The Next Generation of Barristas

We interrupt the regularly scheduled blog-program for an important announcement: The Pilgrim will be graduating this year after all. The implication of this startling realization are two-fold -- a daunting work-load for the coming 10 weeks . . . and the need to find a job/place/etc. for the post-September future: Starbucks, here I come!

Economies of Academic Salvation

[The Pilgrim's proposal for presenting a paper at a national conference has been officially rejected.]

The premise of Kazuo Ishiguro's recent novel, Never Let Me Go, is a semi-science-fictional British society in which, once organ transplant technology became available, the government began to breed and raise clones for the express purpose of harvesting their organs once they had come of age. The main characters are amongst these clones -- children being raised in a kind of boarding school, educated and presented with opportunities for creative expression. They are, in a sense, aware of their eventual fate but, as the narrator surmises, are being told always just a little more than they can actually grasp: By the time they have matured enough to understand, they have already come to accept the information as normal.

At one point in the story, however, the children encounter a teacher who is not at all happy to allow them to remain in a kind of fog of denial: She harshly explains that there will be none of the fantasized-about trips to other countries, no careers as movie stars or even as office assistants -- the kids' futures have been established for them since before they were born.

This may sound like an overly deterministic vision, and to an extent it is; yet Ph.D. students to a large extent face a similar dilemma: Everybody knows about the "glut in the market" -- if they didn't know it in 1969 when the famed dissertation on the subject was published, they have no excuse for not knowing it now. More than knowing about it, they have anecdotal evidence: Just a couple of weeks ago, I happened to run into a former T.A. of mine; during my undergraduate days at ye-olde-ivy-covered-tier-one-university, this woman -- incidentally, should anyone care to know, a member of an ethnic minority -- was completing her Ph.D. at self-same institution with flying colors. Today, she teaches at an out of the way state university as a junior professor and describes the job-search as "hell" compared to the "heaven" of graduate school (... a frightening contrast, given the general level of personal, mental, emotional, physical and spiritual exhaustion prevalent amongst graduate students I know -- or even in the case of the occasional M.A. student, e.g. me.)

So: We know. We are told by those who have gone before us (... another acquaintance of mine, a recent graduate from a prestigious European university who has chosen to work outside of academia, informed me that I should not pursue a Ph.D. if I was not prepared to call it good, even if afterwards I had to work at the local Starbucks. The image of the self-importantly whiny Adrian Mole, envisioning himself as a street-sweeper reciting Old English poetry comes to mind.) We observe it ourselves in our colleagues: When two individuals independently of one another over the course of 48 hours identify themselves as wanting to work on their Ph.Ds with a certain well-known theologian at a certain prestigious university, it doesn't take a statistician to calculate the odds of either of them -- or for that matter oneself -- ever actually getting to do so.

But while we thus know in part and prophecy in part, the lemming-like caravan of tens of thousands of M.A. students every year towards Ph.D. and that elusive tenure-track position continues. The brightest, the most politically astute, the most well-connected might make the cut, but as the top of the educational pyramid bulges into a trapezoid shape, the academic employment remains an area where it is indeed lonely at the top. For those genuinely enamored with the process of learning and writing, a reader's card at the local university library and a job with sufficiently lenient hours to allow for the pursuit of one's passion in one's free time might be the better solution: My father who finished his high school degree by taking night classes as an adult and never went beyond that degree remains one of the most widely read and intellectually vibrant people I know.

This particular aspiring Ph.D. student is reasonably bright, moderately gifted, somewhat well-read, you know, considering, and on the whole pretty passionate about the life of the mind. But even within my own small, second (... let us be generous ...) tier institution, I can identify several people better suited to a life of scholarship and poverty -- some with their letters of admission to prestigious programs already in hand, others with the solid familial or spousal support that enables them to embark on the academic adventure without the need for more-than-part-time employment, still others with a firm sense of divine providence steering them into just such a direction. And while this raises the question of just how employable a thoroughly non-pastoral semi-professional theologian might be, in the end the real question may be whether aforementioned non-pastoral semi-professional historical theologian aspires to being employable with or without an additional $50,000+ of debt.

Gilead

[The Pilgrim is frequently uncomfortable when put in the position to assess papers or exams that are really sermons, packaged in 12pt font, double-spaced, 1-inch margined or, as the case may be, blue-booked format. Recently, a younger colleague asked the Pilgrim a puzzling: "What if I disagree with a secondary source -- and don't know why ... I just do ... you know?" Does a subject matter within the realm of theology or biblical studies justify a stance that the student -- a very bright, highly educated one -- would most certainly impugn in the field of history, science, even literature? Or do we just assume that the renewal of our mind requires its transformation into Tapioca?]

"Salve, salvation. Jesus asked himself, Have I confused the two/ Is my name from Hoshea a amockery? DCasting the words into other languages comforted him: Unguento, salvacion. Pommade, salvation. We are so easily misled by labels. Whatever they are called, I am sure that a soft balm and God's blessing are nothing alike."
- A. J. Langguth, Jesus Christs (... a surprisingly devotional little collection of minor heresies)

On the whole, the beginning of a new quarter would be more exciting if the previous one didn't have the hydra-like tendency to sprout two new requirements in need of attention for every one that's successfully dispatched.

La Vie Boheme

[The Pilgrim is firmly convinced that should God have needed to send an 11th plague to the Egyptians, He would have chosen the photocopier and printer the Pilgrim uses for the more stimulating of her daily tasks for His purposes.]

The Royal Society Journal reports that the Brain and Behavior team at the University of Newcastle has recently encountered a break-through in whatever science it is that studies the mating behavior of human beings:

Study in Royal Society journal on link between creativity and mating success

Biologists have puzzled over how the genetic variants that predispose people to schizophrenia persist in the human gene pool, given that the effects of the disorder are so serious. A possible solution is the idea that these same variants can also enhance artistic creativity. Artistic creativity in turn has been hypothesized to increase sexual attractiveness. We investigated these ideas in 425 poets, artists and members of the public. We found that poets and artists share some (but not all) personality characteristics with schizophrenia patients, and, moreover, that they have more sexual partners than average. Thus, some of the personality traits predisposing to schizophrenia can actually be evolutionarily advantageous by increasing mating success.

Now, call me crazy, but this data seems to be something of a slap in the face of singles out there. Most individuals of the un-coupled persuasion have, after all, tacitly accepted that their single state is due to any number of factors including but not limited to their physical appearance, intellectual prowess (or lack thereof), earning potential (ditto), state of mental and emotional health and familial pedigree. Now they are told that not only are they single, their singleness is due to their lack of creativity!

I am, of course, personally far from bitter about this, having discovered at a young age that creativity is its own reward. Thus, for example, the high school-aged pilgrim happily played a couple of musical instruments, drew and painted to her heart's content and wrote the kind of poetry that still gives my life meaning and purpose -- specifically, to stay alive long enough to make sure that not a single piece of it has survived -- all the while bordering on the positively asexual in her singleness. Similarly, I am not troubled by the fact that the findings of the Royal Society notwithstanding, Keanu Reeves appears to have little trouble finding dates. All I'm saying, really, is that should the Royal Society find its doors being run down by a map of disgruntled singles brandishing creatively decorated pitchforks, they will have only themselves to blame.

And now for something completely different ...

[The Pilgrim will be seeing this gentleman on Thursday evening and this one on Friday evening.]

• Because everybody thinks they know the answer: The Pew Forum's transcript on Believing Without Belonging: Just how Secular IS Europe?
• Job in the Muslim tradition -- The Story of Prophet Ayoub
• A Database for Buddhist-Christian Studies, brought to you by the friendly folks from Boston University -- BCSD.
  
• Dabru Emet (Speak the Truth) -- A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity.
  
• ... and because Civil Religion is on the Pilgrim's tiny mind a lot these days, an NPR interview on American Theocracy (... don't send hate-mail. I haven't even read the book yet, much less formed an opinion.)
  

The Cross, the Qu'ran and Theodicy

A professor of mine who happens to be quite engaged in the area of interfaith dialogue mentioned that his church had recently begun to invite Jewish and Muslim adherents to participate in a kind of three-way conversation with members of their church on Sunday evenings. Some of the lessons he's been learning about his own congregation have been somewhere between unexpected and unwelcome -- who knew that the Holy Trinity would be the great unifying force between Jews, Muslims and Christians, simply by virtue of neither group really understanding or caring about it? Others, however, are more thought-provoking:

One of the Muslim participants mentioned that in the Qu'ran, Jesus does not suffer crucifixion. Instead, in a kind of docetist variant, his spirit is taken up to heaven prior to the beginning of the tortures. The Qu'ran puts it this way, in two separate but related passages*:

[3:54] [The disciples] plotted and schemed (alt. "planned"), but so did GOD, and GOD is the best schemer.
[3:55] Thus, GOD said, "O Isa (Jesus), I am terminating your life, raising you to Me, and ridding you of the disbelievers. I will exalt those who follow you above those who disbelieve, till the Day of Resurrection. Then to Me is the ultimate destiny of all of you, then I will judge among you regarding your disputes.
[3:56] "As for those who disbelieve, I will commit them to painful retribution in this world, and in the Hereafter. They will have no helpers."
[3:57] As for those who believe and lead a righteous life, He will fully recompense them. GOD does not love the unjust.

And ...

[4:157] And for claiming that they killed the Messiah, Isa, son of Marium (Mary), the messenger of GOD. In fact, they never killed him, they never crucified him - they were made to think that they did. All factions who are disputing in this matter are full of doubt concerning this issue. They possess no knowledge; they only conjecture. For certain, they never killed him.
[4:158] Instead, GOD raised him to Him; GOD is Almighty, Most Wise.
[4:159] Everyone among the people of the scripture was required to believe in him before his death. On the Day of Resurrection, he will be a witness against them.

This reading according to which the righteous -- Jesus -- is spared painful and ignominous death made good sense to both Muslim and Jewish participants in the dialogue, and would, I am certain, make good sense to anyone not steeped in the theological remnants of Christianity: After all, if one posits -- as Muslims and Christians do, albeit in somewhat different ways -- the special relationship between Jesus and God, and the profoundly God-pleasing life of Jesus, his being spirited away appeals to our sense of divine justice to a far greater degree than his abandonment.

What kind of God deserts his prophet, what kind of Father leaves His Son hanging? After all: Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven ... what? In the profession of Jesus' death on the cross, the Christian community faces the issue of theodicy head-on. If one assumes either the lack of Jesus' relationship with God, or, conversely, the mere appearance of his suffering (... while, as the Apocalypse of Peter puts it, the real, living Jesus is "glad and laughing on the tree"...), one avoids the problem of theodicy -- in this instance.

The problem, however, stubbornly refuses to go away: On a daily basis in these news-weary times, the reader, listener, watcher, minister encounters stories in which the victim's spirit is not speared agony: The ten-year-old skateboarder, pinned under the car of a hapless teenage driver, hovering between life and death for days until the lack of brain activity is confirmed and the family forced to remove their beloved son from life support. The barely-middle-aged mother killed in a freak accident on a rainy night. The child, barely past the age of receiving holy communion for the first time, dying a slow death for want of an organ-transplant small enough to fit his little chest. There is no deus ex machina for them; the very notion of their pain being merely a fortuituous illusion to torment their loved ones shocks the conscience. And in the midst -- the question of God's justice.

Perhaps the most quoted scene in Elie Wiesel's novel Night is the one in which the protagonist witnesses the hanging of a young boy:

"For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice within me answer him "Where is He? Here He is -- He is hanging here on this gallows . . . . " (p. 71f)

The God on the gallow is far removed from the glad and laughing Jesus of the gnostics, and only the most distant relation to the Isa of Islam, who, to be sure, does not claim partnership in the Godhead for himself. Is the scandal of a God who wills the death of his son any greater a scandal of divine justice than a God who silently quits the scene of the very suffering that will mark humanity's past and future?

In his book Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian, David Novak spells out the groundrules of inter-faith dialogue: Amongst the five behaviors to avoid, he notes both triumphalism and syncretism (... otherwise known as "aren't we all the same, really?").

In my limited experience, it is Protestants of one stripe or another who are more prone to either of those behaviors than are their Catholic and Jewish colleagues. This is due perhaps in part to Protestantism's relative youth; especially when it comes to the development of evangelical Christianity, I sometimes envision it rather akin to a scene from a B-grade science-fiction movie -- the kind where a beam, preferably a bright green one, is aimed at an amorphous blog of inert matter which under its glowing impact begins to contort, grow, sprout appendages and evolve in a matter of seconds from amoeba to sapient creature. (My evangelical colleagues, to whom I remain very committed, will forgive me this less than savory analogy.) In other words, the boundaries of what makes an evangelical Christian are still quite fuzzy and rather poorly agreed upon (... when recently, for a paper, I tried to come up with a consensus definition, I came up with quite a few proposed definitions and no consensus.)

Under the circumstances, the desire for certainty and a basic concern for the integrity of one's faith is quite understandable, albeit misguided if expressed by way of triumphalism. On the other hand, for people of goodwill with an eye towards a history of religious oppression, the desire to push the boundaries to embraceembraceembrace as many faiths as possible is one with which I empathize even as I find myself forced to disagree with it. As Novak points out, both eliminate the viability of dialogue -- if either side is unwilling to receive from the other, or, for that matter, unable to share from its own, distinctive tradition, no conversation can take place.

The fact -- and, in the realm of religious dialogue, this is as close to fact as we shall come, I think -- of Jesus' death on the cross remains a scandal for those who maintain his righeousness, not to mention his divinity. This is, I suspect, a detail Christians, myself included, prefer to skip past, rushing ahead to the vindication of the resurrection. Dialogue with Muslim and Jewish believers can, in my view, allow us to dwell a bit longer in the scandal and the god-forsaken-ness of the cross. If Christians cannot find God there, I fear we will not find Him anywhere else either.

* ... which the Pilgrim, in her limited wisdom and total lack of Arabic, pulled from an online English translation.

Rush Hour

An author describing the explosion of new religious movements in Japan in the wake of World War II called it "the rush hour of the gods." The phrase can serve to describe the present religious situation, not only in Japan but in the countries that used to be thought of as belonging to "Christian civilization."
- Peter L. Berger, Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity

(... the felicitous phrase may not have originated with him but is used as the title of a book by H. Neil McFarland. M. Berger, incidentally, runs this little venture. According to Wikipedia, however, he's from my neck of the woods -- a neck that's getting progressively larger, I realize. )

The Return of the Native (or: Top Ten Lessons to be Learned when Presenting before "Scholarly Societies")

[The Pilgrim is pooped. There'll probably a more serious discussion of the vagaries of the past week, but it probably won't be until the Pilgrim's sleep deficit has been pummelled into the merely-double-digits range again.]

10. Never order a calzone in Detroit; there, apparently, the name refers to a cross between a greasy pita and a sub-sandwich.

9. 1.5 star hotels are the accomodations of the adventuresome, those with a deathwish (... was that a drug-deal at the reception front desk?! ...) and the stupid. Having survived Asian roach motels should not suggest to anyone that they are prepared to spend time in American ones.

8. Scholarly conferences allow for only a limited modicum of cross-pollination between theologians and historians; by virtue of the structure of competing sessions, research with even a hint of the interdisciplinary, unfortunately, gets pigeonholed.

7. Monks go Dutch. Even if they also happen to be well-published authors.

6. "Without Zion reborn, Jews would be left at Auschwitz." - Michael S. Kogan

5. One's choice of undergarments impacts the appearance of one's outergarments: When looking in the mirror prior to attending a scholarly conference, the immediate association with Monica Lewinsky isn't the desired effect.

4. Tone of voice and facial expressions can add a layer of uncomfortable partisanship to the most scholarly of papers: Sitting through a (thoughtful, well-researched) paper on the history of passion plays in the Pilgrim's general childhood vicinity provided a host of insights on academic ingroup/outgroup dynamics from the perspective of the latter.

3. In an international airport/laptop conspiracy, most U.S. airports currently provide wireless hubs but lack electrical outlets. This simple omission goes a long way's towards explaining the peculiar sight of business-suited professionals crouching, squatting and splaying across the carpeting in remote corners of BWI, DMA, etc.

2. There are two kinds of people in the world -- the first will call or e-mail you virtually the minute your presentation ends to make sure you're ok; the other will ask "... wait, why are you going to [conference location about which the presenter has complained in tedious detail for weeks on end]?" Both have their distinct merits.

1. Kazuo Ishiguro's novels were never meant to be read in one sitting. After going through Never Let Me Go -- a very fine novel, albeit a little more spotty than, say, When We Were Orphans or Remains of the Day, classic Ishiguro in that it keeps the reader choking back sobs for large parts of it -- cover to cover on the plane from Detroit, it took forever to shake the aura of melancholy and the vague sense of futility.

The American President

... and now a snippet of what I'm really working on:

“The President,” Martin Marty noted in his discussion of different forms of civil religion, “is normally expected to play a priestly role(1). ” While thus the American President is, in strictly realistic terms, a man elected by and accountable to the people, such a prosaic explanation hardly does justice to the passionate love and intense chagrin that the long line of men who have held this office have inspired: Rather, the American president is not only, and perhaps not even primarily, expected to be a skilled diplomat, a savvy consensus-builder or a knowledgeable representative; by the same token, the greatest offense the president can commit against his people does not involve weighty matters of foreign policy or questions of professional incompetence, but concerns matters of basic morality.

Such expectations contrast starkly with those European nations, even amongst countries whose populace do not differ substantially in their religious demographics from America: For instance, in 1998 Bill Clinton outraged an American public with his admission that he had had an “inappropriate relationship” with a staff member. That same year, Austrian president Thomas Klestil barely raised eyebrows amongst his constituents when he married a staffer who had long been rumored to have been the cause of Klestil’s divorce at an earlier point in his presidency. The contrast is made intelligible by the American conception of the President as a kind of national high priest whose “role includes interpreting to the nation its transcendent purpose and encouraging the citizenry in the fulfillment of that purpose(2). ”
--------------------------
(1) Martin Marty, Religion and Republic, 84.
(2) Stanley Grenz, "Secular Saints," 241.

Go in Wartimes

[The Pilgrim, oddly, produces on the whole better scholarly writing when taking occasional breaks to read fiction. The passage below, however, was striking perhaps primarily due to the nature of the Pilgrim's own, semi-scholarly project.]

"Left behind, I wrote in my Nichinichi reports of how popular Go had always been in time of war, of how frequently one heard stories of games in battle encampments, of how closely the Way of the Warrior resembled a way of art, there being an element of religion in both."
- The Master of Go, Yasunari Kawabata

Anatomy of a Conference Paper

[The Pilgrim, having given smug advice on the proper presentation of conference papers, is duely humbled and appropriately panicked at the impending presentation of her own paper(s). Accordingly, in order to atone for undue over-confidence, it seems appropriate to post a rather true-to-life timeline of the life-cycle of a conference paper, from conception to articulation, to demise.]

Variables:
X .... Date of Presentation
Y .... Due-Date of Proposal

X - 7 months: Call for papers goes out.

X - 6 months, 29 days: Author considers the viability of presenting a paper. Period of wild fantasies commences, during which the author envisions being embraced as a daughter by the greats in her field. (Note: During this period, the projected realistic size of the audience is inversely proportional to the number of world-class scholars the author expects to be present. Over the next five months, this number gradually drops to a level of realism, only to surge sharply around (X - 1 month), at which point the author expects to be humiliated before the entire scholastic community.)

X - 6 months, 13 days/Y - 13 days: Author realizes that call for papers will be coming due in less than two weeks and no potential topic has been identified. Period of frantic research begins.

X - 6 months, 1 day/Y - 1 day: Author feels reasonably confident that she has identified a topic, the argumentation for which she will be able to substantiate, at a minimum, without being belted with rotten fruit and/or being barred from the enterprise of scholarship forever.

X - 6 months/Y: Author mails proposal, accompanied by pathetic letter extolling her merits and grovelling for acceptance. Prompt relief at not having to look at miserable topic again for foreseeable future overtakes author.

X - 5 months/30 days: P-A-R-T-Y!!!

X - 5 months, 28 days: Conference chairperson sends cautious reply, warning that 40 page paper would probably have to be ruthlessly formatted for 15 minute presentation slot in case of acceptance.

X - 5 months: Author receives e-mail announcing proposal's acceptance. Sense of bafflement and vague suspicions that conference was simply short on papers this year is drowned out by trimphalism. Visions of being embraced by scholastic community reach their absolute peak; spontaneous award of Ph.D. as well as publishing contract after presentation of paper seems within reach. Author proceeds to forward acceptance e-mail to 700 of her closest friends.

X - 4 months, 31 days: P-A-R-T-Y!!!

X-4 months, 30 days: Author realizes that in forwarding acceptance e-mail, she failed to detach original proposal. Author proceeds to hide under desk in humiliation.

X - 4 months, 30 days -- X - 3 months: Proposal and author enter dormant phase.

X - 2 months, 30 days: Beginning of new academic quarter, the end of which will be marked by presentation of paper. (Query: What paper?!) Author attempts unsuccessfully to remember what her proposal entailed, is reminded by several of her closest friends. Renewed humiliation sets in.

X - 2 months, 29 days: Author comforts herself with the thought of "being ahead of the class" simply by virtue of having chosen a topic and begun research on it -- despite the fact that she, in truth, does not recall much of anything about either.

X - 2 months, 28 days - X - 2 months: Proposal and author enter second round of dormancy.

X - 1 month, 30 days: Author is forced to actually send in conference reservation, book flight and hotel room. Realization of impending deadline begins to loom large.

X - 1 month, 29 days - X - 1 week: Frantic activity ensued, punctuated by bouts of despair, attempts to secure position at local 7-11 franchise, earnest consideration of feigning illness on day of conference, weeping, gnashing of teeth, and crying on faculty members' shoulders.

X - 5 days: One of aforementioned faculty members emerges from office to announce that he has discovered author's presentation announcement and remarks on her "interesting" choice of topic. Author realizes that, mercifully, no one actually listens to her.

X - 2 days: Anxiety at its peak, author proceeds to write blog entry about process.

X: ... TBD.

Theology from the Seams: A meditation on Immigration

[Here's a post that never would have seen the light of day, were it not for the Pilgrim's foolish inability to keep her mouth shut when asked to write something for the friendly local campus publication. A work of inspired genius it is not.]

Theology from the Seams: A Meditation on Immigration

"No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse."
- Mark 2:21

During a recent class-session, a colleague of mine a book on Korean Women’s theology to my attention. The top line on the glossy cover identified the slender volume as being part of a series that dealt with "theology from the margins."

The margins. The word evokes the image of a tapestry, a richly embroidered piece of cloth: The artisan has invested great care into constructing the margins, yet the observer's eye is invariably drawn to the center. The margins are the part that receives the least attention: When the cloth is placed on a table, the margins drop off to the sides. They may be attractively adorned, but more often than not, they are kept out of view -- guests may even, surreptitiously, wipe their hands on them. As the cloth ages, the margins are the first parts to fray, the last part to get patched up.

There are groups that fit this profile in all societies: In the past, women, more often than not, have found themselves on the margins (and in many parts of the world continue to do so); the poor, the broken of spirit and body, the very young and very old, the members of racial, ethnic, religious minorities -- those are the margin dwellers whose voices Christ calls us to heed, the people from whom the very fabric of the Church is constructed

If we keep our eyes fixed on the tapestry for a little longer, we may notice another detail that is frequently overlooked -- the seams, the spaces where cloth meets cloth, stitched together expertly or inexpertly for the purpose of enlarging or enhancing the whole. There are groups who fit this image in our society as well, men and women whose lives take place where two nationalities, two cultures, two languages are fastened together. More often than not, it is the immigrants and the children of immigrants amongst us who conduct their lives at these seams.

If the margins of a tapestry are prone to being ignored, the seams are the places least likely to withstand the wear and tear of daily life. Where the stitching is rough and the patchwork less than aesthetically pleasing to the untrained eye, the seams will be treated as marring the fabric. They will be kept out of sight, to the best of everyone's abilities until they burst open in times of great pressure: In this way, the seams in the great patchwork-quilt that is America have received considerable attention in recent weeks as immigrants and protesters have taken to the streets all over America.

On the other hand, if a seam is delicately stitched, if the fabrics have seemingly faded into one another over the years, the very existence of the seam and the presence of different pieces of cloth on either side of it will be forgotten. This, perhaps happier, experience is one with which I'm personally quite familiar: After a decade in this country, new acquaintances frequently marvel at the quality of my English and the "Americanness" of my appearance, while old friends tend to forget that I am not wholly "one of them."

Yet while the seam has become less noticeable, it continues to shape my experience as a human being, a student, and a follower of Christ: When the minister leads the church community to join her in prayer, to name just one example, the words by which we petition God are different in sound and meter, albeit not in sense and meaning, from the ones I was taught as a child.

This experience is not limited to America for me either: When I go "home," I find myself oddly out of touch with "my own" culture, unfamiliar with the latest slang or, more troublingly, the proper set of academic vocabulary to express my interests and level of education: Like many other immigrants, I find myself on the seams in either nation.

As future pastors, missionaries and theologians, we must learn to speak meaningfully not only about our own experiences but about the experiences of those we encounter. How does the Gospel of Christ Jesus speak to those who straddle the fences between cultures? Surely the Church is familiar with the experience of both the marginalized and the seam-dwellers: From its very beginnings it has been constituted by the powerless, the un-wise by human standards, the ignoble of birth (1 Cor 26); since at least the second century, it has been regarded as a “third race” – neither pagan nor Jewish -- in its worship of God.

The answers are, no doubt, complex: They may involve Paul’s confident assertion that Christians’ citizenship is in heaven, and contain traces of Old Testament stories in which the God of Israel sees and hears those who otherwise remain invisible. As an immigrant and a follower of Christ, my hope and desire in the midst of these pressing questions is for the Church to be a place where the rich tapestry of our community can be appreciated in all its facets: Where the margins may become the center of attention, and the seams are cherished for the creative, providential intentionality with which God has joined together different peoples and different cultures to form a greater, more beautiful whole.

"Although I do not hope to turn again, although I do not hope ..."

"I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."

- from T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets: East Coker"


For a longer but even more timely meditation, consider "Ash Wednesday."