Looking Forward to the End

...Of the Semester! It is my solemn hope to give care to this blog during the upcoming break. It will include some posting, some link fixing, etc... It might be nice to add a person or two to the contribution roll as well. Anyway, I'm more than ready for this semester to end.

I should report, because this blog is concerned with all things Bly, that my American Political Thought professor, Dr. Terrence Ball, actually knows Robert Bly. Maybe I can talk him into making a brief submission pertaining to how Bly's work fits into American political thought. Could be interesting.

The Good News is, You Have Loins

Pablo asked for some more explanation of something I had said in a comment. He noted how one of my comments said that the culture purposely produces weak men. He posed the question "I wonder how much of this is contrary to God's design. God, who tells Job to gird up his loins and the church not to be lukewarm." I said that "The older I get, the more I see the Gospel/Indicative side of that in addition to the Law/Imperative side of it." That last part was his question. How are God's commands on these points Gospel indicatives as well as Legal imperatives?

The idea that the same passage can be Gospel as well as Law is an old one. At different points of time, certain passages may come across to us as condemning or as promising. Even the Ten Commandments might offer Gospel readings if read in a certain light. "Thou shalt not steal" might be read in faith as "You won't need to steal, for I will provide for you." This doesn't require a lot of reading in, either. The Decalog has a preamble that says, "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery." This is the background of the commandments. We can say on the one hand, this is why God is owed such obedience. But we can also say, this is why God is worthy of such trust.

So "Gird up your loins" doesn't just lay a burden on a man's shoulders. It says that his shoulders have been made to carry such a burden. He was created to be a man. This is good news in a world where people are acting like interchangeable cogs. The human chaos of modern society, where order is externally imposed or mechanistic, is not the world as it was created to be. Yes, it may seem a burden to go out and tell this to people. (Especially when half the presentations we've seen modeled don't really have a doctrine of creation as a backdrop.) But it is good to know that the world we see is not Plan A. That would be insufferable.

As to the lukewarm church, it is a relief to run into some of the passages just to see how false all the calls to be nice are. Especially when so many of the "nice" people are anything but.

I was once in a venue where a pastor had been called in to deliver an address to an audience. He cited some statistic about how his church body had a reputation for being among the coldest church bodies according to outsiders. I was not part of his denomination at the time. What it convince me of was that he really had no sense of how he was coming across to an outsider, even as he was discussing the opinions of outsiders. Coming from one of the so-called warmer churches in the survey, I knew that my pastor would never have subjected us to such a tirade.

There's a real limit to what can be done with imperatives. But we have a God of indicatives. He has created a good world. We've been called into battle with him. Some of the good news is that there is something worth fighting for.

I know why Ted Haggard did it.

While I will never understand the homosexual urges that Ted Haggard may have, I think I understand what happened to him. There is something in a man that wants to bring it all down, especially those men who hold themselves to certain legalistic standards. But whatever standard you hold yourself to, you know that, from time to time, you have wanted to tear the fucking thing down. It is like when Lt Colonel Hal Moore is speaking to his soldiers before they go to war; "They say we're leaving home. We're going to what home was always supposed to be"(We were Soldiers). Yeah, we would choose the hell of war over this mind numbing peace. Or perhaps there was never peace but a war going on in our heads. To relieve the pressure we lit our world on fire and watched it burn. Bly speaks of a man going down into the darkness willingly and if that doesn't happen the darkness will come up and drag him down.
I don’t know what exactly Haggard’s issue was. This isn’t really supposed to be a analysis. I just know that alot of Men, big and small, seem to take their lives and crash them straight into the ground. Thoreau was right when he wrote "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."
In my own life I see that I was resigned to follow my "Vocation" but really it was just the easy way out. My angst all through my twenties was good and right. Putting this away was hazardous to my health because eventually it will send me spiraling

Passage from what to what?

Kobra's post on tattoos introduces us to the idea of rites of passage. In the old mystery religions, there were many of these. We know that in Christianity, the ancient baptismal practices were quite involved. The candidate would undergo baptism in the nude after a long vigil. Current practice is no doubt valid, in that it "counts" as a baptism in God's eyes. But perhaps it doesn't count as one in some of our own. What do we do to enlarge that?

In Christianity, the passage is from death to life. I remember once talking to someone about the nature of some of our holiday gatherings in our family. You could almost sing the end of the Gloria Patri over such an event: "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end...." This man suggested that it was ironic if the celebration of new life were itself the occasion for entropy and stuckness.

If we decide on what our new rites of passage are to be, and we create them for an intention, then we need to know what our purposes are. That is probably primary. Even if we say, "No modern intentionality. We want continuity with the past." Then the idea is to find something ancient and stick with it. Or we might say, "A break with mother. Connection with men and their wisdom." Yes. How do we get the boy to grab the key beneath the mother's pillow? They must reach beyond key in the story to grab the real one.

What is the golden key you grab when you reach under the pillow?

I'll give Bly a reading for my own life to say how I grab the key. To some degree it is in having the mentor I have. In Jungian terms, my pedagogue is an enigma to my mother. (And vice-versa. Her pedagogue, whoever that may be, is an enigma to me.) I follow a life course enigmatic to my mother. I am an explorer, sometimes not even able to articulate what I'm trying to explore. But I do it anyway. When some wonder whether there is even an exploration, I hack my way forward.

So what is the golden key you grab? Go ahead, be amorphous and enigmatic. Or pointed and specific.

If I had to create a rite of passage to make such a move possible for a kid, I think it would almost have to be a scavenger hunt. Only they could choose which clues to follow. Clues that resonated with them better would lead them to the right pedagogue. Perhaps God has already arranged such a scavenger hunt for many of us.

How would you arrange a rite of passage to endorse grabbing the same golden key you have grabbed? (Read the first chapter of Iron John to find out what the key beneath the mother's pillow is about.)