My library grows faster than my stack of completed books, a “problem” that I attempted to remedy once with the 30 pages per day project. I doubt I averaged 30 pages per day, but I knocked plenty of books off the list in 2009. Here they are:

I’m currently reading Frederich Buechner’s Godric, which I hope to finish before the year is out. I should also mention that I’m 130 pages into Ched Myers’ momentous Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus for a weekly personal study with @bmick. At ten pages/week, we should finish it before the end of 2010.¹

1. Pronounced “twenty ten”, FYI.

Chapter two of Schweizer’s On Waiting uses as its framework one of philosopher Henri Bergson’s experiments to begin building a philosophy of waiting.

Bergson, “in order to demonstrate the existence of a time other than abstract, mathematical time,”¹ performs the following thought experiment:

If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy-nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.

Let me first say that it is nearly impossible to convey the eloquence of Schweizer’s prose and the brilliance of his insights without quoting the whole chapter. He is a skilled wordsmith, to be sure. That being said, I want to briefly explore two concepts that Schweizer begins to develop in this chapter.

The first is the dichotomy between time and duration. In the sugar/water experiment, Bergson makes the claim that the time waiting for the sugar to dissolve is not time in the mathematical sense (tick… tock… 1… 2…), but rather duration, over which one has no control. In waiting, time is not something we stand in relationship to, but something that we embody. “In waiting,” Schweizer says,

time no longer seems to serve as a transparent medium or instrument, it is no longer something external to which the waiter could refer, from which he would be separate, of which he could avail himself, through which he could pass to accomplish something, as when one takes a leisurely hour to have lunch. In waiting, the hour cannot be turned into lunch; the waiter must live the hour, feel it, embody it.²

It is important to understand what Schweizer is doing here, because there is this thing we call waiting which is not really waiting at all. We wait for our oil change to be done. We wait for the nurse to call us out of the waiting room. We wait for packages to arrive in the mail. We wait for. And when we wait for, time is simply an object, a relation. But when we wait outside of “that mathematical time” we experience time as duration — we experience time absolutely. As Bergson says, “It is we who are passing when we say time passes.”³

Which brings us to the second point. When time is experienced as duration, a whole new world is opened to us — a new world which makes us decidedly uncomfortable. Schweizer makes the argument that time as duration exposes us to our own duration, our mortality: “The waiter’s momentary intuition of her own duration — as this occurs, for example, when we suddenly, but always only intermittently, hear our heartbeat — is accompanied by a certain uncanny discomfort…. She would rather think than feel time.”⁴

Waiting is hellish precisely because it forces us to confront our own death, not because there are simply more ticks and tocks left to do their ticking and tocking.

And so in Advent, we wait. We confront our own death and the death of all and cry out to God, asking to be saved from our enduring hell. We cry “O Come, Emmanuel!” because waiting, confronting our seemingly inevitable demise, is unbearable.

We are not waiting for the time to pass until Christ is born and the herald angels begin their song and the whole blessed celebration begins. We are not waiting for. We are enduring. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.

1. Schweizer, Harold. On Waiting. New York: Routledge, 2008. 15. The “abstract, mathematical time” is a reference to Isaac Newton’s idea of time.
2. Ibid., 17.
3. Interesting side note: In 1913 Bergson was denounced by the Pope. His philosophy was considered “false,” “destructive,” and “poisonous” because it was “sugar-coated, subtle, and seductive in nature.” I’ll know I’ve made it when I’m denounced by the Pope.
4. Ibid., 21.

During this season of Advent I have been blessed by a fantastic book titled Watch For The Light: Readings For Advent And Christmas. It contains 45 pithy devotional reflections arranged in daily readings (from Nov. 24 — January 7) from some of Christianity’s all-time best thinkers. Perhaps you recognize some of these names: Henri Nouwen, Meister Eckhart, Dorothy Day, John Howard Yoder, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Annie Dillard, Jürgen Moltmann, Brennan Manning… the list goes on.

Anyway, in the spirit of giving, I would like to give two of these books away. Want to win one? Here’s what you need to do:

That’s it.

A couple of rules: The contest ends at 12:00pm (Central Time) on Thursday, December 17. You may only enter once, and winners will be chosen randomly by means of random.org. And in light of Wess’ recent post, both books will be purchased from Powell’s instead of Amazon.

Happy Advent!

When I set out to do a personal study of Advent, I immediately performed a cursory Google search for “philosophy of waiting” hoping to find an essay or something to catalyze my thoughts on the topic. The search led me to Harold Schweizer’s On Waiting, a brilliant book from the Thinking In Action series from Routledge. It was, in an almost eerie sense, the exact thing I was looking for. So I placed an order.

I am now slowly making my way through the book, and the plan is this: To post blog reflections on a chapter-by-chapter basis during the next couple of weeks.

On Waiting’s back cover promises that Schweizer’s work “examines this ever-present yet overlooked phenomenon [of waiting] from diverse angles and in fascinating style,” and chapter one — “Nobody Likes to Wait” — wastes no time in fulfilling this assertion. Schweizer sets the stage thusly:

Although waiting rooms, train stations, airports, or hotel lobbies are merely to be passed through, I shall argue… that waiting is not simply a passage of time to be traversed… In waiting, time is slow and thick. Waiting is more than merely an inconvenient delay. It is more than a matter of time. Waiting has its rewards, as I want to argue here… And yet, we might think of waiting also as a temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.¹

As a result of the Enlightenment’s lust for the quantifiable and absolute, somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century the concept of time became the primary organizing principle of society. It wasn’t long before people discovered that this reductionist version of “time” was something that could be exploited — time, we realized is money. But “what is lost,” Schweizer says, “when time is money is the content of time itself, but it is a content that seems inconceivable without economic determinations or measurements by clocks.”² That is to say, time-is-money looks like time, but it doesn’t feel like time.

Schweizer next uses the rise of the train system and the resulting necessary synchronization of time between stations and trains to make a great point: “Time is synchronized only for those who have pocket watches.”³ Not knowing when a train leaves, or (even worse) knowing what time it leaves but not having the means to know what time it is now is a serious setback for those too poor to afford time-measuring devices. And lest we be content keeping this problem in the past, Schweizer reminds us that “waiting is still assigned to the poor and powerless so as to ritualistically reinforce social and political demarcations… The poor will always be with us; the poor will always wait. Their time is not money.”⁴

…Blessed are those who wait? Maybe so.

Schweizer then moves on to discussing the effects of the ubiquitous screen on waiting. Because I am never very far away from my laptop, and am almost always attached to my iPhone, the very act of waiting is nearly non-existent in my daily existence. It’s going to be a few minutes? No problem. I’ll just play a quick round of Drop 7. No need for me to just sit here. For Schweizer, the acceleration of new technology continues to compress space, which in turn makes waiting feel like an unwarranted and alien expansion of space. For us, waiting is nothing more than sheer tediousness.

Which is why, for Schweizer, the very act of waiting is subversive:

“By the divine standards of time’s exactitude, by the diviner economics of its consumption, by the light of speed, waiting must seem a temporary aberration, an anachronism, an embarassment. The person who waits is out of sync with time, outside of the ‘moral’ and economic community of those whose time is productive and synchronized or whose time need not — in the habit of velocity — be experienced at all. The waiter’s enforced passivity expels him from the community of productive citizens; his endurance of time estranges him from the culture of money and speed.”⁵

It is when we truly endure time that we wait, Schweizer argues. This form of waiting is never accompanied by the preposition “for” — waiting “for” this, or waiting “for” that. And it is this type of waiting that situates us decidedly outside of the “community of productive citizens.” When we wait, we send a message that says we are not held captive to a consumerist society, a society which worships at the altar of time-is-money.

It will be interesting to explore how Schweizer unpacks all of this in the coming chapters. I’m particularly keen to think through how his assertion that we can have “unexpected intuitions” when we practice waiting as enduring time and not waiting “for” (”objectless waiting,” as he calls it) can still have transformative power during Advent when it seems like we most decidedly are waiting “for” — for the coming of the Promised One.

Stay tuned.

1. Schweizer, Harold. On Waiting. New York: Routledge, 2008. 2.
2. Ibid., 4-5.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. Ibid., 6
5. Ibid., 8.

Relationships Unfiltered: Help for Youth Workers, Volunteers, and Parents on Creating Authentic Relationships

Last Friday I had the privilege of spending some time with Andrew Root (@RootAndrew on Twitter) on the campus of Luther Seminary in Minneapolis, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Youth and Family Ministry.

In addition to hanging out and attending one his classes, I was able to interview him about his newest book, Relationships Unfiltered. Relationships Unfiltered is sort of like a condensed, more practical, and less scholarly version of his first book, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, which I have called the “absolute best youth ministry book out there right now”. Although less heady than Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, Relationships Unfiltered definitely doesn’t disappoint.

Anyway, you can listen to the interview below and/or download it for listening on portable devices. Enjoy.

Click here to download the interview in mp3 format [39 minutes | 17.1mb]

Click here to download the enhanced interview in m4a format [39 minutes | 34.5mb]

Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904-1984) on the Incarnation, from a short prayer/essay on Advent:

Contrary to all our fond hopes, you seized upon precisely this kind of human life and made it your own. And you did this not in order to change or abolish it, not so that you could visibly and tangibly transform it, not to divinize it. You didn’t even fill it to overflowing with the kind of goods that men are able to wrest from the small, rocky acre of their temporal life, and which they laboriously store away as their meager provision for eternity.

No, you took upon yourself our kind of life, just as it is. You let it slip away from you, just as ours vanishes from us. You held on to it carefully, so that not a single drop of its torments would be spilled. You hoarded its every fleeting moment, so you could suffer through it all, right to the end.

This comes from a fantastic little book called Watch For The Light: Readings For Advent And Christmas. Be on the lookout in the coming week for a giveaway of this book. :)

Kester Brewin has just begun an Advent-themed blog series which he calls Advent(ures) in Incarnation with a post titled Incarnation as A Comic God Making a Tremendous Joke. Towards the end of the post, Kester encourages us to

see this season as the opening lines to the most tremendous joke. It is a joke in which roles are subverted and words are twisted. It is a joke which is shocking in the extreme — with God impregnating a girl. It is a joke in which something actually happens. A joke in which the apparent tragedy of human history suddenly takes a comic turn.

One of the reasons I was so captured by his thoughts is that I recently read Frederick Buechner’s Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale on a spiritual retreat. But before we go any further, keep in mind that when we talk about tragedy and comedy we’re talking about them in the classical sense — to generalize, “the terms comedy and tragedy commonly refer to the ways in which dramatic conflicts are resolved”; tragedy has a sad ending and comedy has a happy ending.¹

But I like the way Buechner defines it: “The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable.”² Comedy is like the person slipping on the banana peel or Wile E. Coyote riding a malfunctioning ACME rocket into the side of a cliff. They didn’t even see it coming.

And just when things seem inevitable for Israel — the people of the Covenant — God enters into the tragedy of human existence and transforms it into an uproarious comedy in the form of a New Covenant. How unforeseeable is that?

How unforeseeable is it that when Israel was expecting a David-like king who would rule with power and might, restoring God’s people to their former glory, God sent a child who lived a perfectly normal existence for 30 years before not only prophesying against power, but opening God’s story to Jew and Gentile alike?

How unforeseeable is it that the poor are the blessed ones? That the prodigal is welcomed home? That the least of these matter? That kingdom is actually like a little mustard seed? That the dead would be raised to life? Are you starting to get the joke?

Buechner continues:

Is it possible, I wonder, to say that it is only when you hear the Gospel as a wild and marvelous joke that you really hear it at all? Heard as anything else, the Gospel is the church’s thing, the preacher’s thing, the lecturer’s thing. Heard as a joke — high and unbidden and ringing with laughter, it can only be God’s thing.³

Advent, then, is a time when we place ourselves in the center of the tragedy. We wait, we hope, and we pray. What for? For “God’s thing,” the New Beginning of God’s story. For the comedic turn of events that is Jesus Christ. During Advent, let us remember that, as Buechner says, “The Gospel is bad news before it is good news.”

1. Source.
2. Buechner, Frederick. Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977. 57.
3. Ibid., 68.

“He is your king, the king promised to you, whose own you are. He and no other shall rule over you, but in spirit and not after worldly rule. This is he for whom you longed from the beginning. This is he for whom your dear ancestors were yearning and crying with heartfelt desire. From all the things that until now have burdened, oppressed, and imprisoned you, he will redeem you and will set you free.”

From Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent, 1522.