F(e)asting: Ascetic or Aesthetic?

A Lenten beat poem 

based on Matthew 4:1-11 and Isaiah 58:1-2

We long to know the face 

and grow in the ways 

of the Lord, but growing pains 

strain us 

as we fill into the God-shape. 

In the past, 

on a monastic retreat,

I resisted the delicious scents 

of fantastic eats. 

But no ascetic ecstasy awaited me that Lent 

- just the persisting hunger of a fast broken and bent. 

Lenten abstention came and went, 

but what had it meant?

Is self-affliction our eternal condition? 

Images of the kingdom 

riveted to the lingering 

moments of hunger and homesickness

- those cravings 

enslave us to the awaited 

age of rebirth, 

testify to our desired new earth, 

preempting redemption through a

Lenten diremption 

of temptation from beneficence. 

Empty the self kenotically. 

Idiotic? 

Possibly. 

Gutting the body, hollowing the bowels, 

following the hallowed fertilized fallows 

awaiting a new seeding. 

Make peace with the season 

as a septic cleaning

- an existential enema 

for the proleptically resurrected. 

Fasting is not being-unto-death, but living 

through the death-ing of the present everything, 

stretching longingly

toward eternity. 

Yet we are indeed 

called to recall 

that we are carbon-based life forms, 

fodder for conqueror worms,

whose enzymes and germs 

will un-spoil 

corpses into topsoil, 

readying the killing fields 

for harvest yields. 

Resurrection smells like the mouldy bread of vitality, 

a non-finality despite the decay of mortality. 

Etching an ashen intersection upon my face,

I reminisce the life-in-death of the Lord’s Last Feast.

Our results are not timed at the finish line, 
but by the rhythm and rhyme of the sacred time. 
The divine kairos 
criss-crosses 
the minutes and seconds of history 
which all of us spend in blisteringly 
dull routines, with aches in our feet 
racing and pacing in the desert heat. 
We miss the synchronicity, 
that cosmic elasticity, 
when the Spirit spins the globe 
to revolve on the rpms of the heavens, 
faster, 
faster, 
fasting. 

Then the world grinds to a halt, 
and the light and the salt 
dissolve into wastelands 
everlasting.

A perimeter line 
on the sandswept hillside 
etches the divide 
between the swollen cravings 
of my heart’s raging 
and the distant objects of my extant longings.
They’re what I pace toward, 
turn my face toward. 
As long as I seek my missing piece, 
the reasons I give 
for the habits I live through 
only justify 
and lie 
that the circles on the ground 
my tracks have worn down 
are a path that’s tried and true.  

Hold fast, 
boldly fast. 

Striving for renewal, 
depriving my insides of fuel 
for my drives
...but still alive.

Viewed from addiction, 
elation is temptation. 
My motivation and identity 
pours forth from negativity, 
an abyss obsessing over what will fill me: 
a far cry from Chesterton's vision
of the necessary as luxurious, 
the quotidian as the flourishing, 
a revelling in the commonplace 
as the placeholder of grace. 
Glasses raise 
just to reach normalcy 
instead of praising exorbitantly.
The moment that wine
becomes medicine, 
it settles in 
to balance the baseline: 
liberating libations 
instead merely negate negations. 
Zero-sum logic 
turns gifts into projects, 
and the overflow of the gift 
becomes a leaking drip to be fixed. 
So don’t discourage in privation, 
but flourish in elation. 


Yet I profess that fasts
slowly grow awareness
in us. 
Wallace reminds us 
that this is water. 
This is water. 
This is water. 
This is wine. 
The scratched record skips 
and flips 
and finds a new groove, 
a new tempo in time. 
From the background, 
we hear the soundtrack again, 
new sounds bounce back and then 
echo and fade. 
Wade through the white noise,
wait for the right pause, 
orchestrate the wait, 
and test that whole rest. 
...
Mark time 
til you find 
that stark line, 
a melody to remedy 
and supercede 
the unplayed notes and beats 
you left behind. 
Overblow the pianissimo, 
‘cause finally the finale 
rallies the silent symphony. 
Break your fast now 
as the band breaks into a faster tempo, 
desires fire on all cylinders 
as they fill up on sensory overload. 
Shout like trumpets, 
blow low and high notes 
- and know that your song floats 
toward the right hopes.

This is no time to forego, 
this is the time to go forward. 
Out of the wild, 
riled up to sup. 
Out of the desert 
seeking dessert. 
Never abstain because you’re still stained, 
never desist because you’re diseased. 
Indulge in superfluous profusion:
fast faster...and feast!

A Commentary on Community

It wasn’t until college that I realized that I had never heard the word “community” -- I mean, really heard it, heard people leaning on it than as more than just a simple representation of social proximity. But last year, the concept really opened up on my consciousness when I spent a semester living in a makeshift intentional community within the restrictions of Christian college dorm life, studying with other students and professors about Christian solidarity and the meaning of intentional togetherness. That experience taught me reams about the goodness of communal intentionality, as well as the perils of community visions that are too narrow and rigid to accompany the organic unfolding of many unique individuals being together. However, the more I learned about the richness of the notion of community, the more disillusioned I became by the popular employment of the term itself.

It is not simply an overused word: it has entered the realm of cliché, where terms become buzzwords, bearing the weight of a thousand illusive allusions. Thus, it has become fashionable in many sectors of our society to promote a certain naïve brand of communitarianism: witness Starbucks' hijacking of the term to peddle their wares globally. Unfortunately, this sloganeering lip service is dangerous, because it provides a bright, comforting facsimile of virtuous unity with none of the responsibility or reward of its actual pursuit.

I hate that I still thrill at the sound of such empty communitarian rhetoric, but it's beginning to take its toll on me. The “community jones” that has been growing in me has stretched me to convey myself in terms of neighborhood, togetherness, unity, interdependence, etc. Of course, these terms also stand on the brink of semantic binging, losing their meanings through overuse. As a word, “community” suffers from an identity crisis: it can’t decide whether it wants to be descriptive or prescriptive. As long as we merely  “communify” the status quo rhetorically, we fool ourselves into feeling the buzz of a more purposeful co-existence that lacks the life-breathing implications which only hard work with one another can bring.  Does such rhetoric get in the way of true community by convincing us it already exists when it doesn’t?  Or rather, is such language an important first step toward truly changing the way we think and act in the world?

I think the problem is that community presents itself as being real instead of being an ideal grounded in reality. “Community” is not simply a label to be stamped onto any togetherness in the hopes of feeling better about how little we truly put into one another. For instance, a picture of agrarian farming is idyllic and breaks us out of our suburban reverie, but it rings false in my ears. Being from an Iowan farming town, I know bullshit when I smell it, particularly when it reeks of pastoral platitudes. This is my problem with pop ecology (the “going green” lip service which most international corporations have embraced in pursuit of a more “real” image). Now, I’m all for a robust local commonwealth and I consider myself a communitarian. But the more I've thought about how I imagine an ideal neighborhood openly sharing its joys as well as its struggles, I've realized how much true community I've missed in the mundane moments of my existing relationships. I began to realize that those experiences could be inspirational pointers to a life more in tune with those around me and with God.

Walking under the interstate overpass a while back, I saw a group of kids and adults painting a giant mural on the wall, one of those feel-good community scenes. It struck me that I'd always imagined those murals of cooperative, ethnically diverse, sunshiny neighborhoods as being painted by a single artist, yet here was proof that the form of community was bearing fruit, even if the painted image itself promoted a misleading vision of community.

In spite of my reservations about the content of the project (although it's certainly more inspiring than the surrounding abyss of neon signs, ad banners, and half-hearted graffiti), I was impressed by the fact that this was truly a community endeavor. Far from being platitudinous, the form of the artwork sincerely attempted to match its message. I think this scenario captures perfectly the essence of the problem prompted by oversimplified notions of community.

So what do I propose? I think it's important to begin where we are. We need to acknowledge the traces of goodness and rightness, wherever they may be found, in the people and relationships already surrounding us. As far as the linguistic issue, the beautiful flip side of a suspect communitarian lexicon is that the over-sized load of meaning that “community” implies serves as a wonderful reminder of our goal together, calling us into a more loving, intentional embrace of others around us in surprisingly ordinary ways. It is not an apathetic baptizing of the ordinary under communitarian terms, but it is instead a call to further commitment, and to re-commitment.

I think those intent on creating healthy communities together need to commit explicitly to a shared purpose, so that we have a common referent instead of the hazy illusion of unity. Unity needs a direction, a purpose, a vital telos. First and foremost, we need to see each other as worth pursuing relationally for each other's sakes, without ulterior motives. However, that kind of intentionality can quickly stagnate into a flat-souled tolerance of each other. So we shouldn't simply turn our gaze from those actually present with us toward some utopian version of each other, but we need a vision of who we could be as uniquely created individuals, together with each other in community -- a vision more in line with how God views us, how God created us to be, individually and together.  Cornel West has said, “Justice is what love looks like in public;” that sentiment embodies much more closely the kind of gracious, loving togetherness that the term “community” has wearied from trying to carry. So, by all means, use the word. But let it remind us that the word implies work.