Walter Benjamin worked thirteen years on Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), beginning in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when he fled the German Occupation in 1940. A friend, George Bataille, “hid the manuscript away in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France during the second world war and then retrieved and delivered it to New York at the end of 1947”!!!
It is a work literally dug up and recovered from the rubble of war.
Benjamin called this project “the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas.” It is a giant mess of a book, designed to undermine the bourgeois ideological mask that typically overlay historical presentations of the 19th century.
It gave birth to something new: history from below rather than from above. It looks to the rubbish of history, the conquered, the suffering ones, as the center for history. The world has typically told its history focused on the victors.
It’s very style is illustrative of its substance. One commentator said it “induces in the reader a secular oneiric attention, a sort of watchful dreaminess–even a sort of illuminating boredom” (Mark Kingwell).
Illuminating boredom. History from below. Creativity from the ash-heaps of history.
I’ve been pondering this while looking at highly creative projects I’ve seen emerging from Lutheran friends. The first one was planted, quietly, on our church driveway, and has spread like a strange kind of food desert fire through neighborhoods and social media. Jessica McClard, our council president, together with friends, erected a Little Free Pantry on our property.
You can find all kinds of articles about The Little Free Pantry online, because it has blown up in social media. If you want to listen to an interview with Jessica, I recommend the one we recorded.
The Little Free Pantry is not a big thing. It holds less pantry items than one cupboard in a household kitchen. But it’s had immense impact “from below,” changing the lives of givers and receivers alike, perhaps even undermining the traditional patron-client narrative that dominates 21st century charitability.
Then there is Rev. Jason Chestnut (together with his ecumenical colleagues Rev. Jennifer DiFrancesco and Rev. Sara Shisler Goff) at The Slate Project. The Slate Project is a new kind of Christian community that gathers both on-line and face-to-face in Baltimore, Maryland. They are committed to following the way of Jesus together, into their local and digital neighborhoods and discerning in community how to be the church in the 21st century.
Jason is leading our denomination in doing church ‘from below’ in the social media arena. It’s a lot of work to minister in digitally-mediated contexts, and much of it gets buried in the rubble-heaps of inattention. Jason and his colleagues are working in the theater of struggle and ideas, in particular emphasizing the theology of the cross as it plays in a strangely mediated world.
Speaking of plays, I’ve also been paying attention to a project Daniel Maurer has been rolling out. Of course, Daniel is most well-known, and deservedly so, for his books and graphic novels, the most recent of which is a spectacular graphic novel about Martin Luther as a dad.
But he’s also been at work developing a resource of downloadable progressive church plays and dramas, funchurchplays.com. He calls the site Arches ‘n Bells, and it is the first website—ever—to focus on producing thespianic awesomeness for progressive mainstream churches and faith communities.
Well, skits and dramas are their own kind of technology, and they take their own kind of steel nerves to do well. But Daniel’s right when he observes that “kids, youth, and adults respond to theatrical productions and they hold people’s attention.” Some chancel dramas I saw as a child are still stuck in my memory banks, as are the crazy skits we made up at church camp. Drama has staying power.
Finally, sometimes the church has to be saved from itself, and the movement in our own denomination aiming to do just that is #DecolonizeLutheranism. http://decolonizelutheranism.org
Their inaugural conference is coming up this October, and registrations are already open. My friend Francisco Herrera, together with a whole host of folks, are planning to decolonize Lutheranism, but his way of doing it may not be what you expect.
Two of the firmest foundations for Lutheran life and identity are the liturgy and the Confessions – especially the Augsburg Confession. Francisco writes, “When we come together in October, the main question we will be asking each other is “What does it mean to be Lutheran?” Sometimes it will be tied to things like tradition and family, other times the ways that we talk about God and Jesus and that ever-sneaky Holy Spirit, still other times the writings of Luther and company and all who have worn the mantle of “Lutheran” over the centuries, in whatever the land or language. Hence, the liturgy and the Augsburg Confession are two prime places to begin all serious conversation on Lutheran identity – fertile earth from which something new and exciting and inspiring always springs.”
Sometimes you don’t know who you really are until you build a pantry. Sometimes you learn your own faith by designing a meme. If you want a theological challenge, try writing a play that illustrates your theological convictions in a story well-told and well-acted. If you want to find your center, ask those outside your center what real center you both share together (and maybe sit down for a meal of lefse AND injera).