Terrified

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Catholic, Catholic Church, evil and suffering, Jesus, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD, Protestant

It was Good Friday, and I was doing, for the first time really, the stations of the cross. This was my first time, not because as a Protestant I had had any major problems with it, and not even because I was not attracted to it, but simply because, as a Protestant, doing the stations of the cross would have involved making a fuss of the emergent or high-Anglican variety. Anglo-Catholicism was the closest I could get to Rome outside of Rome, but it always seemed to involve a certain kind of hyper-ostentation, distinguished as Anglo-Catholicism is by such loudness. It is thank God possible to be quietly and anonymously Catholic (in humility rather than shame), but, as an Anglo-Catholic, one needs to be very loud about how Catholic one is, perhaps with a shrillness designed to convince oneself of something about which one has doubts.

In any case, it was Good Friday, the day before my reception into the Church, and I was doing the stations of the cross with my RCIA group. I was kind of hoping to slide into the Church – quietly, and without much fuss – and I knew my relationship with God well enough to know that I needn’t expect anything of the mystical or experiential variety – my relationship with Him was and remains enough, and it was sufficient for me to take this step He called me to without much ballyhoo or other diversion of the experiential, spiritual, or social variety. As is typical of my experience of God, he disappointed my expectations.

To contextualize this, I will need to backtrack a bit regarding the ongoing saga of my struggles to understand matters of faith, suffering, and death. As someone with a longtime history of depression and OCD (in the official fancy language my condition would cheerfully be termed “comorbid”), and further with various family members and friends suffering from such things, the question of the place of suffering in faith has always been much less easy for me to ignore than it seems to be for some Christians. Add to this the death of a close friend three years ago, deep alienation from Christian community (too Catholic for Protestants, too Protestant for Catholics, and deeply wounded by the effects of some nasty church and parachurch politics), and a tendency to always put my worst foot forward when it comes to interviews or applications in the area of my vocation, and it is fair to say that frustration is not likely to be something I can forget anytime soon. A fever pitch of suffering would be a bad way to describe it – that happened in the much more volatile period of our younger romance – and now Suffering and I had settled into the familiar routine of destroying each other even while relying on each other for stability like an addictive drug when the exotics and passion are gone, and all that is left is bathetic routine. Not only did I know Suffering, but I made myself an expert in all her ways – I would be the prophet proclaiming her existence to a stubborn and obstinate church. I could, quite literally, say what most could only say figuratively – I really did do a Doctorate on suffering.

But I return to the stations of the cross and Good Friday, with a caveat, which is this. When I describe what follows, I do not necessarily mean that all this hit me on the head at once, or that I immediately came to this realization. I’m pretty sure that every moment we mark of deep significance in our lives is preceded by so many other important moments we don’t notice, and, furthermore, may not even be initially understood – the post-experience reflection on the experience is as much a part of the experience as the temporal moment when one first marks it. What follows is the totality of my impression – thus far – of what happened on Good Friday.

What happened was that, at some point while we were doing the stations, I realized that I had met my match when it came to the understanding of suffering – in this church, in this place, I was becoming part of a people that knew suffering in her bones. Not in the sense that the Church has necessarily suffered more than other groups – indeed, in her imperfection here on earth, she has on a number of occasions been the cause of suffering – but rather in the sense that here, in Christ’s body, a body I could taste, touch, and smell in the sacraments and in my fellow Christians – here, in this body, suffering was understood, in the deepest and most mysterious sense of the word. Yes, other churches I had been part of had the crucifixion narrative as well – but the crosses were bare. In contrast, here was a devotional practice that was not trying to be radical or prophetic or sexy or relevant or any of those other things – it was not screaming for attention, as was my own “prophetic” bent concerning suffering – rather, it simply was. It was not some radical thing (except in the most literal etymological sense) that would strike like lightning and change my life fifty different ways to Sunday. No, it was a basic and humble grammar of suffering. And I, the expert, the self-proclaimed seer, with the Doctorate on Job, stopped my mouth, and was silent. No longer could I say, “But you don’t know what it’s like” – because She did. The Church did.

I don’t recall too precisely the exact moment this all came upon me, but I do feel it had something to do with the third time Christ stumbles in the stations. I knew enough of them prior to know that this is the part I most valued, the part where Christ looks at us, after having stumbled twice before already, and we have no clue what to do. Is it about us? Are we selfish enough to be glad for Christ’s suffering because we suffer too? On the other hand, when he looks into our eyes like that, the cross breaking his back, is there anywhere we can flee to evade that look that says it has everything to do with us? Is it an example? An act of empathy? The suffering servant? The broken beast of burden? Christ is physically naked, but it is we who are ashamed – he has looked into our souls. To stumble once might be a token example – even the best stumble. To stumble twice is a little more, but perhaps just another token – we can draw on his forgiveness if we happen to fall a few times, so long as we are generally consistent. But a third time. That is the clincher. He means it. He will really be there. Every time. Seventy times seven times, and more, if necessary. Every time. The face full of sorrow that is also mercy and grace. Eye to eye, and heart to heart.

That is a broken description of the glimpse I had into the Church – the place where suffering is uniquely understood – and the place where I covered my mouth. At that same moment, I felt a kind of release. It is a heavy burden to think of oneself as a prophet on behalf of all suffering everywhere, and suddenly I saw – Christ’s body, the Church, was carrying this burden. It was not mine to carry. I could help or participate or pray or not – I could understand or not – but whatever I did, God had suffering and death taken care of. And it was then I realized the most terrifying thing, that I was free, free to explore that thing far more frightening and unpredictable to me than any kind of pain or suffering: joy. I still have very little idea what this means – particularly as I am accustomed to associate the word “joy” with the facile glossing and painting of pain. And I don’t like joy, because it comes at all the wrong times, and doesn’t come to everybody equally. But it is a treasure, of Christ and His Church, and having retired from the position of self-proclaimed prophet of suffering and pain (though I make no promises concerning relapses), I am at liberty to explore it – joy – the greatest problem that we face as humans. I am terrified.

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Gnosticism, Materialism, and the Cruciform Realism of Grace

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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.

Some Boethian Musings on Lent

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Boethius, Christ, Consolation of Philosophy, Desert Fathers, evil and suffering, God, Gospel, Jesus, Lent

I am in a particularly difficult situation right now – looking for jobs in a very tough job market and overall trying to figure out my vocation – and I often hear from people that “God has something out there for me, so just keep going.” This by the way is perfectly good theology – I cannot fault it – and I also cannot fault those who wish to give me comfort in this way, well meaning as they usually are. However, whenever I hear it I can’t help wondering about the bigger question of the nature of the “something” out there for me. Implied in the statement is that this something will be something I want, something that people can immediately recognize as a blessing. And when I think of this, I think of Boethius.

For those who are not familiar with Boethius, he was a medieval philosopher and politician in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. He was accused of conspiring against his emperor, Theodoric, and was imprisoned. His most famous work, The Consolation of Philosophy, opens with the imprisoned Boethius’s lament. Very soon, however, he receives a visit from Lady Philosophy, who takes him to task for his fruitless and immature self-pity, and undertakes a dialogue with him, leading him through a gauntlet of questions and answers that cut to the philosophical heart of his problem, often leaving behind exactly the kinds of question we most care about in the twenty first century, which is how we deal with suffering and loss emotionally. In fact, there is a sense in which Boethius is speaking of something that I think we have nearly lost the cultural capacity to imagine, an inexorable reality that is both good and does not cater to each and every of our whims [rather, people in general seem to believe in an inexorable reality that is by and large evil and destructive, and a progress fighting against this reality and for our whims – the idea that a) the cosmos might be good and b) that it provides a pattern to conform to rather than an imperfection to be perfected is very alien to a modern way of thinking]

In any case, I think of Boethius at times like these because Philosophy will not let him remain under the delusion that the “something” out there for him must necessarily be something he will like or something most people would consider a blessing. It includes both the top and the bottom of the wheel of fortune, and some brutal facts about the way things work. Boethius, for instance, must realize that though he was in his own way seeking to do something he considered good through politics –to “change the world,” so to speak – this change is not ultimately in his hands – from Boethius’s perspective, he left behind a corrupt government. Moreover, the end of Boethius’s own personal story is something of a case study in what he was trying to show in The Consolation – Boethius was eventually executed for his alleged crimes rather than reinstated.

Despite its name, The Consolation is hard reading. It is hard because all those things we want, such as emotional comfort, reassurance, and diversion are not there. In fact, the first few times I read it, I, coming out a good emotive Evangelical background, kept wondering: “Where is personal experience? Where is the incarnational Christ that meets us where we are at? Isn’t it He whom we turn to for consolation?” This sense was in fact so pressing for me that I gave a paper approximately oriented around it to a society of Boethian scholars, and scandalized them by suggesting that there is no consolation at the end. For a while I wondered if Boethius in fact had not been a little too influenced by Greek philosophy and not enough influenced by Christ. What I did not recognize but hopefully recognize now is that, whether or not there was consolation, there was certainly truth, and it is a truth that we need to hear particularly around the season of Lent.

While it is nice to come up with a comfortable juxtaposition wherein we have the cold, unfeeling God of the philosophers on one side and the personable buddy Jesus on the other, I can’t help seeing the point Boethius was driving at at the very heart of the Gospels – part of faith means recognizing that God’s blessing and salvation are not the same as personal or national success. At one point, Christ is talking about the crucifixion and Peter, being a good Evangelical, stops him and says, “Don’t go talking about crosses and suffering. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. And surely it cannot be that.” Christ’s response is to address Peter as Satan. And we see it elsewhere in reverse: when asked whether a man went blind on account of his own or his parents sin, Jesus says it is neither – it is so God can be glorified. And those who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them were not worse people than those who did not. The God revealed in Christ is the same God who speaks out of the whirlwind in Job.

Like Boethius and Christ in the Gospels, I often wonder about those who are not blessed. I have heard from various Christians stories about how God has brought about a particular set of circumstances to bless them in a particular way; moreover, I have no doubt that God is behind these things – every good and perfect gift is from above. But I sometimes can’t help wondering about the flip-side of these stories. What about the other people who were killed because they did not leave the country at just the right moment when the tsunami hit? What about the people who were not protected from the stray bullet by the Bible in their pocket? I can’t help thinking that, for every person who experiences miraculous healing through prayer, there are many others who die with prayers no less fervent. Once in fact I heard someone listing the things they were thankful for. They were in the hospital for something at least treatable, and one of the things they were thankful for was that they were not like so and so in the next bed who was dying of such and such a disease etc. Apparently, God is praiseworthy because he did not give me that illness, and we can move on without dealing with the fact that someone – anyone – suffers from it.

Lent looks these problems square in the face. With Christ we set our faces like flint toward Jerusalem. I imagine that none of the Desert Fathers went into the desert because they could not find one – deserts were plentiful and barren in the minds and hearts and cultures of the affluent societies around them. Rather they sought a physical environment that in fact reflects the way God’s world really works, at least in this time between times. People are parched and hungry in the desert. Yes, people die. And in faith we say that, yes, God made this world and it is good with all its mysteries and tragedies, though that does not keep us from asking once or twice now and then if this cup cannot be taken from us. Some like Pilate think truth is illusory, a vapour that does not really exist. Others seem to think of it as an objectively solid club to beat people over the head with. I suggest that it is a nail that pierces our hands and feet, and penetrates even to dividing joint and marrow. And there will not be resurrection until we have tasted it in our blood.

Back when I was part of Evangelical circles, there was not much talk of Lent. I have a theory that this is because there was a popular theology asserting that Christ not only died to take away our sins but also our suffering. If you take away suffering – the long, slow purgatorial path of painful penance – you can do away with Lent. From the perspective of such theology, Christ celebrated Lent once for all, and it is finished.

I and the liturgical calendar would like to submit otherwise. The blessing is not that Christ takes away our suffering, but rather that our suffering in a way as miraculous as transubstantiation can become part of the suffering of His body, the church. Pain and suffering will not go away this side of the apocalypse, and there are always people, Christian and otherwise, who will suffer. In Lent, we as the church do not come to fix this, though goodness knows we will do as much as we can. Rather, we witness to an alternative way of suffering, a way that shatters the illusions and vexations that we take comfort in, a way that exposes us to the searing whirlwind of truth in the desert of repentance. And the deepest secret of all is that there is a strange tenderness, even in the heart of the whirlwind.

 

Josh Ritter and the Problem of Evil

Tags

biblical wisdom, Brothers Karamazov, Christian, Ecclesiastes, evil and suffering, Job, josh ritter, theodicy

There is much that I could say about the Christian problem of evil and theodicy in terms of development and contemporary theological manifestations, and I will perhaps at some point write it all down here. At the moment, though, I want to make a very small foray into the matter by suggesting that, if you are a Christian, you should really pay attention to the work of Josh Ritter, who is I would argue one of the most brilliant lyricists in modern music.

Personally, I was first attracted to Ritter’s music by its resemblance to Biblical wisdom, and the first song I heard of his (Bright Smile) reminded me so much of the crypticism of Song of Solomon that I knew I had to track him down and hear more of his songs. Further listening has convinced me that his work has much in common with the Biblical books of Ecclesiastes and Job, two of my favorite Biblical texts. The problem of evil is raised in a variety of songs, such as Harrisburg, Folk Bloodbath, Girl in the War, and In the Dark; the cry for something something or someone evoked by the experience of evil and suffering is articulated in “To the Dogs or Whoever;” and Josh often finds his answer in a position that lies somewhere between humanism, in the best sense of the word, and a gesture toward a sacramental theology wherein the grubby roots of things lead one to something higher, almost implicitly incarnational though the Christology in the background is rarely articulated and may not even be fully understood by Ritter himself.  Songs expressing this tentative answer to the problems of evil and suffering include Lantern and Long Shadows.

Despite the excellence of his songwriting, it was with some measure of trepidation that I recently picked up Josh’s recent book – borrowed it from my sister, actually – and began to read it.  Contemporary musicians often have a bad habit of assuming that their success in one medium guarantees their success in another, and too often popular artists depend on their popularity as means of legitimating their own frivolous and mediocre forays into areas that are not their primary medium.  My fear was that Josh, an excellent musician and lyricist, had written an amateur novel as a side project.

However, I was thrilled to find myself thoroughly mistaken in my initial impression.  Josh is a poet, and what comes out best in his songs also dazzles in his novel, Bright’s Passage.  To return to the theme of this post, the novel does an excellent job of raising numerous questions about the goodness of God, the existence of evil, the role of the human will, suffering, destiny etc. – everything one would expect to find in a work raising the question of the problem of evil and the possibility of formulating a successful theodicy or defense.  I will not tell you how he deals with this question, and indeed I’m not even sure if Ritter always understands himself the full extent of the questions, problems and images he catches by the tail – what is certain is that he has a good sense for live questions, and he seems happier to encounter a living mystery than a neat and solid but dead answer.

So why am I suggesting that you read this book?  It is by no means a Christian story if by that we mean a story where the characters find all their answers in God.  But then, by that measure, neither is Ecclesiastes on its own, for the immense longing it creates can only be answered by another work, nothing less than the work of Christ.  And it is in creating this Ecclesiastean longing that Ritter excels, particularly against the backdrop of contemporary culture.  The early existentialists seem to have thought  that a rejection of God on the grounds of his alleged responsibility for suffering and evil (think Ivan Karamazov) would bring humans to a state of tragic nobility – they may not be comfortable or happy, but at least they would be honest and aggressively destroy illusion.  The interesting thing is that this is not what happened.  Once God was rejected there was no particularly good reason to be honest or to destroy illusion – if we’re all going to die, we might as well die comfortably (the modern idea of a “good death).  And it is more comfortable not to think of things that disrupt us like death, suffering, and God, so we devise ways to distract ourselves, bread and circus games, so to speak – or, to use the latinate turn of another modern author, panem.

What I appreciate about Josh’s work, both in his songs and his novel, is that he doesn’t let go of disturbing things.  His art begins in the chinks and flaws that modern culture seeks to hide, and that signal its eventual doom.  And he doesn’t flinch.  Yes, he questions God, but so does Job.  And no, I don’t know if he is a Christian, though I pray for him.  What I do know is that someone questioning God because of the evil in the world is likely to be a good deal closer to finding Him than someone who gives up on the search altogether and self medicates through analgesic media – or, indeed, who, like Job’s friends, have made a corrupt and falsified version of faith into their own personal brand of analgesic.  Though it can never be considered the eschatological end of the cosmos, there are times when a cry of pain is exactly what we need to hear – not only do we need to hear, but we need to listen, and support those trying hard to listen.  “In the dark I thought I heard somebody call,” says Ritter in one of his songs; so did I, and that is precisely why I am a Christian.