Comment on Mefi about the Xian Dominonist thing.


I am a canadian, and I am in a liberal theological college, but I've been thinking about this for a while. I don't think there is one movement, but I think there should be things said:

a) That there is a large number of different political movements that could be considered Dominonist--and they rarely talk to each other. Rushdooney, of course and the Pentacostals, but also Mormons and some people who might not be protestant at all. And it ranges from a kind of manifest destiny to a very explicit seeking to violently overthrow the government. We should be careful of not putting everyone in the same pot.
b) I think that for a bunch of reasons, mainline protestant denominations have been drying out, and I think that mainline protestant denominations are a moderating force. Reagan's soft Presbyterianism was a far far way away from Rushdooney's more unaffilated Calvinism; and Bush's Methodism had much more moderation than some of his inner circle--but also remember his inner circle included atheists (Rove, Cheney). There is no atheists in Perry's inner circle--and Bachman does not have the moderation of mainstream denomination--She was part of the Wisconsin synod, which is the crazier ends of Lutheranism (Pope as Anti-Christ, etc) but her withdrawl from the synod is a major story, and one that has been under reported.
c) I think that secular reporters on the coast don't know how to read Religion and tend to be dismissive of it.
d) I think that the moving towards Africa (and I have a lot of evangelical friends who have spent time in Tanzanina, Malawai, Ghana, Botswana, Uganda, and Nigeria) for example, and fueling the dangerous rhetoric about sexuality there is a set of Christian actions that combine colonialism with evangelicalism. I think that by using Africa as a testing ground, that they are working on how to bring that kind of work home, and that really scares me.
e) Cornelius van Til, the Dutch Calvinist, who was the first person to connect these thoughts together, ended up with some pretty difficult political positions. Van Til claims that there can be no neutral ground between the believer and the non believer, that there can be no place for conversation, for discussion--this seem to be an anathema to the democratic project.
f) This idea against neutrality suggests that via home schooling and other institutional building up, there is an attempt to pull certain kinds of American Christian's away from America--or to pull American citizens towards Christianity. There is a long tradition of dropping out, from the state, in Christendom, but that tradition is often tempered by a strong belief in hospitality. I am okay with the dropping out, but I think that the forcing towards, is a violation of Christian hospitality.
g) I don't like Calvin.
h) Rushdooney's holocaust denial is something that should pretty much disqualify him as a historian, which he claims to be. It is not outside the realm of Christan exceptionalism, and the connection between Zionism and antisemitism by his followers has a distasteful history.
i) as someone on the left, who is also spends time with a wide variety of Christians, and who is Christian himself, we have to be careful not to hang before trial, but there is a strong matter of concern here.

Bachman and Perry scare me, in ways that Wright doesn't--because I think Wright is working against privilege, and Bachman/Perry are working towards it.

it's called what we bought:the new world.

I think i sort of figured out one of my problems with Robert Adams...the photog. I love him, and he is one of those people that I have been plagiarizing for a decade, so it might not quite be problem.

in his introduction to What We Brought to the New World, photos of Denver from the 70s, he qoutes Whitman and Keuroac to prove that Denver was a kind of paradise, and then talks about the suburbs of Houston, Seattle, Salt Lake and Phoenix.

He sees the documenting of these landscapes as an elegiac attempt to reclaim his work away from the suburbs work--work of metastasizing sameness, but he inadvertently created these tributes to the same kind of manifest destiny spirit he was railing against.

There is an invisible ley line b/w SLC and Edmonton--and Edmonton was like Denver and Houston in terms of money and oil and status and a kind of working class spendthriftness--a set of metaphors about plenty. Taking photos of the suburbs (and this is my photos of towns outside of Toronto, as well, I think) for me is marking what happened after the suburbs.

Like Baltz's New Industrial Parks, these are ur-narratives of aWestern Suburbness, that was new, and seems weathered and old after three decades--not the decay of industrial nostalgia, but what happens when those spaces are lived in.

Going back home, everything is across the highway,and the downtown is dead or dying. The suburbs are an organism that moves its bodies further out and further out. It takes the space of expansion. In the west there is still room to expand--and so downtowns die and the farmland is taken over by suburbs--and so Adams is prophetic about the west--but he is also wrong that the suburbs die. The west was never pure and the addition of the tract homes, the supermarkets, the developments never made it less pure--it was another kind of life. Maybe parasitic, but not in the way that Adams imagines.

attack the block is amazing. the monsters, the aesthetics, the horror trope of urban spaces as refuge and urban spaces as danger, the various ideas of alien, the one liners, the smart politcs, and its really nice to see a working class, racially diverse story about london so soon after the riots.

These three passages could be considered about adoption and identity, because identity shifts, and refuses to be be the same throughout a life time, and because they are about questions of geography, of choice, of desire, they become complicated and difficult places. Painful places.

Joseph is the son of Jacob, literally and figuratively the son of Israel, and he is sold into slavery in Egypt—Egypt as a place of exile, but also Egypt as a place where patriachs gain power, a place in Isrealite imagination of wealth, of status, of earthly goods. Joseph was successful in Egypt, he was the second most powerful person in the land, he goes from a slave to a vizier, from an Israelite to someone who is found safety within the Egyptian court...this is not the only patriarch who goes through Egypt, who understands the power of otherness, of an exilic imagination, the isolation from the homeland, the being sent out and returning, or being forbidden from returning is central to the larger understanding of the world—it is seen in Moses, who liberates his people from the Pharaoh, and it is seen in Christ, who flees to Egypt, in order not to be killed by Herod, and so Joseph, becomes one beginning of the Israelites as strangers in a strange land, this strangeness requires of them an explicit sense of cultural and social memory: “"Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt."

Joseph so isolated from his family, that they sell him to the stranger, they abandon him, and after years, he returns—and this is the place where his forgiveness becomes intensely moving, the hugging the neck, the kissing of the forehead, his brothers eventually accepting of Joseph as prophetic though previously what sent Joseph away was his hearing the voice of god, no matter how obliquely, or symbolically—the younger brother becoming an example for the older brothers—the seeking and the gaining of forgiveness—of course it is an example, an intense, moving, radically renewing, almost raw, example of family, of forgiveness, of closeness, of the desire for completion, but also all of it, is intensely, forever a homecoming, but Joseph never loses the Egyptian part of himself, he is a citizen of Israel, and his family, and his people, but his land, the province he lives in, Goshen, is carved out of Egypt, and the way that he reads dreams and prophecies has an Egyptian style—remember that his brothers don't recognize Joseph when they first see him in the court of Egypt.

This question of inclusion and excision, of being an alien and being a member of a group, becomes firmer over time, there are rules, conclusions that are reached, so that the call of hospitality is given and so people do not lose their Jewish identity, so they do not become Babylonians, or Egyptians or Canaanites. Joseph becomes a way, in a liturgical sense, an introduction to the problems of the Gospel.

The gospel becomes really difficult for Christians who have a social justice bent, We try to be like Christ here, but Christ here is not the man who says the first will be last and the last will be first, he is not the christ of priority of the poor, or the one who talks about the leveling of inequility—here he uses a racial slur, and worse he tells the woman that she will never be part of the jewish culture “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”--for those of us who are not Jewish, who are not part of the lost sheep of Israel, how do we connect ourselves to the Lord, a Lord who in this passage who has decided to be abandon us---it reminds us that Christ was not a christian, that we as Christians are interlopers for the original message, and that we are not here, like christ, but we are the Caaniate woman, who are begging for a small intervention, a small notice of Grace, from a God who might not have priority for us, or at least at this point in time, in this point in the history of Christ, he was not for us.

In the Anglican tradition, there is a memory, of our base humanity, of our fallen nature, of our inability to fully understand or know the Master and our internalization of our separation from the divine comes from the difficult place where Christ isolates himself from the larger world. The prayer of humble access in the 1662 BCP can be seen as a place where we recognize that we are adapted into this tradition—it is not only our separation from the full glory of god, because of our humanness, it is because we are part of another tradition, a branch that has been transplanted onto the tree of life. Let me read that prayer:


We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

The prayer of Humble Access is the place where we are exilic, it is a mark of our exilic space.


This is where the epistle provides a place of grace—this fear that we are defiled, that we embody the problem of purity, because the first half of the gospel is about what can defile and what cannot defile, but the purity and the defiling happen at the same time—and just as we cannot presume to come to this thy table, we cannot presume to clean enough, to wash our hands the right way, or say the right words, or to pray sufficiently to be pure, We are Christian because we have agreed to be adopted into the family of Abraham, but we are still strangers in a strange land.

God's understanding, has grown wider, the contract he had with Abraham has grown past the lost sheep of Israel to the dissident members of other places and other tradition. Because we cannot understand God, because we are not perfect, and because God is perfect, because God is beyond time and space, and because we are stuck in our own temporalities, we cannot avoid being disobdienent—this is the exile that we live in, the absence from the divine, the being unable through our own skills, gifts, powers and understanding to receive the Eucharistic cup, the cup that was not taken away from Christ, though he asked.

This is grace and mercy, to be adopted into the citizenship of Israel, not with the awkard rules of hospitality not with the hostile word of Christ who only sought his own lambs, but if we want ot be adopted, if we want to be a member of the Abrahamic covenant, then we can be.

This choice cannot be easy, and we are still exiles from the lord—but there is power in this choice of adaptation, of adoption.

there does seem to be an uptick in evangelical xians rship to Bunyan.

jenny teller's sci. illustrations are gorgeous, and an excellent way for visual and written info to co-exist. esp. see the jellyfish.

the typography of John Carpenter's the Thing.

hundreds of japanese munciapl flags


compare this with Shelton's Honey Bea, as Brad Shoup did in TSJ, & talk about the implicaitons of list songs on country music.

CAmeron met with Murdochites 26 times in 14 months. Also, read the new yorker's article on murdoch this week.

almost three dozen photos of allnations pow wow in seattle.

W. Chaput the new archbishop of philly, is RAtzinger claiming ideological purity and hard work over innovation and a certain kind of mercy?

i'm back and forth on Romney's LDShood as a liability in 2012, this new study makes me lean into thinking it is a major one.


Trapeze Strip Tease, released by Edison.

Elizabeth ParkeR a domestic worker in 19th century england, was beaten and thrown down the stairs when she refused to have sex with her employer, as a revenge she cross stiched her testimony on a peice of linen.

i spent 12 hours listening to some of the deputations, and watching mamoliti be angry and ford be bord, and i was hoping it would make a difference, now i'm not sure.

Chuck's essay on Eric Church quashed some of my love for it--but then I listened to this:

Sue Tilley who posed for Beneifts Supervisor Sleeping, writes a tender and quite amusing adendum to the offical Lucian Freud obit in the gaurdian.

martin skidmore died.

Women's suffering has often inspired admiration from audiences whose embrace of their tragic heroine can seem like equal parts sympathy and sadism. Those of us who took pleasure in the fruits of Amy Winehouse's inner turmoil now have to acknowledge its ultimate end. As we contemplate this, we can also revel in what was most entrancing about her music: its brashness and utterly engaging power, the upfront expression of a woman who was loud without apology. Her big notes still live.

Anne Power's on Winehouse

last auction cycle warhol was responsible for up to a third of revenues from the major houses. The economist explains this, and how it might not be a good thing.

Toronto project for restoring, in aesthetic ways split concrete planter boxes.

it was a tradtion in the 18th century and earlier, in london, of when droping a child into a foundling hospital, leaving it with a bit of spare cloth, here is an onlin eexhibition that explains the practice, and shows some notes and cloths.

120 mid century modern logos.

though Clark Henry's Butch Guide comes from 1982, the masculinity as assumed normal in the gay male community, and the refusal to acknowledge butch asa kind of drag is still ripe for heavey parody.

Bette Davis on Joan Rivers in the mid 80s.

1500 South East Asian Book Designs.

Marvel Hex Codes

Corruption in China is begginning to be seen by the outside world as a major problem--and this comes with the liquidity of capitial, like this telegraph article on officials funnelling 76b out of the country.

minnepolois bus tickets

design treatments for St Bartholemew's church in NYC, including these icons for guild work:

From Jul 10, 2011

United Steaks of America

some pretty great street shots of Melbourne.

6000 prisoners in California are on a hunger strike.

From Jul 10, 2011

Zoran Lucic, Wayne Rooney Poster, From the Sucker for Soccer seires, more here:
about 35 of them

original art for Teenage Sex Club, a romance comic from 1951.

some photos of Twombly's styudio from the 70s. The work was shot by Horst for vogue , so they have a solid, well defined glamour, and an explicit fashion for the sake of fashion aesthetics, instead of an art history reportage, but there are some things that are interesting none-the-less. The neo-classical sculpture, are interesting because they suggest a set of translations of classical motifs, as opposed to actual anceint work, and hte amount of white in the space are not unsual, but this picture, with that white and yellow pop cylinder in the midst of dull/patinaed brown bronzes is a metaphor of twombly's work:

From Jul 10, 2011

sometimes the majestorium provides a useful stop in corruption, but not before Father Corapi, the charasmatic priest in the WEstern US convinced his followers to give him "He holds legal title to over $1 million in real estate, numerous luxury vehicles, motorcycles, an ATV, a boat dock, and several motor boats, which is a serious violation of his promise of poverty as a perpetually professed member of the society." (Sometimes the reporters for the National Catholic Register are a little bitchy.


STeve Anderson is a very angry man. His speeches against women preaching, against what he considers a culture of licentiousness, and against certain cultures of sexuality, and his refusal to engage in the world are notorious. (mostly because he films and uploads his videos on youtube). These photos of baptisms, and the joy he shows in them, complicates the narratives of anger and exhaustion that function as the core of his work.

John Waters Interview about his art practice.

From Jul 5, 2011

Letter of Resignation XXXI by Cy Twombly, 1967, Ink and Graphite on Paper, collection of John Waters (who described Tyomblys techique, as the "poetics of hte palmer method"

From Jul 5, 2011

Cy Twombly, Anadyomene, Bassano in Teverina 1981, wood, nails, crayon, paint, cloth, and screw eye, 18 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 29" (47 x 57.1 x 73.6 cm). Private collection, Rome

From Jul 5, 2011

Cy Twombly, Roman Notes, Lithograph

‘In his own particular way, Twombly tells us that the essence of writing is neither form nor usage but simply gesture - the gesture that produces it by allowing it to happen: a garble, almost a smudge, a negligence. We can reason this out through a comparison. What would be the essence of a pair of trousers (if it has one)? Certainly not that carefully prepared and rectilinear object found on the racks of department stores; rather the ball of cloth dropped on the floor by the negligent hand of a young boy when he undresses tired, lazy and indifferent. The essence of an object has something to do with the way it turns into trash. It is not necessarily what remains after the object has been used, it’s rather what is thrown away in use. And so it is with Twombly’s writings. They are the fragments of an indolence, and this makes them extremely elegant; it’s as though the only thing left after the strongly erotic act of writing were the languid fatigue of love: a garment cast aside into a corner of the page.” Barthes, on Twombly.

From Jul 5, 2011

From the Blossom Show, in Chicago, his last big american show.

and he, and this is the great thing--talked about how it was needed to discuss the politics (about how the films move between the witch and the nymphette, and that's a problem (and maybe a catholic problem) but it is, and there were reasons for that, and we notice the politics, and we move on to the aesthetics w/o trying to settle the middle.

also toby dammit, fellini, terrance stamp, worth seeing.

oh, and on my question of black swan, he put his fingers and index fingers in a triangle, and talked about black swan, suspira, and perfect blue as three points on that triangle.

he also talked about how, in his way, the perfect is the enemey of the good--and with as much love and desire for Cocteau, as he did for Buba or Fulci (and Fulci's bodily horror)

or about how touch of evil was a better film than citizen kane, b/c touch of evil went off the road (and proceeded to pantomine a car wreck as a good thing, as a worthwhile thing)(

it made my passion and my weirdness and my love for excess, and my desire to expand what is good, and i was really depressed and really gone before i went.


i mean i love suspira, i love argento, but this almost accidental del toro, i think made me feel more hopeful

del toro talking after a double bill of suspira and toby dammit.

it was life affirming, his casual fannish knowledge of film, his love of the aesthetic of film, his desire for the excessive aesthetics of fairy tales to trump logic, a discussion of scopophillia, of hitchcock and his students argento and de palma, how a bollywood film does this thing, where it just leaves the narrative plot and returns at its lesiure, about bluebeard, about the nature of good and evil as it relates to decadence with a small discussion of the piety and evil of joan of arc's leutitent...it went on for an hour, and i just felt affirmed, profoundly affirmed.

drinks and dinner with andy/jamie and their family.

four things i thot today:

a) line from the poet and episcopal priest tim dlugos: each great hope seems/to melt away like snow beneath the force/of the spring, the waking life again" i am working away, slowly and difficulty from systems that contain all to build a life upon--the melting snow, with the feeding water, and the intemperate schedule, and the refusal to have a system, is a metaphor for that?
b) the red and white blocks devolped for testing spatial relations were created in the early 50s at STandford, b/w 1950 and 1970 stanford had several pysch expirments intended towards placing the chaotic into mediated boxes--can this kind of pyschometric testing be connected to Reichs gender work or to the Prison Expriment
c) isaac, being lead by the patriach, to his death or at least sacrifice, we hear the story from Abraham's point of view, in art, in lit, in the scriptures, but is our rship to G-d closer to Isaac than Abraham (and by extension, Jacob knew that he would get the blessnig, and in the wrestling and the maiming and hte lingustic changes, there was really rarely any doubt--the story of Isaac is a crime story, a noir, it has suspense)
d) winters tale as a mirror of midsummers night dream?

ase

As much as I love chart country, and find it oddly inspirational, I have always found the exquisitely construction of Twain's work was made in such a way that any biographical clue was meticulously scrubbed clean. So the songs weren't about anything, even the sex songs refused narratives of the body--so we think b/c of the show on the Oprah network, and because of the hiring of Swift's team who make confessional work, and because of what we know of the divorce, that she has become more confessional...but it's not true. This is slightly sadder then, for example, Come on Over, but gives no new understanding of Twain. Artists don't need to spill shit, we have no real knowledge of Toby Keith, who makes almost no attempt at the personal or the confessional, and an instinct towards the confessional seems to required more of female artists then men, so part of me really admires the chrome sheen of Twain's immaculate production, and part of me still finds it a little too bland to enjoy as a text, or even the use function that she assumes it will (but then i might not be the audience for this) (the interesting thing is that the youtube video recommends videos of the motivational speaker Joe Osteen as a companion to this--and I'm enough of a prickly asshole that I'm allergic about this shit. )

the politics of the tree of life were lousy, the abstacted, vigentte style story tellijng a little wearying, the last third a goopy hippy disaster, his spirtualism and his pangeic theology as a corrective to the european (this time xianity) interesting, and the 30 minute section about the creation of the earth, from the big bang, to the 50s in texas was one the most beautiful things ive seen in the cinema (esp a tiny, few second cut of a sea dinasour, and a slightly longer scene of two raptors)

also, the only film that had sections set in the present day, and oh brad pitt was great.

"Imagine a stream flowing form a spring and dividing itself off into a number of accidental channels. As long as it proceeds so, it will be useless for any purpose of agriculture, the dissipation of its waters making each particular current small and feeble, and therefore slow. But if one were to mass these wandering and widely dispersed rivulets again into one single channel, he would have a full and collected stream for the supplies which life demands. Just so the human mind . . . as long as its current spreads itself in all directions over the pleasures of the senses, has no power that is worth the naming of making its way towards the Real Good; but once call it back and collect it upon itself . . . it will find no obstacle in mounting to higher things, in grasping realities."

gregory of nyssa, qouted here

Sunday, June 12, 2011

If you are ever in a masonic lodge, note the leader’s chair, to the right is a rough stone, and to the left is a smooth stone, the stones, called ashar’s are a visual metaphor for the linear narrative of rough to smooth that exist w/i a mason’s life.

They assume that you are born rough, and thru received knowledge, given by elders, one becomes smooth. But the way the display works, the rough and the smooth are in the same place, the rough and the smooth work not as a narrative but through a perhaps inadvertent, example of mystic time, or church t ime, where it folds up in on itself, where it functions simultaneously, and where a narrative requires enough liquidity to suggest that the rite occurs from the beginning of time, that it never ends, that persons who engage in the rite are changed, are smoothed, but that the smoothing lacks the permance of existience.

The ashars, the dialectic of the smooth and rough that suggests thru placement and thought, two narratives: the narrative of linear progression, I was rough and now I am smooth; I was lost and now I am found; I was in the wilderness, and now I am home in the city; I was a pagan or an atheist or one who refused g-d, and now I am a Christian. But also the narrative of mutual displacement, of decoherence, of a fractal splitting: I am both rough and smooth; though I am found, I still do not speak enough of the language, and am lost; even in the city I am in the wild’s exodous, my conversion to this new life, and to this new theological practice has not made me less of what I was before.

Here on pentacost, which is in most tales, a story of the voice of god speaking clearly and precisely his convenats towards the divine, is like those ashars—there is a linear narrative, that shouldn’t be denied, that there is a miracle of communication, of language, of transference—of being one thing, and then after this radical event, being another thing, but there is also the decoherence, the splitting, the dark seeing, and the terror that comes from the voice of the divine.

We get to easter, as a community—and Christ comes back from the dead, and the flesh of God is obvious. Pentacost works as a second easter, or the second part of easter—where the flesh, the narratives, the responsilbities that were given to us, on the cross become gifts of the spirit—gifts that require a collective responsibility.

But these gifts are often confusing and contradictory, they are often difficult, and they are explicitly in Acts gifts of an apocalypse that we are still waiting for. To understand these acts, we have to recognize the message comes in a variety of forms—there is the gift of language, a reversal, a mirroring, of the curse of Babel. There is the recognition of time, where it functions as an eddy, that floats forwards, backwards, curves in on itself, and provides a place to rest—a time of eternity, where the Eucharist of the Passion is the same Eucharist as Luther in Wittenberg, and the one we have today, and the one that will occur 200 years hence…and the Pentecost is the same way, the passing of the peace, the gathering together as a community, the language used toe express the ineffable become part of the constant renewing of the divine in the life of the church—some of that renewing is difficult, some of that renewing brings joy, and sometimes, we fail to view it as constant. These three messages-of language, of pluarity, and how they fold into a desire for cohesive wholeness, can be eeked out.

Think of the tower of babel not as a curse. We went about it the wrong way, our desire to know God fully collapsed into hubris, but the strong human instinct to work thru the mystery, to talk to god, and to have god talk to us, collectively and personally, comes out of that tower of babel—and when that tower collapsed, it was the birth of language itself—hundreds of languages, there needed to be some work, some process that allowed people to figure out how to talk to each other, now that they did not have the same tounge, but this allowed for different ideas, different perspectives, it allowed for a variety of ways to describe our experiences.

In this sense, Pentacost could be considered a reward for the chaos, a positive spin of the difficulties of Babel’s tower—that God, in the form of the holy spirit, speaks many languages, to a collective group of people, suggests an openness that is perhaps a bit absent in other places—it is not Abraham on the mountain, ready to kill Isaac, it is not Moses removing his shoes and entering the burning bush, it is not Ezekiel or even Christ revealing himself to two confused and frightened disciples during the transfiguration.

This inter-textual, liturgical attachment of this passage, to the passage about the passing of peace , “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”

This leads us to a number of questions, can we communicate to god without terror, is the terror and awe of god absent here, with the wind and the voice of fire, and what does it mean to absorb, to listen to the voice of God in this context—in the words of the pentacost miracle:” in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”

The seeking of peace and the seeking of meaning, happen together, they happen in a mutally agreed upon community—and a community that is radically different then the tight and restricted community of the Isrealites. The theophonic miracle of the Pentacost, is then not only a miracle of language, the rough and smooth stone of translation and understanding on both sides of the Chair of God, it is also a collective miracle, a miracle about the implications of plurality.

Pluraity in the pentacost is not an easy argument, and it is not often pleasant—it rests on several paradoxes that the Anglican church is still working through. That human communities who rest on religious practice work through. The chief paradox is one of open and closed communities. To be part of the community of faith, t here must be an agreement of what is being said, and also an agreement of which interperations, which positions are so beyond the pale that t hey cannot be said. The diversity of opinions, must contain within it, the seeds of its own dissent. In this sense, to hear the voices of god, in their own language are to simultaneously lose part of the identity that is being preserved.

This question rests on the two passages—the one in Acts, about the list of people, like the midrash or kabbalsitic lists in the Babel tales, that note each of the tribes, each of the nations that was created that day and on the passage in corninthons that states that we must become Christians, and to become Christian require an abandonment of old ways. The paradoxical thought process here is, how can we be both now, both open to the possibility of a radical god, open to the dissent that emerges in other voices, how do we mirror or transform, or listen to the holy spirit so the miracle of the babel has now become a gift while recognizing heresy—how do we know what is permitted, and what is beyond reasonable interpretation.

This grasping for interperation, for a proper limning of the voice of God, rests on the body of the Lord, it is through the flesh of the divine made human that the pentacost can happen, and it is because Christ’s body is our body that we can work through these thoughts and feelings collectively For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. But this is also paradoxical: so we are made to be slaves, and in our slavery, we are free, we are made men or women, but thru the flesh of a man, we are made genderless—but all of this seeing and hearing and making and constructing and finding a collective is through a glass darkly, because of our humanity, we are absent of a full understanding of the nature of god—the Pentecost makes that clear: And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist

This is the difficult bit, the problematic bit—that the blood and the fire and the smoky mist consumes us, but consumes us in such a way that we are not fully processed—we are the smooth stone and the rough stone, and we are a smooth stone and rough stone in contexts of other smooth stones and rough stones—we are made into a wall, or a fence, a face that delinates land, ownership, collective responsibility, the commons—but also exclusion, and loss and collapse.

To be a stone in the wall, to be an aggregate—could this be a successful metaphor for cohesive wholeness—the tension between what is said and what is heard, is a tension that is not solveable, because language is always liquid, is always at risk of slipping away from us, and we talk, we listen, we write, we pray, we engage in physical rituals connected to the timelessness of our encounters with fellow believers, and with the nature of god, in the hope that our desires for communication are not futile.

The joy of pentacost for Christians, is a joy of language and social cohesion as a temporary hopeful interaction against the feelings of hopelessness at a God that is often viewed as profoundly absent. It’s not the speaking in tounges, or the ecstatic dancing that marks other peoples working through of the spirit, but it’s still and it’s small and its enough to keep me waiting for the voice of fire, even thru the blood and the flesh and the smoke

bitch you ain't no barbie, i see you work at arby's, #2, supersize, hurry up i'm starving, darling, radical, on the block i'm magical, see me at your college campus baggie full of adderall, call me if you need a fix, call me if you need a boost, see them other chickenheads? they don't ever leave the coop. i'm in the coop cruisin, i got the stolen plates, serving all the feeds over there by the golden gate BRIDGE, i'm colder than the fridge and the freezer, i'm snatchin all your bitches at my leisuuuuure