Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith is divided into three main parts - Look Within the Heart, Look to God in the Book, Look to Others in Community. Chapter 1 of Look Within the Heart asks - "Who will answer my questions?" Nouwen uses the following parable:
Many years ago, there was a young man who searched for truth, happiness, joy, and the right way of living. After many years of traveling, many diverse experiences, and many hardships, he realized that he had not found any answers for his questions and that he needed a teacher. One day he heard about a famous Zen Master. Immediately he went to him, threw himself at his feet, and said: “Please, Master, be my teacher.”
The Master listened to him, accepted his request, and made him his personal secretary. Wherever the Master went, his new secretary went with him. But although the Master spoke to many people who came to him for advice and counsel, he never spoke to his secretary. After three years, the young man was so disappointed and frustrated that he no longer could restrain himself. One day he burst out in anger, saying to his Master: “I have sacrificed everything, given away all I had, and followed you. Why haven’t you taught me?” The Master looked at him with great compassion and said: “Don’t you understand that I have been teaching you during every moment you have been with me? When you bring me a cup of tea, don’t I drink it? When you bow to me, don’t I bow to you? When you clean my desk, don’t I say: ‘Thank you very much’?”
The young man could not grasp what his Master was saying and became very confused. Then suddenly the Master shouted at the top of his voice: “When you see, you see it direct.” At that moment the young man received enlightenment.
The parable is a bit strange; all parables are. I haven't received enlightenment; not by a long shot. The gist of the chapter is "Ask and live the questions" - so even the opening question - "Who will answer my questions?" - must be lived, not answered. I'm trying to do some of that. I made a list of who could simple be present with me as I ponder the questions of my life, without trying to answer my questions for me. My list includes some family, friends, and pastors, and excludes some family, friends, and pastors. My list includes some Catholics, some Protestants, and excludes some Catholics, some Protestants. Some Catholics would too quickly and easily say 'the Church' is the answer to my questions; while some Protestants would too quickly and easily say 'the Bible' is the answer to my questions. The problem with both of these answers is they are not personal. Both the Church and the Bible as personifications of theology and of Truth. The Bible and the Church are institutions of people who lived and live the questions.
Some of my questions right now are:
Is there a God?
What does God want from me?
What is the Church?
What is sin?
These are just some questions I ask in 5 minutes of contemplation. None of them have easy answers. Each of them is open to many lifetimes' worth of exploration. Nouwen says, "Sometimes, in living the questions, answers are found." I asked "What does God want from me?" on Sunday afternoon. My Monday morning pray-as-you-go reading was Micah 6:8: "You have been told, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do the right and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God." And yet this "answer" opens more questions - How do I do right? How do I love goodness? How do I walk humbly with God? These too must be lived.
The other half of that Nouwen quote is, "More often, as our questions and issues are tested and mature in solitude, the questions simply dissolve." And so I go on personifying and living my questions - these questions and others. I am eager to ponder and live my questions with others, but not with those who might dictate my life with easy or simple answers.
I'm seeing a spiritual director now. Sister Barbara Austin is a Benedictine Nun from the St. Joseph Monastery here in Tulsa. I spent one hour with her last week. I'm sad I waited years to see a spiritual director. In that one hour I started seeking God better than all of the time I've spent studying theology.
I told her I was taking theology classes towards a bachelor's degree, and that I struggle with my studies and with theology - not just intellectually but emotionally and, yes - spiritually. Most of the time, I am like the RAF officer who approached Lewis at one of his theological lectures:
I've no use for all [this] stuff. But, mind you, I'm a religious man too. I know there's a God. I've felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that's just why I don't believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who's met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal.
Sister Barbara gave me a copy of Spiritual Direction: Wisdom for the Long Walk of Faith. I read it quickly in a day, and I'm now re-reading it slowly and doing the spiritual exercises. (Writing is part of it, so blog posts may pick up here for a while.) The first chapter is titled, "Who will answer my questions?" and it is even more quotable than Lewis!
... we need to live the questions of our lives ...
Most of the time we respond to questions from below with answer from below. The result is often more confusion.
Once pain or confusion is framed or articulated by a question, it must be lived rather than answered. The first task of seeking guidance then is to touch your own struggles, doubts, and insecurities - in short, to affirm your life as a quest. Your life, my life, is given graciously by God. Our lives are not problems to be solved but journeys to be taken with Jesus as our friend and finest guide.
Painful questions must be raised, faced, and then lived. This means that we must constantly avoid the temptation of offering or accepting simple answers, to be easy defenders of God, the Church, the tradition, or whatever we feel called to defend. Experience suggests that such glib apologetics animate hostility and anger, and finally a growing alienation from whom or what we are trying to defend.
Without a question, an answer is experienced as manipulation or control. Without a struggle, the help offered is considered interference. And without the desire to learn, direction is easily felt as oppression.
Living the questions runs counter to the mainstream of Christian ministry that wants to impart knowledge and understand, skills to control, and power to conquer. In spiritual listening, we encounter a God who cannot be fully understood, discover realities that cannot be controlled, and we realize that our hope is hidden no in the possession of power but in the confession of weakness.
When God enters into the center of our lives to unmask our illusion of possessing final solutions and to disarm us with always deeper questions, we will not necessarily have an easier or simpler life, but certainly a life that is honest, courageous, and marked with the ongoing search for truth. Sometimes, in living the questions, answers are found. More often, as our questions and issues are tested and mature in solitude, the questions simply dissolve.
One powerful aspect of religion-as-map is, "... if you want to get anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America." This may be the first time I try to augment Lewis, but this metaphor doesn't capture that the "anywhere" we're trying to reach is God - an infinite destination. In that sense, no theology - no matter how accurate - can really represent the reality of the destination. Theology can only represent the journeys - the quests - of others who have lived the questions.
So, when I study theology, I must not make it solve problems. Studying theology moves me closer to Truth not when I cling to answers, but when I uncover the map of deeper questions pointing to God. I'm hoping and praying that spiritual direction and discipline will provide me with the compass I need on my journey of living the questions.
I call myself a post-modern, but I've never really known what Modernity is or was. I still don't fully know - I don't think I ever fully know anything. For this post I'm talking about modernity as Fr. Robert Barron defines it - i.e., modernity as subjective and rationalistic, "privilege of the self" approach to seeking Truth (Descartes' "I think therefore I am" ground and ratification of truth) and the Nietzschean "categories of power" paradigm by which we view and evaluate the world. These concepts are way above me, so I won't even try to address them directly. I'm better at stuff like video games. ;)
Andrew Ryan represents a modernity as articulated by Ayn Rand - individualistic, anarcho-libertarian capitalism. Unfortunately, IMO, too many contemporary Christians lean towards, if not fully embrace, this kind of political and socioeconomic attitude. BioShock does a fantastic job exploring natural consequences of this kind of ideology. Furthermore, it presents and demonstrates how modernist fundamentalism corrupts other related human endeavors; it does so with a smart use of characters and their interpersonal conflicts.
Brigid Tenenbaum is a genetic scientist who moves to Rapture (Ryan's underwater Utopian city) and discovers a kind of genetic super-stem-cell called ADAM that allows people to rearrange their cells however they wish (including some wicked super-powers that you use while playing the game). When the commercial research centers refuse to fund her research, she turns to a mob-boss, Frank Fontaine, who directs her research towards manufacturing ADAM as an addictive drug. The population of Rapture demands more and more ADAM, and Tenenbaum devises a way to mass produce ADAM using the bodies of young girls - Little Sisters as they are called in the game.
Dr. Steinman is a surgeon in Rapture who uses ADAM to treat patients. You find his personal journals which perfectly portray the descent down the modernist slippery slope from theoretical to abominable:
Ryan and ADAM, ADAM and Ryan... all those years of study, and was I ever truly a surgeon before I met them? How we plinked away with our scalpels and toy morality. Yes, we could lop a boil here, and shave down a beak there, but... but could we really change anything? No. But ADAM gives us the means to do it. And Ryan frees us from the phony ethics that held us back. Change your look, change your sex, change your race. It's yours to change, nobody else's.
ADAM presents new problems for the professional. As your tools improve, so do your standards. There was a time, I was happy enough to take off a wart or two, or turn a real circus freak into something you can show in the daylight. But that was then, when we took what we got, but with ADAM... the flesh becomes clay. What excuse do we have not to sculpt, and sculpt, and sculpt, until the job is done?
I am beautiful, yes. Look at me, what could I do to make my features finer? With ADAM and my scalpel, I have been transformed. But is there not something better? What if now it is not my skill that fails me... but my imagination?
When Picasso became bored of painting people, he started representing them as cubes and other abstract forms. The world called him a genius! I've spent my entire surgical career creating the same tired shapes, over and over again: the upturned nose, the cleft chin, the ample bosom. Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could do with a knife what that old Spaniard did with a brush?
Steinman: Four-oh silk and ...done.
Nurse: The nose looks terrific, Doctor Steinman ...Doctor?
Steinman: You know, looking at her now... I didn't realize how much her face sags... Scalpel...
Nurse: Excuse me?
Steinman: Scalpel!
Nurse: Uh, doctor, she's not booked for a face lift...
Steinman: Let's just come in here and... *starts whistling*
Nurse: Doctor... Stop cutting... Doctor, stop cutting... Get me the chief of surgery! Get me the chief of surgery NOW!!!
Not only are those little girls veritable ADAM factories, they're nearly indestructible. They regenerate any wounded flesh with stem versions of the dead cells. But their relationship with the implanted slugs is symbiotic... if you harvest the slug, the host will die. "So you see, it's not like killing," Tenenbaum said. "It's more like removing a terminal patient from life support."
As Rapture's population increases, botanist Julie Langford is recruited to create an oxygen-producing garden. She is so fixated on her plants and her task that she doesn't even notice the whole population of Rapture falling into madness. The artist Sander Cohen is similarly impassive to the deaths and suffering of others. He worked closely with Ryan to recruit people to Rapture. Like Steinman he's driven insane by plasmids and by a self-obsession with his own art. Which leads me to why I enjoyed this game so much, and am writing so much about it.
While BioShock is categorically a Sci-Fi First-Person Shooter, it tells a story that, in my opinion, levels a sharp and brilliant criticism against modernity. Whether it's Ryanism, Fontaine's hedonism, Steinman's perfectionism, Langford's environmentalism, or Cohen's subjectivism, they all fundamentally privilege the self(-interest) over and above the other. Ethics, morality, temperance, compassion - all are subjective to the individual. We see this everywhere in our contemporary modern world - from unabridged capitalism, to unrestrained scientific research, to indulgent lifestyles, to moral relativity. BioShock warns most strongly against the modernist approach to genetics, but the whole of modernity stands appropriately exposed for its dangerous potentialities.
What's more the game forces the player to make an objective moral decision through-out the game. It stands in such stark contrast to the subjective chaos of the rest of the game, that when I saw it the first time I cringed inwardly at the thought of it; something that would be hard to do with a book. I would put BioShock right up there with 1984 and Brave New World as an engaging, critical, and prophetic assessment of modernity.
Welcome to the soundtrack edition of "Christian" Music. In my last post about "Christian" music I wrote about some songs that are not intentionally Christian but carried a sense of Christian perspective. This time I'm looking at a couple songs that are intentionally Christian, but are contextually not so. Here's what I mean ...
Civilization 4 Soundtrack: "Baba Yetu" by Christopher Tin.
When you first fire up the Civilization 4 video game, you hear this song and it's pretty powerful. Mark, Matt and I loved this song from the first time we got Civilization 4 home for what would be many all-night Civ sessions. We never knew until years later(?) that it is a Swahili adaptation of the Lord's Prayer by Chris Kiagiri.
I remember reflecting on it later as one of those powerful times we experience God in the world where we don't expect Him. A personal example of "finding God in all things" as in Ignatian spirituality.
Gladiator Soundtrack: "Now We Are Free" by Lisa Gerrard.
Lisa herself said about the lyrics: "I sing in the language of the Heart. Its an invented language that I've had for a very long time. I believe I started singing in it when I was about 12. Roughly that time. And I believed that I was speaking to God when I sang in that language. Now I am filled with the Holy Ghost, that is the promise in the Bible the Church will not talk about, because this secret would mean the fall of the religion." There's some anti-(Catholic)-church attitude in her words - fair enough; I have my own dissent with the Church at times too. In my experience, the Church has a somewhat open mind about this though - at least here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I've tempered my fervor over "speaking in tongues" as empowered by the Holy Spirit from my more pro-Pentecostal upbringing, but I don't know that I've lost all my faith in the experience. Paul cautions against preaching "in tongues" in the assembly without interpretation, and for good reason - it can be wacky and disorderly.
I don't know if I've had another bout with depression recently or what, but I've been feeling convicted, to say the least. I can't tell if I have chronic minor depression, or anxiety, or does everyone who studies theology go thru these kinds of emotional upheavals? (Caedmon?) I'm a bit scared of the grand ideas swimming (and colliding) around in my head - the nature of sin, soteriology, theodicy, and the like. Here's one of the things really bugging me:
If God is just (He is), and God has said that the rich will [hardly|barely|not] enter the Kingdom (He has), and America is full of the richest people the world has ever seen (it is), what hope do we have?
Now I know valid "pro-rich" analyses in relation to the passage. But I still can't help "feeling" (Stupid feelings. If men knew how much emotion they would start to experience after fatherhood, there would be no babies.) conviction that Americans, and especially those of us in the top 10% of wage earners ... well, I can't even describe the feeling. Guilt? Condemnation? Reprehension? There's just something unsettling about Jesus words spoken to a "rich man" who would be extremely poor by modern America's standards.
This morning I was reading my New Testament textbook. (The class is over, but I didn't get to read it all during class - had to keep jumping around to finish my homework on different books.) Johnson was discussing the prophetic motif of Luke's Gospel - demonstrating how the Sermon on the Plain fulfills the programmatic prophecy of the Magnificat. The combination of the woes for those who are rich - who "have their consolation now" as fulfillment of Mary's prophecy of the rich "sent away empty" really struck this cord with me. Do I have consolation in this world? I have a (luxurious) house, plenty of (extravagant) food, a full wardrobe of (geeky) clothes, and a plethora of luxuries and entertainments to pass my time.
Now here comes a point ...
Despite (probably because of?) all that, the prospect of being "sent away empty" is actually a relief to me. It's like one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes - "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." Even with all my "stuff" I desire something more - something else. So when I read that I could be "sent away empty", I'm starting to understand that for those of us who are rich in this world, that statement is really a statement of graceful relief - of salvation, not condemnation. I hope and pray I stay willing to lose this all for the something more and else that I really want.
I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.
Or am I just rationalizing away the guilt of my own extravagance?
I'm closer to the center than I am to the right of the political grid; though I'm still right-of-center I think; though I like to claim I'm "above center." Anyway, in class we sometime touch on the subject of multiculturalism; often with criticism. The "multiculturalism" we discuss is actually the "cultural relativism" that is often promoted in liberal academic spheres, which approaches, but does not reach, a "real" positive multiculturalism.
I tend to agree that multiculturalism is paradoxical, but I'm with Chesterton that paradox is sometimes the proper ordering of Truth - e.g., a crucified messiah, love for those who hate us, etc.
I don't seek a purely multicultural society, but I do hope for something more than a mono-cultural society. One of the things I find appealing about Christianity is the myriad of traditions that can be united, at least to an extent, by our fundamental creed.
This has come to my mind lately because I'm a soccer fan and I'm getting pumped for the World Cup this summer - to be played in South Africa. I came across this commercial that seems to tap (for me) the hopeful and inspiring facet of multiculturalism.
I experience the same kind of thing around the Olympics as well; really, any international encounter that plays out without violence is a good thing, in my opinion. Or at least better than a violent alternative, right?
Here's another "multicultural" video:
I love in this video that the interest goes from Matt, to the scenery, to the other people - from the personal, to the general, to the "other as other," as Acquinas would say. Every time I watch that video (and I watch it a lot!) I find a new person in the crowds who strikes me with their "otherness."
In my mind, these cross-cultural expressions of common humanity are a good aspect of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism can be a strong indicator of the Truth that God creates us all in a similar image - a divine image intended for that 'participatory theonomy.' Of course multiculturalism should be understood as a means to that end - i.e., a relationship with each other with God - and not as an end of itself. And I think it's sad that our multiculturalism is now reduced to either relativism, or else merely 'amusing' objectives (soccer or dance). Why does it seem so hard to mix cultures on more substantial issues - hunger, poverty, war, disease, human trafficking, and the like?
The final questions to answer in the survey of Romans are the bigger ones - Why was the epistle written? And What are its major themes and its theology?
As it turns out, the answer to 'Why' is actually quite practical; as all of my New Testament sources - Johnson, Robert & Feuillet, and Harrington - unanimously agree: "he writes to the Romans, preparing the way for them to become his new base of operations in the West." (Johnson) "As Apostle to the Gentiles he was more anxious than ever to establish contact with the Roman church for, in view of that apostolate, its position as the church of the empire's capital was of paramount importance. ... [He] saw clearly that the roads which led from Rome to all parts of the orbis Romanus could become so many roads of missionary expansion." (Harrington) All roads lead to (and from) Rome.
But an obvious question would be, why is the epistle so long and rich? Johnson makes the point that Romans is Paul's recommendation letter for himself. He's explaining his Gospel. He's telling the Romans, "I know you have your own foundations, but this is what I'm all about, and why we should work for God together." Remember Paul didn't establish the Roman church, and he wasn't writing at any particular crisis in the community like he did in so many other epistles. He's outlining the themes of his mission so that the Romans can understand his intentions of their place in it.
That does not mean Romans is a systematic exposition of Paul's theology. He leaves out a lot of his important theology that he wrote to other churches. "... on this point the Reformers of the sixteenth century exaggerated its value and character." (Robert & Feuillet) Rather, the Roman epistle is a concentrated narrative of the theme of God's salvation - first foreshadowed, presented, and preached to the Jews and then to the Gentiles as well. It is a compelling history of salvation for the whole world. But I don't think it should be applied as a systematic theological dogma of salvation for the individual person.
