When I have something partial presented to me as if it were true or entire, why should I listen with much more than just curiosity?
I have no trouble with belief systems, but what I really want to hear is the intimacy of someone’s individual encounter with the world. Then I begin to trust them. . . .
This is a complicated question. There’s a rhythm, like breathing in and out. For me, the ideal would be the losing of self followed by the return to self with a changed or renewed sense of connection, an awareness of the gravity of one’s existence, and, therefore, a fuller sense of responsibility.
Losing of the self may happen when we’re least conscious of ourselves. And we are most fully ourselves but least conscious of ourselves when engaged in the truest activities. Don’t you think that all ecstatic activity, which finally teaches us who we can be, takes place in the moment when the self is lost and therefore permanently changed, in ways that resonate later, by having been lost? I would say that in the moment when we’re not aware of being self, we are more deeply into being than at any other time. Then part of the self develops an awareness that grows around the knowledge of our capacity for what we might call “deep being.” A new kind of self grows out of this deep being. It’s the serious self that is aware of the significance and gravity of every one of its gestures, and yet it has enough trust in the world outside, in the plenitude of that world, to be able to laugh.
supra something or other
And we need to recall that what seems to be a compelling reductive version is telling you nothing, except that this is an intrinsic element in a complex reality. Behind that reductionism, as again I’ve suggested, is what’s often an unexamined notion of matter. Daniel Dennett (a philosopher for whom I have a great deal of respect) has said that we have to bear in mind in any discussion of consciousness that there is only one kind of stuff. And while that’s very tempting, I want to know a little bit more about what he means by ‘stuff’. Because, of course, the world is not full of stuff; the world is a very complex set of interactions of information-bearing energy. And when you’ve said that, and recognized that the word ‘information’ is, as the professionals say, ‘analogical’ (that is, that it works on a number of different levels in interestingly different ways), it’s no longer particularly interesting to say ‘there’s one sort of stuff’. The world we inhabit is not a world where little solid things bump into each other and nudge each other around. It is a world in which information and instructions (interesting we use these nakedly intellectual metaphors) are conveyed through material exchanges of energy, and the more we analyse those material exchanges of energy, the less it looks like little bits of stuff.
No new discovery, no new method, will ever give a final victory to either interpretation. For what is required, on all these levels alike, is not merely knowledge but a certain insight; getting the focus right. Those who can see in each of these instances only the lower will always be plausible. One who contended that a poem was nothing but black marks on white paper would be unanswerable if he addressed an audience who couldn’t read. Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer’s ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say ‘This is the poem’. Those who can read, however, will continue to say the poem exists.
neither disruption nor despisal
And finally, the working class and the proletariat of all parts of the world are distinguished from the Western bourgeoisie by the fact that they simply cannot turn their backs on the great traditions of humanity. Where the bourgeois class in the profusion of even its intellectual wealth can without serious reservations declare that God is dead, where it can “demythologize” and rationalize the Biblical traditions to make them suitable for bourgeois self-consciousness, where it simply emasculates and abandons dogma and dogmatics, at such points there lives in Barth as in the poor of this earth, who indeed cry out not only for bread, but also for spirit, a knowledge of the indispensability of every particular historical moment of truth. Precisely in the most alienating features of dogma, Karl Barth himself saw the most far-reaching promises for us persons. In that way as a theologian he was completely unbourgeois. He did not clear difficulties away; he broke them open. Precisely that is the hermeneutic of the poor. They do not disrupt, neither do they despise. They knock to see whether it will be opened to them and whether there is something there “for the present day.” And if not, they simply wait.
not nothing, and also almost everything
Part of a lovely reflection from David Ney.
There was more at stake than just conservative or progressive sensibilities. At issue was the very real empirical, philosophical, and theological problem concerning the relationship between sound and words. Wagner agreed with Brahms that instruments could speak. But he also believed that as they spoke they called out for a greater articulation which only human actors and human voices could produce. The question then becomes: Is music enough?
From the standpoint of catharsis, it probably is: the release of deep and hidden emotions has been associated with music since ancient times, and for good reason. Music has the power to draw out our emotions as it somehow draws us deeply into the mystery of existence. When dancers are added to the mix, a similar (though some would say even more profound) experience is forthcoming. The music (or the music and the movement) can be appropriately described as speech. Even without words it can say so much. . . .
When God, the Scriptures tell us, wanted to say that most profound thing, he said it in the form of a body as the Word made flesh. In this particular body, we see that though we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, our inarticulate sounds and searching steps are not nothing. . . . We are often tempted to boisterously assert ourselves through our words: “Here are two swords” we blurt out, even as we bumble about in the dark. Jesus stops us short: “It is enough,” he says (Lk. 22:38). It is enough because, as the Word made flesh, he has already said everything that needs to be said. And yet it is because he has already said everything that we find that we can say so much not only when we speak, but even when we say nothing at all.
justice is social
Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to Jesmyn Ward’s piece in Vanity Fair. It’s good, and it’s worthy of more attention than I’m giving it. For many reasons, the piece is beyond my ability, and maybe even my right to comment on. Some things should just be read, absorbed, and allowed to reverberate on their own terms. Ward’s story is one of those things. And for the parts of myself that would, in yesterdays or even today, find a reason or excuse to dismiss it, much has already been written that I am still learning to listen to—often learning to even want to hear.
It is not according to the quality of their “spirit” that persons are separated out to the right or the left. Rather, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” For “as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me”; and “as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me” (Matt 25:32–46). The spirit that has value before God is the social spirit. And social help is the way to eternal life. That is not only how Jesus spoke but also how he acted. If one reads the gospels attentively, one can only be amazed at the way it has become possible to make Jesus into a pastor or a teacher whose goal was supposedly to instruct persons about right belief or right conduct. . . .
I think we all have the impression that Jesus was someone quite different than we are. His image stands strangely great and high above us all, socialists and nonsocialists. Precisely for that reason he has something to say to us. Precisely for that reason he can be something for us. Precisely for that reason we touch the living God himself when we touch the hem of his garment. And if we now let our gaze rest upon him, as he goes from century to century in ever-new revelations of his glory, then something is fulfilled in us of the ancient word of promise which could also be written of the movement for social justice in our day: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”
Karl Barth, “Jesus Christus und die soziale Bewegung,” (1911)
crazy holy grace
Buechner:
A crazy, holy grace I have called it. Crazy because whoever could have predicted it? Who can ever foresee the crazy how and when and where of a grace that wells up out of the lostness and pain of the world and of our own inner worlds? And holy because these moments of grace come ultimately from farther away than Oz and deeper down than doom, holy because they heal and hallow. “For all thy blessings, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, we give thee thanks,” runs an old prayer, and it is for the all but unknown ones and the more than half-forgotten ones that we do well to look back over the journeys of our lives because it is their presence that makes the life of each of us a sacred journey. We have a hard time seeing such blessed and blessing moments as the gifts I choose to believe they are and a harder time still reaching out toward the hope of a giving hand, but part of the gift is to be able, at least from time to time, to be assured and convinced without seeing, as Hebrews says, because that is of the very substance and style of faith as well as what drives it always to seek a farther and a deeper seeing still.
enchantment, or something else?
The strategy of the Psalmist is to close the infinite distance between God and humankind by confounding all notions of scale. If the great heavens are the work of God’s fingers, what is small and mortal man? The poem answers its own question this way: Man is crowned with honor and glory. He is in a singular sense what God has made him, because of the dignity God has conferred upon him, splendor of a higher order, like that of angels. The Hebrew Scriptures everywhere concede: yes, foolish; yes, guilty; yes, weak; yes, sad and bewildered. Yes, resistant to cherishing and rebellious against expectation. And yes, forever insecure at best in his vaunted dominion over creation. Then how is this dignity manifest? Surely in that God is mindful of man, in that he “visits” him — this is after all the major assertion of the whole literature. “What is man?” is asked in awe — that God should be intrigued or enchanted by him, or loyal to him. Any sufficient answer would go some way toward answering “What is God?” I think anxieties about anthropomorphism are substantially inappropriate in a tradition whose main work has been to assert and ponder human theomorphism.
Marilynne Robinson, “Psalm 8”
“ungodly” clarity
Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary, but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a shard of glass in your gut. Christ is God crying I am here, and here is not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you, here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God. To walk through the fog of God toward the clarity of Christ is difficult because of how unlovely, how “ungodly” that clarity often turns out to be.
affinity defined
Affinity
Consider this man in the field beneath,
Gaitered with mud, lost in his own breath,
Without joy, without sorrow,
Without children, without wife,
Stumbling insensitively from furrow to furrow,
A vague somnambulist; but hold your tears,
For his name also is written in the Book of Life.
Ransack your brainbox, pull out the drawers
That rot in your heart’s dust, and what have you to give
To enrich his spirit or the way he lives?
From the standpoint of education or caste or creed
Is there anything to show that your essential need
Is less than his, who has the world for church,
And stands bare-headed in the woods’ wide porch
Morning and evening to hear God’s choir
Scatter their praises? Don’t be taken in
By stinking garments or an aimless grin;
He also is human, and the same small star,
That lights you homeward, has inflamed his mind
With the old hunger, born of his kind.
by way of the ordinary
Buechner, “The Gospel as Fairy Tale”:
It might be more accurate to say that the world of the fairy tale found them, and found them in the midst of their ordinary lives in the everyday world. It is as if the world of the fairy tale impinges on the ordinary world the way the dimension of depth impinges on the two-dimensional surface of a plane, so that there is no point on the plane—a Victorian sitting room or a Kansas farm—that can’t become an entrance to it. You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary. Something you have seen a thousand times you suddenly see as if for the first time like the looking glass over the mantle or the curtains of the bed. . . .
When Jesus is asked who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven, he reaches into the crowd and pulls out a child with a cheek full of bubble gum and eyes full of whatever a child’s eyes are full of and says unless you can become like that, don’t bother to ask. . . .
That is the Gospel, this meeting of darkness and light and the final victory of light. That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, the one crucial difference from all other fairy tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still. To preach the Gospel in its original power and mystery is to claim in whatever way the preacher finds it possible to claim it that once upon a time is this time, now, and here is the dark wood that the light gleams at the heart of like a jewel, and the ones who are to live happily ever after are . . . all who labor and are heavy laden, the poor naked wretches wheresoever they be.