Are Bottle Caps Enough?

Yesterday I had a friend send me a youtube link for a newly released Coca-Cola advertisement to see what I thought about it. The commercial starts off with some text about how migrant workers are taken from their homes to do manual labor far away for little pay. They do it all with the hope that they will one day make enough money from their labors to counter all of the hardships involved with being away from family and homeland.

And then comes the Coca-Cola Company to the rescue! Because phone calls back home are expensive and the average daily income for these migrant workers is about $6.00, Coca-Cola has invented a machine that provides three minutes of calling time for every Coke bottle cap that you deposit. (So spend 10% of your daily income on a saoda that you don’t need, and you get to call home for three minutes)

The rest of the clip shows people drinking coke and having tearful/joyous conversations with their loved ones. Give it a watch below if you want to see for yourself.

At face value, this ad seems to have all the ingredients for a hallmark commercial style tear jerker. You have marginalized people at the beginning and people who feel a little less crappy about life at the end. Unfortunately, the message of the clip sours a bit when you start to dig a bit deeper.

I commend the Coca-Cola Company for coming out with a fairly strong Human Rights Statement that “expressly prohibit(s) the use of all forms of forced labor, including prison labor, indentured labor, bonded labor, military labor, slave labor and human trafficking.” This is a big deal, and most multinational companies are not willing to make such statements.

Unfortunately, the moral stances of the Coca-Cola Company seem to stop right about there. For those of you who might not be aware, Coca-Cola is one of the primary sponsors for FIFA, and makes billions of dollars off the World Cup every four years. In order to prep a city for hosting this massive sporting event, about 1.5 million workers (90% of whom are migrant workers) are brought in to do the manual construction labor. Sadly, investigations into the living conditions of these workers have shown that there is mass wage theft, exploitation, rationing of food and water, and in some cases physical detention to keep people from running away.

So on the one hand Coca-Cola producing heartwarming commercials that talk about making the lives of migrant workers a little better, and on the other you have the Coca-Cola Company making billions of dollars off of the system that puts these people into situations where they are objectified and taken advantage of. How can there be such a stark disconnect?

Slavoj Zizek (a semi-crazy Slovenian critical theorist and philosopher) has this great bit that he does where he talk about how capitalism has started to take on the role of critiquing itself in minor ways so that we can consume guilt free. It says things like…

…buy as many clothes as you want, as long as you buy the kind that give a little bit back.

or

…order the super mega venti latte from starbucks once a day since 10% of it goes back to saving the rainforests.

The problem comes in when the clothes are still being made by exploited children and the rainforests are still being destroyed by short-sighted coffee companies.

In a similar way, I feel like Zizek would say that Coca-Cola is telling us to support their company because they give a little bit back to people who are being absolutely screwed over… and in doing so hoping that we will just ignore the fact that they are making mountains of money off of the system that is doing the screwing.

And by looking at 2.6 million likes the video has gotten in the last few weeks, it seems to be working. Maybe I’m being a little too cynical, but i feel like Coca-Cola – and we as consumers – can do a whole lot better.

Russian Roommates

One of the outcomes of my extroverted nature is that even when I am traveling by myself, I’m rarely alone. For those of you who know my father, this should come as no surprise. After all, I grew up thinking that it was perfectly normal for somebody to strike up a conversation with random strangers in line and to become best friends in the span of five minutes.

 

When I first checked in to my hostel on Monday, there was only one other person in the room and he happened to speak almost no English. We were able to communicate roughly via google translate and my limited Russian vocab, but the desire to engage waned after the first 20 minutes or so.

Within the next 12 hours, every bunk in our room filled up with people. There was a Russian guy in his mid 20s who attempted to tell me about an “exciting state-of-the-art business opportunity” which turned out to be nothing more than your basic pyramid scheme (with the added bonus of all being in a language that I barely understand). I told him thanks for the offer, but that I’d have to pass.

Then there were the two 18-year-old Russian kids who were spending the summer travelling around the region. They both spoke English fairly well, and were keen on asking me questions about everything spanning from life in America to how Americans view Russia’s ‘liberation” of the Crimean peninsula from the fascists. I tried to keep a straight face when they were telling me about how things really are down there, but I lost it when one of them flat out asked why we – the US – would want to steal Crimea and make it part of the United States. I tried telling him that whoever said such a thing was mistaken, but he seemed unconvinced.

You’ve gotta love state-controlled media…

 

Anyway, these guys were a riot and they were quite excited to have an American around. The first two nights they tried to convince me to come out with them, and they couldn’t quite understand why I would rather take pictures of the city by myself than meet beautiful Russian women at the dance club. “The buildings are old and beautiful, but the women are young and beautiful!” I finally agreed that I would go grab a beer with them last night, but only if we were somewhere without loud music and flashing lights. They were disappointed, but agreed to my terms.

The weather was perfect and we ended up sitting outside of a café with a beautiful view of the main street at night. Now I will note that my new Russian friends are all pretty tiny by American standards and they were clearly a bit tipsy after beer #1. After beer #2 they had all agreed that I needed to find a beautiful Russian girlfriend and that they would be happy to help me in this endeavor. I told them that it would be hard to have a Russian girlfriend in Kazan when I live in Moscow, but that didn’t seem to faze them too much.

After my companions many failed attempts to convince the girls walking by that they should meet their “important” American friend, I was actually pretty impressed when two very attractive young women were intrigued enough to join us. As it turns out, one of them was an engineer who travels back and forth between Moscow and Kazan and is fluent in English. She was interested in the work that I do, was a critical thinker willing to talk rationally about geopolitics, and was excited to be able to use her English with a native English speaker. That’s a pretty rare combo, so I jumped at the opportunity to hang out.

At the end of the night I got a hug and we said our goodbyes, and my roommates were terribly disappointed that I didn’t pursue things further with the young women. One even went so far as to tell me, “Andy, you make big mistake. However, they decided that since we did exchange email addresses, the night was an overall success and they had represented Russia well. I doubt I will ever see any of those guys again, but they helped make the trip enjoyable and I’m glad that we met.

 

Looking out over the Volga

Platzkart

I spend somewhere around15 hours a week on public transport within the city of Moscow and another 5 on commuter trains out to the farm in Taldom, so I like to think that I have a pretty good handle on how these things work in Russia.

That was until I found myself on the platzkart last night…

For those of you who are unfamiliar, platzkart is the third class seating option for the Russian national train system. It is one step lower than four person cabins and one step above sitting on a hard metal bench for the duration of your trip. There is essentially one large cabin with about 50 bunks and a folding table between every other set of beds.

Because of the fact that part of what it means to be a Global Mission Fellows is to make a commitment to simple living (also known as being perpetually broke), everyone suggested platz as the way to travel. I knew that things might get a bit challenging with my elementary grasp of the Russian language, but I’m always up for an adventure so I told myself that it’d be fun.

Seeing as this would be my first trip long-distance solo trip through the Russian countryside, I went to a Russian colleague to get a few tips.

1)   Don’t get drunk and rowdy on the train or else the babushki will yell at you

2)   Don’t eat smelly food on the train or else the children will yell at you.

3)   Don’t try to steal someone else’s bunk on the train or else their real occupant will yell at you

4)   Don’t fart on the train or else everyone will yell at you.

Easy enough…lets do this!

(As it turns out, I was only able to follow three of the four rules)

When I boarded the train just before midnight, I walked up to what I thought was supposed to by my rack and began settling in for the night. A few minutes later, a boy who looked to be about 5 years old came around the corner and started staring. I’m told that I give off the “American” vibe, so I figured he was just curious about the big bearded American guy on the train. Five minutes passed and he was still staring. Ten minutes, still no movement.

And then I realized why he was staring at me.

A woman who looked to be in her mid 60s came around the corner and let in to me in rapid-fire Russian. It was late, I was tired, and the only word that I kept recognizing were почему and мальчик. This went on for a minute or two before I was able to finally get a word in.

Мне очень жаль. Я не говорю по-русски. Медленнее, пожалуйста

(“I’m sorry, I don’t speak much Russian. Could you repeat that slower?”)

Next thing I know she starts un-making my bed and moving my belongings on to the bunk directly above the one I had been occupying. As far as I can tell, I had accidentally started moving in to the wrong bunk, and the little guy was too startled to do anything about it. I apologized this morning, gave Sasha (the little boy) half of the orange that I was eating for breakfast, and all was well with the world.

The other highlight of the trip was getting woken up at 3:48 by the light starting to creep over the horizon. I stayed up and watched a beautiful sunrise over vast expanses of farmland at around 4:15 AM, and then want back to sleep for another few hours. I won’t say that it was the most comfortable night’s sleep I’ve ever had, but I’ve got to admit that my experience came nowhere close to the horror stories that people tell about platzkart. I was able to get the authentic Russian travel experience and even made a new friend. Now it’s time to go exploring in Kazan.

Fresh Squeezed Photo Friday

Well it’s been a while since I’ve done a “Photo Friday” post, so I figured I’d share some recent shots with y’all. If you have been on any of my social media pages throughout the last week, you will have noticed that I have been on a sort of drink making spree.

You see, there is a plethora of fruits available during the summertime in Russia, and one of the things that Russia is very good at is making tasty beverages. Whether it be mors, kvass, medovukha, or any other kind of juice you can imagine, Russians know how to do it right.

On Wednesday afternoon, I stopped by my local grocery store on the way home from work and realized that they had finally set up an aisle with canning supplies. Imagine glass jars, lids, and labels of any size all waiting to be filled with jams, jellies and pickled produce. I decided to pick up a few large ones and then pay a visit to the fruit vendor that I had passed on my way back from the metro. Five minutes and about $15 dollars later, I was walking home with a kilo of fresh strawberries, a kilo of fresh cherries, and a half dozen lemons.

My first project was making a batch of компот (kompot) with the strawberries and cherries. Компот, for anyone interested, is essentially a fruit beverage made by boiling  fresh in water and adding sugar. It’s really as simple as it sounds. I tossed ½ kilo of strawberries, ½ kilo of cherries, and lemon zest into a giant pot of boiling water with some unrefined sugar and let it do it’s thing.

 

Everything in the pot simmering away…

All the good stuff poured into a jar to cool in the fridge.

Next on the list was finding something to do with all of the lemons. Realizing that I had almost an entire bottle of vodka that I had been given as a gift and would probably never drink (sorry Russia, I’m still not a fan of the stuff), I decided to make a batch of limoncello. It’s not the most Russian beverage in the world, but I had the ingredients so I went for it.

I rinsed and peeled half of the lemons, separated the pith from the peel, tossed the peels into a jar with 750 ml of vodka, and let it sit. All that is left to do is wait a week and add some simple syrup and voilà… a sweet and sour lemon liquor to enjoy with friends in the sunshine.

Less then 24 hours later the whole jar looks like it could glow in the dark

 

Seeing as I had half a dozen peeled lemons sitting around, a batch of freshly-squeezed lemonade sweetened with local honey was in order too. I may or may not have already consumed about a liter of it in the last 24 hours. Whoops.

Cocktails anyone?

My final and most complicated beverage adventure is still currently in the works…homebrewed kvass. For those of you who have never spent time in eastern European countries, kvass is a marginally alcoholic summer drink made by steeping fresh Russian lack bread in boiling water, adding dried fruit and a bit of unrefined sugar for sweetness, and yeast for carbonation. It tastes unlike anything we have in the states and is a little odd at first, but Russians love the stuff and I have been made a convert. Here are some photos of the process up to this point, and I’ll let y’all know how it turned out once the batch is finished.

Step 1) Cut up a fresh loaf of Russian black bread and toast in the oven

Step 2) Add burnt bread to a pot of boiling water to steep for about 8 hours

 

Step 3) Strain bready-water mixture and add yeast, raisins, and sugar to the mix

Babushka’d

There are a number of cultural quirks in Russia that have taken a while for me to wrap my mind around, but the one that I still don’t understand is the apparent Russian fear of the cold. You’d assume that a group of people whose roots are in such a harsh climate would’ve adapted over millennia to cold temperatures, but this isn’t the case.

For example, when you come across a child during an average winter day here, they will be bundled in no less than two coats, double mittens, hats, hoods, scarves, ski pants, facemasks, and the like until they more closely resemble a marshmallow then a human being. Now I know that some people feel the cold more than others, but as a person who grew up on the coast even I have to call it excessive.

Another fun example is this idea that if you sit in front of a drafty door or window, you will wake up the next day in terrible pain because of the cold that has leached into you. There may be some sort of physiological truth to this (I doubt it), but if there is I have never had such an experience. Regardless of the factual accuracy of this wives’ tale, it doesn’t stop well-educated adults from scolding you for sitting to near to an open window or door.

Anyway, the reason that I bring up this aversion to the cold is because the sun has finally come back out and temperatures are on the rise. For Russians, this has meant that it is time to slowly start easing out of one season’s clothing and into the next.

For me, it meant that it is finally safe to break out my Chacos.

(If you are unfamiliar with what I mean by “Chacos”, they are hiking sandals made with a Vibram sole and they last longer than any other type of footwear I’ve ever owned. I don’t know the exact mileage that I put into my last pair, but it was somewhere in the range of 5,000 miles.)

Wearing the Chacos during a break from climbing after making my way 300′ up a granite rock-face

The first time I wore them on the metro this spring, you would’ve sworn that I was going barefoot in the snow if you had seen the reactions of some of the little old Russian women sitting and standing near me. So would point my feet out to their neighbors, some would openly converse with other Babushkas about them, and some would even give me the stink-eye for daring to provide such a reckless example to their grandchildren.

In short, they “babushka’d” me.

It turns out that your toes won’t fall off and you wont come down with hypothermia when you wear sandals in 60 degree weather, but that certainly hasn’t done much to keep the babushkas from getting on my case. I wonder what they’ll do when they see the tanktops and shorts in the next week or two…

Looking Back on a Couple ‘Firsts’

About seven and a half years ago, I remember walking into West Ambler Johnston Dormitory – aka “The Waj” – for the first time and thinking to myself…this is going to be awesome!

Sure, I was living on a hall with about 60 other guys that after just a few hours had already miraculously accumulated a distinct smell of sweat, fried food, and faint hints of Natural Light. Of course things were a little uncomfortable in a cinderblock door room with poor circulation that had no air conditioning during the month of August in Blacksburg, VA.

But this place was uniquely mine in a way that nothing had ever been before.

Inside those hallways there were a lot of first: I made my first group of close friends outside of Virginia Beach, I kissed my first college girl, I suffered through my first hangover, I slept through my first 7:45 AM class, I pulled my first all-nighter, and I met the first girl that I ever loved. It was a hell of a ride that incidentally got me placed on “Academic Probation” after first semester grades were released, but it was my ride and I was calling the shots.

That is, until I wasn’t.

On April 16, 2007, just 8 short months after moving into this new home away from home, life for everyone in the Waj, every resident of Blacksburg, and every Hokie past and future was changed forever. Gunshots rang out and over the course of a few hours the lives of 33 of my fellow students and faculty members were extinguished.

And seven years later at 1:42 in the morning sitting in my tiny Russian apartment about 5000 miles away from my favorite town in Appalachia, it still hurts.

As you can imagine, there were a couple of first that were quite a bit less exciting than the one’s listed above that took place as a result of that day:

For the first time I attended the funeral of a friend my own age.

For the first time I experienced what it is like to be part of  “the big story” of the day and to have my privacy completely ignored by news cameras for close to a month.

For the first time I had to share the news with my group of peers that one of their closest friends was on the list of deceased students.

For the first time I decided to force myself to be the “strong” one who was there to support the people I cared deeply about, and as a result for the first time (as well as many subsequent times) I cried myself to sleep.

For the first time I genuinely feared for my life.

I don’t say all of this as an attempt to garner pity or to puff myself up as someone who has overcome adversity, because the reality isn’t that I haven’t overcome anything and maybe never will. God didn’t suddenly take away all of that hurt and sadness, and life didn’t magically work itself out. No, I say it in order to share what was quite possibly the most important “first” I experienced as a result of the horrific tragedy all those years ago.

For the first time, I realized that there is real suffering in our world.

It is the same suffering that I see echoed in the faces of young African men who have been jumped because of the color of their skin, and it is the same suffering that I have seen in the eyes of women who are trapped in an illegal sex trade that treats them as nothing more than sexual objects. It’s the same suffering that I saw in DC through the broken minds and bodies of young vets living on the streets in front of the VA offices and it is the same suffering that ravages the bodies of addicts with nowhere to lay their heads.

I can’t offer these folks the magic answer to this suffering and I can’t promise them that it will get better, but there is one thing that I can do.

I can stand with them in the midst of their pain and brokenness and helplessness, and I can promise to listen. I know it’s not much, but it’s all that I’ve got.

(I know I’ve been terrible at keeping up with most of this crowd, but they are the ones who in one way or another stood with me and allowed me to get to a place where I can do the same for others. I owe you all more than I can ever repay)

Challenge Accepted – Part III

This is part three of my response to the challenge posed by a friend of mine a few days ago. If you would like to read the post that sparked the conversation click here, and if you want to read parts one and two of my response, you can see them here and here.

 

So Now What?

Having done my best to answer the “what if” questions with my last two posts, all that remains is the move from heady ideals into praxis. How does the fact that God helps us reclaim our stories in life-giving ways impact our daily lives? How does Christ’s solidarity with the oppressed and oppressors and our place of belonging change the way in which we share life together with one another? Why does any of this even matter?

For starters, I’d point to what today means within the liturgical year. Palm Sunday is the end of Lent, the beginning of Holy Week, and was quite possibly the event that sealed Jesus’ fate. You see, when we read about the “triumphant entry” into Jerusalem we often times miss the contextual information that is hidden between the lines.

If you just read the passage in Matthew 21 and take it as face value without any deeper research, you might miss the fact that the people laying down cloaks and waving palm fronds weren’t just a random mob of people. In the Ancient Near East, those congregated around the gates of the city were the lowest of the low. Lepers, debtors, migrants from other regions, and the ceremonially unclean…these are oppressed masses gathering together to welcome one of their own.

They were coming to meet and honor the man who was helping them to regain their dignity.

They were coming to meet the man who was subverting the power of the Roman Empire by saying that they – poor, unclean, unwanted people – had a place of belonging.

They were coming to get a glimpse of the guy who was changing things forever.

Call me crazy, but it seems to me that if we are going to claim to be followers of this Jesus guy, then we need to take what he said and did seriously. We need to meet the outcasts at the proverbial city gates (our neighbors in the global south, our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, the mentally ill and physically disabled people who live in our cities, etc) and speak a word of welcome and belonging into their lives.

Furthermore, we need to confront those responsible for the rejection and marginalization that our disenfranchised brothers and sisters are faced with…even if that means having hard conversations with our fellow Christians. We need to help them see a new way of being in communion with one another, and we need to be willing to welcome even the oppressors into this radical vision of reconciliation.

(As I say this, I also have to admit that I am really bad at doing so)

Most of us know that the story of Christ doesn’t end with a triumphant entry into the City of David on Palm Sunday. Jesus’ entrance and exaltation amongst the cities most vulnerable also caught the attention of the Empire that he was attempting to subvert, and I’d assume that  most would agree with me when I say that the outcome wasn’t “fun”.

So David, if God is that which allows us to find meaning in the midst of this mess of a world AND Christ is that which allows us to belong in the Kingdom of God, than it is our job to do the same, regardless of how uncomfortable, meaningless, or isolating it might make us feel.

Are you up for it?

Challenge Accepted – Part II

This is part two of my response to the challenge posed by a friend of mine a few days ago. If you would like to read the post that sparked the conversation click here, and if you want to read part one of my response, you can see it here.

 

What if God really is that which allows us to belong?

So I typically try to explore beyond just the theological realm of old, white, European males when I am doing research, but there is one particular old white guy that I tend to come back to quite a bit. His name is Jurgen Moltmann, and he is in my opinion one of the most well written and pastoral voices in the realm of systematic theology to date.

The reason I bring him up today is because my christology (theological understanding of Christ) is heavily influenced by the idea of a God who suffers alongside creation, and I can thank Jurgen for a lot of it. Here’s a little truth bomb that I think relates quite well to the topic at hand:

“When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his death on the cross also enters into the situation of man’s godforsakenness. In Jesus he does not die the natural death of a finite being, but the violent death of the criminal on the cross, the death of complete abandonment by God. The suffering in the passion of Jesus is abandonment, rejection by God, his Father. God does not become a religion, so that man participates in him by corresponding religious thoughts and feelings. God does not become a law, so that man participates in him through obedience to a law. God does not become an ideal, so that man achieves community with him through constant striving. He humbles himself and takes upon himself the eternal death of the godless and the godforsaken, so that all the godless and the godforsaken can experience communion with him.”

In essence, the move of God towards incarnation, life, death, and resurrection is fundamentally one of solidarity with everyone. It is for the oppressors and for the oppressed; those experiencing suffering as well as those responsible for it.

This might not sound too revolutionary to some, but the reality is that it completely changes the game. Christ unconditionally dies alongside the just and unjust alike, and it is through this act of solidarity with the entirety of creation that all are atoned with God.

(It’s funny how this guy can simultaneously come across as Reformed and as a Universalist)

Anyways, the point of all of this is that I agree that it is through God that we are all able to belong to a reconciled, new community. This doesn’t mean we will always belong the communities of people that we live amongst (we won’t) and it most certainly doesn’t mean that we will always belong to the systems of power that we find ourselves surrounded by and participating in (we won’t).

It does, however mean that we will belong in the reconciled Kingdom of God that we glimpse throughout the biblical narrative, and I’ll gladly take that over any other kind of belonging any day.

*To read more of Moltmann’s awesomeness, check out  The Crucified God

Challenge Accepted – Part 1

Last night I shared a poem by Neil Gaiman and a short theological reflection about our desire as human beings to belong to something greater than ourselves. I then ended the post with a question; “What if God isn’t just that which gives us meaning or allows us to feel like we belong? What do we do then?”

A couple dozen people read the post, some liked it on Facebook, and my old roommate from DC even went so far as to challenge me to a theological duel because of the closing thought.

Knowing that he tends to lean in the direction of theological orthodoxy and I tend to be the friendly neighborhood heretic, David posted the following:

This is great. And I challenge you to a duel: I’m going to ponder your questions and write a blog in response (actually fits really well with my Lent theme of giving up knowing). But you’ve got to do the reverse. Write a blog in which you reflect on: ‘what if God really is that which gives meaning and belonging, the One who doesn’t leave us here alone? What do we do then?’

I’ve been pondering the questions on and off throughout the day and I’ve decided to answer them in three separate parts. 1) What if God really is that which gives meaning, 2) What if God really is that which allows us to belong, and 3) What do we do then? Tonight’s post will be in response to the first.

Also as a disclaimer, these are just my personal thoughts on the matter and shouldn’t be seen as an attack on people who might think differently.

 

Meaning

I really struggled with the first question more so than the latter two because of my understanding of “meaning”. For starters, I believe that there are acts that are devoid of meaning. I think that we can try our best to theologize everything, but acts like genocide, rape, murder, and the like are inherently meaningless. This doesn’t mean that we cannot grow or recover from such acts, just that the acts in and of themselves are meaningless.

However, in order to get to this place, I have to make a few other statements that are a little more controversial. I’m going to lose some post-modern style points for saying this, but I don’t think that meaning is just a socially-constructed reality that comes out of our personal experiences. Now I’m going to lose some Christian orthodoxy points by saying that I also have to reject the idea that meaning is simply divinely prescribed.

To bring this down to a very practical level, I’ll use some real world examples. Forced child prostitution cannot be given some sort of deeper meaning because a social group says so. Genocide can’t suddenly be inscribed with some sort of eternal significance simply because “God says so”.

But – there’s always a but – I do believe that our personal narratives are dynamic. There is an entire school of thought in the field of pastoral care that is dedicated to narrative theology and narrative therapy. With these approaches, people are encouraged to look at the story of their lives and reclaim the parts that cause us pain or challenge our self-worth.

Even though I may not believe that God can suddenly grant meaning to the darkest parts of our lives, there is no point at which God is unable to help us reclaim our stories. Nothing that happens in our narratives is so meaningless that our lives, stories, and experiences become meaningless too.

And that’s Good News.

Love and Belonging

So I know I like to rag on all of that “emotional” nonsense that plagues Facebook and the internet, but I came across the following poem this evening and for some reason it stuck with me. For those of you who don’t know, Neil Gaiman is an author/poet/songwriter/literary critic who has raised eyebrows and garnered serious attention throughout the world of contemporary literature because of his writing. His books might not fall into my genre of choice, but he can turn a phrase. Anyway, here’s the poem.

Dark Sonnet

I don’t think that I’ve been in love as such

although I liked a few folk pretty well.

Love must be vaster than my smiles or touch

for brave men died and empires rose and fell

for love, girls follow boys to foreign lands

and men have followed women into hell.

In plays and poems someone understands

there’s something makes us more than blood and bone.

And more than biological demand

for me love’s like the wind unseen, unknown

I see the trees are bending where it’s been

I know that it leaves wreckage where it’s blown

I really don’t know what I love you means

I think it means don’t leave me here alone

As I reread this, it dawned on me that if you skip the first two lines and then proceed to replace the word “love” in this poem with “belonging”, you would have a pretty accurate painting of the way that faith tends to function for many 21^st century Christians. So many of us don’t know what it means to belong, and so we seek it to the ends of the earth and then a little further.

We fight wars (literal as well as theological) in order to figure out who belongs and who does not.

We witness the attraction and comfort that is created by a sense of belonging, and yet we also see the trail of wreckage left behind when that same belonging is kept just out of arms reach.

We can’t figure out where that desire for belonging comes from or what will finally rid us of the grip that it holds on out lives, but we know that we are terrified of what life looks like when we are alone.

And so for many Christians, a God is constructed in peoples’ hearts and minds that fills the void. God becomes that which grants us meaning and purpose and the ability to belong, and we therefore cling to God with everything that we have.

Now I’m not God and I won’t claim to speak to God’s nature as if I had the inside scoop, but my question for you tonight is this:

What if God isn’t just that which gives us meaning or allows us to feel like we belong?

What do we do then?