Jesus & Dylan: Celebrity as Messiah and Vice Versa

I'm not usually in the position these days of writing on really current day-to-day events, the supposed forte of the blog medium. Well no more! Having seen a movie a few weeks back (on opening day I think!) I'm prepared to launch this blog into the world of immediate cultural relevance.

The movie was I'm Not There, a weirdly successful bio-pic of Bob Dylan as portrayed by six very different actors. The scene is one in which Dylan (the most realistic one, played by Cate Blanchett!) and Allen Ginsberg (David Cross) are heckling a life-size crucifix. Dylan yells up to the statue of the dying Jesus something like: "Play us some of your early stuff!"

Now I know, this would seem beyond blasphemous, but in a strange way Dylan's comment in the movie (which I have no idea as to its basis in fact or not) is spot on, not as a criticism of Jesus but as a sarcastic barb directed at Jesus' fickle followers. And Dylan would be one to know.

The overarching preoccupation of the film is the iconic status Dylan was thrust into after his early success and the reaction of his folkie fans when he continued to reinvent himself and his music. The movie's portrayal of the legendary performance at the Newport folk festival where Dylan first 'went electric' has Dylan and his band ascending the stage and assaulting the audience with machine guns instead of guitars. This is how betrayed Dylan's 'followers' were at his apparent selling out the purity of folk for the crassness of pop.

The connection between Jesus and a modern celebrity, especially one whose position was vested with more significance than the usual pop idol, is in how their followers treated them. Dylan's fans put him on a pedestal, made him the 'spokesmen of a generation', and in many ways became his devotees. When the man moved beyond the image and in directions not expected by the followers, they felt betrayed. The one who was the epitome of their ideal, they later felt justified calling a traitor. The savior becomes the Judas. So it was for Dylan, so too for Jesus.

Dylan fans wanted him to keep doing the acoustic political stuff they sentimentally thought would change the world; Jesus' disciples wanted him to keep up the trajectory of the Messiah apparently come to kick out the Romans and lead their nation to its glorious destiny. When Jesus started talking about rendering to Caesar what was Caesar's and the inclusion of the gentiles, I'm sure his crowds were thinking Jesus was selling out. And when the mission headed to Jerusalem, building up to a very different kind of confrontation with the powers-that-be than was expected of the Messiah, even the closest core of disciples were telling Jesus the first-century Messianic equivalent of "play us some of your early stuff!"

When a supposed disciple denounces the master as traitor it just shows the fact that the disciple never really intended to follow beyond the path they already knew on their own. The problem with being a follower is that it entails that the leader is the only one who could know the destination, and even he usually doesn't.

The persona of a celebrity, whether cultural or religious, is the possession of the fans and will be guarded from anyone who would disfigure it, even the person sharing the persona's name. The idolized savior is a projection tenaciously clung to and claimed by its followers who are capable of killing to protect its purity, even if it means killing the savior himself.

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Conversation Part III: Morality - Theistic, Christian and Otherwise

(continued from previous)

The conversation on the moral superiority of religion vs. atheism is in a way not interesting to me. If that argument were a horse race, mine would still be in the stable, biding his time, thoughtfully munching hay. As I've tried to say, I don't think being religious or having faith is itself any kind of virtue precisely because I do not recognize any strict epistemological dichotomy between faith and reason. (This is why I always gag when I hear someone lauding 'people of faith' in the political realm. The grouping 'people of faith' is beyond vacuous. What a stupid category of people to be in favor of.)

The only reason I pick up the gauntlet here is because the 'new atheists' so consistently seem to hold the opposite view in that they portray having religious faith in general as an inherently morally dangerous enterprise and thereby not holding such beliefs as inherently morally superior. (This is especially so for Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins, Dennett is much more sophisticated as is perhaps to be expected.) They do this without significantly distinguishing between different religions based on the content of their teachings and without distinguishing between actions taken by nominal believers that utterly contradict the tradition's teaching (hypocrites) and those taken in response to agreement with the broadest streams of the tradition.

At the same time that they do not deign to actually engage the content of the traditions they lump together, they speak from a perspective which is impossible to define and, as I will argue, is unable to defend its own moral standing on the same grounds it criticizes the theistic worldview. So we have a group of people speaking as if from a moral high-ground which they are completely unable to give a reasonable defense for holding, denouncing another group that, however in-credible you find its basis, at least has very specific internal reasons for holding its moral perspective. This confusion is why my horse is out of the barn. I am not out here to win the argument between theism and atheism or religion and secularism, but to significantly reframe it.

First I will describe how materialist or secularist assumptions do not entail a morality. Second, I will revisit the case of the morally hypocritical atheist. Third, I will consider some secular sources of morality and look at how the materialist's own assumptions interact with his moral beliefs. Fourth, I will attend to an important mistaken conclusion from the case for morality depending on something transcendent. Fifth, I will return to the case of the one inherently dangerous element that can attend secular morality.

It is of course very common for philosophers or theologians to speak analogically of 'height' or 'transcendence'. The secularist or materialist worldview on the other hand is a flattened perspective. The strict materialist or secularist is one who insists on understanding everything immanently and thereby cuts off the possibility of appealing to any external criteria. The mechanism of flattening a worldview comes in re-description. The materialist points to a perceived dimension of height or transcendence and reduces it to another, immanent, level of explanation - for example the biological, political, psychological or economic. Viewing everything flatly doesn't change what counts as morality, it redescribes behavior previously thought to be moral on another, amoral, level.

So not only is there no longer recourse to terms like God to defend desirable criteria, anything substituted for God is either itself a transcendental term, belief in which is equally or even more inexplicable, or, if it is truly immanent, fails to be able to provide criteria able to qualitatively assess the immanent world.

I propose that for the word morality to have any meaning, the morals must actually represent something really real, not merely an appearance of one thing that is really just some natural epiphenomenon.

The atheist employing the idea of morality derived from universal human feelings or common sense is missing the fact that flattening the world into two dimensions has removed the possibility of morality even being a useful word. The flat world is the world reduced of its transcendent dimension which is the dimension ideas like morality lived in. In the flattened world, morality is no longer really right or wrong - who could have the authority to say so? - it is just whatever the interest group or species with the power to do so defines it as. If we're going to start down the road of reductionism, we should have the courage to follow through to its logical conclusions unless compelled otherwise.

The game of reductionism is a dangerous one, its sword really is two-edged. If one starts with an assumed naturalism or materialism in order to say that all kinds of religious phenomena are just expressions of various natural phenomena, fine. But to be consistent one has to be able to swallow the conclusion that human morality, all of it, is just a chimera as well. If one dislikes that conclusion and knows of some other way of coming up with a basis for morality, I'm more than willing to listen. But beware, as Hitchens mentions in his book (and then ignores the implications of): nobody has been able to come up with a logically convincing and consistent secular basis for morality at least since David Hume pointed out the impossibility of bridging the gap from is to ought. As in, these are the facts; therefore, this is or is not as it should be. No pile of facts is big enough to constitute a single qualitative judgement on the rightness or wrongness of any other fact. If you can't provide a foundation either, then you have to admit that with respect to morals the theist and the atheist are on exactly the same ground relative to one another.

The theist operates upon a morality consistent with his worldview which is itself largely based on faith, the atheist operates upon a morality he has no rational basis for but takes to be correct based on faith. The atheist cannot provide a rational defense of the reality of his morality given his metaphysical views for exactly the same reason that the theist cannot coerce belief in the ground of his morality. The theist has at least the luxury of being internally consistent in his views, the atheist does not, and the discomfort of this leads to all manner of logical abuse.

This amorality of materialism is where my point of the impossibility of a morally hypocritical atheist originates. We've agreed, atheism as such, has no moral content and I am happy to add that neither does theism. What morality a theist holds comes from the character of the god he believes actually exists. The work is done on the level of faith that God exists. But once this is believed, the basis for morals, for good or ill, is firmly in place. The atheist believes himself to be 'neutral' or without any faith commitments as regards the existence of any gods. I don't buy it, but for the sake of argument, fine - he has no faith in regards to the existence of God or gods. He still hasn't explained how he could begin to defend morality from its detractors or conjure up a particular moral perspective, let alone one from which to denounce the theist from.

(Another hypothesis might be that one could just be a hypocritical human being. I have no idea what this would mean. The (biological?) definition of 'human being' implies no morals in and of itself. For example, let's say I'm a human being that just happens to enjoy rape and murder. But those are such value-laden terms! Let's try to be more neutral and objective. Really I just like (or rather am programmed) to spread my genetic material and get rid of competitors for successful completion of such. Perhaps this behavior is part and parcel of being human like it is for so many other purely biologically determined species. After all, we don't speak of bacteria committing rape or wolves murdering. They're just animals being animals, the perfectly flat biological definition of which rules out morality or immorality. For me to be hypocritical in my actions, I would have to hold some further belief about humanity that entailed that the forceful spreading my genes and disposing of rivals was wrong. If I don't believe any such thing then maybe I just have a different idea of humanity than someone who does. Such a one would either need to convince me that their idea of humanity is the right one or else how true morality can be derived without any tradition-based view of humanity.)

Frankly I find the solution of morality coming from 'human solidarity' to beg as many questions as it attempts to answer. I am not convinced humans have such an inborn idea of solidarity with their species. My evidence for this is strictly empirical. Even if they did though, this would not necessarily constitute morality. At most I could go along with the human animal having an evolved sense of protection of its own extended kin network or tribe; one protects and cares for those sharing one's own genetic material. But this is not morality anymore than it would be for any other species. A Water Buffalo protecting her calf from a pack of Lions might look noble to you and me (because we're anthropomorphizing), just as the human mother going without food to feed her child might bring tears to our eyes. But come on, set the sentimentality aside for a minute and let's really follow the skeptical rabbit hole all the way down. If morality is just nature's way of tricking the individual organism into caring about the next generation and the genetic community's survival more than its own, then we have not yet found something that could rightly be called morality.

For another way of showing why secular alternative sources for morality are not logically compelling, allow me to illustrate how reductionist skepticism of religious morality works just as well on secular morality by translating a paragraph intended to dismiss the specificity of religiously derived morals. I will put the original vocabulary in parentheses and my suggested substitutes in brackets.

"To invoke a (heavenly)[common-sense secular] morality you must be specific in your judgments. If (God)[reason or conscience] told you this or that action is unethical, be prepared for an answer that will get you no where close to justice. (God)[Reason] tells you its wrong? Well (he)[it] tells me it's right. This is the kind of relativism we keep (out of)[in] real courtrooms for a reason. You can swear on the (Bible)[human solidarity or the categorical imperative] (or not), but the moment you pull it to your side to defend yourself you will be very quickly dismissed." [Because why in the world should anyone else care if you think one should feel solidarity with the species or only act in a way that one could consistently will that everyone followed a similar course of action. What if they happen to think that that's perfect nonsense and choose to (unhypocritically) act in whatever way they please?]

My belief that reductionistic worldviews do not have sufficient criteria to muster any morality whatsoever is the reason that secular humanism - so proud of its morality - is, and always will be, so utterly unappealing to me. Philosophically it contains all of the 'weaknesses' of Christianity and nihilism without the consistency of either. Secular humanist thinkers who attempt to defend morality are, in my view, just sentimentalists unwilling to give up the ghost. The only philosopher's doubt who gives me pause is the nihilistic laughter of a Nietzsche. If there is no God then there really is nothing.

Allow me just to anticipate another common objection before it's made. It is often said that the theist who argues for the dependence of morality upon a worldview including a certain kind of God as I do (or at least some other kind of transcendental principle), is demeaning humanity and himself. The argument goes that humanity had morality before religion - people knew it was wrong to kill before they had the ten commandments (Though if it were really such universal common sense, then why would it still happen so much?) - and that further it is scary to assume that any particular theist would be out raping and pillaging if only he lost certain of his beliefs about God.

It is important to see why this misses the point completely.

I do not think that I would go out and commit a whole slew of abominable acts if I woke up tomorrow completely lacking in faith. I would probably continue in largely the same behavior I do now based upon what I have been taught is right and wrong (some of which very well might be wrong). The difference is that I would no longer have any rational reason for committing moral acts and refraining from immoral ones. I would still believe that rape and murder were wrong but I would no longer have any reason why they were.

The fallout of the above is that while both the Christian and the materialist atheist can be moral, and both probably will have some type of morality, the Christian must be moral, while the materialist's flattened worldview makes morality optional, a commitment of faith not derived from his more fundamental commitments. This means that materialist atheists or any others who assume their own neutrality must give up their presumably privileged position from which they adjudicate the morals of others.

So again we come around to the point of a certain danger inherent in secular morality. I am not reneging on my point of the moral neutrality of theism vs. atheism in general. The danger of secular morality is not that it doesn't have any morals, or has worse morals, but in its utter confidence in their rightness; its perceived lack of faith. Faith seeks assurance, secular moral reasoning seeks, and too often thinks it has found, certainty. This is why (at least three of) the 'new atheists' sound so like fundamentalists to much of even their atheistic audience. They are so unabashedly confident in the way that only one who believes his ideas derive from reason alone can be. (Atheist fundamentalists largely share a philosophy of knowledge with their Christian cousins. Fundamentalism in Christianity has not to do with the doctrines believed but in how one thinks those beliefs are arrived at; not with what is believed but how those beliefs are held. Orthodox Christians have been around for millenia, fundamentalists are a very modern phenomenon and, to my mind, are basically heretics.)

The Christian may take decisive action, but if she is thinking Christianly, she must do so in fear and trembling. She may err greatly, but if she is a Christian, she is aware of this possibility just about better than any, called so often as she is to repent for past mistakes. If she continues to consciously err in disregard of her professed beliefs then she is a hypocrite and should be named as such. The strict materialist as we have seen cannot be called a hypocrite if he denies the reality of any morality. But if he does feel a moral calling, the secular moralist, if he fools himself into thinking he has banished faith and proceeds by the pure light of reason, will come to his conclusions without-a-doubt and will proceed without caution. Woe to those who get in his way!

This goes to the point about the dangerous confidence of a nation like America. I don't necessarily disagree with defenses of the pleasures and privileges of living in America. The point I was making didn't have to do with life in America, but the life of America and Americans on the rest of the world. The Roman empire was undoubtedly a fine place to live too, if you were a citizen. But I hardly think the Romans patting of themselves on the back for the height of their civilization went over that well with those unfortunate enough to be labeled barbarians. The confidence of America in its status as such a great (the best!) place to live is why it has been so damned confident spreading its wonderful way of life to places like the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, Central America and Iraq, countries and civilizations whose "thanks but no thanks" isn't very readily listened to. "No," says America, "You don't understand how great it is to be an American. Just try it!"

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Conversation part II: Present and Future Focus in Christianity

(continued from previous)

For the sake of the current discussion we'll call the two elements of the Christian tradition under consideration by the shorthand of present and future focus. The present focus is the spirituality of everydayness, the cultivation of moment-by-moment awareness. It includes both the consider the lilies stuff and the validation of finite historical human life itself. The future focus is eschatology, the orientation toward an ultimate end stuff.

Now when I talk about this as a strand within Christian thought, I don't mean the kind of strand that can be pulled out and employed on it's own. Pulling one strand out, any more than hypothetically, unravels the whole thing. (If you follow the metaphor, this is precisely what I take secular culture to have done: pulled out of traditional cultures the elements that it liked while ignoring their overall context. To switch metaphors, I take the ethics of secularism to be a kind of plucking of religious fruit which ignores the roots necessary to actually produce this fruit in the first place.) So, though the strands of Christian teaching can be talked about to some extent independently, they are always interrelated and when separated from one another completely, snap, so to speak. Perhaps it would have been better to speak of the sides of coins which are much more obviously just different angles of the same reality.

While I would understand why a secular onlooker would counsel the religious believer to just develop certain aspects of religion and ignore others (because this is precisely what he has done) the Christian cannot understand this as any more than being told to try and run faster by hopping on one leg.

Given these two distinctive strands of Christian teaching, we turn to some common criticisms and problems they are alleged to lead to. Many would argue that a person is at great risk of abdicating her everyday responsibilities to the extent that she gets caught up in mystical ideals of living in the moment, and to the degree that she thinks about the afterlife, she will ignore the needs of life around her. Notice that in both cases the Christian is criticized for the same thing: a lack of focus on the material, 'real' world around them.

The way that these criticisms apply to the instance of the clergy is instructive here. On the one hand, religious leaders are regularly criticized for being too otherworldly, talking about heaven and saving souls when people are hungry and dying. On the other hand, the criticism is most often paired with the reasoning that they do this in order to secure power and amass wealth in the here and now. So which is it, are the clergy too focused on this world or the next? Is Christianity to be blamed equally because it produces people both like St. Francis, the preacher to birds, and people like St. Dominic, the heresy hunter? Which one is the real Christian, neither, just one of them, or both?

Now obviously I would share anyone's disgust with any member or class of the clergy that would use talk of afterlife to extend their own material advantage. Take the most egregious examples: a Priest pocketing money from indulgences sold to the poor in order to shave years off Purgatory, baptisms in the New World used as justification for immediately killing the 'Christian' savages and conveniently taking their land, or just the charlatan televangelist tricking people out of their disposable income. These are our textbook cases of abuse of Religious privilege or authority.

So the question becomes: are these individuals too focused on their present lives, or are they too focused on heaven such that they allow themselves to commit such heinous actions in this then-devalued present life? But this is exactly the wrong question to ask.

On the one hand, it seems clear that these clergy are paying all the attention in the world to the present. They show clearly by their actions, that though they might hypocritically preach about the next life, this life is the only one that really matters to them. (It's hard to imagine even the most cynical atheist sincerely alleging my exemplars to be acting out of the true sense of Christianity. The whole point of being a hypocrite is that one's actions belie one's convictions.) On the other hand, seen Christianly, they are obviously not paying enough proper attention to their present life. Our wayward Christians do not need to tone down one part of Christianity and crank up another part, they need to practice Christianity! The answer is not to take a balanced approached to this life over against eternity, as if these were two different substances to be taken in equal measure, but focus on both lives, or aspects of life, rightly.

What we've been calling putting too much focus on one's present life or the afterlife is really not an error of where one is looking but in how one is looking. It's a qualitative not a quantitative error. One must not look to this present life as an end in itself but rather as a participation in and preparation for the next just as one must not look to the next life as an escape from this life but as a fulfillment and redemption of its beautifully created intentions.

Christian perspective then is bi-focal, it is properly focused simultaneously both on the creation around one and the eschaton toward which that creation yearns. Again, the question is not over which world one is looking to but what one sees the world as. If one sees the earth as creation then it is impossible to devalue it. When one looks at human beings who, though sinners and fallen, are fellow creatures they will be seen as image bearers of God. And one who viewed his fellows as such would be utterly incapable of committing the acts our exemplary hypocrites are guilty of. It's a little harder to learn to see this way than to walk and chew gum at the same time, but it can be done.

Now, when I mentioned above that our hypocrites can be seen, regardless of what they profess, as acting based on the assumption that this world is all there is, I'm not saying that their clearly immoral behavior is the only way of acting based on that assumption. There are plenty of examples of saintly types among atheistic folk too. But I'm curious on what particularly secular grounds an atheist can both tell the clergymen that it is wrong to do what he is doing, which he probably knows, and why. In other words, without disingenuously resorting to the authority of the believer's tradition, on what grounds other than personal preference could the atheist tell the clergymen, or a fellow atheist for that matter, that his actions were as despicable as we believe them to be.

My advice to the mis-behaving Christian is quite simple: act like a Christian. Christianity has plenty of reason for opposing all of this loathsome behavior and absolutely no reason for supporting it. The actions we criticized happen not because of, but in spite of the individual in question's Christian belief, if in fact they have any. The atheist could similarly tell the immoral atheist to act more atheistically. What could that possibly mean? Again, I'm not saying that atheism necessarily leads to immorality, but I honestly don't know how it could ever oppose it other than arbitrarily. Christians have no problem finding grounds to criticize the hypocrisy of their fellow believers and to tell them that they lack the right quality of behavior. And that is a good thing! What resources does atheism have for assessing correct and incorrect qualities of another's behavior, Christian or not, in the first place? The question is: can one be a morally hypocritical atheist?

Another problem brought up in this regard is the idea of religious action resulting from obedience to a call of some sort. We are fine with people being religious up to a point, but we don't like even the structural possibility for someone to hear a calling to some kind of radical life or action. We are worried about someone obeying if they believed, like Abraham, that God was commanding them to sacrifice their son.

My understanding of the Christian faith and Christian ethics means that this possibility cannot be ruled out. The nature of Christian faith means that one's ethical commitments are in a sense 'open ended,' that is, structurally open to include following through on something one does not fully understand. This leaves one open to undertaking heroic and selfless actions, but I acknowledge that there absolutely is the danger of also doing great evil. Those who have sincerely believed that God commanded them to do something vary from Moses leading his people to freedom and Jesus laying down his life for others, to Spanish inquisitors and 911 hijackers.

Enlightenment rationality tried to solve the problem of religious violence stemming from faith and obedience by advocating a mode of deafness to voices other than one's own conscience. But the danger of deafness is just as great as that of listening to the wrong voice. I would submit that it does not solve the problem of humanity's proclivity to commit evil and could even exacerbate it.

The reason it does not solve the problem is that the call one is deaf to could just as easily be that of the orphan or the widow and the voice of reason or conscience one follows can just as easily self-justifyingly lead to evil as that of a false god. The reason it could be even worse to blindly follow reason is that the follower of reason does not believe himself to be following anything and is thus even more confident and certain that his actions are just than the believer. The Christian believer who acts on faith knows that he can err, even that error is likely, and he thus should be more willing to question his motives. Doubt of course is the correlate of faith, not its opposite. The actor who believes his actions are wholly derived from reason has no reason to doubt his conclusions. These are the people we must watch out for.

Just think of all the wars that have been justified by serving the greater good, freeing those under dictators and burning villages in order to save them. The advocates of these wars probably believed just as strongly that their cause was just as the terrorist believes he is doing God's will. And the victims of secular wars are just as dead as those of religious wars. I also believe it is no coincidence that the two most dangerous empires of the 20th century, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., are nation states wholly founded on enlightenment philosophies of progress and justice which they believed were neutrally derived from reason. [1]

The problem with hearing any 'voice' whether one believes it's God or conscience, is one of discernment. And this is really the point all the way back to my original post on wrestling with a sense of vocation: the work of discernment is hard. It can be as tiring as wrestling with angels, or devils. This is what the apostle meant when he said that one must test the spirits to see if they are of God.

1. This is a paraphrase of Stanley Hauerwas from Resident Aliens

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Conversation on the Christian View of Sacrifice, the World & Eternity

(The following is part of a conversation with a friend wherein I try to answer his objections to my earlier post as to the place of self-sacrifice in Christianity.) [1]

We are going to talk about two seemingly separate strands within Christian thought. On the one hand there is the strand that underwrites or encourages a kind of sacred awareness of the present. You know, "consider the lilies", and all that jazz. A lot of people these days make this kind of insight into the entirety of their spirituality (they also seem to prefer to find their source material in the East, though I think the reason for that has much more to do with faddishness – it takes one to know one - than with what the tradition actually makes available) but most would have at least a sentimental appreciation of that kind of teaching whatever their background.

Christopher Hitchens, incidentally, is not one of these. He finds this type of advice to be positively immoral. I take it that this criticism stems from the perspective that the line of thought represented would lead to a type of resignation toward life, a lack of ambition or direction or maybe motivation to make things better for oneself and one's fellows here and now. This would be basically the old Marxist criticism that religion has the effect of getting people to not notice and attempt to better their circumstances. (This is not a bad criticism in itself, in that this is how religion, including Christianity, is in fact used by cultures and many, if not all of the powers that be. But this is not to say that since a tool can be misused we should discount its intended function.)

On the other hand, there are obvious, deeply held reasons for Christians to care about the shape of their lives. The best expression of this other strand of thought was probably made best by one of those mean old nasty Church fathers that people are so fond of lambasting, St. Irenaeus who said that the glory of God is the human person fully alive. What this means to me is that God delights in what we delight in, and is joyful at what we are made joyful by. But note that like for the human parent in regards to their child, it does not mean that whatever gives us pleasure for the moment gives him pleasure. More about how this comes about below, but basically if the Christian anthropology is right, that we are creatures first and foremost, then, while this knocks us out of the running to be gods – all our own little centers of universes - it gives us a very elevated position vis a vis random bits of purposeless matter. If we are creatures, then we are created for a purpose, and if we have a purpose, we should find it and live it full force.

While I would grant a lot of ground to criticisms made of the failure of Christians in general to live this rightly, I would still want to argue that, for the Christian at least, there will be times where the search for self-fulfillment commonly understood or the call to follow one's bliss will have to be denied. It is incoherent to imagine a Christianity that does not call for genuine sacrifice.

But the beauty of the Gospel is that precisely insofar as we follow through on the sacrifices we are called to make we will find ourselves more than fulfilled. Everyone knows the appropriate verses here: to lose is to find, to be last is to be first, so on and so forth. This is somewhat paradoxical but not that hard to grasp really. At bottom this just means that we are to deny a certain shallow self-fulfillment in the name of a greater, truer one. Everyone has basic experiences of this: to earn the satisfaction of finishing a marathon, one has to do a lot of painful training and preparation.

So it is not really a matter of pitting fulfillment of the self against sacrificing the self for others. Christian teaching rejects the idea that satisfying human needs is a zero-sum game. The truth is that we are actually not in competition with one another for happiness. To serve the Other really is to serve God, not in some loosey-goosey metaphorical sense but actually, factually to do something for God – "whatever you do for the least of these…" It's obvious that if anything in the Christian story is true, then this would mean finding our true meaning in life. If God is God, and created the world and us, then doing what we were made to do would be nothing if not the most glorious, blissful, joy-filled life possible. The problem is, it doesn't always feel this way. (Obviously, as I write this and try to act based upon it, I rarely if ever feel fulfilled making whatever daily sacrifices I'm called to perform.) So instead of trying to shave the corners off the square peg of our selves to fit into the round whole we were made for, we go around creating our own square holes to fit ourselves into. But the fit is never quite right.

And this dynamic of winning by losing goes to another objection that is often made against Christianity, by others and even by myself at times. It can be alleged that Christian teaching is just advocating a kind of delayed egotism. Indeed, sadly, sometimes individual Christians absolutely are guilty of reducing Christianity in this way. They would make the Christian life and the expectation for the afterlife a mere transaction where the person trades some unpleasant business here and now in order to reap the great payoff by and by. (The unpleasant business here and now can fall into the traditional category of 'works,' but faith itself, when taken to be a kind of unpleasant epistemological state to have to be borne for the time-being, fulfills the same role.)

This mistaken tendency is related to another that would have the incarnation of God in Jesus as a kind of mysterious disguise used to trick the fair-weather friends and attract only the true believers. This version would make Jesus' ascension and glorification as a kind of pulling-off-of-the-mask 'gotcha' moment where the enemies of God realize their mistake, weeping and gnashing their teeth while the disciples happily exclaim "Ha, I knew it all along!"

But this cannot be right. Christians believe that in Jesus, precisely through his earthly life, emptied of glory, full of suffering, destined for death, God himself is most fully revealed. The incarnation is not something to get past to see God (except insofar as we need to get past our mistaken expectations of who God should be) it is the very picture where God has most clearly shown what he is like. God is with us, in pain, in suffering, in life and in death. Christ's resurrection, ascension and glorification is God's ultimate seal of approval on creaturely, physical embodiment and the kind of self-giving, self-emptying way of being in the world that Jesus exemplified. It is not rewarded with an altogether different kind of life, it is shown to be the kind of life that imitates God himself and participates in his plan. Ultimately to live the kind of life Jesus lived, to the extent we are able, though it seems to be swimming against the stream of culture or human nature or whatever, is really to be going in line with how God intended things, to be going 'with the grain of the universe.'

Therefore Christian teaching is not that selflessness is a temporary state of affairs, a test to pass in order to be rewarded with an ultimate self-centered paradise. The Christian faith teaches that selflessness is ultimately how we were made to be (even the doctrine of the Trinity shows this: not even God exists for himself alone, but always in self-giving for an-Other.) And thus this is how we are destined to be if we are ever to be what might be called joyful but is better named blessed.

{…Kevin, wiping sweat from his brow, steps down from the pulpit…}



1. A good deal of credit for this conversation - the opportunity to wrestle with things, not the longwindedness with which I do it - goes to my interlocutor who will here go unnamed.

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Scripture, Church, Service: Personal Disciplines III

I have done next to no reading of scripture on its own over the past few years. I read a lot of theological books that quote scripture or reflect on stories or themes from it. There are of course scripture readings and sermons every Sunday. There are scripture readings in my prayer book. My church small group has done studies of a book or two of scripture. But on my own, with Bible in hand, I have done very very little. I have spent more time reading books about books about books of the Bible than I have reading the Bible. I don’t know why this is.

Part of me feels that I need to know a certain amount more background, context or theory to be adequate to the task. But those are all just so many excuses. Maybe I just think it would be less enjoyable reading, that it would be just harder. But that’s not necessarily true either. There is no doubt this is something I need to change.

Church: I began attending my wife's church, Church of the Servant, from time to time as a matter of familial obligation before, and then during, our first years of marriage. We were also married in her church more or less because she wanted to and I didn't have any other ideas. The Sunday-morning ritual had its pleasures though. The preaching in the church (now ours) was (and is) incredible. I enjoyed the beauty and intellectual stimulation of the sermons even when faith wasn't anywhere in my sights.

When things started shifting in my head and heart (who can say which was first?), I began to want to go more often and soon every week just for the reminder of what was so exciting about the faith and for seeing it come together in a worshipful setting. I was, and still am, torn at times about denominational and congegational affiliation. Fretting about theological subtleties and various mixed motivations for staying or going alternately. This conversation, like so many others, plays endlessly in my head lists of all the various bad reasons I could have for doing the right thing and good reasons I could have for doing the wrong thing.

What eventually convinced me that I should join this church as an adult member, and what convinces me to stay committed, was that it felt like home for me. To the extent that home is where family is, and family are those whom you do not get to choose, I would say that I felt this congregation's claim on me before I felt I could claim it. It seemed to both speak to me where I was, being part of the denomination I was raised in, but also to challenge me the way I was ready to be challenged since it is a unique congregation within the denomination. So i feel like it is a place to both put down and discover old roots.

I have made church-attendance fairly important. We don't miss too many Sundays unless we're out of town. Most Sunday mornings church is just where I want to be. I think it really does re-focus me, at least for a little while and I of course have a growing number of connections to people that I don't want to go another week without seeing. While we don't attend the night service like I did as a kid (few do these days) it could be that I'm just falling into the behavior of church-attendance I was raised for. I don't know, maybe that's not necessarily anything to be ashamed of anyhow. The view of Sunday worship I've tried to live up to is as a weekly training in seeing the world rightly, in getting priorities right, and of course as a time of learning through proximity from those further along in the way. Again the tension arises: do I force my will to do the action even when it is disagreeable, trying to keep the real goals in mind, or do I avoid the pitfalls of pride and Phariseeism by doing whatever I feel like at the time?

Service: I do not really do anything in the way of disciplined service. As I mentioned, I try to be more serving in my daily work and family tasks, or at least see them more as service. (Maybe the two are reciprical: seeing something more as service increases one's ability to serve through it, and serving more increases the ease with which the service in something is recognized.) But I'm not someone you'll see serving in a soup-kitchen line or other obvious do-gooder role these days. I idealize those stereotypical heroic front-line roles as the epitome of Christ-like service but have never really participated in them. I resented the near coercive ways these activities were encouraged in school for example, finding it easier to stay home with pure, though self-serving motives than to serve others with mixed ones. I suppose though that the recipients of aid don't much care about the motives of those bringing aid.

I have tried, especially over the last year, to start serving in and through the church itself, the place I think should be the focus of a Christian's service anyhow. So I started volunteering for whatever for whatever responsibilities advertised a need for help within earshot. I currently help out running the sound board one Sunday a month, I've taught a few Sunday-school classes and I just started a three-year term as Deacon. I don't know if any of these things are specially suited to any gift of mine, but they are all things that the Church needs done and I feel good in general about contributing to the daily running of or the institution that has and continues to do so much to serve me.

There are dangers, I think, to being active in the institutional life of an organization like a church. It is easy to either lose sight of the goals of the organization and focus too much on control and management or to become jaded by seeing the nuts and bolts operations and the flawed human beings who are trying to come together in the service of something beautiful; trying to be something beautiful. I think seeing the behind-the-scenes operations of my childhood Church contributed to my disenchantment with that Church and maybe religion in general. Though probably even the most sincere and humble Church in the world wouldn't have allayed my omnivorous doubts at the time.

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Work: Personal Disciplines II

I’ve been torn for some time, all along really, about work, both inside and outside the home. With all of the disciplines, drawn to theorizing as I am, I am not able to separate how I think the discipline should be thought of from how I actually experience it. My struggle is with how to get them to be one and the same.

With work this tension is the most obvious. On the one hand I believe one should perform gratefully, as God’s calling even, whatever work one finds oneself given to do. (I've found the clearest theological exposition of this view in the Benedictine and my own Reformed tradition.) So if I find myself working at an insurance company talking on the phone all day and chasing a toddler, rocking a screaming baby and washing dishes all night, then that’s what I should be happy doing. On the other hand maybe I have a real calling or gift in some other area that I should explore by going back to graduate school or seminary or at least by continually and intentionally developing whatever that gift might be in my 'free time'.

This might just be a tension I have to deal with but how I actually experience this does not feel healthy. I experience it by feeling resentful of the daily things I am given to do, the job that I should be more grateful for, the family that I should be more appreciative of and present to. This is obviously not a good situation, but how does one go beyond one's comfort zone and pursue a calling if it is not somehow away from one's normal, daily life. (Indeed, the very word calling seems to have the connotation of calling out of one life and to another life while the word gift seems to have the connotation of nearness and presence.)

Any possible way that I can imagine creating a life where my daily life and work involved my passion for education and the world of ideas, would necessarily involve years of sacrifice that I would ask of my family. How could I possibly do this just to satisfy my own selfish urges. Aren't I just ungrateful for all the comfort and ease I've been given and looking for even more by way of self-fulfillment? But then the other voice says: "Staying on the track you're on is just your allowing yourself to follow the path of the upwardly mobile, middle class. You're just justifying your trying to grasp the good life with the theology of everydayness." To which the other voice replies: "But really your describing your desire to pursue a career that involves your hobbies of thinking and reading and writing and calling it a vocation is just the theological justification of your own self-centeredness." Then the third voice comes in and says something to the effect of calling the whole interior monologue a sign of hyper-narcissism. The statement that "we should never have scruples about whether the state in life we have chosen is the most perfect or what sort of progress we are making. These are merely signs of excessive self-regard." [1] hits me like a punch in the gut.

It sounds trite but it really is anguishing to think about. I find it nearly impossible to compromise with myself. I feel like I either need to give up all desire for any change in my situation right now or I need to start changing it right now. The idea that I should be contented with my work for now with the possibility that another door will open down the road when the family situation allows it, doesn't satisfy any of the voices. It seems to validate the negative interpretations of all three.

How does one say that one way of life is right and another wrong when either judgement can be seen as self-serving? What does one do when one can't even discern one's own true motivations? How can the mind know the secret desires and motivations of the heart?

1. Prior Aelred, Singing God's Praises p. 304

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Prayer & Fasting: Personal Disciplines I

The first spiritual discipline I have worked at is prayer. I began with the assumption or conviction that prayer should be regular and as fixed in time as possible. I’m not sure what gave me this idea at the time, but I was sure that if Christian devotion meant anything it involved somehow submitting oneself to God, and submission can not happen in prayer if I only pray when and how I feel like it.

I came to understand it later in Benedictine terms as what Anthony Damron, O.S.B. calls “the sanctification of time.” He goes on to write that formal prayers are necessary because relying on spontaneous prayer would be too irregular and thus not useful for growth while also recognizing formal prayers have dangers too, that of becoming incantation. (Singing God’s Praises p. 43)

My attempts at actually going about praying, like I said, have been very mixed. I wanted a prayer regimen that was based in a book that was fairly easy to follow, that heavily incorporated the psalms, and that involved at least a few readings or offices a day. I leafed through the Book of Common Prayer a few times, but didn’t really get how it worked and didn’t know how to figure it out. (Outside the Abbey, I’ve only been to an Episcopal service a handful of times and don’t really know very many Episcopalians.) I came across a new prayer compilation, I think just about three years ago, still in the first year of my conversion, called The Divine Hours edited by Phyllis Tickle. It included four Offices a day, each with one complete psalm, a Psalm fragment repeated a few times throughout, some Collects from the BCP, a paragraph reading of scripture, the Gloria which I then recognized (this was also probably right about the time that I was brought to the Abbey for the first time), and also some other religious poetry or hymns.

When I started, I was very committed and read all four offices, one in the morning, one at lunch, then next right after work was through for the day and last, right before bed. I’m not sure how long I kept that up, but I think it was for a few months. Then I stopped for a few months after becoming disillusioned. One problem was that the book was rather large and thus a pain to haul back and forth to work. I then started back up for a little while doing all four, but soon left that off for an idea of my own devising. I continued using the prayer book for morning and evening prayers. During the day, I selected and memorized five Collects from the BCP to recite in place of a longer Office. The goal was to have a total of seven periods of the day, and I ordered them as made best sense for the rhythm of a workday. I couldn’t do them at fixed times, since my schedule varied, and I didn’t have five events to base them on, like meals and so forth. My solution was to recite them at fixed intervals, an amount of time that spread them roughly evenly between waking and sleeping (I think it was about every two and a quarter or two and a half hours.) I procured a watch that had an automatically resetting timer that also had a vibrate function, whenever it went off, the push of one button turned it off and started the countdown again. Wherever I was during the day, I would get a vibration every two and a half or so hours that no one else could usually notice, then at the next available moment recite the prayer mentally or verbally, depending on the setting.

I was pretty proud of my solution because I felt it suited my goals and matched the needs of my schedule and abilities. I liked the idea of having the simple memorized prayers and their carrying me through the day, so that even if I worked late, or ate lunch early, the cycle kept me aware of my relative position in the day. I liked the idea of a call to prayer; my little watch mirroring a monastary’s bell. Of course, I chose the number seven also to duplicate a monastic day’s cycle even if my ‘Little Hours’ were very little, about thirty seconds.

Most of all, I wanted something on a fixed schedule (intervals being an adequate substitute for fixed times in my mind) because I was drawn to the idea of making prayer a kind of seasoning spread throughout the day, acting as a reminder that everything I was doing during the day should be done with an awareness of God and as an offering to God. Since the interval model could and did catch me literally doing anything and everything in my day it held the opportunity of drawing me out of my indifference and redirecting me to my present task with greater mindfulness. Well that was the goal.

My actual performance of the discipline of prayer seems to swing from extreme to extreme. Either I am praying a lot and wondering why, or praying very little and wishing I was. (I try to get insight into this wishing but it's slippery. I don't think it's just guilt, which would obviously not be a good motivation. But just as I'm not always sure that my prayers are genuine, I'm not even sure that my desire for genuine prayer is genuine.)

These days have been very crazy: a new baby, an illness, just all around unpredictable schedules. But probably none of that is really to blame. I've just been going through a period of low motivation the last few months. These things seem to go in cycles for me. A good day for me lately has meant just a brief prayer before bed, read from my prayer book, or not, depending on how late I stay up and when my daughter wakes up.

There are a few other practices I've experimented with around the general topic of prayer, the first was the rosary I bought sometime in the first year of my conversion. Now I wasn’t very serious about intending to use it, I was even a little wary of buying it, seeming as it did to fit into that old tendency of mine to focus on accessorizing hobbies over the hobbies themselves. I was at the store with my wife who wanted to buy a rosary because she had been studying it a bit and I just got one for the heck of it too. In an interesting foreshadowing, the rosary I bought, selected based on purely aesthetic bases – it looked fairly solid and simple – turned out to be a Benedictine one, having Benedict’s cross embedded in the crucifix and a Benedictine medal at the joining. I never really did much with it, but I had never really intended to. For a time I used it to do repetitions of the Jesus prayer punctuated by the Gloria and then an Our Father at the end. I never found this avenue very fruitful – I think I was too self-conscious about it – but I haven’t ruled out trying to use it again.

I’ve many times read or heard someone talking up the benefits of scripture memorization and whenever I do, it strikes me as just the perfect thing to do. The first place to start was obviously the Psalms which over a few months I memorized eight of, but I also memorized, as prayers, a few religious poems: one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, A Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the first of the Eleven Verses to the Lord by John Berryman, then also some non-religious poetry. I did the majority of this about two years ago. I worked on them, and then employed them, going for long walks around the neighborhood with my then infant daughter on my shoulder. I have no good reason for having stopped this exercise. I found it very helpful to be able to call up these words, and the work of memorizing I didn’t find that difficult. I still retain what I had though, or if one Psalm fades if I haven’t recited it in a while, I can usually recall it with a quick reading or two. I know this is a practice I need to return to.

To aid in the use of Psalms in prayer, either memorized or as encountered in prayer books, I wanted to study them. Over the past few years I’ve read a handful of small studies: Bonhoeffer’s Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Church, Breuggemann’s Spirituality of the Psalms, C.S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms, and I’m currently reading James W. Sire’s Learning to Pray Through the Psalms. In general I’ve found this study useful and definitely need to do more of it.

I’ve experimented with fasting for the last three Lenten periods. The first year I did a kind of sunup to sundown fast, eating a small breakfast, a regular dinner and nothing in between for most of Lent other than Sundays. The past two years I started with 24-hour fasts, having just a small lunch each day, then building toward longer fasts – 36, then 48, then 72 hours - at the end of the week and eating normally, perhaps more than normally - feasting, on Sundays.

I tried to talk about it as little as possible (Jesus' explicit instructions right?) but there were immediate and some extended family that had to know, the latter because we were living with them. Mostly it just felt kind of embarrassing to own up to. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was raised with. There were certain insights I was looking for or expecting based on what I had read about the discipline. I was hoping at the very least for a kind of increased awareness of my own weakness and an openness to God. I may have gotten that but it was mixed with the self-certainty that I could do this, could make it through x number of hours or days without food. C.S. Lewis writes that while self-mastery is the goal, one of the inherent dangers of will-focused disciplines like fasting is pride. What you could really call the pride at risk here is an idolatry of the will.

Then again there were days that were utterly humiliating, where I didn’t do what I had told myself to, where I came home at the end of the day depressed and tired and just sat and snacked. Emotional eating I’ve heard this called. Maybe seeing that this was obviously what I was doing on a ‘failed’ fast day was itself instructive in that it pointed to what I was probably doing during normal eating periods. Be that as it may, it still often felt like my ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ were counted for the wrong reasons.

I believe strongly that fasting is something that Christians are called to but at the same time I sometimes feel it is something that I have absolutely no business dabbling with. Maybe it's just the lack of guidance. But maybe it's my doubting my own faith that causes me to feel conflicted about my experience with such disciplines.

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Cool Calvinism & Fixed Hour Prayer

Here is an interesting article by a (former?) Calvinist on why he (used to) think Calvinism is cool. It focuses on the Reformed tradition as antidote for the mushiness of American Evangelicalism.

I also recently stumbled on this great essay about fixed hour prayer with a few personal stories.

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I Will Not Survive or, None of Us Gets Out of Here Alive

So I recently found out that I am relatively in-the-clear in terms of my cancer. The doctors have decided that I don't need any treatment following the surgery and will only keep me under close observation for the coming years. I am trying to be as grateful for this news as I ought.

This officially makes me a cancer survivor. In fact, I've been told that I'm a survivor from day one. Whatever that means.

I've been saying all along that I never really felt like a cancer-anything: victim or survivor. The diagnosis didn't feel that real when I had it and so the cure doesn't feel that real now that I apparently don't have it. So maybe my ambivalence about the designation 'cancer survivor' has to do with this lack of the news really sinking in but it has also made me reflect on the idea of survival as it is experienced in our present culture.

It has often struck me that our culture is positively obsessed with the idea of survival. Perhaps this emphasis on being a survivor of an illness is but one manifestation of a more general feeling in the air.

We really have a schizophrenic attitude toward life and death. We are at the same time more obsessed than ever with avoiding death and more willing than ever to tempt death out of plain boredom with the shallowness of our lives.

On the one hand, perhaps because death has been pushed back and life expectancies have gone up so dramatically in the West, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that death might just be optional. Believing the goal might be attainable, we become obsessed with avoiding death, even reminders of it. On the other hand, living in a world where day-to-day survival is no longer a pressing issue, members of affluent cultures invent artificial ways to make their survival a matter for their concern again. We see this latter manifested in, for example, the survivalist movement or just your now-everyday extreme sports where the whole point is to flirt with the brink of death just in order to feel the rush that accompanies it. The survivalist or skydiver is then merely inventing a way of replicating the feeling an ancient forbear might have gotten just in the course of trying to bring home food from the hunt.

In the following I will be exploring the former phenomenon of the hyper-avoidance of death and the elevation of the value of survival.

It is now apparent that we will not stop our war against death until we have banished its very countenance from our collective sight. We fight every sign of aging, every wrinkle and gray hair, with the utmost ferocity. Those who can no longer hide their age are themselves hidden away with the rest of their kind in retirement or nursing homes, well cared for, as long as we youth-filled ones don't have to be reminded of their, and our future, existence. When someone inconveniently insists on still kicking the bucket, we keep their body so chemically preserved and make-up caked that they probably look better in the casket than they have for years. By all means, don't let them look like what they really are: dead!

I believe that behind this disturbing emphasis of our culture on survival is the general loss of meaning in our lives. In the not-so-distant past a person had hope for an afterlife. In the new world we comfort ourselves with dreams of a really long life. (I'm ignoring here the theological difference between eternal life and the merely everlasting life-after-death which, though taken to be the default conception of heaven, is not really a Christian notion at all. Christians believe in resurrection not resuscitation. In fact, it may be that the weakness of our religious imaginations in respect to the afterlife is in part a result of the larger cultural shift of pinning all hopes on this life and attempts to lengthen it.) We tell ourselves that this is an improvement. "One life at a time" we call it. We pretend to celebrate living for the moment, or valuing life for life's sake but the truth of our feeling is expressed in the tenacity and anxiety with which we cling to our lives.

Lacking something beyond life to provide the context or substance for valuing life - a spiritual or religious dimension - we have come to grasp after mere survival with all our strength and at any cost. Paradoxically, the more we make life itself the focus, the less weight it seems to carry. Life used to be deemed nearly priceless, but it shrinks under the burden of our attempt to make it into the ultimate value. Our collective existential crisis is but our intellect's realization that without spirit, we really are no different than the other animals. The tragedy of our situation is that we are too smart to ever think that mere smarts can make us any more than a clever beast.

I came across one extreme instance of this attitude in an interview with Ray Kurzweil on NPR's Fresh Air a couple years ago. Kurzweil is the author of, among other books, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. In the interview, Kurzweil came across with an enthusiasm that was truly infectious but it was almost pitiful how much he seemed to have convinced himself that it was a reasonable goal to live forever through careful health maintenance until the day that technology can swoop to the rescue.

Setting aside the perhaps more profound difference between a person who believes in some kind of afterlife or resurrection and one who doesn't, imagine for a minute the difference between two individuals, one who knows she will die - eventually, and another who thinks there might be a possibility of not dying. I'm picturing these two individuals on their deathbeds each with a mortal gunshot wound, minutes from certain death. Either one might be experiencing any range of emotion: sadness, regret, devastation, fear. But the average person knows they will have had to die eventually. It was just a matter of time. Now contrast that with someone like Mr. Kurzweil and imagine the devastation someone in his position would feel if he were unlucky enough to have had a fatal accident before the fortuitous advent of nano-bots able to repair any possible wound or computers ready to upload our brains to be re-booted into a new body, or whatever the solution to death is that's supposedly right around the corner. The picture of this deathbed scene, much less the life lived trying to avoid it, is actually quite heartbreaking.

Secularists like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens argue quite frequently that believers are more dangerous precisely to the extent that they hold a belief in an afterlife. The argument goes that since a believer feels personally immortal, they are more willing to use this life carelessly and thus more likely to take others with them. The obvious example is the modern suicide bomber, who - we can't help thinking - is more likely to blow himself up because of the reward he thinks he's headed for. This argument has a certain logic to it though I was never convinced that since it seemed befitting of the suicide bomber, it was thus appropriate for all believers. One need pay attention to what is being believed.

There is also an argument that cuts the other way which the picture of these two hypothetical deathbed scenes brings to mind. It makes a certain amount of intuitive sense that one who feels this life is the end all and be all would do more, right or wrong, to protect it or prolong it. The Psalmist understood this well when he prayed to be protected "from men of this world whose reward is in this life." [1] The more potentially fearsome is the one with nothing left to lose. Who truly has nothing to lose, the one who is entirely committed to this life or the one who loves life more than everything except the values from which it derives its meaning and value?

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes that "what people want today is not salvation, but health. ... The medical establishment is the counter-salvation-promising group in our society today." [2] I agree that what people are seeking through the new emphasis on health and longevity is a kind of salvation. What is sad is that what so many pursue as their only comfort in life: more life, is in regards to the full-blooded Christian story of death and resurrection a rather pathetic parody or at best a pastiche.

Again, it is not a matter of being against survival, but mere survival. Life is supremely valuable but it is not of ultimate value. Life is like joy, the more it is pursued as an end in itself the more it slips from one's grasp and the more the very goods it contains are corrupted by its receiving misplaced emphasis.

It could be argued at this point that pursuing survival is a matter of believing in the sanctity of life which people, including Christian people, often think of as an obvious conclusion of Christian convictions. To find out why this might not be so I turn again to Hauerwas who proclaims:

"I want to know where Christians got the notion that life is sacred. That notion seems to have no reference to God. Any good secularist can think life is sacred. Of course, what the secularist means by the word sacred is interesting, but the idea that Christians are about the maintenance of some principle separate from our understanding of God is just crazy. As a matter of fact, Christians do not believe life is sacred. I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe that there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in and of itself." [3]

Hauerwas makes clearer than I ever could the difference between life as ultimate value and life as a very important though derivative value.

I don't mean to be overly hard-nosed in any of this. It is nothing if not understandable for human beings to cling to life. We obviously should love life. The difference is between the hopeful affirmation of a beautiful gift and the fearful clinging to what we take to be our only lot. Like so many other differences, like for example between lust and love, it could be said that holding out for mere survival is the worst coming from the corruption of the best.

In conclusion, I leave you with this final thought from Stanley:

"We Christians are people who must learn to live, as we have learned that life is a gift. We thus live not as if survival is an end in itself, but rather because we know that life allows us the time and space to live in the service of God. We should not view time as something to be lived through, nor life as an end in itself, but rather see life as the gift of time enough for love." [4]

To this I can only add an Amen, in the hope that I will myself continually learn this lesson.




1. Psalm 17:14 NIV

2. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 611 "Abortion Theologically Understood"

3. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 614 "Abortion Theologically Understood"

4. The Hauerwas Reader, p. 585 "Reflections: Suicide and Euthanasia"

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Hot and Cold, Never Warm

Every day I become even more confirmed as a hopeless sentimentalist and yet more incorrigible in my cynicism.

Could it be that this is the appeal of the Christian faith, its way of combining, even inextricably intertwining, the highest and lowest estimations of mankind, without confusing or muddling them?

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Etiquette & Prayer: Matters of Practice

---What follows is my response to a friend, edited and made anonymous, who wrote me a sincere note about, among other things, his struggles with feeling genuine empathy with someone like myself in the midst of serious illness. It turns into a reflection on the relationship of a loss of faith and feelings of inauthenticity in spirituality. ---

There is always an element of uniqueness or incommensurability to any kind of grief or suffering. This uniqueness makes a truly empathetic response difficult. I think at the core of this difficulty is not just the awkwardness that doesn't know what to say in a given situation, but has more to do with the difficulty of mustering a truly heartfelt and sincere response, a response that would feel as though it did some justice to the weight of the matter at hand. It is really a question of the place of politeness and etiquette vs. pretending and hypocrisy.

We all know there is ample reason to be wary of excessive emphasis on any code of conduct and plenty of evidence for the worst kind of hypocrisy hiding behind them.

That said, I don't think one should be too quick to dismiss etiquette. As I argued before, in the case of the responses that are expected to news of an illness: no matter how formulaic and repetitive the messages, a genuine sentiment really can penetrate the surface, even though sometimes merely mouthing the appropriate words can be just plain wearying.

As I talk about this question of etiquette vs. hypocrisy, I will also explore interesting resonances in the question of authentic vs. inauthentic actions in general but especially in regards to the spiritual life.


I take the position that even simple rules of etiquette: saying "please" and "thank you" or greeting someone with a smile or at least greeting them instead of ignoring them etc. etc. are a basic lubricant for the gears of civil society. Imagine navigating a complex civilization where nobody observed these rules, or rules like them. It would be maddening and utterly depressing. It would be a world where every interaction felt like a day at the DMV. (I'm picturing here especially Marge's sisters in the Simpsons.)

On the other hand, I do understand the impulse that rejects the seeming inauthenticity of surface politeness. I think, if we're honest with ourselves, we all struggle with feeling fake, or just plain false in situations where we're expected to make such-and-such a response. (I think this is most intensely felt in adolescence when we first peer behind-the-scenes of the adult world and see that they're not all they're cracked up to be.)

I think, though, that there are two different responses to this feeling of inauthenticity. One is to reject the rules of etiquette because they apparently lead to inauthentic actions. This is the response of the surly teenager who won't smile at a stranger or wish anybody a good anything if they don't good and feel like it, (unless, of course, they're being paid to do so by their fast-food employer). What this response really is, is the absolutizing of one's ego, the dwelling on of one's own feelings above all else. This is the response encouraged by most all of American culture. It is the Disney philosophy of following one's dreams, whatever the cost and regardless of whom it affects.

An alternative response might be to really listen to the source of this feeling, to try and learn from the fact that one's response feels as though it falls short of some standard, and do something to cultivate the character trait that would naturally give rise to the desired response: friendliness, gratitude, empathy etc.

Someone reminded me today of one of the slogans of Alcoholics Anonymous which is to "Fake it till you Make it." The idea of faking something in order to make it is really an insight into character development and parallels neatly with the history of spiritual disciplines and also with what I've been trying to say about the proper response to false-feeling etiquette. (I wrote before about a similar parallel between moral and spiritual development here.)

I think, generally, the same things could be said of proper civil behavior and proper religious behavior. There is a kind of performance of "proper behavior" that is aimed at manipulating what others think of one, which is hypocrisy, and there is a kind of performance of civil or religious duties which recognizes how short one's own impulses fall from one's ideals, but which persists in the activity in order to mold and shape one's own character, to become the kind of person one wants to be by doing what that kind of person does. The behavior might be the same. The difference is in the attitude with which the behavior is undertaken.

Another way of putting this is in the words of Aristotle who said "We are what we repeatedly do." So if we want to be grateful, we should act with gratitude; if empathetic, with empathy; if pious, with piety. This is not to reduce these virtues to simple automatic outcomes of external activities like the bouncing of so many billiard balls. As I've said before, there can be different motivations and intentions behind performing the same activity. There is a politeness that crassly covers up hatred and there is a politeness that strives for deference to and respect of one's fellows, just as there is a piety that aims at reputation maintenance or the manipulation of others as well as a piety that persists through the feeling of the absence of God in order to make oneself available for the God who speaks in silence. From the outside these vastly different actions would look identical.

Which brings me to my last point on the topic of etiquette. The very fact that one is aware of the inadequacy of one's own feeling towards another's grief says that they are in no danger of hypocrisy, and the fact that one is troubled by that lack and open enough to admit it, says that they would be putting themself in a position to grow through these experiences.

I think there is a connection again with the spiritual life, especially in the basic practice of prayer for example. I wrote before about the idea of praying even when one doesn't feel like it and I think the same thing goes for the feeling we often have of not knowing how. I certainly don't believe that not wanting to pray, or not knowing how to pray, has anything to do with genuine prayer. I believe this for exactly the same reason that I believe things like friendliness or empathy don't always require the interior emotion first and the action second in order to be genuine.

At the beginning of prayer is the desire to pray. Knowledge of how to pray comes later, if at all. As with the dynamic of the virtues where action is born out of desire which develops into character which affects future desires, so too with prayer. The "authentic" prayer that is a goal of the religious life can only be reached by means of prayer. To learn to pray, one must just begin praying.

Thomas Merton, a man of prayer if there ever was one, wrote in a very famous prayer: "I believe the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing." Merton is referring to actions in general, but this layering of motivation - action, desire, hope - applies as much, if not more so, to prayer. This picture then gives us not one degree of removal between the "authentic" prayer and the muddling activity we mortals or even monks undertake, but two: not only does one desire to pray, but even while praying, one hopes one is desiring to pray. This is, in fact, to be expected.

Prayer is a vast, deep and complicated subject I am not really capable of doing more than touching on. I mean just to say that prayer is not merely a matter of lists of requests and thanks, though it probably essentially involves these. Christian prayer is a very different matter from prayer in general, if there were such a beast. Centered as it is in the Trinity, Christian prayer is nothing less than the means by which the creature is invited into a participation in the divine life. One does not need to look to mystics to find an expression of this mysterious truth. The Bible itself says that "we do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express."

I know there are often people who, maybe feeling they have outgrown or lost their prior faith and the ability to sincerely pray, but who might feel this as something genuinely lacking in their life. Might this not be because they were frozen in inaction with regards to a spiritual life in the same way one can feel at times in regards to simple matters of etiquette - because the uncomfortable feeling of "inauthenticity" has allowed the perfect to become the enemy of the good?

I said above that it seemed to me the very fact that one was troubled by inadequacies in their own response to grief could put them in a position to grow through these experiences towards a perhaps more genuine ability to share in grief. I guess what I'm wondering is this: If one were troubled by the loss of prayer in one's life, could it be that there is an equal opportunity to be open, through that very sense of lack, to genuine prayerfulness which would always only be through imperfect attempts at prayer, no matter how inauthentic feeling.

I have come to believe that there is. Indeed, I can only hope that there is.

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Maximus on Money & its Relative Dangers

I remember musing in a conversation with my wife a year or two ago that there were two different ways of caring too much about money: wanting to have it in order to spend it, and wanting to have it in order to keep it. In my mind the difference was between hedonism and an obsession with security. It turns out that a 6th century Saint, Maximus the Confessor, bested me by one.

He writes that "there are three reasons for the love of money: pleasure-seeking, vainglory, and lack of faith. And more serious than the other two is lack of faith." [1]

If I remember correctly, our conversation was about the tendencies regarding the use of money encouraged in mine and my wife's respective upbringings and the relative dangers represented by each. I think most people assume that the misuse of money always equates with hedonism (and really, Maximus' category of vain-glory can be seen as a certain species of hedonism). At least this was the case for me.

It's too easy though to just look at the spendthrifts, the indulgers in decadance, the celebrities living extravagant lifestyles, and judge. I think Maximus is exactly right here. If we want to look for the most dangerous effects of money, we would do well to look at the old, retired couple, with every penny they've ever been able to pinch in the bank and well-invested, insured to the hilt, practically on death's door, but still unable to part with any of their treasure. This picture, usually deemed a respectable position to end up in, really shows a Gollum-like obsession with wealth. As the Good Book says: "where your treasure is...."

Now this is not to say that hedonism and vain-glory are not serious dangers. They are. But perhaps just because everyone agrees on this and because involvement in these vices is much more obvious, they are the relatively less dangerous tendencies to exhibit.

An excessive focus on pleasure-seeking can be a distraction from the life of faith but an over-reliance on material wealth and resources for our security goes directly to the heart of the life of faith, undermining the trust we should have in none but God.


1. Quoted in: The Monastic Way edited: Hannah Ward & Jennifer Wild, Eerdmans 2006

Original source: Maximus the Confessor, from The Four Hundred Chapters on Love, Third Century 16-19, trans. George C. Berthold in Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 63.

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Intercessory Prayer 09-16-07

Dear heavenly Father, we have come together to repent. We have come together to worship. And now we come together with these humble requests.

We pray for your Church in all places and all manifestations. We repent for the missteps we have taken and will take - the many things done in your name that grieve you – and for all the divisions we create or maintain in Christ's body that ignore his own teaching of love and unity. We acknowledge we do not know how to undo what has been done, and seek your guidance and care to make our congregations and denominations the expression of church you would have us be. Lead us forward Lord, we do not know the way.


We pray that you would be with Church of the Servant, bless all of its ministries and its leadership, especially those newly installed to their posts. We also thank you for the service of those just leaving their posts.

Knowing that we can accomplish no good apart from you, we ask you to rule over us God. Transform our hearts to love what you love and hate what you hate. Help us to die to our own wills and selfish desires and breathe in us a new spirit of willing obedience, that your will may be done. Cause us as your body to bring the same blessing to others as you have brought to us so many times through this body.

We pray too, Lord, for the nations and peoples of the world. The world stage is so daunting to us. Here more than anywhere else we feel our individual and even collective powerlessness. Bring your will to bear. We pray that you will provoke those in positions of influence and leadership to feel the weight of their responsibilities and guide them to bring about your ends. Comfort us and all who are anxious with the knowledge that these things too are indeed in your hands.

We think most especially of the ongoing strife in Iraq. Even unaware as we are of the extent of the suffering there, we are confident that you feel it fully and are more deeply grieved by each lost life, each broken family, than a mother is by the loss of her child. Bring soldiers home safely. Shelter those caught between factions. Bless all who are in harms way.

We pray for those caught up by the awesome power of this earth: for those affected by the earthquakes in Indonesia, for those in the paths of hurricanes. We do not understand how this suffering can persist in the presence of your power and love. We submit ourselves to your will, but please Lord, come soon. Make these sufferings come untrue. [1]

We lift up again those in our local communities and those worldwide who suffer daily in ways that don't make the headlines. We pray for those who are incarcerated and their separated loved ones. We pray for those mired in poverty, trapped in addictions or crushed by illness. We know you are close to those who suffer. Kindle awareness of your presence in the hearts of those experiencing burdens in their everyday lives. Make us, your servants, aware of the ways you give us to be your agents each day. Show us the people you want us to show your love to.

We pray for all teachers and students just completing semesters or just embarking on new semesters in education, especially those away at school. Give them all alike minds on fire for knowledge of your world, the will to work diligently toward their goals and the vision to use their gifts wisely.

Be with Jana Vander Laan in her examination before Classis this week. Give her wisdom and guidance through the process, and give her examiners the gift of discernment in completing their task.

We pray for Josh Baron and family as they continue to seek your direction for their lives. Give them your peace and patience as they do.

We thank you for my own positive test results this week showing the containment of the cancer and be with me and my family as we finish any further treatment the doctors recommend. Be too, with Madeline Van Goor. Continue to be with her during her time of recovery.

We offer you these requests Lord, even more sure that you listen to our prayer, than that we really desire what we pray for. [2]

Amen



1. The phrase "come untrue" is used by Samwise Gamgee in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

2. Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day 52, Question & Answer 129

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Bearing Each Other's Burdens

Walking around with a big piece of news like a cancer diagnosis and a recent surgery is a kind of burden. I am speaking here not of the anxiety over the issue itself, but in terms of the unseemliness of talking so much about oneself and the repetitiveness of explaining over and over the story and the details known thus far. News travels fast and sending a few mass emails goes a long way. But still, people are away or are in a circle of acquaintance just beyond the email list, so one is in the position of explaining a lot and often. Or else one opts to say nothing, to say everything's "Fine."

Wendell Berry writes beautifully in the novel Hannah Coulter about a time and a place where it was assumed that one mostly grinned and bore through it, no matter what it was.

"I need to tell about my people in their grief. I don't think grief is something they get over or get away from. In a little community like this it is around us and in us all the time, and we know it. ... But we shut our mouths and go ahead. How we are is 'Fine.' There are always a few who will recite their complaints, but the proper answer to 'How are you?' is 'Fine.'
The thing you have most dreaded has happened at last. The worst thing you might have expected has happened, and you didn't expect it. You have grown old and ill, and most of those you have loved are dead or gone away. Even so:
'How're you?'
'Fine. How're you?'
'Fine.'

There is always some shame and fear in this, I think, shame for the terrible selfishness and loneliness of grief, and fear of the difference between your grief and anybody else's. But this is a kind of courtesy too and a kind of honesty, an unwillingness to act as if loss and grief and suffering are extraordinary. And there is something else: an honoring of the solitude in which the grief you have to bear will have to be borne. Should you fall on your neighbor's shoulder and weep in the midst of work? Should you go to the store with tears on your face? No. You are fine.
And yet the comfort somehow gets passed around: a few words that are never forgotten, a note in the mail, a look, a touch, a pat, a hug, a kind of waiting with, a kind of standing by, to the end. Once in a while we hear it sung out in a hymn, when every throat seems suddenly widened with love and a common longing:

In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

We all know what that beautiful shore is. It is [our community] with all its loved ones come home alive." p. 61

The people the narrator speaks of are not so very different from a lot of people probably. They are not so different from my people.

There is an obvious nobility in perseverence to this sort of stiff-upper-lip attitude and Berry describes it about as well as can be done, but that's not all there is. I think this tendency can also easily fall into pride, the terrible situation of really feeling like it is not all 'Fine' but the inability to admit it or to ask for help. I don't think the narrator's positive portrayal is wrong in this sense or overly sentimental either. But the same stoic demeanor might arise from two different sources in two different people: one is courteous and humble about the universality of suffering, the other is pig-headed and proud.

The other reaction I have is that, however the news gets out, the responding words and sentiments do get through. One might hear the words "We're thinking about you guys" or "We've been praying for you", a hundred times in a row until one would rather just sink back below the radar, to say everything's "Fine" just in order to get on with it and go back to talking about the weather. But then hours later, or in the middle of the night, the realization sinks in that there are literally hundreds of people for whom my situation constitutes a real concern in their life. There are probably dozens and dozens of individuals, not counting immediate family, who have prayed sincerely, maybe even on a daily basis, for the best possible outcome. Which is to say they have, however briefly, centered themselves and focused the whole of their being on bringing about blessing in another's life, in my life. That is a truly amazing fact.

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Birth, Cancer, Gilead

I've been re-reading Gilead, the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Marilynne Robinson lately and I am constantly amazed by how much depth can be communicated in a novel. It is striking how a story about fictional characters can pack more insight into, well ... life, the universe and everything, than just about anything else. I just find it so exceedingly odd and wonderful that a total stranger can think and say things so important and meaningful to me; can be so important to me just because of words thought up, written down, and sent out into the world, directed to who knows whom.

The novel takes the form of letters written by an aging Midwestern preacher to his young son set around the mid-twentieth century. Through them, the father tries to communicate everything he would want to tell the man his son will become but won't have a chance to as he is not expecting to live long. Along the way he relays the story of the boy's grandfather and great-grandfather who were also preachers, but men very different from each other and from the writer of the letters, the boy's father. In this way, there is never any regurgitated platitudes, however noble, but a transfer of embodied ideals. The father strives to give the son as much of what he has learned about what matters enfleshed in the story of where the boy has come from even as the father lovingly, understandingly expects for his son a life very different from any of the preceding generations.

Well it may be more than a coincidence (though I'm usually quick to be dismissive of these kinds of things) but it is at the very least a quite remarkable coincidence that I am by happenstance reading a novel about a dying father addressed to a son who will barely remember him at the very time that I have a two week-old son at home and find myself with a cancer diagnosis.

My son, Jonah Gregory, was born August 18th, just past two weeks ago. He is doing very well by all accounts, including that of the Doctor who saw him the morning of Friday the 31st of August for his two week well-child visit. This was also the same visit that brought me to my first physical in something like eight years at which I heard that I had testicular cancer, something I should have seen as likely given the symptoms, but which was completely, totally, off my radar screen.

Now I don't mean to be melodramatic. I don't think I'm on my deathbed. I fully plan on raising and knowing and loving my new son and his older sister until I'm old and gray and they're so full of all the advice and insight I can manage from whatever wisdom I hope to be able to scrape together by then that they're just itching for me to quit it already and kick the bucket. But illness of any seriousness does put certain thoughts in mind. Reading a novel that depicts the most convincing, sincere attempt to reach out and love someone from beyond the grave, even if one's own situation is only a brief scare (as I hope this will be) is, well, a balm for the soul.

So as I've hinted at, I believe Gilead to be just about the most beautiful and poignant thing I can imagine being written in my age, in my language. At least every other page is a sentence or paragraph so perfect, so sublime that it would bear hours or days of reflection.

The proper response to beauty is on the one hand a recurring theme of the book, as much of what the father wants to say is about loving the world, and on the other hand constitutes the body of the book; the father's very act of writing is an overflowing of love and gratitude for the life he has lived. One of his refrains is to declare how much he will miss this world. What makes the novel so transcendent is how the sheer beauty of the writing and the story itself participates in and reproduces the theme, giving the appreciative reader the overwhelming urge to thank the bearer of the message and then to share it with others.

[Ms. Robinson, I can't imagine your ever reading this, but if you are, Thank you! I want to say "you'll never know how much..." or "there aren't words to say..." but I believe there are. You have said them. What you have written is a thing to be grateful for as well as a portrayal of the most sincere and intimate gratitude. So I believe you already know what I want to tell you. It's what anyone who feels a profound debt of gratitude wants to tell the one who has been a medium of grace in their life. The feeling is like the student who experiences that 'click' in their understanding - a small epiphany even - maybe over something small like a mathematical proof or a poem, and getting so excited by the elegance of it they want to go back to the teacher who showed it to them and explain to them exactly why it is so worthy of wonder. Maybe the teacher needs these reminders of the weight and worth of their material from time to time. It is all another example of that wonderful economy of love and grace, their way of increasing the more they are given away. {This also puts me in mind of how love might mirror knowledge in the paradox of the learner: both Plato's solution of positing that learning is mere remembering what we once knew - which is really less absurd than it sounds when one grapples with it - and also of Kierkegaard's reflections on the need for the teacher to bear both the message and the means of understanding the message and the relation this has to the learner-disciple of faith. But even I won't pursue this tangent further}]


(Again, related to this business of beauty eliciting or even demanding response, I've thought many times before of how the aesthetic dynamic has parallels to religious piety. True worship can really be thought of as just the same overwhelming impulse directed toward the creator of the universe as appreciative fans experience with respect to their favorite artist, movie star or sports hero. True evangelism then would not be some guilty obligation or arrogant imposition but just that love spilling over the brim of one's soul onto anyone who is nearby but especially toward those with whom one feels the bonds of affection. True love does not compel but woos. One should probably not attempt to evangelize someone one is not in love with or be an evangelist for a story one has not utterly fallen for. Evangelism then, should be like courtship in that it should be at least as hard to keep quiet about one's faith as it would be to not tell a friend about the person one has fallen head-over-heels in love with and plans to spend the rest of one's life with.)

(If you'll suffer me one more related parenthetical: I think it might be interesting to measure a book by its blurbs. Not by a who's who of the reviewer or which media outlet they represent type of yardstick but by how beautiful the language is that the reviewer is inspired to summon in their response. I am more swayed by poetic praise from a nobody than by pedestrian suggestions by the most noted of writers. I say this because the blurbs on the back of Gilead, about the author's previous novel, Housekeeping, are themselves beautiful pieces. Like all good writing, they give the reader the impression of stretching the language to say what it can't contain.)

Now Marilynne Robinson can write wise and beautiful things in just about any setting, on just about any topic, as in fact she has. But the setup of Gilead gives it a distinct advantage for reaching profundity. Art often reaches to extremes to depict the depths and heights of the human soul. Think the Iliad and the Odyssey, Henry V and Romeo and Juliet, Saving Private Ryan and Gone With the Wind. We find the deepest resonance in stories of war or love, or love in the midst of war, even if these extreme situations are utterly foreign to us. Even relatively shallow instances like my boyhood favorites: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and The Last of the Mohicans - stories of love worth dying for in the midst of a world in turmoil - point to the need of humanity to take up a meaning that exceeds it. Mankind can fathom no greater absolute than death and no greater force with which to oppose it than love.

The format of Gilead gives the author the unique ability to conjure a credible 230-page deathbed scene. This seems a fortuitous circumstance for a story but also a tall order to follow through on. Robinson does not waste one page of the opportunity. Some of the (I'm running out of adjectives) best parts are where the father steps back to try to explain again his purpose in writing in the first place.

Here are a few short selections:

"I'm writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you've done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God's grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you." p. 52

"I'm trying to make the best of our situation. That is, I'm trying to tell you things I might never have thought to tell you if I had brought you up myself, father and son, in the usual companionable way. When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters. There are so many things you would never think to tell anyone. And I believe they may be the things that mean most to you, and that even your own child would have to know in order to know you well at all." p. 102

"The history of the church is very complex, very mingled. I want you to know how aware I am of that fact. These days there are so many people who think loyalty to religion is benighted, if it not worse than benighted. I am aware of that, and I know the charges that can be brought against the churches are powerful. And I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, sheltered and parochial. In every sense, unless it really is a universal and transcendent life, unless the bread is the bread and the cup is the cup everywhere, in all circumstances, and it is a time with the Lord in Gethsemane that comes for everyone, as I deeply believe. ... It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. If I could only give you what my father gave me. No, what the Lord has given me and must also give you. But I hope you will put yourself in the way of the gift." p. 114

These are not my words, but they are the words - the sentiments - I would want to communicate to my children, my wife, my parents, my siblings and all my family and friends, were I to leave tomorrow or some day decades hence.

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