time was romantic, exhilarating, and awe-inspiring - but it could not mask the profound sense of sadness that hung in the air like the suspended dust that did its best to fill the void left unoccupied by the absent townspeople. The tragic sadness that haunted the town assured me this was no dream, that the top was still spinning, that my curiosity had lured me into an unwanted awareness of the third-world reality that runs like the cracks in the floor of the Chihuahuan desert through the bedrock of the American dream.

That's why I'm so thankful for Eliza Griswold's latest contribution to the DailyBeast.com, "A Teen's Third-World America." Following 16-year-old E.J. Montoya, a member of the Santa Ana Pueblo, through a day at his cutting edge school, the Native American Community Academy (including his 2-3 hour commute), Griswold writes

We were parked outside his trailer in a rented white SUV. Around us in the darkness: a broken baby carriage, a rattletrap Volvo sedan, an anonymous pile of junk littered on the bare ground. I've seen this kind of chaos in refugee camps in Eastern Congo and gypsy settlements in Rome, but not in America.

I've just finished reading Griswold's stunning The Tenth Parallel, which details her travels through regions of encounter between Christianity and Islam in both African and Southeast Asia, which I hope to review, God-willing, sometime this week. Yet, while that work made me feel at once righteously indignant and also sheepishly ashamed of my ignorance and lack of engagement with the persecuted church across the world, her latest article reminds me that I need not ship off to Malaysia or Sudan to find myself in the midst of the world's injustices. Painful as it is to have to admit again and again, I've walked among them my whole life. They are all around me. Not just atop mystical hills that evoke Gabriel Garcia Marquez and whiskey priests and romanticized campesinos - but, undoubtedly, across the street from my seminary, and also in the midst of my own soul.

Admittedly, I have a bit of a literary crush on Ms. Griswold. Just as I am ensnared in an infatuation with Regina Spektor's singing (my wife is well aware of these, for the record!), I find Griswold's voice possessed of a strange power to move my imagination with evocations that lift me out of mundanity and into the mysterious wonder of the every day. I respect and deeply admire the way that Griswold (the daughter of Frank Griswold, former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church) uses her considerable journalistic prowess and beautiful prose to enter into the stories of people on the margins to bring to life the drama embedded in the fabric of the world that lives beyond the veils of the reductionism of the ideologically-constructed mass media narratives that permeate so much of our reading and hearing. She peers into the particularities of life, invites us to witness, and so reveals truths deeper than our illusions and hopes larger than our ignorance. Which is really what good journalism, and all good writing, ought to be about.

If you haven't heard of or read the Tenth Parallel yet, please do. In the meantime, read some of Ms. Griswold's other articles here, and find yourself more deeply immeshed in the stories of those upon whose back our world is constructed, and with whom our future lies. May we all be woken up from our American dreams, and discover the waking lives she makes present. Hers is a way of reporting that embodies the best of the possibilities of a journalistic discipleship.

Collecting Manna: Annie Dillard

One of the joys of being home for the holidays is digging around in books of bygone days, rekindling long dormant conversations with old and near-forgotten friends. As I prepare to re-enter regular blogging mode, here's a passage from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that, judging by the excessive underlining and pudgy stars in the margin, I must have read last during my freshman year of college. Its still just as good today:

Thomas Merton wrote, "There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues." There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagent and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the gaps." The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the cliffs in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind laces through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend this afternoon. You can't take it with you. (San Francisco: HarperPerennial, 1998, 274).

Inner Beauty...

I've been reading a lot about St. Augustine's notion of beauty. At one point in his exposition of Psalm 44, the venerable Bishop of Hippo notes that God "who sees you within loves you within; he loves you within, and you must love him within, for he fashions your inner beauty" (Expositions of the Psalms (trans. Maria Boulding. Hyde Park: New City Press, 2000, 306). OK, so Augustine is talking about the renewal of one's conscience and the granting of right intentions to sinners, but really, doesn't it just sound like that cheesy line you heard in a million Disney movies growing up about beauty only being skin deep? Show me the ugly person who felt comforted by this, and I'll cede this blog-space to you. As my hairline continues its long pilgrimage of recession away from my forehead, I can tell you I'm not buying it. I'm more inclined, to ask with Jack Nicholson's Melvin Udall: "what if this is as good as it gets?"

Well, anyway, the real reason I am breaking on page 10 of a 15 pager due at 5pm to offer such pearls of wisdom is to attempt to concoct a legitimate reason for posting this AWESOME video from the Patriots-Packers game last night. Thanks to Tommy Grimm for sharing. Who says big men can't gun it? Guess it really does prove the old cliche...you can't judge a book by its cover...OK, enough...just watch and be amazed...

We Could Be Heroes...

Greetings from Rochester, NY, home of the never-ending slate-gray sky and towering banks of dirty snow. Dreary as it sounds, its home, and I'm looking forward to enjoying it more as soon as my final paper is completed and turned in...tomorrow!

In the meantime, I couldn't resist a little break from St. Augustine to comment on a fascinating story from TheDailyBeast.com in which reporter Winston Ross goes to Seattle to interview...ready...REAL SUPERHEROES!!! OK, so they're basically just a bunch of average joe's in homemade costumes banded together to wander the streets of the Rainy City in search of alleyway drug deals, corrupt crack houses, and other haunts of hideous hooligans. One caped crusader in particular, "Phoenix Jones," has "faced down skinheads wearing brass knuckles, disarmed people wielding screwdrivers as weapons, chased down a man firing a gun in the air, and stopped one homeless man from stabbing another." Appropriately, they're calling themselves the Rainy City Superhero Movement. Mark Driscoll, your wildest dreams have come true...

The plot thickens: there is actually an international league of individuals engaged in the pursuit of justice called the Real Life Superhero Movement (RLSH), and they are none too pleased with the emergence of the rogue Seattle contingent and their media-courting vigilante showmanship. Yet

Jones is mostly polite with the RLSH members who criticize him, but he makes no apologies for his approach. The real-life superheroes mostly hand out food to homeless people, he reports scornfully. Superheroes are supposed to take down criminals. "They can keep feeding homeless people with sandwiches," Jones says. "Leave the crime to me."

Ross narrates his journey through the dark (and fairly uneventful) streets of Seattle in the Superheroes' dirty Kia, complete with requests for escort by drunken sorority girls and a near-fatal run-in with intoxicated kids who think the reporter is trying to steal his car, one of whom challenges Ross:

"You messing with my van, homie?" one of them says to me, his hand on what he's clearly trying to communicate is a weapon in his waistband.

I assure him I'm not, and realize I'm relieved that Phoenix Jones doesn't run into any real crime on our patrol. There's a reason, I've learned, that most real-life superheroes hand out sandwiches: fighting crime can get you killed.

Its a fascinating and fun read, and it begs the question: if comic book afficiandos and would-be martial artist are willing to so seriously identify their own stories of salvation and redemption with the narratives of the comic books that have indelibly shaped their imaginations, what kind of challenge does their embodiment of their beliefs, issuing forth in their zany yet life-risking pursuit of justice, pose to those of us whose own story claims to transform us into the equivalent of the "real superheroes league," which includes the menial, unmasked, every day work of not only handing out sandwiches, but also becoming ourselves broken bread and poured out wine for the sake of those who groan under the weight of systematic injustice and slavery to the life-defying powers of the world? On the cross, Christ re-wrote the script of what it means to live as a hero - yet, what could we learn from the willingness of Phoenix Jones to place his life on the line for the sake of strangers he may never meet?

Regardless, it certainly gives new meaning to St. Paul's invitation to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ..." In the meantime, we'll keep doing the work the violent neglect: being with, for, and changed by, those to whom sandwiches are given, and from whom salvation is received. We may discover that, far from donning masks ourselves, it is actually Christ who, clothed in the disturbing disguise of the least of these, has come to save the day for us.

Collecting Manna: Andrew Louth

Andrew Louth is a Russian Orthodox priest and Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies at the University of Durham (his full bio can be found here). I've been reading his beautiful book, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, reprinted 1999), in which he argues against the dissociation of modern theology from aesthetic sensibility in favor of their reunion in a way of theology that "should hinder and resist the natural craving of the human spirit for a clear, transparent and definite system" - what Wittgenstein bids us to when challenges us to leave aside the quest for "crystalline purity" of understanding in favor of a return to the "rough ground" - from which the following passages are taken:

At the same time, theologia for the Fathers is broader than our term, for it means not just the doctrine of the Trinity, but contemplation of the Trinity. Theologia, for Evagrius, a friend and disciple of the Cappadocians, is precisely contemplation, theoria of God, as opposed to contemplation of the cosmos. A theologian for him is one who has attained this state of pure prayer: "if you are a theologian, you pray truly, and if you pray truly, you are a theologian." There is here no division between theology and spirituality, no dissociation between the mind which knows God and the heart which loves Him. It is not just that theology and spirituality, though different, are held together; rather theologia is the apprehension of God by a man restored to the image and likeness of God...St. Basil's Liturgy is prayer, his book On the Holy Spirit is theology, though the latter is ot without passages of prayerful ecstasy, and in the former the mind is concerned to express something with exactness and clarity...

But whatever the case with the Fathers, for us there is an almost unconscious division between theology and spirituality; even if we feel they belong together, we have to relate them to each other, and not all theologians want to relate them too closely. The commitment that prayer implies seems to some to compromise the 'objectivity' of theology as rational study. The centre does not hold: the object of theology retreats and is displaced. Theologians become more concerned with one another, and less with the God who is the traditional object of their study. Kierkegaard's impression of the state of theology remains appropriate: 'to me the theological world is like the road along the coast on a Sunday afternoon during the races -they storm past one another, shouting and yelling, and when at last they arrive, covered with dust and out of breath - they look at each other and go home...'

...Theology is not simply a matter of learning, though we risk losing much of the wealth of theological tradition if we despise learning: rather, theology is the apprehension of the believing mind combined with the right state of the heart, to use Newman's terms. It is tested and manifest in a life that lives close to the mystery of God in Christ, that preserves for all men a testimony to that mystery which is the object of our faith, and, so far as it is discerned, awakens in the heart a sense of wondering awe which is the light in which we see light. (Louth p3-4, 147)