Quincy Street Missional Church

So, I have some friends at Quincy Street, and this week the Boston Globe is doing a huge four-part story about the church, its history and mission.

Be sure to check back each day.

http://www.boston.com/news/specials/masiss/

In Memoriam

So, in 2005 I left the Big Evil Law Firm and started working at Do Gooder Legal Aid. In September I left Do Gooder Legal Aid and now work for the government, doing similar sorts of stuff.

I found out yesterday that the executive director of Do Gooder Legal Aid died this week. My first reaction was "But I just saw her three months ago. She was fine!"

She wasn't fine. She hasn't been fine for decades. She had cancer for 22 years, it started metastasizing (sp?) a decade ago and the latest recurrence started a year and a half ago. This is not fine.

But she was such a trooper, just kept working (more than) full-time throughout everything. Piecing things together from the obit, it sounds like she was working full blast until about three weeks ago and her last time in the office was about a week ago -- finalizing the hiring for my replacement, it sounds like.

Man. I didn't even think of her as sick, not really. You'd think the chemo headscarf would have been a clue, but it just became part of the fabric of the universe. She wrapped a scarf around her head and went to chemo once a week and otherwise just kept chugging along as if nothing was wrong. That was just supposed to continue forever. Well, no. It doesn't work that way.

Grant her eternal rest, O Lord, and let the perpetual light shine upon her.

Leviticus meditations: Mythology

So, I hang out with some families on a regular basis and have discovered that with certain kids, asking "Do you want to read a story?" ALWAYS works as a child-wrangling technique. We have gotten to the point where small children will sometimes climb into my lap and wordlessly hand me a book. This is excellent.

One of these small children has recently become interested in Greek mythology and is currently quite enraptured with an "introduction to the Olympians" book. Now, I love Greco-Roman mythology. I got drawn into this when I was a older then he is, but thought this was the most fascinating thing ever and it ended up leading me into taking Latin in high school, occasionally flirting with the thought of a classics major (ended up minoring) and other hopelessly nerdy things. So I particularly enjoyed helping introduce him to these stories, and am not especially concerned that this will lead him to abandon the faith of his family and church and instead worship Zeus and Athena.

It occurred to me that come January I won't be able to read this particular book to the children. It further occurred to me that this truly stinks.

So I was gearing up to write a post about how much this stinks, how there's really no harm in reading these stories at all. And even assuming that we were living in a society that actively worshipped the Olympians, a faith that's shielded from all challenge isn't much of a faith and how am I supposed to interact with the nice pagans enough to tell them about Jesus if I'm so walled off from their way of seeing the world. If I was in a particularly nerdy mood, which let's face it I usually am, I might even cite C.S. Lewis talking about how the similar themes throughout various cultures' mythologies (e.g. a dying and rising god is a very common theme) point to the One True Myth of Jesus.

I was going to say "Well, I can't cite chapter and verse, but I'm sure it's in there ..." and then continue on with my rant. But then I decided that it would be a much better post if I cited the specific law that was getting my goat. So I started paging through. And skimmed and skimmed, and flipped through some more pages. There's something about not worshipping idols, OK of course that's a bad plan. Not planning on doing that. There's something on not creating idols, ok, that's not what we're talking about either. Skim skim skim some more, haven't found it yet ... and now here we are at the end.

Huh. So apparently as long as we're very clear that we're not worshipping Athena, enjoying Bulfinch's Mythology is just fine.

This is good news. I wonder what other "well of course that's forbidden" assumptions I have will also be groundless.

A new low

So I've been reading "The Know-It-All" which is about the author's determining to fill in the gaps in his education by reading the entirety of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Finished it up last night. It's part memoir, part collection of amusing factoids, part meditation on the entwined nature of knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom.

The other night, I realized that I was sitting around and reading a book about someone who was sitting around and reading the encyclopedia.

Even for me, this is an odd pastime. I am a meta-loser.

Leviticus meditation: Gleaning

Hi folks. I'll be thinking and talking a lot about the Book of Leviticus for the next month or so. So if you're struggling with insomnia, check out my blog and that should do the trick! Here's the first installment.

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God. Lev. 19:9-10

I don't know about you, but I don't have a field. My "harvest," such as it is, comes in the form of a directly deposited paycheck and a portion of that is set aside for the church and other charities. So does that cover the instructions about gleaning? I don't think so. It seems to me that gleaning is about sacrificing some of your own economic efficiency to help people support themselves. Part of the tithe is also set aside for widows and orphans -- that's about directly supporting people who cannot support themselves. They're both important, but they're not the same.

The tithe translates relatively easily to a market-based economy. Giving is giving. But what are we to do with these gleaning commands? Isn't the market all about enabling people to support themselves?

Well, IMHO, a market-based system is better than the alternatives but we still need to be deliberate about making the system work for people rather than seeing people as cogs in the great machine that is the system. The market is all about efficiency. In commanding his people to allow for gleaning, God tells us that we need to sacrifice some efficiency to enable people to provide for themselves.Which leads me (at long last!) to a point. Buying fair trade products seems to me to be a modern day equivalent of gleaning. These markets are designed to enable artisans in the developing world to support themselves and their families. Consumers do pay a premium to buy fairly traded coffees rather than the standard cans of Folgers or Maxwell House, but maybe that's the economic efficiency we're supposed to sacrifice.

Many grocery stores stock fairly traded coffees and some other fairly traded products as well. A friend of mine works for www.tradeasone.com. Ten Thousand Villages, run by the Mennonite Central Committee, has stores in Coolidge Corner and Central Square. Maybe shopping at these places rather than Target, and accepting that the prices will be somewhat higher, is the modern day equivalent of leaving the gleanings for the poor and alien.

Faith supporting justice?

I am a Christian, and I care very much about social justice. I like to think that my faith inspires and fortifies my justice work. I like to think that faith makes justice work richer and more powerful than it would be without an understanding that God is permeating everything.

But I look at the world and don't see that faith makes a difference. I know people who are passionately committed to justice -- but either don't believe in God at all, or maybe believe that in some vague and undefined way God is behind it all, but God is never at the forefront of their attention.

I would like to be able to invite them into faith. I would like to say that faith commitment does not detract from their justice commitment but instead makes it all the more real and powerful. But I don't see how that's true. I don't see that they're missing anything. If anything, they seem to be able to be much more sane and balanced than I am. They can work hard, do what they can, and let the rest be. If I'm doing all things as if I'm working for God, how can I ever say that I've done enough and now it's time to go play? But of course that way of life is unsustainable.

All this seems decidedly backwards.

A distressing thought

So, I just finished reading A.J. Jacobs's "A Year of Living Biblically." This was a great book! I found it to be funny, poignant, wise. Jacobs is a great writer, and he found such depth and wisdom in these dusty old OT regulations. I want to try this too! Although maybe not to the extreme that he did.

So, the other day I was looking for a new book to pass my time on the train. I've been feeling a need recently to "break out of the Christian Bubble" a bit, so I didn't want to get something Christian-themed. I picked up Jacobs's previous book, about reading his way through the Encyclopedia Britannica. It's definitely a different book, but there are moments that are funny, poignant, wise. He's finding value in these dusty old books that I never would have imagined. I want to read through the Encyclopedia Brittanica too!

Uh oh.

What if the value I found in "The Year of Living Biblically" was less a function of the wisdom in Scripture and more that I really like A.J. Jacobs and his perspective on life?