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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