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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CRC Welcomes Women, Sort Of

My denomination, the massive and now ancient (just turned 150!) Christian Reformed Church, has made a decision to further include women in church office. This decision interests me, not only as a member but as a compelling case study of dealing with ecumenical issues.

The change that's actually occurring is a little confusing but let me try to recap, quoting the CRC Synod News Service. First, "since 1995, congregations and classes had been allowed to ordain women as office bearers under a system of local option. Currently 26 of the 47 classes have exercised that option."

What is new is that, "synod voted last night to remove the word 'male' as a requirement for holding ecclesiastical office in the Christian Reformed Church. This opens the way for any CRC congregation to ordain women as ministers, elders, deacons or ministry associates."

Whereas before, a classis had to exercise the option to ordain women before a congregation could choose to, now any congregation can make the decision on its own. Which means that under the old or new systems, any individual congregation could not ordain women if it so chose, regardless of its classis's decision or now its denomination's decision. There apparently wouldn't be a problem if a particular congregation just happened to have no ordained women now, or anytime in the future.

Already we see that the denomination is allowing a fair amount of diversity. It is leaving the door open for a CRC congregation to have no ordained women and presumably reject the possibility of any individual's ordination solely based on their being a woman while officially supporting the idea of women's ordination.

In addition to this change the synod affirmed last year's vote to allow women to be delegates to synod. By way of compromise and with the "desire to maintain unity in the church by respecting the convictions of those who believe the Bible prohibits women serving as office bearers. It allows classes to set restrictions on women serving as delegates to classis meetings."

Based on this, not only could there be an individual hold-out congregation that didn't ordain any women but a local classis could prevent women ordained by a local congregation, freed by the new rules, from coming to its classis meetings. They would, however, have to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with ordained women at the denomination-wide synod.

Well that's the decision. The question is, is it a good one? Does this model the kind of unity in diversity that we should seek in ecumenical dialogues with other denominations? Or is it a compromise that satisfies no one, just barely preventing the splitting up of an already small denomination?

The first thing I thought when I read this was, What if it was any group other than women? What if the Church had a similar rule on an ethnic minority? What if the denomination allowed classes to restrict attendance of classis meetings based on ethnicity? Or what if the situation was reversed? What if a congregation or classis went to the opposite pole and decided they wanted only women to be ordained and they wanted to restrict classis meeting attendance for men?

OK, so these examples might be disingenuous. There isn't anybody seriously arguing that racial minorities or men shouldn't be ordained (at least any more? in the case of minorities) while there is, it seems, a reasonable case to be made against women's ordination. But what if there were such a one? Is the case for allowing these congregational differences just that "people of goodwill can disagree?"

My next thought was, If this is an acceptable route to take on women's ordination, why not on other issues? Why couldn't a whole host of schisms be undone along these lines of allowing the exercising of local options. Imagine that the Vatican suddenly said that, though they maintained their teaching as the right one, Lutherans could be allowed to dissent at the local level on issues of priestly celibacy, the doctrine of the sacraments, supremacy of the pope etc. etc. Then imagine that the Vatican and the Eastern patriarchs dropped their squabbling over the filioque and decided to just agree to disagree. Then really stretch yourself and imagine the CRC and the RCA got over their disagreement about lodge membership and got back together. Would that mean that the substance of the disagreement was judged in retrospect to never really have mattered much in the first place?

The tension is real. On the one hand I want to argue that many of these theological disagreements are important and we shouldn't just opt for a lowest-common-denominator unity. On the other hand it's obvious to everyone involved that the disunity of the church is a sin and striving for greater unity should be on the front burner for all. Our problem is just that we disagree on what matters are relatively unimportant enough for unity to trump or we just opt for the position that the church is united, it's just smaller than you thought.

In the case of the CRC, the synod is trying to maintain unity, obviously - nobody wants another denomination - while "respecting the convictions of those who believe the Bible prohibits women serving as office bearers." By officially taking the side in favor of women's ordination while allowing lower levels of authority to differ, they are in effect saying that a woman's equal standing in terms of ordination is important, but not that important.

I might agree, if it came down to either that or another split-up denomination, but then again, I'm not a woman.

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Everday Mysticism

It seems like everybody wants to be a mystic. The mystical way is usually taken to be that of the extreme ascetic: your stereotypical bone-thin, gaunt-eyed, cave-dwelling kind of saint. That way may well have its place, but a path for the more everyday mystic is pointed to by Richard Mouw who writes in his Praying at Burger King that:

"I seldom find myself in a praying mood while sitting in a restaurant. But I typically don't pray because I am feeling especially 'spiritual.' If I had to wait for those moods to set in, I wouldn't pray very often!" [1]

Mouw goes on to draw the analogy between greeting or recognizing the presence of a person and recognizing the presence of God, noting that when we see someone we know, we don't usually ignore them because we don't feel like greeting them, but bring ourselves to greet the person because their very presence obliges us.

How does this relate to God? If God is everywhere all the time, we should be continually recognizing his presence. True, we should. This is clearly the impulse behind the scriptural imperative to pray without ceasing and the various forms of life that have tried to take this seriously. But alas, most of us struggle to focus on God for more than a minute without distraction.

Michael Himes writes in The Mystery of Faith: An Introduction to Catholicism that the basic idea behind everything from corporate worship to prayer is what he calls the sacramental principle: the idea that if something is true at all times and in all places one must pay attention to it at some time, and in some place. A finite human being just cannot attend to the infinite but in a timely way. (Moreover, this 'condition' of human experience should not, from a Christian perspective, be seen as simply negative but part of their originally good createdness. [2]) This picture of trying to recognize the infinity of God in some particular way is exactly what is given us in the image of someone like Professor Mouw trying to reach a momentary awareness of God sitting in a restaurant - a 'worldly' distracting Burger King of all places.

But isn't this type of activity, either greeting an acquaintance with a smile when you really wish they'd go away, or bowing one's head and praying when one's mind is anywhere but with God, just what we call hypocrisy? Well, it can be. The trap of hypocrisy is an ever-present danger for any of humanity's higher aims whether they be moral or spiritual. It is just false though to say that the choice is between either hypocritical pretending to be what one really isn't and just doing whatever the heck one feels like.

The other option is to act the way one wants to become. [3]

So a spiritual activity becomes hypocritical then, not when one has mixed feelings about it - otherwise spirituality would be only for the already perfect, but when it becomes the end in itself. Jesus compared people who evinced this kind of religion to white-washed tombs. But spiritual actions can also be a means to an end, a way of exercising an impulse one wants to become more and more spontaneous. It's no accident we call something like prayer a spiritual practice, because it is nothing other than training oneself to be aware of God's presence more fully and more consistently. [4]

This is why the discipline of prayer at fixed times, according to the clock or events like meals or waking and sleeping, is so important. It recognizes the infinity of God by immersing oneself more consciously into time as a way of reaching beyond it, and growing in awareness of that which is outside of time. The other option, of being 'spiritual' when one feels like it, far from getting us to God, just makes us more in thrall to ourselves and our own agendas.

To return to the comparison with a friend: we all recognize the difference between a friend we only like to see when we're in the right mood, and the deep friendship that is as important and as appreciated in the hard times as in the good. (Marriage should embody the ideal of the human relationship here.) What kind of a god would it be that was only there when we felt like turning to him? Truly that god would be one of our own making.

1. p.4

2. see Smith, James K.A., The Fall of Interpretation

3. I think there's a lot that could be said, if it hasn't been already, relating Christian ethics of character as in Hauerwas, and the theology of spiritual formation.

4. For further reflection on the spiritual life as training, see Willard, Dallas, The Divine Conspiracy

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Notes for a Conversation with My Friends, the Atheist Respecters of Transencence, Part I

My dear friends, even though you are all basically agnostic or atheistic in your thinking and I am a Christian (and a pretty theologically conservative or orthodox one at that,) I do so appreciate and enjoy our discussions on the idea of transcendence and the philosophical categories involved in thinking about it, I would like to delve deeper into that conversation here.

You have quoted approvingly Wittgenstein's statement that "what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." [1] I would happily agree that there is an important truth in this statement not just for the atheist respecter of transcendence but also – or even especially – for the Christian. (Another part of me bristles at the presumption of Wittgenstein’s ‘must’. Whence comes his right to make such an authoritative claims? But I’m getting ahead of myself.) Since I have assumed that you are either atheist or agnostic [2] with respect to belief in god, but have this idea of an ineffable transcendence, I have decided to call you atheist respecters of transcendence. [3]

There are a few points I want to develop here. In this Part I posting, I will try to describe, as far as possible, the common ground we seem to share in our view of transcendent reality and the attendant difficulties that inhere in using finite language to talk about it. Then I will try to describe how postmodern thought – insofar as it undermines any strict dichotomy between faith and reason – makes religious speech, knowledge and thus the religious life, more not less tenable. In subsequent posts, I will address further outcomes of this paradigm change in epistemology.

First, in Part II, I will flesh out the argument touched on here that the only understandings truly troubled by the postmodern turn, are those based upon a purportedly neutral view of truth. I will look especially at the idea of atheism’s alleged ethical superiority using the arguments of the current crop of apologists for atheism: Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, as case studies.

In Part III, I will explain a possible Christian response to postmodern thought, namely, how the way past the impasse of the apophatic impulse is to be more, not less, open to tradition-based teachings, institutional understandings and in-credible stories of transcendence. Included in this, I will discuss the paradoxical nature of Christian teaching, arguing that it essentially always incorporates into its positive theological assertions, strong negative theological elements.

If I’m able to continue on to a Part IV, it will be on how, a trajectory parallel to that of the postmodern critique of modernity and resultant re-opening to tradition would be exactly the path required of any post/modern human commitment robust enough to undo the imprisonment of the self from its own bubble of narcissism.

Now, we have discussed the idea of transcendence but not what transcendence means. So before I explore how the postmodern outlook affects the discussion, we have to stake out some common ground in our views of the nature of transcendence. One of the difficulties with the conversation though, is that its very possibility is a big part of what needs to be discussed. I’m not assuming that everyone would immediately agree with the picture I describe, nihilism is still a live option, I am just trying to cautiously lay out a shared sense or intuition we, and many others, all seem to have. To pin down a reason isn’t my goal here, but just to give outlines of what we seem to share, experientially or phenomenologically, in order to move forward to the topic of how one could talk about any possible transcendent reality.

To explain my use of the word transcendence, I will use a few examples of ways or even degrees that something can be described as transcendent. To begin with the most mundane: as I look at a three-dimensional object, say a cup, the far side of the cup transcends me perceptually, but not essentially, I can simply turn the cup around and that transcendence is flattened. [4]

To skip ahead a little, there is a deeper way in which the past, even my own past experience, transcends me. It is not present to me for perception in any first-hand way, thus any views I have on it are at best theories and partial reconstructions. This transcendence is no longer accidental, able to be undone like the far side of the cup, but essential to the nature of what is experienced.

For my purposes, the really interesting step occurs when we talk about the experience of other persons. To encounter another person is to encounter some’thing’ which, no matter how familiar, or known or even studied, will always, and essentially exceed my comprehension. [5] Imagine the most brilliant psychologist in the world who also happened to be in possession of a machine which could scan an individual’s body and brain in a way as far beyond today’s MRI as an MRI is beyond an x-ray. Then make the person under observation the scientist’s spouse of 50 years. We would still say that, beyond the amazing amount of detail available, there is an essential something that cannot be grasped. As much as we might think the mind arises or emerges from the brain’s functioning and personhood from the interaction of the brain and the body, most of us would say that you or I cannot be merely reduced to these things. To put it another way: another’s stream of consciousness can never fully overlap with one’s own. We are always, irreducibly, mysteries to one another.

I think we are on common ground so far, but I also believe that we can go one step further. It also seems to me that we find ourselves believing that there is some type of existence or some quality of experience that is more essentially transcendent of us; something from which these other instances of transcendence derive their transcendence; something that is at the very least phenomenologically and ethically transcendent, but that also defies description in any human categories including, but not limited to, current scientific, philosophical or religious categories, but probably also any imaginable future category. Some might describe this as a god or God, but to others it might be a philosophical notion anywhere from a Platonic form like Truth or Beauty, all the way to Derrida’s idea of the undeconstrucible, in the name of which deconstructions are carried out (i.e. the Justice in the name of which all particular instantiations of justice are deconstructed). This would mean that whatever concepts one could bring to bear on whatever is behind this experience of transcendence, those concepts would even more so than for the above categories of transcendence, essentially and always fail to completely capture what they are pointing to. [6]

John Caputo (perhaps another atheist respecter of transcendence) wrote, in an intensification of Wittgenstein’s sentiment, that “by the time one has said that something is ineffable, that one cannot say a thing, one has already been speaking for some time and one has already said too much.” [7] On this view, not only is every interpretation of the absolute imperfect insofar as it misses something, the very act of predicating something to that which is beyond predication is a mistaken undertaking. Caputo notes the difficulty of remaining faithful to this insight in thinkers from contemporary philosophers to Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, who all want to insist on the absolutely indescribable nature of the absolute but who also spend gallons of ink and reams of paper saying exactly why this is the case. It feels a bit like the bind one finds oneself in claiming “the only rule is that there are no rules.” Is this just hypocrisy or paradox or both?

It’s clear that both atheist respecters of transcendence and Christian namers of the ineffable together, contra Wittgenstein and the apophatic impulse generally, seem to be compelled somehow to speak on this subject, even if it is only to make negative statements. My own wrestling with this issue has been specifically over whether this type of via negativa, can also incorporate any positive pronouncements on the nature of transcendence. If we agree that every truth claim made about the ultimate is wrong, I want to add that some are clearly more wrong than others, which means that some are more right. (See my earlier post on Deb Rienstra’s beautiful way of putting this.) So the question really becomes whether purely apophatic thinking is even humanly possible, leave alone desirable. I take it as a matter of deductive logic that any statement of the form “God is not…” or “the transcendent is not…,” if true, reveals knowledge of the transcendent. This might appear a simplistic conclusion, but the implications for how to think and speak of ultimate things are broad.

We all feel, not just comfortable in pointing to different social orders and saying “this is not just!” We would insist on it as a right, even perhaps a duty to do so. When asked to define Justice itself though, we are at a loss to do justice to it. (Try to imagine yourself as a character in a Socratic dialogue making this attempt and succeeding in a way that would compel the great gadfly to agree with you and you’ll know what I mean.) So too, I’m comfortable saying God is not the flying spaghetti monster, Thor, Zeus, myself, nature or even just the the Prime Mover. But in the name of what or whom do I say this?

It’s not fair to, on one hand, commit (or submit?) to a belief in a positive understanding of Justice through critiquing fallible instantiations of the ideal, and then on the other hand argue that it’s incoherent to believe there is a God, who is by definition conceptually transcendent, just because one isn’t able to provide a proper definition. I am not making the argument (at least at this point) that if you believe there is such a thing as Truth, you have to agree with me that there is a God who is the source of it. But, it is only fair that if you find it credible to set the bar at one level for thinking about one class of transcendent ideas you can’t suddenly jack it up for another. If we can muddle about making our provisional theories about the nature of Truth, Justice, Beauty, and Love, and even act upon them, then we are at least as justified epistemically to proceed in like manner with respect to the divine.

To insist on speaking about the unspeakable “is not a matter of ‘giving up the infinite’ but rather of giving up the assumption that the only way to ‘do justice’ to the infinite is to speak of it in its infinity - which, of course, is impossible.” [8] Perhaps it is a better service to Justice to make our best attempts at bringing it about according to our limited understanding than to just sit on our hands out of false humility, and perhaps it is more respectful of the transcendent to name it God and worship him, than to just feign absolute ignorance.

Thus far I’ve been trying to deal with the background of approaching the infinite with finite words. Now what does postmodernism have to do with this picture? First, let me provide some tentative definitions. When I use the word modern or modernism, I refer roughly to the period immediately following the Enlightenment, up to and possibly including today. The Enlightenment itself is of course at least as complex a phenomenon as postmodernism, but I will rely on a terribly simplistic working definition to function as a launching point: that of Hans-George Gadamer’s characterization of the Enlightenment as having a basic “prejudice against prejudice”. [9] The paradigmatic example is, as always, Rene Descartes and his 'discovery’ of hyperbolic doubt as the way to true knowledge. The idea is that we should doubt everything (again, says who?) until compelled to belief on pure, objective, rational grounds. Doubt, in other words, is given the benefit of, well, doubt. All beliefs are guilty until proven innocent. All prejudices are prejudicially swept aside. Descartes famously comes to all kinds of conclusions, including the existence of God, as if out of thin air, and while his success is not very accepted, his method and standard of what counts as success have stood as the ideals behind most of western philosophy ever since.

One of the key elements in the formation of the Enlightenment was its reaction to the confessional wars. The Catholics were fighting the Protestants, the Protestants were fighting Radical Protestants, all (apparently) over theological differences. So it made some sense then – since it seemed to be these stories and prejudices which were dividing us – to have thought that we needed to get beyond them in order to establish peace. It is no accident that the seeds of postmodernism, already perhaps sowed in the 19th century, began to sprout in the aftermath of the World Wars which were seen in many quarters as a signal of the failure of the Enlightenment project. The time period that saw the rise of postmodern thought was also defined by the Cold War, a conflict which, while threatening the very extinction of the species due to the facing-off of two superpowers, was carried out by the nations which were most thoroughly rooted in and defined by modernist philosophies. Both communism and capitalism can be easily described as different versions of the story that humanity is on a march of progress toward inevitable utopia. The nations that had the strongest beliefs about their representation of objective justice and morality seemed the most bent on killing each other with the real danger of taking the rest of the world with them.

To turn the discussion to this emerging postmodern thought, it is first necessary to distinguish postmodernism from postmodernity, the latter of which I take to be a cultural context while the former is more a philosophical sensibility. While the two inevitably have an intertwining cause-and-effect relationship, I limit my comments to postmodernism. Even cutting the matter down in this way still leaves a huge topic. But since I’m not attempting an exhaustive study, I’m just going to jump in head-first again and go with the definition used by Lyotard who described postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” [10]

The crux of this definition is obviously in how one defines a metanarrative. Many responses to postmodernism implicitly assume that religions like Christianity are metanarratives par excellence and thus, depending on who’s doing the reacting, either Christianity or postmodernism is to be rejected. I do not take this view. Christianity does have an explicit teaching on the past, present and future, not only of every human being’s life, but also of humanity, life and the world itself. If Christianity is true, then it affects everything.

So how can this not be a metanarrative? Maybe the misunderstanding arises from a lack of Greek vocabulary. The “meta” of metanarrative basically means beyond, so a metanarrative is beyond a narrative in a way roughly analogous to the way metaphysics (dealing with the nature of reality – determining what kinds of things exist) is beyond physics. The story goes that the librarians at the ancient library in Alexandria were categorizing the works of Aristotle and when they got to the philosophical works they didn’t have a word for, simply labeled them metaphysics, because they were shelved after, and were obviously different from, the works on physics. Now it would be nonsensical if a physicist felt he had to give up his understanding of the world gained from Newton, Einstein and Hawking because he read yet another philosopher declare the end of metaphysics. But this is the reaction that some Christians have, or others expect them to have, toward their beliefs in the light of postmodern thought.

Jamie Smith writes that in defining metanarratives, “what is at stake is not the scope of these narratives but the nature of the claims they make. For Lyotard, metanarratives are a distinctly modern phenomenon: they are stories which not only tell a grand story (since even premodern and tribal stories do this), but also claim to be able to legitimate the story and its claims by an appeal to universal Reason. On Lyotard’s account, the Enuma Elish, though telling a story that is universal or grand in scope, is nevertheless not a metanarrative because it does not claim to legitimate itself by an appeal to scientific Reason. On the other hand, Lyotard sees classical Marxism as a metanarrative insofar as it claims to be a system legitimated by Reason, and therefore to be universally accepted on that basis.” [11] So much for postmodernism.

To connect the two ideas, I take it that the Enlightenment began as a heightened suspicion of local narratives; any particular or historically-based tradition which claimed to connect to Truth. Postmodernism then is really a kind of extension of, or even hyper-modernity, as it turns suspicion toward the Enlightenment itself, seeing it as merely the tradition of being against traditions, or as just another story about the origins and ends of mankind. (Once upon a time, say the objective philosophers, there was the state of nature where there was a war of all against all. Since then, we have been steadily marching forward in progress – with the occasional setback - and we will one day live happily ever after.)

Enlightenment thinkers doubted faith in order to seek knowledge, postmodern thinkers have doubts even about doubt and either give up on attaining real knowledge of the world, becoming nihilistic, or recognize that some sort of leap of faith is the necessary beginning of knowledge. But it’s not so much that postmodern theories of interpretation imply one needs to make a leap of faith, but that even to hold out on faith is itself a faith-like commitment. What the break-down of the dichotomy between faith and reason entails is that any interpretive, hermeneutic commitment, including of course moral ones, are always already faith commitments.

When doubt is made the primary means of attaining knowledge, we should hardly be surprised when we only end up with more doubts. It seems like the path of doubt, once begun, works like a kind of Chinese finger trap: the harder one tries to free oneself, the more stuck one gets.

So there are really two moves going on here. The first is, in pointing to the fundamental faith commitments of all interpretations, postmodernism levels the playing field for all modes of discourse, whether they be scientific, rationalistic or religious. [12] The second is to point out the fundamental difference between self-consciously, narratively-based belief systems, like religions with a founding myth which they need not be embarrassed about unabashedly proclaiming, and stories whose very tale seeks conceal its basic narrative character, like modernist beliefs in Truth, Justice, Humanity and Freedom.

Another way to look at this is through the claim made in modern society and politics that what is needed is a naked public square. To extend the image, it is as if the emperor of modernity has mandated a neutral space where everyone must shed the clothing of their respective presuppositions and faith commitments before entering. Postmodernity is like the child pointing out, “The emperor has clothes! Everyone in this square is still fully clothed and just pretending to be naked.” The emperor, himself luxuriously clad, and his followers are all duly ashamed. [13] The Christian is not troubled by this, she knows, at least when properly reminded, that her belief in God is not arrived at from an objective standpoint but always and only through faith seeking understanding. If the Christian thought there were some basis on which to believe in God other than God himself, they would obviously be worshipping in the wrong direction.

In conclusion, though my Christian beliefs are not dependent upon postmodern philosophy, I do find myself compelled by some of its ways of viewing the world and ways of human knowing in the world. I find in postmodernism a peculiar kind of ally; a sort of enemy-of-my-enemy, contingent alliance. Insofar as I find myself in dialogue with atheist thinkers who are still wedded to modernist epistemological assumptions, postmodernism is a useful tool not only because it deflects some of their more strident criticisms of faith in general and Christianity in particular, but also because it ironically makes those criticisms seem even less tenable than ever on their own terms! I will turn to the question of how criticisms of faith commitments backfire on the more militant atheists in Part II.

For now, Adieu and Goodbye (God-Be-With-Ye)!


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notes
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1. Wittgenstein, Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus, proposition 7

2. I’m taking up atheism as the more appropriate term. Agnosticism – without knowledge – is to me not an interesting middle ground between theism and atheism. Even vocal atheists admit the possibility that there could be a God, they don’t claim certain knowledge that there is no God, they just don’t believe in one, they lack theistic belief: a-theism. The orthodox Christian is really agnostic about God as her belief is based on faith and not the pure and certain knowledge to which the modern definition of agnosticism seems to oppose itself. It’s also important to remember the arch-enemy of orthodoxy in ancient and modern times, was and is Gnosticism. So it would make sense that orthodox Christian belief is in an important sense agnostic as well.

3. I apologize if this nomenclature feels limiting and I will happily refine it if you think it's a mischaracterization. But you see, I just can't help using labels, imperfect approximations of reality, as a means of moving forward. I also understand that I'm speaking to multiple people and that there are differences in your opinions. But I'm doing my best to address what seem to be common elements in your thinking.

4. I don’t remember which particular professor of mine used this analogy, it was probably more than one. (Maybe all philosophy professors use something like it.) I’ll just cite my reference as: Calvin College philosophy department, 2002-2004

5. I’m relying here on my understanding of Levinas & Derrida’s treatment of what they call the essential Otherness or alterity of human persons one to another.

6. Trying to describe the phenomenological transcendence of the four examples I’m dealing with is difficult because I’m trying to describe different levels of qualitative difference. A rough analogy would be to say that to go from black-and-white to color is one qualitative change, but to go then to 3-dimensional moving images is a greater qualitative change.

7. Caputo, Against Ethics, p. 75

8. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation, p. 129

9. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 273

10. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, xxiv

11. Smith "A little story about Metanarratives" In Christianity and the Postmodern Turn, p. 125

12. This leveling of the playing field does not mean an anything-goes relativism of interpretations.It just means there is no neutral or objective perspective on any class of knowledge. I guess a conclusion one could take is that “I’ll just think whatever ever I please”, and believe, for example, that the earth is in the center of the universe because the Bible says so. It’s true, this probably couldn’t be proven false. But this would be a silly conclusion. It would be to give up on the task of hermeneutic discernment, missing the other half of the statement that some conclusions are better than others.

13. I thought I made this up, but later (re)discovered that the source for this metaphor is from Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology, p. 182-83

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Gotta problem with your religion? Good.

"Just on a theoretical level there is a mistake in going from the background you come from to an entirely fresh background. The way you know that a religion is your religion is that you have problems with it. If you don’t have problems with it, it’s not your religion."

This quote is from an interview with Philip Groening about his new film Into Great Silence. I liked it so much because I think it succinctly addresses a topic that is often on my mind: the problem of shopping around for a religion, or for that matter, a denomination or congregation.

Lord, I pray that I will never cease having problems with the religion through which I find myself being reached by you.

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Hermeneutical Headaches or, Why Libraries Make Me Dizzy

I love to read. I also find reading excruciating. I'm usually reading a number of books at a time which is nothing unusual, but what might be different about me - and which my wife, Marie, at least finds insane - is that I usually know how many pages I have left to the next chapter and to the end of each book. It's a cliché for avid readers to say they're sad when a good book comes to an end. I do have that experience, but usually I can't wait until I finish a book so I can start another one.

The root source of my impatience (let's call it what it is) arises from the combination of my wanting to read every beautiful, informative, clever, important, in short: every worthwhile book, while, having worked in bookstores for seven years, being pretty well aware of just how many worthwhile books are out there. It's a lot. But this is only the beginning. The main reason libraries (my shorthand for the sum of human knowledge) are prone to having deleterious effects on me is that not only do I want to read so many books, but I want to already have read them.

Mark Twain said that "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read". I take his meaning to be that people want the cachet of having-read the classics: showing off a degree of education, name-dropping esoteric authors and making highfalutin literary references (I think 'highfalutin' is the language Huck would use - [that was a shameless ploy to show I've actually read Twain]). I may be as guilty of this literary snobbery as the next person but that's not the real reason I want not just to read, but to have-read, well, everything.

The first reason is that what I enjoy even more than reading a book is discussing an already-read book with another. The opportunities for that are few and far between these days though, so that's not really it either. More than anything else, what makes my head spin around stacks of books is the hermeneutical circle involved in making one's way through them. The hermeneutical circle as applied to a particular work is the idea that one understands the work as a whole in terms of its constituent parts, and understands each part in terms of one's understanding of the whole. If we take a book like the Bible for example, we would obviously say that one doesn't understand it until one has read the whole thing. The concept of the hermeneutical circle would add that one can't have a full understanding, even of Genesis, till one has gotten through Revelation. But once we've done that, we have to re-read Genesis in light of our new understanding, which changes our view of everything else, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. Suffice it to say that if we read through a book once, we've only just begun.

If this picture isn't daunting enough, we have to add in all the knowledge outside of the book that is required to read (understand) it more fully.( Notice I didn't say outside the text! [Oh shame on me, another "look-at-how-smart-I-am" reference.]) So let's say I want to read a certain novel I've heard great things about. So I read it. Then I read it a few more times, studying all angles, the beginning in light of the ending and vice versa etc. Then I think, I should read it in the original French. So I learn French and read it again. But the novel is set in the Sixteenth century, so I should read everything I can about that period. But the author wrote it during World War II, so I should read everything I can about that period to understand the author's context. But what if I'm not sure how this whole reading and learning thing works at all? I need to read books on linguistics, hermeneutics, the philosophies of language and interpretation, learn those work's original languages, historical contexts etc. etc. The rabbit hole goes pretty far down.

Tentative Conclusion:

Perhaps if one were able to fully read any one text, one would by definition have read every text; one would be - omniscient.

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The Sopranos: Science & the Meaning of Life

In season 6, episode 4 of The Sopranos, Tony's in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound and the resulting surgery. He's been reading a kid's book on dinosaurs, the only reading material around, when he turns to his nephew Christopher, and says, "Get this. It says here if the history of the planet was represented by the empire state building, the time that human beings have been on earth would only be a postage stamp at the very top. You realize how insignificant that makes us."

Christopher replies matter of factly, "I don't feel that way" gets up and walks away.

What a humorous lesson on how to elegantly deal with the tendency of some scientists and scholars to overinterpret the facts. Beautiful.

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Kierkegaard on Monasticism

Soren Kierkegaard is quoted as the epigraph of Nancy Klein Maguire's An Infinity of Little Hours, as saying:

"Of this there is not doubt, our age and Protestantism in general may need the monastery again, or wish it were there. The 'monastery' is an essential dialectical element in Christianity. We therefore need it out there like a navigation buoy at sea in order to see where we are, even though I myself would not enter it. But if there really is true Christianity in every generation, there must also be individuals who have this need..."



I love reading Kierkegaard. He's not always the easiest on his readers, but the reward is always well worth the work. He is also one of the few philosophers that regularly makes me laugh out loud. I was surprised though to read him with anything like the above positive appraisal of monasticism in the light of his emphasis on the individual's conversion experience and his trenchant critique of Christendom.

Monasticism can be two different, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, things. On the one hand it can be an individual's path of intense devotion and zealous attempt at attaining perfection. This is the only thing most people picture when they imagine the life of a monk. On the other hand, at least in its oldest, largest and most influential form, the Benedictine tradition practices communal sanctification and communal salvation. It emphasizes what is true of Christian teaching in general: that there is no salvation for any individual apart from the body of believers.

I'm not sure which conception of the monastic Kierkegaard would have had in mind, but I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiment on its continued necessity to those within and without its cloisters.

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Individualism Redux: Authority Part IV

I'm afraid I didn't do quite a good enough job painting a picture of the purely individualist view of the self, the view that rejects all authority other than its own. (Holders of this view would probably use different terminology.) So I can't resist adding a couple quotes from someone who does a much better job. I know there's endless material that would do as good a job or better than what follows, but since I've just shelved the book a week ago and it's fresh in my mind, I'm going to turn again to Cardinal Ratzinger (aka Benedict XVI). These are a couple of his takes on "tyranny of the self" in his book, Salt of the Earth.

"Man is conceived in purely individualistic terms; he is only himself. The relation that is an essential part of him and that is what really first enables him to become himself is taken away from him. This claim to be the ultimate and sole authority over oneself, and the claim to have the right to appropriate as much of life as possible, while no one has the right to stand in the way, is part and parcel of the sense of life on offer to man today." p. 167

"You are built for love, and therefore for giving, for renunciation, for the pruning of yourself. Only if you give yourself, if you lose yourself, as Christ puts it, will you be able to live. This basic option has to stand out in all its starkness. It is offered to man's freedom. But it should still really be made plain that to live by making one's own claims is a false recipe for life. The refusal of suffering and the refusal of creatureliness, hence, of being held to a standard, is ultimately the refusal of love itself, and that ruins man. For it is precisely his submitting himself to a claim and allowing himself to be pruned that enables him to mature and bear fruit. ... Somewhere deep down man knows: I have to be challenged, and I have to learn to form myself according to a higher standard and to give myself and to lose myself." p. 168

If the above descriptions don't hit the nail of 21st century American selfishness square on its proverbial head, then I don't know what would.

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Not Whether but Which: Authority Part III

Any debate on religious authority usually takes the form of those in favor of authority versus those against it. Thus conservatives will argue for obedience to authority (Catholics stressing hierarchy, Protestants the scriptures) while liberals or progressives argue against it. But it's never really a question of whether or not one obeys an authority, but rather which authority one respects. [1] The mistake then is made by both sides in this debate. Indeed, the mistake is to have the debate at all.

Authority in and of itself is not inherently bad, nor is it inherently good. Authority is good when it is properly oriented toward good ends. Thus the progressive side of the debate, couching its argument in terms of liberation and freedom, is to my way of thinking, just substituting the tyranny of the self for obedience to an external authority. (I think the way to view this is in how celebrities clearly seem to be enslaved to the image of themselves that they propagate in the culture - genuine celebrities being just an extreme version of the average self-centered American ego.)

The conservatives do the disservice of granting the terms of the debate instead of pointing out that there is no rejecting of authority but only a switching of allegiances. Conservatives thereby come across as being against freedom instead of more fruitfully stressing the classic distinction between freedom-from (negatively defined) and freedom-for (positively defined).

If what I've said so far seems to be taking the 'side of authority', reneging on my claim that the debate over authority is a false one, it is only because in our time and place, 21st century America, we exist at an apogee of individualism (blogs themselves being an interesting manifestation of ego-extension) and so we really are in no danger of accidentally becoming overly submissive to authority. (At least as a culture. It should be noted that some individuals, because of personal psychological makeup, can be more prone than others to the abuse of authority.)

So while on the one hand the extreme individualism of our society makes anti-authority tendencies stronger and thus more in need of counter argument, on the other hand I do think it is the case that recognizing no authority other than one's own self, what I've called the tyranny of the self, is the more pernicious of the traps to fall into. There are two basic reasons for this.

One is that, because one whose only master is oneself imagines that they are without a master, they mask from themselves the nature of their enslavement and are in far greater danger of never achieving true liberation.

And two, while one who seeks to submit to some kind of external authority will always have their inherent selfishness and pride to call into question abuses of authority, submission to the self is self-reinforcing, a kind of feedback loop that has nothing outside itself to break the vicious cycle of pure self-servitude. We need something other than ourselves to call us out of ourselves.

It goes without saying that authority can be easily abused, though it is important to keep in mind the afore-posted distinction between authority and power. We might say that the mistake those in authority make is to rely on the exercise of power while the anti-authority mistake is to throw out the need for authority because of the misuse of power.

There is a sense in which the complete jettisoning of authority in our culture because of abuses has the positive outcome of opening space for submission to the Church to be truly free. Finally, nothing I've said so far assumes a conclusion to the necessary discussion on what form Christian authority should take in terms of ecclesiology or family life, etc. However authority is manifested in the Church it is always through mutual submission and whoever is in a position of authority need always lead in terms of service above all.

Another picture to reflect the distinction between the question of which authority versus the false debate for and against authority is in Jesus' claim that his yolk is easy and his burden light. The first thing to note is that there is no question in this statement (let alone the rest of the New Testament) as to whether or not becoming a Christian involves submitting oneself to Christ. The Christian is nothing if not a follower in the way of one who has gone before.

The other thing I've often wondered about this statement of Jesus' is what burdens and what yolks are being held up for comparison. I think a common tendency would be to assume the heavier burden alluded to is the Law of Judaism, especially of those legalistic Pharisees. There may be something to this, but while I have no exegetical basis for it, I think it is more useful (again, in our context) to see the heavier burden, the harsher yolk as that of subservience to ourselves.

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1. This writing is a riff along generally Hauerwasian lines. It isn't based on any work in particular but after writing it, I realize that the basic idea isn't any new insight of mine. In addition to various Hauerwas essays, it is probably most indebted to Jamie Smith's reading of postmodern thinkers such as Foucault. (See especially his chapter on Foucault in Who's Afraid of Postmodernism.) The usual caveat applies: the above authors get credit for any useful insights and I get credit for any mistakes, oversimplifications etc. etc.

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Benedictine Authority Defined: Authority Part II

This is the second of a multi-installment 'series' on the idea of authority, both in general and as it relates specifically to theology and the Church. Call it, if you will, an attempt at conceptual rehabilitation.

Having begun to chew over a sense of religious authority, and reactions to it, in the last post by looking at the person of Pope Benedict XVI, I turn now to a reflection on authority as it is viewed within the community still responding to the authority of the first Benedict, the one called Saint, whose voice echoes down to us from the 6th century. In his book, Saint Benedict for the Laity, Eric Dean, a lay monastic associate writes that:

"Much of the domination we resent in our society is associated with power rather than authority. Clearly, we have largely lost our comprehension of the distinction, common to writers of the Middle Ages, that stands as one of the authentic achievements of the natural law tradition: the distinction between authority and power. Power is the simple exercise of force or the credible threat of force." (p. 14) Then, after some discussion of concrete examples of the exercise of authority vs power, Dean concludes, "It would seem that the authority persons have is inversely proportional to the amount of force they need to achieve compliance with their desires. Real authority needs no force." (p.16)

I'm not sure what the background to my thinking on the matter of authority is. Perhaps one could say that my interest in a rehabilitation of the concept is merely a psychological manifestation; a resurfacing of my relatively strict upbringing, especially as I am trying to stake out the right way to raise my own family. Be that as it may, two things have seemed relatively clear to me as long as I have been trying to wrap my head around the theological issues surrounding authority and obedience, freedom and submission.

One is that the path of a Christian life becomes almost unintelligible without some sense of both authority and its implicit companion, obedience. And two, that what people typically react to when they reject or repudiate these notions are at the very least caricatures of the concepts, or at most something different all together. It is on this second point that I find the above distinction helpful.

While Dean here doesn't provide us with a positive definition for what authority properly should be, by distinguishing authority from power, un-defining the former in terms of the latter, he does open up a lot of space, and brings us worlds closer to developing a proper positive sense of authority. (Dean further reflects on what the conflation of the two terms means in practice for everything from politics to parenting in a very illuminating fashion.) Registering the above distinction was kind of an "Aha!" moment for me. I always felt there was something missing from the conversation whenever the topic of authority reared its head. Dean puts his finger on precisely the problem. Sometimes a little argument over semantics isn't such a bad place to start.

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Prefect Turned Pope: Authority Part I

I recently completed a book-length interview with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, entitled Salt of the Earth. I've also read his Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and his first Papal encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love). I first started browsing his books when he was elected Pope, out of an interest in Church current events, and then continued because I can't help picking up small, well written books of theology, especially the kind you can read in a handful of sittings, which is precisely Ratzinger's medium.

Philip Jenkins, in the title of a recent book, claims that Anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice. This might seem an extravagant claim, but also, on the face of it, bears a fair amount of credibility, depending on how you nuance "acceptable". (I'm assuming that this acceptability is determined, as usual in America, in very WASPy environs.) If this is the case, then certainly there is no element of Roman Catholicism that so rankles its detractors (anti-Catholic bigots?) as the office of the Pope. The Pope, it seems, is such a scandal, not only because as the symbolic unifier of Catholicism, he stands for everything thing else about Catholicism that one could object to, from crusades to confessionals, but also because of the intrinsic objectionable nature of someone, in this day and age, presuming to wield such an absolute authority. Indeed it seems like much of the Protestant reaction to Catholicism is basically anti-authoritarian in character.

With this as background, add to the mix the personal reputation of the current pontiff, Benedict XVI. The reactions to whose election, in the popular press at least, invariably employed words such as conservative or rigid, or included the obligatory reminder that in his most recent digs as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger was heir to the tradition of the much maligned Holy Inquisition.

So it was pleasantly surprising-like a breath of fresh air really-to read the thoughts of this reputedly reactionary example of an already 'authoritarian' tradition, and finding a very human, very open voice, full of patience and charity for interlocutors, and characterized throughout by a depth of humility that would be a welcome change in your average academic theologian.

Here are just a few examples of Ratzinger's mode of discourse on the topics of faith & doubt, change, institutionalization, the Enlightenment, and world religions.

"Faith never cuts off questions. ... It could also become rigid if it no longer exposed itself to these questions." p. 88

"There needn't always be universal answers. We also have to realize our limits and forgo answers where they aren't possible ... we don't find answers by forcing everything into a system." p 101

"I agree with Cardinal Newman, who says that to live is to change and that the one who was capable of changing has lived much." p. 116

"The great Churches of the Christian countries are perhaps also suffocating on account of their own over-institutionalization, of their institutional power, of the pressure of their own history. The living simplicity of the faith has been lost to view in this situation." p. 123

"In this sense, the development of the Enlightenment, with which the model of the separation of Church and state appears, definitely has a positive side. ... Here are opportunities for a more vital, because more deeply and more freely grounded, faith, which, however, must fight against being subjectivized and which must continure to try to speak its message publicly." p. 240

"The dialogue with other religions is under way. We are, I think, all convinced that we can learn something, for example, from the mysticism of Asia and that precisely the great mystical traditions also open possibilities of encounter that are not so clearly present in positive theology." p. 263

Do these sound like the words of a doctrinally rigid church dictator to you? Pope Benedict XVI doubtless speaks with a degree of authority, even to the secular world. With the above as representative of his mode of thinking, I for one would welcome his type of authority having more of an influence.

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Descartes, Eat Your Heart Out, or: Augustine's Thoughts By a Fireplace

Don't worry. This isn't going to be another rant against everybody's favorite philosophical whipping boy, poor old Rene Descartes. I came across the following quote a while back in The City of God by the eminent Aurelius Augustinus, otherwise known as St. Augustine. In the 26th Chapter of Book II, he says the following:

"I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the academicians: What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not cannot be deceived. And if I am deceived, by this same token I am. And since I am, if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am. For it's certain that I am, if I am deceived. Since therefore I the person deceived, should be even if I were deceived, certainly I am not deceived in this knowledge that I am. And consequently, neither am I deceived in knowing that I know. For as I know that I am so I know this also, that I know."

Now it's been a little while since my formal philosophy-studying days or since I've read any Descartes, but doesn't this sound uncannily familiar? Wasn't Descartes' claim to fame, or infamy, depending on your perspective, supposed to be his innovation in proving his own existence, his cogito ergo sum? I for one feel cheated. Not only does Augustine seem to accomplish the same thing as Descartes did, he did it over a millennium earlier and quite elegantly to boot. It's interesting though, to see how the two thinkers come to the seemingly same argument and what they intend to do with it. For Descartes, his cogito is his attempt to ground an unshakably sound philosophical system, the baseline from which he intended, and attempted, to go on to prove everything else that interested him, like the existence of God for example. For Augustine, the argument that, at the very least, he has no reason to doubt that he exists, comes across more like his way of making quick work of what seems to him like a rather silly line of questioning. One pictures the ever august Bishop swatting away, like so many bothersome flies, the arguments of a rabble of pestering academics who have so much time on their hands they've forgotten who, or even that, they are.

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Attend to the truth: A Beginning and Mantra

I plan to use quotes or brief selections I come across in my reading to bounce off of in order to spur some incidental thinking. The first quote is from Debra Rienstra's recent So Much More: an Invitation to Christian Spirituality. There are of course countless beautiful and inspiring words to draw on from down through the centuries. The reason I'm giving this quote the role of launch pad and mantra for this blog is partially because it is so beautiful and so poignant, but partially also because of happenstance. It just happened to be one of the most interesting things I read in the 24 hours before starting this blog.

So without further ado, here's Ms. Rienstra:

"Perhaps, you might propose, all notions of the transcendent are equally far from an astoundingly incomprehensible truth. In that case you could indeed say that all religions lead to God or are equally mistaken about God. The other viable possibility is this: no matter how astoundingly incomprehensible the truth, some notions represent a more accurate perception than others. I live by this latter option, because it seems to me that the minute you grant any notion of truth at all, it follows as a matter of human dignity that we ought to pursue this truth as ardently as we can. Perhaps we stumble; perhaps we are limited in our perceptions; but we ought to try. After all, we live by various notions of truth whether we attend to them or not; better therefore to attend." p. 8

What struck me about this passage besides the obvious beauty of it (don't you think - even if you disagree with the substance?), is that it occurs within a sub-heading called "Spiritual but not Religious". The whole phenomenon, perhaps even movement, of religionless spirituality, and what motivates it, is something that I've wrestled with putting into words before. So, while on the one hand I was a little annoyed to find that someone had already dealt with the topic so thoroughly, and with such apparent ease - taking up less than two pages; on the other hand I experienced the excitement of that old familiar sense of recognition; of seeing laid out perfectly, thoughts which had banging around in my head but which I had not been able get nailed down. I could barely suppress shouting "Amen!".

If I can restate her point less elegantly, Rienstra seems to be arguing basically that it is more respectful of someone else's faith to disagree with them, than it is to just flippantly assume they believe the same things as you do. For many, disagreements over religious beliefs amount to nothing more than tasteless criticisms and useless arguments. Certainly inter-faith discussions contain many criticisms that are tasteless and many arguments that are useless, but there is a world of difference between charitable debate and fearful shouting matches. What those who want to discount, or at least down play, differences between faiths, fear above all is being judgmental. (As Rienstra also says, this fear does stem from some of the best human impulses.) After all, we are told to "judge not". What Rienstra seems to be saying though, is that it is ultimately much more judgmental of another's set of beliefs to not take seriously how it differs from yours and thus how at least one of the two of you has something wrong, than it is to say everything is in fundamental agreement. If someone were to tell me that Christian teaching consists of basically the same thing as all the other religions, I would feel a bit patronized. If you don't grant me the dignity to even theoretically choose wrongly, then you have taken away my ability to choose at all.

So while Rientstra is primarily addressing the age-old issue of religious pluralism, I'm interested in how her thought applies within the Christian community. If truth between religions matter then truth within a religion matters, and we should attend to it too. This is not to say that the only way to attend seriously to the truth is by formulating pure doctrine and excluding from the Church everyone who is in error. Obviously we are not able to do this, and probably shouldn't even want to. But that does not mean that the opposite is true and that no lines should ever be drawn. On what issues and how tightly to define these boundaries are always the trickiest issues, but that's not even what I'm getting at here. For me the mantra: "We all live by various notions of truth whether we attend to them or not; better therefore to attend." is relevant for those of us who feel that itch to pursue theological questions. Reading theology is for me a kind of devotional practice, and also a way of trying to live out at least one quarter of the Greatest Commandment. I say all this because I sometimes get the impression that some Christians look suspiciously at those of us who enjoy reading abstract or esoteric books of theology. As if we're needlessly complicating the simple faith of Jesus or even somehow heretically flirting with earning our salvation through the 'work' of study or contemplation. The important part of the quote is that we all "live by" different truths. As a professor of mine used to put it: "Ideas have legs." The fact is, obscure questions matter greatly to the Church and to individuals in their everyday lives because they affect in myriad unknown ways how we live out our lives together. Attending to that pursuit of truth in my own small way is what I aim to do with this space.

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