- A large framed print, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, depicting a lone bird in an overcast sky, hanging on my bedroom wall.

- A rock, picked up in the Plaza de Armas, Cusco, Peru, by Julia Pelsinski on a night we went dancing, which she carried in her purse for over a month and gave to me the night before I left Peru.

- A large mess, on the floor of my bedroom in the basement of my parent’s house the result of: 1) my attempts to organize, which inevitably involves the room falling into a bigger mess than before on account of everything being pulled out for sorting (most things being thrown/given away), 2) my luggage basically exploding when I “unpacked” after returning home, 3) my inability to put my “unpacked” things away due to the current organizing process (which, admittedly, is not my favorite thing to do, and so takes a very long time, because it’s easy to get distracted by reruns of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” when you are doing something you dislike).

Good bye old friend. You’ve been good to me.

I just wanted to say again how much I loved the sand dollar necklace. The peppermint dental floss was an inspired touch. Who are you Ned Plimpton? I find myself asking that question. I hope you allow me to find out.

Love, Jane.

1. Contemplative Practices

Silva hates any kind of contemplative practices. His characterization of them (as typical with most things on his site) is skewed and actually opposite of what those types of practices are about. He constantly refers to them as being “mindless” activities where you “mindlessly” repeat phrases or words. Meditative/contemplative practices are really about mindfulness. Exercises like praying beads or lectio divina are challenging and instructive because it is difficult to be mindful on one phrase or verse for more than a few moments. Through the repetition and stillness of contemplation you become open to seeing things in a new way. Silva has taken shots at Brother Laurence, but Laurence’s whole point was to make sure every action he took was God centered. God communicates truth to us in very profound ways when we are still.

However, the real root of the problem is that Silva doesn’t believe in the validity of a contemplative experience. He writes “Contemplative prayer, by design, focuses on having a mystical experience with God. Mysticism, however, is purely subjective and doesn’t rely upon truth or fact.” People of Silva’s ilk are scared of the idea that there are parts of life/the human experience that aren’t purely objective. But the truth is many of our experiences, especially relational experiences, are subjective. I’m not going to say there is no such thing as objective truth, but in our day-to-day life most of our feelings are subjective. The way I love my parents, the way a man loves his wife and the way we react to our experiences are subjective. Why wouldn’t the way we relate to God be the same way?

2. Sola Scriptura

The thing about Silva is that his beliefs aren’t really Nazarene or Wesleyan. Silva hammers over and over that the only way God communicates with us is the Scriptures. That the Scriptures are the only source of truth. That contemplative/eastern/roman practices are evil because they are not specifically mentioned in the Scripture. Anyone who payed half attention in their sophomore theology class at a Naz. school knows about the Wesleyan quadrilateral, which is John Wesley’s belief that our theology comes from four places: Scripture, experience, tradition and reason. Wesley didn’t believe in Sola Scriptura. In fact that is one of the main differences between the Wesleyan traditions and the Calvinist/Reformed traditions.

But not only is Silva’s belief not Wesleyan, it’s not Scriptural. Silva wrote on his site (in response to a student who said they were listening for the voice of God), “Well, for me I listen to God by mainly reading His word, and understanding what His word says to me. His Holy Spirit guides me into truth, but it is always grounded and goes back to His word. I do not hear a little voice in my ear!” Throughout the Scripture, God actually does speak to people through a little voice in people’s ears! In fact, the Scriptures weren’t written for a lot of those people, so God communicated through a variety of means. He speaks through burning bushes, talking donkeys, valleys of bones, mysterious floating wheels, dreams, visions, angels, disembodied hands, tongues of fire and audible voices. He also communicates to his people through metaphor, whether it’s wrestling with Jacob, or through the actions of the prophets like Hosea. To say that God can’t or doesn’t speak to us through contemplation, or in a way that is mysterious and miraculous, is to rob God of his power and creativity, and deny that God is still active in the world today.

3. Inerrancy In Scripture

I’m not going to argue against the idea the Bible is the inspired word of God. I don’t have a problem with believing that. But the phrase “inerrancy in Scripture” is invoked by people who don’t actually mean they believe the Scripture is inerrant. What they really mean is that their way of reading it is inerrant. They like to talk about evolution and how the earth is really only a few thousand years old but they miss some of the most important parts. Silva is pretty vocal about evolution being taught in Nazarene schools, but I haven’t found anything on his website objecting to R.O.T.C. programs on campuses that advocate violence and military service (which, unlike evolution, is specifically mentioned by both Christ and Paul). The whole “inerrancy” camp wants to be able to have their cake and eat it too. They way to be able to claim the whole Bible is completely true but pick and choose what parts of the Message they follow.

In conclusion, while I do think Silva is wrong, I also think it doesn’t really matter. His beliefs belong to a scared group of reactionaries who are seeing their value-system becoming more and more irrelevant. I talk to a lot of young people from all over the world every day. The people who come into our cafe aren’t going to respond to people like Manny Silva. It’s a new day. And just like there was a need in Europe during the 16th century for something different than Catholicism, today there is a need for something that addressed the concerns and experiences of people growing up in the 21st century. Because of the ease of travel and the availability of information, primarily western/modern world-views are being put into a broader context. People are realizing that there are other ways of thinking that are just as valid and useful. I don’t want to be glib, but I feel like in twenty or thirty years there won’t be any more Manny Silvas, and this whole conversation is going to look pretty silly. Here’s hoping.

Allow me to digress momentarily in the spirit of full disclosure: yes, I am a photographer. And yes, I do work in some of the types of traditional, technologically obsolete mediums that instragrams pretend to emulate. So yes, I do feel an extra-special twinge of hatred with the knowledge that these programs are slowly degrading my passion. However, I’d like to think that I am the kind of person who would hate them even if I didn’t make photographs.

Ryan Mcginley was the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney in New York City. His first show was a selection of polaroids. They depicted the life of his peer-group and their insane, drug fueled misadventures across N.Y.C. The show’s images (titled, “The Kids Are Alright” after the “The Who” song) have resonance for two reasons. The first is that they were heavily edited (Mcginley is known for photographing everything, at time of the show he had a selection of thousands and thousands of polaroid images to choose from). By distilling his life and lives of his friends down to their essentials, he made a fascinating world even more fascinating. The second is that, by using a medium well recognized as the domain of family vacations and simple social documenting, he was (probably unconsciously) making an absolutely insane (really, you have to see some of them to believe them) lifestyle some how normal and relatable.

The reason why I bring this up is because, as far as I have experienced, instagrams are neither of these. In recent years, probably because of new found ubiquity and ease of digital photography, combined with the slow death of polaroid photography, it seems like many people have made the mistake that by simply using a polaroid camera, they are attributing extra importance on an event. This kind of photography mimics the style and form of Mcginley’s work, but misses the point all together. The reason why photographs like his are interesting is because interesting things are going on in them. John Berger says that good art transcends its medium. The worst part about instagrams is, not only do they not transcend anything, they are actually degrading a medium. At least polaroids have some kind of action and object associated with them. Instagrams assume that, it isn’t the polaroid that attributes some special significance, but that it is really just certain types of color schemes that are perceived to be polaroid-ish (or holga-ish).

Make no mistake, an instagram does not make a shitty photograph less shitty. In fact they are often the opposite, being either too smeared to be intelligible or too instensely colored to be enjoyed. They are hypocritical at best (on one hand they revere a medium by trying to copy it while stripping away everything that makes the medium worthwhile), but tend toward simple embarrassing hipster-pretention. Like scuffing up something new to make it look old or wearing a trucker hat. I don’t fault anyone for enjoying the novelty of such a program. But it has gone far beyond novelty. It’s a fad that damages art because of its double whammy effect: it takes a medium (telephone photography) so prolific it has almost no value, and covers it up with a pretense so thin it’s laughable. The idea of people using a program to make digital pictures look like their analog counterparts is so obviously ironic I’m surprised no one has done a gallery show where they use an instagram program to take purposefully-shitty images.

Grow up. Stop pretending like you are doing something you aren’t. That blurry picture of your dog, or your band or your girlfriend reading isn’t more interesting just because it has an ugly orange tint and a pretend paper border around the edge. You aren’t fooling anyone.

How do you fix a system like this? My friend Caylin is a Nazarene missionary who ministers both to the people making these types of goods and the people selling them. Both have needs. Both are ultimately being exploited by the extranjeros buying the goods.

Extranjero literally means “stranger.” It’s how Cusqueños refer to white tourists. After being here for two months the level of dependency that Cusco has for extranjeros is becoming more and more obvious. It’s frustrating and depressing, because I am coming to understand my part in all this mess, and how by being here, I am contributing.

Here’s another example. I have quite a few extranjero friends in Cusco because of the Cafe. For many of them, going to one of the local discotecas is a pretty popular past time. I was shocked to learn from my friend Maria that white people get in for free, and get free drinks, but Peruvians have to pay. How do these places exist? Because they play western music and have lots of western people, and therefore Peruvians want to be there. This is place where a people are being exploited by extranjeros and by themselves. It’s a lot easier, after being here, to understand how Marxism has taken such a strong hold in South America.

It’s a common sight to see one or two bricheros when ever you walk through the Plaza San Blas. A brichero is a young man who seduces extranjeras (foreign women) to live off of their generosity. As my spanish teacher Gloria says, “Una forma de la prostitución.” Gloria actually has a lot of good things to say about these types of problems. When I asked her if there is something I can do she answered “No.” She said, “It’s not your fault, it’s the Peruvians fault. It’s Peruvian culture that puts extranjero lifestyle on a platform, and associates it with having money. We are the ones who need to change, you shouldn’t feel guilty.” She told me she actually goes to the clubs that charge her while letting the white people in for free, because they tend to be a lot safer than other clubs around Cusco, plus they play better music.

I can’t find my way in this kind of world. A dear friend told me “I feel like just loving people is good enough. Well not JUST loving. Love is the important ingredient and the rest falls into place.” I guess for the moment I’m not even sure how to do that.

Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.