Category Archives: Notable Quotes

Marilynne Robinson on Poetry and Religion


Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson (The Death of Adam) reviews Harold Bloom’s new anthology American Religious Poems in the May 2007 issue of Poetry magazine. The book itself is merely the jumping-off point for an eloquent, original essay on how poetry and religion both need and exceed the boundaries of rational analysis. Some highlights:


Any reader of Ecclesiastes or the Book of Job is aware that the canon of scripture has room for thought that can disrupt conventional assumptions about the nature of belief, whether these assumptions are held by the religious or by their critics. Indeed, religion is by nature restless with itself, impatient within the constraints of its own expression….Any writer who has wearied of words knows the feeling of being limited by the very things that enable. To associate religion with unwavering faith in any creed or practice does no justice at all to its complexity as lived experience. Creeds themselves exist to stabilize the intense speculations that religion, which is always about the ultimate nature of things, will inspire….

There is every reason to turn to poetry in order to acquire a sense of the nature of religion. The two seem always to have been intimately linked. This deep and ancient affinity cannot be accidental. One does not “understand” what Aeschylus or Isaiah wrote, because poetry is not, in the ordinary sense, “understood.” If it is great, it is lived with over time by individuals and civilizations, interpreted again and again in its impact on language and thought and the arts, and on all those souls who are sensitive to its pleasures and sufficiencies. In just the same way, religion is not to be “understood.”

Again, poetry is best interpreted by poetry. William Carlos Williams tells us vastly more about Walt Whitman than the whole tribe of his critics and biographers can hope to tell us. Whitman made Emerson far greater than Emerson was on his own. Perhaps Sophocles did as much for Homer. Likewise, to the exasperation of those rationalists who wish they would just say what they mean, religions interpret themselves in religious terms. If the Gospel of Luke doesn’t make sense to you, Augustine and Luther won’t either. Those who look into this anthology are likelier than others to have some experience of poetry and to recognize the inadequacies of interpretation and paraphrase. But religion, not only in America, has been seriously distracted by the supposed need to translate itself into terms a rationalist would find meaningful. So liberals have set out upon a long, earnest project more or less equivalent to rewriting Shakespeare into words of one syllable—if such a thing can be imagined as an effort fired by moral passion and carried out by people who would themselves confess to a deep affection for Shakespeare. Fundamentalists have responded with a furious rejection of the very thought that the Bible might operate at the level of poetry, which amounts to a literalist insistence that the text is already available to understanding in the rationalists’ own terms and which yields endless futile controversy, notably about creation. This collaboration of supposed antagonists, liberals, and fundamentalists has meant that, for the moment, religion and poetry seem alien to one another as, historically, they have never been.

But the problem of paraphrase is deeper yet. Anyone, asked to give an account of her or his deepest beliefs, will experience embarrassment and difficulty. This is true because of the way belief lives in experience. By analogy, it is impossible to know how many nuances and associations a given word has until they are discovered in the use of the word, or in the recognition of a novel inflection given the word by another speaker. Even the most familiar words exist in us in a field of potentiality to which paraphrase can never be adequate. What but poetry could arrive at Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “the the”? On the same grounds, the expectation that a straightforward account can be made of any system of belief is naive, and attempts to accommodate the expectation are also naive. This is not to say that religion is closed against the inquirer. No more is poetry. However, like mathematics and music, they must be approached in terms that are appropriate to them. If the individualism and pluralism of American culture have indeed been especially friendly to the flourishing of religion, perhaps this is true because they discourage blanket statements about religious belief, which are always inadequate and disheartening.

Read the whole essay here.

Chabad Meditations: God in Exile


Chabad.org today sent me this “Daily Dose” from the writings of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem M. Schneersohn, as translated by Tzvi Freeman:


They have banished G-d into exile.

They have decreed He is too holy, too transcendent to belong in our world. They have determined He does not belong within the ordinary, in the daily run of things.

And so they have driven Him out of His garden, to the realm of prayer and meditation, to the sanctuaries and the secluded places of hermits. They have sentenced the Creator to exile and His creation they have locked in a dark, cold prison.

And He pleads, “Let me come back to my garden, to the place in which I found delight when it all began.”

Archbishop Rowan Williams on Hearing the Bible in Community


Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, gave a lecture this week in Toronto entitled “The Bible Today: Hearing and Reading” which argues convincingly that Biblical interpretation must be reconnected to the church’s communal life.

This was also the dominant theme of the Wheaton conference on the ancient church fathers that I attended last week. As in the Archbishop’s lecture, the speakers there, who belonged to Catholic, Orthodox, and a variety of Protestant denominations, agreed that modern Christianity (especially Protestantism) has developed an overly rationalist and individualist approach to the Bible, isolating theological arguments from their real-world proving ground, namely the church’s sacramental worship, mutual care and service to the community. I’ll be blogging about their specific insights over the next few days. Meanwhile, here is the Archbishop, displaying the intellectual sophistication and generosity of vision that I associate with the Anglican tradition at its best. Boldface emphases are my own addition:

Not even the most tradition-bound and hierarchical Christian community has ever seriously argued that the authority of the contemporary hierarchy can wholly displace the reading of Scripture, or that the language of scripture is anything but finally normative in some sense for the community. And even the most ideologically insistent liberal is unlikely to argue that Scripture can be relegated entirely to the level of illustrative historical material about the remote beginnings of the faith (though the last century has seen a repeated swing in that direction, even if it has never quite got to that point of blunt denial). In what follows, I don’t intend to offer a novel theory of inspiration, or a set of tools that will finally settle the current debates over interpretation within and between the churches; my aim is a very modest one, to examine the practice of reading the Bible so as to tease out some of what it tells us about the nature of Christian identity itself. Because some of our present difficulties are, at the very least, compounded by the collision of theologically inept or rootless accounts of Scripture, and it seems imperative to work at a genuine theology of the Bible as the sacred literature of the Church. Popular appeals to the obvious leave us battling in the dark; and the obvious – not surprisingly – looks radically different to different people. For many, it is obvious that a claim to the effect that Scripture is ‘God’s Word written’ implies a particular set of beliefs about the Bible’s inerrancy. For others, it is equally obvious that, if you are not that savage and menacing beast called a ‘fundamentalist’, you are bound to see the Bible as a text of its time, instructive, even sporadically inspiring, but subject to rethinking in the light of our more advanced position. As I hope will become evident, I regard such positions as examples of the rootlessness that afflicts our use of the Bible; and I hope that these reflections may suggest a few ways of reconnecting with a more serious theological grasp of the Church’s relation with Scripture.

To begin with the simplest point: before Scripture is read in private, it is heard in public. Those of us who assume that the normative image of Scripture reading is the solitary individual poring over a bound volume, one of the great icons of classical Protestantism, may need to be reminded that for most Christians throughout the ages and probably most in the world at present, the norm is listening. Very few early or mediaeval Christians could possibly have owned a Bible; not many in the rapidly growing churches of the developing world today are likely to either. And this underlines the fact that the Church’s public use of the Bible represents the Church as defined in some important way by listening: the community when it comes together doesn’t only break bread and reflect together and intercede, it silences itself to hear something. It represents itself in that moment as a community existing in response to a word of summons or invitation, to an act of communication that requires to be heard and answered.

So the Church in reading Scripture publicly says both (i) that it is not a self-generated reality, created simply out of human reflection and ideals, and (ii) that what is read needs to be read as a communicative act, – that is, not as information, not as just instruction, but as a summons to assemble together as a certain sort of community, one that understands itself as called and created ‘out of nothing’. Whatever we do in private with our reading of Scripture, we must do in awareness of this public character. The Church – a familiar enough point – is in the language of the Bible itself an ‘assembly’, a ‘convocation’: an ekklesia. It declares its basic character when it represents itself as listening to the act of ‘convoking’, calling together. From one (crucially important) point of view, the celebration of the Eucharist is that representation, the moment when all are equally and unequivocally designated as guests, responding to invitation. But, since the authoritative and defining patterns of Christian practice never reduce themselves to single and simple models, from another point of view, the hearing of the Bible is that representation. As I hope to suggest later, these two basic ways in which the Church says what it is cast a lot of light on each other….

Two principles emerge very directly from this, though they are not always stated clearly in the Church. The first is that when we are dealing with texts that are grammatically addressed to a specific audience, we are being asked to imagine that historically remote audience as not only continuous with us but in some sense one with us. Just as in Deuteronomy, there is an insistence that the words spoken at Sinai are being spoken ‘not to your forefathers’ but to ‘us’ here present today – to all those in the liturgical assembly at any moment in Israel’s history (Dt 5.2-5), so for the Christian –and the Jewish –believer. We, here and now, are incorporated in the audience. The second principle is that in dealing with texts that are not grammatically directed in this way, we are obliged to ask, ‘What does this text suggest or imply about the changes which reading it or hearing it might bring about?’ The Bible itself gives us a cardinal example of ‘texts’ – oral recitations in this case – clearly intended to effect change: the parables of Jesus. And the sort of change they envisage is the result of being forced to identify yourself within the world of the narrative, to recognise who you are or might be, how your situation is included in what the parable narrates.

These principles need a good deal of further filling out if we are to be able to apply them to some of the hardest interpretative cases, but they are significant and, I’d say, primary implications of the practice of hearing Scripture publicly. Both tell us that the ‘time’ in which we hear Scripture is not like ordinary time. We are contemporary with events remote in history; we are caught up in the time of recitation, when we are to reimagine ourselves. For this moment, we exist simply as listeners, suspending our questions while the question is put to us of how we are to speak afresh about ourselves. We stand at a point of origin, and, as listeners, our primary responsibility is to receive….

Among those skills we need to bring for receptivity is a capacity to think through what the initial relation between text and audience might be. I am not thinking primarily here of the way in which good critical scholarship elucidates such relations, though that is one of the underappreciated gifts of intellectual modernity – the enrichment of sheer historical imagination in ways barely accessible to most premodern readers and hearers. What I have in mind is a more basic matter, the capacity to read/hear enough to sense the directedness of a text. Fragmentary reading is highly risky to the extent that it abstracts from what various hermeneutical theorists (Ricoeur above all) have thought of as the world ‘in front of the text’ – the specific needs that shape the movement and emphasis of the text itself. Elements in that text may be valid and significant, but yet be capable of partial and even distorting use if not seen as part of a rhetorical process or argument. It is always worth asking, ‘What is the text as a full unit trying not to say or to deny?’

Two contentious examples. The first of them is, as we shall see, of more than accidental importance in understanding certain things about Scripture as a whole, but I choose it because of its frequent use in modern debates about relations between faith communities. Jesus says in the Farewell Discourses of John’s Gospel that ‘no-one comes to the Father except by me’. As an isolated text, this is regularly used to insist that salvation depends upon explicit confession of Christ, and so as a refutation of any attempt to create a more ‘in
clusive’ theology of interfaith relations. But the words come at the end of a typically dense and compressed piece of exposition. Jesus has, at the end of ch.13, explained that the disciples cannot follow him now; he goes ahead to prepare a place. Thus, he creates the path to the Father that the disciples must follow; they know the path already in the sense that they know him. And this knowledge of him, expressed in the mutual love that he has made possible (13.34-5), will carry them through the devastation of absence and not-knowing which will follow the crucifixion. Seeing and knowing Jesus as he goes towards his death in the perfection of his ‘love for his own’ is already in some way a knowing of the Father as that goal towards which the self-giving of Jesus in life and death is directed. The Father is not to be known apart from this knowledge of Jesus.

Now this certainly does not suggest in any direct way a more inclusive approach to other faiths. But the point is that the actual question being asked is not about the fate of non-Christians; it is about how the disciples are to understand the death of Jesus as the necessary clearing of the way which they are to walk. If they are devastated and left desolate by his death, they have not grasped that it is itself the opening of a way which would otherwise remain closed to them. Thus it is part of the theology of the cross that is evolving throughout the later chapters of John, the mapping out of a revelation of glory through self-forgetting and self-offering. The text in question indeed states that there is no way to the Father except in virtue of what Jesus does and suffers; but precisely because that defines the way we must then follow, it is (to say the least) paradoxical if it is used as a simple self-affirmation for the exclusive claim of the Christian institution or the Christian system. There is, in other words, a way of affirming the necessity of Christ’s crucified mediation that has the effect of undermining the very way it is supposed to operate. If we ask what the question is that the passage overall poses, or what the change is that needs to be taking place over the time of the passage’s narration, it is about the move from desolation in the face of the cross (Jesus’ cross and the implicit demand for the disciple to carry the cross also) to confidence that the process is the work of love coming from and leading to the Father….

As I have said, this does nothing to settle the exegetical questions fiercely debated at the moment. But I want to stress that what I am trying to define as a strictly theological reading of Scripture, a reading in which the present community is made contemporary with the world in front of the text, is bound to give priority to the question that the text specifically puts and to ask how the movement, the transition, worked for within the text is to be realised in the contemporary reading community. To move too rapidly to the use of the text to make a general point which does not require the reader to be converted is to step outside what I have been calling the time of the text, the process by which it shapes its question. It is to make the text more passive than active, and so to move away from the stance of the listener, from the stance of the Church as trying to be still enough to hear and free enough to respond to God’s summons to be his community….

A written text inevitably has about it a dual character. It comes before the reader/hearer as a finished product, and so as something that can in some ways be treated as an object. If we are not careful its written character can be misused by working with the text as if it were passive. In contrast to the event of a voice speaking, it can be abstracted from the single occasion when the hearer has no control over what comes to her or him from outside. At the same time, a written text requires re-reading; it is never read for the last time, and it continuously generates new events of interpretation. It is fruitful of renewed communication in a way that the spoken word alone cannot be. So to identify a written text as sacred is to claim that the continuous possibility of re-reading, the impossibility of reading for the last time, is a continuous openness to the intention of God to communicate. Just as the text itself contains re-reading, is almost constituted by re-reading, so that it repeatedly recreates a movement towards conversion (towards the cross of Jesus, in Christian terms), so the eternal possibility of ‘reading again’ stands as a warning against ignoring the active ‘restlessness’ of the text in summoning the reader to change. The writtenness of the text is from one point of view risky as a strategy of communication: it risks the appearance of passivity, and the re-readability of the text risks the appearance of indeterminacy. Yet from another point of view it can be seen as inseparable from the risk of the communication it itself describes as well as enacts – a divine communication that is never without human speech and narrative, never just an interruption of the created continuum but a pressure upon it that opens up to the divine by the character of its internal relations and connections, the shifting, penitent perspective of a story enacted in time. The writtenness of the text is like the sheer factuality of the historical past as the vehicle of revelation: it is something irreversibly done, but for that very reason continuously inviting or demanding….

We noted earlier that the celebration of the Eucharist and the reading of the Bible are the most universal ways in which the Church ‘represents’ what it is; and both sow the Church as a community committed to listening afresh to its foundational call. The gathering of the assembly for worship is not simply a human routine, however much it may come to look like that. It is, theologically speaking, a moment in which the present activity of God is assumed and responded to.

But to read Scripture in the context of the Eucharist – which has been from the beginning of the Church the primary place for it – is to say that the Word of God that acts in the Bible is a Word directed towards those changes that bring about the Eucharistic community. The summons to the reader/hearer is to involvement in the Body of Christ, the agent of the Kingdom, as we have seen; and that Body is what is constituted and maintained by the breaking of bread and all that this means. For Paul, exploring it in I Corinthians, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is strictly bound up with the central character of the community: what is shown in the Eucharist is a community of interdependence and penitent self-awareness, discovering the dangers of partisan self-assertion or uncritical reproduction of the relations of power and status that prevail in the society around. So if Scripture is to be heard as summons or invitation before all else, this is what it is a summons to. And the reading and understanding of the text must be pursued in this light. We ask what change is envisaged or required in the ‘time’ of any passage of Scripture; and now we can add that whatever change that is in particular, it must make sense in the context of the formation of this kind of community – the Eucharistic Body.

Take Scripture out of this context of the invitation to sit at table with Jesus and to be incorporated into his labour and suffering for the Kingdom, and you will be treating Scripture as either simply an inspired supernatural guide for individual conduct or a piece of detached historical record – the typical exaggerations of Biblicist and liberal approaches respectively. For the former, the work of the Spirit is more or less restricted to the transformation of the particular believer; for the latter, the life of the community is where the Spirit is primarily to be heard and discerned, with Scripture an illuminating adjunct at certain points. But grasp Scripture as part of the form taken by the divine act of invitation that summons and establishes the co
mmunity around the Lord’s Table, and the Bible becomes coherent at a new level, as a text whose meaning is most centrally to do with the passage from rivalry and self-assertion and the enmity with God that is bound up with these to the community in which each, by the influx of the Spirit, takes responsibility for all, and all for each. The context of the Eucharist, in which everyone present is there simply because they are guests by the free generosity of the host, obliges a reading of Scripture in which what is decisive is always this shared dependence on God’s initiative of welcome which removes pride and fear.

But equally, take Scripture out of the Eucharistic context and the Eucharist itself becomes different. Without this anchorage in the history of God’s creative welcome as slowly and painfully spelled out in the history of Israel and Jesus, the Eucharist can more readily be distorted into a celebration of what the community now senses itself to be or to have achieved. It is robbed of the analogy that makes it contemporary with the founding act – what you might call the ‘Deuteronomic analogy’, thinking back to the text from Deut.5 discussed earlier (‘Not to your forefathers…’),and so does not see itself as formed by a divine communication that is in fact conveyed through human history, through the record of faithful and unfaithful response. If the Eucharist is properly a covenant meal, as the founding text declares, it presupposes a connectedness with the history of the covenant people; it always has (setting aside for a moment the debates over whether the Last Supper was historically a Passover meal) a Passover dimension.

Thus Eucharist and Scripture need to be held together if we are to have an adequate theology of either. The Eucharist is the primary locus of the listening Church, the place where it shows itself to be there in response to the call of God; and the Scripture that embodies that call has to be read as leading to precisely this point, the existence of a community that embodies Christ and does so by reflecting his kenotic act. And as I have hinted already, this must be anchored clearly in a theology of the Spirit, which holds the two themes together. The Spirit, according to John’s gospel, is the remembrancer, the divine agency that makes the words of Christ contemporary. It is the Spirit that incorporates us into one community with the disciples at the Last Supper and indeed with the Deuteronomically imagined people of Israel. It is the Spirit that enables the mutual self-offering that builds up the Body and that unites the members in the prayer of the glorified Christ. It is the Spirit that connects the periods of God’s communicative action towards humanity and thus connects the diverse texts that make up the one manifold text that we call Holy Scripture. The Spirit’s work as ‘breathing’ God’s wisdom into the text of Scripture is not a magical process that removes biblical writing from the realm of actual human writing; it is the work of creating one ‘movement’ out of the diverse historical narratives and textual deposits that represent Israel’s and the Church’s efforts to find words to communicate God’s communication of summons and invitation. The Spirit through the events of God’s initiative stirs up those words and makes sense of them for the reader/hearer in the Spirit-sustained community. As Karl Barth insisted, this leaves no ground for breaking up Scripture into the parts we can ‘approve’ as God-inspired and the parts that are merely human; the whole is human and the whole is offered by God in and through the life of the Body, always shaping and determining the form of that life.

The Spirit in the New Testament, not least in the Johannine tradition, is associated in its fullness with the resurrection of Jesus; and my final point is to note the way in which Eucharist and Scripture alike have to be considered in relation to belief in the resurrection. The Eucharist itself is generally recognised as, among other things, a continuation of Jesus’ meal-fellowship with the marginal and disreputable in Israel; by this fellowship, he declares a new way of being Israel that will not restrict membership to those who can satisfy conditions but will be open to all who are ready to be welcomed by him in the name of Israel’s God. The eucharistic encounter is with the Christ who is still today actively defining the people of God simply by his invitation. Seen like this, the eucharist is not the memorial of past meals with Jesus but the reality of contemporary response to his hospitality – a hospitality once and for all established as indestructible by the cross and the resurrection, so that what was done in the ministry of Jesus in Galilee and Jerusalem is done constantly in the history of the Church.

But to say that Christ’s transforming hospitality is renewed constantly in this history is also to say that Christ continues to speak in and to the community. The community exists because of God’s act of communication, as we have seen repeatedly; the resurrection is the persistence of that act. Without belief in the resurrection, our understanding of Scripture is going to be deficient at best. If it is not the present vehicle of God speaking in the risen Christ, it is a record only of God speaking to others. For it to be an address that works directly upon self and community now, it must be given to us as the continuation of the same act, the re-presenting and re-enacting of the same scriptural reality of invitation and the creation of a people defined by justice, mutual service and the liberty to relate to God as Father and faithful partner.
Read the whole lecture here.

Book Notes: Jesus Mean and Wild


Christianity Today managing editor Mark Galli’s lively, challenging book Jesus Mean and Wild: The Unexpected Love of an Untamable God explores the many gospel passages where Jesus breaks out of the sentimental “meek and mild” model that we mistake for love. Every era has its characteristic blind spots about Scripture, such as the Victorian missionaries’ connection to an imperialism that clashed with Christian ethics. Ours is believing that love and judgment are opposed. If Jesus is love, we conclude he must have been ever-patient, ever-kind, undemanding, never criticizing sinners. To his credit, Galli recognizes that unskillful shame-based religious leaders and communities bear some of the blame for this over-correction.

In a succession of chapters exploring passages from Mark’s gospel where Jesus is anything but “nice,” Galli shows how the qualities of Jesus’ love that seem so fearsome — impatience, harsh criticism, radical ethical demands — are really the qualities that make his love life-transforming and effective against evil. Galli is a dialectical and dynamic thinker, holding opposite principles in tension rather than exalting one over the other, in a way that seems faithful to the multifaceted nature of Jesus in the Bible. He reasons clearly, while recognizing the inability of theological reasoning alone to show us how to balance competing values in any given situation.

As this book reminds us, an advantage of faith over secular philosophy is that we need not (in fact, should not) solve these problems on our own. We are not adrift between the Scylla of rigid legalism and the Charybdis of ethical chaos. We can ask God for personal guidance in applying the complex messages of the Bible to our lives. Galli writes, “Prayer is a mysterious, unfathomable, intense conversation with the Father, who will not give us formulas and principles but will give us himself.”

In prayer, Jesus discovered how to give of himself more selflessly than most of us can imagine doing, yet also to move on from towns where there were many invalids still to be healed, so that he could follow his call to ministry elsewhere. The Jesus of the gospels is neither heartless nor a doormat, but we might become either one if we turn one polarity of his character into an abstract rule — if we want to be right, for certain and by our own power, rather than to be led by the Spirit.

The discussion of prayer is a small part of Galli’s book, but it made a big impression on me. It helped me see what Christians mean when they talk about letting the Holy Spirit open the words of Scripture to you. I had been reading the Bible as an ordinary book and trying to perceive with my intellect whether it was divinely inspired. In other words, there was only one person in the conversation, me. The only alternative I could see was “believing” the propositions I thought I found there, whether they made sense to me or not. However, this just seemed like another one-sided conversation, only the speaker was the anonymous writer of the Bible pasage. What gave another mortal such authority over my conscience? Now, I’m hoping to discover a third way, one that begins with listening to God, and letting go of some of my fears of “getting it wrong” due to my lack of Christian education. (Of course, I’d have to make time to read the Bible first…how many months do I have left on that New Year’s resolution?)

From the edgy typeface and crown-of-thorns motif on the cover, I suspect that Galli’s book is especially aimed at Christian men (perhaps the same ones who bought John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart) who find the rosy-cheeked blond Jesus of modern devotional art to be just a little too passive, too unheroic, too…girly-man. Is the evangelical anxiety about homosexuality (nearly always male homosexuality, though conservative magazines occasionally run nutty articles about rampant lesbianism among high school soccer players) partly due to Christian men’s feeling that their religion is already dangerously emasculating? Galli has done his male readers a service by depicting a Jesus who uses authority and aggression in the service of love, who is unpredictable, who takes risks and asks us to do the same.

The passage I quote below, from a chapter titled “The Joy of Unfulfilled Desire,” particularly spoke to issues I’m confronting as I write my novel. So much of sexual sin arises from a misplaced desire for transcendence, seeking to exceed or submerge the self in the other. While lust leads to idolatry and commodification when it’s separated from an unselfish commitment to the beloved in her full personhood, the false freedom of promiscuity nonetheless points to the truth that something of the soul’s longing is left over even in the most fulfilling marriages. Without meaning to, I’ve gotten one of my fictional characters into such a predicament that even his boyfriend’s unselfish love can’t save him: he needs the gospel, good and hard. And I, in the so-called real world, am looking for a church where he’ll get it.

But now back to Galli. Reflecting on why Jesus masked his messages in parables, he writes:


The gospel has an element of mystery, no matter who is at the receiving end. For those with hardened hearts, the mystery remains impenetrable. For those who seek out Jesus for an explanation, some of the mystery is removed — and at the same time, more mystery is encountered….(p.103)

That our questions will remain unanswered and our longings unfulfilled is precisely the glorious nature of heaven. We are finite beings who are limited in knowledge, in space, and by time….But here is where we differ from the rest of the created order: God has placed eternity in our hearts (Eccles. 3:11)….(p.104)

This eternity in our hearts often frustrates us to such a degree that we take shortcuts to bridge the gap between our longing and its fulfillment. This is one way to define original sin. Adam and Eve felt they could not live with finite knowledge, and so they reached out for the knowledge of good and evil by eating of the very tree that God forbade. And with that one act, they became aware even more acutely of the gap between the eternity in their hearts and the finiteness of their nature. This in turn made them want all the more to close that gap prematurely….

All sins are in one sense an attempt to fulfill a genuine, righteous longing, but in a way that is inappropriate. Augustine talks about this in his Confessions: “The soul commits fornication when she is turned from thee, and seeks apart from thee what she cannot find pure and untainted until she returns to thee.” He then goes on to ask what the godly thing was he desired when he infamously stole a pear from a farmer’s field. He finally concludes that he was seeking freedom “to rebel against thy law…so that, even as a captive, I might produce a sort of counterfeit liberty.”

As material beings, we want to enjoy the material blessings of this earth. We also long for sexual intimacy. We want to be respected and honored. Most of all, we want to know and be known by our Creator and to please him. But there are inappropriate ways to satisfy righteous longings, and since the time of Moses these inappropriate means have been given names: adultery, coveting, idolatry, and so forth.

But — and this is crucial — it isn’t as if there is a righteous way to find complete fulfillment of any of our holy longings. To be sure, marriage is a wonderful place to attain a degree of sexual intimacy. Honesty and hard work are the divinely appointed means for earning and enjoying material blessings. Authentic worship of the invisible God is the path to a deeper relationship with him. Yes, God will give to those who seek, knock, and ask; he will fulfill our longings for wisdom and love — but only up to a point.

To be human is to be finite and to have eternity placed in our hearts, which means we know that we will forever exist as finite beings, with infinity — that is, perfect fulfillment of all our longings — just out of reach.

There is only one being for whom all longings have been completely fulfilled (so to speak), so much so that we say he is a being who has no needs. We are decidedly not that being, and we never will be. We will always, forever even in the kingdom, long for more.

Yet — and this is also crucial — this is not a frustrated longing, but an infatuated longing. When a young man and woman fall in love, they have found another person who suddenly fascinates them. This woman is the first person I think of when I wake up and the last person I think of before going to sleep. I relish every minute I spend with her. I ask her all sorts of questions about her life, her interests, her passions. The more I know, the more I realize I don’t know, and my fascination becomes even more intense. When we fall out of love — out of this giddy, wonderful period — it’s partly because we run out of energy to be continually fascinated. And we become bored and selfish and a host of other things. But the experience returns now and then throughout marriage, and it is this experience that reflects, I believe, the type of experience we’ll have with God for eternity: an endless falling in love, an endless fascination, an endless pursuing of the mystery of God — and the fact that we are never fully satisfied is precisely one reason we’ll find the kingdom of heaven such a joy. (pp.104-06)

This is good news to me as an artist: I couldn’t enjoy a heaven without creativity, where every satisfaction was already complete. Or a heaven without sadness, perhaps not the horror of depression but the pleasant sadness of a rainy day, the darkness of fear and danger that is the flip side of desire. Christian art would be much better if it were less afraid of what Henry Vaughan called the “deep and dazzling darkness” of God, the absence He gives us so that our hearts will be stirred to seek Him.

Erin McKnight: “Absolution”


Erin McKnight, assistant editor at the literary e-zine The Rose & Thorn, has a beautiful essay in their Spring 2007 issue about her coal-mining ancestors:


I have greedy eyes. They scan photographs hungrily, brown irises flaring while trying to determine whether an unusual color or angle is new. When they realize that what they have found is something they’ve seen before, something that belongs in the picture, they drop back into shallow pools. These eyes don’t look; these eyes search.

When they move across the photo taken on the day of my Christening, they hunt for what they can’t see. They register the flush of youth on my parents’ cheeks, the creased gown shrouding my new body, and the cake with buttery layers promising to announce my entry into the world, but they aren’t finding what matters. Tucked into corners, and folded behind furniture are people in shadow. I suppose it doesn’t matter that I can’t see their faces, because I wouldn’t recognize them if I could. I like to imagine there would be a fuzzy sense of familiarity, but I know better than to believe we’d look alike. For the visitors in this photo all that matters is their sense of purpose, which I know is to claim me.

On this day, they pressed a stain of black into the soft skin on my forehead. I know it now to be an ‘x,’ because there’s nothing else this mark can be. It reminds me of the greasy cross I received each year as a child on Ash Wednesday. This sign transformed me for the duration of its wear and even now, privilege and responsibility smell to me like heavy incense and palm ashes.

The ‘x’ is thick and heavy in its certainty. No delicate lines form my obligation to them. Perhaps the shape lies so deep because its outline was traced numerous times by their dirty fingers. I choose to believe, however, that in death they no longer feared their own hands, and found the confidence to push into my flesh.

They made this ‘x’ with coal––the ink that has stained generations of Scottish bodies––when they smeared their signatures across my head….

Read the whole essay here.

The Cross Is Only the Beginning


In this week’s free email newsletter from Relevant Magazine, web editor Jesse Carey asks why Christian iconography puts so much emphasis on the cross, a symbol of death, when our faith is about new life. Carey suggests that understanding sin and punishment comes naturally to us, whereas God’s grace exceeds the bounds of logic and human control:


[I]n a way, the crucifixion makes sense. For most people, judgment is logical. Death is inescapable. Witnessing a man die only takes observation. Believing He rose from a tomb requires faith. Maybe the reason many Christians seem to embrace the crucifixion and put little emphasis on the resurrection is because Jesus dying on the cross makes more sense than Him coming out of the grave.

G.K. Chesterton said in Orthodoxy, “Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom…Such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner, frequently a successful reasoner.” Chesterton makes it clear earlier in this work that he is not attacking reason, but a reliance on logic can counter the idea of faith. In other words, it is easy to make sense of the crucifixion; it is something that we can feel guilty for. Our sin put Christ on the cross. We are responsible for His death. But the gift of eternal life (which is represented by the resurrection) defies logic.

Christ rising after death grants believers the gift of eternal life, eternal life that we don’t deserve, that we didn’t earn. It is only granted by God’s grace. Trying to logically reason through the idea of grace is what would turn Chesterton’s mathematician into a madman. There is no formula for grace; we did nothing to earn it. God loved us, so Christ died and rose so we could live. After we accept His sacrifice, we owe Him nothing in return. It is poetic; it is a loving Father’s gift that can’t be figured out. Christianity is not based on works; it is based on grace, and it’s that grace that takes faith.

Amen!

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be enjoying four blessed computer-free days at Wheaton College’s “Ancient Faith for the Church’s Future” conference on the early church fathers. Coming up next: quotes from Mark Galli’s Jesus Mean and Wild; more favorite poems; “Saving Jesus” Episode 11 (and why there won’t be an Episode 12). Meanwhile, in the tradition of the sitcom “clips episode”, enjoy these posts from the recent past:


George Herbert: “The Dawning”


Same-Sex Love and the Bible

Learning From Art’s Flaws

Christians Writing and Reading the Forbidden

N.T. Wright on the Redemption of the Whole Cosmos


“Where the New Age has made its greatest inroads has been, I think, at the points where the church has allowed itself to slip into the prevailing dualism, with a distant god and a negative attitude towards creation (including one’s own personal bit of creation, that is, one’s body). The New Age offers a sudden and exciting reversal of this: creation, including oneself, is divine. Paul’s gospel offers the reality of which this is the parody. Creation is not God, but God has made it to reflect his own beauty and, ultimately, to share the freedom of the glory of his children. Human beings are not divine, but they are designed to reflect his own image, and to be filled with his own Spirit…

“In particular, the Pauline redefinition of God included, as we saw, the redefinition of the righteousness of God… (In Romans 8) Paul outlines and celebrates the hope that one day the entire cosmos will have its own great exodus, its liberation from bondage to decay. The point is this: the covenant between God and Israel was always designed to be God’s means of saving the whole world. It was never supposed to be the means whereby God would have a private group of people who would be saved while the rest of the world went to hell (whatever you might mean by that) Thus, when God is faithful to the covenant in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and in the work of the Spirit, it makes nonsense of the Pauline gospel to imagine that the be-all and end-all of this operation is so that God can have another, merely different, private little group of people who are saved while the world is consigned to the cosmic waste-paper basket. It is not insignificant that the critical passages at this point, the middle of Romans 8 and the middle of 1 Corinthians 15, have themselves often been consigned to a kind of exegetical and theological limbo, with Protestant exegesis in particular appearing quite unsure what to do with them.

“I suggest, in fact, that we should be prepared to think through the question of justice—God’s justice for the world, in the eventual future, and anticipated in the present—as part of the theme of what we cal the righteousness of God. The word dikaiosune, after all, can just as easily be translated ‘justice’ as ‘righteousness’. If it is true that God intends to renew the whole cosmos through Christ and by the Spirit—and if that isn’t true then Paul is indeed talking nonsense in Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15—then, just as the holiness of Christian living in the present is a proper, albeit partial, fitful and puzzling, anticipation of the future life of the resurrection, so acts of justice, mercy and peace in the present are proper, albeit inevitably partial, fitful and puzzling anticipations of God’s eventual design. They are not lost or wasted; they are not, in the old caricature, a matter of oiling the wheels of a machine that is about to run over a cliff. They are signs of hope for a world that groans in travail, waiting for its promised liberation.

“When we explore God’s righteousness to its very end, it reveals (as we saw) the love of God—the creator’s love for the cosmos he has made, and his determination to remake it through the victory of Christ over the powers that deface and distort it. God intends to flood creation with his own love, until the earth is filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. If the gospel reveals the righteousness of God, and if the church is commanded and authorized to announce that gospel, it cannot rest content—for exegetical as well as theological reasons—with anything less than this complete vision. And it cannot therefore rest content while injustice, oppression and violence stalk God’s world. After all, Christians are commanded to bring one small piece of creation—their own bodies—into obedience to the healing love of God in Christ. Christians are to live in the present in the light of what God intends us to be in the future. That, as we saw, is what holiness is all about. How can we then not apply the same point to the whole of creation?”


      — from What Saint Paul Really Said (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997), pp.162-64

Good Friday Meditations: Stations of the Cross


In the Catholic church that I attended this afternoon for a re-enactment of the Stations of the Cross (the episodes of the Passion story from Jesus’ death sentence to his burial), the priest and lector read these amazing reflections by Mother M. Angelica, P.C.P.A., which can be found on the website of the Christian network EWTN. I encourage my readers to seek out the full text; below, I quote some passages that were especially meaningful to me:


The Second Station: Jesus Carries His Cross

How could any human impose such a burden upon Your torn and bleeding body, Lord Jesus? Each movement of the cross drove the thorns deeper into Your Head. How did You keep the hatred from welling up in Your Heart? How did the injustice of it all not ruffle your peace? The Father’s Will was hard on You – Why do I complain when it is hard on me?

…My worldly concept is that suffering, like food, should be shared equally. How ridiculous I am, dear Lord. Just as we do not all need the same amount of material food, neither do we need the same amount of spiritual food and that is what the cross is in my life, isn’t it – spiritual food proportional to my needs.

****

The Third Station: Jesus Falls the First Time

My Jesus, it seems to me, that as God, You would have carried Your cross without faltering, but You did not. You fell beneath its weight to show me You understand when I fall. Is it pride that makes me want to shine even in pain? You were not ashamed to fall- to admit the cross was heavy. There are those in world whom my pride will not tolerate as I expect everyone to be strong, yet I am weak. I am ashamed to admit failure in anything.

If the Father permits failure in my life just as He permitted You to fall, then I must know there is good in that failure which my mind will never comprehend. I must not concentrate on the eyes of others as they rest upon me in my falls. Rather, I must reach up to touch that invisible hand and drink in that invisible strength ever at my side….

****

The Eleventh Station: Jesus Is Nailed to the Cross


It is hard to imagine a God being nailed to a cross by His own creatures. It is even more difficult for my mind to understand a love that permitted such a thing to happen!…

It seems, dear Jesus, Your love has held You bound hand and foot as Your heart pleads for a return of love. You seem to shout from the top of the hill “I love you – come to me – see, I am held fast – I cannot hurt you – only you can hurt Me.” How very hard is the heart that can see such love and turn away. Is it not true I too have turned away when I did not accept the Father’s Will with love? Teach me to keep my arms ever open to love, to forgive and to render service – willing to be hurt rather than hurt, satisfied to love and not be loved in return.

****

The Twelfth Station: Jesus Dies on the Cross

God is dead! No wonder the earth quaked, the sun hid itself, the dead rose and Mary stood by in horror. Your human body gave up it’s soul in death but Your Divinity, dear Jesus, continued to manifest its power. All creation rebelled as the Word made Flesh departed from this world. Man alone was too proud to see and too stubborn to acknowledge truth.

Redemption was accomplished! Man would never have an excuse to forget how much You loved him. The thief on Your right saw something he could not explain – he saw a man on a tree and knew He was God. His need made him see his own guilt and Your innocence. The Promise of eternal life made the remaining hours of his torture endurable.

A common thief responded to Your love with deep Faith, Hope, and Love. He saw more than his eyes envisioned – he felt a Presence he could not explain and would not argue with. He was in need and accepted the way God designed to help him.

Forgive our pride, dear Jesus as we spend hours speculating, days arguing and often a lifetime in rejecting Your death, which is a sublime mystery. Have pity on those whose intelligence leads them to pride because they never feel the need to reach out to the Man of Sorrows for consolation.

****
That is my prayer today for all whom I have offended and all who have offended me.

Christian Wiman on Poetry and Religion


Christian Wiman, editor of Chicago’s venerable Poetry magazine, shares some brilliant thoughts on poetry and religion in the Winter 2007 issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. This article (unfortunately not available online, so subscribe now!) is taken from his upcoming book Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Some highlights:


Language can create faith but can’t sustain it. This is true of all human instruments, which can only gesture toward divinity, never apprehend it. This is why reading the Bible is so often a frustrating, even spiritually estranging, experience. Though you can feel sometimes (particularly in the Gospels) the spark that started the fire of faith in the world — and in your heart — the bulk of the book is cold ash. Thus we are by our own best creations confounded, that Creation, in which our part is integral but infinitesimal, and which we enact by imagination but cannot hold in imagination’s products, may live in us. God is not the things whereby we imagine him.

      ********

You cannot really know a religion from the outside. That is to say, you can know everything about a religion — its history, iconography, scripture, etc. — but all of that will remain inert, mere information, so long as it is, to you, myth. To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality. This doesn’t mean that the words and symbols are reality (that’s fundamentalism), nor that you will ever master those words and symbols well enough to regard reality as some fixed thing. What it does mean, though, is that “you can no more be religious in general than you can speak language in general” (George Lindbeck)….I would say that one has to submit to symbols and language that may be inadequate in order to have those inadequacies transcended. This is true of poetry, too: I do not think you can spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point, you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.

(For an elegantly written book on the latter theme, check out George Steiner’s Real Presences.)

Blogging will be light this weekend because I’ll be attending the feminist anti-porn activists’ conference at Wheelock College. Of course the biggest question on my mind this afternoon is “What should I wear?” So far I’ve packed my leopard-print sequinned hat, camo pants and a crucifix. Let ’em wonder.

Update on the Human Condition

Two quotes today that sum up my current philosophy of life. The first is from Catholic blogger Cacciaguida‘s review of “Breach“, the new movie about FBI agent/Russian spy Robert Hanssen:


The world is not in fact divided between the pure and the impure (or take any other matched set of a virtue and its corresponding vice): it’s made up of impure people who acknowledge the obligations of purity and try to meet them, and impure people who don’t.
The second comes from the blog of award-winning poet and fiction writer Sally Bellerose, talking about what she’s learned from her experience of chronic illness (her own ulcerative colitis and her father’s dementia):


People need to feel safe.  I sure do. Who wants to be reminded that we are soft-skinned vulnerable creatures? For security sake we need to feel in control of our environment and our selves. All kinds of conditions threaten that control. What could be more basic than the need to feel safe in our bodies? That we are born dependent can’t be denied, but a few years after birth, control of bodily function is a given for most people. Disease, disability, any condition that takes away that baseline of corporal control is a kind of body betrayal to the person affected and an unsolicited reminder to the well and the unwell that humans are vulnerable and that (forgive the very bad pun) ‘shit happens’. But things do go wrong. All bodies refuse to work as desired at some time or other. As humans, we don’t want to be confronted with the fact that no amount of research, medical break-through, or new technology is going to keep our bodies from eventually breaking down.

We are at risk, some more than others, but not just four year-olds getting spanked for a situation beyond her control, or old folks with a confirmed diagnosis, all of us, at one time or another. Most people are not happy to be reminded of their own frailty. I think most chronic illness, but especially conditions like UC, which exposes the messiness of life, scare people because they are forced to consider their own tenuous bodies. People who are well want to believe that disease happens to other people, other people who have somehow lost control, older people or people with less access to care, people unlike themselves.

But it’s not just UC that people fear. My real life dad has Alzheimer’s. I write, sometimes, about a demented dad. People often ask, “How do you feel about exposing your father in print?” They mean, “How could you possibly disrespect your dad by portraying his dementia?” For expedience and self protection I lean on the, “I write fiction,” answer. I really “feel” that dad suffers from an extreme of a universal condition. All people in the real and imagined world are a bit doddering. Our minds, like our bodies, just don’t always do what we want them to do. This is not news to anyone with an iota of self awareness. No one escapes this human condition. If you think you are never weak-minded, you are, at the least, in jeopardy of being a bore.

Say you won a Pulitzer in Literature at 30, and died in a car crash at 32; some part of you died mentally frail. You may have been successful at keeping your fragility from your editors, publishers, and readers, but something in you was teetering and foolish. Like failures of our GI tracts, whether in a big way as happens with UC or in a more contained and only occasional way, as happens with an intestinal virus, all our systems fail all of us, in greater and lesser ways.
It’s to Sally’s credit that she can make this sound like good news. Which, in a strange sort of way, it is.