Joshua M. Casey's Blog, page 2

I’m Publishing a Book!

This is going to start super general and end very specific, so bear with me…

First, the general.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot on the purpose of art––particularly my art.

See, I deeply believe part of our role as humans is to sub-create: to take the raw materials of creation and craft it into something which is part of it yet radically new. While it is stunningly beautiful on its own, we are tasked with its ordering and shaping, called to reveal new aesthetic vistas by our own manipulation of the natural world.

In some artistic pursuits, such as painting and sculpture, the act sub-creation from available resources is obvious––you take the stone or canvas and apply chisel or paint––but in others, like music or in my case, writing, the concept becomes more abstract.

At a base level, music is the conversion of friction or breath into sound waves, which vibrate invisibly in our ears, translating themselves yet again into neural data for our brains to process––yet the magic of music breaks the bounds of such clinical definitions.

The spoken word functions similarly, if yet more mysteriously, as societies attribute particular meaning to the sounds made by human mouths, allowing for the communication of ideas both practical (“take out trash the out”) and obscure (“how did we manage to create a society in which someone is offered an imaginary thing––money––in exchange for braving the elements to move my waste from one location to another”).

Again, these sounds do more than vibrate, they change the sounds from experience to meaning, changing and shaping them, so that the sub-creative powers of the writer are twofold: they manipulate the physical world of sound and the internal world of the mind. As Jewish scholar and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Words create worlds.”

And now we have the written word, which can weave its spell in our minds without even the intermediary of a voice. The trials of Odysseus and the wanderings of Abraham––once passed on by silver-tongued poets in marble halls and shepherds sitting round their campfires––have made their ways into our libraries and homes. And now, with the internet and its bevy of connected devices, these words have the ability to travel with us in ways even the physically-printed word found difficult.

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…All of which leads me to the specific.

I wrote a book. And I’m going to publish it this year!

Shortly after arriving in Bloomington three years ago, I began writing an account of my life, mostly for therapeutic reasons, though I also held some deep hope that it may help, entertain, or even inspire others. So I began the blog series “My Story,” examining my life through the lens of faith and my relationship with the church. As a pastor’s kid twice over (both my birth and adoptive fathers were youth pastors), who then grew up to become one himself, my life was essentially conducted within the halls of church buildings or around church people, so when I suddenly found myself rejected multiple times by the church, the entire foundation of my reality crumbled.

This called into question not only my faith, but my entire world. It ended my career and cast doubt on my “calling.” It forced a change to my community, my home, and any future plans.

Inspiration struck when I realized that much of my life to this point had followed a well-trod path: the expectation, revelation, descent, brokenness, salvation, and wandering reflected in my story were not unique to me. The narrative of the cosmos, which I was discovering and describing in my own life, has always been taking this shape.

In the Christ Story, particularly as practiced in the liturgical calendar, we see this same path played out in the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and in the growth of the community that took his name. I found names for these broad strokes of my life in the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, and Ordinary Time. 

So I began to arrange, to organize and name my story, hanging it on the scaffolding of the Church Year. With the frame in place, the work began to explode. I desired to meditate on these movements, searching in their long histories of faithful observance for some crumb of relevance for today. By the time I’d finished, I had a piece of art in seven movements, covering my own life as well as the lives and works of fellow sinners and saints. It contained moments of great personal pride and shame, stories from history and culture, and the words of luminaries from Dostoevsky to The Dude.

Now, for the last several months I have held this work in my hands, wondering what in the world to do with it. Ought it merely to be a personal accomplishment? A shelved piece of art, such as a painter may put in his attic, hidden under sheets, to be discovered by his children after he’s gone?

Or ought it be shared? And if so, how?

First, I asked friends and family to read the thing, to tell me if it was worth sharing, or if I ought indeed to hide this thing in the digital attic. The response was overwhelmingly positive, so I began seriously considering how to release my art into the wild.

Now, after months of seeking advice and critiques, of finding an editor, a cover designer, and begging for blurbs from author friends and acquaintances; after endless discussions on how to present this, how to raise the money for it, and how to “sell” it, I’m thrilled to announce the coming publication of my first book,

Tracking Desire: A Memoir(ish) Walk Through Faith, Failure, and Finding God Under My Feet.

As summer progresses, I should be able to offer more information regarding the book itself, the expected release date, and ways you can partner to help make this a reality.

If you would like to stay up to date, I encourage you to sign up for my newsletter.

Thank you for reading and sharing my deep excitement for this work I have spent so much time producing.

Peace,

Joshua

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Pentecost and Protest

Tongues of fire fell suddenly on those poor who had walked closely with one who had no place to lay his head. They appeared upon the unlearned crowns of those educated by one who was well-acquainted with sorrow; held together in fellowship of lives broken, blessed, and given away around the one table he had refused to overturn.

In the gloom, eyes sparkled in understanding beneath the red glow, arcs of light reaching out. An unnatural wind rattled through the darkened room, extinguishing candles while florid petals of flame ignited, licking the matted hair of the sleepless company, binding those who had lost so much into the fraternity of suffering, suddenly sparking the will to act.

They stepped into the morning light and walked toward the city center, tongues loosened by the flames to speak to those who had so recently taken everything from them. They stepped out to speak words of pain and frustration, of warning and of hope. They stepped into the light and held out the dawn to those who had lived in a land of deep darkness.

They called the hearers––those who had so recently cried out crucify!––to repent: to turn back from their belief in violence’s ability to resolve pain, and join God’s work of doing something new in the very midst of old systems of oppression. They gathered by the thousands in the midst of the city and, as soldiers and governors and priests looked on, cried out for change. And that day, these people starving for something new found it.

In the oncoming years, they would be jailed, beaten, lynched, and conspired against. They would be chased from town to town, blamed for riots and fires, for the moral and religious degeneration of a people . . . And yet still the new life grew from the midst of the old one’s dead rot, until, what started as the cry of a single people in one hurting city––fed up with oppression and weighed down with hopes long deferred––transformed into a global movement of freedom and eternal life. Not freedom from life into some hereafter, but freedom for life in the here and now.

The powers––with their monopolies on legal violence––did their damnedest to crush the nascent hope. They sent in their soldiers and infiltrated meetings, they prayed to their gods and closed the treasury’s coffers. Yet the violence done rebounded upon the state that had perpetrated it. As the man whose death let loose the cries of change had absorbed the hatred and pain and misunderstanding of his torturers until they could not bear it, so too did his imitators receive the very worst from the powers and offered only love in return––love and a demand for change. 

And so the powers had no other choice but to crumble under the heaviness of such weighty hope. What looked like the uprising of a riotous rabble in the heat of the day in the middle of a city exploded into a new humanity that refused to die or be silenced by the old.

Of course, it too has struggled to keep the faith and remain on the path of the one who founded it by his death and life––violences have been done in the name of the one who refused all violence––but still the new life surges on, guided every so often by new winds. 

I say “new,” but it is the very same that bore tongues of fire on the heads of those downtrodden prophets who had had their fill of fear and violence. And it is blowing again. If we will attend, they will transform our death into new life. Let us see and hear, repent and be baptized.

Breaking the Church Addiction

There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile.

Marcus Aurelius, Gladiator

 

Nice pocket square.

That was my first thought after playing the video in which iTown Church’s pastor described their reopening the last weekend of April.

Pulling attention from bespoke wardrobe to spoken words, I learned that Christians were now “officially in a position in which your religious freedoms are being removed in the interest of public health.” The pastor continued, “I agree that we need to follow the data, we need to listen to our doctors, we need to protect those in our community who are the most vulnerable. But I do not agree with our fundamental rights to worship being revoked.”

As the video played, I noticed myself running the full gamut of reactions: sartorial appreciation, laughter, eye-rolling, cynicism, and finally, anger.

That last one really surprised me. 

Aren’t I beyond this? I thought. Why am I disappointed in a church I don’t attend and angered by a pastor I don’t follow? Let them do what they want and I’ll do what I want. Really, I laughed to myself, this season has simply shown churches how “non-essential” they actually are.

And yet still I raged, sharing the video with friends and family who commiserated with me, then gleefully took to social media to debate the post on their own feeds. I laughed at their responses but found my stomach still churning. A line from the movie Gladiator came to mind: the General Maximus, incensed and exasperated by his forced-participation in the bread and circuses, screamed, “Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome—this is not it!”

[image error]“Are you not entertained!?” – every worship pastor ever

I thought of the Church,1 of my abandoned project to reform its worship through my own ministry––and of my many and absolute failures. I thought of my friends, most of whom have similarly given up on their own reformation projects––except one one who has continued the fight: reaping anger, depression, and financial ruin as a reward.

There was indeed a dream that was the Church I thought. And this? This is not it.

I cannot enumerate all the ways in which the church has failed. Rather, I hope to simply urge followers of Christ to fulfill their calling as the Church . . . By leaving it.

Really. We have been addicts and the institution has been our dealer, and we have a brief space in this lockdown to get clean. 

After millennia of attempting to “reform” or “restore,” to resuscitate the institution’s cold corpse, we must accept that it is in fact dead; all that now lives are the unwitting flailing of nerves, like a crushed spider’s twitching legs. But soon even that movement will cease and the institution as we’ve known it will be swept into the dustbin of history.

There is no saving the institutional church. Christ has indeed sent it “prophets and sages and teachers.” Some of them have been “killed and crucified” while others have been “flogged in the synagogues” (or the social media equivalent) and “pursued from town to town.” Too long has it feasted while others have starved, and separated itself when it ought to have been the yeast spread throughout the societal dough.

The church has fashioned for itself a gilded cage for its people to be held, coddled and safeguarded, while good pastors are run out or run down, and the bad ones grow fat. Nearly all denominations and traditions have at one time or another allied themselves with Caesar in order to forward their own agendas, enriching their coffers and cultural power. 

So now, when many find the cage’s gates forcibly locked “in the interest of public health,” congregants addicted to its supply, are set adrift, becoming “spiritually sick.” As Pastor Pocketsquare said, “People who are physically strong are growing emotionally and spiritually sick, and I believe the solution to this problem is the physical gathering of the church.”

But sometimes that “sickness” may be incipient recovery.

He goes on, reminding us that “church” is from the Greek word ecclesia,2 which means “those called out from their homes to a public place.” While others more learned than I could give a full explanation, suffice it to say he is using a very narrow interpretation here that miraculously results in “butts in the seats.”

But the Church ought to exist as the “called out ones,” spreading throughout the world, not sequestering themselves in a single place.

And so we must call out the Church from the church. We must fulfill the Body of Christ’s namesake and call the Church out from its place of privacy into the world.

As it is, however, we are in a position of people feeling “spiritually sick” because they have not performed their acts of public worship––as though God has withheld blessing and life and protection because their rites have not been fulfilled. But if we only live in the presence of God while publicly worshiping, the church has failed us. If our only community is within the walls of the church, the church has failed us. If we don’t know our neighbors and can’t stand being near our family, the church has failed us.

I would counter that, rather than being our primary place of worship, community, and family, church is primarily intended to function as a reminder—a sacramental moment that reorients our vision to what is always true, everywhere. An important reminder, yes. One that offers the healing balm of personal contact, yes. But it is to be a staging ground, not a destination. A reminder of the point, not the point itself.

And this is why we must call out the Church from the church.

For those of you accustomed to a weekly service, have you begrudgingly noticed that you . . . just maybe . . . don’t actually miss it as much as you thought you would?

Sure, there are aspects we miss, but they are not without resolution. And that’s my point: breaking our addiction to church does not mean abandoning the Church. All that is most weighty can be found outside the walls. Some may wish to keep going to a weekly service, but (again) as a reminder more than the point. I wager, if we step away long enough, we might just see the bloated institution for what it truly is, and realize that the Church’s relationship with the church has for too long been one of addict and dealer, and that in seasons like this when we are forced into detox, we begin to see clearly just how dependent we have become.

The ending of Gladiator finds Maximus killing the usurper Commodus in the arena, and attempting to reinstate Aurelius’s dream of Rome. But this is, of course, pure fiction. No such thing happened: no general-turned slave-turned gladiator saved the decaying empire. The few who held the dream died or left, their territory dwindled, and the Roman Empire slowly fell—like the buildings that now haunt the Eternal City—into ruin.

And so we must call out the Church from the church. For if we do not, the few remaining who rightly see their participation in a local congregation as an added privilege, rather than the point, will continue to leave their faith in the same buildings they abandon, never to return to either. Yet if we succeed in calling out the Church from the crumbling facade of its institution, perhaps we can finally scatter into the world we’ve been sent—into our neighborhoods, jobs, and (obviously) local pubs—and awaken and remind the world of its true nature. 

And if we succeed, we ourselves can fully become the Church: the living reminder that “Christ is all and is in all”—that each and every human being is filled with the same “same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead” and suffuses the cosmos.

So if a short lockdown can help break the addiction, then pass the hand sanitizer.

 

1. I’ll try to carefully indicate whether I’m speaking of particular churches or the mystical Body of Christ, the Church.

2. Because every announcement video needs a little Greek sprinkled in.