The World According to lululemon

Like the dutiful Vancouver husband/father that I am, I marched off to lululemon on Saturday to see if I could find my wife a gift worthy of both her maternal skills and her status as an emerging distance runner. lululemon is a Vancouver company famous mainly (I think) for its yoga-wear (although I couldn’t help but notice that their tags say “designed in Vancouver, made in Cambodia”). At any rate, it is, apparently, where all the cool moms get their workout gear so off I went to see what I could find.

After an interesting experience that involved, among other things, being asked if various store employees “measurements” were similar to my wife’s, I found myself trudging back to my car, the proud owner of a shiny red environmentally responsible plastic bag with the “lululemon manifesto” emblazoned across it (I didn’t realize that fitness outfitters were allowed to have “manifestos” - who knew?). Not surprisingly, I found the wisdom on offer rather intriguing.

It ranged from the prudent…

Drink FRESH water and as much water as you can. Water flushes unwanted toxins from your body and keeps your brain sharp.

to the vacuous…

Breathe deeply and appreciate the moment. Living in the moment could be the meaning of life.

to the strangely morbid…

Visualize your eventual demise. It can have an amazing effect on how you live for the moment.

To the comical…

Children are the orgasm of life. Just like you did not know what an orgasm was before you had one, nature does not let you know how great children are until you have them.

To the unexpectedly insightful…

Listen, listen, listen, and then ask strategic questions.

To the axiomatic…

What we do to the earth we do to ourselves.

To the quasi-Buddhist…

The pursuit of happiness is the source of all unhappiness.

To the narcissistic…

Your outlook on life is a direct reflection of how much you like yourself.

To my personal favourite, the “protest against nature”:

Nature wants us to be mediocre because we have a greater chance to survive and reproduce. Mediocre is as close to the bottom as it is to the top, and will give you a lousy life.

You can imagine my relief at having nature’s nasty plot brought to my attention.

All in all, though, an interesting medley of pop-psychology, philosophy, and ethics for the side of a shopping bag (certainly more than I’ve come to expect from, say, Shoppers Drug Mart). If nothing else, it made for a nice distraction as I was painfully inching my way out of an overcrowded parking lot on a Saturday afternoon.

SURPRISE ENDING: Well, it seems that while my Mother’s Day selections were good as far as style goes, the sizes were slightly off so they had to be returned for exchange. Two hours later, my wife returned home with a couple of books for the kids, but no lululemon bag. It seems that she just couldn’t stomach the prices, and decided that a couple of home-made cards from the kids were present enough.

Sniff… I love that woman. So principled, so strong-willed, so well-grounded, so fearless and bold, refusing to be manipulated by the marketing machine…

Maybe another line should be added to the “manifesto”:

Breathe deeply, and choose not to spend exorbitant sums of money on ridiculously overpriced consumer goods.

I’m not holding my breath.

 

The Circuitous Path to Environmentalism

When I was a kid I distinctly remember feeling, at times, somewhat resentful of my “Mennonite-ness.” It wasn’t anything distinctly theological (although like many kids, I suppose, there were moments when I didn’t like being “the Christian” amongst a group of friends who mostly were not) or cultural (I don’t recall particularly liking borscht at the time, but ours was not a family that clung to any of the typical cultural identifiers of German “Mennonite-ness” too fiercely). I knew enough Christians to mitigate the unpleasantness produced by my status as a “cognitive minority,” and there were enough sweet German pastries to offset those Mennonite dishes that happened to offend my palate. No, the source of my resentment lay elsewhere.

To be blunt (and it’s somewhat embarrassing to admit this), I resisted how frugal we were taught to be. This came both from my own parents and, more directly (at least in my admittedly spotty memory), from my grandparents. I remember being told all the time to not throw item x out because it could be reused, to turn out the lights when we left a room (I can’t help but think of these silly BC Hydro commercials where people are applauded for turning out the lights, unplugging their cellphone chargers, and so on - we have our own ways of separating the sheep from the goats these days, don’t we?), to eat what we took (or take less!), to avoid littering, to turn off the water while brushing our teeth, to take shorter showers, to put on a sweater instead of turning up the heat (had to stick that in dad!), to be content with used hockey equipment, and the list goes on. Waste and profligate consumption were, quite simply, anathema to my grandparents.

I can’t help but notice the similarities between the way that my grandparents approached life and the way that we are currently being “encouraged” to live to avert environmental catastrophe. In both cases, a lifestyle of responsible consumption and fiscal restraint are offered as important components of living well in the world. The difference is, I think, in the motivation behind the two ways of approaching the world.

I’m not going to romanticize or over-theologize about my grandparents reasons for advocating a lifestyle of responsible consumption. They had nine kids and money was tight. To whatever extent the “three R’s” (reduce, reuse, recycle) represented their approach to consumption, a good deal of the reasoning behind this was simple economic necessity. However, I think they told us not to waste and to use resources wisely for deeper reasons as well. The earth was the Lord’s, and all within it. We were accountable to God for how we treated the planet he had made. Being wasteful and irresponsible in our consumption of resources was not just imprudent, it was immoral.

My grandparents may not have had all of the sophisticated scientific justification for living modestly that we now possess (or think we possess), but I think that their reasons for challenging their wasteful and careless grandchildren went beyond economics. Simply put, the God we served expected better from us. They knew what it was like to go without and that many on our planet struggled to meet basic needs. To live wastefully was to adopt a posture of indifference to the plight of others and to turn our backs on an important part of our heritage by refusing to learn from it.

I’ve been reading Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It over the last little while and I’ve appreciated the way in which he probes our current cultural obsession with such things as reducing our “carbon footprint.” Lomborg is as convinced as the next person that human consumption and lifestyle patterns are having a negative effect on the environment (although he differs with some of the apocalyptic predictions of some popular commentators); he’s just not convinced that such initiatives as the Kyoto protocol are the best way to attack the problem. More importantly (and necessarily, in my opinion), he’s a bit skeptical of the rhetoric being used to promote responsible action. I was drawn to Lomborg’s citing of the following passage from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth:

The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise…. When we rise, we will experience an epiphany that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge.

I wonder what my grandparents (or other Christians down through the ages) would say about Gore’s implicit view of those eras which preceded our current cultural moment. No “generational mission?” No “compelling moral purpose?” No “shared and unifying cause?” I have no illusions that my grandparents saw their approach to consumption as an “epiphany” or as a response to a grave “moral and spiritual challenge” in and of itself. But I’m quite convinced that they saw it as a (small) part of what it meant to be a responsible bearer of God’s image - as a (small) part of what it meant to respond in gratitude to the God who had made them and the world in which they lived. Sounds almost like a “compelling moral purpose” to me…

So now, twenty-odd years later, I look back at how I was raised with a sense of irony and appreciation. It is deeply ironic that a culture that has spent decades consuming itself to death has now “realized” that our future may depend on living with less and using what we have more responsibly. I think my grandparents (and many before them) knew that a long time ago. My appreciation comes from the fact that we were taught to live this way (although we didn’t always learn very well!) not as a response to catastrophic predictions from a sometimes hysterical mass media or because of a felt need for “spiritual transcendence” or a “unifying generational mission” but because we simply had obligations: to God, to our fellow human beings, and to the planet.

As in many other areas, I find myself in the position of expressing appreciation to those responsible for helping a stubborn, ungrateful, wasteful and acquisitive youngster to find his way in the world. I’m grateful that, to whatever degree they were able, my parents and grandparents modeled a way of being in the world that was, in some ways, ahead of its time. Whether this was the result of economic necessity, theology, or, more likely, a combination of the two, I’m thankful that it has, at least partially, trickled down to me. As a result, I will enthusiastically do my part to “save the planet” but for reasons that have less to do with the edicts delivered from on high by the current prophets of climate change than with a cultural and theological heritage that I am only beginning to properly appreciate.

 

Offended by God?

Over the course of my thesis research over the last year or so, I have come across a lot of different reasons for doubting the existence of God. One major stumbling block for those who reject Christianity is those parts of the Bible which seem to justify actions that we consider to be culturally backward, confusing, and irrelevant or, even worse, immoral. And I think that most Christians, if they’re honest, will agree that there are parts of the Bible that they find baffling, frustrating, or, possibly, just plain offensive.

A friend and I were in Alberta for a speaking engagement this past weekend and one of the biblical figures we focused on in one session was Moses. Most people are fairly familiar with Moses and the cluster of stories in his life which are prominent components of our biblical imagination (scenes like the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the receiving of the Ten Commandments, etc). One feature of Moses’ journey that is, perhaps, less well-known is the way in which he boldly interceded to God on behalf of his people when God seemed ready to wipe them out for their idolatry. Moses repeatedly calls on God to remember what he promised, to consider what the other nations would think, to turn away from his anger and show mercy (Ex. 32:9-14; 33:12-17).

Surprisingly, God relents. Moses’ courage and boldness appear to earn him God’s favour in a manner  somewhat analogous to how Job’s blunt expressions of confusion and outrage at his misfortune led God to ultimately declare that he, and not his friends with their neat and tidy religious formulas explaining human suffering, had spoken rightly of God (Job 42:7-10). In both cases, confusion, ambiguity, and outrage were presented to God honestly and unapologetically. In both cases, it seems that God was less interested in human beings pretending that God’s actions and intentions were perfectly obvious, transparent, and morally praiseworthy from a human perspective than he was in an honest acknowledgment of the pain and offense that walking with him can and does cause.

I’ve been reading Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God over the last week or so. Here’s what he has to say about what to think when we come across a passage in Scripture that we find outrageous:

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you…. Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? … Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination.

In other words, one skeptical assumption worth challenging is that if God exists and chooses to reveal himself to human beings, he is obliged to do so in a way that will simply confirm and validate our (profoundly historically and culturally conditioned) conceptions of what is good, admirable, and admissible.

On one level, I don’t find this much easier to accept than an atheist or an agnostic. I don’t find the idea that my moral conceptions might not represent the last (or at least the best thus far!) word on the question of what God is like to be a particularly comforting or comfortable one. But if I take seriously the fact that human beings are finite and fallen creatures, whose only access to reality is profoundly shaped (in positive and negative ways) by a whole host of historical, cultural, and psychological factors, then it makes sense to say that my vantage point might not be the plumbline which these matters are adjudicated.

In one of my philosophy classes in university, a professor told the story of a friend of his who was a committed Christian and a celibate homosexual. When my professor asked his friend if he agreed with the Bible’s teaching on homosexuality, his friend said that he did not. This, my professor found truly baffling. How could he possibly choose to commit to a religious tradition when he was in such obvious disagreement with it on a matter as important as his sexual identity? His friend said that Christianity made sense of enough important elements of his experience, and that God had proven faithful enough over the years that he had learned to trust and yield to him when it came to matters that he disagreed with. His confusion and disagreement with God were preserved within the context of faith, and with the understanding that it is at least possible that human conceptions of what is right and wrong might require modification.

My professor obviously found this pretty difficult to stomach. What, after all, could be more important than being true to one’s own beliefs? If anything is sacred in our post-Christian Western culture it is the individual’s freedom to decide what is true and meaningful for themselves. Yet I got the sense that he had a deep respect for his friend, as well. His friend’s position was not inconsistent or absurd. It simply took seriously the fact that human beings don’t see the whole picture and exhibited a conviction that faith does not require us to sacrifice our honesty - before God or before each other.

I find that facing the implications of the inherent limitation of the human condition - even when it comes to our moral intuitions - it is somewhat liberating in a strange sort of way. I don’t have to pretend that I love everything in the Bible, nor do I have to pretend that God’s way of acting in the world makes obvious sense and demands nothing but my reflexive and unthinking praise. Whatever else may be going on in the stories of how Moses and Job related to God, it seems that one important lesson is that God is not put off by human doubt, anger - even offense - in response to their understanding of how he is working in the world.

 

Wishful Thinking

“Hope” and “change” are words that are being slung around quite regularly lately. From Obama, Clinton and McCain south of the border to Ed Stelmach in my home province of Alberta to the eminently hopeful Oprah Winfrey, everybody’s selling something revolutionary - something which will offer us a brighter future, one in which things will, finally, change for the better. Hope might not be very realistic, and it may be historically unjustified, but it certainly does sell, as politicians (and Christopher Hitchens) know as well as anyone.

Selling hope is, of course, parasitic upon a level (preferably a manageable one) of discontent. Even in cases where people are mostly satisfied with the status quo - the province of Alberta, for example, where the Progressive Conservatives have now won eleven (!) consecutive majority governments - Ed Stelmach was eager to point out that he had “new ideas, new energy, new leadership for a new century.” Even a party that’s been in power for forty odd years has to keep things “new” and “progressive. If ever there was a case where you might think you could get away with selling “old” ideas, you would think it would be in Alberta politics, but that’s just not how election campaigns are run. Old ideas are interesting, perhaps, but new ones are always better - or at least more exciting and marketable

No one knows this better than Oprah - the one we turn to for all of our spiritual, relational, personal health, book-selection, and assorted other real or imagined needs. The Washington Post ran a pretty funny column yesterday discussing Oprah’s apparent inability to make up her mind whether or not her life really has been fundamentally revolutionized from one year to the next, or which diet, new book, philosophy, or spiritual program is responsible for said revolution. I was under the (obviously misguided) impression that Oprah discovered the “secret” to life last year, but it seems that was only a dress rehearsal (or maybe it just didn’t “take”) for this year’s book that has changed her life and revealed the path to universal happiness.

(I’m getting a little confused - last year I was supposed to just think the right thoughts and all of my wishes would just instantly come true, but this year it seems I’m supposed to transcend my selfish attachment to ego. It all sounds very bewildering to me, but I guess if I just watch her show and buy her products she [or one of her gurus] will sort things out for me eventually. I hope. Conceptual clarity and consistency aren’t, I suppose, high on Oprah’s list of desirable life-changing ideas. Personally, I think that getting “awakened,” “revolutionized,” or having my entire way of looking at the world fundamentally altered on such a regular basis would get a little tiring and disorienting, but I digress…)

However convoluted and inconsistent the latest gimmick being sold by Oprah might be, however trivial, dishonest, and vacuous our political discourse, however little evidence we might have that “new” equals “better,” each of these things point to the fundamental human need for hope for a better future. We can’t help but hope, to expect that the future will be better than the present, that one day - who knows when? - things will be as they ought to be. Someone’s going to make our deepest longings come true, whether it’s Jesus or Oprah, Barack Obama or Ed Stelmach. We are, as Frederick Buechner puts it, “wishful thinkers”:

Christianity is mainly wishful thinking. Even the part about judgment and hell reflects the wish that somewhere the score is being kept. Dreams are wishful thinking. Children playing at being grown-up is wishful thinking. Interplanetary travel is wishful thinking. Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.

“Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.” I like how Buechner puts that. It allows us to view the hope being sold on TV and in the political arena with a mixture of cynicism and understanding. We are cynical because we know that nobody’s going to be able to deliver on the kinds of promises that are frivolously tossed around to buy votes or sell books and DVD’s; but we understand that human beings are plagued by discontent (some of it manufactured, some of it inherent in the human condition) and are incorrigible hopers. We understand that the truth that we are set wishing for in our various ways, is both real and necessary.

 

(Grateful?) Cognitive Minorities

I count it a good Sunday morning at church when I leave the building empowered with good ideas for living well. Among other things, I think, the Sunday morning service ought to provide people with tools for interpreting their experience (at an individual or collective level) through the lens of the biblical narrative. Church ought to be a place where people can go to have both the world, and their beliefs about it (religious or otherwise) rendered in intelligible terms, and in a manner that both challenges and encourages the way in which they participate in it. No small task, to be sure, but this morning’s service managed to accomplish all of these things, benefiting greatly from a little “outside help.”

Today we were joined by two Mennonite Brethren leaders from Québec, Éric Wingender of École de théologie évangélique de Montréal and Charles Martin, the moderator of the Québec MB Conference. Together, they provided us with a window into the religious culture of Québec , as well as a timely challenge regarding the nature of the church’s influence in the broader culture. The province of Québec, much like the Greater Vancouver area, is an overwhelmingly secular environment - one in which a public profession of Christianity is likely to be met either by bemused apathy or open hostility. Québec’s situation differs from other parts of Canada due to the historical influence of the Catholic Church - an influence which, according to Martin and Wingender, is widely perceived to be a negative one. The Quiet Revolution in the 1960’s - a period of accelerated secularization in Québec culture - figures prominently in the collective cultural mindset. Christianity is perceived largely as a thing of the past, a relic from a period of Québec’s history that is best forgotten.

So how is one who continues to believe that Jesus Christ really does represent the clue to history to respond in a cultural context such as this? Peter Berger used the term “cognitive minority” to describe those in the modern West who believe in the supernatural despite powerful social and psychological pressures toward secularization, and while Wingender did not use this term, Christians in Canada - whether in Montréal or Vancouver - will likely resonate with Berger’s explanation of it:

Whatever the situation may have been in the past, today the supernatural as a meaningful reality is absent or remote from the horizons of everyday life of large numbers, very probably of the majority, or people in modern societies, who seem to manage to get along without it quite well. This means that those to whom the supernatural is still, or again, a meaningful reality find themselves in the status of a minority, more precisely, a cognitive minority… By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society.

In a context where the absence of belief in God is assumed, confidently self-identifying as “religious” isn’t always easy. Yet the fact that Christians no longer enjoy the status of “cognitive majority” is not necessarily something to be bemoaned. The message of Martin and Wingender in today’s service was that the overwhelmingly secular context in which many Canadians find themselves might just give us the chance to take a fresh look at how the nature of the gospel message ought to affect how Christians engage with the broader culture.

Both men strongly advocated a re-imagining of Christian influence within culture, moving away from the top-down approach those in Québec are so familiar with, and toward a “bottom-up” mentality, where Christians exercise influence through love of neighbour, compassion, building community, and seeking not only to present Christianity as a plausible “cognitive option,” but to demonstrate its truth in everyday life. On this view, the main issue is not “how do we take back what we’ve lost?” (especially when what we “had” might have been acquired illegitimately or immorally in the first place), but “what unique opportunities to reflect God’s redemptive gospel are made possible by our position as ‘cognitive minorities?’”

The text Wingender preached from this morning was Matthew 8:18-27. In these verses, Jesus displays two apparently contradictory ways in which God has worked and continues to work in the world. In 8:18-22 Jesus responds to a teacher of the law’s declaration to follow Jesus wherever he goes with an enigmatic description of the nomadic and uncertain nature of his ministry on earth. Wingender interpreted the “foxes have holes” statement as an expression of God’s peculiar and less-than-obvious way of working in the world. God “hides” himself from us in that he comes to us in unexpected ways that we find confusing and unsettling. Then, in the calming of the sea in 8:23-27, Jesus displays his power over nature, working in ways we are more accustomed to expect from a deity. This, Wingender referred to as God’s “revelatory” nature. Thus, God simultaneously hides and reveals himself from us. And the appropriate human response to God’s paradoxical manner of working in the world is trust.

So what does this have to do with how Christians, as “cognitive minorities” ought to think about and respond to culture? Simply put, God’s way of working in the world will sometimes seem strange to us. The loss of cultural influence by a once-dominant Christianity may not seem like a good thing - it may even seem to be something that God might have some interest in preventing. It certainly doesn’t seem like the most obvious way to “make disciples of all nations” (Mat 28:19).

But perhaps here in Canada we are entering or in the midst of a season of “hiddenness” as opposed to “revelation” with respect to how institutional Christianity relates to the broader culture. Perhaps the church’s mode of being in the world at times reflects the God they are called to image, operating in different ways - now advancing, now receding from view - in different historical contexts. For roughly 1500 years, God’s name was proclaimed or “revealed” by a culturally dominant church, which had both positive and negative consequences. Now, with the rapid secularization of the West, maybe the time has come for the “hidden” face of God to be proclaimed by a church who is humble, penitent, open to dialogue, and committed to loving our neighbours as ourselves.

I’m probably guilty of any number of exegetical errors in the preceding, but I am, at any rate, grateful for the message communicated by my French-Canadian brothers this morning. Both seemed deeply committed both to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to embracing the challenge of representing him to a culture that seems, on the surface to have had enough of God. I’m grateful for their reminder that wherever we find ourselves - Québec, Vancouver, or anywhere in between - we must realize that God does not work according to the straightforward linear models of “progress” by which we evaluate “success.” He reveals. He hides. And we trust.

 

The Real Thing

I’m rather loathe to hop on two horses that have been ridden as promiscuously and enthusiastically within some Christian circles as U2 and C.S. Lewis, but coming across both in the same week is bound to be at least somewhat thought-provoking, right? I’ve been a U2 fan for quite a while now - at least since The Joshua Tree was immortalized as my first “secular” music purchase in 1987 (by “secular music purchase” I mean the first cassette tape (!) that was not selected from among the six meager offerings at the local Christian bookstore). While I’m not one of these rabid fans who think that life as we know it began with U2, or that Bono is going to save the world, I do enjoy their music immensely (and I’m not quite as cynical as some re: the perceived endless moralizing of Bono).

So, you can imagine that I was pretty excited to go see U2 3D with a couple of friends at the IMAX theatre last night. I figured that this was about as close as I would ever get to seeing them live, and I was not disappointed. I have to say that it was a pretty cool show. I think the last 3D show I saw was roughly a decade ago, so my memory was a little foggy as far as what to expect. Once the glasses were on, though, it was pretty amazing. You almost feel like you’re a part of the concert itself (filmed in Buenos Aires) - there are arms raised in front of you, sweeping panoramic shots of the stadium, and the members of U2 doing their thing virtually right in your lap.

As always, the music was solid. One of my favourite U2 songs has always been “One.” While the lyrics of the song have, undoubtedly, been subject to many misguided interpretations, I will unashamedly take the liberty of adding my own to the mix. I’ve heard the song probably a hundred times or so, but last night, for reasons that will soon become apparent, the following line stuck out to me:

One love, we get to share it

Leaves you baby if you don’t care for it.

I read C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce for the first time this week and found his conception of the nature of heaven and hell to be a compelling one. I was particularly intrigued by his notion that heaven represents a “more real” world than the world we currently inhabit - more solid, more beautiful, more good, etc. It is, in a sense, the most “worldly” world there could possibly be, a place where every hint of goodness and beauty and nobility and purity is validated and received its fullest expression.

By contrast, hell is the least “real” place imaginable. Those who inhabit it are fearful, transparent, selfish, and characterized by an increasing desire for solitude. And according to Lewis, we who currently occupy the planet are always in the process of becoming either more or less “real” - more or less of what we were created to be.

So I found myself wondering last night, as I was up close and personal with Bono and the boys, if love really does “leave us if we don’t care for it.” I think Lewis would say that it does. The choices we make in life place us on a trajectory that will, one day, be finally honoured and rendered permanent. We are entrusted with the fearfully unique ability to become either more or less human.