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Welcome to our feature interview for Insights, the faculty journal of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. I am William Greenway, editor of Insights and professor of philosophical theology. The author of our lead essay for the fall 2023 issue of Insights is Dr. David White, the C.

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Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education Emeritus here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Professor White earned his PhD in religious education at Claremont School of Theology, where he wrote a dissertation on reclaiming the prophetic voice of youth. He is an internationally respected authority on youth spiritual education, and is the author of Practicing Discernment with Youth, A Theology of Youth, Spirit, and Vocation.

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He is co-author of Awakening Youth Discipleship in a Consumer Culture, A Guide for Youth Ministry, and most recently, his most recent book is Tending the Fire That Burns at the Center of the World. Professor White has received significant grants in support of his work, including a $1.2 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to create a project on youth discipleship, a Wabash grant on teaching diversity, and a Templeton Foundation grant exploring spoken word poetry and joy among youth. Professor White is an ordained Methodist minister, and for many years early in his career, worked in numerous churches as youth pastor, associate pastor, and as a conference coordinator for youth ministries. This issue of Insights celebrates Professor White as he retires after 18 years of service here at Austin Seminary.

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after 44 years as an ordained Methodist minister, and since he started serving as a youth minister in churches before he was ordained, after 51 years of service as a minister and youth minister. And even the word retired, retiring, is premature, for Professor White continues to work on the spiritual needs of youth, continuing to write, teach, and to serve on the board of the Center for Youth Ministry Training which is focused upon preparing a new generation of pastors for youth ministry. Now, let me note that an abbreviated written version of this discussion will appear in this issue of Insights.

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The title of Professor White's essay in Insights, which we will discuss today, is Habitations of the Spirit, Remediating Ex-Carnation. Welcome, Professor White. We are looking forward to hearing your insights on reconnecting to the Spirit in a secular age.

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Thanks, Bill, for that comprehensive introduction. Well, it is great to have you here. I want to start with a two-part question. And I'll go ahead and give you both parts if you can unpack them as you will.

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First, what is a habitation of spirit? And second, what concerns led you to decide to focus this issue, your essay for this issue of insights, upon habitations of the Spirit? Yeah, I want to linger with that first question a bit, because it is really sort of fundamental. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, it really sort of is implicated in several of your other questions.

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So I want to linger with it. First of all, let me say that Habitation, of course, is simply a term that means dwelling place or home. And the term habitation of spirit has been used historically to point to the fact that the spirit can reliably be manifested, felt, experienced, participated in in relation to material and tactile relations.

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In other words, life in the spirit is deepened in relation to an identifiable, a fluid set of practices. And so this is this is this is not to say, of course, that the spirit can be confined or controlled or exhausted by these practices. If the spirit is mediated by the practices, it is never exhausted by them.

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There is always an excess to the Spirit that outstrips whatever we glimpse of the Spirit in and through these practices. So the practices and forms of Christian faith have their roots in the past, in the church's experience, but also must be mediated anew in each new historical context with its exigencies and also in relation to the Spirit's creative leading. So Jerome Berryman, you know, we're talking about something here that is sort of paradoxical.

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And so Jerome Berryman once used the term bounded freedom to talk about the tension that's involved in, he was speaking of godly play, a pedagogical approach for working with children. But I think it's a good way of talking about Christian liturgy and practices. in general. And so his term bounded freedom is a way of pointing to the fact that liturgy and Christian practices have structured sort of activities and gestures, but which are also always surpassing themselves in new meanings and new sense of wonder.

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And so also I'm reminded of another Christian educator, Maria Harris. who in discussing the relative fluidity of the church's practices, observes that we create the forms and the forms create us. In other words, talking about Christian liturgy and practices. We create these forms and then they in turn shape us.

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And the practices by which our faith is awakened, and initially practiced have a kind of inner integrity that gives us access to a kind of knowledge that allows and even insists upon our ongoing creativity. But it is a knowledge that can't be attained apart from engagement in these material practices. So it is sort of a, you know, from within these practices,

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we gain a sense of how we can consistently move beyond them. So I want to make this a little clearer by using an analogy. So as you know, I'm a jazz guitarist of a sort. And I want to, you know, so jazz is unique compared to other musical genres that are more or less

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prescripted. Jazz is hard to pin down or define precisely, but if we take a snapshot in time, we can see some commonalities. Jazz has a sort of chord structure or a narrative ordering that we can say, you know, is sort of fundamental to jazz music. But even this is highly fluid.

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Ordinarily, jazz introduces a melody, but then it plays with that melody. It experiments with it. It departs from it, encircles it, and returns in service to it.

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And it considers the melody from a multiplicity of different ideas. It looks at the melody through the lens of pentatonic structures, blues notes, chromatic structures, minimalist tones, baroque maximalist you know, perspectives, you know, so all of these are just different techniques as ways of reflecting on the main melody or theme. But the freedom of jazz, you know, of course, is not unbounded freedom.

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All of these ways of considering the melody are elaborating the melody, pointing to it from different angles so we know it in a new way and a more comprehensive way. So this is one of my favorite jazz guitarist. Pat Matheny says this is this is one of the problems we see in young jazz musicians. It's sort of like they they they play an idea and then they play another idea and then they play another idea.

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I mean, sort of like, you know, there's a window, there's a chair, there's a door. But what he wants to say is that all of the improvisation that jazz musicians do ought to be elaborating the central kind of theme, elaborating the melody or the theme. And so, you know, Pat Metheny was asked in an interview, you know, what he's thinking about when he's improvising. And this is one of the most frequently asked and also one of the most mysterious questions of jazz.

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And of course, he says a good musician needs to know their tools, how to handle the guitar, the scales, the theory. And, you know, a good musician has spent thousands of hours rehearsing with these materials. But finally, these are not determinative. In the moment of improvisation, the musician's consciousness is totally absorbed in the zone of the music such that there's no room for conscious thought.

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So in this ecstatic moment, something else, something larger is guiding and leading the music. So proficient musicians become transparent to this something else. In moments of improvisation, boundaries are exceeded and something new is given expression such that musicians often look back surprised when they hear their. recordings because they never have never played this before, they often say.

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And of course, no two jazz concerts are precisely the same. So improvisation gives expression to something that we might call spirit. And even, you know, even sort of atheist musicians freely use language like this. But notice, I want us to notice that the good stuff

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as Pat Matheny calls it, would not happen without the original materials, the structure, and the dispositions trained by these sort of foundational materials and practices and forms. But these sort of foundational forms are not identical with the spirit, but they serve, in a sense, as a kind of home for it. Spirit cannot be known apart from the such tactile engagement with these, materials over many years, and so, as I suggest in the article, liturgy and practices provide. a kind of structure, sort of like a jazz melody or jazz theme that invites our engagement, but prompts a kind of improvisation and invites new forms that depart and circle, float free and return, but which always allows us to see its object in new ways.

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The object of, you know, love of God and neighbor, perhaps, in new ways. Always, and again, improvisation is not, again, random ideation. Remember the mistake of young jazz musicians. Its substance and its excess cannot be known apart from the integrity that's glimpsed in the beginning and in the theme and seen anew in each new improvisational moment.

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So Pat Matheny says that when he begins a jazz tune, He says that the whole song with its improvised solos is somehow implied in the first notes that he hears. So in some mysterious way, jazz is guided by something that always escapes full articulation, but which also can't be known apart from this home that it builds one note at a time. And so my argument is that Christian liturgy and practice, Christian practices provide something like the structure of a jazz tune, which invites participants into its distinctive ethos, its distinctive way of knowing that guides us into those improvised moments.

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The good stuff, the improvisation does not emerge randomly, but it's intuited in the song's material structures. In other words, the spirit is mediated by these material forms and points to new forms, new ways of meaning and new ways of wonder. So that's sort of an opening kind of framing of the concept of habitation. Does that make sense?

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Yeah, and what I'd love to hear, it's really an interesting analogy and a powerful analogy, but in terms of its maybe its concrete application in terms of, well, however you're meaning to apply it. Let me ask you the second question, the second-half of the question, maybe you can explain it in terms of the application. What are the concerns that led you to focus this essay and this issue of insights on habitations of the spirit?

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And how does this move, this invitation of improvisation with within the constraints or within the using concrete tools or forms relates to that concern and addresses it. Yeah, so I mean, you and I have had long conversations about some of this, but in my view, we're living in a historical moment where it seems like any meaningful notion of spirituality seems to have been rendered unnecessary or even trivial, both by Christians on the right and the left.

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Christians on the right adhere to doctrine or systematized thought. Christians on the left adhere to their own sort of orthodox moralism. moralisms. Both sides are not only opposed to the ideology of the other, but they tend to avoid the dynamic core of the Christian faith, which is spirituality.

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In reality, in my view at least, it's not ideologies or grammars that make Christian faith true, good, or beautiful, just as in jazz, it is not the scripted form that is finally determinative. This way of thinking is sort of like, I think, it's sort of like the tail wagging the dog. This way of thinking makes dogma determinative for the mystery, when in fact it is this mysterious something, the spirit, that gives expression to the forms. And while forms may seek to bear witness to the spirit, they cannot exhaust the spirit and must forever point to new angles, perspectives, realities of its object.

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And so, again, this is, you know, I think we're at times both the right and left in our sort of reduction to dogma and moralisms, we all sort of risk a kind of ideology by not keeping embracing a faith that is more alive and more fluid. So that's, in a sense, that's sort of, you know, what prompts me to think about this topic of spirituality. But on an experiential level, let me say something about all of this on a more experiential level.

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We might observe, for example, that forms lose something of their dynamism, hence their beauty, when they become flattened by familiarity. And so I think this is one of the problems that, one of your questions later on has to do with, what are the risks of liturgy or worship? And I think this is one of the problems that get flattened by familiarity.

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If we care about the future of the church, we must, it seems to me, discern its new forms without rejecting the old. It is this dynamism that makes the church alive, dynamic, and I would argue beautiful. It's part of the very logic of Christianity for it to be always made strange.

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And so, makes strange, but in a new way, sort of like in jazz improvisation, in a way that always sheds new light on its object. And so, So this is, I think, part of what's at stake, I think, for me, is what we're seeing, the decline of the church and the possibility of enlivening the church. But I would also say on a social and maybe political level, we might observe that many of the cultural conflicts that we see

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today have to do with the intransigent rigidity of both the right and the left, both of which have forgotten how to attend to what is concrete and dynamic in each other and in the spiritual reality, the fundamental reality of the spirit. We've rendered each other as enemies. And I think in your terms, we've forgotten how to see the face of the other. We are not finally reducible to our ideologies or our abstracted identities.

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The Christian tradition suggests that we are created in God's image to participate in this dynamism of God's Spirit. So for me, these are some of the things that I think prompts sort of a return to this theme, the theme of spirituality, and emphasizing this theme. So you begin with a very dramatic story of the citizens of a French village, the village of, am I saying this correctly, La Chambon?

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La Chambon. La Chambon. And the villagers there who hid Jews it's considerable risk for themselves during the Nazi occupation.

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How does that story relate to habitations of the spirit and everything you're talking about, the about the importance of ritual in relationship and practices in relationship to habitations of the spirit? Yeah. So and this is the point that Craig Dijkstra is making in And essentially all of his writings during the 1990s, his work on Christian practices.

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But the point that Dykstra and Dorothy Bass want to make using the story of La Chambon is that the Chambonet community did not harbor fleeing Jewish children out of some random act of kindness. In other words, their liturgies and their everyday practices of hospitality created in their hearts a kind of open space for the spirit to work. And so again, harkening back to our analogy, like jazz improvisation, their hospitality began with learning a melody

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in worship and which gets elaborated in their lived practices in their community as they welcome each other into their homes and then celebrate holidays of welcome for each other and where they welcome travelers on the journey. And so all of these become ways of elaborating the the melody they learn in worship. And this and so And all of these elaborations are in service to that original melody, and then so opening their door.

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doors to fleeing Jewish children was a way in the spirit, sort of an improvisation. It's sort of a way the spirit breaks boundaries and creates new possibilities for the village of Le Chambon. At least that's how Craig Dykstra sees that story of Le Chambon. and how it lends itself to Christian practices.

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And you're a Methodist, right? So let me go ahead and invoke a couple of what I think of our good categories of John and Wesley, which you have here. On the one hand, means of grace, which by which he means things that happen in worship, you know, the sacraments or in Bible study or prayer. So these are more traditional, you know, religious, spiritual practices that you'd think of.

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And but then he also thinks that very significant, not just as the fruit of faith, but in terms of formation, I think in the sense that you're talking about works of mercy, by which he means, you know, you know, working, advocating against injustices, feeding, clothing the poor, taking care of those who are in need, these other sorts of things. So you have these means of grace and you have works of mercy. And you kind of, you are, you have both, right?

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And both of these are parts of the tools. And both you see, it seems to me, as important. But can you say, what some people might say now is, well, I do the works of mercy. I'm engaged in, say, goodwill, or I go do some other service projects, sorts of things, but they're not engaged in means of grace.

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What would you say about why you think, and actually for Dykstra and a lot of your essay, you always mention the works of mercy, but a lot of the emphasis turns out to fall on these, you know, means of grace, these traditional worship practices. How do you think both are really essential in terms of having a good balance while maintaining still a spontaneity in the sense you've been talking about jazz, but utilizing and participating in both of them. Yeah, so I mean, you're right.

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Wesley is trying to name, sets of practices. And you're also right in observing that for Wesley, these practices, are not just the fruit of faith. They're not just sort of something, a sense that we do these things out of some duty or culmination of faith.

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But in fact, for Wesley, they are ways that we meet God. You know, they are ways that we encounter the holy in and through these practices. And so that's why I think they're so crucial for my discipline of Christian formation. I mean, I think, you know, it really is a significant, you know, lack when we don't teach people, you know, not just the rhythms of liturgy, but the rhythms of liturgy beyond the liturgy, the liturgy of these practices.

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And so I don't know if you, so beginning in around the fourth century, figure, Prosper of Aquitaine, articulated the posture of the church, and maybe I'm sure you've heard this phrase, Lex Arande, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi, right? The law of praise is the law of belief, which is also the law of life. And so in this phrase, what Aquitaine was affirming

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was a consistency and a continuity between the life of worship, the life of thought, and the life of lived practice. And all of these are conditioned by worship. So Don Salyers, as you've heard me say this several times now, called Christian practices the liturgy beyond the liturgy. And here he's trying to sort of maintain this sense of continuity between what happens

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in worship and what happens in Christian practices beyond the sanctuary. So, and of course, we can point to movements in the church, the Benedictine communities, for example, where the ordo refers not only to a way of praising God, but a way of life in and beyond worship. And so, you know, historically, A lot of communities have tried to maintain this sense of continuity between worship and lived life.

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But if you're asking if I see churches that are unable to maintain this integrity or continuity between worship and life, then yes, of course. And I think, and this was part of my article was trying to address this problem in the Western world, especially, and especially in modernity, we have conceived that the church has authority over the soul and the state has authority over the body. This is sort of a compromise that we see happening in early modernity.

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And as the church has has ceded authority over the body, it has also unwittingly ceded authority over the soul. And so this is, again, this is the point of my article, how these different things end up conditioning not only our bodies, but our souls, because the two are integrally related. Any number of things claim our bodies and souls. And we've, you know, we might talk about political ideologies.

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In my article, I talk about consumerism, technology, all of these things. And let's use this as a transition because, I mean, so now you're talking about ex-carnation. Right.

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So when you're talking about the chart, you know, there was this... suppose it's split, the church is going to take the soul, the state's going to take the body. But when you say, no, actually the state got the soul too, but it becomes a soul which is ex-carnated and a body now, which is ex-carnated in your language. So let me ask you, because that is a term that not many of us have heard before, let alone understood in any depth what you mean by it, because you're studying this habitation of the spirit, right?

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So you're seeing the church, its practices, both its liturgies and Also, it's social practices in the world. And it's engagement in those in creative ways. It's sort of the jazz of the spirit, which incarnates the spirit, ideally in the church, in which has been lost in many ways.

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You want to help reinvigorate. And You've named some ways in which you can be lost when it becomes either completely random, so it's disconnected from the rhythms, the understandings, the liturgy of the church and the understanding of the spirit carried there, or it becomes a dead orthodoxy. And now you're just doing these liturgies for the sake of doing the right liturgy and you want something that's having both of these and engaging them in ways that are open to the world and have a spontaneity to them.

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But then you unpack this also in this habitation of spirit in contrast to excarnation. And so in the essay, you unpack that in three ways to make it very concrete. I'll just name them real quickly and then ask you to do them all.

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And if you don't, I'll queue you up to do it. But you have, in relationship to the philosopher Charles Taylor's definition of secularity, and the theologian William Cavanaugh's definition of neoliberalism, and then the philosopher Albert Boardman. Am I saying that name correctly?

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Boardman. Boardman's definition and understanding of technology. So could you define for us ex-carnation, which is what we don't want, and you're setting habitations of the Spirit in contrast to it, but in contrast to these three forms of excarnation, all of which reflect us simultaneously in this our modern age.

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So let me just stop talking and leave it to you now to unpack those for us in your own words. Yeah. So let me say that in a 3000 word article, it's nearly impossible. It is impossible to be comprehensive about

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such things. But so when I'm choosing, you know, these figures, Charles Taylor and William Kavanaugh and Albert Boardman, these are sort of representative figures. I might have chosen, you know, a half dozen or a dozen other figures that say something like this. But but these three, I think I have found helpful and sort of clear about these things.

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So so for Charles Taylor. Taylor, what Taylor is, is doing is trying to characterize the shift to modernity. And so he, he says that in, in pre-modern, in the pre-modern world, there was a sense in which moving in the pre-modern world, everything was alive with meaning and mystery and spirit. And so we, you know, we felt, we felt the,

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there was a, he says there was a sort of porosity. The self was porous to these spiritual realities that were all around us in the world in the pre-modern era. Now, of course, you know, we would today say that, you know, some of that transition away from, to the extent that superstition was oppressive, we want we would want to say that was a good move.

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But there's also a sense in which in which Taylor wants to say there's something that's been lost. The sense that we that we're living connected, you know, alive to a world that is interconnected and in which we are to which we are connected in a felt relationship. And he even says that he makes the almost offhand observation that today we see people flocking to movies about supernatural things and superheroes and, vampires and, zombies and all these sorts of things as a way of, he says, as a way of experience, a kind of frisson, a French term for when our hair stands on end,

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And he wants to say that there's something of this mystery that we seem to yearn for in the modern age. And so he's saying that as modern folks, what has shifted in us is this sort of in the Cartesian sense, we become thinking things that are, you know, we experience the world at a distance. and we experience it cognitively as a thinking thing, and we're sort of mastering the object in the world. And so all meaning now is a sort of mental achievement.

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And so this is where he says that we find ourselves being rendered as buffered selves, is his term, buffered selves, buffered against the world that's alive with meaning. And so this is, he's characterizing modernity. as this sort of sense of buffered self. And then William Kavanaugh, he wants to emphasize, along with others, Rodney Clapp and so many others, want to emphasize the ways in which neoliberalism has influenced our experience of the world.

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And of course, this is, you know, this is This is Marx, right? The money fetish. There's, you know, we live in a neoliberalism is an economic political vision in which wealth and consumption is the chief human end.

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And so by emphasizing wealth and consumption, we end up obscuring other competing traditions, you know, like Christian, tradition or other religious traditions that want to remain alive to other ends, like love of God and neighbor, care for the world. So this is what Kavanaugh wants to illumine as this abstraction that's occurred in neoliberalism or ex-carnation that's occurred. And then Albert Borgman,

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For Borgman, technology, this world of enhanced and sort of rapidly sort of replicating technology creates a world of virtual experience that obscures what he calls focal things and focal practices. And of course, in the article, I used the examples of how central heating and air conditioning recedes into the background of our consciousness. And as compared to focal practices like, you know, pending a fireplace, you have to know something about the land.

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and wood and stacking lumber and building fires and the fireplace becomes a social context of entertainment for the family. So there's a whole world that's created for Borgman. There's a whole world that's created in these focal practices that we lose with technological inventions. And so, you know, we all of these

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you know, he has lots of examples, microwave food and, you know, screen entertainment, TV and movie entertainment. So with social media is another sort of technological device, he might say. We are able to communicate great volumes of information, but we lose the habit of conversation in which we work through problems and get to the other side.

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These were some of the internal goods of what he would say, you know, the world that's created with focal things and focal practices. So the technologies of high finance, of course, and this is one of Kavanaugh's emphasis too, the technologies of high finance seem to try to remove the risk to investors. And so it's precisely the assumption of this risk alongside each other that allows us to live in communion. So anyway, this is Borgman's, you know, argument that is not, is not

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you can't reduce Borgman as a mere Luddite, but he is calling for us to be discerning about the ways in which we are losing touch with the concrete, organic world of matter, focal things. And of course, you know, my argument is that liturgies and practices, Christian practices, are ways of restoring a sense of the incarnate, restoring our relationships with with things material. So anyway, that's in a nutshell, that's so excarnation, yes, is, I think, a risk and a problem that folks are reflecting on, you know, from lots of lots of different angles.

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Can you, I take it this would be true of other faith traditions as well, right? The, so it's not just Christian, but Jewish or Buddhist or Muslim or other practices, and there would be parallels here. What would be essential among faith traditions that you would say, you know, so if it's not just Christian, but what is it essential about faith traditions, which makes them the, what you turn to? to resolve excarnation.

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Instead of turning to, say, dinner clubs or other sorts of, joining a golf club or a tennis club or other sorts of things that I might do that would engage me personally and physically, it may not be bad. but would be potentially not meet, not do everything that you're hoping to do when you appeal to the Christian org, and you may have not in your head. So it sounds like other faith traditions. But I'm asking, what is it there that you think is distinctive and significant to move against these forces of excarnation?

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Yeah, so I think there are lots of ways of answering that question, but one of the ways that I might answer is in terms of Marion's distinction between the idol and the icon. I think there are ways of engaging the material world that only reflect back to us our egos or our own sort of very particular egoistic concerns. And then there are ways of engaging the world as icon

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that open its mystery and it's a whole infinite world of meaning and significance. And so so I think that's one way of talking about what I think religions do. They they they name the world differently. They name the world in terms of mystery, and they resist the flattening of the world to merely sort of egoistic terms.

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Would you relate this? And now, of course, I'm going off script from the question that I gave you. So, with COVID in our teaching in our churches, well, goodness in everything, thank goodness for technology and for Zoom, which we're using now, and which we used to teach and to worship and to be together, even as we were in isolation in our homes. Nonetheless, there was a sense, I think, that many of us had of loss, that while it was, not to, not to, not to be, not to see it as a bad thing, but it's somehow something that was lacking.

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something essential. Would you interpret that sense that I think so many of us have to this contrast you're drawing between habitations of the spirit and X carnation, maybe in this case in particular in relationship to technology? And how would you use this to unpack that and to affirm the significance of participation, real physical participation? in some community of worship.

00:42:40.960 - 00:43:05.280

So let me say a bit a little bit about the COVID and sort of our retreat into Zoom during those. So I don't I don't want to diminish or disparage the helpfulness. I think Zoom, for many of us, we would not have been able to continue our teaching had it not been for Zoom.

00:43:05.760 - 00:43:43.760

But but I think it's helpful for me to think about teaching in Borgman's terms, you know, teaching as a focal practice. So when we so think about all the things that a student and a professor does as they're, you know, as they're walking to the classroom, they they walk through, they walk past trees and bushes and flowers and amidst sunshine and birds singing an auditory sort of experience. They greet each other on the steps as they're walking up to class.

00:43:44.080 - 00:43:58.040

They ask each other, inquire each other about their days or about their week or how are you doing on this or that assignment? I hear your mother has died. I mean, can I want to bring you some food? So there are these little exchanges that happen.

00:43:58.040 - 00:44:11.760

They enter class, they sit down. And in my class, they're sitting sort of in a circle. So they're looking, they're able to see each other as they respond to the substance of the course.

00:44:11.840 - 00:44:38.000

And they're often dozens of little side conversations that they're having with each other. Some of it is on the topic of the course, but a lot of it is are ways that people care for each other in community. And so, you know, I could go on.

00:44:38.000 - 00:45:00.400

There are lots of little internal goods that happen in physical teaching event. And it is just, it's really difficult to replicate all of those in a Zoom event. And so I'm not trying here to be exhaustive about the internal goods, but just a hint at them.

00:45:01.200 - 00:45:38.120

And I think that's my fear is that we, you know, as we, you know, resort to, you know, to technology that we lose behind or obscure or ignore lots of these little internal goods that I think really sort of make us more human. So that was in response to the first part of your question. What was the, you wanted me to reflect on the worship experience?

00:45:38.120 - 00:45:59.760

Is that? Well, perhaps. I mean, it's up to you, but insofar as your suggesting, I mean, because there's a lot of things that can be done in person, right, that aren't in Zoom, but you're stressing Christian worship, liturgy and practices.

00:45:59.840 - 00:46:24.880

You're also suggesting, well, it's not, I'm not limiting it to Christianity. This would also hold true for other faith traditions. But what is it? Is there something about faith traditions, which again, just like we don't want to put down Zoom, I don't want to put down becoming part of a gym or a supper club or all the other things that one can do.

00:46:25.280 - 00:46:43.440

But somehow it seems to me you're suggesting there's something special, distinctive, needful, good about church. Maybe, let me go ahead and put something else in. You've done a lot of work on joy in youth, right?

00:46:43.440 - 00:46:54.160

And so a lot of people engage in these other activities. in pursuit of joy. Now, I know I love doing these other things too. I know you do as well.

00:46:54.480 - 00:47:09.280

But is there something about faith traditions which brings a distinctive sort of joy? So there's, you know, so it's, in other words, it's not just going to jazz clubs and playing jazz. That's great. You do it, you love it.

00:47:09.760 - 00:47:41.280

But if you do that apart from in your life, any religious traditioning there still might be something missing, I think is what you're suggesting. And I guess I, you know, so when you talk about the church shrinking or faith tradition shrinking, I gather you're not concerned about that because you're pro-church. But because there's some good the church and these other faith traditions bring that you fear is being lost.

00:47:41.280 - 00:48:09.200

So maybe that, maybe you could tie that in with what the work you've done on joy, which again, my hunch is, relates this to a way in which, you know, great, become a jazz pianist or guitarist, but you would also want to be part of a faith tradition. to have the richest possible, most joyful life. Yes. So use that as your and then go.

00:48:12.080 - 00:48:30.400

So. So yeah, let me let me say a little bit about why. So. So first of all, let me say that I tried to say in the beginning that I don't think the set of Christian practices that we tend to sort of rehearse

00:48:31.520 - 00:48:59.360

And I don't think that we should think of those as exhaustive. In fact, I think it's entirely possible to think about things like, you know, you know, exercise or running or painting or doing art or playing music as as a as a Christian practice. I think it's entirely consistent with with with the narrative.

00:48:59.360 - 00:49:53.520

And this this brings me to the I think what I hear as one of your main questions is what happens in worship, you know, in religious tradition, what happens in religious traditions that is distinctive and determinative or different? And so what I what I want to say is that and this this gets back to Jamie Smith and sort of my sort of riffing on Smith. One of the things that that religious, you know, celebrations do is they sort of they sort of embody a narrative of the world. You know, they sort of teach us a way of narrating our lives in the midst of a world that is, you know, populated with others and with God and where God lives and moves.

00:49:53.840 - 00:50:52.880

And so you know, in worship, for Christians in liturgy, and I think I can say in other traditions, I see something very much like this, liturgical gestures, you know, they're not arbitrary sort of activities, or they're not sort of to keep us awake, or to, they're not even sort of ways that we greet each other and wish each other a good day. There's a sense in which those, the gestures of worship, everything from passing the piece, you know, to singing our songs together to, you know, to reciting prayers, to coming forward to the table, you know, in the Christian tradition, all of these things embody the narrative, you know, a narrative of the world and how the world is and our place in the world.

00:50:53.360 - 00:51:10.080

And so I think, I think that's that's what I would say is important and distinctive. And they don't they don't function on a purely sort of intellectual level. They function at a sort of felt level, experiential, embodied level.

00:51:10.880 - 00:51:41.280

So when we, you know, we go through the rhythms of our worship, kneeling for prayer, standing and singing and turning to each other in passing the piece, we are we are training our bodies and our hearts in a sense, and that training extends into the world. It extends beyond the sanctuary into the world. And I think, again, I think all religious traditions do something like this.

00:51:41.280 - 00:52:18.760

They sort of inscribe a narrative of the world, you know, in some sort of bodily form, especially in in sort of the theistic traditions, especially, they embody a sense that we ourselves before God. So there is a sense of which life is lived differently when there is a presence in the world that is alive. And so anyway, that's what I think religious traditions do.

00:52:18.760 - 00:52:27.280

Does that make sense? Did I get all of your questions? Well, yes. I mean, how do you want to do it?

00:52:27.280 - 00:52:55.840

I mean, it was a pretty wide open big question. I do want to say one one thing I want to say, I think I do want to I do want to say that I think I want to make I want to make an argument for a kind of synchronicity or syncreticity. I think that, you know, Christianity has a kind of inner integrity. that we can sense in its parts, as I've said, the liturgical gestures and everything.

00:52:56.400 - 00:53:23.280

But it's also always in a kind of constructive moment. It's always seeking ideas and practices to help to help better express that whole, that the name of God, you know, the the other, the world. And so it doesn't it shouldn't surprise us that Christians in the third and fourth centuries borrowed from Neoplatonism.

00:53:23.680 - 00:53:49.680

It shouldn't surprise us that Thomas Merton borrowed from Zen Buddhism. And so all of, you know, and so I'm not opposed. I think there's something really interesting and important about Christians, you know, attending and embracing practices from a broad range of sources, other religions, but not just other religions. I would say Christians might also

00:53:50.160 - 00:54:10.000

borrow from aesthetic practices, you know, as artists, you know. So anyway, I just wanted to say that we're a word about syncretism, because I think my argument is for a kind of syncretism. So. I want to push you there one thing here.

00:54:10.360 - 00:54:39.160

When you talk about the, you know, works of mercy as liturgy beyond liturgy. And it's a preparation which liturgy prepares for you for beyond liturgy. Liturgy, it still seems to me like a prioritizing of worship and of the means of grace, you know, the prayer and the sacraments and all those sorts of things, which then extend out into practices in the world.

00:54:39.600 - 00:55:00.640

But I'm wondering if it's not, if it's, you know, and I think this is, seems to me consistent with Wesley, actually, if not in the received understanding of Wesley, that it's it's the other just as much that it's that is is is engaging in practices in the world. works of mercy.

00:55:00.640 - 00:55:55.000

So not just any practices, but practices which are the Matthew 25 practices, right, plus social advocacy and all the rest, that actually engaging in those things then informs your understanding of the liturgy inside, the means of grace, what you do in worship, to the point that even maybe one of the ways of criticizing churches as being kind of simply about orthodoxy would be the degree to which they are focused upon what they're doing in worship. But if they don't have an equal amount of energy and engagement, and something more than just giving money, but in the sense you're talking about actual concrete bodily engagement and works of mercy outside of the walls of the church, then there's an imbalance that's problematic because it goes both ways. And it would be interesting, I mean, we don't really have a study of those villagers

00:55:55.640 - 00:56:17.720

of La Chambon. But it would be interesting, you know, my hunch is, it's not just welcoming each other, the practices they engaged in, it's these other practices too that formed them in that sort of community. And of course, this would be part of what is called for, you know, in every religious tradition. I mean, they all call for these sorts of works of mercy as a concrete engagement.

00:56:19.600 - 00:56:36.640

But sometimes in your essay, and of course, in the traditions, it kind of goes one way and the people you're citing. Don't you think it would go both ways, that engaging in those works of mercy externally also would feed the church and it would be a concern if we don't see that. would be a place to say,

00:56:37.440 - 00:56:58.880

here we're not actually allowing the spirit to be spontaneous and to be played in its fullness. And that's going to lead to an ex-carnation because, and this would go with Taylor, now it's become orthodoxy. It's about becoming the form without the concrete experience. To incarnate this is actually to do this in the world.

00:56:58.880 - 00:57:16.400

And if there's not a balance there, then we fall into a sort of ex-carnation of kind of an empty orthodoxy. which might be something that's, part of the critique we hear of many churches today. Anyway, just your reflection on that. Yeah.

00:57:17.040 - 00:57:45.120

So I think I'm going to say that I'm going to remain, in a sense, I remain agnostic about the priority. But in one sense, but in another sense, let me say this. So you remember my analogy of jazz. So I think jazz absolutely, you know, is distinguished by improvisation.

00:57:46.080 - 00:58:19.200

But the improvisation is an elaboration on the theme, is on the elaboration on the the sort of fundamental melody. And so I would say that that both are important. I I think that. I think that what worship does is sort of offers, narrates the world in a certain way and trains our sensibilities about, you know, where God is in the world, who we are in relation to God and the other.

00:58:19.680 - 00:58:53.840

And then, and then our practices beyond works of mercy, our practices beyond worship are just ways of improvising on those themes. They're ways of sort of extending ourselves and trying new directions that make sense of those themes. And I think you could argue that, I think I could see an argument that by not doing works of mercy, not doing the practices, the liturgy beyond the liturgy, that we have somehow impoverished the liturgy.

00:58:54.560 - 00:59:23.600

I think that makes sense. I think we have not done a good job of to the extent that the practices beyond the sanctuary shed light on and elaborate that central narrative and add dimension to it. I think there could be an argument there, but I think both are important. So one of my sources that I like, Alexander Schmemann, Orthodox, you know, theologian,

00:59:24.240 - 00:59:53.520

observes that if we want to evangelize the world, call the world back to God's shalom, then he says that worship is where that world is first made manifest. And so worship is, in a sense for him, is a kind of realized eschatology. It's the place where enemies are declared amnesty, where friends share a table, where God is made visible in ordinary things. And I know it is,

00:59:54.200 - 01:00:16.720

It is usual these days to say that the church is not attentive enough to our efforts in the world. But I want to suggest that I, in a lot of the churches I attend, I want to suggest that the opposite is true. We don't take worship seriously enough. What our worship is today, Schmaimon would say, our world will be tomorrow.

01:00:17.040 - 01:00:45.280

He would argue that the worship is the outpost of the kingdom into which, as the Bible says the whole cosmos will someday be absorbed. So, you know, I think and that's that's Shemon. I'm not necessarily coming down with him, but I but I did I do want to at least sort of, you know, name both sides of this, you know, both sides of this tension.

01:00:47.120 - 01:01:20.640

But again, I am somewhat troubled by congregations that minimize, you know, what happens in worship and then sort of uncritically embrace social movements that have their own integrity, you know, that may or may not sort of reflect something of the fullness of, you know, of Christian Shalom. So anyway, that's what I'm concerned about.

01:01:20.800 - 01:02:11.760

And I think I can see, obviously there are problems with both of those extremes, you know, people who only take seriously worship or people who only take seriously practices of mercy. So final question. If you could sum up in a sentence what you hope would be the concrete differences in understanding and in practice that would result from people reading your essay um what uh what uh what what would they think and do differently what what would be the what would they get from the essay that would change their understanding and practice well I'm not going to give you a sentence okay but but a few a few maybe um so

01:02:12.720 - 01:02:35.840

I'm suggesting that we live in a time where people are shewing any notion of tradition. Tradition is seen as a kind of a prison preventing human freedom or authenticity. That's kind of what tradition is seen as. Indeed, anything that constitutes a challenge to the dominion of the ego or the will

01:02:37.040 - 01:03:16.480

or anything that might call for askesis or discipline is sort of diminished or obscured or ignored. On the other hand, we have seen Christians making tradition into an idol and weaponizing it against anything that's novel, new, or living. And what my article, what I'm trying to do in my article is I'm trying to remind us that there is a living spirit afoot in the world that breathes in and through material forms, in liturgies, and in tactile practices.

01:03:16.880 - 01:03:45.040

And I would like to see us lay aside all forms of religion on the right and on the left that pretends to exist an abstraction from this living reality. So in this view, and maybe this is the sentence, spirituality is the true and living source of theology and ethics, and that spirit is mediated in material practices. So that's a few sentences.

01:03:46.160 - 01:04:19.680

Well, thank you very much for, you know, such a provocative essay and such rich reflections. I appreciate that. And these are difficult themes, bringing in Taylor and Cavanaugh and Boardman and these forms of excarnation. But it seems like we're in these complex times where we find ourselves with a sense of alienation, with something lacking, and at the same time, a sense that

01:04:21.160 - 01:04:49.840

challenges we confront are growing larger than ever. And so getting some of these spiritual and community questions right becomes all the more essential, even as it seems like there's forces that are, you know, working quite to the contrary and alienating ourselves from what's truest and best in these great wisdom traditions. So I appreciate the way in which you try to call us back to reflect on that and gesture.

01:04:49.840 - 01:05:14.000

Of course, in this context, giving a complete answer is impossible. And that's why people can turn to your books for more. And of course, we all need to be working forward on these important issues, which you bring before us in terms of bringing back habitations of the Spirit in an age of excarnation.

01:05:14.000 - 01:05:17.920

So thank you. Thank you very much for this, David. Thanks, Bill.