Excelsis

Of course, vagueness has its value, and for me that was being able to manufacture the perfect description for the particular person asking about the company. If I didn’t want to give her the impression that it was very much linked to specifically evangelical Christian theology, I didn’t have to. If I wanted to be especially curt, I could usually just say I was doing web design, and people would stop asking questions. That’s another thing–the lack of clarity on the company I was interning for spread also to my own job description. I never knew from day to day what I would be doing, and it was rarely what I expected. Obviously, I liked this situation, and it worked well for me, since I never really had time to get bored with a particular project to the point where I was trying to find ways to make it look like I was working on it while really surfing the internet. On the other hand, I did, I will admit, write a good many weblog entries while at work.

The highlight of my internship was attending a seminar, put on by Excelsis, taught by Graham Tomlin of Wycliffe Hall at Oxford. In many ways, that seminar was the organizing agent of all the confused and scattered thoughts on culture and religion I’d had over the course of my Stanford education (not implying that Stanford had anything to do with the thoughts). Its title was the same as a recent book by Graham, called The Provocative Church, and the subject matter was, for lack of a less clichÈ concept, the relationship between modernism and postmodernism.

During the sessions of the seminar, I realized I had a very narrow idea of the interplay between modernism and postmodernism. Like most of my philosophical knowledge before “purification”/”objectification”, it arose as a result of apologetic endeavors. That is, I viewed “postmodernism” as nothing more than a longer version of “relativism”, and therefore the enemy of true Christian faith. As it turns out, I was completely wrong on the definition, and the inference is decidedly less clear than it used to be.

In any case, I began to see postmodernism not as a well-formulated though anti-logical doctrine, but instead as a haphazard jumble of values, cultures, literatures, emotions, semi-philosophical thoughts, and the like, that had one common thread: a deep suspicion that modernism, or the de facto state of the world for the past however long, was not going to bring us to utopia. With this realization, many floodgates were opened, and I saw that, to my surprise, I really had more in common with what I would now call the “postmodern” than the “modern”. Indeed, I saw that many of my struggles with church, with philosophy, with the apologetic approach to Christianity, were the struggles of a postmodern soul seeking refuge from antisepticity, but likewise afraid of going the other direction to pure, dirty, rawness.

Complexity abounds, though, so I would not go so far as to simply proclaim “I’m postmodern”. As I’ve mentioned, it’s not clear what exactly that even means, and whether it is more a positive or more a negative concept. Looked at as a philosophy, there are no doubt things I will want to take up and things I won’t, just as with modernism, which gave us valuable fields like analytic philosophy. There are other ways to look at it, though, and maybe more important than the philosophical viewpoint is the cultural viewpoint. I like to think that I am a very culturally aware person (to a painful degree at times, especially when with people who are less so), and if this awareness extends to myself, I will be right if I say that I am in many (if not most) ways uncomfortable in “modern” cultures, and more comfortable in “postmodern” environments. This must be qualified by saying that the kind of postmodernism I am discussing is not the variety that has run, fad-like, through many of today’s churches. Youth group leaders are eager to chop off their hair, get an earring or 3, turn off the lights, burn incense, spout phrases like “lectio divina” and so on, while remaining at the core perfectly modern. As far as I am concerned. I am not talking about that.

But enough with the labeling that I don’t want to get into anyhow. The point is, I felt like I was given just the right lens through which I could analyze the unanswered questions of my personality, my relationships with people, and my faith. The main point of the seminar, of course, was on the engagement of the Christian church with this dynamic of the postmodern replacing the modern, and therefore useful to the entire community present, not just myself individually.

Sadly, the analyzing I spoke of is not yet done, though I’ve been working on it for this entire school year. That might end up taking longer than I thought.

Right now, Excelsis is working on turning that seminar experience into an interactive learning tool which will essentially become a self-contained class on DVD. Having seen a prototype of the interface (and having transcribed a good deal of the text from the lectures, Q&A sessions, and so on), I am really excited to see how the final product looks. I can only think that, if it was the perfect vehicle for propelling me into a completely different mode of thinking about things, it could very well do the same for many other people. And then we’re one step closer to influencing Christians to be more aware of what is going on around them. (Ironically, I went into philosophy hoping ultimately to be able to influence non-Christians to come to faith, but now I think I am more concerned with the Christians, as we are in what appears to be a rapidly sinking ship).

Over the past year, Excelsis has (in my intern’s opinion) grown up and grown more focused. Seeing progress on the project which before was sketched out only in ideas and dreams, and seeing plans to hold four more seminars this summer, has given me a sense of what Excelsis is about (or one of the things it is about) and what it has the potential to do. Moreover, they’ve hired a few more people, bringing the total team size to a whopping less-than-10. It’s a good thing I like this team (of which Pavi and Faith keep weblogs of their own), though, because I have agreed to work for Excelsis after graduating. In other words, I have a job! As a soon-to-be-philosophy-graduate, this is more than I can expect, ask for, or even dream about.

Honestly, I am excited about Excelsis because it seems like it could be, for me anyway, the next chapter of a good story. The next step towards Mt. Doom, if my story is an epic. (I hope it is. In epics, depending on what character you are, you actually find the beautiful warrior princess you are looking for. Sometimes it’s even more towards the front of the book!).

Luckily for me, that next step is not through the ash-ridden plains of Gorgoroth, but to Orlando, FL, well-nigh paradaisical! Living at home with my parents (and occasionally, my sister or brother) will be awesome, and I can’t wait to finish up here, pack up my car, stick my bike on the rack, and drive cross-country just so I can start my new life there. I’m always ready to start a new stage in life–to wash the staleness of the old one off: to reset, tabula rasa style, and commit once again to avoid compromise, to love people, to believe in people, to give God another chance to show his face, and all the rest.

For now, it’s time to put my head down and stick it to the man! That is, finish well and actually graduate. But I’ll have a toast nonetheless: to the future!

(PS: For more info about Excelsis, including an idea of some of their initiatives that I did not mention, you might as well go to the website: excelsis.cc.)