Acedia & Me

Funny (you should pardon the pun) this should come up:

"The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market," Buckley told me, "is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex."

Funny only because of the synchronicity, because last night I started Kathleen Norris' next book, Acedia and Me. It is a true return to form for her, and a concept that should be familiar to anyone who knows her autobiographical work.

She spends a fair amount of time in the beginning of the book trying to explain what "acedia" is; how it is distinguishable from laziness or ennui or depression; how it is has gone in and out of fashion (it was considered "obsolete" as a word in the 1933 OED, then came back in the 1972 and 1986 supplements); things like that. Perhaps the best way to explain it, is this story from Evagrius Pontikus in the 4th century:

The demon of acedia--also called the noonday demon--is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all. He presses his attack upon the monk about the fourth hour and besieges the soul until the eighth hour. First of all he makes it seem that the sun barely moves, if at all, and that the day is fifty hours long. Then he constrains the monk to look constantly out the windows, to walk outside the cell, to gaze carefully at the sun to determine how far it stands from the ninth hour [or lunchtime], to look this way and now that to see if perhaps [one of the brethren apppears from his cell]. Then too he instills in the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, a hatred for manual labor. He leads him to reflect that charity has departed from among the brethren, that there is no one to give encouragement. Should there be someone at this period who happens to offend him in some way or other, this too the demon uses to contribute further to his hatred. This demon drives him along to desire other sites where he can more easily procure life's necessities, more readily find work and make a real success of himself. He goes on to suggest that, after all, it is not the place that is the basis of pleasing the Lord. God is to be adored everywhere. He joins to these reflections the memory of his dear ones and of his former way of life. He depicts life stretching out for a long period of time, and brings before the mind's eye the toil of the ascetic struggle and, as the saying has it, leaves no leaf unturned to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight. No other demon follows close upon teh heels of this one (when he is defeated) but only a state of deep peace and inexpressible joy arise out of this struggle.

Acedia, as Norris explains, drains the joy out of living, out of life that God means for us to enjoy; it drains that joy away, and we have no one but ourselves to blame for that loss, yet that is precisely why acedia is so hard to combat: because we are fighting ourselves. And where am I going with this? Where Norris goes, in stories from her own life: the concept, the reality, the tedium of the quotidian, which is one source of acedia: repetition.

I was a bratty kid who didn't want to make her bed.

"Why bother?" I would ask my mother in a witheringly superior tone. "I'll just have to unmake it again at night." To me, the act was stupid repetition; to my mother, it was a meaningful expression of hospitality to oneself, and a humble acknowledgment of our creaturly need to make and remake our daily environments.....

One of the first symptoms of both acedia and depression is the inability to address the body's basic, daily needs. It is also a refusal of repetition. Showering, shampooing, brushing the teeth, takine a multivitamin, going for a daily walk, as unremarkable as they seem are acts of self-respect. But the notion of pleasure is alien to acedia, and one becomes weary thinking about doing anything at all. It is too much to ask, one decides, sinking back on the sofa. This indolence exacts a high price. (pp. 13-14)

One more quote, then:

Repetition is at the heart of monastic life, which is one reason my attraction to it seemed odd at first. Morning, noon, and evening, monks return to church to pray the psalms. When they have gone through the entire cycle of one hundred fifty psalms, a process that takes three or four weeks, they begin again, day after day, year after year. In a similar way, a community reads through major portions of the Bible. Every Advent, on hears Isaiah, and during Easter, the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation. And elderly monk, disparaging the romantic image of monastic life, once said to me, "People don't realize how much of it is just plain tedium."

But it is tedium with a purpose. To support themselves, the first Christian monks spent their days weaving palm branches into baskets and ropes they could sell. And as they worked, they prayed....[T]he monks...regarded this repetitive work and prayer as their way to God, hoping that over time the "straw" of mundane tasks could become the "gold" of ceaseless prayer." (p. 18)

Repetition: it is essential to daily life, but it is so tedious and the world offers us so many diversions, so many ways to "pass the time" and "spend" the hours until, to wander into Wordsworth's fuzzy pantheism, "so little we see in nature that is ours."

None of which has anything to do with the prattling nonsense of Buckley and Kristol. Such talk of entitlement is anathema to Christianity (though you'd seldom know that, to hear Catholics like Buckley, or Protestants like James Dobson, talk). But the use of the word, in that context, just struck me as more than coincidental. And acedia is something I've been wrestling with for many years now. I thought I was trying to embrace the tedium of repetition, the security of the humdrum (there is nothing secure nor repetitive in being only partly employed for so many years); now I realize I've been sinking into it, seeking out the repetitive in order to hide in my acedic existence. It isn't quite the joy Evagrius describes, so perhaps the demon is not yet defeated. But as Norris says:

As any reader of fairy tales can tell you, not knowing the true name of your enemy, be it a troll, a demon, or an "issue," puts you at a great disadvantage, and learning the name can help set you free. (p. 4)

Maybe that's only as far as I've gotten; to be able to call the name. Well, good enough, for now.

Vanity of Vanities....

I know it's really, really not the right thing to say, but honestly: what is new here besides the technology?

Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know. If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.

At my screening, when a character in the film mentioned the early blog platform LiveJournal (still popular in Russia), the audience laughed. I can’t imagine life without files but I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete as LiveJournal. In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.

First, I should say I'm not "on" Facebook, and I don't want to be. In terms of this essay, that makes me a Luddite, not even Generation 1.0. Fine. I can live with that. And I have to say my touchstone here is the monastic community Kathleen Norris described in her books Dakota and The Cloister Walk, which is to say a world as virtual to me as the world of Facebook. And yes, I do understand there are enough people on Facebook to constitute a large country of its own; but it isn't a country of its own, is it? And it isn't new and different and alien to all human experience before now. Or is it now? Or now?

Do you get my point? I'll come in again.

How about now? No, not then, now. Well, that's already past. And so has this. Well, I should say, so will this.

Blogging was going to change the world. It was all going to be different now, all these people connected together into like-minded communities by the wide-open freedom of the World Wide Web. Except it didn't happen. People I used to converse with daily have all gone back to their lives, or gone on with their lives, and it turned out our interests weren't all that much the same, after all. Probably we would have drifted apart had we seen each other every day. I know all the friends I had in Austin, all the friends I had in seminary, are almost all just memories now. Time's moving finger writes and having writ, moves on. I can keep in touch with them just as well by e-mail or snail mail or telephone as I could by any internet access. I don't, very well, in part because the life I live now is not the life I lived then, and so few of them are a part of it. There are other reasons, too; but that's private. I'm not going to go there with you.

This isn't yet the "open internet" that Mark Zuckerberg envisions. Not for me, anyway.

So I keep in touch with people, and I don't, and that hasn't changed because of e-mail or blogging or even because now everyone is on Facebook. Maybe that's why everyone drifted away from blogging; maybe it's not. Either way, the familiar faces are gone, and the new familiar faces are growing tired of me, or I of them. I find myself repeating myself, like talking about everything old being new again, because I don't know what else to talk about. I don't know how not to be the persona I am on-line, when I'm on-line. And it isn't me; even when it is; because I'm more than that. And dragging that "more" on-line to display it, to explain it, to justify who I present myself to be now, is as much trouble as trying to keep up with people I was never that attached to anyway, people I shared work and experiences with, which I don't share anymore.

My true friends, my close friends, my best friends, have survived it all with me. I'm lucky. I have friends I've known since earliest childhood. I'm very lucky. I have new friends I might as well have known since earliest childhood. I hardly talk to them here; most of them I don't talk to here at all. But that's life, it seems to me. I am, as I say, lucky. The Great Transformation is still the Industrial Revolution. That one upended everything we knew about being human, and shook it all about, and tossed it back on the table in a random jumble and said, "There. Now do something with it." The reaction to that was Romanticism. The reaction to the "Computer Revolution"?

Po-Mo? No. What, then?

We're still wandering around in the ruins of Romanticism, though as a literary and philosophical movement we've now decided ("we"="scholars") it ended after only 30 years. Barely a generation. What is a generation now? Am I connected to my brother-in-law, the former Green Beret in Vietnam, over 10 years my senior? To my brother, two years younger? To anybody born between 1946 and 1964? Sometimes I don't feel like it. Sometimes I feel very connected to my daughter's generation, much more so than I ever felt connected to my father's generation (which isn't saying much, upon reflection, since I've never felt connected to my father's generation). But what connects us a culture? 9/11? Vietnam? Woodstock? Disco? Reagan and "Morning in America? "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

What revolution in technology has changed all of that? The industrial one, which uprooted us from home finally and fully, long after Abraham left his home and family and followed an unknown God to seek out an unseen land? Certainly not computers. They didn't cause us to create ribbons of highway, or race from place to place in mad riot, or to worship money above all things, that most determinedly American of sins and salvations. And it was long before computers and interstate highways and as many cars as there are Americans (1934, to be precise) that Eliot wrote:

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
Nor does the family even move about together
But every son would have his motor cycle,
And daughters ride away on casual pillions.

So tell me again how new this all is. Tell me again how this:

What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of God.

Doesn't describe Generation 2.0, and Generation 1.0, and the Lost Generation of Eliot and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, as well. Tell me again what is so different, what has so fundamentally changed.

No, the problem is not technology, and it is not communications, and it is not sociology, and it is not even theology. It is pneumatology. It is spirituality. It is the relentless pursuit of what is desired, against the relentless desire for what is truly needed. It is as old as humanity itself, and as new as the next birth.

Call the satisfaction of the desire, the satiation of the itch, wisdom. And stop ascribing it to things wanted or invented or imagined; and start ascribing it to people, and the human condition.

A condition that really hasn't changed all that much, despite the externalities.

Du musst gehen!

I don't have a problem with this just on constitutional grounds. I have a problem with it on theological grounds:

Operation Restore Our Community or “ROC”…begins next week. The city judge will either let misdemenor [sic] offenders work off their sentences in jail and pay a fine or go to church every Sunday for a year.

If offenders elect church, they’re allowed to pick the place of worship, but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department. If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender’s case will be dismissed.

Set aside the 1st Amendment problem (which ThinkProgress details very nicely), there's the theological, or I should say, ecclesiological problem: what is church for?

In other words, do I want these people in my church because they don't want to go to jail? And the answer is: No, I don't.

Because they are prisoners otherwise? Don't be ridiculous. The criminal charges against them mean nothing to me. No, the problem is: why are the "sentenced" to church for one year? Because worship has magical powers? Because God's presence is only felt on Sunday morning for an hour, and it's the only place we can be sure God is present, and on a regular schedule? Is it because it's the only place God is likely to get their attention, and once God does, that will straighten them out?

If I am taking this lightly rather than theologically, it's because it barely deserves serious consideration. But think about the assumption here: somehow "church" will provide something that is missing (shades of Augustine!) and that will provide the corrective to their behavior that jail manifestly fails to do (and when do we start having that conversation about justice and what prison is for?).

If this wasn't a small town in Alabama, I suppose it would make as much sense to sentence the offenders to be oblates at a monastery. I mean, look what that did for Kathleen Norris!

Okay, enough silliness. Let's consider the thinking, such as it is, behind the proposal. First, that God is only known in a place where God is always known to be. Well, then, consider the counter examples of Abraham (not sure where he was when God first spoke to him); Moses and the Burning Bush; Elijah and the whirlwind; Jacob's ladder; or even Nathan reproaching David. Or any of the prophets speaking to anyone who would listen in Israel. Where is the Biblical evidence that God is in the Temple and only available for revelations during scheduled visiting hours?

And then there's the famous story of Jesus at the Temple, watching the rich man ring in his money while the widow meekly contributes her mite. Things haven't changed much in 2000 years, but we still need Jesus to tell us what's going on; and we still need to listen.

And there's the rub: "He who has ears had better listen!," Jesus liked to say. But if we have ears and don't use them, will a year in church on Sunday mornings make us any wiser? And what is it we are to learn? Are we to see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, and know with our own minds? Or is the truth known to believers the truth that is revealed by God? If God can harden Pharaoh's heart three times (look it up; Exodus. I'll wait.) before the Israelites are finally released from Egypt, then who do we blame for criminals who don't know enough right from wrong not to commit crimes? God, for not opening their hearts? Or the church, for not preaching loudly enough they can't help but get the message?

If the revelation comes from God, then the church can do nothing to forward it to the unbeliever and those to whom it hasn't been revealed. If the revelation doesn't come from God, then our knowledge is only what we discover, and what we know is only known through our senses (and we're all empiricists) or it is more importantly what we recover from our pre-birth memories (and we are all Platonists). Either way, it ain't Christianity; and that's the theological problem.

I suppose the idea is that if we are guilty by association, we will be redeemed by association, too. But I've been around church people, and a year around them might be must enough to convince me not to spend any more time around them than I had to. So there's another frivolous reason to condemn this silly idea.

But the central one remains: what is church for? For rubbing off on people? Or for being a place where, when you go there, they have to take you in? Which is better, but should it ever be a place where you have to go, or else?

Not my church; not the church I'm a member of, or the church I'm (if ever again) the pastor of.

Scanning religious news on Sunday morning

Jim Gaffigan (like Stephen Colbert) is a committed Catholic.  But he also understands how problematic it can be to be identified as a believer in anything remotely religious.  At least, according to his new sitcom, which, interestingly, gets a very fair treatment in ThinkProgress.

The best part of the article, though, is this:

Conversely, liberals sometimes hide their faith when navigating the progressive cultural spaces they call home, wary of triggering the fury of those who are wounded by or critical of religion. (For a sneak peak, check out the anti-religion comments that will inevitably populate the bottom of this post.)

Without a trace of irony, the comments to the article furiously attack religion in all it's imagined forms, and tell it to go away and stop bothering them.   As the article points out:

And while liberal people of faith are increasingly proud of their religion, polls show they do so only with the caveat of not wanting to impose it on anyone else.

Most of the comments are about how imposing their faith on others is all that "religious" people want to do.

Honestly, "religion" is like a dog-whistle on the internet:  the very word provokes Pavlovian responses completely unconnected to the topic of the article.  As Ana Marie Cox said:  "Why do I need to prove my faith--and why should I try?"  Funny, too, because her attitude is not all that different from what one might expect to hear from Kathleen Norris:

It does come up: Since leaving Washington, I have made my life over and I am happier, freer, and healthier in body and spirit and apparently it shows. When people ask me, “What changed?” or, “How did you do it?” or, sometimes, with nervous humor, “Tell me your secret!” I have a litany of concrete lifestyle changes I can give them—simply leaving Washington is near the top of the list—but the honest answer would be this: I try, every day, to give my will and my life over to God. I try to be like Christ. I get down on my knees and pray. 

Meanwhile Pope Francis is talking like what the Jesuits call a "free person":

Francis asked the bishops to reinforce the "indispensable role" of ordinary folk in their dioceses. "In reality, lay people who have an authentic Christian formation shouldn't need a bishop-pilot, or a monsignor-pilot, or clerical input to assume their responsibilities at every level, from political to social, economic to legislative," he said.

"Rather, what they all need is a Bishop Pastor!"

He complained that often official church documents are too heavy on doctrine and theory "as if our orientation isn't aimed at our people and country but rather students and specialists."

A comment at Salon attributed the decline of Christianity to the Internet, which provides more information about 'reality' and the falseness of religion than ever before.  The internet provides us more information, it's true.  But what is true and what is false requires must as much discernment as ever.

And as for that scary news that denominations are in decline?  You could do worse than reconsider that is more important:  your denomination, or God.  There are two ways to put this (or six, if you prefer a list).   You can pray the prayer of Church Anniversary of the old E&R Hymnal:

Grant that thy Church may be delivered from traditions which have lost their life, from usage which has lost its spirit, from institutions which no longer give life and power to their generation; that the Church may ever shine as a light in the world and be as a city set on a hill.

HEAR OUR PRAYER, O LORD.

Or you can boil that list of six down to the essential:  Things don't matter.  Ideas don't matter.  People matter.

And lastly, it's Pentecost; have some art.

But what do we mean when we say....?

Since you are so eager for spiritual gifts, strive to excel in them for building up the church. Therefore, one who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret. For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unproductive. What should I do then? I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also. Otherwise, if you say a blessing with the spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say the "Amen" to your thanksgiving, since the outsider does not know what you are saying? For you may give thanks well enough, but the other person is not built up. I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you; nevertheless, in church I would rather speak five words with my mind, in order to instruct others alos, than ten thousand words in a tongue. Brothers and sisters, do not be children in your thinking; rather be infants in evil, but in thinking be adults.

I Corinthians 14:12b-20

Seems we are still on that subject: the "building up of the church." First, let's note that "faith" in the New Testament is actually the word "trust." The Greek word is "pistis." It's primary meanings are: (1) that which causes trust and faith; (b) solemn promise; oath; trust (c) proof, pledge (2) trust, confidence, faith. We have layered it over with so many centuries of lamination that it is sometimes useful to strip away the varnish and see the word clearly again. "Faith" does not mean "irrational belief in an invisible sky being on no basis except fear and projected desires for an uber-parent." It means trust. And trust, ultimately, means acting in spite of vulnerability. It means, too, that we need each other.

Look again at what Paul says: "For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unproductive. What should I do then? I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with my mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also. Otherwise, if you say a blessing with the spirit, how can anyone in the posiiton of an outsider say the 'Amen' to your thanksgiving, since the outsider does not know what you are saying?" My immediate thought, on hearing that yesterday, was that Paul was talking about our theological discussion. Theology, we like to say, engages only the head. But if it doesn't engage the spirit also, of what use is it? Kathleen Norris has excoriated theologians in her books, for what are usually very good reasons. Theologians, like all professions, develop their own jargon, and all too quickly, like all professions, they become another conspiracy against the laity. Surely that was the purpose of the Reformation, to end the divide between cleric and lay. And yet we have built it back up again. Who is there to save us from this miserable fate?

Now, of course, it is theology which divides us again. Theology tells us homosexuals and perhaps even women cannot offer the sacramental presence to others. Theology is our excuse, our scapegoat. It isn't that we hate gays ("Not that there's anything wrong with that!" ); it's that our theology tells us we cannot allow them into the priesthood. Don't blame us; but we must preserve our theology. Alternatively, it is our theology which tells us we must allow gays and lesbians and women to be priests, that this fulfills the vision of the basiliea tou theou, of the basiliea tou ouranon. And when theology fails to provide us a definitive answer, fails to give us salvation from ourselves, from our own fears of the other, we blame theology for being impractical, for not being our saviour.

And then we say that our group, alone, has the gifts which build up the church, because our theology tells us which is the proper church to be built up, and everyone prays for the power to interpret, but we make sure that power is interpreted to interpret only what we have already concluded is true. Because truth is so much easier to rely on than trust. Truth can be verified; trust must be taken on faith. And there we are: vulnerable again.

"Covenant" is another tough word. My seminary professors were anxious to remove it from any legal context, lest we confuse it with "contract." It was a wise distinction. A contract is a promise binding on the parties to it, one sealed by the offering of consideration, othe giving up of some small thing by the person accepting the contract in response to the offer made by the other party, who is bound to the contract once the consideration proferred in response is accepted. But that's how the law finds a contract exists, not how the law interprets the concept of contract in all its manifestations. The difference is that contracts can be broken, and are merely business arrangements, creations of law. Covenants were creations of law, too; but that word has taken on meanings which are supposed to transcend the limitations of contract law. A contract, after all, is enforceable against both parties, but only by a third party. You cannot enter into a contract with one other person on a desert island, unless there is a third party on the island who can enforce the terms of the contract against both of you. In a covenant, both parties agree to be bound by the terms of the arrangement, and both parties can be held accountable to their agreement: but only by each other. One party, also, cannot walk away from the agreement. It is binding, and both parties remain bound to it.

That, at least, is the cosmological thinking that tries to explain the covenant between the God of Abraham and human beings, whether it is the covenant with the descendants of Abraham, or the "new covenant" established between the Risen Lord and all believers. Covenant is a very charged word, but again, it includes a necessary element of vulnerability. When God called Abraham to walk before God and be righteous, and promised Abram land of his own, and descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, Abram had no basis on which to believe God would do these things. Abraham was called to act only on trust. He could not act on past experience, on knowledge that the things God promised were true and could be trusted. Abraham could not even act on the promise that what was promised would come true in his lifetime. God said Abraham would be blessed, and through him all the nations of the world would be blessed; but that couldn't possibly come true in Abraham's lifetime. And yet Abraham believed.

Everything, you see, begins with Abraham.

And it all begins with trust, when you have no basis upon which to make trust. Paul is making essentially the same offer to the church in Corinth. "Srive to excel in them for building up the church." He knows we are selfish creatures, that we want something because there is something for us in it, and we, unlike Abraham, want the results right now. But Paul directs us outward, through ourselves toward the other. "...if you say a blessing with the spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say the 'Amen' to your thanksgiving, since the outsider does not know what you are saying?" This is the challenge to theologians, to explain themselves clearly. This is the challenge to all members of the church, cleric as well as laity, to speak from the spirit, but speak clearly. The spirit may be personal, or even transcendent; but if you do not speak through the mind, how am I to know what you are saying? What good is it to me, to the body of Christ, the church?

This is a challenge to everyone, even to the Philip Jenkins' of the church, who champion a "conservative" over a "liberal" theology (there is much more to be said on this topic). But it is a challenge to liberals, too. Is the church about to die if it does not change? Perhaps in post-Enlightenment Western European culture, it is; but that is not so obvious as it might seem. Is the church only the church in European culture? What then of the Orthodox? Of the Copts? Of the Church in Africa? Conversely, is the church only the church when it is "traditional"? But tradition, and my tradition? Hang it all, there can only be one "tradition"! Right?

What should I do then? I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also. Otherwise, if you say a blessing with the spirit, how can anyone in the position of an outsider say the "Amen" to your thanksgiving, since the outsider does not know what you are saying? For you may give thanks well enough, but the other person is not built up.

What should I do then? What would build up the church? And what would tear it down? Paul addresses that, in his letter to the Corinthians. Clearly what they are doing he thinks is tearing the church down; and he reminds them their focus should not be on them, but on the other, on the person "in the position of an outsider." Who can be anyone who is not you. That is the person you have to be concerned about. Even your thanksgiving to God should be given so that the outsider can say "Amen." Even your thanksgiving to God is not for your benefit, but so that someone else can join in. It comes from God; it goes to God; but it goes through you.

A grave responsibility, indeed. Enough to make you tremble.

One doesn't know why one trembles. This limit to knowledge no longer only relates to the cause or unknown event, the unseen or unknown that makes us tremble. Neither do we know why it produces this particular symptom, a certain irrepressible agitation of the body, the uncontrollable instability of its members or of the substance of the skin or muscles. Why does the irrepressible take this form? Why does terror make us tremble, since one can also tremble with mind, and such analogous physiological manifestations translate experiences and sentiments that appear, at least, not to have anything in common? This symptomatology is as enigmatic as tears.

But thus does the Spirit speak to us; with sighs too deep for words, with trembling that reaches down to the very core of our being; with thoughts that must be pressed through mind in order that others might hear and say: "Amen."

Let the reader understand. He who has ears, should listen.

Friday after Ash Wednesday 2007

I shall always be able to stand on my own two feet even when they are planted on the hardest soil of the harshest reality. And my acceptance is not indifference or helplessness. I feel deep moral indignation at a regime that treats human beings in such a way. But events have become too overwhelming and too demonic to be stemmed with personal resentment and bitterness. These responses strike me as being utterly childish and unequal to the fateful course of events.

People often get worked up when I say it doesn't really matter whether I go or somebody else does, the main thing is that so many thousands have to go. It is not as if I want to fall into the arms of destruction with a resigned smile-far from it. I am only bowing to the inevitable and even as I do so I am sustained by the certain knowledge that ultimately they can¬not rob us of anything that matters. But I don't think I would feel happy if I were exempted from what so many others have to suffer. They keep tell ing me that someone I ike me has a duty to go into hiding, because I have so many things to do in life, so much to give. But I know that whatever I may have to give to others, I can give it no matter where I am, here in the circle of my friends or over there, in a concentration camp. And it is sheer arrogance to think oneself too good to share the fate of the masses.

And if God should feel that I still have a great deal to do, well then, I shall do it after I have suffered what all the others have to suffer. And whether or not I am a valuable human being will only become clear from my behavior in more arduous circumstances. And if I should not survive, how I die will show me who I really am.

Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943, tr. Arno Pomerans. New York: Pantheon. 1983.

WHEN I'M WORKING as an artist-in-residence at parochial schools, I like to read the psalms out loud to inspire the students, who are usually not aware that the snippets they sing at Mass are among the greatest poems in the world. But I have found that when I have asked children to write their own psalms, their poems often have an emotional directness that is similar to that of the biblical psalter. They know what it's like to be small in a world designed for big people, to feel lost and abandoned. Children are frequently astonished to discover that the psalmists so freely express the more unacceptable emotions, sadness and even anger, even anger at God, and that all of this is in the Bible that they hear read in church on Sunday morning.

Children who are picked on by their big brothers and sisters can be remarkably adept when it comes to writing cursing psalms, and I believe that the writing process offers them a safe haven in which to work duough their desires for vengeance in a healthy way. Once a little boy wrote a poem called "The Monster Who Was Sorry." He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him: his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: "Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, 'I shouldn't have done all that.'''

"My messy house" says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his age and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?

--Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace. New York: Riverhead. 1999.

THE LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was very sorry to have made humankind on the earth, and was grieved to the heart. So the LORD said, "I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created--people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them."

But Noah found favor in the sight of the LORD.

--Genesis 6:5-8

Struggling for good thoughts

What a Person is, that really is not adequately thematized in the Christian perspective.

Kathleen Norris would argue that this is because the Church moved away from the insights of the desert monks. She points out, for example, that they weren't that interested in "sin," but their "eight bad thoughts" devolved into the "seven deadly sins." And, not surprisingly, there is an institutional reason for the change:

...monks such as Evagrius were free of the heavy baggage of Western Christendom's concept of sin. What the Church later defined as sin, desert monks termed 'bad thought,' which to my mind is a much more helpful designation. Given the history of the Church's emphasis on sins of the flesh, contemporary readers may find it odd that the early monks regarded lust as one of the lesser temptations. They identified it as a form of greed, the desire to possess and use another person inappropriately in the pursuit of one's own satisfaction. Anger, pride, and acedia were considered the worst of the "thoughts," with acedia the most harmful of all, for it could inflict a complete loss of hop and capacity for trust in God.

As the "eight bad thoughts" of the desert monks eventually became the Church's "seven deadly sins," acedia was dropped from the list, and the monks' profound understanding of the common temptations that all people suffer lost ground to a concept of sin as an individual's commission of a bad act or commission of a good one. This in turn led to a superficial form of self-justification, for instance: If I don't overeat, then I'm not guilty of gluttony, if don't commit adultery, I am free of lust. The new emphasis on acts also contributed to the Church's power; it alone could identify the acts that it alone had the power to absolve. The monks' subtle comprehension of temptation as thoughts that the individual may identify and resist before they turn into harmful actions was largely submerged. (pp. 29-30)

Why was acedia so important?

Monastic people have always known acedia to be a particularly vile temptation that can inflict great damage on the psyche. Mary Margaret Funk, a contemporary Benedictine, writes that "dejection and anger afflict the mind; food, things, and sex burden the body; but acedia is lodged in the very soul." In the fourth century Evagrius marked acedia as one of the spiritual afflictions, far more deadly than the more physical temptations such as gluttony or lust, or the melancholy arising from depression or anger. Acedia, he insisted, is something more, a weariness of sould that "instills the heart of the monk a hatred for the place, a hatred for his very life itself, [and] a hatred for manual labor," which in the early monastic world was always linked with prayer.

We may not think of prayer or manual labor as essential for our well-being, but "hatred for the place" is a thoroughly modern condition.

Part of the issue here is that: if the Person were adequately thematized, what role, then, would the institutional Church play? Patocka speaks of a God who is in relation to the person, "but...a Person who sees into the soul without being accessible to view." It is language that would resonate with the Romanticism of the melancholy Dane:

The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another. This is why there can be two forms of despair in the strict sense. If a human self had itself established itself, then there could only be one form: not to will to be oneself, to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself.

The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be oneself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.

Romanticism taught us to reconsider the self, to see the person as an individual, someone valuable simply in themselves, simply as a being. That assumption is behind the "person" in Patocka's term or the "power" in Anti-Climacus' term. We have to be careful not to commit anachronism to say that this is also what the desert monks understood, and that the "Person" or the "power" is what they were seeking, what they were struggling to know as clearly and as directly as possible. But if they were, then they understood what got in the way, and they understood the struggles it took to overcome those self-inflicted obstacles. And even if they weren't, they still bring us back to this question: what is the Person? How do we properly understand that term? If we move away from the "either/or" of sin, where do we go? Into sin? Or into the mystic, as Van Morrison said? Are we better off struggling with "bad thoughts," than with cosmic evil?

The Illiberal Case for Redefining Marriage

I saved this from what is now eight years ago (or so), because I was intrigued by it, and because I knew Don Browning's work. It's an interesting, if sloppy, argument.

Take justice. Some legal theorists wonder if giving marriage benefits to same-sex couples does injustice to other human arrangements where people care for one another brother caring for ailing brother, a younger daughter caring for her aging mother, two older women pooling resources without having sex. Why privilege partners in sexual relationships and not those actually dependent on one another? Rather than extending marriage to cover all dependent relations, shouldn't we find other ways to support people who need help?

Try as I might, I can't see where that argument has a discernible link to a defined concept of justice. What it is primarily concerned with is the idea that homosexuals are having sex, and they only reason they want to be married is so they will have sex with each other, because homosexual relationships, according to this paragraph, are only sexual relationships.

Then there's this:

Others ask whether same-sex marriage may be unjust to children. Doesn't it raise to the level of normative social policy the idea that children don't need the parents who gave them life? Others observe that we do not know the effects on children of being raised by same-sex parents. Recent reviews by Steven Nock and Robert Lerner of existing social-science studies of gay parenting demonstrate that all are inadequate with regard to testable hypotheses, sample, controls, and hence conclusions. In short, we have no knowledge about these effects even though recent court opinions assume we do. This raises the question, is it rational to develop social policies without better knowledge?

Two problems here, one glaringly obvious: if children "need the parents who gave them life," what of adoption? And second: should social policy arise from the people? Or should the people be guided by social policy? One vision exemplifies Jeffersonian democracy; the other sounds more like Brave New World.

And this is classic closing the barn door after the horse is out reasoning:

Same-sex marriage does not simply extend an old institution to a new group of people. It changes the definition of marriage. It reduces marriage primarily to a committed affectionate sexual relation. It goes further. It gives this new and more narrow view of marriage all of the cultural, legal, and public supports that accrued to the institution when it functioned to hold together this complex set of goods.

One could as well argue that Loving v. Virginia changed "the definition of marriage," as, in fact, it did. But what intrigues me is the idea that same-sex marriage "reduced marriage to a committed affectionate sexual relation." Not because I think it does; but because I think we've already done that.

The idea that human beings are primarily sexual beings can be traced back to Vienna in a period just prior to Freud. Freud did not sui generis decide the sex drive was the prime motivator of human conduct, he adopted the view from others in what is now called the "Viennese school." But the idea is now rampant, and now rampantly accepted in Western culture, that human beings are primarily sex machines: that all our motivations and ambitions and purpose are centered on sex; and if not on procreation, then merely on satisfaction. If Christianity has turned more and more toward sex as the enemy of the spirit, this is a part of that turn (and may well be the whole of it. Even the Puritans weren't as fascinated with sex as we imagine them to be. Hawthorne's novel is revisionist history, not documentary; and he writes in the century that ended with the rise of the Viennese school. Something new never comes out of nothing preceding it.). As Kathleen Norris points out, the Desert Fathers weren't concerned with sexual desire as a root evil. They were more concerned with spiritual sins, with matters that took the soul away from the presence of God.

If we accept that humans are primarily sexual creatures, then we accept that marriage is primarily about sex. That was certainly the message in response to the "sexual revolution:" that sex was to be "saved" for marriage, and so marriage was primarily about sex. In the movie "Diner," the married Shrevie is asked by his friends about the sex, because they imagine that's what marriage is all about:

when you're dating, everything is talking about sex. Where can we do it? Why can't we do it? Are you parents gonna be out so we can do it? Everything is always talkin about getting sex, and then planning the wedding, all the details. But then, when you get married... it's crazy, i dunno. You can get it whenever you want it. You wake up in the morning and she's there. You come home from work and she's there. So all that sex planning talk is over with. And so is the wedding planning talk cause you're already married. So... ya know I can come down here and we can bullshit the entire night away but I cannot hold a 5 minute conversation with Beth. I mean it's not her fault, I'm not blaming her, she's great... It's just, we got nothing to talk about... But it's good, it's good

And it turns out, of course, marriage is not about sex; it's about a great deal more than sex. But when you decide people are sexual beings first and foremost, and then decide they must also curtail that sexual drive until it can be employed in "accomplishing a complex alignment between sexual activity, procreation, mutual help and affection, and parental care and accountability," then marriage is already all about sexual relationships.

Except, as Shrevie found out; it isn't. And it never has been.

Of course, the Wife of Bath might disagree; she happily uses sex as a means to control her husbands. That is, when she isn't using her intellect against them, or her sheer willingness to be as physically aggressive as they are. Indeed, it's hard to read Chaucer as a proponent of the kind of social policy Browning is arguing for here. In "The Miller's Tale" Alisoun (also the Wife of Bath's name!) enjoys a win-win, as she sleeps with the young scholar and never gets punished for it, an idea Kate Chopin resurrected a few centuries later, but found she couldn't publish in her lifetime. And, of course, the Wife of Bath's tale is about a woman who uses her appearance to teach a knight a lesson in humility and proper marital relations. So marriage has never always been about "accomplishing a complex alignment between sexual activity, procreation, mutual help and affection, and parental care and accountability."

But is marriage just about sex? Advocates of same-sex marriage emphasize the other aspects of marriage, since marriage and sex are almost completely divorced from each other now (that is, fewer and fewer people think we cannot have the latter outside of the former). If anything, the topic of same-sex marriage allows us to reconsider the purpose of marriage, and to think about how much we've reduced it to legitimizing sexual relationships, and left it at little more than that and "parental care and accountability." We don't need to fear the dilution of "marriage" by allowing same-sex couples to claim the word for their relationships. We need to fear how much we've already diluted marriage as an institution and a concept, and we need to consider what we really want it to be, and how to make it into that. Because the more we cling to "how it was," the less we are going to see "what it is." And while it may be comforting to think some institution can control the concept and keep it a sacrament (on one end) or establish a social policy that defines it (on the other end), the fact is marriage as it is practiced and as people regard it, isn't conforming to any one, limited, institutional definition.

And the sooner we see marriage for what it is, the sooner we can begin to redefine marriage into what we clearly want it to be.

Snap Judgments

Two books came into the store the other day; which should I add to my reading list?



The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby. This one, I'm told, combines historical analysis with contemporary observation. Unfortunately, all too true. When I flip the book open (honest! Serendipity! Synchronicity! Moving of the Holy Spirit! I report, you decide!) this is what I read:

In the United States, Dawkins [yes, Richard D.!] has been attacked not only for his general criticism of religion but for his uncompromising defense of Darwin's theory of evolution. One conservative American writer describes Dawkins as a "poor public intellectual" because, in articulating his views on the randomness of nature, he "appears to be utterly indifferent to the spiritual and emotional difficulties that his writings cause for many readers." It is hard to imagine exactly how anyone might function as a public intellectual while taking care to avoid all issues that might trigger a spiritual, emotional, or intellectual crisis among his or her readers. It is not necessary, however, to be concerned about the emotional difficulties of Dawkins's audience to conclude that he is somewhat off the mark in his assesment of the compromise between faith and reason by what is generally called "moderate" religion.

Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon Books 2008), p. 206.

Which sounds semi-reasonable enough, despite all the appeals to vague and glittering generalities. The "American religious right," we are told, rejects what "moderate religion" tries to accomodate: "secular education and secular government." Well, maybe, but that's rather a broad brush, even for H. Richard Niebuhr. Still, it's the conclusion of this chapter that really brought me up short:

A general attention to the supernatural, extending beyond narrowly defined fundamentalism, lies at the heart of the profound divide not only between religious America and secular Europe but also between devout religious believers and secularists wtihin the United States. "People are reaching out in all directions in the attempt to escape from the seen world to the unseen world," George Gallup, Jr. told a correspondent for U.S. News and World Report in 2002. "There is a deep desire for spiritual moorings--a hunger for God." (p. 208-09)

Now, frankly, even attributing that statement to St. Augustine of Hippo would not be enough for me. The statement of George Gallup, Jr., in a newsmagazine, is a valid statement of the state of American thought, or even spirituality? Really? Well, it is for Ms. Jacoby:

The desire to escape from the seen to the unseen world is not confined to Americans who profess an ultra-conservative form of faith or, for that matter, any form of orthodox faith. "Escape" is the key word: the resurgence of fundamentalism in the United States has occurred within the context of a pervasive nonreligious antirationalism taht reinforces extreme forms of religion and also affects the broader public's views about science, education, and reality itself.

This puts me in mind of Niebuhr's comments on monasticism, sprinkled throughout Christ and Culture. Niebuhr has no truck with the monastic life, and it finally becomes clear his knowledge of it is Luther's late-in-life rejection of its validity, where he labelled it a "retreat" from the world. Of course, one need only read Kathleen Norris' work to know the monastic life is still lived among people, strangers mostly, whom one is forced to live on intimate terms with for the rest of one's days. Rather like family, you don't get to pick 'em, not entirely; and anything involving living with other people can't really be called a withdrawal from the world. Still, we are all experts on what we have the least experience with, so Ms. Jacoby sinks to some very risible stuff indeed, and maybe even correct; but I submit, no more grounded in reality than the natterings of David Brooks on American sociology or the pronouncements of any TV pundit on why people are voting for John McCain, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton. When in doubt or without data: pontificate! And by the way, how does this desire for "escape" coincide with the resurgent interest of fundamentalists in American politics, an interest which, based on the tallies for Mike Huckabee recently, has yet to abate? And Joel Osteen is still packing them in preaching about what will be seen if you just have as much faith and as kind a smile as he does. God wants you to be rich, is Mr. Osteen's pitch, and there ain't nothin' "unseen" about that appeal.

So I don't really get it.



The other book is: Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq, by Michael Scheuer, someone presented as a 20 year veteran CIA analyst and former head of the "Osama Bin Laden" unit. Mr. Scheuer's thesis is encapsulated on the back dust jacket (he lacks the words of tribute from Douglas Brinkley, Marcia Angell, Helen Thomas, Frederick Crews, and Jack Miles that grace Ms. Jacoby's volume; I'm thinking that's probably a good thing.):

As I researched this book, I became fixed on a single question: "Is there protection of U.S. interests and American citizens, and the maintenance of American sovereignty, independence, and freedom of action, any longer the primary, overriding concern of the U.S. federal government?" The answer should obviously be an emphatic yes, at all times and on every issue.

And yet the more I read and researched, the more I encountered the discrepancy betweeen the words and deeds of U.S. leaders, as well as the vast gulf between their description of the world adn the world as I perceived it in my twenty-plus years as a counterterrorism analyst. And, as I looked closely, I became increasingly doubtful if the answer to the pivotal question above could be even a timid yes.

Since 9/11 there has been a war between two opponents. One one side are the Islamists, fighting in deadly earnest for fully explained reasons and limited objectives; on the other, the United States, grandly assuming inevitable victory ove a foe that exists only in its mind.

My aim in writing this book was to point a finger at the unnecessary and self-defeating mistakes the United States has made since 9/11--political, diplomatic, military, and intellectual--mistakes that could have been avoided had our government paid attention to history and put America first.

Michael Scheuer, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq (New York: Free Press, 2008)

The preface to the book makes clear the thesis: that "the much ballyhooed and nearly beatified 'bipartisan approach' to post-Cold War foreign policy played out its string and collapsed" in the sands of Iraq; and, of course, nothing has been learned from that. This book may be as wrong as Ms. Jacoby's may be right. But Mr. Scheuer's book is packed densely with data and details, and proceeds carefully from one well considered proposition to the next, never launching filament purely out of itself (or others) into the air, assuming it has become anchored somewhere across the void. Ms. Jacoby's book just puts me in mind of a lot of what I read already; and Mr. Scheuer's book reminds me of what's missing in the public discourse. I think that's a pretty strong recommendation.

And to bring this back (abruptly) to the other discussion, this gem from Nicholas Kristoff, who surely means well, but who just as surely should know better. His column today is about Gitmo and torture, but on the way he drops this burning insight:

Most Americans, including myself, originally gave President Bush the benefit of the doubt and assumed that the inmates truly were “the worst of the worst.” But evidence has grown that many are simply the unluckiest of the unluckiest.

Which is why, of course, we have a legal system. Because we never assume any one government official is wise enough to know who the "bad guys" are, nor do we give that government official unlimited power to do what he thinks best. Everytime we've done that in American history, we've regretted it. It's always the fact that the evidence shows those declared "evil" (Native Americans; slaves; Japanese Americans during World War II; German-Americans during World War I) are "simply the unluckiest of the unluckiest").

When will we ever turn from vague and glittering generalities to carefully considered facts? Not any time soon, apparently.

Open the doors....

Not that TPM has a smaller readership than this place (any smaller and I wouldn't even read it!), but this is interesting. To paraphrase: at least 3 studies cited by TPM indicate that having a four year degree increases, rather than decreases, the likelihood one will attend a church. As the 2011 study puts it:

“education positively affects religious participation, devotional activities, and emphasizing the importance of religion in daily life.”

Which, of course, is not supposed to be true. One can pile up all kinds of statistics about declining membership in mainline denominations, and establish all kinds of stereotypes about "know nothing" believers, especially in fundamentalists and evangelical Christian churches. These numbers don't refute those, nor indicate where the college educated are most likely to worship. "Religion" and "religiosity," of course, includes Hindus and Muslims as well as Christians and Jews. The popular image of Christians as bible-thumpers who think Jesus spoke the English of King James is as misplaced as the idea that "Inherit the Wind" is about fundamentalism; but it's also about as ineradicable. At the turn of the 20th century there was a burgeoning mail-order business in the "teach yourself Greek" business, as Christians sought to read the New Testament in the original texts. It may be that, again, we are seeing people turn to religion not because they are ignorant, but because they are wise. It may be there was a reason why Kathleen Norris' books were best-sellers, and why even Dom Crossan could become an almost household word.

We've spent a great deal of effort in America since the GI Bill fostering college degrees and the acquisition of knowledge. It could well be that acquiring knowledge leads one to desire to acquire wisdom, too. Not everyone, certainly; and these statistics may not indicate a "wave" at all. They may indicate something deeper, more profound, and more permanent.

As well as much more hopeful.

Hospitality, Powerlessness, and the Being of God

I don't base my life on mathematics.

Although I understand and acknowledge the importance of mathematics in the world, and even to understanding the nature of the world, I'm not mathematician nor Platonist enough to think that mathematics defines all that is worth knowing in the world, such as my friendships, my family, my wife, my daughter; or myself.

I understand that mathematics is an intellectually rigorous enterprise which requires capabilities I don't have and a mental discipline I have never been able to acquire.  I understand mathematics is capable of explaining many important things and that it is enormously useful, and that what little use I can make of it with arithmetic (I have something of a calculator in my brain; mostly a lot of memorized facts about simple arithmetical equations) is as far as my abilities will ever go.  What I don't do, is make those limitations the basis for a critique of mathematics as a study, except insofar as some mathematician tries to go the Platonic route with me, and argue that mathematics is the true language of reality, or even a reflection of the eternal forms.  Because that's crossing over into philosophy, and there I yield easily to no one.

Which is not the same thing as saying I am a philosopher, or wise in the ways of philosophy.  It's not the same thing as saying I"m a theologian, either, although I'm more of one than I'll ever be a mathematician.

What prompts this reflection is this post at Wounded Bird; and the underlying assumption that, in matters religious, we must all be theologians, or at least acknowledge the superiority of theology, or we must simply be believers, and fall back on our Romantic emotional sense of what is true, because it is grounded in our experience or our childhood or just our "self."  And even to adopt such language is, again, to adopt the language of philosophy; yet how else are we to express our thoughts, and how else are we to explain our understanding, limited though it may ever be, of God?

Negative theology is one such recognition of the limitation.  Negative theology begins with that God is not, because vast though that is, it is more easily understood by human reason than the true nature of God (which is the true subject of theology).  And there's the rub already:  what is the true subject of theology? Julian of Norwich wrote theology, even though it was not recognized as such in the 13th century (nor much today; my categorization is my own, thank you very much).  Kathleen Norris wrote three books of theology, though she famously eschewed the field and all associated with it.  Until the Enlightenment, theology as the mother of the sciences and the foundation of reason in Europe.  It was theology that inspired the preservation of Plato, and the recovery of Aristotle, truly a gift of the Muslims to the Christians.  It was, argued Thomas Cahill, theology (and the Irish) which saved civilization.  Perhaps we should stop here and first define our terms.

Theology is, first, not an Hebraic legacy, but a Greek one.  It arose, not from the teachings of Christ, nor even from the letters of Paul, but from the early church leaders steeped in Greek forms of reason (there are many valid forms of reason; the Greek, though foundational to Western culture, is only one among many).  It arose almost purely, as the later phrase would have it, as "faith seeking understanding."  But it is important to note that "understanding" was sought within the Greek terms of reference, according to fundamentally Greek ideas of reason.  There are, we must understand, other frames of reference available to humankind.

Even the Romans, as influenced by the Greeks as they were, did not wholly fall in line with Greek reasoning.  They had their own views of reality and validity.  The Greek forms are as natural to us as breathing, and even when they don't take the most rigorous forms, like formal logic (which is so akin to modern mathematics), we all, in Western culture,  fundamentally reason as the Greeks taught us to.  Does this mean we are all Greeks, or even all logicians?  Of course not; but we function from reasoning that can easily lead us to Greek logic, if we chose to follow it that far and that studiously.

And the result would be no more certainty than we enjoy without pursuing logic to its formal conclusions.  One of the first rules of formal logic, in fact, is that it doesn't establish truth.  It establishes valid conclusions drawn from the proper application of a formal system of reasoning, but the truth of the conclusion is dependent upon the information brought to the formal system.  Garbage in, garbage out, and the formal system of logic has no function which guarantees garbage is not fed in.  The classic syllogism "All humans are mortal, Socrates is human, therefore Socrates is mortal," is a valid logical conclusion.  But it doesn't establish the existence of Socrates, or the truth that all humans are mortal.

Systems will not do the work for you.  To put it bluntly:  systems will not save you.

Martin Luther's great theological insight was that he was saved by grace, not by faith.  But this insight was not the result of rigorous theological effort; it was much more a cri de coeur, a desperate rejection of the damnation that his studies of Augustine had lead him to fear.  Scholars will tell you Melancthon was Luther's theologian; but outside of scholars, who remembers Melanchthon today?  Luther not only gave us his fundamental idea, one almost universally accepted now; but he also gave us the concept of negative theology.  He understood, in other words, the limits of theology; and he even took advantage of them.

There are, you see, different types of "theology," and some of the most important ideas of theology don't come from expert theologians.  Luther needed Melanchthon, but Melanchthon needed Luther, too.   Any discussion of the nature of God is theology, whether the discussion is coming from Dom Crossan or from Pat Robertson.  The importance of theology has always been as a support to faith; never as a replacement for it.  The idea that theology should, indeed must, replace faith is actually an artifact of the Enlightenment and, like the myth of medieval church men obsessed with angels and pinheads, actually a product of the critique of faith, not of its faithful examination.

I think it safe to say that at some point around the Enlightenment faith and reason were fully separated, although they had never been as one in Christian theology.  Reason was, until the Enlightenment (broadly speaking) a gift of God.  It was reasoning that Augustine employed in his own cri de coeur, his Confessions.  Reason is again paramount for Aquinas, one of the finest reasoning minds to ever record his thoughts.  Both men are instructive here: Augustine's heart famously led him to faith; it was his reason that puzzled out the explanations his Greek-influenced culture demanded, and much of that reasoning was a response to competing theologies which we now mostly remember, if at all, as heresies.  But Augustine's reasoning (along with others) was aimed at supporting faith, not at supplanting it.  The arguments over the heresies was an argument over how to understand the proper parameters of faithfulness as Christians, arguments no different from those Paul had with his churches in Galatia or Corinth or even the church in Rome.  Paul did not establish those churches on reasons alone, but neither could reason fail to be a part of his discussion of the new faith of Christians.  Aquinas, even more than Augustine, applied rigorous reasoning to bring the then newly-discovered insights of Aristotle into what was an already well established theological framework.  And yet, the end result of all Aquinas' work, work that scholars today spend a lifetime studying and still say they do not fully grasp?  He had a vision, after which, he said, all his work was as straw; and he never wrote another word.

The visions of Julian of Norwich were, arguably, beyond reason.  They certainly weren't the end result of reasoning; yet she spent her anchorite revising and revisiting those visions and making sense of them both through her experience and her faith, and through her reason.  She did not reason as Aquinas did, nor even as Augustine did; but is she any less a theologian for that?  Her vision of Christ as Mother preserve a theological insight that might otherwise be lost to Christian thinking, and we are all the richer for it.  It isn't, of course, a conclusive vision, and it provokes all manner of response, even today.  Some emphasize it, some try to explain it away, none make it a pillar of their theological arguments.  But it is a statement about the nature of God; and in line with Luther's negative theology, that we can only truly say what God is not, we need to be careful to say God cannot be Mother as well as Father; not in our understanding, which will always have to explain God or experience God in the frame of reference we already have.

There are, as I say, various theologies:  there is theology as the umbrella term for Christian reasoning about God, and then there is theology, the specific field concerned with the nature of God, as opposed to Christology, which is concerned with the nature of the Christ; and pneumatology, the study of the nature of the Holy Spirit; not to mention ecclesiology, and soteriology, and systematic theology, and the theology of worship.

You get the idea.

Must we be mathematicians who understand geometry both Euclidean and non-Euclidean, and elementary analysis, and calculus, in order to speak of arithmetic at all, or how we understand the workings of the world in terms of quantum mechanics?  I cannot say I am a physicist, but I can understand some of the ideas of modern physics without being ashamed of my inability to follow the mathematics that underpins them.  Neither do I need to understand Christology as Jan Sorbino does, nor theology as Gustavo Gutierrez does, in order to grasp the idea of the preferential option for the poor, or to consider the virtues of liberation theology.  Perhaps I do if I want to discuss the matter with the Pope Emeritus; but if I want to practice the preferential option for the poor as my Christian duty?  I only need a certain understanding of the teachings of the Gospels.  That understanding will be a theological one; but need it be a formal, even a systematic, theological one?  Only if I wish it to be so.  Will that understanding answer all my questions, clear all doubts, confirm all beliefs?  Of course not; nothing will.  Life is messy.  We reason from life to conclusions; never from conclusions to life.

Theology is what we engage in when we talk about God, whether it is to understand our own thoughts about how to be a Christian, or whether it is trying to explain the function and necessity of "natural law".  Theology originated as an endeavour of people trained in Greek reason to speak of God in terms of that reasoning, usually as a way of distinguishing one set of ideas (acceptable) from another (heresies).  That kind of theological effort is apologetics, although it is more and more, and especially since the Enlightenment, seen as the sole purpose of theology.  There are, of course, other uses; and they can be as esoteric as Tillich's Systematic Theology or as deliberative as Barth's Dogmatics, or as narrow as a text I picked up in seminary about the theology of worship.  But it can also be a hymn, a Celtic prayer, a meditation by a poet, a record of a mystical experience, the reason why you react to a psalm or a sermon.  Theology is perhaps even better defined by what it isn't, than by what it is.

And what it primarily isn't is an academic exercise carried out solely by learned practitioners with knowledge and abilities far beyond those of mortal men and women, with insights too deep for untrained minds to plumb and understandings too vast for common people to follow.

The underlying post behind that post at Wounded Bird laments that theology does not lead to certainty; but that, I would argue, is the proper way of faith.  Theology, or more properly scriptural studies in seminary, taught me that the parables of Christ, far from being visions of heaven in an earthly guise, are disturbing pictures of a world turned inside out by the presence of God, a world in which certainty is the failure, uncertainty the hope of faith.  At some point perhaps that leads me to Luther's negative theology; to the idea that I can only know what God is not, based on the revelation in Scripture and through the teachings of my church (we are long past the days of "The" Church).  It is at least better than the certainty that I know what cannot be known.  Or, more accurately, that I need to know what cannot be known.

Rorschach Tests

I may just quit writing for awhile, and instead merely post Kierkegaardian parables, throw them out like inkblots, and let the interpretations be your own. That, after all, is what Kierkegaard would want.

Consider this one, for example. The only guidance I would offer is to point out that "the literary world" of Kierkegaard's day, would be the MSM of our own.

If I tried to imagine the public as a particular person...I should perhaps think of one of the Roman emperors, a large, well-fed figure, suffering from boredom, looking only for the sensual intoxication of laughter, since the divine gift of wit is not earthly enough. And so for a change he wanders about, indolent rather than bad, but with a negative desire to dominate. Every one who has read the classical authors knows how many things a Caesar could try out in order to kill time. In the same way the public keeps a dog to amust it. That dog is the sum of the literary world. If there is someone superior to the redst, perhaps even a great man, the dog is set on him and the fun begins. The dog goes for him, snapping and tearing at his coattails, allowing itself every possible ill-mannered familiarity--until the public tires, and says it must stop. That is an example of how the public levels. Their betters and superiors in strength are mishandled--and the dog remains a dog which even the public despises. The levelling is therefore done by a third party; a non-existent public levelling with the help of a third party which in its insignificance is less than nothing, being alread more than levelled.... The public is unrepentant, for it is not they who own the dog--they only subscribe. They neither set the dog on any one, nor whistle it off--directly. If asked they would answer: the dog is not mine, it has no master. And if the dog had to be killed they would say: it was really a good thing that bad-tempered dog was put down, every one wanted it killed--even the subscribers.

And simply picking up on, not the conclusion, but the beginning of that parable (no other connection is necessary, except perhaps Kathleen Norris' study of acedia), one more parable:

The gods were bored, and so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, and so Eve was created. [From that moment on] boredom entered the world, and increased in proportion to the increase in population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille; then the population of the world increased, and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea is itself as boring as the tower was high, and consitutes a terrible proof of how boredom gained the upper hand.... I desire no disciples; but if there happened to be someone present at my deathbed, and I was sure that the end had come, then I might in an attack of philanthropic delirium, whisper my theory in his ear, uncertain whether I had done him a service or not.

Well, It IS Sunday, Isn't It?

Eric Trump comes under fire by Baptist Pastor after claiming his father has done more for Christianity than anyonehttps://t.co/Xxry1K2tu6

— Raw Story (@RawStory) September 11, 2022

Eric Trump just now at a MAGA Republican rally in Kentucky: “There’s no one that’s done more for Christianity than Donald Trump. No one.”

I can think of one or two people.

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) September 11, 2022

St. Augustine. St. Aquinas. St. Francis. St. Ignatius Loyola. St. John of the Cross. St. Fiacre (patron saint of gardeners. I have his statuette in my garden.) Martin Luther. Jean Cauvin. Pope Francis I. Reinhold Niebuhr. Hans Kung. Soren Kierkegaard. Kathleen Norris. Thomas Merton. Dorothy Day.

Eric Trump is so ignorant his ignorance is ignorant. https://t.co/oT3oXTLT20

— Ken Olin (@kenolin1) September 11, 2022

The "clouds of witness" throughout the millenia. I could go on. But Mr. Olin says it more pithily.

"How long...before we get the fourth wall-TV put in?"

This makes me think I should re-investigate Ricouer on narrative:

It’s unfortunate that Black Cindy’s narrative is unique, but in the world of prestige dramas and comedies, religion or acts of worship are usually presented as things outside of intellectuality or artistic expression. “The Good Wife” has done an excellent job of critiquing the public perception of atheism with Julianna Margulies’ Alicia Florrick. In Season 6, although she does not struggle with her beliefs, there are some interesting complications along the way (especially because she’s running for public office). Alicia’s atheism fits well with her character—she’s analytical, smart and a realist.
She believes in the law and is concerned primarily with its execution, as opposed to issues of faith.

Although religion was never a topic that became a major part of the series (which is telling in and of itself), we saw similar oppositions between faith and intellect (or faith and work) on “Mad Men.”

Peggy Olson’s character (played by Elisabeth Moss) was responsible for the few storylines concerned with religion, and she was set in direct opposition against her Catholic mother and sister. Her relationship with Father Gill in Season 2 seemed to work against these oppositions at times, but for the duration of the series they mostly stayed in place. In Season 3 “Mad Men” also gave us this memorable exchange between Sally Draper and Betty:

Sally: Why don’t we go to church?

Betty: We go to church.

Sally: On Christmas. Carla goes every Sunday.

Betty: We don’t need to go every week.

The issue of class not-so-subtly creeps into the dialogue here, as Sally is asking about their black nanny and maid. It’s implied that she’s someone who needs church, while the Draper family can afford to attend just once a year.

Perhaps the best “Mad Men” example might be the [failed] relationship between Don Draper and Rachel Menken. One of the most emotional scenes of the final season saw Draper attending her shiva. Her Jewish background was always a point of interest, but because the character was not a series regular, we saw her more as Don’s lover—the one who got away—rather than a character for whom religion was important.

If the thesis isn't clear there, it was stated explicitly a bit earlier:

Bob Dylan would say we’re all gonna have to serve somebody, but Black Cindy’s storyline suggests that how we worship and believe is as important as what or whom we worship. And when her Afro Puffs went kosher, so to speak, “OITNB” brought us the type of religious conversion narrative rarely, if ever, seen on television.

I suppose we could focus on the irony that Bob Dylan is a Jew who converted to Christianity (a long time back, if the stories are true), but for the article, the thesis is that "issues of religion" are matters of worship and belief.  Religion is about how you spend some portion of your week (in worship) and what you believe in.

Black Cindy: Honestly? I think I found my people. I was raised in a church where I was told to believe and pray. And if I was bad, I’d go to hell. If I was good, I’d go to heaven. If I asked Jesus, he’d forgive me, and that was that. And here, y’all sayin’ it ain’t no hell. Ain’t sure about heaven. And if you do something wrong, you got to figure it out yourself. And as far as God is concerned, it’s yo’ job to keep askin’ questions, and to keep learnin’ and to keep arguing. It’s like a verb. It’s like—you do God. And it’s a lot of work, but I think I’m in.

There's something of Kathleen Norris in there, and of religious people taking their religion seriously enough to devote their lives to it, as nuns and monks and priests; but then again, not really.  The point of religious belief is not to center your life on arguing with God, either, even if you meditate deeply on the idea that "Israel" means "struggles with God."  If that's all you're doing, you're still a non-believer struggling with some very simplistic idea of the notion of "belief."  Which is not what the Drapers do; or Peggy Olson; or Alicia Florrick.

But it's the narrative of what believers are supposed to be doing.  On the other hand, does anybody have a narrative where they imagine Pope Francis doing this all day? Or Sr. Simone Campbell? Or should we better start with Ricouer?

On the other hand, the relation between these two hermenuetics begins to reverse itself once we begin to consider the other side of the narrative, namely, the confession of faith. But this other dimension remains inseperable from the structure of the story. Not just any theology whatsoever can be tied to the narrative form, but only a theology that proclaims Yahweh to be the grand actor of a history of deliverance. Without a doubt it is this point that forms the greatest contrast between the God of Israel and the God of Greek philosophy. The theology of traditions knows nothing of concepts of cause, foundation, or essence. It speaks of God in accord with the historical drama, instituted by the acts of deliverance reported in the story. This manner of speaking of God is no less meaningful than that of the Greeks. It is a theology homogenous with the narrative structure itself, a theology in the form of Heilsgeschicte.

Paul Ricouer, "Philosophy and Religion," Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, tr. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress 1995), 40.

The narrative of the confession of faith is not a narrative of how religious believers explain themselves to non-believers.  The frame of the narrative presumed in the Salon article is that all believers are deeply concerned with the question of belief, with the validity of belief, with even the facticity of God.  But that's a modern obsession, a non-believer's obsession, even an atheist's obsession (whose source of identity, as an atheist, is in being opposed to the belief of the theist, a curious attempt to be yang to their yin; the atheist thus needs the believer; the believer doesn't need the atheist.).  But the confession of faith is not a confession of a proof of God's existence, or a conclusion as to all the important questions of life (that much Black Cindy and I can already agree on).

To the world, the accepted narrative of faith is that only atheists are concerned with matters like the law and its execution; which surprises at least this Christian lawyer, and many other Christian and Jewish and Muslim lawyers I've known.  The stories Ricouer speaks of are the powerful stories often encountered in spirituals (Thought Criminal has run a series on spirituals; you should look at them), or in both the abolitionist movement and the Civil Rights movement.  Those stories are still the backbone of the "black church" experience in America.  They don't have a lot to do with the validity of worship or the existence of God; they have a lot more to do with issues related to the law and its execution.

Consult the writings of Dr. King, for more information.

This is the box popular culture wants to squeeze religion into; squeeze it in and declare it defined and relegated.  Not that evangelicalism and fundamentalism haven't worked hard to make that narrative the dominant narrative of religion in America.  In an excellent article at Religion Dispatches the reduction of Christianity to a never ending cycle of sin, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption is discussed in terms of Billy Graham's grandson, who confessed to an extra-marital affair.  If you're old enough to remember Jimmy Swaggart sobbing out his confession, you know the routine.  If you grew up around the "revivalist" culture of the South, you know this is the backbone of southern Christianity in almost all it's varied forms.  And yes, it's pretty thin gruel and a pretty shallow pool, and the reason I saw, 20 years ago now, such pastors announcing to each other they'd discovered something new to revive worship in December:  Advent.

Maybe Christianity really is just all about worship.  One can be forgiven for thinking so when revivals are a central part of one's worship life; when altar calls are the central ceremony of public confession, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption.  I didn't grow up in that church culture, even among my grandparents and their friends in the Primitive Baptist church, but I grew up amongst it and I know its contours fairly well.  The old joke was that we got all the Baptists sobered up enough of Sunday morning to get 'em to church to ask forgiveness for what they did on Saturday night; and that was pretty much what being a Southern Baptist meant.  My grandparents, on the other hand, were poor people among poor people who brought food every Sunday, sang from shaped-note hymnals because they wouldn't use even a piano, listened to lay preachers like my grandfather, shared a generous meal after every worship service, and called each other "Brother Madison" and Sister Lenore," and it meant they were family because they were one in the spirit and one in the Lord.  And if they struggled, they struggled with how to live up to what God meant to them, and what God's word meant.  They didn't go to church every Sunday because they needed to; they went because they wanted to.  They went because that's where the family would be, and they wanted to be among them.

I attended a black church once, in seminary.  It was an assignment, a push to expose us to as many forms of Christian worship as we could find.  It was the only church service I've ever attended where the pastor had to take the microphone and urge people to leave, so the next group of worshippers could get in, and the next service start on time.  Nobody watched the clock during worship, and nobody was anxious to leave the company of the others when it was done.

Neither of those narratives show up in the stories of the Drapers or the Catholic church of Peggy Olson, or even in the Judaism of Rachel Mencken or Black Cindy.  That's all right, of course, they don't have to.  But we take literary representations as either distillations of a hard-found truth (the initial comments at Salon disparage the author's opening linking a mere "TV show" to the literary efforts of James Joyce or John Milton, as if one can only sully the purity, the holiness, of the other), or as fair representations of how the world "really is."  And much as I enjoy "Mad Men" and admire Matthew Weiner's use of religion in his story-telling (especially the episode that focusses on Holy Week and Easter at Peggy's church), "Mad Men" doesn't represent anything beyond the stories of those characters.

There is a narrative we cannot, dare not, challenge.  Once it is settled upon (and it is settled upon quickly, in almost any new story that comes along), it is assumed as true and solid as the ground we walk on, as the houses we live in, and not even flood and fire and wind can destroy it fully.  But the narratives about faith don't even begin to consider the narrative of the confession of faith (except as a confession to never think again).  And that is, at the least, a disservice to the world we live in, even as we become more and more determined to live in it through the lens (!) of the narratives we see on screens, the constantly flickering screens that are making the future more and more like the one Ray Bradbury imagined in Fahrenheit 451 and "The Pedestrian," every day.