Test the Spirits (Mark 6)

For me, the tricky thing about doing a blog about the 12 Marks is that I don't actually agree with the spirit of every Mark. And Mark 6, Intentional Formation Along the Lines of the Old Novitiate, is one Mark that falls short of me agreeing with it. Why? Well, the novitiate, the period of preparation and discernment undertaken by a new member of a religious community, is not "old" in the usual sense of the word. Yes, it has been around a long time, since Jesus instituted it by virtue of his ministry. But it is not "old," like one might speak of an old house or an old lady or an old banana. When we refer to these things as old, we are referring to them with reference to secular time, the natural plane of time. Conversely, I think that the novitiate exists in higher time, the supernatural plane of time. We practice the novitiate in a space measured by secular time, but the practice itself, like the Sacraments, is rooted in higher time. By entering into the novitiate, we are entering into the life of Christ. So the problem with the New Monastics referring to the novitate as "old" is that since it is eternal, it cannot be "old." So while to draw from the wisdom of the novitiate is all fine and good, a "new" novitate will never be more than the shadow of the "old" novitiate. Not only does the wheel not need reinventing; it cannot be reinvented.

With that said, this will be another short post because the ways in which Hyaets shadows the novitiate are rather limited. At Hyaets, new prospects are invited to do a volunteer resident discernment year. I know very little about this process, other than that few is any permanent residents have entered into the community through this channel. I also know that the general idea of discernment year is that one enters into it and tries to test out how they fit into the community and that this process is evaluated every three months during this year. I now ask everyone to reflect on the following quote from the Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia, monastic guru and founder of the original alternative community almost 1500 years ago:

"Do not grant the newcomer to the monastic life an easy entry, but as the apostle says, 'Test the spirits to see if they are from God.' Therefore, if someone comes and keeps knocking at the door, and if at the end of four or five days has shown patience in bearing harsh treatment and difficulty of entry, and has persisted in the request, then that one should be allowed to enter and stay in the guest quarters for a few days. After that, the person should live in the novitiate, where the novices study, eat, and sleep."

Again, sorry for the boring post, but I'm not a huge fan of Mark 6. I'm now on the choo-choo-train to the 919 and they gave me a New York Times, so I have to be a good white person and get to reading it.

Pax et bonum.

The Exhausted Matt Submits Humbly to the Church (Mark 5)

At Hyaets, we have the tendency to wear ourselves out. That is why, as you may have read before, that we take the Sabbath very seriously. Cause in the beginning God toiled for six days and then he RESTED on the 7th. Sometimes our rest doesn't always fall on the 7th day, but we still rest. Well I have toiled this week (or so it seems) and now it is time to rest. In about an hour we have our neighborhood community meal, and after that I want to go to bed so I can be well rested for my trip home tomorrow. But besides providing an excuse for a shorter blog post, I thought mentioning Sabbath would be a nice tie in to a very brief treatment of Mark 5: Humble Submission to Christ's Body, the Church.

Now without going into any depth at all, I want to touch on the two practical reasons that we submit humbly to the Church (that is, those who profess to believe in Jesus Christ) as offered by Ivan Kauffman in his essay on Mark 5. One, we do so to avoid the pride associated with individualism. By submitting to the Body of Christ, the community of believers, we subordinate our own and various individual ends to the overarching and supernatural end of the Church. Second, we submit in order to avoid spiritual pride. No one, including Jesus, likes a Pharisee, those whose sins were chiefly those of spiritual pride. By submitting to the Church, we realize that we are a constituent part of the Body of Christ, serving our own, unique function and carrying our own, unique crosses. We will hopefully realize that we, serving in those unique capacities, are not better than other, perhaps laxer, parts of Christ's body serving in different capacities.

Back to the relation between Sabbath and Church. As God gave the Sabbath to man as a sign of irrevocable covenant (Ex 31:16), God also created the world for men to be in communion with God through the Church, prepared by the election of Israel as the people of God. Sometimes to rest in the simple splendor of this telos for humankind is just what one needs to renew his or her mind and spirit...

Off to the community meal!

Pax et bonum

The Fragility of Fingers (Mark 4: Racial Divisions)

If y'all hadn't figured it out yet, our neighborhood is almost entirely African-American. I was kind of surprised about this when I first got there, as I had thought that our neighbors would be more racially diverse. But no, the hood is vastly black, and would probably be quite different if it were not so. You see, black folks (and this could be said for other races I'm sure) are a lot different from us white folk (and probably from other non-white folk). Yep, that's right. A LOT DIFFERENT. Different cultures, not completely different or separate, but significantly different. We, as homo sapiens sapiens, are not all one happy human family of unity. We are differentiated by the cultures we come from. At Hyaets, it is usually difficult to carry on a conversation with a neighbor because these differences run so deep. I'm not going to focus on the differences, but I would like you to remember that those differences exist.

Mark 4 of the new monasticism is lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities and the active pursuit of a just reconciliation. Yeah. Say that three times fast. Now I'm not the sort to go on ad infinitum about white privilege, racism, oppression, etc. To me all that critical race stuff just sounds like BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. However, I do think that the author of the essay on Mark 4 raises an important concern in that as Christians, we cannot conceive of the Church as one Body of Christ when our racial differences divide us more than our faith unites us. We cannot be more connected to our fellow whites and blacks than we are to fellow followers of Christ. I also think it is important to understand that these divisions arise out of problems in knowing what to think of and how to interact with those who are different from us.

Assuming that there are racial divisions in our churches and our communites worthy of lament, how do we go about pursuing a just reconciliation? The Apostle enjoins us to "keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace" (Eph 4:3) And as a bond of unity, it is charity that "binds everything together in perfect unity" (Col 3:14). Now charity, or agape, or love in modern parlance, is considered the highest of the theological virtues, infused in the soul by the Holy Spirit. Lets not get into all that mess. I want to focus more on the object rather than the subject of charity. That is, without me going all Holy Spirit on your ass, we need to ask how we can begin to imagine those who are different from us as proper objects of charity. St. Thomas argues that charity is a kind of friendship, and since friendship is rooted in fellowship in human life, or an Aristotelian notion of "living together," God and our neighbor are proper objects of charity while "irrational creatures" are not. I think that this argument delineating the proper objects of charity offers an answer to our question. We have to imagine people who are different from us as capable of sharing life with us in order to act with charity towards them. Practically speaking that means we have to look past the things that really separate or disgust us to commonalities. (And there are things that really distance me from my neighbors on Tuckaseegee. And I'm not just being a "racist.")

How can we realize these commonalities? One way is through pity and fear. Aristotle had some thoughts on these two emotions as they relate to tragedy. Martha Nussbaum writes that under an Aristotelian view, "pity and fear will be sources of illumination as the agent, responding and attending to his or her responses, develops a richer self-understanding concerning the attachments and values that support the responses." Our responses to potentially tragic events can result in realizations of what we, as humans, care for, and as Susan Feagin puts it "remind us of our common humanity." Another way is through humor. By laughing with each other, even at the most base joke, we remind ourselves that we all share something, even if it is just a common sense of humor.

This summer, I have shared both reactions of pity and fear and reactions of humor with my neighbors. Thankfully, I've shared in many more funny moments than in moments of tragedy. In fact, I can only think of one sort-of-tragic moment this summer. And that incident happened today, so I will share it with you. And to spoil the ending a little bit, I am OK.

Once upon a time, Matt got back from the basketball gym with a car filled with kids. He parked the circa 1990 diesel Suburban/hood-mobile that he had used to get there in the driveway. He is retrieving something out of the front seat when all of the sudden Kahlua (our young/clueless neighbor) closes (read slams) the back door on Matt's pinky finger. The following chaos ensues, more or less in this order:

1) Matt uses colorful language in a belligerent tone of voice.

2) Kahlua tries to open the door which crushes Matt's finger even more. This happens multiple times.

3) Holly (lovely fellow intern/housemate) says "I don't know what to do!"

4) Matt makes even more of a scene.

5) Matt, thinking the door to be locked, uses his free hand to unlock the door vis-a-vis power lock. When that doesn't work, Matt reaches around to manually pull up on the lock, only to find that this hood-mobile only has a screw sticking out where the lock thing should be and is of no use. Matt screams.

6) Some neighbor with dreads who was posting up on Tuck walks right up to Matt and says the following: "Damn, this nigga's finga be stuck in the door."

7) Someone opens the door. Matt pulls out his finger.

Then neighbor Reynard, who had rushed out of the Tuck house looks at Matt's "wound" and and says: "put some ice on it, it'll be aight." And everyone lived happily ever after. The end.

Though this incident isn't tragic, it reminds me that people like myself and people like my neighbors are made humanly common by our fear of and pity for the victim of getting a finger crushed in a door. I recognize in myself and in my neighbors the same attachment to bodily well-being that motivates us to be concerned for the person in my situation. These are moments in which I imagine sharing life with my neighbor, thus opening the door to acts of charity toward them and, hence, Christian unity,

That's all for today. I know I'm a day behind on my posts, but fear not! I will get caught up, even if it means posting on the Sabbath.

Pax et bonum (peace and all good things to you good people)

Mark 3: Hospitality Towards the Stranger

I know very little about Christian hospitality as it stands as a tradition in the Church. I know that around Hyaets we would read Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001) if we wanted to learn more about such things. I don't have time to read this book while I'm here, but by examining the back cover I found that it is focused on hospitality's roots in Scripture and traditional Christian practice. I'm more interested in providing an effective argument for hospitality as a moral good. The hospitality I'm about to describe is simple, but rare in this day and age.

What is hospitality? At Hyaets, hospitality takes the form of welcoming the stranger into our lives, broadly construed. It can mean opening up our houses, our backyard Clubhouse, our bathrooms, dining room table, use of our telephones, etc. It can also mean letting our guard down and making ourselves intentionally uncomfortable in order to connect with and welcome a person.

Here is the outline of a preliminary theory of hospitality:

1) Hospitality, the virtue that has as its object the welcoming of the stranger, can be viewed as a means of reconciling distributive injustices in an imperfectly compliant society. I borrow the term "imperfectly compliant" from John Rawls, who wrote an influential book on perfect compliance justice, which describes (counterfactually) a perfectly just world. Imperfect compliance justice concerns how we ought to deal with injustice (e.g. punishment, just war, etc.) I will elaborate on this view in (4).

2) Unlike sharing (refer to yesterday's post), hospitality is disinterested. We do not welcome the stranger because we love the stranger, or have an interest in her. Rather, we welcome the stranger because (I'm assuming) we are morally required to do so. I won't go into the argument behind this, as my point here is to contrast hospitality with sharing, which does not fall under the requirements of morality to the extent that hospitality does.

3) By welcoming the stranger, we attend to them, and open ourselves up to relations with them, and hence possibility. Disinterested hospitality can pave the way for interested sharing.

4) Injustice creates opportunities for hospitality in the sense I am talking about. The times when we need to show hospitality to a person would correspond to the times when they have unmet needs that the moral agent can meet. I cannot think of a situation where we would welcome a STRANGER into our life if that person did not have a need that could not have been met elsewhere. I assume that a perfectly just world would, within reason, meet all human needs. Therefore, for an act of hospitality to have moral content, it would have to occur in an imperfectly just world. This makes much sense if one considers the Aristotelian view of injustice as stemming from pleonexia, or acquisitiveness; desiring more than one's share. If there was no pleonexia in the world and goods were distributed justly, there would be no opportunity for hospitality.

5) We need a definition of stranger! A STRANGER is someone you do not know personally nor have any usual interest to know personally. To go off on a tangent, at the beginning of the summer Helms and Greg very graciously welcomed me into their home, despite believing with good reason that I may be (1) a Republican and (2) an EVANGELICAL. Helms and Greg are truly excellent hosts. However, I do not qualify as a stranger because they did indeed have an interest in getting to know me personally (namely, I was assigned to live and work with them for a 10-week period).

6) Any Kantian worth her saltpetre would stand behind the virtue of hospitality. As the virtue of welcoming the stranger, hospitality maximizes actions which treat others as ends in and of themselves. All that it requires of us is that we attend to other people, but specifically those people with whom we have no interest in being in relation. Since we have no interest in being in relation with these people, we have no reason to treat them as means to our various ends.

To close: I started this blog as a way to focus myself over the last two weeks of my ministry in Charlotte. I didn't really know where it was going at first, but now I know that it will be very focused on topics in ethics as they relate to my experience at Hyaets this summer. Until August 9th it will serves as a springboard for half-baked academic ideas, a place to practice writing for the sake of writing, and less so a mode of reflection on life in Enderly Park. I will continue using the 12 Marks as a framework for my postings. Along that line, I'm changing the title of my blog. Thanks to Greg for suggesting this new title and for all the other funny things he says.

Lend me some sugar!... I am your neighbor! (Or Mark 2: Sharing Economic Resources with Fellow Community Members and the Needy Among Us)

This summer, I have seen the following means to human flourishing shared amongst ourselves and our neighbors:

-fresh eggs
-canned food
-kale
-lawnmowers
-meals
-houses
-bedrooms/bathrooms
-sugar
-ice cream
-finances
-bus passes
-cat-catching services
-diapers
-peanut butter
-oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
-bread
-Chicken Elmo
-movies
-cooking oil
-snack food
-the pancake cooker thing

Sharing is easy at Hyaets. Here are four reasons why:

1) People are intentional about being dependent on others.

Most of us will spend a great deal of our time trying to achieve some degree of economic independence. Even if we do not direct our lives towards the consumption of more and more material goods, we at the least have a desire to live comfortable lives. We want an economic lot greater than one that means just "getting-by" and we do not want to have to rely on others for our own welfare. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with this common desire. It does a great deal, I think, for our self-esteem and stability for us to have independent control over our lives.

But economic independence presents obstacles to sharing. When we have no need ourselves, it becomes difficult to have empathy for or attend to those with real needs.

At Hyaets, we can experience empathy for our neighbors because many of us are as poor as they are. And to the extent that we are better off than our neighbors, we remain dependent on each other, pooling and sharing our resources as a community (and as an economy of scale!). So reciprocal sharing becomes a way of life within our community, and thus enables us to share with our negihbors.

2) People realize that their neighbors are in need and often deserve help (and if neighbors don't deserve help, they try to be merciful and share with them anyway) .

Growing up, I often believed (for one reason or another) that poor people were poor because they were either (1) lazy bums, or (2) that they had made some very bad decisions. This summer, I have found that while some poor people are both lazy bums and very bad decision-makers, some are not either of these things, and there is not usually a causal relationship between a Tuckaseegean's economic status and his or her work ethic or decision-making track record.

So without trying to answer the question of why the poor are poor, I think it is important to say that we know that most of our neighbors are not entirely, or even mostly, responsible for their poverty, and sometimes entirely not responsible in the case of intergenerational poverty.

I have spent a bit of time on the question of desert because I believe that many of our neighbors are poor unjustly. But even in the case where some person ought to be poor for the rest of her life; that is her just desert, we still ought to share with her. (Cause we got that whole WWJD thang going on!)

3) People do not measure their happiness by the accumulation of material things.

Hyaets members would be pretty miserable if they did. We don't have a lot, first of all. Second, if we did measure our happiness in this way, it would be difficult to share as much as we do. For we would necessarily be diminishing our own expectations by sharing our resources with others. Instead of having more, we would have less, and this in and of itself would be against a conception of happiness-as-the-accumulation-of-material-things. But we do not subscribe to this conception, and I imagine that those who do would have a difficult time sharing with others.

4) People love each other.

So why do we share?

The best reasons for sharing seem to be neither egoistic nor moral. Obviously sharing is not egoistically motivated. If my neighbor comes to me asking for an egg and I only have two, both of which I am planning on using to make Mom's oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipie, sharing may have a detrimental effect on my own welfare. Yet I still give my neighbor an egg.

Yet, the strongest reasons for sharing are not moral. While it may be morally good to share, say an egg, with my neighbor, it does not seem to be a requirement of morality that I put myself in situations that would be conducive to sharing. As Christians we are required to practice acts of charity, but we are not required to share as such. Nor does sharing seem aimed at improving the welfare of society. At Hyaets, if our goal was to better our neighborhood by maximizing the welfare or utility of our neighbors, we would not be doing a very good job. We do not manage our resources or direct our actions toward this goal.

Alternatively, I think our sharing is motivated by love- love for our neighbor. If explained by love for neighbor, sharing is motivated by a reason outside of our self, but is at the same time bound up in interest. In order to share, we have to be passionate about sharing and about neighbors. In my experience, a disinterested act of sharing is not usually an option. We love our neighbor, and we usually have some interest sharing with this neighbor we love, usually along the lines of making our lives more meaningful.

Sharing is bound up with hospitality, which is the realm of Mark 3, so this post will be continued in some fashion tomorrow.

Pax et bonum
Matt

Mark 1: Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire

As I mentioned last night, I am beginning a series of reflections on the 12 Marks of New Monasticism. The 12 Marks come out of a collection of essays edited by the Rutba House, an intentional community in Durham, N.C. (Eugene, O.R.: Wipf & Stock, 2004). The 12 Marks as I see them offer a guide to understanding the intentional Christian communities that have sprung up throughout North America under the guise of New Monasticism, or NM. Though certain Hyaets members dislike labels, I have found the NM and the 12 Marks beyond helpful in understanding the mentality and practice of our community.

With that said, I shall turn my attention to the first mark, Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire. In her essay of the same title, Sr. Margaret McKenna offers an interesting theology of relocation based on the ethos of desert retreat and reflection found in Isaiah 35, Hosea 2:5-7, and various Gospel accounts of Jesus heading into the desert for extended periods of spiritual renewal. I encourage you to read and reflect on these passages if you are interested.

I would like to focus here on how Hyaets embodies a relocation to an abandoned place of Empire. According to a 2006 Quality of Life study commissioned by the City of Charlotte, our Enderly Park neighborhood besides being very poor had a violent crime rate 4.5 times higher than the city average, a 29% teenage pregnancy rate, and a meager one-third rate of students passing End-of-Grade Examinations. Signs of social and economic depression are visible to those walking our streets. Many houses are boarded up, some from the inside so as to appear to be occupied. The former Freedom Mall, long shuttered, recently reopened as a massive social services office hub. Running eastward on Freedom Drive some mornings, I reflect on the city skyline as the sun rises behind it. The crowned-topped tower of the Bank of America Corporate Center and handle-topped tower of the former Wachovia headquarters along with their shorter companions seem to cast mile long shadows over our neighborhood. These skyscrapers are symbols of failure as much as they are symbols of wealth. The second-largest banking center in North America, Charlotte and its star banker Hugh McColl pioneered the cross-regional consolidation of banks that ultimately led to the 2008 financial crisis' "too-big-to-fail" conundrum. As a result, our country and our neighborhood especially are still in the throws of the Great Recession.

Despite its troubles, our neighborhood seems like it won't remain abandoned for long. Money is encroaching on the hood with HUD- funded revitalization popping up all over the place. A giant new condo complex on Tuck just across the railroad tracks is filling up with white people. West Morehead Street, about half a mile away and formerly pretty hood, is now an up-and-coming area of the city. So, the Question of the Day is as follows: what will come of Hyaets if and when Enderly Park becomes the next NoDa or South End? Will Hyaets minister to the loneliness and need for community of the noveau-riche bourgeois? Or will the community relocate in order to wallow in the misery of another poor neighborhood? My instinct tells me that Hyaets partners would try their very hardest to find another poor neighborhood, because for one reason or another it seems like people in our community seem to enjoy being around poor people by virtue of their being poor, or abandoned as such. In that case, my concern would be that the community would become more devoted to abandoned places and people than to God or any sense of purpose in staying and bettering a place. This problem is probably a common pitfall amongst intentional communities.

Why so serious? Perhaps my next post will get back to making light of heavy topics. Its just that its easy to become so glooooooooomy when you are living in the ghetto.

That's all for today! You can check back Monday for Mark 2. Tomorrow is SABBATH, which means its time to rest, which Hyaets people take VERY seriously.

So, until Monday folks, you're going to have to read something else. Like the Sunday New York Times, for all you white folk out there.

MundoVista (Or Tale of Two Camps Part Dos)

This week was spent at Camp Mundo Vista sharing the story of Hyaets with 300 young Christian women. Yes, that's right, Mundo Vista is a GIRLS' camp. I am not a GIRL. This detail made things rather awkward, which I shall try to relate to you. But first, I need to call to your attention the Problem of the Day (i.e. rant)

While at Mundo, I had two startling run-ins with the social phenomenon known as "Evangelical Christianity". Encounter #1 involved an intelligent, well-educated adult saying (in reference to Other religions) that religions are man-made, what God wants is a "relationship", and that without Jesus humans will be separated from God FOREVER. Moreover, this individual made it very clear that she will "go to the grave" believing that. In an unrelated instance (let's call this Encounter #2) a cabin of 4th-6th grade girls generously offered to make greeting cards for us to take back to the kids in our neighborhood. These cards were all very nice. What interested me though was one message in particular:

"You are GOD's creation and no matter what, never forget that you have a special place in HEAVEN! And I hope you've accepted Jesus into your life and if you haven't then here's what you can say! ....."

"Dear God I believe that you sent your son to die for me! I love you! Amen!"

Interesting! What we have here is two people about 20 or so years apart in age and similarly far apart in cognitive abilities, intellect, and life experience. Yet, both put forth similarly dogmatic views on the utmost primacy of belief in Jesus Christ for salvation and (presumably) the good life.

I wonder how the segment of Christianity represented by these two individuals would respond to the following dilemma:

Person X is a faithful, kind person who loves God and loves her neighbor. She prays very often and tries to lead a morally upright life. An objective bystander would agree with this assessment. Problem is, X is a Muslim and has been her whole life. Person Y is a born again Christian who goes to church every Sunday, and is even an elder in his church. Problem is, Y is an alcoholic who beats his wife. Which one of these individuals, if either, is good? Which, if either, does God save? ... Just some fodder to chew on for those who have beliefs similar to those of my two new friends from Camp Mundo Vista. I won't attempt to answer these questions here, as that would take a book-length project, but I believe that Karl Rahner took pretty good crack at it in his concept of "anonymous Christians."

So that's the Problem of the Day. Back to the experience of being the token guy at an all girl's camp. First of all, I now know what it feels like to be the elephant in the room: stares, stares, attempts at discrete glances, more stares. Probably a good experience to have, but still awk-awk-awk-ward.
Second, the amount of flirtation that I was on the receiving end of was absurd, both serious and in jest, as well as from both 10 year old campers and 20 year old counselors. Funny, but wierd. Basically, I felt like I was in a place that I neither desired to nor ought to EVER be. Looking up though, I did enjoy having the entire lower floor of the Mundo guest lodge as my Man Cave, which was a nice respite from the close quarters I've gotten use to over the course of the summer. And much more importantly, I had a great time chilling with my colleagues Molly and Holly and my super awesome "supervisor"/Hyaets veteran Anna. We had many good laughs and more importantly, Holly and I dominated in spades.

Now Molly, Holly, and I are back in Charlotte hanging out with JUDITH, the Park Road intern that stays (and parties/shops at Target) with us. We will be spending our weekend visiting parents (those belonging to Holly and myself) and resting up for two more weeks of non-stop ministry and communal living.

Tomorrow I'm going to begin a series of posts on the 12 Marks of New Monasticism, a collection of essays I've found helpful in understanding intentional Christian communities. This series of postings will take us through August 6, the day before I return home. Until tomorrow friends;
Pax et bonum.

Spreading the Good News (Or A Tale of Two Camps)

Today, I would like to reflect on the first of two weeks of the summer that I spent away from Charlotte. This first week was spent at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia for Unidiversity youth camp. The other week, which I am in the middle of right now, is spent at Camp Mundo Vista outside of Asheboro, North Cackalacky.

Unidiversity Youth Camp is a camp that is run by youth ministers from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which is code for lib-rul Baptists for all you non-Baptist folk. Despite overtones of unity and diversity, Unidiversity consists of almost all white, middle class kids from places like Greenville/Spartanburg, G-boro, Charlotte and the like. Then there are our kids: black, lower-income Tuckaseegeeans. The week went pretty well as far as our kids were concerned. They seemed to have a good time. I, however, was in mad-at-the-world mode most of the time, angry at the rich white kids in attendance, very similar to the ones I grew up around. There appear to be at least two reasons for my state of mind.

One, the week was too much fun. Yes, there was worship every night and a bible study and a seminar everyday, but most of the kids' time seemed to be spent either playing sports or socializing or engaging in fun activities (water games, karaoke, etc.). Fun is all fine and good, but its a discipleship camp for Christ's sake! My camp roommate and Hyaets housemate Greg described camp as hedonistic in the way typical of American teenagers, but I don't think this is quite right. The problem with all the fun being had was that it meant room wasn't being made for more serious pursuits; notably contemplation and action. If I sat through a week of preaching and teaching on topics as diverse as God qua God, forgiveness, the problem of evil, celebration, happiness, renewal, water, and sex, I am sure I would want a significant amount of time to reflect on these things and/or cultivate actions that would put thought and teaching into practice. This did not happen though. I hope that at the very least seeds were planted that might produce moments of contemplation and action at later points in campers' lives.

A second reason I was a funky Biscuit that week is provided by the attitudes and actions of campers with economic and social positions similar to mine. All week, the air was heavy with their mentalities of complacency and entitlement. In a nutshell what was running through my head were questions like this one: "How the HELL do you call yourself a Christian without wrestling with moral questions so difficult that you cannot bear to continue donning that Polo Ralph Lauren tunic on your back?" In retrospect, my anger was rational in one way and irrational in another way. Rational, one, for the same reason that I fear that I am morphing into a Kantian, and hence a miserable person (that is, holding myself and others to the impossibly high standard of the categorical imperative). And, two, irrational because I envy the simplicity of faith that allows people such as the White Campers of Unidiversity to avoid the tribulations associated with the moral questions of Christianity.

Two weeks later, I am no longer mad about my Unidiversity experience, but I remain a tad bit bothered. I keep reminding myself that one of the central paradoxes of Christian moral theology is the duality of the primary goods of human flourishing on the one hand and renunciation on the other hand. I have to mind the fact that neither myself, nor the White Campers, nor Hyaets, nor two millenia worth of Christian thinkers have found an adequate and certain solution. I also have to mind the fact that people who think they are right about their solution of choice often forget that they have to contend with the many who disagree with them. It is these two facts that create within me the desire to find a solution to the paradox.

That's all for now, tomorrow will bring a reflection on the week at Mundo Vista.

Fertalizzzzzzer

I am beginning a blog about my summer experience. I know that sounds pretty trite, like most college kids do that, blah, blah, blah, but before you close this window, realize that I am two weeks away from returning home, and the only reason I am going through the trobule of starting a blog this late in the game is because I am certain that I have sufficently important things to say. So, dial up www.mattontuck.blogspot.com everyday (except Sundays) until August 9 for what will hopefully be a not-too-horribly-bad daily reflection on what I have experienced this summer.

So what have I been up to this summer? I'm serving as a North -Carolina-Baptist-Campus-Ministries- funded-summer-missionary at Hyaets in Charlotte, NC. "What the hell?," you ask? I know! I often ask such questions of myself. To answer them would be beyond the scope of this short post. To be brief, Hyaets (Hebrew for "tree of life") is a faith-based 501(c)3 organization that takes the form of an intentional community aimed at caring for and about each other and our neighbors. Hyaets is located is located in Charlotte's Enderly Park neighborhood, which is defined by the city as a low-income, high-risk "challenged neighborhood". Hyaets has a decent website (hyaets.org) you can look at if you want to know more about its history, its people, how you can contribute financially, and so on and so forth, yada, yada, yada. My intention here is simply to pique your interest.

Anywho, I'm writing this blog about my Hyaets adventure and there are two more pearls of information that I need to cram down your throat so that you are not completely in the dark.

1) Tuckaseegee Road or Tuck is the main thoroughfare in our neighborhood. Hence the name of this blog (If you picked up on the reference to a literary work , congratulations! You are probably a learned white person!) Popular places on Tuck include the Quic N' Easy, the Milestone Club, and the Center. Sometimes our entire neighborhood is referred to as Tuckaseegee, since the well traveled #8 bus route that serves it is also known by that name.

2) My display name(s) are my three street names. This is kind of a joke, but it kind of isn't. Many people in the hood have street names, usually given to them by other hood dwellers. MattEasy was given to me by Gene, a neighbor that I got to know briefly. Jada, one of the kids that I hang out with, gave me the name Biscuit. I changed it to Biscot-T, (1) because biscotti is a more bourgois-sounding baked good than plain old biscuit, and (2) to affilliate myself with the rapper T-Pain (or is it T-Pane?).

So that's the story. Next post will be tomorrow by this time. I'd like to close with a serious note about sensitivity. Many of the subjects I write about will be serious, though I will try to be my usual self, casting these subjects in a sarcastic and perhaps humorous light. I realize that by maintaining this blog, I have little control over who reads what I have written. If you are offended by the content of this site, I apologize. Read at your own discretion.