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Tag Archives: Christ

How Love of Literature Makes Me a Bad Teacher

03 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Awkwardness, Christ, Christian, Holy Spirit, Literature, silence, Teaching

Common sense would seem to suggest that the more one loves one’s subject, the easier it should be to teach it to others. I imagine there are some people for whom this is true. However, I find it exactly the opposite. The more I love my subject, the more difficult it is to teach it to others.

Why is this? I think the best explanation is that when one loves something very deeply, one comes to marvel at it in its whole complexity, at least as far as one can understand it. For instance, if we were to compare, say, pieces of literature to ornate castles, the ones we love best would be the ones in which we are thoroughly familiar with the cracks, passageways, and secret catacombs – the normal, the anomalous, the beautiful, and the vulgar all lumped together; to see any part of it is to see the whole; even the smallest part is the mystic’s synecdoche, bringing before one’s eyes the entirety with which one is so familiar.

And this is exactly the problem for teaching. It becomes hard to remember what it was like to encounter the thing originally, piecemeal – a bit here, and a bit there – and so one forgets that newcomers need a tour. When so many parts of a great and complex work of literature strike one speechless with awe, one forgets that, without help, these parts might seem confusing or meaningless. Our deep love for the thing strikes us speechless, but from the outside, that speechlessness can look like ignorance or indifference. And so I find that those works I have studied most deeply and love most thoroughly come across in exactly the opposite way I intend. I stutter because I am in awe – because I do not want to meddle with the perfect complexity of the thing – but very often this comes across as confusion or disorganization. Poets often speak of love as a kind of madness, and here it is maybe true; deep love for something makes us bad teachers.

Conversely, it is far easier for us to codify and categorize those things we are less attracted to or know less about. For those things we know less about, we become students alongside our students and so make the journey together. For those things we are less attracted to, there may only be a few bits (if any) that are compelling, and so we find it easy to put these subjects in fairly simplistic boxes.

What has this to do with being a Christian? Everything, I think, and I think this because I am in love with Christ and His Word and His Church and the Tradition he has given her and the Holy Spirit etc. And this is precisely why I find it so hard to communicate my faith – the life of my Beloved – to others. It is not something that will be reduced so that it fits in a portable handbag that I can then shuffle off on others. Rather, it is in my flesh and blood, in my very bones. And to communicate it without stuttering and stammering – the thing that actuates my every breath – is as impossible an act as standing outside myself. I find myself in the dazzle of a dynamic silence that probably looks like boredom to those on the outside.

I should be clear; I do not say this with the pretense that this makes everything in my life lovely or bearable or joyful – it doesn’t. Even less do I mean to flaunt this as some kind of spiritual ideal that everyone is called to; different people are called to different things. What it does I hope help explain, maybe, is my awkwardness and silence. I do not speak when I ought to, and I sometimes speak at the wrong time, and it is all haunted by a deep and abiding clumsiness. If you have experienced this, please forgive it if you can as the awkwardness of one who loves deeply, abashed and in awe of Reality and the One who made it. And when you do not hear me shouting words of praise, it is not because I do not wish to praise – it is simply that words are inadequate.

The Heart Has Its Reasons

27 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Catholic, Catholic Church, Christ, Christian, Christian Church, Christianity, Invisible church, J. R. R. Tolkien, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, Protestant

For the next while, I will be stepping away from the Catholic/Protestant question, at least in the public forum of this blog. I will finish my post series on Giussani, and will still undoubtedly speak out of the broadly catholic tradition that so shapes my faith. But for the moment I would like to set aside the back-and-forth debate that I, admissibly, am responsible for – not because bad things have come out of this (far from it), or because my fellow interlocutors have been unfair or graceless, but simply because it exhausts me emotionally, and seems not to be what I am in need of right now spiritually. If you are thinking to yourself right now that this is very escapist of me, you are thinking exactly what I feel – I hate setting aside any question, and moreso because I have OCD, which insists that I should deal with such questions 24/7, if possible to the detriment of all other duties and responsibilities. So, yes, I too feel like it is escapist, but, as J. R. R. Tolkien wisely pointed out, sometimes those most concerned about escapism are the jailers.

I started this set of posts for two reasons. The first is that I feel like decisions like this neither can nor should be made in a dark corner. I appreciate Christ’s response when he is arrested, that he does not have some deep, dark secret conspiracy – if anyone had wanted to know his “secret” plans, they had only to listen to him when he taught publically. I have a deep respect for this kind of openness. Hiding in such cases may indeed mean one is hiding as much from oneself as from everyone else. And a decision made wisely should be able to stand up to external criticism.

But perhaps it is my second reason that has got me into trouble. This is that, having just moved to a new city, being painfully introverted, and in any case having a theological and spiritual past that makes Christian community difficult for me (I usually end up either saying nothing or rocking the boat), I figured I would spare those around me by blogging rather than making others talk about these things with me. In some ways this was necessary because it has constantly been hard to know who to talk to and how. But in others ways it has made things worse because the alchemy that occurs in writing – the transformation of thoughts and impulses into polished and sensible prose – leaves behind the raw emotion and pain that is behind much of this crisis. To be very, very clear, I do not in the least fault anyone for responding reasonably to my reasonably put arguments and musings – it is not fair to expect people to read the emotions behind arguments. But for my own sake – for the sake of a heart that seems inextricably woven into my brain – I need to step back. I cannot pretend to be arguing with disinterest, that the things I am saying are not in some way the lowings of a brazen bull.

Of course, I don’t know how well I will be able to maintain this stepping back process, because the particular difficulty is that for me everything is connected. My impulse is to say that I will on this blog turn my attention to more pastoral matters – such as, for instance, the Christian response to mental illness – but I feel that even this, like the most practical and simple good, cannot be talked about apart from doctrine. My response, I think, must differ, depending on what we think Christians are, and how we think about the visible and invisible church. My mind is a quaking bog – unsettle one bit and the whole body trembles.

This, of course, does not mean I am going to stop pursuing the questions I have been pursuing, or thinking about the Catholic church – I will. The difference, though, I hope, will be that I am more honest, and find communities in which to practice such honesty, and avoid the pretense that this is something that I can engage with anything less than my entire person. And so – as I did when I shared on Facebook my first post on this subject – I request prayer – I know not for what – I can only pray that the Spirit intercedes for me with groans, and that I somehow survive.

When the Riddles of God Are More Satisfying Than the Solutions of Man: Toward a (Hopefully) Irenic Response to Captain Thin

26 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Tags

Bible, Catholic, Catholic Church, Christ, Christian, Christianity, God, Israel, Too Dame Catholic

I have been mulling over Captain Thin’s response to my posts – very deeply in fact – and I finally think I may be able to respond. Let me preface this by saying that, in “real” life (as on this blog), Captain Thin has been a very supportive friend as I have been going through my sundry crises. This, of course, makes it all the harder to disagree with him, not only because I know how deep the ecumenical bonds between us are (and it pains me to focus primarily on the disagreement), but also because these matters cut to the very heart of us. For all the civilized tone that I hope we have been able to maintain here – in Christian charity – disagreement is still deeply painful, since the very fact of Christianity compels us to see the people we are arguing with as people rather than mere arguments; and even moreso when the people we are arguing with are some of our closest friends. All that being said, I would not for a moment expect a friend to agree with me simply for my sake, nor would I find it easy to be friends with someone who expected this of me – all that to say that, far from a distraction from our friendship, the theological debates and discusssions that Captain Thin and I have are part of the cement of our friendship; we have been known to get together to watch Dr. Who and end up being distracted from it by wonderful theological conversations; certain parties have also beaten us over the head with pool noodles on account of us continuing at length a good theological discussion when everyone else was ready to go out for coffee. All this to say that the disagreement I put forward here is a very painful thing and a very important part of our friendship all at the same time.

But let me proceed. From what I can tell, Captain Thin’s primary problem with the Roman Church is its close association of the church with an institution. This, in his argument, ignores the invisible church that exists both inside and outside institutional churches; moreover, it condemns many faithful believers to a set of anathemata announced at Trent. Quoting Donne, he notes that, since Trent, faith is become pricey and costs more, that is, things that people used to be able to get away with believing in an older, pre-tridentine church have now been codified and condemned. Quoting Luther, he situates the Church in her people, and not in her wood and stone.

On the anathema question, I am grateful to Louis Thomas, who posted a helpful link under Captain Thin’s post. Basically, this post clarifies that the anathemata put forward at Trent are not automatically put into effect; that is, the statement does not categorically apply to people, but only does so when matters have been investigated regarding the person charged, and when the church has formally charged them. Moroever, the state of anathema more or less is a description of excommunication (not necessarily saying anything about eternal salvation, but rather referring to one’s relation to the earthly Catholic church), and it would seem redundant to tell Protestants that they are not part of the Catholic church – one would imagine they already know as much, and that that by definition is what makes them Protestant.

Furthermore, as the Catechism makes clear (see sections 817-19), the Tridentine condemnation of Protestants it seems would not usually apply (except indirectly) to Christians who hold contrary beliefs in the present, insofar as their Protestantism is inherited rather than borne of open and deliberate rebellion against the church; indeed, such Christians are part of ecclesial communities and are recognized as fellow Christians by the Catholic church. Of course, what Captain Thin charges is that, while this is what the church might put forward in the present, its assertion is inconsistent with its beliefs about the deposit of truth in tradition; indeed, in his assessment, such a statement is not really a clarification of doctrine, but rather a clever manipulation that pretends that Catholics have always been saying the same thing when they really have not.

Frankly, I don’t feel I have quite enough knowledge and experience at the moment to be able to gauge on my own the degree to which the Catholic treatment of this matter is clarification and the degree to which it is manipulation – I feel that dealing with things like this is a very complex matter – but conversely, I’m not sure Captain Thin has given quite enough evidence to convince us of the contradictions with which he charges the church. The reason I say this is that I have encountered very similar arguments concerning the Bible. Skeptics will find little bits here and there and pit them against each other and make big deals of them etc., and the charge is usually that, since the Bible is internally inconsistent, it cannot be the word of God. In fact, it seems that the Bible itself even perhaps dares us to think about this, giving us as it does four different versions of Christ’s life (surely it would be easier for an authoritative holy text to only have one). But I have come to be glad of these alleged “contradictions,” precisely because the thing I trust least in the world is straightforward answers, because they fail to capture the complexity of the world. It would be much safer and simpler if, say, God had given us the four spiritual laws rather than a Bible. But it would not be a full response to the complexity of the human condition – a complexity in part created by God, and in part due to sin. This means that the conclusion to which I have come regarding life is not that I should seek the least contradictory and most internally consistent answers, but rather that I must seek the answers where the truth that I see of them is enough to convince me to trust the bits I don’t get, and where the complexity of the answer correlates to complexities we find in actual life.

Of course, all these things are value laden, and really all I can say about Cathoic tradition is that, what looks to Captain Thin like a clever dodge, looks to me like an attempt to reckon with a complexity that must be reckoned with by any Christian. I mean, as Christians, we do in fact believe we have a revelation from God – which one might simplistically equate with direct and unmediated access to the truth, not buffeted by the permutations of history. And yet somehow also the church very much is buffeted by history and is not simply given a truth that can pretend to be extra-historical. This, by the way, seems to me very much in keeping with the manner of a God who reveals himself through Israel (rather than directly through extra-historical illumination), and through the Christ who takes on flesh in history. In fact, in all these things, there are problems. When is Israel being (as it is) the chosen people, and when is it behaving in terms of its historical context (that is, should we recreate an Old Testament Judaism or not)? What bits of Christ’s life are pointers to direct Christian behavior, and what historically contextual (for instance, should we make a ritual of spitting and putting mud in the eyes of the blind to heal them in the same way we might promote the ethics of the sermon on the mount?)? These are complicated things, and one might dismiss them as internal inconsistencies in the Christian story (surely truth must be simpler than that?), except that we find our own lives reflecting the need for an answer this complex. Even the task of understanding what our selves are and how we might reconcile that with times when we seem to behave or think in different ways (cf. Romans 7) suggests that some version of such a complicated synthesis is working in us (whether we know it or not) as soon as we get up in the morning; If I had to respond to someone who charges that Christian faith is too complicated and casuist, I would not have him or her examine Christian doctrine, but rather examine him or her self, and then gauge whether the complexity of Christianity answers the complexity he or she sees in him or herself. This, I think, is what made classical philosophy such a wonderful prep school for Christianity, with the Delphic motto, “Know thyself.”

But to return to the question of the church: from my perspective – from what I have seen in church history, of the modern church etc. – the clarificatory aspect of tradition is not simply a clever dodge but an attempt to deal with the same complexities dealt with in Israel’s history and the life of Christ; what might it mean to communicate the eternal truth of God through finite forms, as God seems so bent on doing? Again, it would take far too long to outline what makes me see this in Catholic history, but that is okay; it has become clear to me that, whereas in Protestant circles one can maintain the illusion of a complete apologetic – a watertight proof – the Catholic church, by virtue of her largeness, catholicity, and bounty, cannot ever be singly defended. She is a large country with many borders, and one finds oneself able perhaps to defend the border by which one enters (if that), but also finds that one must trust by faith that the rest of the realm is in God’s care and is being defended as necessary.

Such, then is my response: the function of tradition in the Catholic church only looks like a dodge when one holds it up to an unrealistic expectation of “consistency” that neither reflects the complexity of Judeo-Christian history, the Bible, or life itself. I had meant also to write about some problems with giving the invisible church precedence over the visible – and why wood and stone, though perhaps not the defining materials of the church, are still an integral part of her. However, this post being too long already, I will leave that task for another time.

Reflections on Luigi Giussani’s Trilogy, Part 2: At the Origins of the Christian Claim

19 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Tags

Christ, Christian, Giussani, God, Gospel, incarnation, Luigi Giussani, Pharisee, Religious Sense

They had Christ right there – with them – and they missed it. How could they not see? Why were they so blind? How could they not recognize him? It is typical in Christian circles to ask such questions, with the implied assumption that we, had we been there, would have recognized him right away. We, the good Christians of the twenty second century, would have flocked to him, praised him, where the stupid people in the Bible – the Pharisees, the Romans, the keepers of the law – failed.

But I have always wondered about this. Of course, we hope that our place in the story is with the disciples, those who recognized Him, but how can we know? When I look in my heart – and see the piles and piles of problems there – I certainly want to be one of those who would have recognized him, but find myself fearing; what if, instead of one of the “good guys,” I would have been one of the bad guys? I would after all make an excellent Pharisee, fastidious and proud as I am. I also see in myself the figure of Pilate, agnosticism hiding behind a sensible-looking but false neutrality. Moreover, even when one doesn’t account for these proclivities to evil, there are still questions. From the perspective of hindsight, we feel we can of course “see” the outcome – Jesus was of course the messiah – but one wonders if it can have been at all clear at the time. There were after all all kinds of pretenders to messianic claims around Christ’s time, and the correlation of the Old Testament prophecies with Christ’s life – while certainly not false – nevertheless often require a somewhat counter intuitive interpretation of such prophecies. Put another way, there was, I think, another reason besides hardheartedness that people expected a military messiah – left with just the prophecies, it would be very difficult to hypothesize without divine guidance a messiah that takes the form Christ takes.

I preface my reflection on Luigi Giussani’s At the Origin of the Christian Claim with these matters because it is exactly such questions Giussani deals with in his second book. What kind of encounter would it take to convince an ordinary person, with all his/her virtues and flaws, of the divinity and messianic function of someone one initially mistook for just another generally wise man? Put another way, what kind of encounter had to happen for those curious – encountering Christ in all his curiously simple complexity – to transform from ambivalent onlookers to disciples of Christ? This question – what Giussani describes as Christ’s pedagogy – is the matter of the second book, which seeks to demonstrate that Christ is a concrete answer to the questions and problems raised by the human religious sense, outlined in his prior book.

Anticipating critics who suggest that Christ’s incarnation hardly accords with the kind of tough questioning and seeking involved in pursuing the religious sense, Giussani suggests that no seriously proposed hypothesis should be dismissed as out of hand before it is considered. The problem that the religious sense will have with the Christian incarnation is that it is not something one can figure out or hypothesize on one’s own; the path of such searching, left to its own devices, leads perhaps to Socratic irony at best and sophistry at worst. But, as Giussani points out, that the Incarnation cannot have been “figured out” by human searching alone does not necessarily indicate its falsehood – it is after all unreasonable to exclude out of hand the possibility that God could take initiative and propose an answer to the religious sense that humans could not have come up with on their own. But in opening ourselves to this possibility, one raises the difficult question of determining how one might verify it – what rubric do we use to verify the claims of someone who claims in fact to be the source of any and every such rubric? Hypothetically speaking, if one were to appear on earth from a realm beyond worldly experience, this person would presumably defy what we consider reasonable in many ways. Yet how does one tell if this person is telling the truth – if their claims of beyondness are actually real – or if their incoherence is in fact something that should be judged false when gauged by human experience?

For Giussani, we are left with a problem. If Christ is the messiah – God-made-man – then his very confusion of our sense of rationality and common experience will in fact constitute part of the proof that he is Other to us. Yet such confusion might equally suggest that he is a pretender using obfuscation as a cloak to conceal a scam. Is he hard to grasp because he is beyond us, or because he is simply incoherent?

This for Giussani is where the issue of method becomes important, that is, the issue of determining means of gauging a phenomenon appropriate to that phenomenon. This may sound complicated, but it is really a very fancy way of saying something that Christians have always insisted upon – that the whole person matters, as does the entire capacity of his/her judgement, and the most fitting answer to the problems raised by human existence is not that which simply answers a single niche problem confined to a single experience or criterion. Rather, the answer will be that which holistically answers in a way that does not do violence to the understanding of human nature as a whole, defined as generously as possible to include reason, emotion, psychology, relationships etc. – in short, all that constitutes human experience.

Turning to the gospels, then, Giussani discusses the way we see Christ encountering humans such that these humans are brought to a point of crisis where they either must acknowledge Christ as who he is and trust him – even beyond their understanding at times – or must decide against him and turn away. For Giussani, it is of the utmost importance that Christ’s appearance is never coercive; there is enough about him to invite further those who are curious and freely choose to explore, yet belief in him is never absolutely compelled or completely incontrovertible, as might be the case, say, in a mathematical equation. Giussani sees this as God’s way of honoring the free will he has given humans. There is enough evidence to go on for those who seek truth. But God will not compel anyone to follow him by the violence of a too narrow syllogism – those who wish to reject him can, and do. God will not compel stubborn hearts.

The shape of Christ’s answer to human experience – what is invoked in humans by the religious sense – is thus the matter of the book, and the book’s burden is defining and nuancing this answer such that it is mistaken neither as simplistic or completely incomprehensible. In my prior post, I described Giussani’s conception of human existence as a great riddle to be solved by as many legitimate means as are available to us. Conversely, Christ, for him, is a divine riddle posed as an answer to the human riddle. As such a riddle, Christ gives his followers just enough of himself to keep them following him – just enough of himself that they can know he is trustworthy – but there is always a part of Him beyond the bit of Him they see and measure, the part that continually challenges them to open themselves to the mystery of heaven beyond themselves, toward which He is the way.

The rest of the book is a sketch of how this Divine Riddle that answers the human riddle interacts with those he meets in the gospel accounts. I say “sketch” because the intention is hardly to exhaust what could be said on this matter, but rather to offer tantalizing glimpses of this interaction and so invite readers to further consider these gospel accounts for themselves – an intention in which (I feel) the book succeeds admirably.

But the series does not end here, and this in itself is a significant thing. I could list off any number of authors who might have ended here; the first book introduces the human need, and the second book shows how Christ answers that human need. What more can remain? What in fact remains is the question of how Christ’s life- a life lived historically two thousand years ago – is mediated to us in the present. It is, after all, one thing to say that Christ was such that he was sufficient as an answering riddle to those in the first century, but their experiences are not ours – say what we will about our personal relationships with Christ, we cannot say – at least in the strictly literal sense – that we have put our fingers in the holes in his hands, or that our hearts burned within us while he talked to us on the road. But if we have not done these things, how can we in fact evaluate Christ’s answer, if that very answer is a person – in flesh and blood – rather than a proposition? How can we encounter One who has not been present – at least in the full physical manifestation described in the gospels – for the last two thousand years? Is there another way that we might encounter Christ, not as a detached idea or historical artifact, but as His full Person, the very Person proposed as the answer to the religious sense? Is there a way of encountering this Person, not secondhand through accounts written thousands of years ago, but in such a way that we can evaluate him via our own experiences and judgements? This question – whether Christ can be encountered in the present as in the past – will be the matter of my third review, dealing with Giussani’s Why the Church?

Gnosticism, Materialism, and the Cruciform Realism of Grace

07 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Christ, Christianity, church, cross, emergent, evil and suffering, Gnosticism, God, hipster, Irenaeus, Jesus, Mark Noll, materialism

If you are from my generation and from a particular kind of Protestant background, you will probably have had, at one point or another, the “aha” moment when you realize your tradition has gnostic tendencies, and that this might be a problem. As for many of my peers, this for me happened probably around the time I read Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evanglical Mind, which took the movement to task for being too gnostic. Such gnosticism can be defined in many ways, but at bottom the definition I will be using for this reflection is one which defines gnosticism as a denial of God’s Genesis assertion that His creation is good, paired with an assertion of spirituality that will save us from, rather than redeem, creation.

This realization – that Protestant gnostic tendencies are in fact heterodox lies about reality – is, I believe, absolutely necessary for everyone from such a background. However, this realization has (at least as far as I can tell) become in many emergent and hipster Evangelical circles as common as were once the Sinner’s Prayer, the four spiritual laws, and altar calls. It has in some places become a conversation stopper – if I don’t like what you are doing and think you should loosen up and have a little more fun, be a little more worldly, I can tell you to stop being so gnostic (without defining that or examining my motivations or rhetoric), and that will suffice for an answer – if you don’t listen it is just because you are an uptight Protestant. In sounding this harsh, I am, I hope, not just pointing fingers at others, but mostly at myself – when I become excited about something and its liberating quality I can also become very graceless about it, and such gracelessness is nothing other than sin.

Reflecting a little more on this, I have become concerned that gnosticism comes naturally to those in a suffering world, and that unless we fight it as Christians rather than mere comfortable materialists, we are just replacing one problem with another. Let me put it another way. It is not at all difficult for an affluent, white, middle-class person to appreciate the goodness of creation, which such a person interprets as the goodness of their own material success. And it is easy to turn around and preach this version of a prosperity gospel to others. But what if one’s material life is not perfect? What if one lives in the downtown Eastside of Vancouver, or the North end of Winnipeg? What if sheer existence – material life – is deeply painful? What about those who suffer chronic pain? What about those whose everyday lives in a material world have brought them to such a point that they spend every waking moment wishing to escape? Yes, this is still gnosticism, and condemnable on Christian grounds. But it is in many ways at least more natural and noble than a materialism that criticizes the poor because they don’t have the material circumstances to be triumphalist about their corner of creation.

This, I think, is why it is the centrality of the cross that distinguishes Christian opposition to gnosticism from a more materialist kind. The centrality of the cross in such opposition is found in many places, but the following quote from Irenaeus’s Against Heresies (in which he describes the gnostic beliefs he opposes) is particularly telling:

“Wherefore he [Christ] did not himself suffer death, but Simon, a certain man of Cyrene, being compelled, bore the cross in his stead; so that this latter being transfigured by him, that he might be thought to be Jesus, was crucified, through ignorance and error, while Jesus himself received the form of Simon, and, standing by, laughed at them. For since he was an incorporeal power, and the Nous (mind) of the unborn father, he transfigured himself as he pleased, and thus ascended to him who had sent him, deriding them, inasmuch as he could not be laid hold of, and was invisible to all.”

As this quote suggests, the real heart of Christian disagreement with gnosticism is not a vague and benevolent warm-hearted embrace of creation (though it may on occasion include this); no, it is a position that states that we can look upon the very worst suffering of creation, the very worst contortion, and still concur that this creation is good, good enough in fact that God can be incarnate in such a body even in the midst of its brokenness. This is a costly rejection of gnosticism – it hurts. In fact, our very survival instincts advise us that it would be easier to be rid of the whole material world. It would be easier to side with the gnostic Christ who lets another suffer in his place and stands by chuckling at the very folly of material. It would be easier to be callous. And though we may look at ourselves and say we are not those who would turn away and laugh at a dying man, the gospel suggests we are. It may not appear to us as blatantly as the callousness of the gnostic Christ. But we do buffer ourselves with material, with prosperity, and then we call our appreciation of this prosperity an appreciation of incarnation. But when we do this, we, no less than the gnostic Christ described above, deny the fullness of creation and incarnation, for we disdain to look upon – and I mean, fully look upon – the one, the ones, we have pierced. In a strange way the materialist’s alleged rejection of gnosticism begins to look in its escapist and selective read on creation much like the escapist spirituality of gnosticism itself – the only difference is that, for the materialist, the site of triumphalism is a selectively culled hoard of matter, while, for the gnostic, the triumphalism is in the realm of spirit.

So what does this mean? It means that the most important – and the most difficult – task of the Church is to go against our almost instinctual impulse to become escapists when we encounter crosses, in the poor, the oppressed, the weak, in our own private pains. It is a Herculean task, for our propensity in the face of such is either to become gnostic – deny the goodness of materiality altogether – or selectively cull reality until the horrible pain of it is no longer in our sight. In the face of this, the Church lives to direct our gaze – fully and directly –  toward what we would not see: the Crucified Body. More cruelly – or more miraculously – She teaches us to say as we look, “It is good.” This is the horror of the Christian redemption of all creation, the horror that is also love – the cruciform realism that is the beginning of our salvation.

Of Sacrament and Scandal: For My Beloved Wife on our Seventh Anniversary

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Adam, Anniversary, beauty, Christ, Divine grace, Eve, God, Jesus, marriage, Wife

It is often hardest to write in a straightforward way about the things and people most central in our lives.  That, perhaps, is why I always seem to write around theology whenever I approach it – it would not feel right to simply reach out my hand and steady an apparently wobbling ark.

But theology today is not my topic, or at least not directly; rather, I want to say something to M, my wife, on this day marking the seventh anniversary of our marriage. And where do I begin? I suppose I could begin – in that time honored and now largely lost tradition – with describing your beauty. Yes, by this I mean your physical beauty, that still causes me to thrill when I see you, because you are breathtaking. And if anyone should protest that I am incorrect in claiming we no longer begin here – with physical beauty – I would counter otherwise. Modern society has trained us to be either materialists or idealists, either those who chase after a shallow and disensouled sexiness, or those who do not see the body at all – we are too polite, too sophisticated for that, too in control of ourselves to find ourselves viscerally attracted to beauty. But there you are, your body. And I hold my breath, and hold my tongue; the way I want to describe you is better done privately. And I look at you, and know what God meant at first creation when he looked at his work – when Adam first looked at Eve – and said with awe, “She is good.”

But this of course is just the beginning of who you are and what you mean to me – it is just the surface of the deeper beauty and love you keep deep within you.  I know even as I say this what your reaction will be – how you will roll your eyes at me in sarcastic disbelief.  But I have been married to you for seven years – and in a relationship with you for nine – and this is something I know; despite your attempts to make light of it, there is in you a very deep love and loyalty, so intense and firm that you are often reluctant to even acknowledge it in yourself sometimes. I am blessed to experience this love, a deep beauty you often go out of your way to hide, lest you become the centre of attention. You can try to hide under a bushel, but I will proclaim your beauty – and my love for you – to the world.

And then there is the fact that you put up with me, which I imagine takes some doing. You have to be a special kind of person to appreciate having Ecclesiastes 12 read at your wedding, or to appreciate a memento mori as a Christmas gift. You are that person, and I love you for it. And it also takes someone like you to appreciate that what is not easy may still be good – that amidst all the various happenstances of suffering and trial, we can still sit down and share a picnic beside the still waters in the valley of the shadow of death.

What’s more, you are generous, and willing to share these picnics with others. We came together through a mutual sense of woundedness and a desire to be something – a community – that could be helpful to others in their own pain. Yes, we were idealistic, and as always there are things we couldn’t have accounted for; just how deeply pain and suffering permeate the world is something that I realize now I cannot measure – the only measure of this can be Christ’s cross, and to think we can understand it – beat it on our own – is foolish.

But we can be a community gathered around this cross; together we are a sacrament, that is to say, together, beyond our particularities and problems and sufferings; or, perhaps better, despite ourselves and through these things; the grace of God visits earth. And I am thankful for this – for you – for us – daily. I am thankful for seven years of grace.

And I am thankful for the scandal of it, for in a society such as ours, bent as it is against radical loyalty, it is a scandal. And yet perhaps the scandal of such a thing is not as modern as we might think, for the disciples too seem to have found Christ’s words on marital faithfulness disconcerting (Matthew 19:10).  Mere common interests or friendship or desire is not enough to hold us together – it is by the grace of Christ, experienced inside and outside His church, that we are bound.  This grace is for us to whom Christ refers as “those to whom it has been given.”  It is our vocation – this riddle given by God to the world – the wonder of us together.

And so I am thankful: for you, for your love, for the past seven years, for the blessing of being one flesh with you. And it is with such thankfulness – a thankfulness and gratefulness that I often express only abysmally, as I do here – that I wish you, my wife, a happy anniversary. Thank you for the miracle of seven years together.

Once More With(out) Feeling: OCD as an Amplifying Factor in Thinking About Matters of Faith

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Anxiety, Catholic, Catholicism, Christ, Christianity, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Faith, God, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD

Today I want to talk about the elephant in the room. That would be OCD. It plays a factor in all of what I’ve said, and it is only fair to address this. The factor it plays works in multiple ways.

First, the doubt and fear I have felt recently is something I haven’t felt quite so strongly since high-school, when I went through a very severe period of OCD, severely doubting simultaneously (it will sound odd) whether Christianity was true and whether I had in fact done the right things (e. g. prayed the proper prayer, been devoted enough etc.) to be a Christian. As with most OCD fears, my experience was based on fears that are in some situations valid, but that were amplified and made ubiquitous by OCD. It is, for instance, not an unusual thing for those who grow up in a Christian context to have doubts about their faith at some point, and about whether they are in fact Christian because they believe it or are just going along with their family. Usual, yes, but as I pointed out to a psychiatrist once when he asked how I knew it was OCD, it is not usual to be so caught up in one’s mind that one can’t even participate in regular conversation. It is not usual to hole oneself up in one’s room to replay a loop – an unanswerable loop that will in fact find chinks in any and every potential answer to all questions, no matter how absurd. It is to be afflicted with doubting for its own sake (it is not for no reason they call it the doubting disease), rather than in fact looking for something. They say that at the root of OCD is an inability to live with uncertainty, that is, to proceed (as most people do without realizing it) taking a certain amount of things for granted and being okay going what seems most plausible rather than waiting for 100% certainty to act (compulsions are attempts to neutralize and gain control over the uncertainty). People don’t realize how much trust and faith they exercise daily in living their everyday lives, how much they take for granted. And it is right that they should. But when you have OCD, you can’t. Every moment and every site is an instance whereupon the world hangs. And theologically speaking it may be so. But those without OCD are able to blessedly let God or fate or whatever they believe in worry about that for them. With OCD, the fate of everything rests on one’s shoulders. And that is presumably why, in the prior posts, the question has emerged so urgently, and why it has been the thing I obsess about day and night, often to the detriment of things I ought to pay attention to. This, I want to be clear, is not a function of the validity of the question or the matters I am dealing with (I have written an entire doctoral dissertation haunted by the OC mentality, and it does not I think invalidate what I have argued – just makes it much harder to know the difference between real, valid criticisms and that of my fiercest and most false critic, my mind). For those staunch supporters of the Reformation who want to simply explain away what I have said on grounds of madness, I will here note that Luther, an instrumental figure in the Reformation, very probably had OCD. So it cuts both ways. I will not explain the Reformation away as merely a function of OCD if you will do me the favor of not explaining me away.

The OCD amplifying factor is perhaps most relevant in understanding my first post on these matters. OCD makes it hard for me to tell the difference between the Evangelical church as it exists and the Evangelical theology my OCD latched onto and warped into tyrannical torture. Was I so very attacked, or was my brain attacking me? And if my brain was attacking me, was it doing so on its own, or simply amplifying a real fear or danger in Evangelical culture? To make the converse of the Luther parallel again, the number of hits on that post do suggest that writing it was a little like climbing a blind staircase and reaching out to a rope for support, and finding that the rope rang a bell that everyone recognized. OCD or not, I seem to have hit on something.

But there are also other factors of OCD involved, and this is where I do think one can identify more of a problem in Evangelical theology. It has taken a long while for me to be able to articulate this, but part of my brand of OCD involves a fear of emotional/spiritual contamination. One knows the horrors in one’s own head – particularly when one suffers from intrusive thoughts – and one knows the potential for perverted intentions and manipulation – and one knows that even the best of us may fall prey to these. And so, from childhood onward, one of the deepest things I have wrestled with is how to relate to others. More typical contamination fear in OCD involves fear of spreading germs and diseases to others – the compulsion that follows the obsession usually involves a ridiculous standard of cleanliness and an avoidance of others (if you avoid others you cannot make them sick – at least until OCD dissolves even this certainty). This is me, but on an emotional and spiritual level. As a human being I have, like all others, an innate desire to connect with people, in friendship and in love. And in my worst OCD moments I refrain as far as possible because I do not want to ruin it. I do not want to ruin the people I love around me. I do not want to manipulate or use them. I do not want to think of them in improper ways. And so I avoid. There is a sense in which I can in fact be physically present with people and emotionally/spiritually absent, or as absent as is possible, my mind clenched in a tight little ball of control.

And this, I suppose, is where I will take Evangelicalism to task, and this for its individualism. From what I can tell in my experience of it, community is allowed and encouraged for those who have a taste for it, those who are extroverted or make friends easily. But it is not enough of a tenet of faith to be enforced. That is, there is not a spiritual duty to seek out those on the sidelines, who are isolated, and ensure they are participating in the community of the church. Faith, for Evangelicals, at the end of the day depends on one’s personal – where personal is understood as individual – relationship with God, and, at the end of the day, community is not part of salvation economy – we are left alone with God on our knees, and expected to do anything – whether the community agrees or not – that we feel God wants us to do (and if you protest that we are not left quite alone – we have the Bible – well, OCD unguided by tradition can do very funny things with that as well). And very often these things we feel God wants us to do – crazy from all normal perspectives – belong in fact to the voice of OCD in our heads. The person with OCD is left alone before a God he or she can’t see clearly, and out of respect for personal piety, no one will pry into them and help them to be real Christians, to experience real grace.

And this is where I see, at least in its ideal form (practical may be a different matter), the Catholic church being an improvement. Christ’s grace is mediated through the Church, and this, far from being a dilution of faith, is a way of supplanting that other mediator – our personal spirituality, our minds, our OCD – and making sure we are actually Christian. You will understand how desperate I am for such salvation if you consider my position; take whatever passion, reason, and imagination you may find in my writing, amp it up about ten times, and then imagine it fueled by a boundless ferocity and viciousness toward a particularly unfortunate target. Now imagine that you are that target, and how that might feel. And now realize that I, in fact, become such a target daily, a target of my own most deadly weaponry. Let me introduce my traveling companion, OCD. Please to meet him; can you guess his name?

There are two relevant Chesterton quotes that I have been particularly thinking about lately. One is from the biography of Thomas, where he suggests that the beauty of Thomas’s incarnational theology is that it saves people from their own spirituality. I understand this, and it is in fact a very important aspect of the Church even before Aquinas – part of the Church’s uneasiness about eremitic monasticism emerged from this very problem – crazy people like me going off into the desert for reasons only masquerading as God-inspired, and unguided by the tempering factor of community.

The other Chesterton quote I am reminded of is his observation that the Church is like a detective that hunts down people and finds out their sins, not to condemn them, but to forgive them. This is what I need. I need a church that is a hunter, relentless as a hound, that will pursue me to the utter reaches of hell and batter my heart till the fortress falls. And I’m not sure how many ecclesiologies are strong enough to do this. Certainly, a church is weakened in this regard just to degree that it is not bound to the heavy and ponderous battering ram of tradition with Scripture glowing at its core. And though I am still having trouble explaining to others this next matter on anything other than grounds of desperate hunger, I want a church with the full package. Seven sacraments. A Mary blessed among women and called blessed by all generations (an assertion strangely not accepted by most alleged Biblical “literalists”). A full set of the communion of saints. And a real presence in the Eucharist (this IS my body) that I can not only appreciate in the experience of communion, but that I can also adore. Because the gates of hell are strong gates indeed, and they are very deeply embedded in me, and salvation can be nothing less than a full assault on these gates with all the forces available – material, spiritual, and otherwise – in heaven and on earth. Indeed, I even imagine that many Evangelicals and Protestants reading this are right now agreeing with me and wondering why I would have to be Catholic to think this. I may not, but I am not sure that it can come out of any other imaginative matrix than Catholic tradition infused to saturation with Scripture.

And Yet He Has Not Left Himself Without Witness: A Retrospective Look at Catholicism and Evangelicalism with Special Guest Flannery O’Conner

30 Thursday May 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

≈ 30 Comments

Tags

Catholic, Catholic Church, Christ, Eucharist, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Flannery O'Connor, Holy Spirit, Protestantism

Yesterday’s post was a cry of pain. I state this, not as an evaluation, but as a description. It is as much a cry of pain as those of Job, or the groans of the Israelites that provoked God to bring about the exodus from Egypt. That it was a cry of pain is certain. What we do with that – and how we interpret it is another thing. So I would like to take a moment to perform a little exegesis on that post and add some clarification.

The two points I was trying to make – and ones I still support – are these:

1) Evangelicals who have been complicit in pastoral neglect in the past have no right to suddenly become the theological police when someone speaks of leaving. There are people who do have a right to speak, and those are the people who have been with one from the beginning and intentionally walked with one a long way. Indeed, I would worry if someone became Catholic without speaking to such people. What annoys me are the people who suddenly become interested when they need to tow a party line they have not explored themselves, and do not bother to familiarize themselves with the person involved or the facts. Indeed, I do even admit it is fair for a latecomer to the conversation to offer input, provided they do so respectfully and with the proper awareness that there is a large part of the story they have not lived through. Indeed, part of why I wrote the post was to help myself understand who I should and should not trust as I discuss these things with people.

2) Staying with the Church in the midst of corruption and believing God is still there often in spite of his ministers is in its strongest form a Catholic doctrine. It may I suppose also be found in some versions of Anglican and Lutheran theology, but of the three the Catholic church has the strongest doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist, and it is this belief that Christ is really (rather than just symbolically) present that suggests faithfulness to the church – we go, so to speak, because it contains the conditions needed to really partake of Christ’s body and blood, not because of good or bad customer service. For instance, imagine I want a real Mars bar. If I am to actually get it, I will have to get something made in the original Mars bar factory. Even if all the staff are rude and the service is terrible there, there is no way around it – I’m sure I could find companies that produce knock-off brands with much better customer service and much better manners – but all my griping about this will not turn a knock off into real Mars bar. This is a somewhat poor comparison because I do not want to denigrate Protestant communion by referring to it as a “knock off” – even in its most symbolic form, it certainly does not deserve to be called that. But I do think the analogy gets at my point. A Catholic theology says there is Something there regardless of the ministers. An Evangelical says the Church is a meaningful body just to the degree that there is a certain level of vibrance, dynamism, etc. If these are wanting, the only conclusion I can come to from an Evangelical perspective is that I should leave and find somewhere where they are not – and I will never find that place because the world and churches are broken. It is not a question of finding a healthy church. It is a question of finding a church that tethers us to Christ in the midst of its unhealthiness. Not that unhealthiness is ever an ideal. But the Catholic I think would say that the beginning of the cure for that unhealthiness lies in Christ’s presence in the church – it comes from outside and into us – whereas for an Evangelical the cure is posturing oneself – emotionally, intellectually, etc. – in a certain way toward Christ and his word. The latter really do want to make their faith their own.

I also want to clarify what I did not mean to say. As Father J wisely clarified in the comment section, it would be imprudent to suggest that one simply become Catholic because the pastoral care in Protestant circles is flagging. Indeed, if this were the reason, it would just make sense to find a Protestant church with better pastoral care – and who in any case can tell if the pastoral situation on the Catholic side is better or worse? No, what I am looking for is a church with a doctrine that suggests radical faithfulness to the Church regardless of one’s experience with it. It is the Church where I may find myself sitting beside Judas and Peter at the Last Supper Table, knowing that I could follow the paths of either of these figures, both of whom denied Christ, but had different ends.

In addition, another thing I did not intend to say (and don’t think I did if one reads the post carefully) is that there were no blessings, or graces, or support in the Evangelical church; God, I am confident, was there. Perhaps not in all the places I was looking for him – particularly not in my inner emotional self so ravaged by sadness and fear – but He was there. I was blessed to be born to a mother with a deep sense of piety and a father with a good deal of heroic endurance, surviving as he was with depression in Evangelical circles. From my mother I have the capacity to feel, and from my father I have the capacity to think. I was blessed to be born into a house jam-packed with books, the books I could turn to when there was no one else, and the seeds of what has become my academic career, tied also very closely to my faith. I was blessed with friends – yes, we were outliers, but we were friends. I was blessed by Bible Quizzing (long story, ask me sometime); the huge chunks of Scripture I memorized through this program are still with me, and the Biblical orientation of the program meant that real Christian friendships could be formed more gently, unlike the more intense Youth Conference deals from which one was expected to go away changed. I was blessed by Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship and the friends who took pains to draw me out of myself; I was blessed to meet my wife there, with whom I have been now for seven good years. The intent of the last post, then, was not to say that nothing was there, but rather that it puts me out of sorts when a good number of people who have not bothered to be supportive suddenly show up and start asking questions when one mentions Catholicism. And maybe in some ways these people are less likely to show up than I expect. I got a surprising amount of encouragement and feedback on the post – sometimes from unexpected sources – and I also have to consider the “amplification factor” of OCD, which I will explain in another post – the part that will take a criticism one heard no matter how long ago and cling to it burr-like so that it is always in my head as fresh as the day it was said, and as menacing.

This of course will leave most people puzzled. If God is in some way in the Evangelical church in spite of problems, why not just stay there? And my answer must be that it can offer no solid reason for staying with a corrupt church, which the church militant will always in some way be. In the face of corruption, it will seek exclusion and perfection (with the illusion that somehow drawing another circle will keep those in that circle from problems) – it is as if one had auditions to decide who could get into a hospital, and those who were healthiest were given precedence while the sick were bumped lower in the line or bumped off entirely (dare I say this sounds like social Darwinism?).

But how can God be both in both the Catholic and Evangelical Church? For an answer to this – and I expect no one to like it – I turn to Flannery O’Conner. O’Conner was in the interesting position of being a Catholic in the southern U. S., which meant she probably saw far more extreme incarnations of Protestant Christianity than I ever have up in the less heated reaches of Canada. And I like her response to these Christians because it was complex. From a certain perspective, one might imagine she was in a perfect place to support her own Catholicism by showing up the sheer lunacy of some of these Protestant extremes. But she doesn’t. In fact, often in her stories it is very strange kinds of Christians – Christians of the sort I am certainly not comfortable with – that are vehicles of grace. For instance, in “Greenleaf,” Mrs. Greenleef collects newspaper clipping of tragedies and crimes, buries them in the dirt, and prays over them in what can only be describe as a charismatic way. She is not the Christian we want her to be. We want the exemplar of Christianity to be sane, reasonable, like (or so we imagine) us. But that is not what we get. I had the pleasure of taking a class on O’Conner in Vancouver, one of the more secular cities of Canada and somewhat correlative to the “north” often criticized by O’Conner. It was extremely interesting watching the students – many of whom had come to this particular theological seminary to escape such “crazy” Christians – squirm at the thought of such an embarrassing person being a conduit of grace. And O’Conner also holds the converse – being Catholic is not a free ticket to assumed superiority. This she shows in “The Temple of the Holy Ghost,” where the main character must learn to be chastened of her pride, much of which consists in her assumption of her “superiority” over uncultured low-church Christians. She critiques where we think we are safe, and sees grace where we can only think of shame.

And this, I suppose, is how I have come to see the Evangelical church. From a Catholic perspective, God works both in and outside the Church. In the Church he largely works through revelation, the synthesis of this revelation (tradition), and participation in the sacraments. Outside he works more generally if less directly and in a less immediately perceivable way through all sorts of things in the world – the theological distinction here would place revealed theology within the Church and natural theology without. What I want to suggest – and it is bound to make some angry – is that Evangelicals exist in a twilight zone between these two theologies. Whatever else it wants to claim, much of what Evangelicals have by way of spirituality, theology etc. is a pared down minimalist version of broader Catholic tradition – Evangelicalism doesn’t have the entirety of the tradition, but there are lots of points Evangelicals and Catholics agree upon – the Catholics are different not so much in overt disagreement, but rather in that they have an extra helping of tradition and the real presence etc. This, as far as I can tell from the Catechism, is perfectly good Catholic doctrine, though I will be happy to accept clarification on that point from someone who knows better what they are talking about.

On the natural theology side lies experience. Evangelicals, I suggest, cannot be such without it – the strange warming of the heart – and it seems to me impossible to have such a thing as a negative theology in Evangelicalism, or at least the modern incarnations I am talking about. We are probably not used to talking about spiritual experience as “natural theology” per se, but strictly speaking I think it fits the definition – theology gotten from things that happen in creation, and this includes spiritual experience because such experience is never disembodied (that is, outside creation).

And this leads me to the way I, via Flannery O’Conner, interpret Evangelicalism. Let us start with natural theology. Nature in some way points to God, but the exact way this works out is often circuitous and confusing – nature is both beautiful and brutal by turns – and the character of God is hardly self evident from nature. So natural theology involves interpreting signs that point to God, but also the recognition that these do not always point to God in any kind of straightforward way.

And it is something similar I would suggest with Evangelicalism, but one step up. If nature points to God, how much more a group of Christians? But, I would argue, this group of Christians does not point to God in exactly the way it supposes. Lacking what must always be the first commentary on Scripture, tradition, the signs they produce are often broken, angular, and hard to read. But, as Flannery O’Conner suggests, these signs are nonetheless still signs, no matter how twisted. They may not be perfect, and in many cases may be something we will not want to emulate at all, but we have a strange God who will speak by strange means, through the mouth of an ass if need be. And so, much as I am uncomfortable with the undisciplined and emotive character of Evangelicalism, I cannot deny God’s grace in it. He has, after all done stranger things, not the least of which is stooping down to earth to visit someone like me.

An Open Letter to the Evangelical Church: Where the Hell Were You?

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

Bible, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, Christ, Christianity, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, Trinity

For a good long time now I have been very attracted to and defensive of Catholicism.  Certain things recently have made this attraction more pressing, and something I need to figure out now rather than at some point in the distant future. And usually when I bring this up with some of my Evangelical friends, they are uncomfortable – usually the strategy is to point to some superficial, cherry-picked proof text that allegedly tells against Catholicism, and to tell me that I am becoming un-Biblical or something and that I need to be careful. That there are scandals in the Catholic church, which are inherent in the Church and not incidental, as apparently is the case in Evangelical scandals. In fact, as someone who grew up in Evangelicalism, I don’t even need someone around to tell me these things; my brain is so trained that these responses pop up all by themselves. Here is my response, but I want to begin with a clarification. As I write this I do not have a specific person in mind, and I will also add that not all the Evangelicals I know and knew are like this (though incidentally usually those who are not seem to be outliers in their churches). But I do want to respond to this voice, and my response can be summed up as follows: You who care – who suddenly care so much about my faith – where the hell were you? Where were you, when I was spiritually thirsty and you did not give me a drink, when instead I got a shiny powerpoint presentation? Where were you during the times of doubt and fear, depression and OCD, when I was forced to dig – deep into Christian tradition – to find those parts of the communion of Saints that actually spoke to my condition? Where were you when my world was shattered, multiple times? Where were you when I was the odd person on the edge – the person who didn’t and still doesn’t fit in – and you had the advantage of being normal? If it matters so much now to you – that I stay – where were you when it counted?

And do not, for a moment, think of answering with something emergent or hipster or some such bilge. As far as I am concerned, this is just Evangelicalism 2.0, yet another attempt to be culturally sensitive, that is, to absorb and overlook the most destructive elements of a culture of death just because you want to be relevant. When we were children, we wounded with the sword of modernity. Now that we have become adults we have put away childish things and taken up the more sophisticated passive aggressive sword of postmodernity, or whatever it is we are in right now. No, I do not want to attend your church with some cool and sensitive symbolic name. And yes, I do suggest your ecclesial structure is as unstable as the shifting movement of history. And no, I don’t care what you think “modern people” (whoever they are) need. I need love. I need Christ. And you think I want a trinket wrapped in the gaudy disguise of ostensible sincerity.

Of course, others will say all this is not at all the issue. Surely one should hold to the truth regardless of one’s experience. So, these will say, you have had a bad experience with the Evangelical church. So what. Christ and Christianity are not synonymous with the church. Maybe you should just stay the course regardless – suffer through it for the sake of truth. But what truth, and how do I know it is truth? The things that Evangelicals think are so self-evident Biblically are in fact not (show me how we get the doctrine of the Trinity without tradition and I will be happy to listen to you). Just reading through the Bible will not make me an Evangelical – it will not even necessarily make me a Christian. Because the Bible is received through the church. What you are telling me is that I should, despite bad experiences, stick with the Bible as understood by the Evangelical church out of a sense of loyalty to truth in spite of difficulty. And if you protest that yours is simply a plain reading – not informed by and dependent on the Evangelical church – I will be happy to point out all the cultural and other factors that have slanted your “plain reading.” There are many heretics who were “just plain readers” of Scripture. So you are faced with a choice: are you asking me to stay true to a Biblical faith unmediated through a certain Christian community? Or are you asking me to trust the Evangelical community? If the former, I would suggest that such a Bible does not exist (given that individual interpretation itself is shaped by the community that it is part of) – if you think you are just reading the Bible plainly, on your own, you are manifestly unaware of the structural and ideological forces that have shaped you. Not (I think) that being so shaped is necessarily a bad thing – but it does make things a matter of which communities one trusts rather than a matter of looking under a rock and finding God one day.

And this is where my problem is. I cannot trust Evangelicalism, with its suggestion that somehow, in spite of the fact that most Medieval writers had the Bible at the tip of their tongue in a way that no one does today, they went wrong whereas we in our modern laziness and stupidity have somehow got it right via “progress.” Evangelicals protest – what about the Bible, won’t it get lost in tradition? I would reply that the Bible is precisely the reason I question Evangelicalism. I question it because the Bible, a book that ought to be read as God’s word, has become a pawn of modern relevance. And those who become reactionary – the “it isn’t popular but God’s word says it” kind of people – are usually just the same people in a converse dress. Their agenda for the Bible is set by a reactionary knee jerk reaction to the relevant “liberals.” Far from being a simple confrontation of corrupt modern culture with God’s word, theirs is the dissolution of the Bible in a simplistic and modern worldly polemic. And so, no, I’m not sure that I would stick with this community in spite of bad experiences – because often there is not even a Bible at the heart of it to keep me there.

As far as I am concerned, the ecclesiology I have found that actually supports sticking with a Church – amidst and despite its sins and scandals – is a Catholic ecclesiology, because it insists that Christ’s church inheres in its material manifestation beyond some vague ethereal thing that disappears every time you try to grasp it. It insists that there is something in the very material fabric of the Church herself that justifies sticking with her over against any of the pain-sparing merits of disembodied spirituality. And I have come to see that being part of a church will mean being faithful to something because God is there rather than because I feel a certain way about it or have a certain experience with it. And unless you can convince me that at the heart of Evangelicalism there is something worth trusting, all the picky little trick questions and idle challenges you can throw at me won’t do a thing. Even a single tear or a gesture toward recognizing my pain might do miraculously more, though it may be too late for that. You – who care so much, so concerned about protecting a Bible you don’t actually read, a Bible you appropriate for you own purposes – where was your concern when I was in pain? Where the hell were you?

On Suicide, Part 1: A Response to Question 2 of the Patheos Conversation on Mental Illness and Health

19 Sunday May 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Christ, Christian, Christianity, church, Epistle to the Romans, Faith, God, Jesus, Mental health, mental illness, Paul, suicide

Question 2 of the Patheos Conversation on Mental Health

Research suggests that religious faith protects against suicide. Why do you think that is in light of how your community responds to suicide? How can we tread the fine line of discouraging suicide while not making the grief of family members worse?

The devil took me up on a high mountain and showed me all the kingdoms of the world. And he gave me a research statistic. With this, he said, you will conquer the kingdoms of the world for you faith. Under this sign you will conquer.

As the prior creative bit might suggest, I think a statistic like this must first of all for Christians and others of faith included in the research be a great source of temptation. It is tempting to use it in a triumphalistic way. After all, in a culture of death (as the late John Paul II described it) it is no surprise that suicide is prevalent, and it is no surprise that faith is a deterrent in such a culture. If we would turn back to God, have a revival, become a Christian nation again, we would answer the problem of suicide. As usual, God has the answer all along, and we are just ignorant of it. Of course science supports us.

Before interrogating this attitude, I would like to say a bit about the research itself. From my own experience, it rings true. It is always difficult to play the “what if” game, but, as someone who is often depressed, and for whom suicide seems at times the least unattractive option, I do think it is possible I am alive because of the habits of hope that are part of Christianity. I say habits because I am not good a feeling hope, but there is something in the Christian insistence that one must get up again after falling, and being steeped enough in the church has instilled that in me, to my benefit. But then, I also wonder what kind of study produced this information. What if it is statistically true but only because those who do end up killing themselves are alienated in church and leave long before they actually do it. What if it is just because the church does not have a place for those so troubled they are on the verge of suicide?

But to return to the prior point, suicide is complicated, and a church that merely rests on its scientific ability to discourage suicide (and implicitly or explicitly blames secular culture alone) will be marvellously ill equipped to deal with depressed people, particularly as such churches are modelled on a culture that presumes there are “normal” people and then those ill people who want to kill themselves. For a moment I want to turn this on its head. We presume that the reasonable thing is to not want to commit suicide, and that people in their natural state are and should be happy, wanting to live life. But I actually wonder if this is the case.

I wonder because for very sane people throughout history, suicide, far from being a categorical sign of madness, has in fact been a deep philosophical puzzle – we need only think of Donne’s Biothanatos or Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus to see that suicide is not only taken seriously by “crazy” people – it is perhaps also taken seriously by people who can actually see the groaning world around them. And I would suggest that at least some of the attitude that distinguishes the modern division between “normal people” and “suicides” is the result of a great modern whitewashing of the world via a media that acts as an opiate of the masses. We do not consider suicide reasonable because we have swept under the carpet all the ugly bits that might in fact drive us to it. Modern society is a culture of death. But it is a culture of the kind of death that wants eternal life, and suicide is a chink in its armour. We do not appreciate the suggestion that the world might be so bad we might not want to live in it, and we appreciate it less for the nagging bit of our soul left that reminds us there might be parts of this critique that are true. (For further clarification here, please see Addendum)

As long as Christians do not see the compelling nature of suicide and simply think of it as a madness that their own sane faith can cure, they will not be helpful. And I hope to demonstrate this via Romans 7 and 8. Read Romans 7. But omit verse 25. I suggest that the picture painted here, minus the turn to God, leaves little option but suicide. Yes, this chapter is talking about a particular kind of despair pertaining to our inability to perform the law. But I think there are lots of ways one can take this. Biblically speaking, all such frustration is the result of original sin; for instance, though the degree of my culpability is something only God can know, I feel exactly like Paul here when I look after my son, knowing how many stimulating, encouraging, and beneficial things I could do with him, but sitting there paralyzed by fear and sadness while he watches TV. The good I want to do I cannot do, or so it feels.

But now I want to pars Romans 8. On a surface read, one might feel this is saying exactly the kind of thing I caricatured before. Everything is despair, but when we turn to Christ it will all be hunky dory. But I am not quite sure this is what Paul means, and I think the distinction hangs on what is meant by Christians having “the first fruits of the Spirit” (23) and the rest of creation groaning in expectation. The problem from a very practical perspective is of course this – there are very much some kinds of help that one can get for such despair outside the church, and I do believe that in the best instances these constitute real help. At the same time, there are those in the church who are very much being not helped – where is the glorious freedom we seem to be talking about?

What I want to say is that, though what is primarily talked about here are the “first fruits” of Christ, that is, his personal adoption of us, there is in this passage an implicit sense of second and third and fourth fruits. Though Paul describes what is probably the highest form of Christian interaction with Christ, we can imagine the Spirit (who hovered over the water) at work in so very many aspects of the creation we don’t understand or can’t trace, even as he is at work in so many prayers beyond the groans of our understanding. My point is that, if every good and perfect gift is from above, the business of us who have what Paul calls the first-fruits is not simply an act of entrenchment against everything else happening in the world, but rather an act of looking for places where the Spirit is working in the world – the flesh here does not in fact mean created material but rather the improper use and orientation of it. It is a Christian’s business to look for and applaud places in society and the world where God’s Spirit is working in and with material, even as it is the Christian’s business to ensure that those within the church can benefit from such material work (e. g. medicine, psychology, etc.). The church is the place where God’s first fruits have been endowed, and is thus the instrument capable of naming most fully such blessings. But the blessings themselves, like rain, fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike, the hardened atheist clinician and the habited nun, and the church’s business is not so much to have a corner on this grace as to recognize and name it when they see it.

Hence, Romans 8 answers the suicidal impulse, not by suggesting the Christians have a corner on the kind of grace, hope, and discovery that helps fight it, but rather by highlighting the first origin of all these secondary graces in Christ, as well as the Christian ability to name them and recognize them in their fullness. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the rocks cry out, and it is I think not untrue to say that the infinitely more odd things of God’s creation – psychologists, medications, treatment etc. – also glorify God in their way too.

This being said, the effect is not immediate. Paul still speaks of suffering (v. 18). The full redemption of creation is a long time coming. And so sometimes we need to wait with each other. There is no good excuse for sitting amidst suffering that can be avoided or helped in a healthy way, and many churches are culpable in this area. But when created matter has not caught up with our spirits, when (as with the experience of only partially treatable OCD), the tic in our brains has not yet caught up to the deeper spiritual knowledge of a graced world, we must wait with each other, weeping and laughing by turns. For this, I think, is what it means to be the church amidst a world still realizing the freedom Christ has bought and its extent into the deepest reaches of some of the very darkest corners of creation.

Addendum: I want to here clarify that I do not here mean to imply that depression is always due to societal problem that are ignored or not redressed. Indeed, depression in its most biochemically potent form will cause depression even in what is ostensibly the most perfect of external situations and environments. Of course, it is often the very fact of such an experience that many in the church implicitly or explicitly deny, for things that do not fit formulae trouble us, and when not confronted by them directly, we find it more comfortable to pretend they don’t exist.

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