Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Torbjorn Ekelund's "The Boy and the Mountain" - Review by Ron Dart

Torbjorn Ekelund, The Boy and the Mountain: A Father, His Son, and a Journey of Discovery (Greystone Books, 2023).

The Boy and the Mountain was originally published in Norwegian in 2017 and translated into English in 2023. Ekelund has, thus far, published two fine books that weave, thoughtfully and delicately together, the layered relationship between humans and nature: In Praise of Paths and A Year in the Woods. There is a meditative approach that shapes and defines Ekelund’s writing style, and such a tendency is front and center in The Boy and the Mountain.

There are a variety of suggestive layers at work in The Boy and the Mountain and the interweaving of such layers makes this missive inviting and evocative. There is the story of a young child (six years of age) who wandered from his mother in a backcountry and mountainous in southern Norway (near Kongsberg) in the Skrim area, lost his way, and was found dead---such was the fate of Hans Torske when he disappeared July 8 1894 and was found July 29 1895. It is this mysterious death of Hans that is constantly, like a stream, running through the mind of Ekeland as he takes to the same area with his son (August) for a father and son trek to, in principle, the summit of Styggemann mountain. But, what is the significance of mother and son taking to the backcountry, father in the city, Hans innocently leaving mother, then disappearing, lost in the woods, disoriented, many in the area searching for him, when found a year later dead? This is certainly a tale of poorly prepared trips and treks into nature, a child acting in a spontaneous and creative manner, nature quite indifferent to such a choice, no sense of how to orient or find his way back to his mother, then being lost and nature taking its inevitable toll—certainly no nature romanticism, those unprepared and unaware often victims of nature’s ways and means. So, the tale of Hans is the warning and backdrop to the hike of father and son.

How the End Must Come — Kenneth Tanner

 

There is a turn in human existence when for more than three hundred years the first Christians follow Jesus in the way of peace-without insurgencies, without rebellions, without riots. It is the first such sustained movement of non-violence before or after, and still stands as a witness to the authenticity of the gospel.

 

The way of self-preservation (as families or communities or cities or nations) has not always been the way of Christians, and as citizens of a world power Americans may not trust Christ enough to make the first Christian path our own.

 

Millions have perished down the centuries trusting in their crucified God. To suggest that they should have taken a more realistic or utilitarian stance, that they should have taken up arms, is a blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. These followers of Jesus were looking for a transfigured world, had a different country in their hearts.

They trusted that God was on the side of humanity, on the side of his creation, never a God with or for one people or one culture or one land but a God with and for everyone, everywhere.

 

Is there a final moment in history when instead of fighting, instead of taking up arms against the penultimate Hitler or the final ISIS, or whatever form death's last great tyranny takes, the church again visibly rejects the means and powers of this world, this privilege of self-defence, our idolatry of weapons, and wills instead to beat our swords and spears into farming tools, chooses to trust the humility and weakness of God in Jesus Christ to vindicate us-not our armaments, our anger, our right to stand up for ourselves-in order to manifest an already-accomplished defeat of darkness on Golgotha?

 

What if the end comes only after an unprecedented and great slaughter of Christians, after a worldwide crucifixion of the body of Christ, in which after great sacrifice in imitation of her Lord she dies and rises from the ashes of her demise by the Spirit, and God is finally all in all because the cruciform pattern of love that governs the universe and holds all things together and gives all living things breath, is confirmed in a peculiar crucified and resurrected people who look like the human God.

The Allure of Moral Clarity in a Time of War: A Response to Russell Moore - by Bruce Fisk

The Allure of Moral Clarity in a Time of War: A Response to Russell Moore’s “American Christians Should Stand with Israel under Attack” (Christianity Today, October 7, 2023)

Bruce N. Fisk, October 12, 2023

Between the headline and the byline of Russell Moore’s recent piece in Christianity Today we read:

“While we pray for peace, we need moral clarity about this war.”

It was this call for “moral clarity”—in a time of horror, rage, and confusion—that caught my attention. It reminded me of William Bennett’s 2002 hymn to patriotism, Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.

In the wake of 9/11, Bennett reminisced about how “the doubts and questions . . . seemed to fade into insignificance. Good was distinguished from evil, truth from falsehood. We were firm, dedicated, unified. It was, in short, a moment of moral clarity.”

It was this moral clarity about America’s righteousness that accompanied US troops into Iraq on a misguided quest for regime change. Cheered on by with-us-or-with-the-enemy rhetoric, our war on terror left many thousands dead, wounded, and displaced, and sowed seeds of resentment and despotism across the region.

Many are calling Hamas’ October attack Israel’s 9/11. Indeed, per capita, the number of slain Israelis is already more than ten times the number of Americans killed on that dark day in September 2001. Hamas has perpetrated unspeakable evil and horrific war crimes.

So, we’re told, one side is clearly right. The other is utterly wrong. This is not the time for moral confusion. We must stand with Israel. Full stop.

To claim moral clarity in such a moment, however, is far from helpful.

It means we take refuge in binary thinking, silence contrary voices, and erase the complexities—legal, historical, political, theological—that have beset the land and demographic wars in Israel/Palestine for over a century.

My first visits to the Holy Land, two decades ago, were marked by moral clarity. Today, I know too much. I’ve seen too much. Hamas is committing war crimes, without question. But they are not committing them in a vacuum.

Uncritical pro-Israel clarity over recent decades has provided international cover, financial backing, and biblical justification for legalized discrimination, settlement expansion, extra-judicial killings, and systematic Palestinian subjugation. Christian Zionists’ unflinching opposition to partitioning the Promised Land has excused land expropriation, demolitions of homes and schools, and other forms of legal discrimination. This kind of clarity we do not need.

In the weeks ahead, history will repeat itself. Thousands of innocents have already become homeless. Palestinian families, trapped between Hamas butchery and Israeli bombs, will suffer and die. What we need to hear at such times are calls for indiscriminate compassion, challenges to work for justice, and invitations to humbly acknowledge our complicity. What we don’t need to hear are tales of light and darkness.

Allow me to contend for messy perplexity rather than binary certitude, by challenging seven assertions embedded in Moore’s piece.

A Theology of Lived Experience - MariJean Wegert

If Christian leaders factored “lived experience”
into their theology, everything would change.

If Christian leaders understood and were able to empathize with the lived experiences of marginalized humans, they would preach very differently.

They wouldn’t preach depravity to LBGTQ humans who are already living in a body clenched tight with chronic shame.

They wouldn’t preach “emotions can’t be trusted” to women who are already told by doctors, partners, and the media that their physical pain, autoimmunity, anxiety, and depression were “all in their head.”

They wouldn’t preach suffering as godly to black bodies who carry the trauma of four hundred years of suffering in their DNA.

They wouldn’t preach “empathy is a sin” to men who were taught that suppressing their feelings (except for violent aggression — and posturing aggression while their football teams damage their bodies for entertainment) was a sign of true masculinity.

They wouldn’t preach logic and reason as a way to understand truth to a civilization founded on disintegration of the heart, body, and spirit from the mind, and subsequent homogenization and commodification of all things good and beautiful.

They wouldn’t preach a god of absolute, unquestioned authority to humans who have grown up without a felt sense of agency or resources to access their value as a co-creator with God.

They wouldn’t preach punishment as justice if they knew that punishment never truly rehabilitates, and that pathologies we call sin start to resolve only in the Presence of an empathetic witness.

They wouldn’t preach “the church has a masculine feel” to a politicized world where a rapist, misogynist, lying abuser is exulted as the hope for the nation — a nation that
desperately needs the voices and fearsome energy of femininity to come back into sanity and balance.

They wouldn’t preach that lived experience isn’t valid if they realized that discernment is holistic: it includes a person’s whole being, body, mind, and emotions — and interrelational — truth doesn’t emerge in a vacuum, and it can’t fit in a box — and must necessarily include dynamic, and relational modes to come anywhere near accuracy. Humans who lose their ability to feel emotions also lose their ability to make rational decisions.

They wouldn’t preach that lived experience isn’t valid if they knew the physical, emotional devastation that chronic invalidation has wreaked on their wives, their congregations, their friends in the closet, their marginalized community members they claim to love with the love of Christ.

Men wouldn’t tout that lived experience isn’t VITAL and necessary for discernment, and consequently (because obedience is physical, not cognitive) for truth if they realized that their own experiences in a male body have necessarily to hold up this destructive lie, internalized a self-betrayal so encompassing that they aren’t even aware of the dis-integration within.

Christian men wouldn’t need to defend this lie with their theology, and their mental conception of their creator, if they had courage enough to put down their white-knuckle need for certainty in exchange for the terrifying leap of faith called in their own pulpits “surrender.”

As C.S. Lewis put it, “No one is told any story but their own.”

Reposted by permission from https://marijeanelizabeth.medium.com
MariJean is a marvelous blogger whose subscription we endorse.