Mark 8: Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children

We got married couples and their children, but we don't really have any "celibate singles" at Hyaets. Why? Because Hyaets is made up of Protestants. And Protestants love to get married and make 2-3 babies. Protestants even let ordained ministers marry and make 2-3 babies. In some cases, man and wife are even co-ordained-minister-PASTORS (with 2-3 PK's of course)! Yeah. We Rome Cats be trippin' all over that shit.

There are three monogamous married couples currently staying at Hyeats:

1) Mista Greg be married to Miss Helms - they stay on Parkway (as do I)
2) Mista Jason be marred to Miss Joanie - they stay on Tuck-a-SEE-gee
3) Faith and Jacob be married - they stay on Rush

There are four CHILDREN specimens attached to the aforementioned married couples:

1) Johnus Tysonus - two years of age, child of Greg/Helms, fav questions include "whats this?" and "what doing?"
2) Zebulonus - birthed by Greg/Helms on June 20th of the current year, spends most of his time napping, crying, eating
3) Joyus Kateus - 18 mo. (?) of age, child of Jason/Joanie, loves cell phones/keys, laughing and "playing" with Johnus Tysonus
4) Norus - birthed by Jason/Joanie on July 26th of the current year, also busy napping, crying, eating (so busy in fact, I've only seen her once!)

The way we support married couples and their children is by recognizing that marriage and children are goods in life that are choice worthy, and that celibacy may not be the only state of life that can bear the greatest spiritual fruits. More broadly, we recognize the dual goods of celibacy and marriage, and the scriptural authority behind this conviction. In her essay of Mark 8, Jana Bennet suggests that rather than focusing on the contentious history behind the celibacy/marriage question, we embrace both states of life and focus instead on supporting and keeping the respective vows of celibacy and marriage. I think this is a great idea, and since I know little about marriage and celibacy, I'm going to leave it at that.

4 days and 4 marks left in the community. Then it will be time for debriefing and the Essay in Two Parts.

Pax et bonum.

Mark 7

I know I keep teetering back and forth on the content of this blog, but the 12 Marks of New Monasticism, from which "12 Marks and a Matt" takes its form, are just all over the place. So on account of today's Mark this post will be more reflective and less theoretical.

Mark 7 is Nurturing Common Life Among Members of Intentional Community. In terms of Hyaets, that means that community members try to share Christian life with each other. To clarify what sharing Christian life means, at Hyaets it takes the outward form of eating dinner together on M/T/Th and praying together in one of our living rooms M/W/F mornings and Thursday evenings. Inwardly, "nurturing common life" takes the form of being intentional about attending to others in our community. By attending to others, I mean anything from spending time with others to be willing to lend others a helping hand. This ethos of life together stands in contrast to mainstream life, which sometimes takes the form of "life apart." Going home to North Raleigh land this weekend reminded me that life together represents a major departure from the norm. Not only do men and women not generally live intentionally in community, but families don't always eat together or make time for one another, much less pray together, as their time is often occupied by other pursuits. I don't think being busy or living life "apart" are regrettable or balmeworthy modes of being. Moreover, I really have not provided, read, or heard ANY convincing normative arguments for living in intentional Christian community in the 21st century. Rather, the point I'm trying to convey is that living together is at its core opposed to living apart.

Today I was reminded (in a roundabout way) that as Christians, we are called to orient at least a part of our time and energy towards life together and with God. The readings at Mass today focused on how worldly concerns can pose as distractions from devoting oneself to doing God's will. (I believe they were Eccl 1:2; 2:21-23, Col 3:1-11, and Luke 12:13-21). In his homily, Father mentioned that he had recently acquired a BlackBerry that he finds to be useful and good, although he did make the joke that he is now maybe too available. He did not decry worldly objects and concerns such as BlackBerries as evils separating us from devotion to God and each other. Instead, he took the more nuanced position that we ought to be sure that we possess objects rather than allowing objects to possess us. For when objects do possess us, they present a grave obstacle to life with God and with each other. Along this line, even when we do live busy lives "apart" from one another, we can be diligent to ensure that our the sources of us being busy and "apart" do not possess us to where we cannot remain faithful to God and each other. I think this caveat is an article of faith worth living by for those whom, like myself, think we live in a world and amongst people that are good and worthy.

I know I posted on the Sabbath, but hey, I'm a busy guy. What can I say?

Until next time,
Pax et bonum

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