The idea of the hermit’s life—simplicity, devotion, closeness to nature—lurks somewhere on the periphery of most people’s consciousness, a way glimpsed, oddly familiar, not taken. It is like one of those tracks you sometimes see as you drive along a country road, a path leading up a hill and disappearing into a wood, almost painfully inviting, so that you long to stop the car and follow it, and perhaps you take your foot off the accelerator for a couple of seconds, no more. Most of us wouldn’t like it if we did walk up the hill, we’d become bored, depressed, uncomfortable, take to drink. But the idea is still there: the path we didn’t take.
That’s from Isabel Colegate’s A Pelican in the Wilderness. My friend Luke once played up a phrase I used in the subject line of an email, saying it was a good title for a future blog site, and also a proper summation of our history of conversations: “rambling and inconcise.” Well, if you haven’t already expected it, consider this essay at least potentially … uh, maundering and incompendious.
I have one friend from an old college writing class with whom I exchange written letters. After a heart attack, one of her wishes was to send and receive more hand-written letters. Of course, it was impossible to start writing letters without both of us lamenting the lack, and praising the existence, of that simple and old and neglected medium of pen and paper. I like to think of (personal) emails as being moderately capable of resembling letters, and representing an example of at least a moderately good use of technology. The funny part is that, while I have one friend who writes letters, I have … [checks figures] … zero friends who write emails, at least with any regularity. It’s a lonely world, and for me text messages, while great for quick shares, can often make me feel even lonelier. Kind of like how sleeping on an airplane can have the reverse effect and make you feel more tired, getting a text from a friend who I rarely see makes me feel even less connected. Maybe that’s a bad analogy. But the point is that texting is an inherently lazy and poor form of communication. For some things, that’s perfectly fine. But I think it should always be treated as an inherently lazy and poor form of communication. (I fully admit, if you are not someone I text with regularly, and you randomly send me a text message, there is, without any malice, a very high likelihood I will not reply.) With a COVID epidemic having only compounded a loneliness epidemic, why in shit’s paddleless creek are we not at least writing more email-letters to each other? Of course, I have no idea how many letters or emails anyone actually writes in a given week, nor how anyone regularly communicates with the people they love but don’t see. So, while I have not (yet) had any heart attacks, maybe this is just my own way of asking for more emails.
But the goal here is not to lament the displacement of more thoughtful and thorough forms of communication.
I have a lot of opinions about the church culture in which I grew up, at least half of them quite critical. The problem is that I simply hate being someone who laments the status of “the Church” while not being someone who is even attending the gathering of one. I have been to … [checks figures] … exactly one church service in the last three years. (It was an episcopal church in Idaho Falls. The voice of the woman leading the church was so shrill that it made me ashamed to wonder, but no less actually wonder, how on earth she could have chosen the right profession. I am still ashamed of this, but still admit it.) I was not in regular attendance in Maine even before the pandemic. And while working night shifts and finishing a baccalaureate were certainly factors, they were also excuses I was all too content with.
I read something recently that said some version of a very common refrain, about how the church is a motley crew with all kinds of differences, but we meet because we know that we agree on this ultimate thing: praising God in Christ Jesus. I deeply want to say yes and amen, and I want to say something about how the church has never been perfect but has always been a wayward group needing encouragement and correction just like everybody else. But however true those things are, the first phrasing especially feels too cliché, too dismissive. It does not help with how not-at-home I feel with the Republican Conservative Evangelical church that I have known most of my life. Yes, for over 30 years I’ve heard that we are Christian first and everything else long after, but words are one thing and fruit another. And of course, as a necessary caveat, I am grateful for all the teaching and training and wisdom and love I have received. It is that same Evangelical church that is somehow responsible for forming me and also responsible for my rejection of it. (I think it was Tim Keller who pointed out that the problem with Christians is that they aren’t Christian enough. To me, it is an internal inconsistency that seems always redirected toward an external enemy; or, as I have quoted Garry Wills a thousand times, the church which systematically rejects its own sources of wisdom “cannot contribute what it no longer possesses.”)
Where does all this leave me? I have no idea. Rambling and inconcise, I suppose. But the goal of writing should be openness and honesty leading to discovery, no? I certainly hope that’s what this space is for.
I am, have always been, and will probably always be, a skeptical believer. But while I have watched a few people give up on faith entirely, I have never felt that deep faith itself shake. Question? Yes. Despise? Yes. But always there. I had lunch with my friend Marilyn at Fajita Grill shortly before I left Maine. I remember being more than a little offended when she told me that, after our previous meeting, she thought that maybe I had also given up altogether on faith. I’m still a little baffled as to how I could have conveyed that. Exactly what I believe about the Christian faith and how I believe it—how could that not change over the years? But that small Reformed remnant in me does still wake up and say, “Thank you.” (“Oh, the twisted roads I walked! Woe to my outrageous soul,” wrote St. Augustine. “But look, you’re here, freeing us from our unhappy wandering, setting us firmly on your track, comforting us and saying, ‘Run the race! I’ll carry you! I’ll carry you clear to the end, and even at the end, I’ll carry you.’”)
I suppose it’s obvious how all this might be derived from a quote about recluses and hermits. But another quote from one of Colegate’s following chapters might make it more obvious still:
We think we might be [like the contented hermit] ourselves if some things were different . . . forgetting of course that the condition of complete simplicity costs, as Eliot said, not less than everything. Hermits can achieve that state, some of the time or all of the time. There are also restless hermits, ecstatic hermits and madmen. There is hallucination and there is fraud. Too much physical darkness and emptiness result in sensory deprivation in which the brain, finding nothing solid to work on, malfunctions frantically among phantasmagoria.
Colgate goes on to quote Richard Rolle (italics added):
It behoves him then who would sing of his love for God and rejoice fervently in such singing, to pass his days in solitude. Yet the abstinence in which he lives should not be excessive . . . I myself have eaten and drunk things that are considered delicacies . . . in order to sustain my being in the service of God . . . For his sake I conformed quite properly with those with whom I was living lest I should invent a sanctity where none existed, lest men should praise me where I was less worthy of praise.
She closes that chapter with this counsel:
Melancholy and morbid fantasy do assail the hermit. He remembers Ecclesiastes: ‘Woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.’ A solitary may take leave of his senses, misinterpret messages or invent them, diminish, despair, die. ‘Be not solitary, be not idle,’ remains then the best advice, until such time as the branch grows green again.
While I could spend any number of consecutive days tucked away with a few good books in the corner of the house or in a small coffee shop, I would very much like not to be solitary, not to be idle. For an introvert like me, that can take work. It does take work and, I promise, I’m still working on it.
It may not seem as obvious, but the hermit thing is relevant not only for my individual self, as it relates to the church or elsewise, but also for the church as it relates to the world. I hear over and over again about how “set apart” and “otherworldly” the church must be. And surely this is true in some sense, to some degree. But surely there is a touch (if not a zeitgeist!) of docetism in there. Surely the desire to be set apart undoes something crucial in the message of the incarnating, suffering, reviving God.
I shared a short article from Wesley Hill not long ago, where he points out that the original language in Philippians 2 is a bit ambiguous on a point we often take for granted, since there’s a connector often present in English in vs. 6 that is not present in the Greek. “Though he existed in the form of God” could just as easily be translated as “because he existed in the form of God”: because he is God, therefore he emptied himself. Now, there are a lot of reasons for the first understanding, and I’m not saying that it’s necessarily better translated the second way, and I don’t think Hill is either. But, if God is triune, self-giving love, doesn’t it seem like a textual ambiguity worth appreciating?
Here’s part of a quote from Arthur Michael Ramsey (at short but greater length here):
The self-giving love of Calvary discloses not the abolition of deity but the essence of deity in its eternity and perfection. God is Christlike, and in him is no un-Christlikeness at all, and the glory of God in all eternity is that ceaseless self-giving love of which Calvary is the measure. God’s impassibility means that God is not thwarted or frustrated or ever to be an object of pity, for when he suffers with his suffering creation it is the suffering of a love which through suffering can conquer and reign. Love and omnipotence are one.
Ramsey goes on to quote David Jenkins:
In relation to the practical problem of evil, God is neither indifferent, incompetent nor defeated. He is involved, identified and inevitably triumphant.
There is perhaps nothing that makes me more deeply joyful than what Ramsey and Jenkins describe. Those words “involved,” “identified”—they are the heart of existence for me.
Though I have quoted it before, perhaps just as importantly and well stated is Karl Barth, from his Church Dogmatics IV/3:
The solidarity of the community with the world consists quite simply in the active recognition that it, too, since Jesus Christ is the Saviour of the world, can exist in worldly fashion, not unwillingly nor with bad conscience, but willingly and with good conscience. It consists in the recognition that its members also bear in themselves and in some way actualize all human possibilities. Hence it does not consist in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them, rejoicing with them that do rejoice and weeping with them that weep (Rom. 12:15), not confirming and strengthening them in evil nor betraying and surrendering them for its own good, but confessing for its own good, and thereby contending against the evil of others, by accepting the fact that it must be honestly and unreservedly among them and with them, on the same level and footing, in the same boat and within the same limits as any or all of them. How can it boast of and rejoice in the Saviour of the world and men, or how can it win them—to use another Pauline expression—to know Him and to believe in Him, if it is not prepared first to be human and worldly like them and with them?
What Barth says next I first read quoted from George Hunsinger, and it’s something that has stuck with me ever since I read it six years ago:
[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. The world only too easily sees itself as a community which has no care but for its own life and rights and manner and which thus tries to separate itself from those around. The world itself constantly divides into individual cliques, interested groups, cultural movements, nations, religions, parties and sects of all kinds, each of which is sure of the goodness of its own cause and each anxious within the limits to maintain and assert itself in face of all the rest. . . . As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow His example and to sit down at table with the rest, with all sinners.
Which brings me back to Colgate and hermits and life outside of church attendance. “For his sake I conformed quite properly with those with whom I was living lest I should invent a sanctity where none existed.”
I wrote to a traveling nurse friend a few years ago who encouraged me to read Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. Here’s what I wrote:
I told you in Liberia that I’ve never been a big fan of The Message [translation], or at least that it’s never done anything for me. That’s still true, really, but every once in a while I find something in it that is very helpful. In this case, I really liked his translation of Philippians 4:5. NKJV says, “Let your gentleness be known to all men.” NASB uses gentle spirit. ESV, for some unknown purpose, uses reasonableness. Peterson paraphrases it like this: “Make it clear to all you meet that you’re on their side, working with them and not against them.” Naturally, since I’m often reading an ESV, I wondered how he got from “reasonableness” to all that. Turns out, most of the verse spins on one word: epieikés. Here’s the definition I found: “properly, equitable, gentle in the sense of truly fair by relaxing overly strict standards in order to keep the spirit of the law.” Long story short, I like Peterson’s translation better.
I think the NKJV comes closest with “gentleness,” but it seems like that one little Greek word needs a lot of English words to do it justice. We exist apart from the world only insofar as we exist for it. To quote Barth again: the church does not/can not seek to exist “in a cunning masquerade, but rather in an unmasking in which it makes itself known to others as akin to them.” If that is not epieikés, I don’t know what is. It’s a taking down of walls and refusing to build them up. More than that, it’s walking unarmed away from the city with nothing more than what God has given you.
As difficult as things have been in recent years, as much as I often feel like a hermit in exile, I do think that I have felt more for the world than ever before.