Reflecting on 'The Love That Matters' by Charles Featherstone (1)

I’d like to devote the next few posts to a book that I recently finished reading -  The Love That Matters: Meeting Jesus in the Midst of Terror and Death by Charles Featherstone.

I first became aware of Charles’ (Charles's?) story via a blog post/interview with the author over at Internet Monk.

That interview led me to his website.  And from there to an essay by Rod Dreher entitled "Love Opens a Door", the meat of this essay being Featherstone's response to one of Dreher's earlier essays.

Featherstone's first words hooked me:

But there was a dismissive tone to [your Time essay], to your “Yes, God is love, but…”
And that bothers me. Because it is no small thing to say, “God is love.” Or “God loves you.”

That line grabbed me then and it still grabs me now.

It is no small thing to say God is love.  Thank you for saying this.  Only overfamiliarity and an impoverished imagination make it so.  In the end, eschatologically that is, we suspect that perhaps this love might not amount to much.

I'm talking about myself as much as anyone else here.

I finished the essay and ordered the Kindle version of "The Love That Matters" right then and there.  And it sat in my ever-growing list of unread books since then, gathering digital dust.  But with my recent explorations of Muslim/Christian relations, radicalization, etc. (topics to which I'll return to in future blog posts when I work through another book I recently read - Allah: A Christian Response by Miroslav Volf) my fuzzy recollection of Featherstone's experiences as a practicing Muslim renewed my interest in reading his story.  And at this point it must be clarified that this is NOT a "I was once a Muslim but now I'm a Christian" memoir, the type that crusading Christian apologists love to love.  Featherstone's experiences as a practicing Muslim are indeed a part of the story.  A big part of the story in fact. But they are not THE story.  It is more complex than that.

So the posts that I’ll devote to this book are not a “review”.  I’m not “reviewing” the book.  I wouldn't know how to do so with a book like this.  I’d simply like to acknowledge and attempt to think through a few things from the book that stood out to me.

Having given that disclaimer, a few brief thoughts.

Charles is a very good writer.  His journalistic background is displayed in his ability to craft a sentence and tell a story.  These skills have manifested themselves in a deeply personal and honest book.  It’s not easy to write with honesty and vulnerability.  In fact it's downright hard.  When Chaplain Mike over at the Internet Monk selected Sufjan Stevens’ “Carrie and Lowell” and his “Album of the Year” for 2015, he said “Not since Bon Iver’s devastatingly plaintive For Emma, Forever Ago have I heard an album bleed like this one.”

It bleeds. 

To me, that’s one of the highest compliments that can be given to an artist.  And I think it’s true about this book.  It bleeds.

continued

Lent 2017, Day 1 - What is Lent again?

Well that was quick.  I didn’t even get through one day.  What the hell is Lent about again?

A few days ago, I read a post over at Internet Monk – Another Look: Lent is not about getting better.

The 1^st 2 sentences:

"Lent is not about getting better.Lent is about preparing to die."

Boom.

The post proceeds to question the narrative of Lent as primarily a 40 day exercise in spiritual recommitment.

"Dubbed “adventures,” “training,” “journeys,” “discipline” or “formation,” the focus was more on getting better, stronger, more mature, more capable.  Casting off death so as to become more alive.  Stripping off the sin that so easily besets us and running a good race to the finish.

I don’t know."

Me neither.  I really don’t.  These dubbings are fine as far as things go, but Lent has to be about something other than 40 days of trying extra hard, right?  What possible purpose could a mark of ashes serve in that narrative?  None as far as I can tell – any connection is superficial.  No, effort and intentionality are not the enemy.  But our trying, our plans, our good intentions, our self-improvement projects – none of it alters the fact that the bodies through which we perceive existence are going to die. 

Ash to ash.  Dust to dust. 

And if Lent is about that instead, well, then maybe our attempts at devotion (noble as they may be) are out of step with Lent’s meaning.  Maybe they’re even counterproductive when it comes to the particularity of Lent because Lent is about something else.  I know that a well-intentioned giving-something-up-for-Lent has a liturgical history, but can it actually get in the way of that “something else”?

Enter the Walter Bruggemann Lent devotional that I’m reading this year – A Way Other Than Our Own.

Right away, a different vision and Lenten purpose is presented:

“But this is a God to whom a turn must be made, a God of demand, a God of demand ready to be a God of grace…not just hard demand, not just easy grace, but grace and demand, the way all serious relationships work.” 

“The imperative is around four verbs, “seek, call, forsake, return,” good Lenten verbs.” 

“Lent is a time to consider again our easy, conventional compromises and see again about discipline, obedience, and glad identity.”

Sigh.  I can't help but hold these two hermeneutics in tension.

In past years, I might’ve brushed off the Internet Monk approach as morbid and pointless in favor of Brueggemann’s approach.  This time around it’s pretty much the opposite. 

Are these two approaches at odds with one another? 

What the hell is Lent about? 

Is this not knowing part of it?

I can’t say why, but as I pondered this a post from a few years back by the always perceptive Richard Beck came to mind – Love is the Allocation of Our Dying.  The post had nothing to do with Lent.  Not directly anyways.  It was posted in mid-September.

“Life is a finite resource always slipping away.  Every minute that passes is a passing of life, a movement toward death.  Every moment we are being expended and used up.”

“Because to love other people in small but tangible ways over a lifetime is a way of dying.”

Maybe this is how these two seemingly contradictory viewpoints can be held together, even if only loosely.  It seems misguided to suggest that Lent is intended as a season where we simply sit around and think about death (although such sober meditation is far from unnecessary).  No, there is the matter of being.  Of existence.  What shall we do?

After the hope of advent and the vision of epiphany (and maybe Lent isn’t supposed to make sense except that it proceeds from these?) we resolve to love as the allocation of our dying.  It is the form that our dying takes, and the form that reveals just how much we don't want to die.  This is hard.  Sometimes it is pleasant and sometimes it is not.  We will fail.  We will both lack the imagination to envision what such an allocation looks like and will fail to do what we can imagine.  Even our successes are usually riddled with the anxiety of death or ego.  

Our own successes cannot save the world.  Or ourselves.  

We face this.  We allow ourselves to dwell in that for a moment.

I don’t know.  Just thinking out loud.