The Lingering Lemon of Death

please stop -- musing on the binary opposite of deconstruction

friends, people i admire, who are bravely wondering about what makes church good here in the 21st century, often say something like, "i am done hanging out with the people deconstructing their faith, i need to be connected to constructive or re-constructive voices."

i have two problems with this

first, just because YOU are done, why does that mean everyone else needs to be done. give them the same permission that you wished you could have received, to question the unquestionable for as long as it takes.

second, stop saying "deconstruction"

Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

now i flunked out of both high school and college, so i could very well be wrong about this.  i certainly do not claim to understand derrida.  i could barely make it into "Of Grammatology" before my head exploded

as i understand it, if you can "re-construct" your ideas after some scholarship and analysis, the thing you did just before that, was NOT deconstruction.

examining a system until you have identified the the component parts, and diagnosed which ones are not working and need replacement, is not deconstruction, that is just modern scholarship.  we knew how to do that before derrida.  it is still useful, but it is not deconstruction.

deconstruction has something to do with making invisible things visible, yes, but that is just the first part of a deconstructive gesture.

my limited understanding of the word "deconstruction" is that it pertains to an activity that has little to do with understanding the true inner meaning, or of stripping away the old baggage.  deconstruction seems to me to be, if anything, a move away from the "inner truth quest ", even a move away from the idea of inner truth.  a deconstructive gesture can even be intentionally false, if need be.  it is performance art which speaks untruth if needed, leaving an imprint on existence ... truth itself is now stamped on reality, and visible in the negative space.

deconstruction does not happen outside the text, 40,000 feet above, where all context is in view. deconstruction eliminates the boundaries between ourselves and text, and places us in the middle of the text, along with the verbs and nouns, to be read and interpreted.

i don't know exactly what deconstruction is, something about artfully, playfully, outlining hidden monsters of complexity and paradox, but never with the intent of resolving them, but rather with the intent of setting them free to wreak havoc.

to the extent that i do understand deconstruction, a fully deconstructed christianity would be an offensive, personal, radical, messy, disaster.  the next step after deconstruction would be a party, or a riot, but not a careful reconstruction with all the good parts cleaned up and functioning properly, and new gears and knobs connecting them.

i say this not because i want to claim a higher understanding of deconstruction, but because i think the way forward is to always have space for the trickseter, offensive, crazy thing that deconstruction is, so i want to rescue the word as from the ghetto of things that wise people should "get over".

Deconstruction is love, the love of something unforseeable,  unforegraspable, something to come, absolutely, something undeconstructible and impossible, something nameless. -- Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jaques Derrida, John D. Caputo and and Jaques Derrida

photo was from this page, which when i stumbled on it, was so perfect, i had to include one of the photos in this article

Dionne's Grandmother's Santa Fe Teahouse Oatmeal

At the top of the the Canyon Road art gallery climb in Santa Fe is a tea house. There are many kinds of tea. It is a great place to stop and rest, or to sit and write. There are many kinds of tea, a whole lot of tea, some of it very good. None of this matters.

What matters is the oatmeal. I know what you are thinking, "Oatmeal, something which brown sugar and butter makes barely palatable, how could that matter?" You speak from ignorance of the heavenlies, and so I forgive you. This is a food to make you weep for the beauty of life which you could never see until you ate the oatmeal and now love and joy are possible in ways previously unimagined.

I have been making this for family and friends for a couple of years, and it is mindblowingly good. Whenever I need to make it, I just go the tea house web site and there is the recipe and I cook it and we are all happy. Except it appears that the tea house is under new ownership and they no longer have the recipe on their web site.

No problem, everything on the internet is archived forever at the Internet Wayback Machine, right? Wrong! Apparently sometimes important things, like the recipe for the breakfast of the gods, are not archived. Fortunately google still had the old page cached, and so I am re-posting it here because this is the kind of thing which cannot be allowed to be forgotten. There is some work involved, if you are lazy or in a hurry, some shortcuts can be taken and it sitll turns out great.  The black rice and wheat berries can be hard to find but Whole Foods seems to always have them.

Dionne’s Grandmother’s Now Famous Oatmeal

The Grains

• 3 cups of Chinese Black Sticky Rice (or Forbidden Rice)
• 2 cups Steel Cut Oats
• 1 cup winter wheat berries

Rinse all grains (separately) under cold water, and drain. Soak the rice and wheat berries overnight (they can soak together). Be sure the water level is a few inches above the grains so they remain covered. The oats need to soak two hours before cooking.

Be sure to soak all of the grains regardless of what elevation you live at.

Place the soaked rice and wheat berries in a pot and add enough water to cover the grains by about 2 inches. Cook at a low simmer for 45-60 minutes. At the same time in a separate pot cook the oats again adding water to cover the grains by about 2 inches. Cook on a low simmer for 30 minutes.

After everything is cooked and it’s still warm, add the oats to the rice and wheat berries. If you want you can let it cool at this point and even freeze it.

If eating now, then you add ... The Whatnot

The Whatnot

• 2 cups Heavy Cream
• 1/4 cup Maple Syrup
• Bananas
• Whatever fresh berries are available
• 1 cup Brown Sugar
• 1/4 cup Butter

Mix brown sugar and butter into the warm grains (or adjust the amount to desired sweetness).

Add maple syrup to 1 cup heavy cream (you can also use a non-dairy substitute for the cream), mix well.

When the oatmeal is served pour sweetened cream some over the warm cereal. Don't skimp, you will just come back and pour more if you do.

At the tea house, this is served with bananas and berries, but you can top with any available fresh fruits, or as Dionne grew up eating it, you can top it with lardons for a sweet and savory combination.

Beat the rest of the heavy cream until firm and top each bowl with a dollop.

Makes 6 servings

... and here is apparently Dionne herself at the Santa Fe farmer's market, showing you how it is done.

 

why i am not a convergence christian

this post is skipable if you don't care about petty squabbling among protestant christians about who gets to be the cool hip thing that is happening now who has the way forward.

once upon a time a few people, with some access to power, became almost accidentally branded as "emergent" christians. emergent sort of meant something new, something natural, something surprising. these people cared about finding a faithful and beautiful faith, and not so much about the word. to the extent that the word made it possible for people to search for and find this kind of faith, they were happy to be called "emergent"

once upon a time, people who have been trying to do things which are new and different for decades and decades got pissed off at the emergent people. why did they get all the press? where was their blood, their broken bones, their long suffering?

once upon a time, the people who know exactly what christianity is, who spend all their time defending christianity against new ideas, because all new ideas are really evil in disguise, noticed "emergent". these people had access to more power and more money than the people who became branded as "emergent". as a result, it became advantageous to trash "emergent" christianity. money and influence became available to you if you just threw emergent under the bus.

so it became very unfashionable to be emergent. you have people from two different directions claiming that anything under the "emergent" banner is automatically not interesting.

recently there is this new word, "convergence", and it seems like people are spinning in circles in excitement about how great this new word is.

i am trying to not say anything bad about this, because if that word helps people find a way of faithful living which is generous and good, hallelujah.

i am going to say this. i don't think "convergence" is a particularly great word. it implies a center, a place where jesus really is, and i think that idea is the opposite of what was beautiful about "emergence". which suggested a series of non-centered outbreaks which might have a common center deep at the roots, but would necessarily disburse and distribute once they hit the real world. this distinction is why i prefer the unfashionable label of "emergent" to this shiny new "convergence" thing.

[ Postscript: I really like Anthony's different spin on this same topic of the power of labels, it is mentioned in the comments, so I thought I would include the link ]