There are moral choices and there are the consequences of those choices. The market gives us choices, and morality itself is [we tell ourselves] just a set of choices in which right or wrong have no meaning beyond the satisfaction or frustration of desire. The result is that we find it increasingly hard to understand why there might be things we want to do, can afford to do, and have a legal right to do, that nonetheless we should not do because they are unjust or dishonorable or disloyal or demeaning: in a word, unethical. Ethics is reduced to economics.
“a state of profound truth-seeking”
Holy Saturday is a silent phase between the Good Friday and the Resurrection, but it is not an empty phase. On the contrary, in the experience of silence and notable absence, the solidarity of God with those who are suffering grief, pain, and abandonment is most clearly expressed. The experience of “no news” in the situation where good news is hoped for is an experience of deepest desperation, insecurity which paralyses human capacities to act – shall we accept the emptiness of death, or shall we continue hoping? Holy Saturday therefore offers a salvific reading of the situation of insecurity – sometimes there is nothing we can do to know more about the events or to change them, yet we constantly experience social or emotional pressure to “do something” or to “change something.” The theology of Holy Saturday therefore stands in juxtaposition to this pressure; it tells those who are deprived of means to change events that “doing nothing” save remembering is not an empty activity but a state of profound truth-seeking and truth-telling.
let life surprise you
This little painted rock lies up against a metal post on the walking path near us here in Bozeman. Lest you get too idyllic an image, it is the post on which the bucket for dog poop hangs.
I love the phrase, “Let life surprise you.” Or I love the idea, anyway. The phrase is, of course, remarkably cheesy and a little cliché. But I love the idea, especially in a less common phrasing: “Stay for the surprises.” (I take the phrase from an interview with Jamie Tworkowski.) Because some of the best joys and happinesses in life are (perhaps by definition) unexpected, and therefore yet to come.
This is Sarah Lindsay’s poem “Small Moth“:
She’s slicing ripe white peaches
into the Tony the Tiger bowl
and dropping slivers for the dog
poised vibrating by her foot to stop their fall
when she spots it, camouflaged,
a glimmer and then full on—
happiness, plashing blunt soft wings
inside her as if it wants
to escape again.
Sometimes, even the daily — no, even the moment-to-moment fluctuations are enough to remind me when I am down or angry or whatever: wait a bit, stick around, let life — let joy or happiness or whatever you want to call it — surprise you. It always does.
no end in sight
All of what Trump has shown disregard for—the letter and spirit of the law, the security of sensitive information, the foundational republican compact of the country that elevates the Constitution and the rule of law over the will of its leaders—is not good for anyone. And with every opportunity that responsible leaders fail to do something about it, Americans just get more used to it.
bothsidesing
Alas. The fundamental problem, going back to the AMA/Endocrine Society nonsense, is that most people don’t know much about this issue. So the average person is going to see a statement like this one and, well, believe it. Those are very impressive-seeming organization names!
I’d argue the American Medical Association and Endocrine Society have a fundamental obligation to, at the very least, not spread outright nonsense. . . .
But highly respected institutions, like these organizations and like countless media outlets, do keep spreading misinformation on this subject. At a certain point, if you’re just trying to figure out the truth about these subjects, why wouldn’t you give up on the AMA or the Endocrine Society or the AAP or Scientific American or Science Vs? Seriously. Once it’s established that these institutions are much more interested in coming down on the “right” side of a hyper-politicized debate than in making a good-faith effort to communicate the truth — once they’ve shown, over and over and over, that they only deploy the full powers of their reasoning and skepticism selectively — what is the point of trusting them?
I’m not totally blackpilled. These organizations all still have good people working for them and are capable of solid work. I would still trust The New York Times or even Science Vs over the countless maniacs spreading conspiracy theories on YouTube. But I’m gaining a better and better understanding of how said maniacs gain a foothold. When someone comes to me and complains that they just can’t trust mainstream institutions anymore, what can I do, knowing what I know, other than shrug?
Folks like Alex Jones will always have some influence, unfortunately, even in otherwise healthy epistemic landscapes. Humans are imperfect and our brains are easily hijacked by charismatic madmen. But why make it such a cakewalk for the Joneses of the world? Why give people easy excuses to abandon mainstream sources of knowledge?
Don’t complain when you dislike where those disillusioned folks eventually end up, is all I’m saying.
I’m not really a fan of the “bothsidesing” business — dumb is dumb, wrong is wrong, you aren’t justified, no one made you do it — but that doesn’t mean that good points can’t be made and understood in terms of cumulative cultural extremes. It seems objectively true that, as Anne Applebaum put it, “the process of radicalization [is] mutually reinforcing.”
Here’s how she put it exactly:
Both would blame the other for accelerating the dynamic, but in fact the process of radicalization was mutually reinforcing. Milder, more moderate members of both communities began to choose sides. Being a bystander got harder; remaining neutral became impossible.
The reason I think it’s worth understanding — worth having a permanent place in our understanding — is not to make excuses for anyone, least of all ourselves. It’s important because it helps us to understand, or at least attempt to understand, those drawn to the most extreme sides of our current cultural battles. And doing so might actually take us a step or two closer to turning those battles back into conversations. The attempt really matters, because it reflects a disposition without which there can be no peace. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s mother said, in a letter to him not long after he was imprisoned,
What Augustine said was indeed right: “The ear hears according to the disposition of the heart.”
If I’m being completely honest, I don’t like the cardiac dispositions of almost everyone I meet these days. And I’m finding my own disposition to be increasingly negative and hopeless. I do attempt to find and pay attention to the best voices with the best dispositions, but that can be very hard work. Quite frankly, it’s exhausting. And I am often exhausted. But I also can’t think of many things more important than the task of finding truth-tellers, sharing what they are saying, and attempting to do the same truth-telling ourselves.
Here’s Daniel Dennet in 2017:
As usual with arms races, both in human warfare and in natural selection, advances in offense are cheaper than the defensive responses to counter them. This is especially true in epistemology, the world of fact, knowledge and belief. No matter how carefully you, or your organization, gathers, tests and evaluates evidence, your reputation for objectivity and truth-telling can be shattered with a few well-aimed lies by your opponents. With your reputation shattered, your goods, however valuable in fact, will be almost unsalable. Skepticism and doubt is cheap, confidence is expensive. This asymmetry is a major problem, and it will take patient and unrelenting effort to restore confidence in sources that deserve confidence.
Or, better, it will take patient effort and unrelenting courage. Patient (i.e. “long-suffering”) effort because it really is difficult, endless work (especially at the beginning) to find solid ground and to avoid the reactionary news set by the lowest possible bars. And unrelenting courage because, unless you are very lucky, you will often be doing this without the company or the approval of many around you.
As Stanislas Vinaver (known as Constantine) put it in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “Yes. For the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for the sake of my soul, I have given up on the deep peace of being in opposition.”
Dennet says something else that summarizes pretty well what it is I hope I’m doing—not as any sort of specific project as yet (although the blogging is something), but as the near-constant background noise of every single day, no matter the situation. He says, “What we need to do is enlarge these islands [of reliable trust], patiently building from small to large, creating resilient webs of trust to replace those that have been dissolving in the onslaught of the media.”
That sounds like pretty good daily work to me. But it’s always worth remembering what T. S. Eliot wrote in “East Coker”:
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Also sprach Zarathustra
Viktor Ivančić and Drago Bojić:
When on the one hand one sees the vast number of religious manifestations and the pervasively arrogant and aggressive religiosity of people, and on the other hand there is the evil these people advocate and do, one shudders at the thought of the people of faith. If we imagine God to be good, merciful, forgiving and just, and religious communities and their temples places where God should “dwell,” then that God is often dead and buried precisely in the place where he should live.
buying and selling
Hannah Arendt:
Public relations is a variety of advertising; hence it has its origin in the consumer society, with its inordinate appetite for goods to be distributed through a market economy. The trouble with the mentality of the public-relations man is that he deals only in opinions and “good will,” the readiness to buy, that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.
hermits
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.
“to dazzle with possibility”
We are in thrall to the language of transformation. It instantly rallies the human spirit. It promises radical personal growth. It hints at transcendent forces that we’ve all but buried in our pragmatic, I-am-the-prime-mover-of-my-life sort of age. And it taps into one of the most powerful ideologies of consumer life—the endless project of self-invention and reinvention. […]
The goal of transformation is left open-ended, unstated, and uncertain, as if we have done our jobs as educators when we increase the sheer number of possible choices available to young people without helping them figure out which ones are actually worth pursuing. Ironically, in leaving these questions unanswered, we do not actually avoid advancing a conception of what the good life entails. On the contrary, we suggest to young people that change for its own sake is itself a worthy modus vivendi. We are setting students on a path of perpetual transformation, making them into people who are always searching for experiences that stretch and strain their prior commitments and who, in the last analysis, lack existential purpose. Such continual up-endings can have an addictive quality, luring us toward nowhere in particular, so long as it is shocking and surprising. In the end, transformation becomes valued precisely because it does not fulfill the timeless human longing for greater wisdom, purpose, and character. Rather it “frees” us from the hard work and moral integrity that are required to achieve these fundamental goods. […]
Not all transformations are created equal. Although transformative education is often cached out with the logic of option expansion just described, this is not the only kind of transformation we might experience. In fact, if we reflect on experiences that have actually exerted a transformative effect on our lives, we generally focus on the very opposite of increased options or choices. . . . When we talk about such experiences, we concentrate on the greater sense of purpose, understanding, and meaning that the experience has brought to our lives, not the naked plus sign between it and our prior perspective. In other words, we value our transformations less for the Big Change it effects and more for the New Good that has begun to reshape our lives.
. . . Transformative education in its most compelling form points students toward real human goods that inspire them to become better people than they are right now. It increases the richness, depth, and perspicacity of students’ views of themselves and the world around them. It awakens a desire to fill their lives with ever-expanding value and meaning. And it encourages them to pour their hearts into vocations, practices, and ways of life that have proved to be both intrinsically valuable and conducive to human flourishing, in the best cases over millennia. Transformative education is not merely about increasing life options; it should help students wholeheartedly commit to those that are deeply worthwhile.
“to enrich and to complicate”
“Others look to religion to provide a clear and all-encompassing explanation of world events, and an easily understood method for dividing out the good guys and the bad. This approach also falls short. As a Christian, admittedly a rather imperfect one, I believe that we all benefit from God’s providence and live under his judgment, and that when properly seen and understood the tangled threads of human history will ultimately reveal the work of a divine hand. But my faith also teaches me that, as C.S. Lewis put it in the Narnia books, Aslan is not a tame lion. Faith in God can help you find the inner strength to face the storms of history with courage and resolve, but the Christian revelation is intended to lead people toward a deeper engagement with the mystery and the wonder of the universe. Those who look for point-by-point guides to a coming apocalypse in the Christian scriptures, or those who think that a simplistic reading of the ethical teachings of Christ eliminates the need for hard political thinking are missing the point. Christianity—and in this it resembles all the great religious traditions—exists to enrich and to complicate rather than to simplify our understanding of the contemporary world.”
The Bible’s story may indeed be considered a metanarrative subsuming all other narratives, or a truth that relativizes all other forms of knowledge. But as metanarrative and final truth, the Bible does not speak directly about everything per se. It rather speaks of everything indirectly, because it speaks of the origin, redemption, and final purpose of all things. Believing what the Bible says about the Bible, in other words, makes it possible to affirm both that the Bible provides a comprehensively true perspective on all things and that the Bible does not explain everything in the world directly. With the Scriptures’ own statements about themselves in view, attitudes toward studying the world – eagerness to exploit secondary ways of knowing – should be opened up rather than shut down. This openness to experiencing the world, in turn, is exactly what a biblical vision of divine creation, with Christ as the active agent, encourages. […]
In [J. I.] Packer’s phrase, “sola scriptura was never meant to imply that what is not mentioned in the Bible is not real, or is unimportant and not worth our attention, or that the history of biblical exegesis and exposition, and of theological construction and confession, over two millennia, need not concern us today, or that we should restrict our interest in God’s world and in the arts, sciences, products, and dreams of our fellow-human beings.” Rather, “The Bible has been given us, not to define for us the realities of the created order, nor to restrain our interests in them, but to enable us to diagnose, understand, appreciate, and handle them as we meet them, so that we may use and enjoy them to the Creator’s praise.”
For a truly biblical view of the Bible, it is important not to treat the Bible as a storehouse of information sufficient in itself for all things but to embrace, rather, the Bible’s own perspective that leads its readers to a God-ordained openness to all things.