For the final meeting of our first-year Anglican Colloquium, we were asked to prepare a short write-up modeled on the essays of the This I Believe series. Here’s what I came up with. Now, what do you think?

Here’s hoping all y’all are enjoying a fabulous Christmas season,
J.

I believe in lost causes.

I should be clear that this is not so much an intellectual conclusion—some positivist nugget I’ve obtained by journeying through the darkness of ignorance, sifting through its mystifying presence by cataloguing and classifying it in the spreadsheet of my disembodied mind.

No, this is something I feel in my bones, an intuition I feel bubbling in the pit of my stomach, that little something that gets me up in the morning and through my first cup of coffee.  It’s the surge of excitement I feel when I discover an exciting piece of theology or theory; when I hear about the work my best friend is doing in campus ministry; when I’m teaching a bunch of undergraduates why I think Michel Foucault has everything to do with Jesus; when I’m singing “All My Hope On God Is Founded” in a big neo-gothic cathedral or John Tirro’s setting of the Sursum Corda huddled around an out-of-tune upright piano in a dingy old building with really bad carpet.

See, I think Cornel West has it right: we come into this world between urine and feces and we leave as corpses.  What a fabulously complex miracle of suffering and beauty!  If I didn’t believe in lost causes like beauty, I don’t think I could get up in the morning.  If I didn’t believe God is constantly at work redeeming this fleshy, dirty mess we call “life,” I don’t think I could live it.

But I can hear Dr. West right now: “No, no—less talk about death, more talk about corpses.”  Okay… corpses.  Let’s talk about my grandmother’s: the lifeless body left behind for my mother, her daughter, to mourn; the body that represented the steamrolling of her fondest hopes that her mother would live to see me.  I’m startled by the fact Mom is now older than her mom was when she died; I’m stunned by this corpse, by this body stripped of life far too soon.

My nanny is a lost cause—but one my mother and her siblings never gave up.  And between you and me—my fellow Episcopalians—I ask my nanny to pray for me when I can’t pray for myself; I usually send up a Hail Mary and a “Hey Nanny” back-to-back.  And sometimes, she holds me while I cry.

This affinity I have for lost causes isn’t some opiate for the human condition—or evidence that I’m simply maladjusted.  Think I’m crazy for thinking we could come up with something better than the present configuration of our economic order?  For imagining a world in which my gay friends no longer get thrown up against walls by their step-fathers?  Well, excuse me, but I’ve been to Mass today, and friends, our God does not abide by our pitiful definitions of the possible.

So watch as all our proud hegemonies, these our stately cultures of death, come crashing to the ground, the God from whom all words recoil taking on our humanity—with its urine, feces, and corpses—and tearing them apart from within.

Our world needs a little Advent, so I believe in lost causes.