{"id":990,"date":"2012-12-21T21:35:17","date_gmt":"2012-12-22T01:35:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=990"},"modified":"2012-12-26T15:48:39","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T19:48:39","slug":"and-i-feel-fine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=990","title":{"rendered":"And I feel fine . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"

Best wishes for a happy New Year – and a joyous Christmastide – from your friends at profligategrace.com!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While listening to a recent Christian sermon on Daniel 3, I had two\u00a0thoughts. First, I noted that the preacher moved very quickly from Hebrew apocalyptic to individualistically pastoral. (Do not pass the\u00a0Holocaust; do not collect a 100 reasons to be confounded.) And, second, I kept hearing that fabulous Beastie Boys song. Each time the\u00a0preacher said “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,” I heard the beat the\u00a0Boys stole from Sly Stone. (I am not sure which is worse: being\u00a0critical of another preacher’s lack of depth or finding myself\u00a0repeatedly distracted by a riff from “Loose Booty” . . . )<\/p>\n

For the past week, I have had another college-days song running\u00a0through my head. Of course, from REM.<\/p>\n

I have jotted down notes for all sorts of clever posts (trust me) on\u00a0news and life in the last few months. But I have been teaching three\u00a0classes, mothering the fabulous Green Street girls (now including 3\u00a0bitches; we got a puppy), and trying to concentrate all of my writing\u00a0and editing energy on the upcoming issue of the Muslim World<\/a> that I am\u00a0co-editing with Danny Arnold. The essays are now all in, and mostly\u00a0edited, and I am now facing concerted, focused work on completing my\u00a0own essay for the issue. Hence my need for a blog post on something\u00a0else.<\/p>\n

A young Whole Foods guy asked me this evening how I am spending my\u00a0last day on earth. He also told me to watch out for the zombies. I\u00a0realized then he was teasing me. \u00a0In case you have no vaguely pagan\u00a0friends or even acquaintances (and have missed all the jokes on the Internet as well), I will tell you that today was to be,\u00a0according to some, a marker of the end of days, due to the way some\u00a0people read a Mayan calendar. And this recent, niche obsession fits\u00a0with one narrative device I have been trying to write about regarding\u00a0“24” and “Game of Thrones.” In each show, the clock is ticking . . .\u00a0ticking toward the detonation of a nuclear device, so we MUST TORTURE\u00a0. . . or, in the case of G of T, revolving toward an interminable\u00a0WINTER, when all of those who have been rightly filled with dread, and dreadful monster tales, will be able to shout to their lackadaisical\u00a0neighbors a grisly, satisfying: “WE TOLD YOU SO!” (The preface to the\u00a0series starts with a young deserter having his head — quite\u00a0graphically — chopped off while soberly attesting that he has,\u00a0indeed, seen the monsters from the North.)<\/p>\n

I will post more from that (truly, almost done) essay soon. For now,\u00a0I want to note the tragic timing of time in the last week. At the\u00a0same time that quite disparate people in my life were speculating\u00a0about the end of the world calendar, just about everyone around me,\u00a0embodied or on the radio, has been trying to find some way to make\u00a0sense of sheer horror — to hurry, hurry, and find an explanation —
\nto find some way to prevent another unthinkable tragedy. I admit I\u00a0have a vote here too. I vote we ban violent shows and video games for\u00a0children under the age of 13. (Me and Tipper Gore evidently have more\u00a0than divorce in common.) But my impulse to vote for a policy change\u00a0NOW, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE! runs along the same emotional synapses as\u00a0the impulse that has some of my Texas kin calling for every public\u00a0school teacher to carry a gun, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!<\/p>\n

Which leads me back to apocalyptic thinking, and to the book of\u00a0Daniel. My beloved colleague Anathea Portier-Young has accomplished a\u00a0remarkable feat: a scholarly book on the Bible that is both\u00a0academically acclaimed and genuinely useful. Rather than come up with\u00a0some clever way to explain what she wrote about, I will shamelessly\u00a0cut and paste from her book’s website<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Building on a solid contextual foundation, Portier-Young argues that\u00a0the first Jewish apocalypses emerged as a literature of resistance to\u00a0Hellenistic imperial rule. She makes a sturdy case for this argument\u00a0by examining three extant apocalypses, giving careful attention to the\u00a0interplay between social theory, history, textual studies, and\u00a0theological analysis. In particular, Portier-Young contends, the book\u00a0of Daniel, the Apocalypse of Weeks, and the Book of Dreams were\u00a0written to supply an oppressed people with a potent antidote to the\u00a0destructive propaganda of the empire — renewing their faith in the\u00a0God of the covenant and answering state terror with radical visions of\u00a0hope.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I want to keep asking why it is that so many modern Americans are\u00a0drawn to apocalyptic thinking, and in ways that seem more to turn\u00a0against ourselves, with ramified, reverberated terror rather than turn\u00a0us toward one another with “radical visions of hope.” Do many of us\u00a0have some sense that things are profoundly not as they should be\u00a0within our own empire? And, are we not only strangers in a strange land, but also strangers from one another, maybe in part because I\u00a0find my neighbor’s account of why<\/strong> America is a strange land\u00a0profoundly strange in and of itself!<\/p>\n

Jonathan Haidt has argued<\/a> that the best way to unite the strange\u00a0strangers who find ourselves neighbors is to find someone and\/or\u00a0something to fear. \u00a0Haidt is drawing on the worst of the worst in civil religion and\u00a0recommending it. Remember Chris Hedges’s War is a Force that Gives us\u00a0Meaning<\/em>? Hedges wants to recommend against such meaning-making,\u00a0“natural” as it may seem to sociobiologists like Haidt. Haidt is\u00a0suggesting it (in the New York Times<\/em>, no less) as a civic strategy.<\/p>\n

We don’t live in 24-World, or Gaming-Throne-Landia, or Narnia, where\u00a0it is always winter but never Christmas. The ticking time bomb and\u00a0the pseudo-Mayan doom and THE policy that will end horrific, random\u00a0violence are all ways of thinking that draw on the life-blood of\u00a0anxiety, and that try to control that anxiety through control.<\/p>\n

I want to close with a little word to my brothers and sisters in\u00a0Christ who are all on board for guns in schools. Something had gone\u00a0terribly wrong when kiddos were taught to “Duck and Cover” in\u00a0preparation for a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. It wasn’t\u00a0going to save their hides an iota if mutually-assured destruction\u00a0failed. It simultaneously brought cataclysmic fear and uncritical\u00a0compliance into a setting where children ought to receive a kind of\u00a0sanctuary from such fears; a school room is frightening enough, just\u00a0with the daily trickiness of being a kid (read Ramona Quimby, Age 8<\/em>\u00a0again, if you don’t remember). What has sent many of us mommies over\u00a0the metaphysical cliff this last week is that just such a little\u00a0sanctuary of A,B,C’s, homeroom hamsters, and cheesy goldfish was\u00a0unspeakably violated. The answer to such violation is not to make the\u00a0sanctuary into a fortress.<\/p>\n

But, I can say this and sort of mean it because I have fiercely pious\u00a0friends who remind me, even when I forget, that the calendar could not have ended today. The New Year started a few weeks ago, when the\u00a0too-short acolyte tried to quicken the wick on the first Advent candle at Trinity UMC. So, Happy New Year, a few weeks late, as I anticipate\u00a0the coming, again, of the one who daily brought about the end of the\u00a0world as I know it, who gives me reason to shake my loose, middle-age\u00a0booty and receive, at least intermittently, “radical visions of hope.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Best wishes for a happy New Year – and a joyous Christmastide – from your friends at profligategrace.com! While listening to a recent Christian sermon on Daniel 3, I had two\u00a0thoughts. First, I noted that the preacher moved very quickly from Hebrew apocalyptic to individualistically pastoral. (Do not pass the\u00a0Holocaust; do not collect a 100 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[94,99,100,92,93,95,98,96,97],"class_list":["post-990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-ethics","tag-94","tag-advent","tag-all-caps","tag-apocalyptic","tag-daniel","tag-game-of-thrones","tag-guns","tag-newtown","tag-nra"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-fY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=990"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1015,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/990\/revisions\/1015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}