Northeast!

Some scenes from the recent vertiginous trip to China's northeast, strictly in sequence except this map from the museum dedicated to the neolithic Hongshan culture in Chifeng, which conveniently shows all the places we went in black, starting with Dalian at the bottom and winding up in Shenyang at the far right. ... There's a story to each pic. Ask! 

 

A map which happened to show all the places we went, at the 红山文化博物馆、Hongshan Culture Museum in Chifeng, Grand water display and a more mysterious coastal veil near 大连 Dalian. Classic holy mountain scenery at 医巫闾山 Yiwulüshan and unique mountaintop outcroppings at 克什克腾世界地质公园阿斯哈图石林景区 Heshigten Global Geopark. Silkworms fried to perfection at a restaurant near Yiwulü. Contrived jade dragon worship and big sand dunes at 玉龙沙湖 Yulong Sand Lake, a few hour north of 赤峰 Chifeng, with a view from our hotel window. An enteprising espresso-tuktuk at the entrance to Chifeng's Hongshan Culture Museum and a scene of the red mountain (=hongshan) which gives it its name. Models of pagodas at the 辽代历史文化博物馆 Liao Dynasty Cultural Museum (starting with the wooden pagoda south of Datong which we saw nine years ago), also in Chifeng, and a live v-logger in rented Qing dynasty kit holding forth among peonies at 喀喇沁王府, a Mongolian prince's mansion. One of a myriad fossils - this a bird-like feathered dinosaur named after Confucius - found in the Jehol Biota near 朝阳 Chaoyang, a town (at 3 million the smallest we stayed in) whose Liao dynasty pagoda is accompanied by a steady stream of circumabulators. (You might recognize it from the scale models in Chifeng.) Somewhat clunky cherubs graced the lush landscaping of the housing complex we stayed in in 沈阳 Shenyang, whose 东福陵 tomb complex for the founder of the Qing dynasty I remembered from my first Shenyang trip. A diaorama of the Hongshan people from the 辽宁省博物馆 Liaoning Provincial Museum doesn't tell us what they're worshipping. Some of the offerings at a seafood hotpot place. And one more view of the fossiliferous neolithic and Liao-shaped Northeast, from our Korean Airlines Flight out. 

Antiphonal

Finished Year B of the College for Congregational Development - got a certificate to show for it and even a teeshirt! 

The back of the teeshirt mimics and laments the psalms we recited in Morning and Evening Prayer - psalms we said "antiphonally": verses alternate between the two halves of the room, but each verse is also divided in two (by the asterisk), in whose middle there is a pause of, they told us, about three heart beats. This means there's a longer gap between the two parts of each verse than between the end of one verse and the start of the next, intoned by other people. 

This is an ancient practice, and one I have long loved. A long time ago I taught students how to do it, telling them to think of it like a pendulum, with a slowing and change of direction at the end of each swing, a breathlike suspension in the middle of each verse, before it gathers speed for the next. I must have had a way of letting them know how long to pause because I don't remember the anxiety we all felt here at CCD, not wanting to be the first to break the silence! Or maybe I'm remembering the times I spent in Benedictine monasteries where monks accustomed to this practice (they do it seven times a day!) made the pauses feel completely organic. I relished each one, like a draught of cool clear water, and remembered that here too.

At one point today (maybe it was even during Morning Prayer) we were asked to reflect if there were things we'd done during our week together which might be of use in a wider context, and I thought of - antiphonal chanting. How valuable it would be, I thought, if people had the experience of being in this patterned rhythm together with others, including silence, and especially if they knew from it that every verse of scripture (maybe any verse!) has more in it than its words. It is but a container for deeper knowledge or presence we can't articulate, the opening of a door to this vaster sustaining reality. Might this stop us in our tracks at the moment of judgment, condemnation? 

It occurs to me now that this thought was consonant with the aspect of "Episcopal identity" I gravitated toward during an exercise earlier in the week (see the array of twelve in the second image here) when asked what we thought our distinctive gift to the wider society might be. I picked 

Loving the questions and helping others love the questions about God, the spiritual life and life itself.  

Discussing that with the two others who gathered there I found myself making a similar point: our society pushes us into rigid, premature and polarizing identifications (answers), estranging us from the deeper transformative mysteries of our lives and interrelatedness (questions). 

Obviously, engaging more people in antiphonal psalm recitation isn't the way to do this! (I'm not sure everyone at CCD is a fan either - witness the teeshirt.) But other things like periodic retreats, or weekly sabbaths, maybe even structured collective experiences of breathing together in silence, might be. Thank you, CCD!

Giving up the privilege of praying

 

 

 

First in a suite of "Prayers for Strangers in this Strange Land" in the new issue of Sojourners, responding to the clashes and clamor around the impending 250th birthday of the US. 

Formations

Barely returned from China and I'm at the second half of the College for Congregational Development, picking up from last July. The handwritten newsprint posters, held up by blue packing tape, the strangely compelling windows of the Thomas Berry retreat center, the endless iterations of chicken breast concoctions for dinners... Even unjetlagged it would be déjà vu all over again. Happily, about half of the participants are familiar from last year, too!

Last year's rather wrenching program was focused on individual differences/ "preferences" and the dynamics of interpersonal relations in organizations in the midst of change, including the infamous Myers-Briggs test, which - amazingly! - noone has so much as referred to in passing this time. There were a few sessions on the particular charism of religious organizations but they were few. This year's is about the congregations all of us participants were sent by and will return to, and full of fun provocations like these twelve aspects of "Episcopal identity," spread along the four walls of our meeting space for us to graze among and then congregate before where there seemed a particular resonance. 

We're still given nuggets from business schools but the excitement comes in sessions on Episcopal or Anglican "temperament," the Benedictine way of life which this temperament makes accessible to laity as well as clergy, and each community's concentric circles of "mature practitioners," "Sunday sacramentalists," "occasional attendees" and the "vicariously connected," each a site of grace.

The curriculum's overall understanding of congregational development is the development of congregations of all sizes, locations, and conditions into more faithful, healthy, and effective communities of faith - one size does not fit all! - and we're asked to share all manner of perspectives on the congregations which sent us. We also got to go on a field trip to consider how congregations are known from the outside. Our team went to the jewel box of the Church of the Transfiguration. 

The focus has been on what our trainers are calling "formation," the way an organization, old or new, develops and renews itself by asking "who are we? what are we here for? who is our neighbor, and how are we related to our neighbor?" "Formation" comes from the scary model which operates in the background of the whole project to move beyond the "church in decline" diagnosis of Mainline churches like the Episcopal Church, Alice Mann's "life cycle of organizations."

Here is it, with little Xs from each CCD participant marking where we would place our congregations. It's natural that organizations live and die, but we're about ways of having the fullest life before the inevitable through various practices of "ongoing renewal, revitalization, redevelopment and outside intervention." (One of our trainers described it as "brush your teeth or they'll fall out.") This involves embracing the different "sizes, locations, and conditions" of church communities, and welcoming the reality that, in our own time, the "vicariously connected" are among our most important interfaces with the wider society. The old model of church-going, and of churches' contributions to society, is obsolete.

I'm not able to do any of this, needless to say, without thinking about my life in other institutions going through existential challenges: colleges and universities, liberal arts and the humanities, and of course our own sick puppy of a school... topic for another day.

Time warp

I've been off the grid for the last fortnight, having that vertiginous off-the-chart experience travel in China always offers me. 

This year's trip is to the relatively untouristed northeast - 辽宁 Liaoning and 内蒙 Inner Mongolia. We started in 大连 Dalian, a just century-old city on the coast. In the mountains of 赤峰 Chifeng we encountered the 辽代 Liao Dynasty, which ruled northern China for two centuries a thousand years ago, soon trumped by the 红山文化 Hongshan Culture, dating back 5000-6500 years. But even human history feels recent here, as a visit to 朝阳 Chaoyang reminded us, where we saw fossils of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and early angiosperms named after every place we'd been!

Back to grim US and New School realities on Friday. 

Involuntary separations

What we learned at a Faculty Senate meeting this morning was made known to the world later in the day. Nineteen beloved faculty colleagues are being let go. (The article doesn't mention that sixty-eight staff members are as well.) Almost all of the faculty, along with another forty-odd who have accepted various "voluntary separation" offers, are from the liberal arts divisions of The New School.

Liberal arts enrollments are indeed an ongoing challenge, for us as in other universities, but more than a few of us think university leadership is taking the opportunity of budget-forced "work-force alignment" to fundamentally to turn the ship away from the "social research" which has long defined us. Hidden within the article is the reality that many liberal arts departments are being devastated.

A university without a history department is a different animal.

Bicenquinquagenary

What to call the upcoming 250th celebrations? 

The current regime (Robert Reich argues we shouldn't defile words like "administration," "president" or even "government" to describe these lawless brigands, but "regime" is OK) has found ways to make even "1776" and "250" toxic (taxpayer-funded slush fund for paramilitary thugs? monstrous arch of vanity?), confirming their unworthiness of the history they claim to embody. What can we say worthy of that history?

Although decades of reconstruction await, I think the rest of us will muddle through. I'm heartened by Jill Lepore's wry perspective on the 1976 bicentennial ("by almost any measure, 2026 is a goat rodeo") and Heather Cox Richardson's just-unveiled "250 to 250" project, among other interventions. This history, as Richardson reminds us, is ours. 

But what to call the whole thing? The official moniker "semiquincentennial" - half of five hundred - gives me thousand year Reich vibes. A long view of history suggests that two hundred fifty years is a pretty impressive achievement. Most empires don't last that long, let alone longer. Invoking five hundred years sounds grandiose and presumptuous. (Most trees don't live nearly that long, for instance.) 

I'll settle for bicenquinquagenary (a term I encountered first at Princeton's 250th in 1996). If that sounds a little wobbly and weird, so much the better. At its best, the United States of America has always been a little loopy and piety-challenging.

Pea tangle

Camera lucida

Just sun and a tree dancing this morning. Eat your heart out, Man Ray! (But don't ask me why this magnolia, alone among the trees along West 12th St., freed itself of the sharp edges of every other's shadows.)

New School upon New School!

The New School aged a quarter century in a day! At the university's 90th commencement at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn today, our president referred to ours as a 130-year-old institution. A new story of the New!

It makes sense to start our institutional storytelling with the origins, 130 years ago, of the oldest part of the present institution - the pioneering school of fine and eventually applied art much later (1942) renamed Parsons School of Design. Parsons was saved from collapse by the briefly solvent New School in 1970, before rapidly becoming the most successful and lucrative component of the ensuing hybrid university, but what was happening there before 1970 fits awkwardly if at all into received New School stories. 

It would be good to weave our stories together better. Each is a bit of a shaggy dog story, though. What William Merritt Chase concocted in 1896 is nothing like what the school now named Parsons was to become. And of course the same could be said for the New School for Social Research, started in 1919, which my co-historian J and I have long argued spent a century trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) not to be a university. For its part the serendipitous 1970 merger - a surprise to both parties - only started to make any kind of sense in the last twenty years.

So it's passing strange to think that proto-Parsons was in some sense New School before New School was! It's the sort of thing folks say when they marry into families, but nevertheless more than a little odd. 

When The New School (the one kicked off in 1919) celebrated its centennial seven years ago, we saw first efforts really to combine the two stories. (You'll recall I found that no comparable efforts were made in storytelling around New School's 75th or Parsons' own centennial in 1995 and 1996.) These recent efforts mainly took the form - familiar, too, from marriages - of suggesting that TNS and PSD were meant for each other. The long years spent on their own - half a century for one, three-quarters of one for the other - were a kind of wandering in search of the unexpected partner who was destined to complete them. It was forced but the giddy conventions of centennial celebrations excused it.

If one hundred and thirty, it's funny to think that The New School is in fact a nineteenth-century institution! But it's less fun to think about these differently nested stories at a time when the Graduate Faculty, the distinctive key to The New School for a long time (though only starting in 1934, and never exclusively), seems about to be restructured nearly out of existence. I'm not quite ready to imagine that The New School existed in some nascent way before the New Schools of the twentieth century - and might somehow continue after them, too.