"But though he rid himself of this cause of trouble, he was far from tranquility. His religious propensities were strong, and his education had been such as to associate ideas of the highest importance with the subject. His reverence for God was deep and habitual, his belief in a future state fixed, and his conviction that God had revealed himself to the world was too deep rooted to be easily removed. There was a great deal, too, sublime and beautiful and delightful in the history, character and teaching of Jesus, which he could not reconcile with his imposture, any more than he could reconcile the doctrines he had been taught with his truth. Here, then, was another distressing embarrassment. At length he strove to escape from it by avoiding the subject altogether. He put away his Bible, he neglected public worship, he involved himself in other studies and active pursuits, and tried to forget all he had ever known or thought about revealed religion. But he could not succeed. It came to his thoughts in spite of him, and never suffered him to be at rest. His mind often misgave him; he became anxious, melancholy, fitful, unsettled; an unbeliever yet longing to believe- striving to think himself wiser and happier than others, yet secretly hoping he should one day be like them; with a fixed abhorrence of what had been urged on him as the peculiar doctrines of the gospel, yet conscious that human wisdom could have no light, and human weakness no hope, except from the declared mercy of Heaven....
"Who has tried to believe more than I?" he continued. "Who has more earnestly longed to believe? And who has been more wretched for want of believing? Yet I might as well have tried to persuade myself that I could walk upon a sunbeam. But it is all past: let us say no more about it. It is a subject on which I have not talked nor read for years. I cannot bear it."
- Excerpt from 'The Recollections of Jotham Anderson' by Henry Ware
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Late Garden
Now the bare earth, the sparse and yellowed leaves
Dwindle away in this first wind of fall
Wither as never in summer, when they all
Lay parched and panting palely in the heat
Of sun-bleached August.
Nasturtiums now shrink prostrate, here and there
Flares up one last defiant bloom of orange
Black hanging rot creeps upward without pause
Beneath the burning balls of dahlias.
Hyssop to purge the stiff and chilling earth,
Great basil spreading,boldly green and staunch,
Warm dusty sage that savors of the hearth-
A candelabra hedge of lavender
Stoops gray and hunched.
Kneeling to pull the brittle tubes of allium,
Nigella, with its brown and lacy globes,
A fragrant spray of pink attar of roses
Brushes my cheek; I pause to breathe the fresh
And minty breath of purple agastache.
Dwindle away in this first wind of fall
Wither as never in summer, when they all
Lay parched and panting palely in the heat
Of sun-bleached August.
Nasturtiums now shrink prostrate, here and there
Flares up one last defiant bloom of orange
Black hanging rot creeps upward without pause
Beneath the burning balls of dahlias.
Hyssop to purge the stiff and chilling earth,
Great basil spreading,boldly green and staunch,
Warm dusty sage that savors of the hearth-
A candelabra hedge of lavender
Stoops gray and hunched.
Kneeling to pull the brittle tubes of allium,
Nigella, with its brown and lacy globes,
A fragrant spray of pink attar of roses
Brushes my cheek; I pause to breathe the fresh
And minty breath of purple agastache.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Minutiae
He only wants one.
A single lettuce seed, one golden brown speck shaken from the packet into his hand. "Will it grow in this?" Little wooden vase, as tall as my thumb, fresh from the lathe.
I love him for his rapt reverence, his careful fingers as he plants it.
The wonder as it rises, wee green curl like a baby's finger above its circlet of earth.
I love him because he loves it for what it is, tender speck of life tottering out of the dark soil, and never thinks of what it might become- root-bound, spindling, a salad on his plate.
Two years ago, when he planted the lemon seed, only one, and told me it would become a tree, I never envisioned the tree that sits in our window now, cherished like a firstborn child. "In a few years, we may have lemons", he says, and I believe him, knowing he would love it still, lemonless because it was a seed tossed from the kitchen which some strange alchemy of earth and his tenderness have quickened to vigorous life.
I love him for the lavender seeds from his grandmother's garden, folded gently in moist paper towels, cradled in plastic, carried in his pockets, close to the heat of his body. "They need warmth to germinate." The seedlings, dead two months later in their little pots, are forgotten when I remember the magic of those tiny white sprouts lying on wet paper in his hands.
Tonight, cutting brush in the clearing, an impossible spring day in February, we pause and look up. Beyond the low, rusting roof of the barn, great swaying tufts of pine arc into the sky, backed with the rose and gold of the sunset glittering through them, the sky fading to blue above them. Our hollow of matted grass circled by its tangle of trees and rotting fence posts is shadowed and intimate below this breathless, windy loveliness of the treetops and Western sun.
"Do you have your camera?", I ask him. "I'd like a picture."
He stands there, head back, still watching. "We have a picture", he says. "We don't need a camera."
A single lettuce seed, one golden brown speck shaken from the packet into his hand. "Will it grow in this?" Little wooden vase, as tall as my thumb, fresh from the lathe.
I love him for his rapt reverence, his careful fingers as he plants it.
The wonder as it rises, wee green curl like a baby's finger above its circlet of earth.
I love him because he loves it for what it is, tender speck of life tottering out of the dark soil, and never thinks of what it might become- root-bound, spindling, a salad on his plate.
Two years ago, when he planted the lemon seed, only one, and told me it would become a tree, I never envisioned the tree that sits in our window now, cherished like a firstborn child. "In a few years, we may have lemons", he says, and I believe him, knowing he would love it still, lemonless because it was a seed tossed from the kitchen which some strange alchemy of earth and his tenderness have quickened to vigorous life.
I love him for the lavender seeds from his grandmother's garden, folded gently in moist paper towels, cradled in plastic, carried in his pockets, close to the heat of his body. "They need warmth to germinate." The seedlings, dead two months later in their little pots, are forgotten when I remember the magic of those tiny white sprouts lying on wet paper in his hands.
Tonight, cutting brush in the clearing, an impossible spring day in February, we pause and look up. Beyond the low, rusting roof of the barn, great swaying tufts of pine arc into the sky, backed with the rose and gold of the sunset glittering through them, the sky fading to blue above them. Our hollow of matted grass circled by its tangle of trees and rotting fence posts is shadowed and intimate below this breathless, windy loveliness of the treetops and Western sun.
"Do you have your camera?", I ask him. "I'd like a picture."
He stands there, head back, still watching. "We have a picture", he says. "We don't need a camera."
Easter
"I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."- C.S. Lewis
Monday, November 30, 2015
The First Noel
I dread Sundays with a special dread.
For at times, quite suddenly, in stillness, in music, the realization of a love betrayed sears across my heart in a flash of unexpected pain.
I sing mechanically, entertaining myself with the task of finding a harmony, or perhaps merely the sound of my own voice. And suddenly I find myself shaping the words to a song which I have sung just a few years or months ago in a passion of adoration and trust, and the stabbing sense of loss brings tears.
I think as little as possible about religious faith during most weeks. I generally succeed in focusing on things that have more pressing interest or import to me right now. My marriage, my job. Things I need to get done. Creative hobbies- gardening and homemaking, cooking and planning special meals, writing, painting, homesteading, sewing and collecting antiques- dreaming the life I want to live and create for my family, trying to forget the things that hurt or worry.
Yet there's an internal voice which won't be silenced entirely ever, which raises itself at moments of confusion like this to wonder if everything that passed before, my whole life, my whole way of viewing the world, can really have been only a shadow and a dream built on a false system of belief.
To describe the Christianity I remember as a 'system of belief' seems so sterile.
Mustn't there be, somehow, somewhere, existing in some form, something that is God?
Can't we find Him, know Him? Does He care about us?
Will I ever trust again, ever 'worship' again, ever find any concrete meaning in the Universe greater, more noble than myself to demand sacrifice and loyalty, to give hope and serenity in exchange?
This beginning Advent season is the worst, the most agonizing, because so recently I loved it so dearly.
How can it move me, still, so powerfully- the beauty, the harmony, the exquisite balance and detail of the great Story? It bathes the history, literature, art of my culture, of all Western Civilization, in the reflected brilliance of its colors and light.
Not long ago I was a Christian repulsed by my religious community and its practices, wracked by doubts. I think now that I am an agnostic in love with Christianity.
At this season of the year the wonder deepens- the joy, the solemn mystery of this faith attain their climax.
Into the darkness and the cold, across the miles of silent snow, through the heavy gray clouds and mist or the icy brilliance of our million stars there comes the soft glow of candlelight and the glad sweetness of their singing, growing in strength, pushing back the night to the very blackest edges of the universe. And the old names seem to shine with a new radiance- Adonai, Emmanuel.
Messiah.
This year, for the first time, I stand apart entirely, outside in the barren dark. Without, an icy wind rakes through the emptiness, and the windows of their churches, bright with candles, vibrating with song, throw this new grief into stark relief.
For unto us a child is born. For unto us a hope is given.
There is such a hopeless sadness in this loss of faith- so much weariness and confusion, even anguish in this journey out of Christianity. That vanished faith, imperfect as it was, immature and at times self-serving was built upon a sincere and hopeful love.
There is excruciating loneliness. A lifetime of relationships are in flux- changing, fading, vanishing entirely. I can't replace the friendships, don't know how to plough through the distance and experience community in new and meaningful ways.
The beloved, familiar melodies of Christmas make this isolation tangible, make the solitude a humming in my ears and a bitter taste in my mouth.
I forget my frustrations with the churches and Bible studies, forget their blundering and lack of nuance or compassion, their ignorance and incurious complacency, their distrust of art and intellect, their click-bait religious and political screeds on Facebook that murdered the last vestiges of my respect and I feel only a desperate envy.
I envy the simplicity of their belief.
I envy their sense of belonging.
I envy their joy, even as I doubt its sincerity.
I envy their Savior, their God-Man, their God With Us.
I envy their Christ Child, snug in his manger.
I no longer believe in Him, but at moments like these I am forced to accept that I love Him, still, with an absurd and tortured love.
Lord, to whom shall we go, when there are no words of eternal life?
For at times, quite suddenly, in stillness, in music, the realization of a love betrayed sears across my heart in a flash of unexpected pain.
I sing mechanically, entertaining myself with the task of finding a harmony, or perhaps merely the sound of my own voice. And suddenly I find myself shaping the words to a song which I have sung just a few years or months ago in a passion of adoration and trust, and the stabbing sense of loss brings tears.
I think as little as possible about religious faith during most weeks. I generally succeed in focusing on things that have more pressing interest or import to me right now. My marriage, my job. Things I need to get done. Creative hobbies- gardening and homemaking, cooking and planning special meals, writing, painting, homesteading, sewing and collecting antiques- dreaming the life I want to live and create for my family, trying to forget the things that hurt or worry.
Yet there's an internal voice which won't be silenced entirely ever, which raises itself at moments of confusion like this to wonder if everything that passed before, my whole life, my whole way of viewing the world, can really have been only a shadow and a dream built on a false system of belief.
To describe the Christianity I remember as a 'system of belief' seems so sterile.
Mustn't there be, somehow, somewhere, existing in some form, something that is God?
Can't we find Him, know Him? Does He care about us?
Will I ever trust again, ever 'worship' again, ever find any concrete meaning in the Universe greater, more noble than myself to demand sacrifice and loyalty, to give hope and serenity in exchange?
This beginning Advent season is the worst, the most agonizing, because so recently I loved it so dearly.
How can it move me, still, so powerfully- the beauty, the harmony, the exquisite balance and detail of the great Story? It bathes the history, literature, art of my culture, of all Western Civilization, in the reflected brilliance of its colors and light.
Not long ago I was a Christian repulsed by my religious community and its practices, wracked by doubts. I think now that I am an agnostic in love with Christianity.
At this season of the year the wonder deepens- the joy, the solemn mystery of this faith attain their climax.
Into the darkness and the cold, across the miles of silent snow, through the heavy gray clouds and mist or the icy brilliance of our million stars there comes the soft glow of candlelight and the glad sweetness of their singing, growing in strength, pushing back the night to the very blackest edges of the universe. And the old names seem to shine with a new radiance- Adonai, Emmanuel.
Messiah.
This year, for the first time, I stand apart entirely, outside in the barren dark. Without, an icy wind rakes through the emptiness, and the windows of their churches, bright with candles, vibrating with song, throw this new grief into stark relief.
For unto us a child is born. For unto us a hope is given.
There is such a hopeless sadness in this loss of faith- so much weariness and confusion, even anguish in this journey out of Christianity. That vanished faith, imperfect as it was, immature and at times self-serving was built upon a sincere and hopeful love.
There is excruciating loneliness. A lifetime of relationships are in flux- changing, fading, vanishing entirely. I can't replace the friendships, don't know how to plough through the distance and experience community in new and meaningful ways.
The beloved, familiar melodies of Christmas make this isolation tangible, make the solitude a humming in my ears and a bitter taste in my mouth.
I forget my frustrations with the churches and Bible studies, forget their blundering and lack of nuance or compassion, their ignorance and incurious complacency, their distrust of art and intellect, their click-bait religious and political screeds on Facebook that murdered the last vestiges of my respect and I feel only a desperate envy.
I envy the simplicity of their belief.
I envy their sense of belonging.
I envy their joy, even as I doubt its sincerity.
I envy their Savior, their God-Man, their God With Us.
I envy their Christ Child, snug in his manger.
I no longer believe in Him, but at moments like these I am forced to accept that I love Him, still, with an absurd and tortured love.
Lord, to whom shall we go, when there are no words of eternal life?
Monday, November 16, 2015
The tossed empty space/ Of cloud rack when the moon has passed away
At first it was a relief- the freedom- the release of that long, fierce intellectual tension between what she believed and what she knew to be true. At last she could gaze with quiet eyes on the shouting and posturing from pulpits, the forced intimacy and saccharine emotionalism of flocks and know herself to be utterly apart from them all without the old guilt, the old surge of confusion.
They repulsed her, exhausted her with their heartiness and jocularity, the strained smiles and artificial sympathy or agreement they demanded of one week after week.
But there were other moments, heartbeats of still beauty when she was alone and the world had ceased to jostle and roar around her when she felt keenly the depth of her loss. At these times she was caught, as always, by the delicate coloring of the sky, the arched loveliness of cedar boughs stretching overhead, and the emptiness of it hammered at her heart.
Before, there was the glory of gratitude, the delicious sense of complicity with a creative God, this artist God poised always in exquisite concentration upon each detail of His world, who spread His treasures before her in the solitude and silence as though he were gladdened by her gladness and her wonder.
She was lost now in this pathless maze of uncreated beauty, this blur of art without its artist. The joy was gone.
There was a weight in this new, tired cynicism which dragged at her with a dull ache. She couldn't un-see what she had seen- that her lifetime of dogged faith in rigid, carefully crafted doctrine- all her finely tuned dogma, the passion, the tenderness, the repentance, all these triumphant centuries of church history with its tales of shining heroism- were built on nothing were all insubstantial and unsubstantiated as air. Only her belief in them had imbued them with life, and this earnest belief had faded and then vanished entirely.
The betrayal cut so deep, was so rooted in pain and abandonment, that its aftermath was paralyzing.
She could not rebuild, could not construct a new framework of faith. The world was empty of magic of symbolism- only its bewildering, meaningless loveliness remained.
Impossible to revel in her liberty. Empty to accept the smug congratulations of those others who had wandered, like her, from the fold, many of whom seemed to wriggle and gambol like puppies in the excess of their delight in their own cleverness, their assurance that only their keen intellect and deep wisdom had made possible their escape.
She turned to the familiar landscape, the gentle trees with their lace-like intricacy, their tracery of twigs as fragile and dainty as the bones of birds. The exuberance of flowers, the ecstasy of light and shadow in a grassy field were waiting, unchanged. She clung to their beauty in her anguish of loneliness and found at times more agony than solace. They seemed so distant and lifeless, so separated from the warm and living personality which had once seemed to animate the universe.
The isolation only seemed to grow in intensity.
Each day she lived the same shock and despair as she realized that her hypocrisy and silence were the last links with the only world she felt at home in, as the weight of her deferred unmasking crashed in upon her. She despised the old world and loved its inhabitants. She cringed at their triteness, their clumsy speech, their absurdity, but she could not bear to break loose definitively from their warmth, their stability, their familiar reassurance. She still craved their approval and respect. The world she saw outside, its materialism, its secular citizens, its vivid scorn for her roots repulsed her no less than her past. She stayed, utterly alone, and the thought of escape remained one of utter loneliness.
She had always felt a deep core of quiet, a silent watchfulness within her. In the old days, it was a vibrant silence, a source of strength and compassion, an inner rest.
Now she was trapped in the quiet in a kind of mute despair, choking back any expression of the grief that throbbed in her head and writhed in her belly. There were all the things which must not be spoken aloud, not to him, not to them. There was the futility of speaking unheard, unwanted words. There were long nights of strangled tears and the harsh, frantic days when she longed for merciful darkness. She clung to silence, curled up protectively upon herself, desperate to hide her tapestry of naked nerves from further torment. In the end, the silence bound her, left her crouched hopelessly cradling a dark and secret shame, a tired disillusionment with existence. Life was strain, every muscle tensed against a coming rejection, a final separation from the only friendship and community she had known.
Her very body mocked her, betrayed her, bled her into utter weariness. Its brokenness locked her behind new walls of isolation, separated her from the comforting physical world. There was no god whose passing cloak she could clutch at in the midst of a crowd, no hope that faith in divine mercy would restore her.
Even suffering was meaningless. She felt an object of ridicule. Self-pitying, melodramatic, absurd in a world of shifting allegiances and doubtful honor.
She dreaded their pity and their prayers.
There were words for the gathering darkness, the plodding misery, the raw emotions, the exhaustion. Depression. Anxiety.
They twined themselves inextricably throughout the fabric of her lost faith, but the weaving was still too narrow, too recently begun and too haphazard for her to discern any pattern.
They repulsed her, exhausted her with their heartiness and jocularity, the strained smiles and artificial sympathy or agreement they demanded of one week after week.
But there were other moments, heartbeats of still beauty when she was alone and the world had ceased to jostle and roar around her when she felt keenly the depth of her loss. At these times she was caught, as always, by the delicate coloring of the sky, the arched loveliness of cedar boughs stretching overhead, and the emptiness of it hammered at her heart.
Before, there was the glory of gratitude, the delicious sense of complicity with a creative God, this artist God poised always in exquisite concentration upon each detail of His world, who spread His treasures before her in the solitude and silence as though he were gladdened by her gladness and her wonder.
She was lost now in this pathless maze of uncreated beauty, this blur of art without its artist. The joy was gone.
There was a weight in this new, tired cynicism which dragged at her with a dull ache. She couldn't un-see what she had seen- that her lifetime of dogged faith in rigid, carefully crafted doctrine- all her finely tuned dogma, the passion, the tenderness, the repentance, all these triumphant centuries of church history with its tales of shining heroism- were built on nothing were all insubstantial and unsubstantiated as air. Only her belief in them had imbued them with life, and this earnest belief had faded and then vanished entirely.
The betrayal cut so deep, was so rooted in pain and abandonment, that its aftermath was paralyzing.
She could not rebuild, could not construct a new framework of faith. The world was empty of magic of symbolism- only its bewildering, meaningless loveliness remained.
Impossible to revel in her liberty. Empty to accept the smug congratulations of those others who had wandered, like her, from the fold, many of whom seemed to wriggle and gambol like puppies in the excess of their delight in their own cleverness, their assurance that only their keen intellect and deep wisdom had made possible their escape.
She turned to the familiar landscape, the gentle trees with their lace-like intricacy, their tracery of twigs as fragile and dainty as the bones of birds. The exuberance of flowers, the ecstasy of light and shadow in a grassy field were waiting, unchanged. She clung to their beauty in her anguish of loneliness and found at times more agony than solace. They seemed so distant and lifeless, so separated from the warm and living personality which had once seemed to animate the universe.
The isolation only seemed to grow in intensity.
Each day she lived the same shock and despair as she realized that her hypocrisy and silence were the last links with the only world she felt at home in, as the weight of her deferred unmasking crashed in upon her. She despised the old world and loved its inhabitants. She cringed at their triteness, their clumsy speech, their absurdity, but she could not bear to break loose definitively from their warmth, their stability, their familiar reassurance. She still craved their approval and respect. The world she saw outside, its materialism, its secular citizens, its vivid scorn for her roots repulsed her no less than her past. She stayed, utterly alone, and the thought of escape remained one of utter loneliness.
She had always felt a deep core of quiet, a silent watchfulness within her. In the old days, it was a vibrant silence, a source of strength and compassion, an inner rest.
Now she was trapped in the quiet in a kind of mute despair, choking back any expression of the grief that throbbed in her head and writhed in her belly. There were all the things which must not be spoken aloud, not to him, not to them. There was the futility of speaking unheard, unwanted words. There were long nights of strangled tears and the harsh, frantic days when she longed for merciful darkness. She clung to silence, curled up protectively upon herself, desperate to hide her tapestry of naked nerves from further torment. In the end, the silence bound her, left her crouched hopelessly cradling a dark and secret shame, a tired disillusionment with existence. Life was strain, every muscle tensed against a coming rejection, a final separation from the only friendship and community she had known.
Her very body mocked her, betrayed her, bled her into utter weariness. Its brokenness locked her behind new walls of isolation, separated her from the comforting physical world. There was no god whose passing cloak she could clutch at in the midst of a crowd, no hope that faith in divine mercy would restore her.
Even suffering was meaningless. She felt an object of ridicule. Self-pitying, melodramatic, absurd in a world of shifting allegiances and doubtful honor.
She dreaded their pity and their prayers.
There were words for the gathering darkness, the plodding misery, the raw emotions, the exhaustion. Depression. Anxiety.
They twined themselves inextricably throughout the fabric of her lost faith, but the weaving was still too narrow, too recently begun and too haphazard for her to discern any pattern.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Sunday Window
"Are you born again?"
I am born
Each morning in sunrise
In wet hung grasses
In webs bright with dewdrops.
"We are gathered this Sabbath"- nasal voice
Sweat beads on his forehead, he smiles
A palisade of teeth, and he squints at us
Happy. To be here, voice booming
Echoing into our inertia, strident.
"To worship the Most High-
Let's shout it and sing it.
Amen! Can I get an amen?"
There are echoes and echoes.
"When we sing it, when we shout it together
Brothers and sisters
We chase that old devil-"
But they are chasing me, my ears are retreating
They chase my eyes to the window.
Joyous in purity, the grey light of winter.
Below are highway and billboards and cars
All shouting; my eyes lift
I will lift mine eyes to where
Tree branches against the clouds are stark and lovely; the streets
Cannot mar the unbroken purity of the sky.
"Cry to the Holy Ghost!" and I cry
To all that is holy
Swaying tree limbs, scudding clouds.
"Get down on your knees and repent!" I cannot
The window is lovely
I am on my knees in a wood and the altar
Is fernbank and birdsong, my heart
Too bright for repentance. Leaves
Lie dappled in sunlight.
The silence is worship.
"Softly and tenderly" braying their loud invitation
"Come weep away the sin" I stand
Grim-jawed and quiet, both eyes in the hymnal,
Still seeing the window.
I am born
Each morning in sunrise
In wet hung grasses
In webs bright with dewdrops.
"We are gathered this Sabbath"- nasal voice
Sweat beads on his forehead, he smiles
A palisade of teeth, and he squints at us
Happy. To be here, voice booming
Echoing into our inertia, strident.
"To worship the Most High-
Let's shout it and sing it.
Amen! Can I get an amen?"
There are echoes and echoes.
"When we sing it, when we shout it together
Brothers and sisters
We chase that old devil-"
But they are chasing me, my ears are retreating
They chase my eyes to the window.
Joyous in purity, the grey light of winter.
Below are highway and billboards and cars
All shouting; my eyes lift
I will lift mine eyes to where
Tree branches against the clouds are stark and lovely; the streets
Cannot mar the unbroken purity of the sky.
"Cry to the Holy Ghost!" and I cry
To all that is holy
Swaying tree limbs, scudding clouds.
"Get down on your knees and repent!" I cannot
The window is lovely
I am on my knees in a wood and the altar
Is fernbank and birdsong, my heart
Too bright for repentance. Leaves
Lie dappled in sunlight.
The silence is worship.
"Softly and tenderly" braying their loud invitation
"Come weep away the sin" I stand
Grim-jawed and quiet, both eyes in the hymnal,
Still seeing the window.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Conflict
This past year I've read little and written less. I hardly know why. Confusion, depression, a long and miserable spiritual dry spell lived in no-man's land, perhaps.
I used to be buoyed up by a passionate belief in beauty. In retrospect, I think I may have believed more in beauty than in God, or at least they were so intertwined somehow, for me, that I could never think of separating them. I didn't believe the Bible because it was true but because it was beautiful, and true because of it's beauty. However, the beauty in the Bible sometimes felt like a well too quickly exhausted, a celebratory dish that became dry and bland if I tried to live on it from day to day. So the beauty of the Bible became the beauty of my idea of the Bible, broadened to include the exquisite detailing I found in the natural world, the heady fascination of literature and art. The Bible was history, humanity, falling snow, a lacy black pattern of tree branches traced against a winter sunset. I went to the fields to pray. When I prayed, I addressed myself in a wondering delight to 'God, who created all this' 'God, creator of beauty'. Beauty, beauty, harmony and beauty, beauty that could exalt me to wistful, melancholy ecstasy was the hunger of my heart. When my faith struggled, Lewis and Chesterton bolstered it up. I hardly know now whether it was my faith in beauty they bolstered or my faith in God. The God I still instinctively believe in now, in spite of my bleak sense of futility, the elusiveness, the impossibility of knowing any spiritual truth with certainty is the God of Lewis, of Chesterton- the God of hidden magical kingdoms, music, the God who surprises with joy, who speaks in legends and poetry and changing seasons. When it was impossible for me to believe any longer in the church as I saw it every day, I clung to their vision of a Church stretching across history, glorious as an army with banners, tried to believe that something transcended the petty selfishness, the narrowness, the lazy minds and plodding intellects of myself and those who surrounded me. When the Christianity I found in America bored and sickened me to death, when I had to conquer my revulsion to speak in our trite spiritual phrases and accept the platitudes of those I previously respected, my focus became global. I thought that in China, in Cambodia, in France I might find a higher idealism, a pure flame I could aspire to. I began to immerse myself in international relationships, cultural study, language study. It exhilarated me. It was easy to believe that God's calling was here, that in following him I could escape, live a life of joyous adventure, convert the heathen, mold them into the sort of Christian community I was searching in vain, share in their resultant persecution and somehow vicariously elevate myself to the sort of superior cultural and spiritual plain I imagined Christians of other nations to inhabit. I still occasionally meet younger versions of myself at this stage in the church, and it leaves me with a tired sadness. Perhaps during this period I was more sophisticated, better spoken (and perhaps not), but the raw idealism, the smug cultural assumptions are there. It was an impassioned moment in my life. I'm not ashamed of it. But I'm tired. Tired and sick at the heart and cynical. The missionary girl is dead. She couldn't convince herself.
I didn't leave the church. Emotionally and intellectually I was pushed out of it day by day by a version of Christianity unable to separate itself from a brutal and childish patriotism, a hatred of science, a fear of intellectual attainments and the honest study of anything, by a culture that glorified ignorance and oversimplification. The fundamentalist world I come from was impossibly narrow. During the moments when I felt myself honestly a part of it, when I was able to fit myself easily to that narrowness, trust it in all its invasive dogmatism, I was happy in a way. I was a part of a community. I belonged. I knew what I (we) believed and it was simple and safe. Nearly everyone I love is still there, and happy there.
The world I come from is all or nothing. The world I come from is black and white. In the world I come from, the worst is to be unsure, noncommittal lukewarm. God will spit you out like rotting meat. In the world I come from, one deviation from the accepted narrative, one false step towards independence, and your only options are repentance or hell. I no longer belong in this world, but these patterns of thinking are burned on my brain. I don't know how to find compromise, enjoy exploring possibilities. The anxiety of deviation from the pattern is overwhelming. I live in a gray wilderness, and how can I tell anyone?
'We' don't believe in gray.
I don't know how to find balance in my relationship with a God who seems so far away right now, whose character and identity seem so fluid.
The day I realized that my absolute faith in the Bible as a perfect and reliable way to know God and his will was shattered, something in me was shattered too. I can't go back to pick up the pieces I loved among the ruins, to search for unbroken images, or at least fragments whose beauty is still discernible and reassuring. The voices from my childhood are mocking, won't let me forget the perceived hypocrisy of those who 'pick and choose' what to believe, who take what they want from the Bible and throw away the rest. Maybe I'm too honest to construct a faith I'm comfortable with, maybe I'm only too broken. I can't be sure.
For now, there's a grey world of poetry, of physical realities- sunlight warm on my hair, the peculiar golden quality the light has just before evening, gardens to be planted, the delicate impudence of squirrels and birds in the yard. There's music, and humanity to study and sigh over. There's love, the beginning of a marriage, a home and family to plan for and dream of and create. There's a hesitant idealism afraid to believe too fervently in itself, in anything. Maybe someday there will be more. I think I can wait. I don't feel like having any choice.
The world of Christianity- not necessarily Christianity itself, but my experience of it, the culture of Christianity I've known so far in my life leaves me cold. The secular world equally so. I'm not traveling from one place to another. I can't stay here and there's nowhere else I wish to go. Maybe it's only a matter of learning to accept never belonging anywhere again. Rootlessness may be the price of freedom, may always have been so.
I used to be buoyed up by a passionate belief in beauty. In retrospect, I think I may have believed more in beauty than in God, or at least they were so intertwined somehow, for me, that I could never think of separating them. I didn't believe the Bible because it was true but because it was beautiful, and true because of it's beauty. However, the beauty in the Bible sometimes felt like a well too quickly exhausted, a celebratory dish that became dry and bland if I tried to live on it from day to day. So the beauty of the Bible became the beauty of my idea of the Bible, broadened to include the exquisite detailing I found in the natural world, the heady fascination of literature and art. The Bible was history, humanity, falling snow, a lacy black pattern of tree branches traced against a winter sunset. I went to the fields to pray. When I prayed, I addressed myself in a wondering delight to 'God, who created all this' 'God, creator of beauty'. Beauty, beauty, harmony and beauty, beauty that could exalt me to wistful, melancholy ecstasy was the hunger of my heart. When my faith struggled, Lewis and Chesterton bolstered it up. I hardly know now whether it was my faith in beauty they bolstered or my faith in God. The God I still instinctively believe in now, in spite of my bleak sense of futility, the elusiveness, the impossibility of knowing any spiritual truth with certainty is the God of Lewis, of Chesterton- the God of hidden magical kingdoms, music, the God who surprises with joy, who speaks in legends and poetry and changing seasons. When it was impossible for me to believe any longer in the church as I saw it every day, I clung to their vision of a Church stretching across history, glorious as an army with banners, tried to believe that something transcended the petty selfishness, the narrowness, the lazy minds and plodding intellects of myself and those who surrounded me. When the Christianity I found in America bored and sickened me to death, when I had to conquer my revulsion to speak in our trite spiritual phrases and accept the platitudes of those I previously respected, my focus became global. I thought that in China, in Cambodia, in France I might find a higher idealism, a pure flame I could aspire to. I began to immerse myself in international relationships, cultural study, language study. It exhilarated me. It was easy to believe that God's calling was here, that in following him I could escape, live a life of joyous adventure, convert the heathen, mold them into the sort of Christian community I was searching in vain, share in their resultant persecution and somehow vicariously elevate myself to the sort of superior cultural and spiritual plain I imagined Christians of other nations to inhabit. I still occasionally meet younger versions of myself at this stage in the church, and it leaves me with a tired sadness. Perhaps during this period I was more sophisticated, better spoken (and perhaps not), but the raw idealism, the smug cultural assumptions are there. It was an impassioned moment in my life. I'm not ashamed of it. But I'm tired. Tired and sick at the heart and cynical. The missionary girl is dead. She couldn't convince herself.
I didn't leave the church. Emotionally and intellectually I was pushed out of it day by day by a version of Christianity unable to separate itself from a brutal and childish patriotism, a hatred of science, a fear of intellectual attainments and the honest study of anything, by a culture that glorified ignorance and oversimplification. The fundamentalist world I come from was impossibly narrow. During the moments when I felt myself honestly a part of it, when I was able to fit myself easily to that narrowness, trust it in all its invasive dogmatism, I was happy in a way. I was a part of a community. I belonged. I knew what I (we) believed and it was simple and safe. Nearly everyone I love is still there, and happy there.
The world I come from is all or nothing. The world I come from is black and white. In the world I come from, the worst is to be unsure, noncommittal lukewarm. God will spit you out like rotting meat. In the world I come from, one deviation from the accepted narrative, one false step towards independence, and your only options are repentance or hell. I no longer belong in this world, but these patterns of thinking are burned on my brain. I don't know how to find compromise, enjoy exploring possibilities. The anxiety of deviation from the pattern is overwhelming. I live in a gray wilderness, and how can I tell anyone?
'We' don't believe in gray.
I don't know how to find balance in my relationship with a God who seems so far away right now, whose character and identity seem so fluid.
The day I realized that my absolute faith in the Bible as a perfect and reliable way to know God and his will was shattered, something in me was shattered too. I can't go back to pick up the pieces I loved among the ruins, to search for unbroken images, or at least fragments whose beauty is still discernible and reassuring. The voices from my childhood are mocking, won't let me forget the perceived hypocrisy of those who 'pick and choose' what to believe, who take what they want from the Bible and throw away the rest. Maybe I'm too honest to construct a faith I'm comfortable with, maybe I'm only too broken. I can't be sure.
For now, there's a grey world of poetry, of physical realities- sunlight warm on my hair, the peculiar golden quality the light has just before evening, gardens to be planted, the delicate impudence of squirrels and birds in the yard. There's music, and humanity to study and sigh over. There's love, the beginning of a marriage, a home and family to plan for and dream of and create. There's a hesitant idealism afraid to believe too fervently in itself, in anything. Maybe someday there will be more. I think I can wait. I don't feel like having any choice.
The world of Christianity- not necessarily Christianity itself, but my experience of it, the culture of Christianity I've known so far in my life leaves me cold. The secular world equally so. I'm not traveling from one place to another. I can't stay here and there's nowhere else I wish to go. Maybe it's only a matter of learning to accept never belonging anywhere again. Rootlessness may be the price of freedom, may always have been so.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Christmas Poem
Creeping in the narrow streets of Bethlehem were shadows
And creeping in the shadows were the people of the town.
In all the hearts of Bethlehem and Israel, lurked shadows;
They waited for a King to bring the long awaited dawn.
And creeping in the shadows were the people of the town.
In all the hearts of Bethlehem and Israel, lurked shadows;
They waited for a King to bring the long awaited dawn.
Weeping in the dark of night, the people wrestled shadows
Weeping in the silent world outside the city wall
And crying in each helpless heart was rage against the shadows
And crying in a stable was an infant in a stall.
Weeping in the silent world outside the city wall
And crying in each helpless heart was rage against the shadows
And crying in a stable was an infant in a stall.
Could you but see in Bethlehem, what wonders chased the shadows!
What lights, what haunting music, leaping heart-songs, flying feet!
While all the weary people slumbered waiting in the shadows,
The shadows all were fleeing from the dawn-light in the street!
What lights, what haunting music, leaping heart-songs, flying feet!
While all the weary people slumbered waiting in the shadows,
The shadows all were fleeing from the dawn-light in the street!
This strange, this shocking story bursts upon us from the shadows
A wailing child and wistful girl make earth's foundations shake.
No longer will the world be left despairing in the shadows
For Light and Life came squirming in a manger at daybreak.
A wailing child and wistful girl make earth's foundations shake.
No longer will the world be left despairing in the shadows
For Light and Life came squirming in a manger at daybreak.
And blinding light comes flooding now to chase away the shadows
And blinded eyes are opened, and the blind man meets the day,
And joy is pulsing in our hearts, set free at last from shadows
As all the power and love of God lies sleeping in the hay.
And blinded eyes are opened, and the blind man meets the day,
And joy is pulsing in our hearts, set free at last from shadows
As all the power and love of God lies sleeping in the hay.
Euthyphro Problems
Note: This is a draft from February 2012 which I decided to publish
I can't believe, and I can't not believe.
Whenever questions like this were brought up in Sunday school, Bible study, etc... I always received the impression that everyone was approaching them like this: "Here are the arguments non-believers are making/questions they have, and here is how we address these arguments/questions in order to bring them into the fold/refute their wicked anti-Christian agenda." I see nothing wrong with looking at things from this perspective, it's just that I can't think of any cases in my own experience (unless one counts encounters with authors such as C.S. Lewis as personal experience) when serious concerns like these were raised as something sincere Christians might themselves seriously struggle with.
The impression I received is that only arrogant skeptics and those hovering on the verge of apostasy, or perhaps the occasional oversensitive intellectual genuinely give credence to such questions and doubts. But actually, I don't see how these ideas aren't a consuming topic of discussion for Christians. How can we claim to have faith when we hide like ostriches from everything that challenges our assumptions? At least, that's what I feel like I've been doing for the past several years. At what point do we stop saying 'It's impossible to know that.', and acknowledge that we feel the desire to know as though it were a physical hunger? At least many of the skeptics and seekers are trying to find answers, and willing to have honest discussions. To be honest, I want to believe that the Bible is perfect and infallible, but I feel more and more that there are inconsistencies which can't just be glossed over. That is, I'm tired of nervously avoiding seeming contradictions to protect the comfortable security of my belief in the Bible's infallibility. Logically, it seems obvious that God's word has to be perfect and infallible, and the minute that this is no longer assumed, textual anarchy reigns. Who is to say what is true, and what is human error? I am seized with terror at the thought of a universe no longer governed by absolute principles and judged by absolute truth, I am convinced that no such universe is possible, yet am careening head on into the possibility that whatever is true, (and something must be!) I can't completely know.
The most intelligent response I've ever absorbed from all my years in church and parachurch functions is:
Start from God, and work backwards, assuming that everything makes sense whether it does or not। This is, to me, the most acceptable answer to the problem, and the one that seems to fit most closely, but I find it less and less satisfying. I'm tired of trying to pretend all of the uncomfortable questions don't exist, or just avoiding everything I can't bring myself to accept. Example: This ____seems to me to be brutal, evil, and unjust. But I know from x, y, and z that God is perfectly loving, good, righteous, and just. Therefore I can rest assured that my corrupt human instincts are leading me astray, and that God's thoughts are higher than mine. It's ok to not understand. If God did it, it was right.
This, for me, leads to a very uncomfortable confrontation with the Euthyphro problem: Is God good because he conforms to an objective standard of goodness, or is goodness defined by whatever God is? If God commands genoicide, does genoicide in that specific instance become goodness, or is the destruction of innocent human life always wrong? Why, if the blood of one Abel was so vocal does the blood of a thousand Canaanite children not cry out from the ground? Obviously it's true that actions of parents/leaders have consequences which extend to their descendants, but why is it alright? Why should the fourth generation suffer for the first? How can one group of people be commanded to massacre another down to the last newborn child and frolicking lamb, carry out orders, and not be horrifically warped? Agreeing that human sacrifice, temple prostitution, torture, and sexual perversion are wrong and deserve punishment, how exactly is mass murder more acceptable, or a viable solution? Agreeing that God is concerned with our character, not our circumstances, and that a slave should serve Christ as humbly and wholeheartedly as a free man, how is it possible for one man to 'own' another created in God's image as he might a dog or a cow, and to, theoretically, exercise the same control over his fellow's life? When is it ok to stand up, say 'This is wrong', and give the full fire of your passion and energy to abolishing it? Was William Wilberforce deluded by rampant humanism, or was he serving Christ well by attacking cruelty and brutality? Based on the Bible's description of God's vision for mankind, how are periods in church history when the church nearly ceased to exist, or became entirely corrupted (The Avignon papacy, pour exemple) explainable? What happened to the warm fuzziness of overpowering love and personal relationship with the Creator? If the Bible is true, God is not arbitrary, therefore, if something seems arbitrary, I must assume that my perception is at fault. But at what point does this simply become a cop out and catch all? If it doesn't satisfy me, what am I supposed to do? Is there something horribly wrong with me? Is no one else tortured by these things?
I don't want to ask this, and I can't help asking. It makes me miserable, because the questions create doubt, and the doubt coexists uneasily with my belief, and somewhere in the wilderness of believing, and doubting, rebelling and repenting, I feel like a traitor- like a woman who is forced against all her inclinations to doubt the man she loves, yet wracked by guilt for her distrustfulness. Saying in the same breath "I'm sure he could not be wrong! How could he have done this thing?" Hating herself for accusing, hating herself for so nearly hating him for the intolerable situation in which she is placed. I'm quite sure that it's somehow my fault, but I can't quite see how, and unquestionably, that must be my fault as well. My conscience is inexorably accusing the Person and institution from which I have always believed my conscience and moral boundaries to be derived.And if I have to ask? If the answers I find are not the acceptable answers? Where do I go? Where do I belong, where find truth? What wilderness of terrifying moral freedom might I find myself in?
Can I say, like Peter 'Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.' when my questions are drowning me overwhelming me, dragging me away from what I once considered my rock and my security as a hot air balloon might pluck away a small child unfortunate enough to be grasping its basket when it lifts off? It's only another question I can't answer. And I'm afraid. I'm floating away.
I can't believe, and I can't not believe.
Whenever questions like this were brought up in Sunday school, Bible study, etc... I always received the impression that everyone was approaching them like this: "Here are the arguments non-believers are making/questions they have, and here is how we address these arguments/questions in order to bring them into the fold/refute their wicked anti-Christian agenda." I see nothing wrong with looking at things from this perspective, it's just that I can't think of any cases in my own experience (unless one counts encounters with authors such as C.S. Lewis as personal experience) when serious concerns like these were raised as something sincere Christians might themselves seriously struggle with.
The impression I received is that only arrogant skeptics and those hovering on the verge of apostasy, or perhaps the occasional oversensitive intellectual genuinely give credence to such questions and doubts. But actually, I don't see how these ideas aren't a consuming topic of discussion for Christians. How can we claim to have faith when we hide like ostriches from everything that challenges our assumptions? At least, that's what I feel like I've been doing for the past several years. At what point do we stop saying 'It's impossible to know that.', and acknowledge that we feel the desire to know as though it were a physical hunger? At least many of the skeptics and seekers are trying to find answers, and willing to have honest discussions. To be honest, I want to believe that the Bible is perfect and infallible, but I feel more and more that there are inconsistencies which can't just be glossed over. That is, I'm tired of nervously avoiding seeming contradictions to protect the comfortable security of my belief in the Bible's infallibility. Logically, it seems obvious that God's word has to be perfect and infallible, and the minute that this is no longer assumed, textual anarchy reigns. Who is to say what is true, and what is human error? I am seized with terror at the thought of a universe no longer governed by absolute principles and judged by absolute truth, I am convinced that no such universe is possible, yet am careening head on into the possibility that whatever is true, (and something must be!) I can't completely know.
The most intelligent response I've ever absorbed from all my years in church and parachurch functions is:
Start from God, and work backwards, assuming that everything makes sense whether it does or not। This is, to me, the most acceptable answer to the problem, and the one that seems to fit most closely, but I find it less and less satisfying. I'm tired of trying to pretend all of the uncomfortable questions don't exist, or just avoiding everything I can't bring myself to accept. Example: This ____seems to me to be brutal, evil, and unjust. But I know from x, y, and z that God is perfectly loving, good, righteous, and just. Therefore I can rest assured that my corrupt human instincts are leading me astray, and that God's thoughts are higher than mine. It's ok to not understand. If God did it, it was right.
This, for me, leads to a very uncomfortable confrontation with the Euthyphro problem: Is God good because he conforms to an objective standard of goodness, or is goodness defined by whatever God is? If God commands genoicide, does genoicide in that specific instance become goodness, or is the destruction of innocent human life always wrong? Why, if the blood of one Abel was so vocal does the blood of a thousand Canaanite children not cry out from the ground? Obviously it's true that actions of parents/leaders have consequences which extend to their descendants, but why is it alright? Why should the fourth generation suffer for the first? How can one group of people be commanded to massacre another down to the last newborn child and frolicking lamb, carry out orders, and not be horrifically warped? Agreeing that human sacrifice, temple prostitution, torture, and sexual perversion are wrong and deserve punishment, how exactly is mass murder more acceptable, or a viable solution? Agreeing that God is concerned with our character, not our circumstances, and that a slave should serve Christ as humbly and wholeheartedly as a free man, how is it possible for one man to 'own' another created in God's image as he might a dog or a cow, and to, theoretically, exercise the same control over his fellow's life? When is it ok to stand up, say 'This is wrong', and give the full fire of your passion and energy to abolishing it? Was William Wilberforce deluded by rampant humanism, or was he serving Christ well by attacking cruelty and brutality? Based on the Bible's description of God's vision for mankind, how are periods in church history when the church nearly ceased to exist, or became entirely corrupted (The Avignon papacy, pour exemple) explainable? What happened to the warm fuzziness of overpowering love and personal relationship with the Creator? If the Bible is true, God is not arbitrary, therefore, if something seems arbitrary, I must assume that my perception is at fault. But at what point does this simply become a cop out and catch all? If it doesn't satisfy me, what am I supposed to do? Is there something horribly wrong with me? Is no one else tortured by these things?
I don't want to ask this, and I can't help asking. It makes me miserable, because the questions create doubt, and the doubt coexists uneasily with my belief, and somewhere in the wilderness of believing, and doubting, rebelling and repenting, I feel like a traitor- like a woman who is forced against all her inclinations to doubt the man she loves, yet wracked by guilt for her distrustfulness. Saying in the same breath "I'm sure he could not be wrong! How could he have done this thing?" Hating herself for accusing, hating herself for so nearly hating him for the intolerable situation in which she is placed. I'm quite sure that it's somehow my fault, but I can't quite see how, and unquestionably, that must be my fault as well. My conscience is inexorably accusing the Person and institution from which I have always believed my conscience and moral boundaries to be derived.And if I have to ask? If the answers I find are not the acceptable answers? Where do I go? Where do I belong, where find truth? What wilderness of terrifying moral freedom might I find myself in?
Can I say, like Peter 'Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.' when my questions are drowning me overwhelming me, dragging me away from what I once considered my rock and my security as a hot air balloon might pluck away a small child unfortunate enough to be grasping its basket when it lifts off? It's only another question I can't answer. And I'm afraid. I'm floating away.
Forsaking Utopia
Note: This is a draft from April 2013 which I decided to publish
This semester has presented me with an alarming, and hitherto unsuspected dilemma.
I'm not going to be a college kid forever.
(shocked silence)
Realizing that my time here is ending, and that something else will need to begin, has been a thought provoking, exciting, and sometimes terrifying theme of the past few months.
I'm trying to understand what exactly I've gained and lost in the past four years, what of enduring value I've learned, who I've become that I wasn't before. Also, I'm struggling to understand where I should go from here, what I'm equipped, and called upon, to go out and do in the world.
It's complicated. Truly.
But, maybe because I thrive on philosophical grey regions, or maybe because I'm the product of a bewildering post-modern society and educational system, I find that my answers to many of these important questions are hazed with doubts, and rich in paradox.
We live in a funny, cruel, dazzlingly eccentric world. I'm endlessly startled and fascinated by it, and the past four years have been an agonizing and glorious indulgence of this fascination. Yet the more I study, the more I feel the sameness, the repetition of human experience in the past, and what surrounds us in the present. We've been doing the same things over and over by different names. And this has been true as much of 'Christianity' (speaking of the institution, and not of historical individuals) as much as of any other group or ideology in society. What troubles me, is that in every instance I see, both among Christians and non-Christians, the people who were wrong have been loudest and most determined- and often, not only dominated, but won the debate. For every Francis of Assissi who passionately opposed the Crusades, there were a thousand 'true believers' to instigate and passionately defend them. Humanity, as a mass, is consistently blind to its own blunders. And in every case, our stated intentions are magnificent.
The frightening thing about evil, is its insistence upon defending itself, upon being cloaked in noble aims and acceptable language. Crusaders didn't butcher, rape and rob Jews and Muslims, they liberated the Holy Land. The Inquisition didn't terrorize, dehumanize, despoil, and torture Spanish citizens, it purified and protected true Catholicism. The Reign of Terror didn't turn a civilian population into a bloodthirsty animal mob, it redressed grievances and protected the fragile liberty of the French common man. Hitler didn't murder the weak and defenceless, he purified his nation of unwanted and hostile elements, striving to give her the prosperity and glory she deserved. Americans and Brits didn't violate human rights by firebombing civilian populations during the second World War, killing thousands of defenceless women and children for the purpose of terrorizing and demoralizing the enemy- we defended liberty and democracy, took out the bad guys, whatever the cost. [Little matter that among the 'costs' were the lives of hundreds of thousands Japanese and German civilians, and providing Stalin with the resources which he turned against his own people and Eastern Europe during years of far more horrific bloodshed and oppression.] Slavery, colonialism, oppression of women... how do we step out of our own cultures, assumptions, and time period to see things as they are? Why have so few even attempted it in the past? How can I know that my very obsession with culture and time, and the blinders they place on our worldview is not in itself a subjective assumption instilled by my culture, and region, and the period I've lived in?
(crickets)
Yet this is clear: whenever mankind behaves wickedly, he attempts to justify himself. And when we behave wickedly as a group, or as a nation, we're all the more foolish, all the more easily satisfied with moral platitudes and evasions, all the more vociferous in our own defence... and all the more deadly. It frightens me, because it's happening at every level of society every day, here, and I don't trust myself to see it clearly. It frightens me, because I frequently feel that I'm alone in my understanding of what's right and wrong. It frightens me because, surrounded by so many fine, opinionated, vociferous people, whom I passionately disagree with, I have less and less faith in my chances of arriving at the correct answers. Also, because I don't clearly understand yet what the proper, loving, Christ-honoring response to these situations is, what conscience may demand of me. But that's a question for another day, and for a different jumble of run-on sentences.
I realize that I don't have anything particularly original or brilliant to say about any of this. If you're bored by this repetition of tiresome and threadbare questions, and my clumsy struggles to address them, I can only apologize, and encourage you to go read something more helpful. I'm not a philosopher, and I can't claim any particular wisdom or enlightenment. I'm simply interested, and concerned, and trying to understand. I want a response to Schaeffer's question 'How should we then live?', and I don't fully trust the accuracy of any of the teachers and theologians who, over the years, have attempted to answer it.
This semester has presented me with an alarming, and hitherto unsuspected dilemma.
I'm not going to be a college kid forever.
(shocked silence)
Realizing that my time here is ending, and that something else will need to begin, has been a thought provoking, exciting, and sometimes terrifying theme of the past few months.
I'm trying to understand what exactly I've gained and lost in the past four years, what of enduring value I've learned, who I've become that I wasn't before. Also, I'm struggling to understand where I should go from here, what I'm equipped, and called upon, to go out and do in the world.
It's complicated. Truly.
But, maybe because I thrive on philosophical grey regions, or maybe because I'm the product of a bewildering post-modern society and educational system, I find that my answers to many of these important questions are hazed with doubts, and rich in paradox.
We live in a funny, cruel, dazzlingly eccentric world. I'm endlessly startled and fascinated by it, and the past four years have been an agonizing and glorious indulgence of this fascination. Yet the more I study, the more I feel the sameness, the repetition of human experience in the past, and what surrounds us in the present. We've been doing the same things over and over by different names. And this has been true as much of 'Christianity' (speaking of the institution, and not of historical individuals) as much as of any other group or ideology in society. What troubles me, is that in every instance I see, both among Christians and non-Christians, the people who were wrong have been loudest and most determined- and often, not only dominated, but won the debate. For every Francis of Assissi who passionately opposed the Crusades, there were a thousand 'true believers' to instigate and passionately defend them. Humanity, as a mass, is consistently blind to its own blunders. And in every case, our stated intentions are magnificent.
The frightening thing about evil, is its insistence upon defending itself, upon being cloaked in noble aims and acceptable language. Crusaders didn't butcher, rape and rob Jews and Muslims, they liberated the Holy Land. The Inquisition didn't terrorize, dehumanize, despoil, and torture Spanish citizens, it purified and protected true Catholicism. The Reign of Terror didn't turn a civilian population into a bloodthirsty animal mob, it redressed grievances and protected the fragile liberty of the French common man. Hitler didn't murder the weak and defenceless, he purified his nation of unwanted and hostile elements, striving to give her the prosperity and glory she deserved. Americans and Brits didn't violate human rights by firebombing civilian populations during the second World War, killing thousands of defenceless women and children for the purpose of terrorizing and demoralizing the enemy- we defended liberty and democracy, took out the bad guys, whatever the cost. [Little matter that among the 'costs' were the lives of hundreds of thousands Japanese and German civilians, and providing Stalin with the resources which he turned against his own people and Eastern Europe during years of far more horrific bloodshed and oppression.] Slavery, colonialism, oppression of women... how do we step out of our own cultures, assumptions, and time period to see things as they are? Why have so few even attempted it in the past? How can I know that my very obsession with culture and time, and the blinders they place on our worldview is not in itself a subjective assumption instilled by my culture, and region, and the period I've lived in?
(crickets)
Yet this is clear: whenever mankind behaves wickedly, he attempts to justify himself. And when we behave wickedly as a group, or as a nation, we're all the more foolish, all the more easily satisfied with moral platitudes and evasions, all the more vociferous in our own defence... and all the more deadly. It frightens me, because it's happening at every level of society every day, here, and I don't trust myself to see it clearly. It frightens me, because I frequently feel that I'm alone in my understanding of what's right and wrong. It frightens me because, surrounded by so many fine, opinionated, vociferous people, whom I passionately disagree with, I have less and less faith in my chances of arriving at the correct answers. Also, because I don't clearly understand yet what the proper, loving, Christ-honoring response to these situations is, what conscience may demand of me. But that's a question for another day, and for a different jumble of run-on sentences.
I realize that I don't have anything particularly original or brilliant to say about any of this. If you're bored by this repetition of tiresome and threadbare questions, and my clumsy struggles to address them, I can only apologize, and encourage you to go read something more helpful. I'm not a philosopher, and I can't claim any particular wisdom or enlightenment. I'm simply interested, and concerned, and trying to understand. I want a response to Schaeffer's question 'How should we then live?', and I don't fully trust the accuracy of any of the teachers and theologians who, over the years, have attempted to answer it.
To Plant a Garden
Note: This is a draft from March 2013 which I decided to publish
I want to plant a garden.
As a child and adolescent, sullenly uprooted and dragged from house to house every 2-4 years, grasping at straws of geographic security, I gradually created a chant, half litany, half poem, which often ran, variation after variation through my head, growing over the years:
I want to plant an apple tree and watch it grow
I want to watch it inch its way up until the sapling stretches over my head.
I want to watch it thicken and harden until I can stand in the shade of its branches.
I want to watch the pitiful scattering of delicate blossoms which may come with the 3rd or fourth spring gradually explode into a haze of pink and white fragrance, like the recklessly combined bouquets of one thousand May brides.
I want to fill first bowls, and then buckets with apples, make sauce, bake pies, and inundate the neighbors with the surplus.
I want to stay in one home long enough to know if it's true when bulb-sellers describe their tantalizing packages of narcissus and muscari as 'good naturalizers'.
I want to plant a lilac bush.
I want to plant a fragile scrap of lilac, or three in a group
French or Persian, or some enchanting Russian hybrid like Beauty of Moscow.
I want to water them through the long hot summers, and gloat over the lovely heart-shaped leaves in Spring, exult when the first infant flower sprays appear, and keep waiting and watching, April after April until the yard is filled with the massive adult bushes and the exquisite fragrance.
I want to plant a climbing rose.
I want to nurse it through its first seasons, wait the extra years for the first bloom, and feel no sense of hurry, because the rose and I have time, and no one is going anywhere.
I want to read manuals about pruning, toss them aside in despair, and train it and twist it, and bemoan it, until it is snaking its green canes over the roof like a flowering octopus, and I'm lamenting its size, vigor and thorns.
I want to plant a garden.
I want to plant a garden.
As a child and adolescent, sullenly uprooted and dragged from house to house every 2-4 years, grasping at straws of geographic security, I gradually created a chant, half litany, half poem, which often ran, variation after variation through my head, growing over the years:
I want to plant an apple tree and watch it grow
I want to watch it inch its way up until the sapling stretches over my head.
I want to watch it thicken and harden until I can stand in the shade of its branches.
I want to watch the pitiful scattering of delicate blossoms which may come with the 3rd or fourth spring gradually explode into a haze of pink and white fragrance, like the recklessly combined bouquets of one thousand May brides.
I want to fill first bowls, and then buckets with apples, make sauce, bake pies, and inundate the neighbors with the surplus.
I want to stay in one home long enough to know if it's true when bulb-sellers describe their tantalizing packages of narcissus and muscari as 'good naturalizers'.
I want to plant a lilac bush.
I want to plant a fragile scrap of lilac, or three in a group
French or Persian, or some enchanting Russian hybrid like Beauty of Moscow.
I want to water them through the long hot summers, and gloat over the lovely heart-shaped leaves in Spring, exult when the first infant flower sprays appear, and keep waiting and watching, April after April until the yard is filled with the massive adult bushes and the exquisite fragrance.
I want to plant a climbing rose.
I want to nurse it through its first seasons, wait the extra years for the first bloom, and feel no sense of hurry, because the rose and I have time, and no one is going anywhere.
I want to read manuals about pruning, toss them aside in despair, and train it and twist it, and bemoan it, until it is snaking its green canes over the roof like a flowering octopus, and I'm lamenting its size, vigor and thorns.
I want to plant a garden.
Danse Macabre
"Lie on the floor, children, lie as though you were sleeping."
It is the autumn of the year.
The leaves rustle and heave like the blankets of a restless sleeper.
Drift down in a slow rain.
My grandmother travels the house on fragile feet.
Smooths with feeble hands the flutter of her pulse.
She drifts between waking and sleeping as the leaves glide down.
In class today, we listen to the Danse Macabre.
Children laid low in little heaps turn earnest faces upward.
Through their tousled bright hair gleam eyes wide and interested.
I watch the faces, open and eager, fearless and fresh, wondering at Death's violin.
These wigglers, these fidgeters, these pokers and gigglers, lying so still.
The little bodies are huddled in pitiful rows, scattered like leaves.
"Listen, children, listen for the rattle of the bones. Listen to the striking of the clock.
For the crowing of the cock."
O childhood, O mortality, why this throbbing ache in my throat?
It is the autumn of the year.
The leaves rustle and heave like the blankets of a restless sleeper.
Drift down in a slow rain.
My grandmother travels the house on fragile feet.
Smooths with feeble hands the flutter of her pulse.
She drifts between waking and sleeping as the leaves glide down.
In class today, we listen to the Danse Macabre.
Children laid low in little heaps turn earnest faces upward.
Through their tousled bright hair gleam eyes wide and interested.
I watch the faces, open and eager, fearless and fresh, wondering at Death's violin.
These wigglers, these fidgeters, these pokers and gigglers, lying so still.
The little bodies are huddled in pitiful rows, scattered like leaves.
"Listen, children, listen for the rattle of the bones. Listen to the striking of the clock.
For the crowing of the cock."
O childhood, O mortality, why this throbbing ache in my throat?
Friday, December 21, 2012
Snow Day
We've been hibernating all morning in a house transformed by snow and blanket-covered windows into a charming cave (I was tempted to say cosy cave, but the chill and draftiness won't be forgotten so easily). Reading, listening to Christmas music, cooking, cleaning, catching up on letter writing and bills, listening to Lex grumble at his online chess opponents... well, it's been lovely.
Days like this simply don't come often enough- days of concentrated quiet, peace, and cheer. Certainly, tomorrow isn't likely to be another of the same if we drive to Kansas City as planned. So it's a good lesson in contentment- accepting to be luxuriously satisfied by the present moment, with no grumbling about its brevity. It strikes me that pleasure- especially the transient pleasure of a day which magically falls somehow into perfect harmony with itself- is exquisite precisely because of its fragility, because of the knowledge lurking behind it that it may be shattered from moment to moment.
It's impossible to extend the volume of a fine, rich broth merely by adding gallons of water to it. You've more liquid, certainly, but it isn't at all the same thing you began with- the savor is lost. Rest and comfort must be made of the same stuff- the more you have of them, the weaker their flavor.
Days like this should be held to the light like diamonds to be admired. Such glittering white perfection without- such homeliness and security within...
How wonderful to have a few hours of intense peace, boiled down to an almost impossible deliciousness, undiluted by any threat of longevity!
Days like this simply don't come often enough- days of concentrated quiet, peace, and cheer. Certainly, tomorrow isn't likely to be another of the same if we drive to Kansas City as planned. So it's a good lesson in contentment- accepting to be luxuriously satisfied by the present moment, with no grumbling about its brevity. It strikes me that pleasure- especially the transient pleasure of a day which magically falls somehow into perfect harmony with itself- is exquisite precisely because of its fragility, because of the knowledge lurking behind it that it may be shattered from moment to moment.
It's impossible to extend the volume of a fine, rich broth merely by adding gallons of water to it. You've more liquid, certainly, but it isn't at all the same thing you began with- the savor is lost. Rest and comfort must be made of the same stuff- the more you have of them, the weaker their flavor.
Days like this should be held to the light like diamonds to be admired. Such glittering white perfection without- such homeliness and security within...
How wonderful to have a few hours of intense peace, boiled down to an almost impossible deliciousness, undiluted by any threat of longevity!
Monday, December 3, 2012
Moments in Munich: Part 2
"The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn."
― Sophie Scholl
February 22, 1943- Three ringleaders of the resistance group 'The White Rose', based at Ludwig-Maximilian unversity in Munich were executed by guillotine at Stadelheim prison just a few hours after being given a summary trial for treason.
The crime of which Hans Scholl, 23, Sophie Scholl, 21, and Christoph Probst, 22 were accused?
Undermining the National Socialist regime through the distribution of inflammatory leaflets condemning the passivity of the German people in the face of Hitler's crimes, and advocating passive resistance and active sabotage of the war effort and National Socialist agenda.*
― Sophie Scholl
February 22, 1943- Three ringleaders of the resistance group 'The White Rose', based at Ludwig-Maximilian unversity in Munich were executed by guillotine at Stadelheim prison just a few hours after being given a summary trial for treason.
The crime of which Hans Scholl, 23, Sophie Scholl, 21, and Christoph Probst, 22 were accused?
Undermining the National Socialist regime through the distribution of inflammatory leaflets condemning the passivity of the German people in the face of Hitler's crimes, and advocating passive resistance and active sabotage of the war effort and National Socialist agenda.*
For many, many years, this group- Sophie in particular- have absorbed my admiration, interest, and affection with a great deal of intensity. They represent, for me, all that is admirable and heroic, all that is honest and loveable, as well as the genuine passion and cameraderie one often feels the lack of, here. From their example and writings- from their very seeking and confusions, I've learned more about the purpose, depth and signicance of life on earth than from nearly any other source. When I found myself living in Europe for several months last Spring, my greatest desire, naturally, was to make pilgrimage to Munich, and attempt to see this city as these courageous fellow-students had seen it.
The fierceness of the emotions roused during the days I wandered with Rita through Munich and Ulm, attempting to retrace the steps of the Scholls, was unsettling. I was haunted by a sense of physical and spiritual closeness to the student movement, awed to walk among streets and buildings which I'd scrutinised in photographs, dreamed of, and reconstructed in imagination for years. I was moved to tears as though the events of sixty years ago had taken place only yesterday. Those days in Munich were fraught with joy and anguish. I understand now why Catholics kneel before their saints. In homage, regret, and gratitude, my heart too weighed me to my knees. There was at times a strange, primitive desire to kiss the very cobbles of the streets. I seemed to encounter the students of the 1940's at every corner- every new sight, and my heart gave a great leap: 'They too saw this- walked by this arch, paused by this church, strode through this courtyard to their classrooms!'
It was with a sort of dread that I at last left this world of the living students and took the train across town to the prison and cemetery where they, and so many others of that generation, lost their lives. I was unprepared for the overwhelming physical proximity of these 'imaginary friends' of my childhood, and with their harsh end. When at last I found myself before the three crosses bordered in shrubbery, I was dumb with the ache and solemnity of the moment, kneeling beside this so dearly beloved little group, and encountering them irrevocably as physical entities as much as symbol.
And it came upon me with strangeness as I knelt there, trembling in tenderness and grief before the grave of my long cherished ideal, that here indeed lay the end of the story, the culmination of my years-long quest. Tears slid and stung- sixty years ago youth, integrity, and beauty were flung here faceless and bleeding, flung here carelessly as seeds, each in their own narrow furrow torn from the suffering German soil. In this twilit forest, Sophie was no longer the laughing, eager girl, the tree-climber, nature lover, the artist, brow wrinkled in concentration, who had led me like an older sister and patron saint through my young womanhood.
Hans, here, was a pitiful remnant of bone- gone was the tall and keen-eyed young man, fierce and piercing in his hawk-like intensity, his life and passion and thought.
Hans, here, was a pitiful remnant of bone- gone was the tall and keen-eyed young man, fierce and piercing in his hawk-like intensity, his life and passion and thought.
Christoph, gentle Chris, marveling at the mountains, carrying his baby son on his shoulders, cherishing his soft young wife, her belly round with his second child, was stripped here of motion, even of flesh.
Feckless Alex with his Russian songs and stories and his sketch pad- hair falling over his forehead, rakish smile clamped around his pipe, charm twinkling ephemerally even from photos- Alex here was nothing.
Earnest, conscientious Willi here was nothing.
Limping, brilliant Dr. Huber here was nothing.
The upheaved German soil had covered all here indiscriminately- the blood of these eager hearts, and, more terrible than blood, the merciless, anguished tears torn from the hearts which lingered after them.
And this was the end of the story.
I will be 22 in October, but Sophie, my darling Sophie, lies halted here forever at 21. And yet, 'The sun still shines.' The April sun trembles softly across the Perlacher-Friedholm, the pitiful mounds of soil lined up in neat rows along the silent earth.
This is the end of the story, and yet, it is a story without end.
This story cannot end, because what these students and their friends represented is not a thing which can be killed, which can wither away into nothingness in the darkness of a cemetery. Those who live ideas intensely- who make ideas the master of their bodies rather than servants of them- such as these, who never stooped to live merely as bodies cannot be reduced to mere bodies in death. To live one's life in the burning core of an idea is to live on as an idea eternally. To live the truth is to live without end within the truth.
Within the truth then, the White Rose lives timelessly. Sophie did not speak lightly when she declared in prison, 'God is my refuge into eternity'. I have come to this cemetery in my quest for these dear friends, and I have not found them, though at last, after so many years of yearning, I stand physically beside them. I have sought the living among the dead. They are not here. They are not here.
My heart is as light in this moment as it is broken. These young lives were discarded here like unwanted seed tossed into the war-torn earth, and look- the seeds have sprung up into life- look, my heart, the dry husks have burst out verdantly as flowers and fragrance- Oh, look, look! Because a little cluster of children laid down their lives in defiant love, un-terrified and self-forgetting love during years of terror and hatred, and now the world is in a tumult of blossoms- the world, the anguished old world is a-bloom with white roses.
My heart is as light in this moment as it is broken. These young lives were discarded here like unwanted seed tossed into the war-torn earth, and look- the seeds have sprung up into life- look, my heart, the dry husks have burst out verdantly as flowers and fragrance- Oh, look, look! Because a little cluster of children laid down their lives in defiant love, un-terrified and self-forgetting love during years of terror and hatred, and now the world is in a tumult of blossoms- the world, the anguished old world is a-bloom with white roses.
Whatever is fine in Germany, whatever is fine, and lovely, and noble in humanity- whatever is honorable, and whatever is strong and vital, I have found it here, and can carry it away with me, conscious of new life and endurance. And Sophie, Hans, Christoph, Alex, all you others who have shown me with such passion how to live and die in integrity, I have not forgotten- and I am grateful.
"Isn't it a riddle . . . and awe-inspiring, that everything is so beautiful? Despite the horror. Lately I've noticed something grand and mysterious peering through my sheer joy in all that is beautiful, a sense of its creator . . . Only man can be truly ugly, because he has the free will to estrange himself from this song of praise.
It often seems that he'll manage to drown out this hymn with his cannon thunder, curses and blasphemy. But during this past spring it has dawned upon me that he won't be able to do this. And so I want to try and throw myself on the side of the victor."
It often seems that he'll manage to drown out this hymn with his cannon thunder, curses and blasphemy. But during this past spring it has dawned upon me that he won't be able to do this. And so I want to try and throw myself on the side of the victor."
-Sophie Scholl
(*If you want to know more of the (magnificent) story of these young people, what they accomplished, and the deep faith and convictions which motivated, them, I recomment Hermann Vinke's biograpy 'The Short Life of Sophie Scholl', 'The White Rose' by Sophie's younger sister, Inge Scholl, and, certainly 'At the Heart of the White Rose: Letters and Diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl' by Inge Jens.)
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