Archive for the 'David Driedger' Category

A Questionable Call?

Published on March 4, 2010 by David Driedger. 0 Comments

This is our game. This game is for world hockey supremacy. We’ve heard the slo­gans. Col­lec­tively we’ve dis­played the pride, enjoyed the swag­ger in vic­tory and felt the blows in defeat. Per­haps in the quiet moments of a bath­room stall dur­ing inter­mis­sion or after this year’s world junior’s tour­na­ment we’ve even ques­tioned whether there is some­thing out of bal­ance, some over­com­pen­sa­tion hap­pen­ing but soon enough the puck drops, the beer is hoisted and we are again trans­ported into the dream of world dom­i­na­tion. I have not fol­lowed hockey for over ten years but the world juniors and the Olympics have drawn me deep into the cor­ners of the hockey world. I fol­lowed with dread the tri­als of team Canada as they teetered and then sta­bi­lized and then charged and then almost col­lapsed as they headed into over­time in the gold medal match. And we all know the out­come. But in my own world I con­tin­ued to travel deep into the oppo­si­tion zone of the hockey world. A place I was once at home in but it now felt strange and sud­denly I heard the whis­tle blow. Did I re-enter the hockey world off-side? The call comes from an unlikely Dan­ish offi­cial, but this inter­na­tional play after all. Embossed on the back of his black and white stripes is SK. But I am not off­side. It is a penalty called against team Canada. SK makes a strange hand ges­ture. I do not rec­og­nize the penalty call. He glides towards the penalty box and says Fort­vivlelse. I wait for the announcer to get a trans­la­tion and make the announce­ment. Then a voice comes over the speak­ers Team Canada has been called on … No, sorry cor­rec­tion Canada, the nation of Canada, has been called for Despair. They are asked to take a time-out to reflect on their rela­tion­ship with hockey.

Despair? A lit­tle harsh don’t you think? Tough call. Up in the media both they dig up some more infor­ma­tion on this offi­cial and they find that SK has a his­tory of hand­ing despair penal­ties. In fact they dig up one par­tic­u­larly con­tro­ver­sial account in which SK was asked to defend his call. The doc­u­ment cer­tainly dates the offi­cial which could raise even more eye­brows. The doc­u­ment was dated back to 1849. There was another nation who was given a time-out for despair. The media jumped on this doc­u­ment and fever­ishly cor­ralled ath­letes from the Dan­ish team to trans­late the doc­u­ment. In order to help Canada under­stand the call they replaced the name of the orig­i­nal coun­try with the word Canada. Through a for­tu­nate con­nec­tion I have obtained a por­tion of this document.

Canada says, ‘We will be Hockey or we will be noth­ing.’ What hap­pens if Canada does not become Hockey? Then they will be in despair. But they will not be in despair over the fact that they did not become Hockey rather they will be in despair because they could not rid them­selves of their iden­tity of not being Hockey. They hoped to become Hockey because they found them­selves, their iden­tity, intol­er­a­ble. And so, they are in despair. But per­haps they will stand atop the podium and Canada will be declared Hockey to the whole world. Surely then they will not be despair. They will have rid them­selves of them­selves and become who they thought they should be. But what then have they done? They’ve suc­ceeded. They’ve now rid them­selves of their iden­tity and become Hockey. And so they are lost, they are not them­selves. They are in despair. And so I stand by my call. And the penalty is hardly a harsh one, though it could be the most harsh. I sim­ply ask that Canada stand alone with­out hockey, at least for a time and see who they are. They are then free to play, to not play, to play well, to play poorly.

It seems that the IOC has found out that SK was never meant to offi­ci­ate this game. He found his way into the tour­na­ment under a pseu­do­nym. Some­thing he has tried on numer­ous other occa­sions. And so secu­rity has come onto the ice to remove him. He makes no objec­tions and gives no resis­tance. He seems con­tent. He has made his call. Canada is called on despair. They either lose them­selves or can­not stand them­selves. A ques­tion­able call from a ques­tion­able offi­cial? Well, either way the time-out is almost over and Canada is free to get back in the game if they so choose.

Boiled Down

Published on February 25, 2010 by David Driedger. 1 Comment Tags: , .

It is encour­ag­ing at cer­tain points to expe­ri­ence life, at least at that moment, as hav­ing been boiled down, clar­i­fied, dis­tilled. I am not sure there is much more to Chris­t­ian life, which is to say life, than prayer and wor­ship. Per­haps there is only wor­ship or only prayer or some third unknown descrip­tion. But for now I still find it help­ful to speak of the two.

Pray with­out ceasing

Let every­thing that has breathe praise the LORD

All things may be prayer and wor­ship. My breath­ing, my eat­ing, my com­ing and my going. My buy­ing and sell­ing, giv­ing and tak­ing. My sit­ting and lying. My speech and my act.

I went for a run today and I did not care (much) for the ben­e­fits I used to hope from this expres­sion (bet­ter fit­ness and self-image) I did not incor­po­rate tech­niques to make my run more effi­cient or effec­tive . I ran and breathed and looked and thought. I ran to the ceme­tery at the edge of town and sat on a bench. It was one of the first sunny almost warm days and on the bench the sun shown directly on my face and the tree behind me blocked the wind. And every­thing was just glo­ri­ous, utterly glo­ri­ous in that moment.

I real­ized then that had I not done this, had I not run in that way at that time I would have been guilty of blas­phemy a fully uncon­scious expres­sion of sin and heresy. This led me then to the much more hum­bling real­iza­tion that much of my life is blasphemy.

A Gold Medal for Protesting?

Published on February 17, 2010 by David Driedger. 0 Comments

To con­tinue with the Olympics …

I have come across var­i­ous anec­do­tal con­cerns and crit­i­cisms of the Olympic games. The crit­i­cisms have revolved around aspects of waste, excess and greed. It is my under­stand­ing that many of the venues in China and Greece are largely unused and dete­ri­o­rat­ing mak­ing them another image of our fast-food cul­ture. I was hop­ing to be quite attuned to these con­cerns as the 2010 Win­ter Olympics approached. I have found that as they began I became enthralled with them.  Never had short-track speed skat­ing and the biathlon seemed so exhil­er­at­ing (not to men­tion snow­board cross). I found it dif­fi­cult to turn away from this real-time drama. Then a nudg­ing of con­science came to me and I needed to ask myself if I could hon­estly sup­port these games. So I per­formed some (very brief) research into the crit­i­cisms of the games. See here for an overview. As I read the crit­i­cisms I had to admit that I largely agreed with them. Yes I agree that the Olympics rep­re­sent tremen­dous waste and excess with their envi­ron­men­tal tolls. Yes I imag­ine that there is an over influ­ence of cor­po­rate spon­sor­ship. Yes I agree that the eco­nomic ben­e­fit of host­ing the games is ques­tion­able at best. How­ever, what came to mind was that these are not crit­i­cisms of the Olympics but crit­i­cisms of our cul­ture as they are reflected in the Olympics. And if this indeed in the case then is it pos­si­ble that the Olympics is at least one of the bet­ter (not deny­ing the many faults still inher­ent in the games) expres­sions of our cul­ture? Should it not be the case that the inten­sity of our protest and resis­tance be ramped up dur­ing the rest of the year and allow our­selves to enjoy and appre­ci­ate what is good in the games?

Per­haps the games are actu­ally more decep­tive, more insid­i­ous with the use of hard­work­ing under­paid ath­letes.  Per­haps the games are actu­ally pure con­sumerism with the drama of the games sim­ply being medium to sell tourism, adver­tis­ing, con­ser­v­a­tive dis­ci­plined cit­i­zens, illu­sions (Believe … in what?) etc.

Please cor­rect me if I am wrong.

Do you know what I know?

Published on February 3, 2010 by David Driedger. Closed

For bet­ter or worse I find myself con­tin­u­ally inter­ested in know­ing, not so much knowl­edge, or per­haps more specif­i­cally I guess I am inter­ested in knowl­edge about know­ing (epis­te­mol­ogy to drop the 10 dol­lar term). Just how is it that we know some­thing to be true, or come to any sort of knowl­edge for that mat­ter. Lis­ten­ing to a church Christ­mas con­cert this year two lines sud­denly entered my mind as though encoun­ter­ing them for the first time,

Said the shep­herd boy to the mighty king,

Do you know what I know?

The words rushed through me leav­ing in their wake wave after wave of emo­tion. Or maybe they dropped on me like stone, like a liv­ing stone on my stag­nant sense of knowl­edge and drove the waves out­ward, out to the ends, to sur­face of my body that I trust to sense and know the world around me. When waves first peaked they were numb­ing leav­ing room for no other thoughts or think­ing and as the waves ebbed my returned feel­ings kept telling me, “But the king has access to knowl­edge.” What can be known the king is able to know. Now I may not be an explicit fan of the king but if there is some­thing to be known the king can extend the reach of his hand to grasp and acquire it. And what of the rhetor­i­cal flaunt that the shep­herd boy adds,

In your palace walls mighty king,

Do you know what I know?

No I try not to fly the ban­ner of the king but the truth is that I am on the side of the king. Per­haps I posi­tion myself as the king or pros­trate myself before kings. This is true because of how these lines offended me deeply, uncon­sciously. I have been build­ing palace walls in my days even in my sleep.  God for­give me.

There is more than one know­ing. There are thrones of knowl­edge. But there is also know­ing that is no knowledge.

And the shep­herd boy did not cre­ate his own know­ing. His know­ing was born of see­ing and hearing.

Do you see what I see?

Do you hear what I hear?

In this already estab­lished new year may we be granted eyes to see and ears to hear a knowl­edge drift­ing some­times rush­ing low to the ground steal­ing past palace walls fill­ing the hearts and minds of those with­out king or coun­try. For the Gospel is a refugee knowl­edge or maybe a refugee of knowl­edge tented under the stars and in touch with the wind.

After Virtue Part III — Seeing the End

Published on December 7, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed Tags: .

Part I

Part II

Sorry I have been a lit­tle slack on fol­low­ing through with my dis­cus­sion of Alas­dair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.  I men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous post that M. uses three main char­ac­ters to describe con­tem­po­rary dis­course on ethics, which he calls emo­tivist (based on sub­jec­tive feel­ing or will).

There is the Rich Aes­thete who is sup­plied with ample means but no par­tic­u­lar end to direct them and so lives with a sense of exper­i­men­ta­tion and explo­ration. There is the Bureau­cratic Man­ager who views all of life includ­ing human­ity as means to be ordered in the most effec­tive man­ner towards the pre­de­ter­mined ends of pro­duc­tion. Then there is the Ther­a­pist who can­not speak of larger human ends but only of human indi­vid­u­als as ends unto them­selves. These char­ac­ters reflect the mod­ern West’s detach­ment to the larger moral frame­work of under­stand­ing humanity’s telos or goal. Mac­In­tyre iden­ti­fies this con­cept of telos as cru­cial in recov­er­ing a coher­ent moral framework.

Mac­In­tyre offers a clearly neg­a­tive eval­u­a­tion of the Enlight­en­ment that pro­duced these char­ac­ters. The Enlight­en­ment is char­ac­ter­ized as an attempt to lib­er­ate soci­ety from the restric­tions of divine moral law imposed by the church. Hav­ing declared the church unfit to reg­u­late moral dis­course philoso­phers began the task of estab­lish­ing a ratio­nal basis for moral­ity. What fol­lowed is described by Mac­In­tyre as almost a com­edy of errors in the devel­op­ments from David Hume to Imman­ual Kant to Soren Kierkegaard. This pro­gres­sion is sum­ma­rized clearly in the following,

Just as Hume seeks to found moral­ity on the pas­sions because his argu­ments have excluded the pos­si­bil­ity of found­ing it on rea­son, so Kant founds it on rea­son because his argu­ments have excluded the pos­si­bil­ity of found­ing it on the pas­sions, and Kierkegaard on cri­te­ri­on­less fun­da­men­tal choice because of what he takes to be the com­pelling nature of the con­sid­er­a­tions which exclude both rea­son and pas­sions.… Thus the vin­di­ca­tion of each posi­tion was made to rest in cru­cial part upon the fail­ure of the other two, and the sum total of the effec­tive crit­i­cism of each posi­tion by the oth­ers turned out to be the fail­ure of all (pg. 49–50).

What is miss­ing from all these mod­els and what is nec­es­sary for moral­ity accord­ing to Mac­In­tyre is an under­stand­ing of human­ity as it could be, or humanity’s telos. With­out this any moral con­tent loses its rela­tion­ship to those who prac­tice it. The con­se­quences of this failed project is a soci­ety run pri­mar­ily by Bureau­cratic Man­agers who order things accord­ing to effec­tive­ness and pro­duc­tion and not the moral ends of humanity.

Mac­In­tyre argues that nearly all con­tem­po­rary expres­sions of ethics are best exem­pli­fied in the work of Niet­zsche. It was Niet­zsche who argued most clearly that what passes for moral objec­tiv­ity is in fact the expres­sion of sub­jec­tive will. This leads Mac­In­tyre to the piv­otal chap­ter Niet­zsche or Aris­to­tle?. It is these two fig­ures who are viewed as offer­ing the only true alter­na­tives in moral dis­course. Aris­to­tle was the frame­work of pre­mod­ern ethics and Niet­zsche is viewed as the cul­mi­na­tion of mod­ern ethics. Mac­In­tyre then poses his crit­i­cal ques­tion, “was it right in the first place to reject Aris­to­tle?” (pg. 117). It is in the fol­low­ing chap­ters that Mac­In­tyre then begins to artic­u­late a con­cept of virtues as it was expressed not only by Aris­to­tle but also in early heroic lit­er­a­ture, in Athens, in the medieval period, as well as cer­tain mod­ern expressions.

Read On

Published on November 27, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed Tags: .

I have begun read­ing Fer­nando Pessoa’s The Book of Dis­quiet. From the first pages of this journal-like ‘fact­less auto­bi­og­ra­phy’ some­thing was stirred in me. Sud­denly the sim­ple and hereti­cal phrase emerged from within me claim­ing, “This book will be my sal­va­tion.” I have never had that sen­sa­tion before in read­ing. I began to feel like the text itself, with or with­out my per­mis­sion, was begin­ning to search me. It was begin­ning to read me aloud back to me. The text was keep­ing in step with me. As I thought it too was think­ing. As I thought it was already think­ing ahead of me. At every pos­si­ble turn it opened paths that I did not know existed. And then it became clearer. I can­not antic­i­pate its goal, its des­ti­na­tion, and so I must humbly fol­low it. So I must decide if its is a sav­iour or a false mes­siah. I can­not know this ahead of time because I can­not assume to know where I will end up if I con­tinue to fol­low. As of now I am read­ing in faith. But then I ask myself what this means for the church, for my faith in God. Have I not already deter­mined the end of my faith, its goal and des­ti­na­tion? Is not the church just a well-rehearsed con­struct that offers no real sur­prise or alter­na­tive? Could this text actu­ally demand more faith than my church? For­give my heresy for the moment. And as though my tex­tual com­pan­ion was already antic­i­pat­ing all this I read the sim­ple and rev­e­la­tory phrase, “I read and am lib­er­ated.” I have already found myself in the text. The text can allow me to be more of myself than I am. I read on … for who I can still become? The author makes no claims as a mes­siah in fact I found out that this man­u­script was found in a trunk after his death. The text is mak­ing no claims to power or con­trol. And still I read on and so I read the cry, “Do my words ring in any­one else’s soul? Does any­one hear them besides me?” For­give my heresy but tonight … I will read on.

After Virtue Part II — Endless Debates

Published on October 21, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

Wan­der­ing the Eth­i­cal Wilder­ness with Alas­dair Mac­In­tytre
Part I

After sketch­ing a land­scape in which our moral frame­work has been greatly dis­fig­ured and frag­mented over time Mac­In­tyre pro­ceeds with the obser­va­tion that most moral or eth­i­cal debates have no real end.  War is wrong, war can estab­lish peace, war can be just.  Abor­tion is unjust, abor­tion can be a nec­es­sary evil, women deserve to have rights over their bod­ies.  These debates con­tinue on through the years over kitchen tables, news­pa­per edi­to­ri­als, aca­d­e­mic peri­od­i­cals and gov­ern­ment debates.  Eth­i­cal debates get reduced to issues which pro­duce oppos­ing par­ties (and there­fore bat­tles of will) which in turn accept no com­mon cri­te­ria for deci­sion mak­ing even though we may evoke larger par­a­digms such as jus­tice or duty or dig­nity.  M. asserts that we have all but lost con­nec­tion to the orig­i­nal for­ma­tion of these larger moral cat­e­gories and so there can be no deci­sion mak­ing when it comes to ethics because the only thing in play is “expres­sions of pref­er­ence, expres­sions of atti­tude or feel­ing,” which he labels as emo­tivism.  With emo­tivism there can be no appeal to some­thing shared and agreed upon unless it so hap­pens that a culture’s pref­er­ences hap­pen to align.  What emerged then as moral stan­dards came from those with the great­est influ­ence and abil­i­ties of persuasion.

How­ever we might agree or dis­agree with this the­o­ret­i­cal under­stand­ing of moral think­ing M. asserts that west­ern moral­ity has sim­ply embod­ied this approach as true.

This chap­ter resounded so clearly in my mind as I raced through the end­less debates and con­ver­sa­tions I have car­ried on with friends, fam­ily and strangers only to come out either exhausted or frus­trated or most likely both.  We have lost a com­mon tra­di­tion of moral think­ing and replaced it with com­pet­ing wills to power (M. sees Nietzsche’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion as essen­tially cor­rect).  So what do the moral char­ac­ters of M.‘s mod­ern emo­tivist moral­ity look like?  He turns to this in sub­se­quent chap­ters as he explores the Rich Aes­thete, the Bureau­cratic Man­ager and the Therapist.

Wandering the Ethical Wilderness with Alasdair MacIntyre

Published on October 10, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed Tags: .

I came across the name Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre as I am sure many oth­ers have in the work of Stan­ley Hauer­was.  And as you read more Hauer­was you encounter again and again Mac­In­tyre.  I am cur­rently tak­ing a course in pro­fes­sional ethics in coun­selling and was given the oppor­tu­nity to choose a text to read and review.  I imme­di­ately took the oppor­tu­nity to finally crack open MacIntyre’s After Virtue.  I am, so far, quite intrigued and hope to share a bit of my jour­ney into the text with you.

Mac­In­tyre begins his work by ask­ing the reader to imag­ine.  Imag­ine that there were a dis­as­ter in the field of nat­ural sci­ence.  “Wide­spread riots occur, lab­o­ra­to­ries are burnt down, physi­cists are lynched, books and instru­ments are destroyed.”  And finally a polit­i­cal power comes into place and bans sci­ence from being taught or prac­ticed.  In time though there is a move­ment to revive this ancient prac­tice and a new gen­er­a­tion learns piece­meal from the scraps that remain.  A new expres­sion of sci­ence emerges but it remains arbi­trary based on par­tial and ran­dom bits of knowl­edge that have sur­vived.  No one real­izes the inac­cu­racy of what they are doing because they have no mem­ory or recorded his­tory of sci­ence as it was in its total­ity.  Mac­In­tyre sug­gests that this imag­ined state of affairs for the nat­ural sci­ences is anal­o­gous to the cur­rent state ethics.  Their remains scraps and frag­ments of eth­i­cal lan­guage and rea­son­ing but they no longer fit into the coher­ent whole from which these con­cepts and prac­tices emerged.

This was an unex­pected but help­ful frame­work by Mac­In­tyre to intro­duce his explo­ration and retrieval of par­tic­u­lar moral tra­di­tions.  I think the image by and large holds.  We con­tinue to pre­serve a par­tic­u­lar vocab­u­lary around ethics.  We speak of jus­tice, hon­esty, com­mit­ment, integrity, inten­tion, respect, val­ues, etc. and yet these terms tend to be stretched and shifted with an elas­tic­ity that makes us won­der where and how they can gain pos­i­tive and eth­i­cal trac­tion in our age.  Mac­In­tyre seems to sug­gest that there is indeed a way for­ward in ethics that is, well, eth­i­cal.  Let’s see where it goes.

Get Real — Part I

Published on September 6, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed Tags: , , , , .
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Now I sus­pect these few sec­onds of video elicited at least a few adjec­tives, inter­rog­a­tives and maybe even some exple­tives.  I hope some of you asked the sim­ple ques­tion ‘Why?’.  I also imag­ine that many of you actu­ally, at least implic­itly, already know why.  Why is it that you can sub­mit some basic searches on YouTube and find scores of peo­ple doing things that strike us as almost unbear­ably stupid?

Heck for your view­ing plea­sure here is another pole walk­ing attempt.

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You may also notice that this phe­nom­e­non is prac­ti­cally the exclu­sive domain of young men.  Coin­ci­dence … I think not.  Com­ing across this video reminded me of two things.  The first is a short story I am work­ing on that reflects on my expe­ri­ence of rais­ing beef cat­tle in south­ern Man­i­toba.  What stood out to me as this piece pro­gressed was the role of cas­trat­ing and de-horning the young bulls strip­ping them, per­haps, of some pri­mal layer of wild and reck­less mas­culin­ity.  I will leave that thought to develop another time.

Sec­ond, this video reminded me of Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Under­ground (bear with me).  The Under­ground Man says, “So this is it – this is it at last – a head-on clash with real life!”  And so we have what comes to close to how I would char­ac­ter­ize Dostoevsky’s work.  In each work it seems that D is will­ing to walk out from pole to pole know­ing the cross­ing or crash­ing will, hope­fully, bring an encounter with ‘real life’.

Dos­to­evsky will take any step and make any turn nec­es­sary so that there will be a pos­si­bil­ity for the real.  The Under­ground Man both despises and feels despised by his anony­mous audi­ence.  He attempts to recount his life with bru­tal hon­esty which means being hon­estly decep­tive at times.  He throws any notion of con­sis­tency out into the street for it is being tossed on your head into the street that one might actu­ally learn some­thing about one’s self.  The Under­ground Man con­cludes spite­fully that he was sorry for ever start­ing this account of his life rec­og­niz­ing that is was a pur­suit in van­ity and has moved away from lit­er­a­ture.  For, “[a] novel must have a hero, and here I seemed to have delib­er­ately gath­ered together all the char­ac­ter­is­tics of an anti-hero, and, above all, all this is cer­tain to pro­duce a most unpleas­ant impres­sion because we have all lost touch with life, we are all crip­ples, every one of us – more or less.”  We all began on pole and fallen so we may as well try and walk them again.  He goes on to tell us that because of our dis­abil­ity with are left with a dis­gust for any encounter, any taste with ‘real life.’ In response to any rejec­tions his audi­ence might raise for this view the writer con­tin­ues by say­ing that, “for my part, I have merely car­ried to extremes in my life what you have not dared to carry even half-way, and, in addi­tion, you have mis­taken your cow­ardice for com­mon sense and have found com­fort in that, deceiv­ing your­selves.”  You have seen the poles, thought of ven­tur­ing out onto them but said to your­self it would not be pru­dent and thought your­self the wiser.  And even after this the Under­ground Man is not finished.

My open­ing quo­ta­tion from this short story came about half-way through the nar­ra­tive and imme­di­ately guided me the rest of the way.  It has crys­tal­lized for me what is clear to all of us.  As humans we act out and artic­u­late the desire for some­thing ‘real’.  Though I don’t think we do this for all of our life.  Real­ness in child­hood is know­ing that the world is more than it is.  Real­ness is cre­ative and unsta­ble.  Real­ness becomes in young adult­hood more con­crete as we begin to pur­sue tan­gi­ble goals in love and voca­tion.  Because the real was always more and big­ger than our­selves it was never cap­tured or tamed and so in time most of us began to sim­ply give up on the real and sought the com­fort­able and sta­ble.  And so from below the ordered streets and time-conscious pedes­tri­ans the Under­ground Man emerges not with a chal­lenge but with an asser­tion and a con­dem­na­tion.  I have fol­lowed through and looked around the cor­ners of the dark cor­ri­dors of the real.  I have said yes to all of life.  The pitch of the Under­ground Man rises in its crescendo.  In deceiv­ing your­selves “as a mat­ter fact, I seem to be much more alive than you.  Come, look into it more closely!  Why, we do not even know where we are to find real life, or what it is, or what it is called.… We even find it hard to be men, men of real flesh and blood, our own flesh and blood.  We are ashamed of it.  We think it a dis­grace.”  The Under­ground Man includes him­self in this con­dem­na­tion.  I think gen­der in this lan­guage should remain spe­cific.  I hope to develop this more in Part II.

The Passion of David Bazan

Published on July 31, 2009 by David Driedger. 1 Comment Tags: .

I came across this great arti­cle on the life and faith(?) of David Bazan.  Here is a post I wrote for my old blog on my own expe­ri­ence with this great per­former in rela­tion to my own min­istry expe­ri­ence.  The post was orig­i­nally titled ‘Min­is­ters of Death’

I sus­pect you can guess who I am (with my star struck eyes) and who Bazan is (appar­ently chew­ing tobacco or something).

I have been lis­ten­ing to Bazan’s music for some ten years now. His music has always rep­re­sented a brave and engaged crit­i­cism of Chris­t­ian reli­gion. What sets his approach apart from more reac­tionary crit­i­cism is how hon­est he remains in his own sense of hope­ful­ness to the spirit of faith. After the show I talked with him and asked if he kept any per­sonal ties to the church. He said that his wife and daugh­ter attend church but that he had ‘made his exit’ (adding a com­ment of it being a hope­ful exit; I think is how he put it). Hav­ing grown up as a pastor’s kid he has tried to dis­tance him­self from the insti­tu­tion with an attempt to sus­pend his received assump­tions. What remains is still a sense of God’s exis­tence, which in his words has cre­ated a strong dis­so­nance to where he thought he was going (athe­ism). He admits that this could sim­ply be the result of such an entrenched world view that he received grow­ing up. I would have liked to talk longer.
David Bazan remains for me a of min­is­ter of death. A min­is­ter in the truest sense (though prophet may be a more appro­pri­ate term) in that his engage­ment with the social impli­ca­tions of faith and reli­gion remain sig­nif­i­cant in his work. The role of death func­tions promi­nently in much of his lyrics whether it is phys­i­cal death, the death of a rela­tion­ship or the death cer­tain beliefs. To those in the church who will lis­ten this min­istry of death injects needed per­spec­tive and the pos­si­bil­ity of change and move­ment.  I believe it was Flan­nery O’Connor (or some­one speak­ing about her work) who said that the rea­son an artist focuses on death is because death is ‘gett­gin some­where’.  In tran­si­tion to the sec­ond sig­nif­i­cant event of the week (when this post was writ­ten) here are his lyrics to “Priest and Para­medics” (see below for video).

Para­medics brave and strong
Up before the break of dawn
Putting poker faces on
Bro­ken bod­ies all day long
The neigh­bors heard a fight
Some­one had a knife
It must have have been the wife
Husband’s lost a lot of blood
He wakes up scream­ing, “Oh my God
Am I going to die?
Am I going to die?“
As they strapped his arms down to his sides
At times like these they’d been taught to lie
“Buddy, just calm down, you’ll be all right”

Sev­eral friends came to his grave
His chil­dren were so well-behaved
As the priest got up to speak
The assem­bly craved relief
But he him­self had given up
So instead he offered them this bit­ter cup
“You’re going to die
We’re all going to die
Could be twenty years, could be tonight
Lately I have been won­der­ing why
We go to so much trou­ble
To post­pone the unavoid­able
And pro­long the pain of being alive”

I per­formed my sec­ond funeral yes­ter­day and the first on my own. I had never met the man who passed away. He was 48 and died of a heart attack in his sleep with no warn­ing (a hus­band and father of two). As a min­is­ter of death who works firmly within the insti­tu­tional church my work stands in some con­trast to David Bazan’s. I hope to make death a lit­tle more palat­able so that its hem­or­rhag­ing force move through the sys­tem with less resis­tance. In rela­tion to death I often recall the words at the close of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness. Mar­low is try­ing to recount the words of judg­ment at Kurtz’s death to Kurtz’s wife. He fails in trans­mit­ting this mes­sage of death, instead he says that Kurtz uttered her name at his death. Mar­low says this in response to his action,

It seemed to me that the house would col­lapse before I could escape, that the heav­ens would fall on my head. But noth­ing hap­pened. The heav­ens do not fall for such a tri­fle. Would they have fallen I won­der, if I had ren­dered Kurtz that jus­tice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he only wanted jus­tice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark — too dark altogether …

David Bazan appears lib­er­ated to speak some of those dark words, but what is his com­mu­nity that needs to hear the dark words of faith if he remains largely unheard out­side the church walls? My speech is mod­i­fied within these walls and not all for bad. Some things are too crush­ing and need medi­at­ing, but the right medi­a­tor is cru­cial. I wres­tle between the min­istries of death. I hope to con­tinue in both, in some way.

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