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Tag Archives: Faith

50 Years of Doctor Who: Religion and Morality

27 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by CaptainThin in Uncategorized

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Andrew Crome, Christianity, doctor who, Exploring our Matrix, Faith, James F. McGrath, religion, Religion and Doctor Who, sci-fi, science fiction, Theology, Time and Relative Dimensions in Faith

Day-of-the-Doctor-banner

Churl and I had the chance to watch the Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary special together in theatres this past weekend. And while each of us enjoys considering the deeper questions in television programmes like this, we both agreed that the 50th was, at its core, primarily just a good romp. [A few spoilers follow.]

That doesn’t mean, of course, that there weren’t interesting questions in the story. The episode revolves around the conclusion of the Time War, an event which has been oft-referenced during Nu-Who but never seen. We already know, as a result, that the Doctor is the one who ended the Time War—an act which took the lives not only of the Timelords’ enemies (the Daleks) but also of the Timelords themselves. To prevent the destruction of the universe, the Doctor sacrificed his own people. Or, put less charitably, in saving countless others the Doctor committed the genocide of his own race.

The 50th anniversary special (The Day of the Doctor) brings our attention back to this event. In fact, as the show is about time-travel, it actually takes us back inside the event, back to the Moment when the Doctor must decide whether the ends truly justify the means—whether the end of the Time War is worth the destruction of Gallifrey. This episode, as a result, is heavy on moral questions. And they are quite explicitly asked here: a past incarnation of the Doctor (who has yet to make the choice) asks future incarnations whether the horror of what he did/will do still haunts them. “Did you ever count how many children there were on Gallifrey that day?” he asks. In other words, did these future Doctors ever look back and wonder how many children died as a result of this decision. The past Doctor wants to know how they live with themselves; he wants the benefit of their retrospect even as he still wrestles with whether he will make the choice or not.

It brings us back to the Moment when the Doctor must decide whether the ends truly justify the means—whether the end of the Time War is worth the destruction of Gallifrey.

I won’t say anymore than that here; you really should just watch the episode yourself. But since we’re talking about Doctor Who and deeper things, allow me to highlight a few interesting articles about Doctor Who and religion.

The BBC has an interesting retrospect on religion in Doctor Who over the past fifty years in a recent article by Andrew Crome entitled “Doctor Who: Time travel through faith.” The thesis in short? “Doctor Who has continually engaged with important religious themes across its 50-year run.” Dr. Crome takes a broad stroke approach to the topic.

For a more frequent discussion of Doctor Who and its relationship with religion, readers may want to check out James F. McGrath’s blog “Exploring our Matrix.” Dr. McGrath, a member blogger for the Progressive Christian channel of Patheos, frequently discusses recent episodes and news regarding Doctor Who. His site is definitely worth watching for new posts on Who.

relative-dimensionsIt’s also worth noting that the above two writers (Dr. Crome and Dr. McGrath) recently collaborated on a new book entitled Relative Dimensions in Faith: Religion and Doctor Who. The book includes essays by 19 scholars discussing such topics as “Doctor Who and the Apocalypse,” “The Role of Christian Imagery in Russel T. Davies’ Doctor Who Revival,” and “The Church Militant?” [If anyone feels inclined to get me this book, I wouldn’t say no to it!]

Finally, readers may want to catch up on my earlier post here on A Christian Thing as well. Entitled “Doctor Who: Religion and the Limits of Human Reason,” I examine the role of gods and demons in the Doctor Who franchise, with particular attention paid to Tenth Doctor stories “The Impossible Planet” and “The Satan Pit.”

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Preaching Elijah

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by chinglicanattable in Uncategorized

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Anglican, Asian American, Ba'al, Catholic, Chinese, Christian, Christology, Deuteronomistic History, Elijah, Faith, feminist, feminist theology, Hebrew Scripture, hermeneutics, historical criticism, homiletics, Karl Barth, Kierkegaard, lectionary, liberal, liberal Protestant, modernity, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Old Testament, Old Testament studies, Protestant, sermon

In the Revised Common Lectionary, today is the third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 5.  The church catholic meditates on the Jesus story in Luke 7:11-19 where Jesus raises the widow’s son from the dead at the town of Nain and is pronounced a prophet. (This theme is certainly brought out by tonight’s Vespers canticle antiphon: A great prophet has arisen among us and God has visited his people.)

I preached today in a young second-generation Chinese evangelical congregational context and set myself up for a challenge. Instead of using the Gospel reading, I tried something that I’d never done before: use the first reading from the Hebrew Scriptures to construct a homily for the lectionary themes for the week. Today’s reading was from Elijah’s visitation to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon.

Drawing inspiration from Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber’s weekly postings of her sermon texts, I’ll post mine here too, though she is a far, far better preacher than I could ever hope to become. (This is not because she is a good performer, though she is that as well. It’s rather because her pastoral gifts seem way off the charts.) Two prefactory notes to this Chinglican homiletical rendition of the passage, one hermeneutical, the other homiletical.

The hermeneutic I’m using here is a typically Chinglican one: typically catholic, typically feminist, and typically positioned between church and academia. Because I don’t read Hebrew, Ugaritic, Akkadian, Aramaic, or German with any level of competency, I decided to do a light review of Hebrew Scripture studies in the last week by poking around the various journals. This literature troubled me on some levels because in the wake of historical criticism going into crisis, there seemed to be a few anachronisms, especially claims that religion could be ‘private’ in an antique text (I felt like throwing Talal Asad at them). However, there were also some gems: in the wake of the historical critical method undergoing some level of crisis since the 1980s, the most interesting historical readings of the text have been feminist materialist ones that probe the political economy circumscribing the text (props to Gale Yee and Alice Keefe for brilliant analyses of the Hosea narratives that were methodologically useful for the Kings text, and props to Phyllis Trible on her analysis on the Elijah narratives themselves). From these readings, it has become apparent that where an older generation of Deuteronomistic History scholars posited a series of binaries particularly between Ba’al and Yahweh (and also Elijah v. Jezebel), these binaries break down upon a close reading of the text itself, a typical task of feminist analysis itself (no, feminism is not just about ‘gender’; it’s about breaking down conventional binaries that uncritically prop up unwarranted hierarchies). Theologically, then, it seems much more convincing to analyze ancient Israelite ‘religion’ (I prefer ‘state cult,’ thank you) as viewing Yahweh as part of the Ba’alic cult, with monolatrous prophets and monotheistic editors during the Exile inserting their own theological analyses that posited a Yahweh that stood out from the Ba’alic cult.

This was helpful for the reading of the text for two reasons. First, it helped me get out of my modern habits, which would have been to read the text anachronistically as one where Elijah and the widow take a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ into the hands of the unknown God, and God delivers because he’s their Tillichian ‘ground of being.’ These studies helped to situate the political context of the text, helping me to see the political dynamics going on between Elijah and the Omride dynasty, between Yahweh and Ba’al. However, second, these feminist analyses cautioned me against taking a strictly dichotomous view between Yahweh and Ba’al, to acknowledge how interconnected they were in the Israelite state cult and to examine deeply the original theological contributions of monolatrous prophets issuing polemics to extract Yahweh from the Ba’alic cult. They also helped me to see parallels between Jezebel and the widow of Zarephath without positing either as ‘good woman’ or ‘bad woman,’ but as very interesting and complex theological actresses in their own right.

Where I depart from the feminist analysis is where I depart from the comparative religion enterprise altogether with a sort of catholic twist: this is the theological move I’m developing from the above hermeneutical method. Reading the feminist analyses, there was a sort of polemic against Yahweh as himself a god of terror, at least as revealed by the prophets. But if we are to take the catholic development of doctrine seriously (one posited by Peter himself when he says in his second epistle that the prophets longed to look into the things of partaking of the divine nature), even someone like Elijah might have been revealing Yahweh through only a glass dimly. Certainly, this is borne out by other interesting analyses in Hebrew Scripture studies where scholars currently note that the Elijah narratives seem to be schizophrenic (or in Charles Taylor’s terms, ‘deeply cross-pressured’) on Elijah’s theology: Elijah is himself a bit of a bombastic character (declaring a cessation of rain on Israel, staging a contest of the gods, slaughtering the prophets of Ba’al, telling Jezebel that dogs will lick up her blood, sending fire down on Amaziah’s army), but the narrative’s portrayal of Yahweh is that of a still, small voice, a gentle God who sounds nothing like Ba’al. If that’s the case, then what’s revealed in this passage is a God who cares for the widow, even if she is from the land of Jezebel, a portrait of Yahweh whose contrast to Ba’al is not one of power, but one of love, certainly foreshadowing the God who reveals himself as love in Jesus Christ, almost despite the prophet’s own over-the-top moments and the authors’ and editors’ ideological agendas.

Of course, I know that this may not be a kosher move in biblical studies; my friend Sam happens to have a fantastic post detailing why bad christological moves in interpretation shut down the congregation’s ability to participate in worship. But the remedy for this might not be to forego talking christologically in a Hebrew Scripture text–we are, after all, Christians; it’s what we do, and why we were considered heretical in the first century–it might be to display a fuller christology than the pet christologies in our traditions. This is a bit of a catholic move, joining these texts in a lectionary that includes the Hebrew Scriptures, the psalter, the epistles, and the Gospels that is read by the church catholic to all speak as a choir of different parts about Jesus (sorry, I got the choir thing from the second reading in today’s Office of Readings from the epistle of St. Ignatius to the Romans).

That ‘choral’ canonical reading is the catholic move that I think is liturgically important, even if it might be viewed with a bit of suspicion from the academy (which is why this sermon is positioned between the church and the academy). There are plenty of passages from which I can draw to make these comparisons, but responding especially to Sam’s point about how these moves should be cautiously made to avoid doing violence to the text, I think in a homiletical setting, these moves should be governed by the lectionary. For example, I could have used Luke 4 where there is a direct reference to the widow of Zarephath. But that would have taken this sermon in a radically different theological direction from the move via Luke 7, which is what the lectionary prescribes. With Luke 4, I would have had to make the sermon about radical inclusion. But the Luke 7 reading makes the piece about Yahweh’s radical self-revelation to the widow as a God of love whose character is radically different from that of Ba’al, a point that probably neither Elijah nor even the Kings writers and editors had fully worked out. Replying to Sam, then, these christological moves need not always be a disservice to the congregation if they are governed by the lectionary; in fact, they can be opportunities for theological creativity.

These hermeneutical and theological moves transition me to homiletics, the delivery of today’s sermon. Here’s where the Chinglican moves come in full form: I was preaching to a group of English-speaking second-generation Chinese Canadian evangelicals whose company I really enjoy. They sing loudly in worship, they allow themselves to crack the most hilarious jokes during worship, they actually laugh at my jokes (brownie points for that), and they are just a fun group to be around. With their lives situated among their generally conservative Chinese families (‘Chinese’ does not equate conservatism, which is why the qualifier is needed), their fledgling second-generation ministry at church, and their secular lives in either school or work, the question became how to sharpen the text’s punch while speaking to this particular segment of the church catholic, even while at the same time keeping the church catholic in mind.

In terms of packing a good homiletical punch, I think Karl Barth has always done a particularly good job (I also said, ‘Now I can preach again!’ after reading Romans), so you will see a lot of ‘God says, “No,'” in this sermon. This especially includes saying ‘no’ to the notion that we as younger-generation Chinese Canadian evangelicals need to develop an exclusionary identity. These identity politics are a fraught issue within the current conversation in Asian North American evangelical circles, but if Yahweh is so inclusive of a widow in Sidonian territory, then the politics of developing a distinctive identity cannot be pursued via the politics of exclusion. Asian American Protestant historian Timothy Tseng and radically orthodox theologian Jonathan Tran have helped me see this very clearly: our second-generation identity politics can be premised on exclusion, especially by orientalizing our parents. These exclusionary impulses should be homiletically countered: because Yahweh reveals himself to the widow as a gift, we too must reveal the Lord Jesus as a gift, as the Bread of Life come down from heaven to give himself for the life of the world, not to consolidate our distinctive identities. (I didn’t develop the eucharistic theme, though, because I didn’t want to get into a debate about the Real Presence, though as you’ll see toward the end of the sermon, there’s a brief mention of the Holy Spirit, which I think is crucial: the thoughtful charismatics I have encountered tend to be quite drawn to a high Mariology, a high Eucharistic theology, and a high ecclesiology.)

Here’s the sermon, then. It’s not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. But I suppose it’s a good record of where I’m at so far in my wrestling with how I might read the Hebrew Scriptures as a Chinglican Christian.

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Elijah
A Sermon for Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Proper 5
1 Kings 17:8-24; Psalm 146; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
This sermon focuses on the Old Testament and Gospel readings.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

The Elijah reading is one of those passages where it looks like the take-away message is, ‘Don’t you trust God?’  It looks like one of those passages where the point is that the really good Christians are the ones who trust God, and the bad Christians who don’t have enough faith or the non-Christians who have no faith just live a lower order of existence.  If you’re not like this, then you should educate me as to how you think. But most of the Christians I hang out with occasionally make these sorts of off-hand remarks, like, Oh, that person is not a Christian, she doesn’t have any faith, and that’s why she has no hope in life.  Sometimes we mean well—we might think that we want to go evangelize those lost people if we get a chance—but this seems to be the way that many of my Christian friends talk.  That annoying colleague at work is annoying because he’s not Christian and because he has no faith, so he takes out his psychological imbalance on us (we think that God can fix him psychologically).  Those politicians of that particular party don’t know God, so they support immoral positions that don’t align with our Christian values; we must battle with them in the cultural arena because they will corrupt our society and our next generation.  Those friends who betrayed us by not taking our side when our lives were going rough—well, maybe they’re just not Christians because obviously if they had faith, they’d have the emotional security to stand with us.  This is even true among second-generation Chinese Christians of our age.  I don’t know if you think this, but whole books have been written titled Following Jesus Without Dishonoring Your Parents and The Chinese Way of Doing Things, where the premise is that because our parents are Chinese, they hold on to these cultural values that stunt their faith so that they end up controlling us, stopping us any time we say we want to become a missionary or a pastor and forcing us to become doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, engineers, and accountants (not that there’s anything wrong with that…my wife is a pharmacist, and we’re quite happy about that!).

It becomes easy to read the Bible like this.  As we read and do our Christian thing, we criticize people we think are losers, or people who annoy us, people who don’t share our values, or people whom we think want to control us.  We say that they either don’t having enough faith to trust God or maybe just have no hope because they’re not Christian.  It’s very tempting to read the passage on Elijah like that. God tells his prophet Elijah to go to Zarephath, a town north of Israelite territory, and to trust him to provide food through a poor widow who only has a handful of flour and a drop of oil in a jug.  It seems pretty straight-forward.  The passage is about trusting God, like if we were in Elijah’s shoes and God called us to go to a far distant land to maybe be a missionary, reach out to the poor widow, and fulfill his purpose for us in our lives.  The widow also has to take a leap of faith, trusting God’s prophet that when God says that the flour and oil won’t run out, they really won’t: do you have enough faith, brothers and sisters, to believe that?  The leap of faith, we think, is what makes us different from our non-Christian friends or from our bad Christian brothers, sisters, and parents who just don’t have enough faith.  In fact, we tell ourselves that non-Christians or bad Christians have little hope because they don’t have a God to believe in; that’s why they have no purpose in life.  Unlike our non-Christian friends, then, we say that we should be secure in our life, our future, our education, our careers, our family values, even whether we’ll meet that special someone someday and date them with biblical principles, and if we don’t have that kind of security, maybe it’s just because we don’t have enough faith.  We tell ourselves that we need faith in God to hear his calling and find out what his will is, just like Elijah heard God’s calling and found out that his will was for him to go north to feed the widow.  What makes us Christian, we might think, is that we take these leaps of faith because we believe in a god and we think we should obey him, leaping into the unknown, letting the invisible God give us a purpose and provide for us while we do his will.

The only trouble is, that’s not what the passage is about.

The whole reason that God is telling Elijah to get food from a widow in the first place is that Elijah is on the run from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel.  Ahab and Jezebel believe in gods—in fact, they believe in too many of them—which means that they happen to have a lot of faith.  Just to give you some context: if you grew up in church, you might know the name Jezebel, and you might associate her with this evil witch-queen straight out of something like Game of Thrones who does like black magic and seduces weak men.  That’s not quite it: the real Jezebel was a princess, the daughter of the king of a fairly wealthy merchant city north of Israel called Sidon (actually, that still sounds like Game of Thrones, but whatever).  Jezebel’s dad and probably Ahab’s dad arranged for them to get married to cement the trade between their two wealthy kingdoms.  The trouble is, once Jezebel becomes queen of Israel, she gets Ahab to start worshipping her god, build an altar that god, build a house for that god, and host some 450 priests to that god at their dinner table (which means she was pretty rich).

That god was called Ba’al.

If you’ve been in church for a while, you might recall hearing this name Ba’al (some people pronounce it ‘bayle’).  Ba’al seems to pop up in every Old Testament story where there’s another god that the real God doesn’t like his people worshipping.  It’s like all these gods get called Ba’al.  They all get called ba’al, because technically, all that ba’al means is ‘lord,’ like some kind of sovereign god, king of the universe, powerful over everything, probably the guy to pray to if you’re a farmer and you’re hoping for some rain.  And for sure, there was a major Ba’al that people prayed to, but there were lots of ba’als (ba’al place names, people named ba’al, subgods that were ba’alish).  In fact, because Ba’al was so generic, some people even thought that worshipping Ba’al was the same thing as worshipping the God of Israel, who went by a name called Yahweh, the God who told the prophet Moses back at the burning bush that his name was I AM WHO I AM, Yahweh.

But here’s the point.  The issue was never that Elijah believed in a god who gave him a purpose in life and everybody else didn’t believe in a god, so they had no purpose in life.  The issue was more like, who is this God that everybody says that they trust and who gives them a purpose in life?

This is a really important question in this passage, because Yahweh and Ba’al really seem to hate each other’s guts.  With Elijah running from Ahab and Jezebel, you could say that Yahweh and Ba’al were sort of duking it out.  It’s pretty clear in the text that Yahweh didn’t really like Ba’al, because when Ahab started worshipping Ba’al, it says that he ‘did more to provoke the anger of Yahweh, the God of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel who were before him’ (16:33).  Yahweh is pissed (am I allowed to say that in church?): he doesn’t like being in competition with this Lord Ba’al.  So Yahweh tells his prophet Elijah to tell King Ahab that it won’t rain until Yahweh says it will (take that, Ba’al).  This means that, as the passage is starting out, we get the sense that Ba’al and Yahweh are both sort of rain gods. This means that they controlled the agricultural economy of the time by making it rain.  By getting involved in this sort of mean-spirited competition, humans become their victims: while they’re duking out their god powers, the humans get a drought.  We get the sense, at least initially, that Yahweh and Ba’al are pretty similar in character: they both like to be worshipped, they both like to control the world, they both have human pawns like prophets and kings and priests who tell people what God wants them to do.  In other words, it’s no surprise that some people thought that worshipping Ba’al and Yahweh was the same thing because it really was, you know, same difference.

And that’s where Yahweh, the God of Israel, begins to surprise us.  He’s nothing like Ba’al.

Yahweh tells his prophet Elijah, who’s been hiding by a creek living off bread and meat that ravens have been sending him, to go up north, up to Zarephath which belongs to Sidon, the same city where Queen Jezebel is from.  Elijah is going to Jezebel country.  There, Yahweh says, a widow is going to feed you.  Now this still sounds pretty mean and exploitative.  It’s like Yahweh saying that in this epic battle with Ba’al, he’s sending Elijah to Jezebel ‘Ba’al-mama’ country, and there, they’re going to exact revenge on Jezebel by making the poorest of the poor, a widow, pay.

The widow seems to read the situation like this as well.  Elijah gets up there and sees this widow gathering sticks, and he says to her in the middle of this drought where there is no water, ‘Hey, get me some water in a jar so that I can drink it.’  You get the sense that this widow goes like, Oh fine, but while she goes off to get it, Elijah demands more: ‘Oh, bring me a piece of bread too.’  The widow has it up to here.  She goes, ‘OK, I get it.  You and that Yahweh your God with your drought thing, you win. You’ve defeated Ba’al. I don’t have anything baked, I’ve only got a handful of flour and a little drop of oil in my jar, so I’m gathering sticks, going to take it home to my boy, we’re going to bake that last crumb of bread, and we’re going to die.  The end; you win.’

This is when Elijah surprises her.  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ Elijah says.  Sure, go home and do all that stuff you said about dying if that’s what floats your boat, but first bake me a little cake and then make something for yourself and your son.  See, the thing is, Yahweh isn’t interested in exacting revenge on you and exploiting you.  We aren’t here to pick on Jezebel country.  In fact, Yahweh’s message is that your jar of flour and your jar of oil won’t go empty until it rains again and you can grow new crops.  I’m not here to exploit you.  I’m here as a gift.

And so they start living off the gift.  They live the good life in the middle of this drought, Elijah with the widow and her son, with the infinite supply of flour and oil.  Life is good.  The widow comes to believe that maybe this Yahweh is not so bad.  Maybe he’s not as vengeful as she thought he was.  Maybe he’s not duking it out with Baal after all.  Maybe he’s a good guy, a good God.

And then her son drops dead.  In anger, the widow confronts Elijah, ‘I knew life was getting too good!  So this is your god after all!  What do you guys have against me?  All you want to do is to drudge up my sin, our sin, the sin that Jezebel caused when she put Ba’al in competition with Yahweh.  And what happens?  Your Yahweh takes it out on my boy.  The little people always suffer for the politics of the gods!  I knew it!  All the gods are the same!’

Elijah then carries the boy up to his upper chamber, puts him on his bed, and cries out to Yahweh: ‘Oh, Yahweh my God, is this what you’re really like?  Like, you’ve got to be kidding me.  Are you really going to take out your conflict with Baal on this widow by killing her son?’  He stretches himself on the boy three times and cries out, ‘Oh, Yahweh, my God, let this child’s life come back into him!’  Yahweh listens.  The boy revives.  Elijah takes him down and gives him back to his mom.  And in that moment, the widow says, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.’  In other words, now I know intimately for myself that you truly speak for Yahweh when you say things like Yahweh is not in competition with Ba’al, that he’s not going to exact his revenge on us, that he has given you to us as a gift, that instead of exploiting the poor, he’s always on our side.

I said at the beginning of this sermon that many of us might think that what makes us Christian is that we believe in a god.  But as Elijah’s encounter with the widow of Zarephath shows us, there’s a big difference between Ba’al and Yahweh, between the gods as we normally think of them and who the living God really is.  Yahweh is not Ba’al: he is not a sovereign dictator who exacts revenge whenever we place other gods in competition with him.  Yahweh is a gift, loving us, giving us life, giving us himself.

Putting our faith in Yahweh, the God who gives himself to us, is what makes us Christian because this God is the God ultimately revealed to us in Jesus.  Here’s a Jesus story.  In Luke 7, Jesus is traveling with his disciples when he comes across the funeral of another widow’s son.  The similarity to the Elijah story couldn’t be more striking.  Jesus sees the widow weeping as the funeral procession marches out of the city, her only son, dead.  It’s as if he hears the cry of the widow screaming at Elijah, ‘Is this what God is really like?’  Jesus stops the procession and calls to the man, ‘Young man, I say to you, rise!’  The young man gets up, and just like Elijah gave the son back to the widow, Jesus gives the son back to his widow mom, and the whole town declares him to be a prophet, one who brings God’s favourable gaze to his people.  Now I know that you are a man of God, and the word of Yahweh in your mouth is truth.

But Jesus is more than a prophet, greater even than Elijah.  Elijah reveals to the widow in Jezebel-country that Yahweh does not the exploit the poor as a sort of vengeance for being put in competition with other gods.  Elijah shows the widow, and through the widow, shows us, that God is a gift-giver: he gives bread that never runs out; he brings the widow’s dead son back to life.  So does Jesus.  Jesus comes breaking bread with tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners, and feeding thousands of people in one go; on more than one occasion, he also brings dead kids back to life to their rejoicing parents.  But Jesus does more, because where Elijah shows us that Yahweh gives gifts, Jesus is himself the gift.

As one greater than Elijah, Jesus doesn’t just bring sons back to life; he is the Son of God who comes back to life.  Elijah challenges Ahab and Jezebel about their Ba’al worship and then runs for his life.  Jesus also challenges the established picture of God during his time, a picture that saw God as taking revenge on behalf of his people against enemies who conquered them and currently ruled them, a God who will rightfully enthrone God’s people to take over the world and make the unbelievers pay for their crimes.  Jesus said, No, to that picture of God; he showed us that the way of God is not the way of conquest, but the way of the cross, loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, blessing those who curse us, praying for those who mistreat us.  But where Elijah runs for his life after he makes challenges Ba’al, Jesus gives his life to show us that God really is love.  Jesus gives himself into the hands of those who hang on to the Ba’al version of god for their identity and the preservation of their power.  As he hangs alone and abandoned on the cross, he cries out, ‘My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?’ but because it’s in Aramaic (Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani), the people around the cross go, ‘What? Elijah?’ and they mock him, ‘Ha! Let’s see if Elijah will come save him now!’  Jesus the Son of God dies, Elijah does not show up, and the disciples go into hiding, screaming just like the widow: I knew it! All these gods are the same.  They’re just out for their own power, and the ones who suffer are the little people.

And that is when God speaks a word that rings clearer than any word he had ever spoken through Elijah: God raises Jesus from the dead.  God says, No, to the version of god that’s vengeful and evil and powerful at the expense of the little people.  God says, This Jesus who is raised from the dead, this is my Son, this is the man of God in whose mouth the word of Yahweh is truth.  Listen to him.

And Jesus, the Son of God raised to life in whose mouth the word of Yahweh is truth, remains consistent to the truth of the God that he reveals, the God who is a gift, the God who is love.  When Jesus says, ‘Do not be afraid,’ to his disciples, he tells them that he has not returned from the dead to seek vengeance.  Because he appears only to his disciples, he does not seem to care about confronting the political people who put him to death.  Because he eats and drinks with his followers, he shows them that he won’t punish them for ditching him at the cross.  No, he says to his disciples the exact same thing that Elijah says to the widow in Jezebel-country, the widow who thought he was there to take out God’s wrath on her: Do not be afraid.  But as one greater than Elijah, Jesus does not only provide flour and oil that won’t run out.  Jesus gives himself to them, to us, as the Bread of Life.  He sends the Holy Spirit on us, his church, joining us with the life of God, to his risen life, so that as he lives forever, we will also live eternal life.

That’s what makes you and me Christians: it is that we have received the life of Jesus as a gift.  This changes everything.  This means that believing in a generic god who controls our life and gives us purpose does not make us Christian.  What makes us Christian is that we have received God’s gift of life.  It means that we have come to realize that the living God is not a god who demands us to give him stuff, sucking us dry by putting time commitments on us and guilt-tripping us when what’s on our mind is not him, but school stress, family problems, workplace politics, unemployment depression, dating agonies, or just the boredom of an unexciting life.  It means that we don’t set ourselves up as superior to non-Christians and that we don’t even exact revenge on the Ahabs and the Jezebels who come after us with their sovereign, controlling lords.  We simply love everyone, even our enemies.

And that stops us right in our tracks when we start to say things like Christians have a purpose in life and non-Christians don’t.  That is just not a Christian thing to say.  The Christian way to live is to realize instead that much of what passes for ‘god’ in the world is the version that is angry, vengeful, competitive, demanding, and arbitrarily powerful.  In contrast to that, Christians embody in our everyday lives the surprise of God’s love, because we are the people who say, Do not be afraid.  God is a gift.  If Elijah can enter Jezebel country and say this to a widow, if Jesus rises from the dead and says this to the disciples who abandoned him, then we must say this in how we treat colleagues who annoy us, parents we think are controlling our lives, politicians with whom we disagree, friends who have betrayed us, and people for whom we think we don’t have time.  Instead of criticizing them and excluding them, we say with our lives, Do not be afraid.  God is a gift.  After all, that’s what Jesus says to us, and we have received his gift of life.

Amen.

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

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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.

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.

Doctor Who: Religion and the limits of human reason

08 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by CaptainThin in Uncategorized

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Christian, Christianity, doctor who, dr. who, Faith, impossible planet, mythology, religion, rings of akhaten, satan pit, science fiction

Doctor-Who-Akhaten

The Doctor confronts the old god in “The Rings of Akhaten.”

In case you haven’t heard, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who. As a fan, I’ve wanted to pay homage to the show for some time, planning to write a post discussing the good Doctor and religion. Now seems as good a time as any, given that the most recent episode “The Rings of Akhaten” is a story in which the Doctor comes face to face with a “god.”

It’s a common enough theme in science fiction: the self-proclaimed deity who is unmasked as a pretender (think Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country—“What does God need with a starship?”). Still, the Doctor’s confrontations with religious beings are a little different than those in other science fiction series. He is, after all, a semi-divine figure himself. All space and time is at his disposal. He can go anywhere and anywhen. He’s more Q than Picard, if you will.

The Doctor’s confrontations with religious beings is different than other science fiction. He is, after all, a semi-divine figure himself.

So when the Doctor comes up against a “god,” we know he’ll be able to expose it as a fraud. And it always is another a fraud. It might be a powerful being; it might be ancient. It might, as in the most recent episode, have existed for millenia, feeding on the offerings and worship of its followers. But whatever else it is, it is not truly divine. It is as much a part of the universe as anything else. It can always be explained. It can always be understood.

Except, perhaps, in one two-part story from the Tenth Doctor’s era. In this story, the Doctor again comes across someone professing godhood: he meets a being which claims to be the Beast, the devil himself. But the Doctor has faced many false gods in his day; they are all pretenders. “If you are the Beast,” he mocks, “then answer me this: Which one, hmm? Because the universe has been busy since you’ve been gone. There’s more religions than there are planets in the sky. There’s the Arkaphets, Christianity, Pash-Pash, New Judaism, San Claar, Church of the Tin Vagabond. Which devil are you?”

Only this time the devil is real. “Which devil are you?” the Doctor asks. “All of them,” the Beast replies. He is not lying.

Here the Doctor is confronted with something greater—and more terrifying—than he can imagine. Not merely because it is an unknown but instead because it is by its nature unknowable. When the Doctor asks the Beast when he came to be chained in the Pit, the latter answers, “Before time.” This answer makes no sense to the Doctor; he cannot conceive of a “before time.”

“What does ‘before time’ mean?” he asks.

“Before time and light and space and matter. Before the cataclysm. Before this universe was created.”

“You can’t have come from before the universe,” the Doctor responds incredulously. “That’s impossible.”

To which the Beast replies, “Is that your religion?”

The Doctor can only respond, “It’s a belief.”

The Beast scoffs, “You know nothing. All of you, so small.”

Here the Doctor, nigh on a deity himself, is confronted by something beyond him. Unknowable. Unthinkable. Impossible. He cannot conceive of existence before time and matter. His reason is too small; it cannot bend so far. He cannot comprehend it. He cannot measure it and test it. “If that thing had said it was from beyond the universe, I’d have believed it. But before? Impossible.”

So too did God question Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone?” (Job 38:4-6). The questions are, for Job, impossible to answer; they are beyond his understanding: “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3). But Job’s inability to answer God’s questions about creation—and the Doctor’s inability to comprehend of existence “before time”—does not change the fact of their existence.

So then: the Doctor finds himself opposed by a power he cannot even comprehend. He has no more ideas. He has no more options. Even the TARDIS—and, consequently, the only chance of escape—has been lost. All hope is at an end. The situation is utterly and completely beyond him.

The situation is utterly and completely beyond him. How fitting then, that the solution must also come from beyond him.

How fitting then, that the solution must also come from beyond him. It has, in fact, been prepared in advance by those who first imprisoned the devil. The Beast had been imprisoned “before time,” he tells us, when “the Disciples of the Light rose up against me and chained me in the pit for all eternity.”

doctor-who-satan-pit

The Doctor meets the Devil in “The Satan Pit.”

It is impossible to miss the reference to Scripture here. “And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray” (Revelation 12:7-9). And again: “The angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day” (Jude 6).

As in the biblical text, the devil was defeated and chained in the darkness (in the television series, the devil is quite literally chained imprisoned on an “impossible planet” fixed in space in the shadow of a black hole). But the Disciples of the Light seem to have foreseen both the Beast’s attempt to escape and the Doctor’s presence at the event. When all hope is lost, the Doctor finds the Disciples of Light have prepared a solution for him ahead of time—quite literally before time existed.

Having fallen into the Pit, the Doctor awakens to find he was “expected.” “I was given a safe landing and air,” he says to the Beast, asking why. Slowly it dawns on him: provision for his safe descent was not the devil’s doing; it was the work of the Disciples of Light. “That’s it!” he exclaims. “You didn’t give me air, your jailers did! They set this up. They need me alive, because if you’re escaping then I need to stop you!” The Doctor discovers what the Disciples of Light intend him to do, and he does it—knowing full well it will mean his own death.

Except it doesn’t. In a deus ex machina worthy of the name, the Doctor’s previously lost TARDIS is discovered to have also fallen into the Pit. In fact, it’s landed right where it needs to be, almost as if by plan. And perhaps it was by plan. That’s what’s so fascinating about this particular Doctor Who story: it leaves room for the possibility of something more—something beyond mortal comprehension, beyond even the super-human Doctor’s understanding. The Doctor lays down his life to defeat the devil, only to find his life restored to him in the end.

God out of the machine indeed.

———————

The two-part story under discussion here is “The Impossible Planet” and “The Satan Pit.”

Cross-posted at Captain Thin.

Further Thoughts on Dealing With Mental Illness as a Christian

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Anxiety, depression, Disorders, Evangelicalism, Faith, Health, Mental health, mental illness, Mercedes Benz, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD

I wrote this post a while ago, but was waiting for the right time to post it on account of my already numerous posts on the subject. Now seemed to be the right time, since I keep encountering people I care about suffering from mental illness, particularly now at this darkest and coldest time of winter. This is for you – you know who you are.

So, having opened up the discussion on two counts of different kinds of mental illness/mood disorder, I want to follow this up with a discussion of the difficulties posed by these things when the person suffering from them brings them into Christian communities. What makes this most difficult is that the things that most deeply affect our spiritual journeys and struggles – those very things that one talks about with Christian friends and considers part of one’s Christian witness – are not the things we have made space for discussing in many Christian circles. Let me begin, for instance, with the typical question of “Where are you at, spiritually.” It is a little similar to the most annoying question you can ask a depressed person, “What is going on? Why are you sad?” Because the problem with the deepest forms of depression is that there is no reason. There is not a narrative one can give wherein it makes sense. It is in the truest sense of the word irrational. There is a story about a depressed person who went on a nice holiday to a beautiful location. She opened the door, heard the birds singing and saw all the beauty, and began to weep. This is depression. In its deepest form, it is by its nature an enigma.

So you see how asking the depressed person about their spirituality can bring about a deep state of anxiety and fear. Not only can they often not answer the question, “Where are you at spiritually,” but simply have no answer to the question, “Where are you?” Where did the person go that seemed to have been here but that seems to have dissolved into nothing? Where did that person’s interests go? Where did the pleasure and even the pain go, that seems to have dissolved into blankness? You can see how bringing up something like this is not exactly what people are looking for in prayer groups, or when they ask after prayer requests. Because it is potentially devastating to some people’s lives and even their faith. Wouldn’t the very existence of such an inexplicable thing be an embarrassment to God, and a faith that cannot handle it? To the former I answer emphatically no; to the latter, I answer that a faith that cannot handle such things is rightly embarrassed because it is not fully Christian – Christ is sovereign, even over things we can’t explain or control.

We get something similar with OCD. There are legitimate fears that one can discuss. But the never ceasing fear that someone will go to hell because you accidentally slighted them in a way they could never have noticed is not one of these; it is an embarrassment even to try to explain because the person with OCD knows how irrational it sounds and is, though they also know how reasonable and compelling it feels. And even when one brings things like this up, the usual Christian response to it is to reason with it. Engage the alleged problem directly. And this becomes a problem. Because OCD by its nature demands such engagement again and again and again. Better to quote scripture at it as Jesus does at the devil and then move on. The primary problem with OCD is that it sets up battles that don’t need to happen and then wastes one’s own and others energy in these battles; as long as you are fighting, it wins, but it will do everything it can to convince you that fighting is the way to win. You will see the problem here. On one hand, OCD is generally off limits as a matter of discussion in Christian groups. But when symptoms are discussed, they are usually discussed as the problems that they masquerade as rather than the meaningless and nagging voice that they are. The irony is that simply neglecting them leaves the sufferer isolated and lonely. Simply engaging them can encourage them. The tricky thing is that really dealing with them is a matter of acknowledging their presence but then answering them with something other than the answer they want. For people such as Luther, Therese of Lisieux, and Bunyan, this something was the infinite and deep grace of God rather than a compulsive parry for the thrust of every obsession. But of course OCD is tricky, and I imagine that even achieving a deep understanding of this grace could fall pray to OCD. Coming out of Christian backgrounds that emphasized this, I recall fearing deeply that I had not really “gotten” grace as I was supposed, and fearing that I was still trying to save myself through works so that I was incessantly trying to have a spiritual experience all the more elusive because intangible and subject to my state of mind, and therefore the perfect prey of OCD – just “letting go and letting God,” is as vulnerable to OCD as anything else.

Of course, the even more difficult thing to deal with is the spiritual complications that things like OCD and depression cause. Some people may sin by coveting their neighbor’s wife, or cow, or Mercedes Benz, but personally I covet my neighbor’s sins. I covet the state of dealing with normal struggles that normal people deal with, that make sense when you tell them to others. Although I rarely knew any of them, I recall being somewhat jealous in high-school of the fluffy kind of people whose deepest concern was a shallow relationship with their eighth or tenth boyfriend or girlfriend. I imagine I would not want to be such a person – in fact I imagine I do not have the capacity to be such a person – but I could always wish; the grass of fluffy banality always seemed greener from the side that felt like hell. And even now I wish I had something more glamorous and dramatic to discuss than what can only be called the elusive acedia so hard to pin down and address and yet the most frequent result of paralysis from OCD and depression.

All this to say I am not sure I know how to tell people they can meet the spiritual needs of people with OCD and depression, but listening to them might be a first good step. Personally, I have no idea about the degrees of pscyhology, physiology, biology, and spirituality involved in things like this – in OCD and depression the whole person suffers and so it is a problem on multiple levels. Clearly there is a biochemical element. Clearly there is a cognitive and psychological element. And though I hesitate to say it on account of the ways that various Christians misconstrue it, there is clearly a spiritual element. To clarify for those who think this way, I am not here saying that such things are demonic in the traditional sense that requires exorcism or Neil Anderson-esque type things etc. – I have seen severe problems when people treat mental illness and mood disorder as such. Particularly, there becomes a problem when these things are construed as purely spiritual problems that can be fixed by deeper piety, holiness etc. What I do mean though is that, for instance, the texts that most resonate with me in terms of thinking about my faith are not those lovey-dovey-happy texts we put up on powerpoint – no, they are those benighted and backward texts that speak of fierce conflict with devils. For whatever OCD and depression are, they certainly feel like those fierce assaults that not everyone else can see or understand. Who knows what they are, but for my money the best way I can describe my experience of faith in the midst of these things is to have people read a text like Guthlac A – preferably in the Old English – and then follow it up for dessert with something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is often very Christian without meaning to be. It is in the absurdities and inanities that the characters in these texts face that I see most often reflected my own condition: not one that fits happily into the model of struggles we ought and ought not to have according to the norms of a nice Evangelicalism, but one that finds a horrifyingly deep darkness and anxiety matched and superseded only by the grace that does not obliterate but has the power to transform and create ex nihilo.

Review of Faith, Hope, and Poetry, Part I: Imagination, Old English Poetry, and Malcolm Guite

28 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Dream of the Rood, Evangelical, Faith, Hope, Imagination, Malcolm Guite, Old English literature, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Theology

In prior posts, I have raised the issue of what I termed “the scandal of the Evangelical imagination,” and have drawn attention to one of the figures who is helping to redress this, poet/priest/singer/songwriter/scholar etc Malcolm Guite. For Christmas, I received a copy of Guite’s book, Faith, Hope, and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, and had all kinds of good intentions of finishing the book and then reviewing it on this blog. My current problem is that I am only a third or so through the book, and already have probably enough inspiration to fill a number of blog posts, so I have decided to post my review of the book in a few parts. Here begins part I:

There is a point where one just can’t take it anymore. By “it” I mean the vague, fuzzy, warm sentimental idealism that one often encounters in my profession, the study of English literature – although to be fair it is more often the rhetors rather than the scholars who play it up. Poetry is inspirational!!!; isn’t creativity wonderful?; imagination is the key to [insert goal here]! And when one encounters this one too many times, one finally snaps.  Isn’t imagination wonderful? No, but I’ll say yes if it makes people like you  go away. Isn’t freedom to be creative great? No, because what you mean by freedom has I think very little to do with being creative. Doesn’t poetry just open your eyes to the wonder of the world?  Yes, yes it does, and also the tragedy, horror and misery of it too. Before one knows it, one feels deep kinship with Swift, seeks solace in Ecclesiastes, and knows what Flannery O’Conner meant when, upon being asked if universities don’t stifle aspiring writers, replied that they rather don’t stifle enough of them.

I include this as prefatory material because it will help give some measure of what exactly I mean when I say that Malcolm Guite’s book is helping to revive in me some understanding of wonder – of terms such as creativity, imagination – that were long ago shattered by encounters with vapours disguised as these things. The main title of the book covers three topics – faith, hope, and poetry – and while I’m good with faith, and good with poetry, hope, as some of you will know, is for me one of the hardest sayings of the gospel. Of course, the hardness of a thing should never keep us from enacting it in faith, but I will say that Guite’s remarkable book is opening my eyes a little to the thing I am trying to faithfully enact. It takes something special to be hopeful without allowing hope to become the kind of optimism that papers over things, and it also takes daring because being hope means imagining a vision beyond the alleged data – a vision that the reality police often do not like. In any case, Guite models both, and if I am a poor student, I am at least a willing student.

So, what is so special about this book? First off, I must say that not everyone picking it up should expect the same experience I have had. It will, for instance, be particularly annoying to those who do not believe in an ongoing conversation of great ideas from the beginning of writing till now. It will be annoying to those who believe that scholars shouldn’t make overarching claims about literary history, and should stick to their own little fields and let others stick to theirs – scholars such as I am in my worse moments. In fact, in approaching the poems he considers from both an academic and creative writing perspective, Guite takes the risk of being charged by one side of sacrificing scholarly nicety for creativity, and on the other side of dredging up old boring poetry that has nothing to say to the modern creative writer.

What such critics might find most annoying, though, is what I find most attractive. In the hands of Guite, old poetry is revivified such that it can speak into the milieux of contemporary poetry, theology, theory, and politics. However, this is not an only alleged dialogue where old works simply become puppetry to say what modern people want them to say – Guite lets the alterity of the poetry push back. The results of this are messy; the book is neither a neat scholarly work in the traditional sense, nor simply a modern “how-to” book for creative writers. Rather, what I sense most behind the book is ongoing dialogue – Guite wrestling with the poems he encounters in an arena where the strictest rules apply and the judge is Christ – no easy outs or deceptive maneuvers here. In certain ways it reminds me of what might have happened had Boethius encountered not Philosophy but the best of the muses rather than the harlots he dismisses at the beginning of the Consolatio.

I will be saying more, but for the current post I will focus on one particular section that impressed me: Guite’s treatment of Old English poetry. As an Anglo-Saxonist, I will admit that one of the most attractive features of this book even before I bought it was its inclusion of a chapter on “The Dream of the Rood.” Very often even Christians talking about faith and imagination are under the impression that nothing much happened before the Romantic period of literature, which has as much as anything else to do with the fact that such Christians who want to engage imagination are often Evangelicals, and Evangelicalism is birthed from the same historical moment as Romanticism – how can they remember what happened before they were born? In any case, as a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, I am often frustrated by those who ignore these literatures when they look to define what creativity and imagination are, and part of the attraction of Guite’s book was the front and centre inclusion of “The Dream of the Rood” – an inclusion no doubt inspired in part by his friend, Seamus Heaney.

Beyond its inclusion, however, the real test for me was whether he in fact “got” the poem – not that I am of course the ultimate judge of this, but as an Old English scholar I am qualified to gauge this chapter in a way that I am probably not for any of the other chapters, with perhaps the exception of the one on John Donne, which I have not yet read. In any case, I was well aware that it would be very easy for a theologian to get his hands on a translation and use the poem as a superficial prop for a more broad theological claim. But this is not what Guite does. To his credit, he includes passages from the original Old English, and discusses minute nuances and shades of words. Of course, not every Old English scholar will agree with his interpretation (if they did, it would have to be a bland interpretation indeed), but I was personally intrigued by what he does with the poem, particularly with relation to the much vexed issue of Christianity and paganism in Old English literature. Though the best critics are careful to hedge their claims and carefully navigate the polyphony of the Old English texts, critics have in the past often found themselves divided into two camps: the exegetically oriented critics situating the literature with regard to the Christianity that informed the context in which the manuscripts were preserved; and oral-formulaic critics more interested in the poetry’s alleged sedimentary paganism preserved from the pre-Christian times when the poetry was passed down orally.

In any case, Guite reads the poem against the backdrop of C. S. Lewis’s idea that pagan myths, rather than mere falsehoods to be utterly destroyed, could gesture, powerfully yet also imperfectly, toward the truth of Christianity. Guite’s articulation of this set something off in my head, and I realized that this is the way I (likewise influenced by this idea in Lewis) tend implicitly to read Old English poetry – though an exegetically inclined critic, I knew, thanks to Lewis, that the inclusion of a pagan idea in a poem must not always be damnable syncretism or subversive revolt, but could in fact be the baptism of that idea, wherein that idea found its perfection in Christianity. Of course, in reality, this is neither Lewis’s nor Guite’s idea but a very longstanding one in Christian tradition. Guite’s relation of Lewis’s conversion, though, via the circuitous but probably also necessary avenue of Norse myth, is helpful in communicating the “The Dream of the Rood” to modern Christians, who can see that the “tree” of the cross is not only a simultaneous appeal to and displacement of Yggdrasil in Old Norse myth, but is also an appeal to and displacement of the enduring value conveyed in the myth and appreciated by (comparatively) modern people such as Lewis.

Of course, what Guite is saying here – that there is something in Old English alliterative verse that modern poets can learn from and use – is not an altogether new idea, given poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, and Earle Birney, as well as the poetry of J. R. R. Tolkien’s deeply Anglo-Saxon imagination. Moreover, there are, I imagine and hope, more than a few lovers or scholars of Old English verse who have tried their hand at it and found the results not entirely unpleasing and anachronistic. Where Guite’s genius lies, though, is in explicitly articulating beyond modern aesthetics why not only poets, but in fact theologians, Christians, and other moderns lamenting the modern/postmodern crisis in fact need to be revivified by engagement with poems like “The Dream of the Rood.”

Faith and Mental Illness

04 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by Churl in Uncategorized

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Tags

Christ, Christian, church, depression, drug, Faith, Germanic, Latin, mental illness, rational, self, Sin

Today’s topic has been brewing in my head for a while, as it is one that affects my own life and the lives of those close to me.  My purpose is to clarify exactly what the difficulty is in thinking about one’s faith and one’s mental illness.  I will start at what seems to be the most surface part of the tension, and try to work my way into what is actually going on.

Very simply put, the surface issue seems to be this: Christianity speaks to us and calls us to Christ as rational human beings responsible enough to take initiative for things; that, at least, is what we mostly seem to presume when we exhort our congregations from pulpits to be more fully Christian.  Mental illness on the other hand takes away our volition and ability to control ourselves – we are vulnerable and at times not even functional enough to take in the content of a sermon if we would.  This, at least, seems to be the surface tension: we perceive the gospel to be one preached to sane, normal, rational people, and mental illness as something that keeps us from being one of these people; hence, the difficulty posed in this post is knowing what exactly a gospel for normal people might have to do with us who are insane.

As one might guess from the above paragraph, part of my means of dealing with this is to trouble the idea that Christianity is for normal people and also that people with mental illness have no volition.  It seems to me that Christianity starts with the basic presupposition that we are all freaks – we are stuck with sin and the effects of sin; please note here that I am not saying that those who have mental illness are so because they in particular have sinned, but rather that mental illness seems more generally to be the sort of thing that could only come about in a fallen world.  In any case, the gospel seems to be the good news that Christ has come to save freaks – from themselves, from others, from their own freakishness – and believing this would seem to be a precondition for receiving God’s grace, so that perhaps the real problem is not how we can help those mentally ill “freaks” receive the gospel, but rather how we can bring the gospel to those who think it is for normal people, that is, those who are probably the majority of people in our churches.  I have been thinking a lot about the parable of the wedding banquet – how the master at the end of the parable brings in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.  We often look at this and tell each other how nice it is that God cares even for these people, even for the least of these.  I wonder though if the reality  is not more shocking.  Maybe it is because we need these people at our “normal” banquets to convert us, to teach us what the gospel really is.  Maybe we need to see them to realize that we ourselves are in a worse state than they – not physically affected, but heartblind, crippled in our wills, and poor in righteousness.

So I have troubled the waters of the “normal” church, but now I would like to trouble the waters regarding the helplessness induced by mental illness.  The point I want to make here is that, though mental illness will limit the ways I can make choices, I am never wholly without choice.  A good example is this.  Imagine that I am depressed, and I therefore treat everyone around me miserably.  In many ways, once I am in a situation where depression is in full swing and there is something to aggravate it and make me act bitterly toward others, there is very little I can do – the reaction is sometimes as inevitable as mixing baking soda and vinegar.  But there are some things I can choose.  I can know my own weakness and deliberately withdraw myself (where possible) from situations where the reaction will take place.  I can explain what is going on to others so that they know the damage I may cause is not as intentional as it may seem.  We are also in a society blessed with antidepressants and counseling, which offer yet another choice.  In my opinion, one of the most cruel choices a mentally ill person can make is to refuse treatment and just “get by” when that getting by is taking a horrible toll on those around them.  Christians are often very worried about antidepressants etc., whether it is right to be influenced by a drug.  What they should worry more about is whether deciding to refuse drugs and forcing those around one to shoulder the burdens caused by this refusal is in fact concordant with loving one’s neighbor.  There are of course many more factors than can be discussed here, and I don’t at all mean to suggest that those who refuse medication or refuse treatment are categorically bad people.  But I would suggest that the question is framed wrong and the actions and intentions therefore skewed when we are more worried  about preserving an intact “all natural self” (which we do not preserve in any other area anyway) than about loving God and loving one’s neighbor.

There; I have hopefully upset everyone equally.  I had initially intended to post about my faith and my own particular brand of mental illnesses, OCD and depression, but realized that in order to do that I would have begin figuring out more generally the tension or perceived tension between faith and mental illness; you can expect further on these things in later posts.  As a side note, I have also chosen very deliberately to use words like blind, freak, lame etc. because I think that the more publicly acceptable terms are tools that we use to trick ourselves into believing we are sensitive and caring – we speak of the visually impaired because we would rather not deal with the blind, let alone love them or see ourselves reflected in their condition.  Also, it annoys me that most politically correct terms simply replace a Germanic word with a Latinate based word, and so in our own way we are simply promulgating another longstanding stereotype, that Germanic words are more vulgar than sensitive Latin words.

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