Jill Lepore:

The New York Times solicited testimonials from readers. “I used to be able to send perfect emails in a minute or less,” one wrote. “Now it takes me days just to get the motivation to think of a response.” When an assignment to write this essay appeared in my in-box, I thought, Oh, God, I can’t do that, I’ve got nothing left, and then I told myself to buck up. The burnout literature will tell you that this, too—the guilt, the self-scolding—is a feature of burnout. If you think you’re burned out, you’re burned out, and if you don’t think you’re burned out you’re burned out. Everyone sits under the shade of that juniper tree, weeping, and whispering, “Enough.” […]

“Every age has its signature afflictions,” the Korean-born, Berlin-based philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in “The Burnout Society,” first published in German in 2010. Burnout, for Han, is depression and exhaustion, “the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity,” an “achievement society,” a yes-we-can world in which nothing is impossible, a world that requires people to strive to the point of self-destruction. “It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.”

Buechner:

If you tell me Christian commitment is a thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say go to, go to, you’re either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your beds and ask yourself: ‘Can I believe it all again today?’ No, better still, don’t ask it till after you’ve read The New York Times, till after you’ve studied that daily record of the world’s brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer’s always Yes, then you probably don’t know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe even more so. The No is what proves you’re a man in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and … great laughter. Not a beatific smile, but the laughter of wonderful incredulity.

The Return of Ansel Gibbs, p. 303

Julie Mullins, in an excellent review/summary of reasons why I appreciate Frederick Buechner so much:

In many passages, Buechner’s prose rises into lyricism, as in his sermon “Hope”:

“I think if you have your ears open, if you have your eyes open, every once in a while some word in even the most unpromising sermon will flame out, some scrap of prayer or anthem, some moment of silence even, the sudden glimpse of somebody you love sitting there near you, or of some stranger whose face without warning touches your heart, will flame out—and these are the moments that speak our names in a way we cannot help hearing.”

Buechner revels in the beauty of the ordinary. Any fragment of experience is worthy of his attention. Christ’s indwelling seizes us in the kindness of a friend who sits with us for a while, the return home after a long journey, the smell of breakfast, a weathered tree, rush-hour traffic. Even a betrayal of friendship, the failure to be Christ to one another, can reveal Christ in some mysterious, apophatic way.

Those flashes of second sight, coming on suddenly and gone as soon as they came, are Buechner’s testimony to an understated kind of faith. For me, Buechner’s sermons are impossible to dismiss, first of all because he does not hold them hostage to their own obviousness. We are free to see or not. He confesses that moments of unveiling often slip past us, obscured by our own distraction and worry. In the title sermon, he says that revelation comes in a barely audible whisper. No wonder we miss it. Secondly, I know that when I have been awake enough, in my own secret betrayals and visions, I have experienced just what he describes.

Nathan Beacom at The New Atlantis:

Getting toward the truth about the world requires what the philosopher William Whewell termed “consilience,” that is, a “jumping together” of inductions from various fields converging on a single reality.

That single reality is always more abundant than we can anticipate, and the mysteries of the South Pacific show that finding it requires a scientific approach as fulsome as the world it studies: a world of particles and forces, and of story and song. It is a world in which the curiosity that drove Heyerdahl, the love for his people that motivated Hīroa, and the desire to serve that compels Ioannidis are as real as atoms and gravitational fields. A scientific outlook that ignores these things could tell us, in Erwin Schrödinger’s words, a great deal about the physical order, but would be “ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.”

Scientifically and otherwise, there is something within the human soul that drives us ever on to the receding horizons, that tempts and taunts us with what lies across the waters, with what is not yet known. For some people, those horizons call like a siren, and they cannot be stopped from throwing their bodies among the smashing waves and the rocks in the hope of a further shore. On that shore lie not just formulas and abstractions, but red and blue, bitter and sweet, pain, delight, good and bad. Perhaps beyond the sea there is even something to learn about God and eternity. The only way to find out is to grab the paddle, meet the wave, and give chase to the sun.

From Samuel Johnson’s preface to his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language:

When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labor, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus inquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to inquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical. But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to look for instruments, when the work calls for execution, and that whatever abilities I had brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one inquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.

Paul Kingsnorth, The Abbey of Misrule:

Spengler predicted that the failure of the Enlightenment would lead to a new search for that beyond-human truth. All of the theoretical edifices constructed by modern Western intellectuals to replace their old sacred order – liberalism, leftism in its myriad forms, conservatism, nationalism – had failed. Beginning in the 21st century, the grandchildren of the revolutionaries and the rationalists, adrift in a failing materialist culture, would enter what he called a ‘second religiousness’:

“The age of theory is drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism all arose between about 1750 and 1850. That of Marx is already half a century old, and it has had no successor. Inwardly it means, with its materialist view of history, that Nationalism has reached its extreme logical conclusion: it is therefore an end-term … In its place is developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger, whose task will be to found a new hither-side that looks for secrets instead of steel-bright concepts.”

When a sacred order collapses, despair can ensue, even amongst those who would not want its return, or who are not even aware what is missing. Day by day, more people are realising that our new sovereign, the Machine, is a false god, and we have no idea how to dethrone him. But the cycle of rise and fall is an inevitable part of the human historical pattern; and a necessary one. ‘The passage from one cycle to another’, wrote Guénon, ‘can take place only in darkness.’

We are in that passage now; we live in a darkness between worlds. Macintyre concluded that the West was waiting for ‘a new – and doubtless very different – St Benedict.’ That was forty years ago, and we are still waiting, but it’s not a bad way to see the challenge we face. Modernity is not at all short on ideas, arguments, insults, ideologies, strategems, conflicts, world-saving machines or clever TED talks. But it is very short on saints; and how we need their love, wisdom, discipline and stillness amidst the roaring of the Machine. Maybe we had better start looking at how to embody a little of it ourselves

Jack Hanson, on the life and thought of Charles Péguy:

As Péguy writes in the Note: “The true philosopher knows very well that he is not situated opposite an adversary, but alongside an adversary, in the face of a reality always greater and more mysterious.” […]

[I]n striving to understand and articulate meaning in our lives, we are not reaching for a perfection that will forever elude us. There is no conclusion, no fact that will save us from the work of attentiveness to our own moment. Instead, we must participate in the production of meaning, which, so far from being compromised by its relativity, is an aspect of divine creativity. The endlessness of interpretation is a reflection of eternity.

Meilaender:

It is true, of course, that the more painful the memory, the more difficult it may be to believe that anything in the future could transfigure it or could draw it into a life story that we could bear to acknowledge as our own—and the more tempted, therefore, we may be to seek a technological fix. At the very end of the story of Job, in its canonical version, the Lord restores Job’s fortune—indeed, his material and familial blessings become even greater than they were before his trials. Scholars, of course, often characterize this prose epilogue as an addendum to the poem that tells Job’s story—an addendum that drastically alters the story’s meaning. Instead of a poem in which Job simply suffers inexplicably, we are given—with the epilogue—a story in which Job’s suffering is finally redeemed and given coherent meaning.

Many—unable or unwilling to suppose that Job’s sufferings might be in any sense redeemed—are likely to prefer the poem without the epilogue. They will prefer Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., in which, without any claims for redemptive meaning, one simply bears what comes with human dignity.

The candles in churches are out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see, by and by.

But note that neither reading—neither a reading which encourages us to hope that what is painful in the past may be transfigured and given new, redemptive meaning; nor a reading which encourages us to bear the ills of life with human dignity, finding in them occasions for courage, endurance, and mutual support—neither of these readings supposes that simply erasing the painful past takes seriously the narrative quality of human life.

“How great, my God, is this force of memory, how exceedingly great! It is like a vast and boundless subterranean shrine. Who has ever reached the bottom of it? Yet this is a faculty of my mind and belongs to my nature; nor can I myself grasp all that I am.” Thus, St. Augustine, in one of the most famous discussions of memory ever written. Dive as deep as we may into that “subterranean shrine,” into the depths of the memories that constitute the story of our life, and we cannot yet see the full meaning of any of life’s events. Caught as we are in the midst of the story, doing our best to follow a plot whose twists and turns we may not entirely fathom, we cannot see anything from the perspective of the end of the story—and, therefore, cannot say fully who we are or what the events of our life may mean.

That is the gist of Augustine’s “confession”: that because only God can catch the heart and hold it still, because we cannot attain that authorial perspective on the end (and, therefore, the full meaning) of our life, God knows us better than we know ourselves. Quite a different spirit is expressed in the famous claim made by Rousseau at the outset of his Confessions:

“Let the last trump sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: ‘ . . . I have bared my secret soul as Thou thyself hast seen it, Eternal Being.’”

One who supposed that he could attain that godlike perspective on the meaning of his life might perhaps be in a position to know what experiences were so painful that they were better obliterated from memory. If, on the contrary, we know ourselves as bodies who live in time, whose lives must have a narrative quality but who cannot know the end or full meaning of our life story, then our task is not to erase memory but to connect and integrate memories ” to live the story as best one can who does not yet know how the plot will work out. Perhaps, in so doing, some of us will believe that there is no past so painful that it cannot be transfigured and redeemed in a truthful story. Perhaps, in so doing, others among us may suspect that the best we can do is blow on the coal of the heart and see by and by (how the plot takes its course). But neither approach will find good reason to act as if we already knew the full meaning of life’s story. In either case we are led to acknowledge our limits, to honor the narrative quality of human life, to accept our need to sustain the life stories of one another, and to wonder at the mysterious depths of a “memoried” human life.

From the new afterword to David Epstein’s book, Range:

One of the earliest recorded uses of the phrase “Jack of all trades” as an insult dates to 1592. In the New Latin form “Johannes factotum,” it was contained in a pamphlet by a playwright criticizing his own industry. The jab refers to a poet with no university education who was apparently involved in various other roles, like copying scripts and bit-part acting, even trying to write plays. The poet on the receiving end of the insult: a young William Shakespeare. The phrase evolved over time, and today it’s usually “Jack of all trades, master of none.” I think it is culturally telling that we habitually hack off the end of the long version: “A Jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

My sister asked me once, “If you were to pick one theologian or author you agree most with, who would it be?” I answered,

For me, it seems like it’s always in flux. But so far I’d say Karl Barth, à la George Hunsinger.

Hunsinger would be my theologian answer. For teacher/writer, and one who is probably a far more accessible writer, Gilbert Meilaender, hands down.

Looking for some past reflection, I’ve been going through some of Meilaender’s essays published at First Things over the years.

This one seems fitting for me over the last year:

Push hard enough on the demands of the Christian life, we might say, and we will learn that the “person” cannot float entirely free of the “work.” What we do both expresses and determines who we are.

There is, however, one way in which [John Paul II’s] Veritatis Splendor might profit from adopting a little of [Helmut] Thielicke’s perspective. The encyclical exudes a kind of serene confidence about the Christian life that may sometimes be difficult to reconcile with the experience of individual Christians. “Temptations can be overcome, sins can be avoided, because together with the commandments the Lord gives us the possibility of keeping them . . . . Keeping God’s law in particular situations can be difficult, extremely difficult, but it is never impossible.” Surely this is true. We would not want to say of baptized Christians that the power of Christ’s Spirit cannot enable obedience in any circumstance. “And if redeemed man still sins,” Veritatis Splendor continues, “this is not due to an imperfection of Christ’s redemptive act, but to man’s will not to avail himself of the grace which flows from that act.”

What we miss here, though, is some sense of our weakness, of the differences in strength and circumstances that mark individual Christian lives. In the famous refrain of Book 10 of his Confessions—give what you command, and command what you will—St. Augustine also expresses confidence in the power of the Spirit to enable virtuous action. But in his repetition of that formula we sense something that is also present in Thielicke’s thought—the precariousness of our lives as Christians, the deep divisions that sometimes continue to mark the psyches of believers, our sense on occasion that the best we can do does not measure up to what we ought to do, our sense (so strong for Augustine) that God knows our character better than we know ourselves.