What is the kingdom of God? [Jesus] does not speak of a reorganization of society as a political possibility or of the doctrine of salvation as a doctrine. He speaks of what it is like to find a diamond ring that you thought you’d lost forever. He speaks of what it is like to win the Irish Sweepstakes. He suggests rather than spells out. He evokes rather than explains. He catches by surprise. He doesn’t let the homiletic seams show. He is sometimes cryptic, sometimes obscure, sometimes irreverent, always provocative. He tells stories. He speaks in parables, and though we have approached these parables reverentially all these many years and have heard them expounded as grave and reverent vehicles of holy truth, I suspect that many if not all of them were originally not grave at all but were antic, comic, often more than just a little shocking. I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath.
The preaching of the Gospel is a telling of the truth or the putting of a sort of frame of words around the silence that is truth because truth in the sense of fullness, of the way things are, can at best be only pointed to by the language of poetry—of metaphor, image, symbol—as it is used in the prophets of the Old Testament and elsewhere. Before the Gospel is a word, it is silence, a kind of presenting of life itself so that we see it not for what at various times we call it—meaningless or meaningful, absurd, beautiful—but for what it truly is in all its complexity, simplicity, mystery. The silence of Jesus in answer to Pilate’s question about truth seems such a presenting as does also in a way the silence of the television news with the sound turned off—the real news is what we see and feel, not what Walter Cronkite tells us—or the silence the Psalmist means when he says, “Be silent and know that I am God.” In each case it is a silence that demands to be heard because it is a presented silence . . . the silence that [our] words are born out of and that [our] words break and that [our] words are swallowed up by.
I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times. It’s hard to believe always but more so in the world we live in now. There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not. I can’t allow any of my characters, in a novel anyway, to stop in some halfway position.
Flannery O’Connor, Letter to John Hawkes 13 September 1959
Are tall buildings that tower above their surroundings inappropriate?
I’ve talked with people whose answer to that is “Yes, obviously,” but when pressed, no one has ever given me an explanation that doesn’t reduce to, “I just don’t like it.”
Maybe that summary is a little slanted, but it’s an easy conversation to imagine. For Herriges, this gut reaction presents a problem:
Unfortunately, the vague notion of “incompatibility” has even made it into many city codes and planning documents, where it functions as a catch-all justification for any advocate or elected official to object to a proposal they personally dislike. This trend is harmful to our ability to talk about urban form, urban design, and development regulation in constructive ways. When we frame the debate around “compatibility” or “scale,” it quickly drags the whole thing into culture-war territory.
This is fascinating to think about, for all kinds of reasons. Herriges goes on to talk about the use of “garbage language,” the importance of human scale and function over form, the primacy of horizontal over vertical dimensions—it’s well worth the read. And as far as I can tell, I agree with him.
And yet . . .
While I don’t have any specific objections, I also still agree with Czesław Miłosz (emphasis mine):
In a landscape that is nearly totally urban, just by the freeway, a pond, rushes, a wild duck, small trees. Those who pass on the road feel at that sight a kind of relief, though they would not be able to name it.
It seems clear to me that Herriges certainly has a place for this scene, and for the human emotion behind it—but not for the nameless cause. Miłosz may not have been talking about scale, but the feeling (pardon the garbage language) seems valid, even though the way it’s described here, and the way it is usually felt in the moment, doesn’t defend itself against Herriges’s argument. Still, it seems right to me; and I think it’s right that this sort of intuition be considered, and maybe it should even make it into some city codes and planning documents.
None of that is to say that garbage language doesn’t exist, but it may just mean that some of our conversations have a problem. And though I’m not a city planner, it’s a very human problem that I’m very okay with.
Wesley Hill is one of those extraordinary writers whose words always manage to inspire. Even the use of a word like “exvangelical”—a word that I’m a little too excited to add to my vocabulary—becomes an opportunity for genuine insight, for the encouragement of a critical thought life that is always also longing for and returning to its “naive” faith. From his recent essay on the novels of Chaim Potock:
Even so, the Evangelical faith in which I was nurtured continues to beguile, inspire, and compel me in ways I am still discovering. I can’t be the Christian I used to be, but I want still, very much, to be a Christian. Potok’s characters help me understand my complicated feelings. They are not only interested in the deconstructive moment, in which childhood certainties are relinquished. They strive also for the chastened second naiveté, on the far side of the desert of criticism, that will make it possible for them to go on being faithfully Jewish.
The eighteenth-century aphorist G. C. Lichtenberg says there is “a great difference between believing something still and believing it again.” The novels of Chaim Potok show us what the latter looks like, and in doing so, make believers like me feel much less alone.
I remember talking to one planner about what one wants from others.
“Respect,” he said, “And their utmost effort.” “But all I want,” I said, “is love and a sense of humor.” His eyes lit up. “I see,” he said. “You mean positive feedback.”
Positive feedback. So we debauch our own sweet nature. I don’t want positive feedback, nor do the young. What they need is so much more important and profound—not “skills” but qualities of the soul; daring, warmth, wit, imagination, honesty, loyalty, grace, and resilience. But one cannot be taught those things; they cannot be programmed into a machine. They seem to be learned, instead, in activity and communion—in the adventurous presence of other real persons.
. . .
But if that is the case, my friends ask, what do you do? I have no easy answers. There are cultural conditions for which there are no solutions, turnings of the soul so profound and complex that no system can absorb or contain them. How would one have “solved” the Reformation? Or first-century Rome? One makes adjustments and accommodations, one dreams about the future and makes plans to save us all, but in spite of all that, because of it, what seems more important are the private independent acts that become more necessary every day: the ways we find as private persons to restore to one another the strengths we should have now—whether to make the kind of revolution we need or to survive the repression that seems likely. What I am talking about here is a kind of psychic survival: our ability to live decently beyond institutional limits and provide for our comrades enough help to sustain them. What saves us as men and women is always a kind of witness: the quality of our own acts and lives. This is the knowledge, of course, that institutions bribe us to forget, the need and talent for what Kropotkin called “mutual aid” — the private assumption of responsibility for others.
We could certainly add that life lived as “witness” is able to appreciate the best ways in which we are able to assume responsibility for others while also avoiding the worst: a way of living that takes seriously the profound resonances of that life which we live but with all the inescapable creaturely humility that also is our lot and our glory.
Marin closes:
What we are talking about here are really acts of love, the gestures by which one shares with others the true dimension and depth of the world. Those gestures are a form of revelation, for they restore to others a sense of what is shared.
. . .
That isn’t much, but it is also almost everything . . . The few real teachers I know, those really serving the young, are simply those who try to live such lives in their company, as freely and humanly as they can. The rest of “education” is almost always rhetoric and nonsense.
Orthodox stress that worship and theology in Orthodoxy are harmonious. Typically, though, more attention is paid to worship—especially regular participation in the prayer of the Church, in rites and rituals—and much less to the content of the faith, to theology, resulting in a gap between worship and theology suggested by the examples here.
Though the examples may not come from much of a study, there’s something very true here that could just as easily be written for and from a small-o orthodox perspective.
The fact is that in life—actual life—most of us are still trying to figure out what it is we’re talking about. We all probably have at least a little heretic in us.
We believe in God—such as it is, we have faith—because certain things happened to us once and go on happening. We work and goof off, we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these, and if our faith is not mainly just window dressing or a rabbit’s foot or fire insurance, it is because it grows out of precisely this kind of rich human compost.
What Billy Collins said of poetry seems closely related to history and community (and pretty much everything) as well. Not that everything needs to be like water skiing, but nothing I can think of requires or benefits from torture—proverbial or otherwise.
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
