In Season and Out of Season

Tags

Ash Wednesday, C.S. Lewis, God, Lewis, Macklemore, Mere Christianity, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, Yelawolf

When I was young, I was the sort of kid who very much wanted to hear the voice of God. Growing up Evangelical, one hears all kinds of stories about this – how God speaks to us personally, and how we need to obey even when we would rather not – and I took this very seriously. I recall one moment as a child, when I was out in the backyard and thought I heard someone calling me. Knowing well the story of Samuel hearing God in the temple, I wondered if it was God calling me in the same way. Nothing ever came of that, but it is a story that illustrates the kind of child I was – for me, the borders between physics and metaphysics felt much thinner than they must for most people in late modernity.

This I suppose is what many people seem to long for and think of wistfully when they want to go back to a more “enchanted” world that has not had its soul ripped out of it. This is fair, but such people often fail to consider some of the downsides of such a fused vision of reality; the problem for me became manifest, and harshly, through my OCD. Normal children, it seems to me, might be naturally protected by an immediate concern for material things that does not place the weight of thick theological and spiritual concerns on their shoulders. I was not. I was constantly looking to hear the voice of God, and my OCD played to that; my faith told me that, figuratively speaking, God and His will might be hiding behind any and every bush, no matter how unlikely – so I checked, again and again, and constantly worried that I would miss something.

Eventually, I learned to distinguish, at least pragmatically if not emotionally, between the voice of God and the voice of OCD. This came about largely through the recognition that, at least for someone like me with a set of broken internal impulses, the way to know God’s will was not by “feel” or “personal experience”  – telling me to do this would be like telling a blind person to see. But those who are blind use other senses and depend on other people, and this is what I did. I turned to the Bible, and when the Bible itself became an object of my OCD – the constant anxiety of worrying about how to interpret a passage – I turned to the communion of saints around me, those living and dead whom I knew to have seen God. I may have been personally blind and directionless, but I could watch their lead and follow them.

The downside of this, though, was abstraction – leaning on others and other senses such as reason was necessary, but it left a hollowness in my heart. The blind still sometimes wish they could see. My method of managing OCD meant that I became reluctant to explore areas of experience and emotion in my faith. I was happy to surround myself with others who could know God in this way, so long as they didn’t compel me to know God after that fashion. And I still insist that this was and often remains necessary for me as I keep working through issues surrounding faith and OCD. But it was not without cost; it meant the death of the child who once thought he heard the voice of God in his backyard.

Fast forward to a scenario two years ago. Fast forward to me, embittered, and angry, and just barely clinging to God. Fast forward to me tormented on the horns of the Anglican dilemma, caught between a church that was so militantly low that it would not even provide ashes on Ash Wednesday, and a church with all the trappings and smells and bells but no fences – one was given perfect freedom to be holy, but also perfect freedom to be whatever else one wanted. And then there was the court case, in which pastoral care was sacrificed on the alter of “proclaiming the gospel” by undertaking huge legal fights over buildings. And then there were the politics in the Christian campus groups that struck a death blow to my endeavors in Christian leadership. And then worst of all there was the death of a close friend, who had been part of our family for the past year, and also part of the close knit liturgical Bible-study refuge that was in many ways one of the few things between me and the abyss.

In the midst of this, I found myself on a plane on the way back from visiting my friend’s parents. I was set to fly into Seattle, drive to Vancouver, and then get on a plane to go to an on-campus interview where I would tell them how many wonderful things I had done in my dissertation exploring suffering and faith. But really all I could think of was that A was dead, and what are any of my accomplishments next to that? I could go and pretend. But a dissertation does not raise the dead.

And then there was the odd moment in the plane when the person I was next to turned to me and wanted to talk about God, and the only thing I could think of was, “How very like God.” I had waited for such random conversations as a child, fervently and in the hope that they would end in the salvation of another, and they never happened. All that had died in me. But here I was embittered and having difficulty justifying my own life let alone my worth as a professor – here I was, huddled up in my seat trying as hard as possible to get others to ignore me – and my seatmate wanted to talk. I still don’t know how he knew I was a Christian. He said he just knew, which is odd because a surly and standoffish person huddled up in the corner of a plane seat and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on his computer does not scream “Christian” to me. But there it was. He had found me out. And all I could think of was “in season and out of season” – but this felt like stretching the “out of season” thing a little bit too far. Conversations like this are not supposed to feel like an intrusion, a curse. But there I was. And so we talked about God.

Nothing terribly dramatic happened. He did not fall on his knees and pray the sinner’s prayer. He did not break down crying as I shared inspirational stories with him. But we did talk. He had just come back from a rehab centre, and part of the treatment involved the twelve step program; one of the steps, I learned later, involves surrendering oneself to a higher power, and it was this he wanted to talk about. I do not remember many of the details. I was tired, and I had to talk about the God who might as well have sent Job on a missions trip halfway through the book, for all the good I expected to do. What I do remember thinking is that he was part of the way there with the “higher power” thing, but that it was not quite enough. He needed Christology, and more importantly, Christ. And so I recommended C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. He in turn suggested (as we had also been talking about music) that I should listen to Yelawolf and Macklemore who were (apparently) up-and-coming musicians. I have not listened to them. But now and then I still pray for him.

Here the story comes to an end. I don’t know if his rehab worked and if he was able to quit his addiction to drugs. I don’t know if he got anything out of our conversation. I also reflected later that, even if he did take my advice and pick up Mere Christianity, he might not have liked it, for what can Lewis have to do with Yelawolf?  I don’t know, and I am fine with that because even when we know the “end” of a story it may not even in fact be the end – ours is to be faithful regardless, as a friend of mine has put it well on her blog.

But I can say it affected me. The experience had all the strange marks betraying the work of the God who is as much a riddle to me as He is a friend and lover and Lord – He gave me what I had stopped longing for long ago, and fortunately when I was too weary to do anything stupid with it – all I could be was a broken self doing the best I could to talk about the God I knew. But it was still somehow encouraging. All I could think afterward was, “In season and out of season…how very like God.” Deep relationships are all about anomalies – the appreciation of a quirk here, or a personality trait there – and it is in these things we feel the qualities of the people we love most dearly. This had all the marks of such quirkiness – an inside joke of the knock-knock variety that my heart has not readily forgotten.

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is Christianity Without Tradition Another Way of Being Spiritual But Not Religious?

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Christian, Christianity, church, God, Lillian Daniels, Religion and Spirituality, Spiritual but not religious

Much buzz has gone on over the past few years regarding Lillian Daniel’s critique of people who are spiritual but not religious. Basically, her argument boils down to the suggestion that the spiritual but not religious label is in most cases a thinly veiled narcissism; the problems that so vex us in organized religion are not in fact the problems of such organizations per se, but rather problems common to humanity – in going off into our own private, self-pleasuring spiritualities, we are in fact refusing to love our neighbors. As Daniels puts it:

“Any idiot can find God alone in the sunset. It takes a certain maturity to find God in the person sitting next to you who not only voted for the wrong political party but has a baby who is crying while you’re trying to listen to the sermon. Community is where the religious rubber meets the road. People challenge us, ask hard questions, disagree, need things from us, require our forgiveness. It’s where we get to practice all the things we preach.”

While I would suggest that  things are perhaps much worse than this – many of us are too cynical even to see God in a sunset – I think the overall point is apt.  What I mean to do here is suggest that it is also applicable to another group of people, whom I will acronymize as CBNT – Christian But Not Traditional.

If you have frequented Evangelical/Protestant churches for a while, you will know what kind of people I mean.  Basically, such people recognize the history of the church – or a certain part of this history – as particularly embarrassing.  Yet instead of condemning the perpetrators as bad Christians – which I think is the Christian response – they assert that these perpetrators are or were not Christians at all.  Much as the sunset-seeker conveniently leaves behind the the complex humanity of his pew-neighbor for the much less “tainted” vision of the sunset, so such a Christian abandons the complex humanity of Christian sinners past.  Not only does this set up the illusion that one has found the “pure” church in the present, free from a benighted past, but the abandonment of past Christians makes it much easier to abandon other Christians in the present.  It also sets us up for a hard fall, for when we discover ours is not in fact the “pure” church – and that its corruptions are identical to the ones we thought we jettisoned with tradition – we will become disillusioned, and will cause others to become disillusioned.  In the worst cases, we cause people to walk away from the church (and therefore God) entirely, because we have catechised them such that they have learned that walking away is the only way of dealing with corruption. To further this irony, those espousing such an ecclesiology are very often the same people lamenting cultures of divorce and the lack of commitment in younger generations. You can rant and roar all you like about the evils of secular humanism, the Enlightenment etc., but bear in mind that these favorite bogeys may in fact be the bastards of our own illegitimate ecclesiologies, the scandals we have walked away from lest they should taint us.

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Apology and a Parable

Tags

Anglican Communion, Anglicanism, Bottle, Catholicism, Evangelicalism, Fountain, God

I am fortunate in having friends to remind me what it means to be a Christian, and in saying this I am not talking about friends from a particular denomination or even only my Christian friends; to the degree that they have held me up to the standard of the faith I claim to believe, atheists and agnostics have here served God’s purposes as well. And there can be no other response to this than thankfulness, a thankfulness I am very bad at expressing. But I do want here to take a moment to express it, particularly regarding my last post.

As Chinglican pointed out in an off-the-blog conversation, the tone I adopted in the last post was – well – not very catholic. Sometimes the words run away with me and I can speak in an off-the-cuff manner that wounds other Christians. I do continue to stand behind what I said, but I also apologize for the manner of delivery and whatever ungracious hurt might have been caused. I also request prayer.

To explain why I need prayer, I would like to post a response I gave to Chinglican privately in explanation of the tone of the post:

“I really hope [the post] did not come across as potshots; when I argue like this, my purpose is not so much to “shoot” at others as much as at the best form of a counter-argument that I can conjure up (drawn from comments of others, my own thoughts etc.). I want to see if what I am thinking can survive my own most devastating counter-argument. So I think that when I find myself arguing against myself like this I sometimes get carried away and permit some mockery. The points I will stand by, but you are right to remind me that when I talk about these things, I am saying things that are overheard by others and taken as directed at them. I will try to be more gracious, though it is sometimes hard with matters like this that reach to the very root of my heart and pluck all the strings of my being, still ungracious as it is this side of heaven.”

It is particularly this latter bit that I want to take up here and articulate further, that is, that though I speak in a fairly philosophical tone, these matters are quite close to my heart. Because I am good at hiding it, I don’t think anyone really quite understands how often and how close I come to utter despair. It is a little like this. Imagine you are on a desert island. And here and there you have found bottles, some more full, and some less full. And for a time you live off these, going from bottle to bottle. But soon you realize you are not getting enough water and eventually you will die of thirst. You keep drinking from the bottles – because what else can you do – but there is no longer the immediate joy and certainty of survival you had when you first found them. And then two things happen. You meet a friend, and a little later on, you discover a fountain. The friend is still fairly new to the desert island, and is happy living off the bits of water in the bottles. He still has hope in this water. But you are taking the long view of the bottles – what for him is hope has become prolonged despair. But the friend has also heard things about the fountain – that though it looks like water, it is really a deadly poison that will kill you certainly, though slowly. This does not entirely bother you because you know you are dying slowly anyway. But your new friend Is adamant and you are put in crisis; you look over at the fountain and are nearly driven mad by the sight of fresh water – you can almost taste it – but you do not want to move without further evidence. So you wait and watch. You see various animals drink from the spring, quite happily, but there is really no way to tell how it affects them – the poison, if it is poison, acts slowly. Finally, much to your amazement, another person comes along and takes a deep draught from the spring, and you ask him whether the water is poisonous. He laughs a little, and says, no, he hasn’t found it to be so. But you press further. What if he is a liar? What if he wants you dead? What if the poison just hasn’t had time to work on him and he doesn’t know? But he points to the stockpile of different bottles you and your friend have collected and tells you that the bottles you have been living off the whole time – variously empty and full – have in fact all been filled at this spring. You have no way of knowing with a hundred percent certainty, but if it is poison, it is a poison you have been drinking the whole time. In finding the fountain, you have not found something different, only the source.

The stranger leaves, and you turn to your friend very deeply hopeful about this, thinking that, with a fountain like this, you may be able to survive after all. But your friend’s reaction is completely different. He does not trust the stranger. But perhaps more irksomely, he is still elated at the fact of having water to begin with – the long-term plan is not in his mind. He is still very excited about the bottles of water, and thinks it is still a pretty good deal to be able to live off them, and he does not want to risk being poisoned when he can have more certainty in sticking to what he knows is safe (he does not in fact believe that the water from the fountain and the bottles are the same). He has not, like you, weathered years in the desert and seen that though the variously filled bottles will kind of get you by from day to day, eventually you start dying of thirst. You become parched.

And there you are, standing beside the fountain with your friend. You are nearly mad with thirst – the deep thirst only fresh water can quench – and at just the moment when you are about to take a drink, he decides you should sit down, share one of the bottles, and talk about the matter for three days, so as not to rush into anything. And you agree, because he is your friend. But you are still parched, and because you are parched, it is sometimes hard to tell where your words are coming from. Sometimes they are reasonable. Sometimes thirst takes over. And sometimes the annoyance at your friend’s reasonable pedantry is too much. You don’t understand how he can sit there and make a show of reasonableness when you are dying of thirst. And so, yes, you sometimes snap, and say things you don’t mean. You forget that, though the water in the bottles did not work for the long term, they did keep you alive up to this point. And they did, in fact, if the stranger was telling true, bring water from the spring. But because your friend is so bent on telling you over and over again how wonderful the bottles are – and wondering why in hell you would risk the poisonous fountain over the bottles – you snap and start badmouthing them. You start telling about the dirty dregs you found at the bottom of one bottle, or the tepid temperature of another, or the mosquito larvae you found in a third. And the more insistent your friend is, the louder is your protest. Not so much because you are arguing with your friend per se. No, it is because your friend has woken in you something that your heart very deeply fears – that he is right. But this for you is a fear where for him it is a hope, because, unlike him, you know that sticking with the scattered bottles means death. In this situation it is hard, to say the least, to speak objectively and without offense. There you are, and there is your friend. And there is the fountain, and there are the bottles. And your thirst is great.

My primary point in telling this story is to try to explain – though never excuse – the kind of uncharitable things that sometimes come through when I write about these matters. Evangelicalism and Anglicanism have indeed kept me alive thus far. And for that I can only be grateful. To return to the metaphor of the story, it cannot be denied that the water I drank from these bottles is real water. As Chinglican rightly points out, there are many things to be grateful for in the Anglican communion, and his examples hit home. I was blessed with the Alpha course when, just at the end of my time in the Evangelical church, its doctrinal stability had a calming effect on my more neurotic radicalist tendencies. The first Anglican church I went to – where my wife and I got married, and where my son was baptized – was and remains an amazing place spiritually – when I visit home, and go to St. Mary’s, the church too feels like home. And, as Chinglican also notes, there is Cursillo. My parents, who incidentally followed me into the Anglican church, have been deeply blessed by, and found ministry in, this movement. These are all things to be thankful for.

What one realizes though is that such things come and go. For instance (as in my case), one might find oneself in an Anglican diocese where the low church people cannot tell the difference between a lawsuit and Christian witness on the one hand, and the bishop can’t tell the difference between Christianity and his own political agenda on the other. And then again (having moved out of this diocese) one might find oneself in a fairly good Anglican church again. But as far as the primary experience of church goes, things can move and things can change yet again. And it is the same with other of the aforementioned spiritual things as well. They come and go, or, as my favorite author would say, “To everything there is a season…” And at some point you realize that these things sustain you for a time, but you cannot live off them. They are bottles of water, but they are not the source. And then you encounter Catholicism, where the deepest source of everything is Christ’s real presence in the sacraments. The positive and the negative experiences will still be there, the wheat along with the tares. But at the end of the day what one is called to drink from is not an experience here or a revival there, but the cup of Christ that is his blood. One of course never stops trying to bottle this water of truth and goodness and distribute it as far as possible among parched people. But the bottled water is not what you live on. The fountain is.

That is, if it is not poison. And there are so many people who want to tell one so. They are still excited about the spiritual experiences here, the liturgical order there, the intellectual rigor here, the ministry to the poor there, etc. And they should be, because it is right to be excited about these things – they are of God. But when they tell me there is no source – or rather that the source is in some kind of vague symbolism or ethereal spiritual experience or freedom to develop intellectually – I despair. And when I despair, I get just a little cranky, because I am thirsty, and have been for a long time. And I know this crankiness left to its own devices will turn into an ugly lack of charity. And so I request, whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever side you are on, pray for me and use me gently – I am deeply in need of love.

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.

Remembering Another Anniversary

Tags

death, Family, Gerard Manley Hopkins, God, Hobbit, John Donne, Poetry, Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

My prior post was in celebration of the anniversary of my wife and myself. But there is another anniversary that also occurs for me, my friends, and my family during this week. But let me backtrack. Two years ago, perhaps two or three weeks earlier than this date, my son and I dropped our dear friend A off at the airport. A was a particularly close friend of our family, living as she did next door and often sharing family life with us, and so my son, then three years old, knew her well. When we dropped her off, and she began to go through Customs, my son was worried and wanted to follow her through. I reassured him that it would be okay, and that A would be back in a few weeks. But a few weeks later we learned that A, ten minutes away from her friend’s wedding, drove into a water-filled ditch by the road and drowned. My words had been lies. Things would not be okay.

It is two years today since she died, and I still don’t really know what to say. Yes, one goes on with life and gets by the best one can, and yes, our very makeup ensures that we are not going through the initial shock of grieving perpetually, but – she is not here. And if there is one thing I have learned, it is that neither answers nor even lack of answers (the much appreciated “mystery” valued in emergent circles) is enough. It is not these I want. There was in her – as there is in every of God’s children – what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls haecceitas, a “thisness,” a particularity that was her. I do not long for answers. I look with longing for the resurrection of the dead, the resurrection of the particularity that was her.

It also seems to me that grief is a mess, plain and simple. My own manner of grieving – after the initial shock – is silence, and this I imagine can be very disconcerting to those who mourn by speaking voluminously. Part of the process for me in fact has been learning to show grace to those who mourn in ways not as silent and not as tactful as myself. But my silence also makes me a horrible comforter, and very bad at extending empathy to others regarding her. There have been many a time when I have wished myself capable of some small gesture of help or comfort – the kinds of gestures by which practical people can be helpful – and I am paralyzed. I am paralyzed because anything I can think of doing seems so small and so insignificant in relation to the one who was lost. In my more rational moments I realize it is by very small things like these – by enacting the grace of Hobbits – that we get through both life and mourning; in fact this was one of the most important things I learned from A, who was stubbornly practical in the way she would hunt people down and help them. But I am so very often paralyzed, particularly when it comes to helping others of her friends and family who are mourning – what I can offer feels less than nothing.

And then there is all the “stuff” that comes with it. I really don’t want to be angry with God. Philosophically and theologically speaking, I don’t think I have good grounds (and I don’t say this flippantly – I have spent the last twelve years of my academic career researching, among other things, the theological problem of evil, and still longer thinking about it). But there is so often a difference between what we want and what we are. Emotionally speaking, when I am not raging Job-like, it is because I have abandoned my emotions as a lost cause, something doomed and waiting for the fix of heaven. No, it is not ideal. But neither was her death.

And as I consider concluding this, I am still not sure what to say. Part of me wants to wrap it up nicely and bring everything to a hopeful close; part of everyone longs for that because of the eschatological desire placed in them by God, and this longing, if not dealt with in patient prayer, makes us liars, as I was to my son – we make up answers because we are not willing to wait for the answer we were designed for. And then there is the part of me that just wants to end with tragedy and loose ends. The honesty of it is appealing. But this too can be a dodge. Because not only does death cast uncertainty on the things and people in life we take for granted; it also casts certainty on the things and people that do and did matter. I am more certain, perhaps even than I was at the time, of the way that our time with A taught us about real meaning in life – not the abstract, theoretical intangible kind, but the concrete kind that exists when you regularly share meals with someone. And so I find myself not only thrown by the uncertainty of life, but also, in an odd way, by the uncertainty of death. Life – her life – was too real (difficult though it often was for her), too tangible for death to be the final word. Some I imagine will take this as just a sop for my wishful thinking, but I think there is a little more to it. There is a reason that, in the Christian tradition, Job is considered one of the first prophets to proclaim the resurrection. Our lives are either meaningless or clues pointing to something else, something higher, and hers was the latter – something I cannot of course here prove but something that her friends and family will understand. In one of his sonnets, John Donne triumphantly proclaims, “Death, thou shalt die.” At the moment I cannot be quite so cocksure – whether it dies or not, it’s still pretty bloody awful to experience right now. But if I cannot at the moment say this with such great boldness, A lived Donne’s words. She knew much of death, and kept loving – and that, I think, is a legacy worth coveting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.