Taken from: http://peterrollins.net/blog/?p=1074
The following is an article written about the Insurrection event that took place in Chicago last month. It was written by Devin Bustin. Devin is working on a novel about a group of boys at a pentecostal summer camp and sketching a new album for his band, Asher Lev.
—
Chris Davis leans across the bar and offers my friend a drink. For the last hour, we have been acting as bouncers, keeping people on the main floor while upstairs, the insurrectionists run wires and check sound.
“So who are these guys?,” Chris asks.
Trace Chicago is the only bar around Wrigley Field that stays open until four in the morning. Concert posters cover the walls and the logo of the joint is an electric guitar sprouting wings. It’s safe to say Chris is used to bands and rock shows, not theologians and events like tonight.
I explain that Peter Rollins runs a community called Ikon in Belfast, Ireland, a place where Roman catholics, protestants, and atheists have been meeting like a church. These types of gatherings don’t happen in Northern Ireland, so Rollins is causing quite a stir.
Over Easter, he and his friends are taking their approach to Christianity to bars from Austin to New York City. Chris pours our beers.
“I grew up in a neighborhood on the South Side,” he says. “Most of my friends were Irish. Once, I wore a soccer jersey my folks had bought in London and my buddies threatened to beat me to a pulp.”
Chris looks like a quarterback—six-foot-three, two-thirty, all muscle—so it’s hard to imagine anyone working up the courage to pick a fight.
“I went to church, too,” he says. “Every week. I don’t now, but I did then. I got sick of people looking like saints in the services and then going home and treating their families like sh– that night.”
Chris says that if church doesn’t change the way people act, then forget about it.
The beer tastes like oranges. It tells us the worst of winter is over.
Chris’s story makes me think of a tract that Rollins and his friends have scattered around upstairs. Comics depict the rapture. God brings the holy up to heaven so they can escape the suffering on Earth.
He calls those who have separated themselves from the world, then announces that he is leaving. The angels are shocked. Immediately, God leaves heaven to suffer alongside those who have decided to feed the poor and care for creation until everything, every aspect of his world has been made new.
I try to tell the parable to Chris, but he needs to serve customers.
My friend and I go back to blocking off the upstairs, sending Chris business.
—
By eight o’clock, the upper room is full. The manager worries about fire code. My friend and I stand by the door because we can hardly squeeze into the room.
A video loop shows a sixties incarnation of Billy Graham preaching. Another cut shows a building, the kind of place where believers meet, burning. The speakers play dub beats and a single sample echos, decays, repeats: Insurrection.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, rustles the microphone, then welcomes the gathering.
“The peace of Christ be with you,” he says.
“And also with you,” some say.
He launches into a call to worship:
In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
In the name of goodness and love and broken community.
In the name of meaning and feeling and I hope you don’t screw me…
In the name of sadness, regret, and holy obsession, the holy name of anger, the spirit of aggression…
In the name of beauty and beaten and broken down daily.
In the name of seeing our creeds and believing in maybe, we gather here, a table of strangers, and speak of our hopeland and talk of our danger…
In the name of Mary and Jesus and the mostly silent Joseph.
In the name of speaking to ourselves, saying this is more than I can cope with…
In the name of goodness and kindness and intentionality. In the name of harbor and shelter and family.
When the call to worship ends, the air in the room has changed.
A candle could light without a match.
“Hey, there.” says Peter Rollins.
He sits at a table with a massive book, a tome. He claims it contains the story of tonight and reads the part about the people sitting in the front row, the girl with the afro, the guy who looks like he’s never set foot in a bar. Rollins says this book contains many chapters, but he wants to start here. “Chapter One: To Believe is Human.”
He tells the story of a man who finds himself stranded on an island with Halle Berry. Over time, the man succeeds in seducing her, and after their night of passion, he asks her to put on a disguise. He gives her his hat and has her hold a branch under her nose like a mustache. Then he leaves.
When he returns, he runs up and tells her, “You’ll never believe who I just kissed.”
The point, says Rollins, is that humans need someone to witness their stories. If their god dies, humans make another one up. In the desert, the thirsty invent mirages. Rollins says he used to try to convince people to believe, but then he found believers everywhere. He has come to see that leading people to the cross means leading people to doubt. Evangelism means offering people a desert in the midst of an oasis.
Pádraig Ó Tuama returns to the microphone with a guitar. He sings a lament shaped from his studies in the book of Jeremiah. His verses throb:
You are strength when I am weak
You are strength when I am weak
You are strength when I am weak
Maranatha
I’ve given up sometimes when I’ve been tired
I’ve given up sometimes when I’ve been tired
I’ve given up sometimes when I’ve been tired
Does it move you?
I’ve f–cked it up so many times
I’ve f–cked it up so many times
I’ve f–cked it up so many times
Hallelujah
I’ve found my home in Babylon
I’ve found my home in Babylon
I’ve found my home in Babylon
Here in exile.
—
Downstairs, Chris has decided to broadcast the audio of the event throughout the bar. My friend goes down and passes him the tract about the rapture. At the door, rowdies mock Chris for playing a preacher over the speakers.
“You know what,” he says. “It’s packed out upstairs and most of the people down here want to know what they’re missing.”
Peter Rollins plunks to a new section in his tome. He reads, “Chapter Two: To Doubt is Divine.” Rollins says churches protect people from the trauma of doubt. Ministers shield people with their sermons of certainty. Worship leaders comfort them with songs that gush like puppy love. Rarely do Christians approach the cross in all its devastation because the messages in services look for shortcuts to the resurrection, ways to bypass the darkness and the earthquake of the cross.
A joke drives the point home. A man signs up for counseling because he believes he is a handful of seed. Over time, the counselor guides him to realize that he is, in fact, a man. He celebrates his healing until the person in the apartment next door starts raising chickens. The man’s crisis returns.
His counselor assures him that no matter what he believes he is not a handful of seed.
“I know that,” says the man. “But do the chickens know that?”
Rollins says many people discuss the futility of fashion, but never change because advertisers believe on their behalf. So many people discuss their doubts, but they never feel their force because pastors and worship leaders believe on their behalf. As a result, no one gets close enough to Christ, the divinity on the cross who believes God has abandoned him.
I have led songs in services for a dozen years. I have gushed and grinned until my spirit and my fretting hand have lost feeling. Still, the rawness of the crucifixion seduces me.
Ó Tuama offers a poem. In Uganda, he says, lesbians and gays find themselves in prison for the way they love. He asks his listeners to close their eyes and think about the bodies of those sleeping in prisons in Uganda, the crime they have committed, and the punishment they face. The poem ends the way it begins: “Think about the people sleeping in the prisons in Uganda. This is not some liberal agenda.”
He says that over the last decade, the words of Frederich Buechner have haunted him, that each person must tell their secrets, even it is only to themselves. For Ó Tuama, this has meant confessing to himself that he is gay. When the poet and songwriter and chaplain confesses this, the air in the upper room weighs even more.
—
The night has dilated. This is no hour-long, seeker-sensitive service. The event pushes toward ten o’clock. That said, the atmosphere is desperate, as if a wound has opened up. I want to leave and the last thing I want to do is leave.
Rollins swills his beer, then talks about a magazine he has found, a Home and Gardens edition from the 1930s. An article describes a party at the home of a politician. The writer raves about the cooking, the piano bench where the politician sits and tells stories to children, the art he hangs on the walls, the meals he spreads before guests while he himself remains a strict vegetarian. Readers meet Adolf Hitler, the nice guy.
Rollins contends that the truth about everyone does not come from their profile on Facebook or the doctrines they check off for church membership, but from what they do.
For those who follow Christ, this means that even if the doubts rage, their actions strain toward belief. While the ideas storm in their minds, the verbs of their lives act toward faith. The desire to believe means wrapping jackets around the shivering and eating and drinking with the starving and risking one’s life for the imprisoned, the ones the authorities sweep out of sight.
The coasters on the bar show the fist of a revolutionary with blood dripping from the wrist. Rollins is calling for an insurrection, a resurrection that starts with stripping oneself of religion and society and politics and identity, then replenishes life in all of its forms.
—
Downstairs, music tears through the speakers, riffs that bare teeth and singers whose voices bleed. The songs carry to the upper room, forcing those gathered to lean forward to hear the theologian.
Rollins says the massive book tells him that nothing will change, that those gathered will return to their mediocrity. Our worship leaders will keep singing about Jesus as their boyfriend and people will keep telling themselves the lies that let them live as they do now. Church will remain the alcohol that keeps people from confronting their desperation. Instead of shock and annihilation, people will continue looking to the cross for comfort and sedation.
Rollins tells a story he heard from a rabbi. A novice passes through a town on his way to prayer. He meets a couple and they beg him to bring their barrenness before God. The novice asks God to give them a child, but God tells him this is not their destiny.
A few years later, the novice stops by the couple’s house. They introduce him to their three children. They explain that after he left, another devout man stopped by and prayed for them. Shortly thereafter, they conceived their firstborn.
The novice brings his confusion to God, who remembers and laughs.
“That sounds like the work of a saint,” God says, “because they have the power to change destiny.”
Rollins closes his book. He says that while his gut tells him that people will go back downstairs and return to their lives without change, each listener can alter their destiny.
Ó Tuama offers this benediction:
The task has ended. Go in pieces.
Our faith has been rear-ended, certainty amended,
and something might be mended that we didn’t know was torn.
And we are fire, bright, burning fire,
turning from the places from which we fell,
emptying ourselves into the hell in which we’ll find
our loving and beloved brother,
mother, sister, father, friend.
And so friends, the task has ended.
Go in pieces
to see and feel your world.
—
We leave the bar close to midnight. Chris is working and I decide to leave him alone. I find him a few days later on Facebook and our profiles become the only reality we share. That said, the next time I lead a song from behind a communion table, I will feel like a bartender. I will ask myself if I am offering this wine to distract people from their problems or confront them with a death in mind.
Outside Trace Chicago, Wrigley Field sprawls like a symbol of tradition and entertainment and sports futility. A giant banner reads,
This Is Our Year.
Keep swinging, I think.
Why do I finally want to cheer for these guys?
My friend and I take a wrong turn and find ourselves lost in the city, as usual. The talk in my car is loud and tense and hilarious and hopeful. Though it takes longer than we want, we make it home. I feel exhausted enough to rest.
Posted at 10:38 |
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