Wisdom in the Darkness — an Inscription

The other day I purchased a collection of poems at Half-Price Books by a poet I had heard about but was unfamiliar with: Li-Young Lee. When I opened the front cover of Rose, I noticed the following inscription written below the title:

Happy birthday, Peter
          Always
             Marissa
                   1999

Obviously, I ignored this basic, non-descript note from one random person to another. Unless there was a picture of Marissa paper-clipped to the top of the page, and she had long, dark hair with deep, blue eyes, why would I give what little intellectual energy I currently have to Marissa and Peter? So, I flipped to the first poem and began reading.

…Before it all gets wiped away, let me say,
there is wisdom in the slender hour
which arrives between the two shadows.
 
It is not heavenly and it is not sweet.
It is accompanied by steady human weeping,
and twin furrows between the brows,
 
but it is what I know,
and so am able to tell.  

I paused and looked up. When my eyes cast forward, nothing in particular caught my gaze, nor did I intend to see something. I was, though, hoping to see something else…

Wisdom in the sorrow (weeping). Wisdom in the anger (furrowed brows). Wisdom that is sour. It is all the wisdom we have. It is all the wisdom we know. It is all the wisdom we can share.

As I tried to digest Lee’s words, my left thumb, which was pressed against the edge of the page, slipped. The first few pages flipped, and my thumb caught the more sturdy, laminated cover of Rose. My eyes fell to the cursive, black letters woven together by Marissa’s hand:

Happy birthday, Peter
          Always
              Marissa
                   1999

Realizing that many of his poems deal with love, death, and sorrow, I was struck by the language and format of Marissa’s note. I couldn’t help but ask myself a few questions:

Why is there no external punctuation after the birthday wish? In particular, why is there no exclamation mark?

Why is the closing marked with a muted “Always”? Is it a desire or a reality?

What does the intentional layering and increased indentation of each line indicate for Marissa? What does it say about her relationship with Peter?

Does the sterile language of the note reflect Lee’s content which therefore reflects the relationship?

As I reflected on these questions, I began to imagine Marissa, late one fall night (or was it morning?), just as the northern breeze started to shake the remaining leaves, sitting on the edge of her rustled bed, palms pressed against her check bones, smearing and staining her porcelain skin with the tears from another. Hunched over her knees, she noticed the tiny red corner of Rose through the distorted lens of the puddle pooling and then splashing down into the crevasses between her fingers.

Hands red and trembling, she reached down and picked up the book. On her nightstand was a pen she used to jot down his sweet words or remembrances of those nights above the city lights. His birthday. On a day like this. Couldn’t he have waited until after his birthday?

With an unsteady hand and a fervent heart, she ordered her thoughts with precision and structure. It was the only way she knew. It was the only way he knew. Each sniffle diverted the hand a bit, but he wouldn’t notice. The pattern of the inscription mirrored the one she wrote for him in 1998 – oh, what different times those were – minus a line or two and a few intentional punctuation marks.

She closed the book and set it on her lap. A deep breath. After scrubbing the stains away with the hem of her short sleeve t-shirt, she grabbed the book, placed it under her arm, and drifted to her car.

Weeping and with furrowed brows, Marissa backed the car out of the driveway and out into the darkness — underneath the street lights which cast shadows behind its wisdom…

O.A.R. and the “Duende”

I attended my first secular concert as a senior in high school. Up until that point, I had gone to a few concerts here and there, but only of the CCM variety; I wildly crowd-surfed at a Billy Graham crusade, and cried tears of joy (or guilt?) on the back row of a Steven Curtis Chapman concert. I even met the lead singer of Audio Adrenaline at Chuck’s Hamburgers after one of their concerts, and to my secret pleasure, he told me I should be a singer because my speaking voice was like his! In the quiet corners of my Subaru, I still hold on to that dream…

As a junior in high school, I approached a friend of mine who had begun dipping his toes in the dark, cool pools of unholy rhythms and lyrics. I asked him to burn me a CD of some of his favorite music. As I ripped the music onto my PC, I proudly and rebelliously titled the name of this curated album, “Secular Mix.” A tinge of pleasure and a hint of guilt rushed through my fingertips as I placed each song into this scandalous folder.

I wore out the speakers of my ’94 Pathfinder with these songs of teenage angst, love, and sex. When I hear one of those songs to this day, each word and beat flows through my senses, and the naïve wonder of a counterfeit transgression fills me with a subtle glee.

But, this concert in 2005 was something of a different sort, and for me, this band was of a different sort. While my original request for this other music was to fulfill my teenage rebellion quota against the Man (particularly, my perception of my faith), standing at the very front of the Gypsy Tea Room with a sharpied X on my clean, pristine hands, sin, guilt, and rebellion were far from my consciousness.

O.A.R. (of a revolution) was on tour for their Stories of a Stranger album. The first time I heard a song on this album, or any of their songs for that matter, was on the car ride to the concert, crammed between 7 other buddies, in a shabby, old Suburban we borrowed from one of our parents.

After the opening act left the stage – with their eccentric bassist (redundant?) who donned long, stringy hair half covering his tight, lipped eyes as he rocked the bass with legs spread like a sprinter on the blocks, but with shoulder arched back, keeping his body erect – the lights dimmed.

The energy pressed hard against me as O.A.R. walked onto the stage in the cloak of darkness. Bodies pushed slowly forward, and the raising smoke from the congregation formed silhouettes of the band and their instruments.

Bum, bum, bum-um began the bassist with a backbeat from the drums pacing in the background. A saxophone soon began mimicking the established beat, and an electric guitar jumped in.

Key change.

The lights shot up and glimmered against my eyes. The saxohphone took the lead and propelled the song into its first verse.

Eyes closed, with a slight sway to his hips, an expression of joy on his face, and a flicker of sorrow in his voice, the lead singer strummed his guitar and began to sing:

Listen here, this will only be
A small portion of your lifetime
That you’ll sacrifice for me

Ok, Marc, I will…

And I did for two hours.

Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who in speaking of Paganini hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’ So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. — Garcia Lorca

I experienced this duende that night in Deep Ellum. Lorca goes on to explain the force that provides the substance of art allows us to also escape from this world. In some ways, that is what happened to me as I felt, heard, and embodied this new, “secular” music – an escape. But, an escape is not simply a removal into nothingness. It is a movement into something else. Generally, I think Lorca would say you escape into the creation of a new form of art that flows out of this unexplainable experience. You are compelled to create something new with the hope of making sense of the duende’s work rising out of you.

While a new art form wasn’t generated out of my experience at the O.A.R. concert my senior year of high school, I was opened to something new: a new form of worship.

The duende has a limitless hold…[like] an authentic religious drama, where in the same manner as in the Mass, a God is sacrificed to, and adored.

At the foot of a secular Jew, soaked in the haze of sour smoke and pressured by a drunk 20something to to give myself to her for a closer spot to the stage, I adored our Lord in a completely foreign and uncommon way. In the midst of someone who let the duende rise up in them in order to create something beautiful, I experienced the “mysterious force” of God’s grace.

In the words of Marc, the lead singer of O.A.R., I felt, without consciously knowing in the words of their opening song, the deunde rising up in me a new way to worship. I plead without the use of words —

Reign on love
Reign on love
Reign on love
Reign on love
Reign

Come on down, come on down
Reign on, reign on
Come on down, come on down
Reign on, bring it down on me

How Language Forms our (Un)Faith

So many of us, supposedly standing for law and order, are merely clinging on to old habits, sometimes to a mere parrot vocabulary, its formulae worn so smooth by constant use that they justify everything and question none. It is one of the most mysterious penalties of men that they should be forced to confide the most precious of their possessions to things so unstable and ever changing, alas, as words. — The Diary of a Country Priest, Georges Bernanos

Growing up, a few words and phrases formed my faith and spirituality – words that were used at every corner of my church and school life:

1. Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ
2. Salvation/saved
3. Sin
4. Bible believing
5. Eternal life
6. Personal relationship

By the time I reached my junior and senior year of high school, the constant reverberations of these terms, from Disciple Now weekends to weekday chapels at school, failed to pierce my heart and soul. It wasn’t as if these words lost their inherent power, but they had “worn so smooth” — sliding past my imagination and collecting in some amorphous, inaccessible pool in my mind and consequently, my soul.

As this pool collected more and more of these words and phrases, the barrier sealing these words from my imagination increasingly felt language’s pressure. The constant use of a language void of significant, personal meaning left me dissatisfied with the very thing the language tried to communicate – the love of Jesus. In other words, since the language was empty, then the thing itself was empty.

Entering college, I had a choice to make:

1. Leave the faith. If this thing – this Jesus – is empty since its particular language can’t fully indwell the essence of his message in my imagination, then the message must be a farce.
2. Hold tightly to a vapid language. The language is not the problem – it is me.
3. Find a new language that may properly communicate the message I instinctively recognize as true.

For my second year of college, I enrolled in a Catholic university. Words like virtue, sacrament, eucharist, image of God, and grace were bandied about in the classrooms and dorm rooms – words I had undoubtedly heard, but had no framework in order to ingest and subsume. The texts I read and the people I met used these words and embodied this language in such a way that the thing – Jesus – began to look and feel fresh again. The old, insufficient language was drained, and the new language filled me with the reality of Jesus, the cross, and the resurrection.

The Christian gospel is rooted in language: God spoke a creation into being; our Savior was the Word made flesh. The poet is the person who uses words not primarily to convey information but to make a relationship, shape beauty, form truth…Words create. God’s word creates; our words can participate in creation. – Eugene Peterson

The language of my youth, over time, was no longer a language that forged a relationship with the Creator, but instead was only useful if the doctrines were disseminated into my intellect. Dissemination lacked the power to transform – to touch the part of the heart longing to be fully human in Christ. Nothing new was created in me.

On the other hand, the purposeful, intentional language of the Catholic church gave me new eyes to see Jesus and his people. While the connotations of the church’s language led me toward certain ecclesiological and sacramental understandings of the faith (hence finding my home in the Anglican church), the power of the church’s language re-imaged my love for Jesus. Their words rekindled and created a refurbished relationship with God.

Language will always drive us to a place of decision in regards to our faith. At some point, especially for those who grew up in Christianity, the words will become stale and dry – failing to create anything new in us. This experience requires a response from us. If we believe language has static meanings and connotations, we will probably choose to abandon our faith or hold rigidly to a faith that lacks meaning and fulfillment in Christ. But, if we believe in the elasticity of language, our faith can be renewed and restored semantically.

There are realities in this world that our words cannot always and fully communicate, but as limited as our language is, paradoxically, it is expansive and powerful enough for us to constantly renew the truth of life and the world. As George Steiner recognizes, language “is in the most naked, rigorous sense of that unfathomable banality, to invent, to re-invent being and the world.”

If language is unstable, yet nonetheless holding the power to create and invent the very nature of reality – a cruciform reality:

Let’s remake the world with words.
Not frivolously, nor
To hide from what we fear,
But with a purpose.
                                Let’s,
As Wordsworth said, remove
“The dust of custom” so things 
Shine again, each object arrayed
In its robe of original light.

And then we’ll see the world
As if for the first time.
As once we gazed at the beloved
Who was gazing at us.

-Gregory Orr

Amen

Part Two — The Slavery of Death: Identity in Christ

For Part One that tells the story that guides the following reflection.

Leading up to my time at Restoration, I believed in a very particular vision of Christianity – a vision that is not fundamentally incorrect, but is reductive of the gospel’s entire message. What it meant to be a Christian, for me, was to think rightly about God and to serve him in an extravagant, according to the Christian subculture, way.

Richard Beck, in his fantastic book, The Slavery of Death, describes these tunnel visions by using Ernest Becker’s notion of hero systems.

According to Becker and Beck, a hero system is a system set up by a culture or institution that, when a person strives to accomplish its plan, are able to find meaning and significance in their life. When you engage with these systems within a particular culture, your ability to execute the system’s plan well renders you a successful person within that society. The desire to be successful, to have the people within your culture view your life as significant, builds your self-esteem. The whimsy of self-esteem, then, masks the stains of death which are really pushing you to live a life of significance. The weight of death on our very being is so heavy, Beck says,

“This experiential burden threatens madness or despair. How do we make life ‘count’ in the face of death? Here is where the cultural hero systems step in to provide paths toward death transcendence – a means towards a symbolic (or literal) immortality. Life achieves significance and meaning when we participate in these ‘greater’ goods that can transcend our finite existence.”

Culture and its institutions – religious, political, or corporate – say, “This is what it means to live the good life. Go,” and we follow along, no matter the cost. In gaining our significance through these avenues, we are pursuing what Beck refers to as our “neurotic anxiety.” We become slaves to death by trying to cover death up with our unrelenting, neurotic pursuit of the cultural hero systems which produce an arbitrary significance.

Now, the fruit produced by these hero systems is often good. To have meaning in life is a worthy and noble thing. To transcend death, even, is a natural impulse because death is inherently evil. But, when these cultural hero systems shape your very identity, even if they are hero systems created by the institution of the church, you begin to conflate your essential identity as one of God’s beloved children with an identity derived from your actions and seen as significant from men.

Beck, by synthesizing the work of William Stringfellow and Walter Wink, claims that by finding our identity within the hero systems of the world, we are, in fact, possessed by the influences of the “principalities and powers” discussed in the scriptures. According to William Stringfellow, the principalities and powers “include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions [denominations], all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols.”

The principalities and powers are fighting for our allegiance, and by succumbing – almost always willingly – to their hero systems, Beck believes, “the institution threatens to ‘dominate, usurp, or take a person’s time, attention, abilities, and effort’…Thus, by attaching myself to this institution – by making its life, mission, and values my life, mission, and values – I can obtain a sort of immortality, a sense that what I did with my life will last and endure” because “the institution seems more durable in the face of death.”

The institution supplants and replaces my identity with its very own identity. Sadly, sometimes this is even done in the name of Christ. If you follow x, y, and z within our church structure, you will receive the fullness of faith. In other words, if you submit to our very specific hero system, you will receive the identity of our community, and you will have significance and meaning in the face of death – and this is also the identity that Christ wants you to have!

Beck: “Yes, the principalities and powers offer us a route to success, self-esteem, and significance in exchange for a life of service. But this service is revealed to be idolatrous – a service rendered to death and aimed only at helping the institution survive.”

Stringfellow: “Everything else must finally be sacrificed to the cause of preserving the institution, and it is demanded of everyone who lives within its sphere of influence – officers, executives, employees, members, customers, and students – that they commit themselves to the service of that end, the survival of the institution…This relentless demand of the institutional power is often presented in benign forms to a person under the guise that the bondage to the institution benefits the person in some way, but that does not make the demand any less dehumanizing…It is an invitation to bondage.”

At the root of this sacrifice to the principalities and powers of the world – the institutions which call for us to participate in their hero systems – is our bondage to the fear of death. These institutions will survive long after us, so if we can find meaning and value within them, if we sacrifice our essential identity in order for them to survive, we can somehow transcend our death and live, theoretically forever, within the confines of the immortal institution we are bound to.

This finally brings us back to our question. What possessed Jed to tell me not to serve at his church plant desperate for volunteers?

The very institution Jed is a part of, the very institution God had tasked him to build within the Anglican construct, had no power over him. The “success” of the church had no sway over him, for the church was not his, but God’s. The large, booming institutions crowding around his doorstep with the magnetic sway of the mall’s Cinnabon had no influence over him. His identity was not shaped by a particular and popular Christian culture pervasive in the south. He didn’t fear the death of the institution he built. He didn’t fear the death of his vocation. He didn’t fear his own death. Instead, he trusted God in his endeavor. His identity was found in Christ – an identity which casted out all fear and allowed him to love me, the individual, so that I could also find my identity in Christ and Christ alone, and not the identity of Restoration the Anglican church.

When we no longer allow ourselves to find our identity within the hero systems of the insitutions we assent to, when we are no longer slaves to death and let its fear control and guide us into finding our meaning within these institutions, Stringfellow says

“Then and thereafter we are free from the most elementary and universal bondage of humanity: the struggle to maintain and preserve, whatever the cost, our own existence against that of all others. Then and thereafter are we free to give our present life away, since our life is secure in the life of God.”

May we be secure in the life of God, secure in our identity of being his beloved, and empty our lives out for the sake of others – even if the culture or Christian culture’s version of success is at stake. May we truly believe that Christ has conquered death by his love and has empowered us to love – even in the face of our fears.

Just as Jed did for me…

Part One — The Slavery of Death: A Restoration Anniversary

Four years ago this month, I walked into Restoration for the first time. I had spent the previous four years bouncing in and out of church. I allowed unsavory institutional decisions and personal theological hangups to expel me from the community, and yet, exiled by my own volition, the pang of loneliness always compelled me back to the place I left. This cycle, while natural and therefore common, left me weary and broken. Not only that, but since my infancy, God had revealed himself to me through three distinct faith communities – Southern Baptist, progressive non-denominational, and Roman Catholic. After the cycle had played out a few times, I was ready to find a home. Cycling back into the fold this time, I asked myself, “Where is home?”
  
There is really no positive language to describe the process of finding a church. In our consumeristic society, there is almost no way of getting around the fact that we are all “shopping” for the perfect church to “buy-in” to; we are all looking to spend the currency of our life at a place that provides a spiritual and emotional good of sort. With the myriad of denominational options, the many different sizes, shapes, and styles, we can’t help but treat the process like a stroll through the Galleria – some churches glitz and glamor as the light shimmers off the perfectly shaped mannequins behind the looking glass, and some are tucked away in the dark corners, far away from the glitz and the glamor and the Cinnabon which draws people in droves, by scent alone, to its prominent place in the mall.

In an ideal situation, the walls dividing the different enterprises are torn down like the open classroom model of the 70s, where we all spend our lives, together, on one item – the worship of God – and that good is good enough. But, that is in an ideal world. Maybe one day…

At this time four years ago, I was looking for five things in a church:

1. Liturgical (Catholic)
2. Egalitarian (progressive non-denominatioal)
3. High view of scripture (Southern Baptist)
4. Freedom to be me.
5. A place to belong.

When I was searching for my “perfect” church, I met Mike at a Wonder Voyage informational meeting. I was hoping to lead mission trips and pilgrimages through this organization during my summer breaks from teaching, and Mike was helping conduct our interviews. During our conversation about the organization and my faith story, they asked me about the church I attended. I danced and ducked the question, trying to put a particular spin on my lack of church attendance, so it sounded like my current exile was some faithful attempt to find God instead of a contemptuous decision derived from my own immaturity.

Mike, as a good student of literature, saw beneath my text and precisely read into my subtext: “I think you should check out Restoration Anglican Church. That is where I go. Based on what you have told us about your life, it may be a good fit for you.”

I knew a little bit about Anglicanism and had attended a few Anglican churches in DFW, but most of the congregations were older. I didn’t feel as if I had a place in their communities. But, at this point, I was desperate.

Two weeks after my meeting with Mike, I entered the shotgun warehouse with exposed concrete and worshipped with the people of Restoration. For the first time in over four years, I actually worshipped God; for the first time in over four years, I felt as if the spirit of God was with me; for the first time in four years, I knew that God actually loved me. I wondered, “Could this be my home?”

I ran down the priest, Jed, after the service and asked him if we could get coffee. I wanted to hear more about the church and get a sense of how I could participate in their life. He graciously acquiesced, and we set a time for the next week.

We sat near the the front door of the now defunct Saxby’s coffeeshop in Farmers Branch. I told Jed of my life in Christ. I proudly explained how I led a fairly large middle school ministry one summer with a friend because the youth pastor was working with the upcoming sixth-graders. I self-righteously told him how I was a head middle school soccer coach at a Christian school at the ripe age of 20. I told him how I interned at a unique church plant in Atlanta that was trying to give away all their tithes offerings to their needy community by supporting themselves with the sales of their own freshly roasted coffee.

I also went into excruciating detail – I mean, how many sob stories does he hear! – about my ups and downs in the Southern Baptist church, my ups and downs of working in two non-denominational churches, and my theological joys and misgivings of the Roman Catholic church.

Finally, after pouring out my whole story, I sighed. Unbeknownst to me, but evident to him, my body sunk in an existential weariness.

As someone who had worked in a church plant and other successful ministries, I automatically assumed I would be put to work from the outset of attending another small church plant. I think I subconsciously relished the opportunity to impart what I thought was, at the time, invaluable wisdom and life experience to this young church (Oh the pride and egotism of youth. Praise God for his shameless mercy!).

But then, Jed spoke words I will never forget, words I share with anyone who is in a similar situation. Jed, with a graceful understanding of my spiritual plight, said, “Justin, if you decide to make Restoration your home, I don’t want you to serve here. After hearing your story, I think you just need to rest, to be. You just need to worship. Maybe in a year or so, you can begin serving with us.”

I was floored, dumbstruck even. My mind raced, “But…but…this is a church plant! Church plants, they survive on volunteers, and I am a willing and trained church volunteer. I have skills, dammit!”

What possessed Jed to respond in this manner? What possessed him to recognize my need to be filled with the Spirit for a time without being poured out? What possessed him to forsake an able (this modifier could be argued) volunteer that could benefit (also could be argued) his life’s work?

Before we answer this question, I think we need to discuss what causes leaders and their institutions to respond differently than Jed did with me. 

To read part two, click here.

Attending to Joy

How is this life to be lived in this fallen world, with all its dangers and temptations, if grace is taken to be the standard of the virtuous life? — Marilynne Robinson, “Grace.” 

 *Cough* *Cough* My brother slouched down low in his brown, leather couch. The overhead light of his small living room splashed to all the corners, pushing back the rain-soaked dreariness which poked through the curtains draped over the windows. The bend of his elbow jostled against his bearded chin as the phlegm attempted to escape his mouth; my parents and I looked at each other.

“We don’t have to go,” I said in a slightly raised voice, trying to overwhelm the muffled sound of the body which seemed to fade more and more into the obscurity of the couch.

“No, we can go. I will be ok,” my brother said with all the muster he had remaining.

To be honest, I didn’t want to go. A few days before Thanksgiving my parents asked me to sign the family up to serve a Turkey Day meal to the local refugee community through an organization my church partners with. We participated in the event last year, but because of my present internal and external chaos, I purposefully withheld this year’s details from my family, so we wouldn’t have to go. My faithful parents, though, foiled my plan.

I took a deep breath. My anxious heart fluttered, and I sunk deep into my chair.  

“Ok, we need to leave in 10 minutes, then.” 

 —————–

My literary hero, Marilynne Robinson, recently released a collection of essays titled, The Givenness of Things. In her essay, “Grace,” Robinson examines a few of Shakespeare’s later plays. Taking into account his historical context, what strikes her is, that within the religious turmoil of Elizabethan England (We are Catholic! No, Protestant! Anglican!), Shakespeare enters the tension of his time and resolves it without drawing lines or taking sides. Instead, in the seemingly tragic moments of The Tempest and Hamlet, he emphasizes the essential quality of Christianity — grace — in order to reveal the common reality which transcends any harsh boundaries man draws. 

Shakespeare gives grace a scale and aesthetic power, and a structural importance, that reach toward a greater sufficiency of expression — not a definition or a demonstration of grace or even an objective correlative for it, but the imitation of a great reality of another order, which pervades human experience, even manifests itself in human actions and relations, yet is always purely itself.

Robinson claims Prospero’s unwonted forgiveness of his treacherous brother, Antonio, in The Tempest, manifests the power of grace in the physical world made familiar by God’s work through Christ. Because this forgiveness mirrors the forgiveness granted to man, the image of Prospero is intended to pervade the darkness of our souls and infuse us with a particular way of enacting grace in the world — a grace flowing from the cross and into the world.

This ability for man to enact grace through forgiveness extends past the mere action or words of forgiveness. The very essence of forgiveness is found in a person’s ability to evaluate someone based upon a criteria other than the way they move about the world in relation to the evaluator. In other words, they see people as a good creation (in spite of their actions), valued and loved by the Beloved and, henceforth, worthy of being valued and loved by man no matter the situation.

Why, then, in moments of crisis and pain, do we forget the grace we experienced in Christ, and the testimony of the saints from life and literature, when we have opportunities to show grace to those who don’t seem to deserve it? Why do we allow fear, self-preservation, and ideology to guide our responses to micro and macro examples of evil?

Iris Murdoch, in her essay “Idea of Perfection,” tries to determine what causes man to act morally and immorally. After deconstructing different points of view, she concludes that the “idea of attention, or looking” determines the way man acts:

[Man] can only choose within the world [he] can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort…One is often compelled by what one can see…But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. 

So, when it comes down to choosing grace for the broken and those who create brokenness, when it comes down to choosing to love and serve the marginalized on Thanksgiving, when it comes down to choosing the way of the cross, why do we — why do I — chose an ideology which has been inextricably mixed and mashed with the culture and Christian sub-culture instead of a theology extricably linked to the experience of my own life and the reality of literature and the witness of the saints?

I think Iris would say to me — Well, Justin, where do you cast your gaze? If looking rightly at virtue shapes a subconscious response to moments of decision, then, in some way or another, what you are giving your attention to is insufficient.

Ok, Iris, I hear you. My self-indulging lifestyle may be missing the mark. Maybe. But, Iris, what do I give my attention to? Is it as simple as 30 minutes a day of prayer and scripture reading? Or is there a holistic, wholesale way of encountering the world which shapes the way I see and attend and act in this world?

Going back to Robinson’s question at the beginning of the post, How is this life to be lived in this fallen world, with all its dangers and temptations, if grace is taken to be the standard of the virtuous life?, maybe the way to participate in this grace is to attend to the world in a specific way — a way which doesn’t mask the reality of the world’s pain and suffering, but transforms it by actually following Jesus’s call to pick up the cross. Maybe, to be able to do this, one must seek joy.

Since joy has a moral dimension, joy can be an obligation…we have significant control over how we construe a situation and whether we are properly attentive to these unowed goods. The command to rejoice presupposes a belief that objectively a given situation ought rightly be construed as good. Absence of joy can then amount to an untruthful rendering of that situation…[joy] simply delights in and celebrates the good that is and proclaims, implicitly, that it is good for that good to continue to be. — Miroslav Volf.

As we seek to live the virtuous life produced by grace, as we seek to see rightly in order to respond morally to difficult choices, as we seek to overcome fear engendered by an ideology antithetical to the way of the cross, as we seek to transform our crippling sadness instead of wallowing it it — seek joy. Rejoice in the beautiful and broken world, in the beautiful and broken relationships of our lives, and see the good which may be hidden in the pores of our suffering — for this is a truthful rendering of the world redeemed by Christ. 

To pursue joy attunes our lives to the good in all things and people; it cultivates a virtuous life, and spurs us on to love and good deeds among those who are the hardest love. The long, sometimes arduous, process of seeing the good compels us to struggle off the couch and provide grace — even to refugees

Detachment

I wrote this a few months ago but never got around to publishing it. I’ve been thinking about the concept of detachment lately and hope to explore it a bit more in the near future, so I thought it might be a decent (admittedly unsatisfactory) primer for further discussion.

I watched the movie, Detachment (2011), last night – for no particular reason, really. I just saw it on Netflix and noticed it was about a teacher, so I thought I would check it out.

Detachment stars Adrian Brody, and if I remember correctly, he also produced it. The movie follows the life of a long-term substitute name Henry (Brody). Henry takes over an English class at a Title I school on the brink of administrative and curricular upheaval due to their low test scores. While the movie includes a politically charged message critiquing “No Child Left Behind”, the central theme transcends base political policy.

The movie begins with the following Albert Camus quote: “And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.” Throughout the story, we see Henry wrestling with this perceived reality. He longs to make a difference in the lives around him, but detaching himself from himself and the external factors bombarding him seem insurmountable, but he feels that overcoming these obstacles is the only way to change the lives of the kids. Even when he succeeds in detaching himself for a brief moment, he unavoidably attaches himself to a world fraught with just as many problems as his own.

In form and content, the movie portrays the weight, brokenness, and hopelessness of our lives and our world. Person after person is crushed (physically and/or emotionally) by the burden of life. While a glimmer of hope is revealed in the transformation of a child prostitute by the familial love Henry has for her, he eventually calls CPS, and she is whisked away to foster care.

The movie ends with their brief, joyful reuniting, followed by the long-term substitute staying with the students at the school he meant to leave. He reads to the students from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” As he reads, the school devolves into shambles – tables overturned, paper strewn across the floor, students themselves removed. Sitting alone on top of his desk, looking out at his disheveled classroom, Henry closes the movie with the words of Poe:

“I looked upon the scene before me…upon the decayed trees—with an utter depression of the soul…There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the soul.”

Henry’s imposition of Poe’s words onto contemporary life is a clear reflection of some key postmodern ideas. Religion failed us. The Enlightenment and its promise of progress failed us. So what do we have remaining? Decay – the depression of the soul. Nihilism.

Hope is stripped away, and the striving to “just make it” (the words Henry uses to encourage a child who eventually decides she can’t make it anymore) replace the collapsed constructs.

I was struck with a few things as Poe silenced to black:

1. I think many of us, if we are honest with ourselves, are crushed by the burdens of this world. We are always hoping to detach from something and hoping to attach to something else. This something has a transcendent quality, something that is outside of ourselves – even if we say the thing we are attaching to is neutral. Our day-to-day life, and the emotions connected to them, indicate our desperate desire to just “make it”. To be ok with ourselves and the world around us. I think ALL people experience this – the religious and the non-religious alike. Some, out of fear, just feel like they can’t say anything about it
2. I think this postmodern recognition is entirely needed, and I am glad it is being represented in one way or another. I also like how literature plays a role, albeit an insufficient one, in making sense of our place in the world.

Yet, I came away longing for something – something ancient, something substantive.

Hope.

The movie makes it very clear that hope is a transient thing. It comes and goes; it is a will within each and every one of us, but it has no substance of sorts, no telos outside of oneself. Yet the burden of life renders this flimsy hope useless.

Therefore, man becomes detached from hope – at least a transformative form of hope. To dig even further, because man is detached from hope, he is also detached from a story. This story is the very thing that brings hope. It is not just hope of a future eternity, but a hope of new life here; a hope waiting to burst through the fallen planks of our decayed house, longing to restore all things to its proper place.

Man is not meant to detach himself from his story, but instead attach himself to the story which guides his story, the one filled with the only sustaining hope, a hope which is oftentimes overwhelmed by the burden of life, yet actually overcome by the yoke of cross.

Caught in the Brothel

In 1907 Pablo Picasso composed a painting which would revolutionize the artistic world. From the Renaissance until the late 19th, early 20th century, rarely deviated from a classical pattern; they were narratival, religious, and realistic. Undoubtedly, there are exceptions to the rule, but generally, Picasso entered into an artistic community dominated by this formula. While the Impressionists movement preceding Picasso started the conversation to disengage from the tradition, the battle for popular and scholastic acceptance barely moved the needle toward progressive form and content. Nonetheless, the work of the Impressionists allowed for Picasso to take his knowledge and expertise in traditional forms and manipulate them for new, transformative purposes.

Enter Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a proto-cubist work by Pablo Picasso. Picasso’s painting, depicting five nude women in a French brothel, freed the modern artist to create outside the bounds of traditional artistic representations through his use of Cubism. Cubism “emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro and refuting time-honoured theories of art as the imitation of nature…they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects, whose several sides were seen simultaneously.”

While Picasso dips his toes into this new cubist form, I believe the real power is found in the content of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Before the release of the final product in 1907, the painting had at least 19 different drawings and iterations. One of the original versions included a doctor and sailor waiting their turn in the brothel surrounded by the gaze and attention of the ladies of the night. Picasso’s shocking shift as the painting evolved is not solely in the disjointed figures of the ladies or their tribal mask-like faces, but in the fact that he removes the men from the scene and adjusts the women’s gaze. The women no longer look at each other, or at the places the men were, but they transfix their eyes on us, the viewer.

Leo Steinberg, in his essay “The Philosophical Brothel”, notes that Picasso’s “shift is away from narrative and objective action to an experience centered in the beholder…one either experiences the Demoiselles as an onslaught, or shuts it off.” No longer is the viewer heeding to the narrative depicted in the scene, but he is, whether he likes it or not, a part of the scene. The viewer is within the narrative, and the narrative is now. The viewer is in the brothel. The viewer, us, is soliciting what the women are willing to give up. The Demoiselles assaults us with this reality – that we, you and I, partake in the baseness of man.

According to Steinberg, the viewer’s encounter with the painting forces him to participate in the deeds of brothel or to flee from it. Whichever path is chosen, one thing remains the same – the viewer was in the deep recesses of the brothel. He was there, and he was seen.

I think, in one way or the other, our life is a series of confrontations with the women in the brothel. We come face-to-face with them and are given the option to stay or to go; we can follow the siren’s song or we can walk away from their tantalizing voices, down the dark and muggy stairway and into the light. Those are our two options – our only two options. We are not permitted to pretend we were never there. We are not permitted to pretend the women never saw us, or that we never saw the women. We are required to embrace the reality of our place in the brothel.

Our identity is bound up in this. To forsake the truth of our lives – the broken, sinful, and redeemed – is to deny a part of who we are. To enter the brothel with hands over our eyes does not change the fact that we are there, and that I am there. Oftentimes I try to create an encrypted file containing my brothel moments as an attempt to block the access of myself to others. As a Christian, I tend to believe my past faults and failures have no bearing on my present. I tend to believe they have no impact on my work or my relationships. I pursue the slow, calculated suppression of those moments.

This tactic presumes my identity as a human being is bound up in my rationality. I think to myself, “I can block this memory from my mind. I have a powerful will and intellect. Mind over matter!” But, as James K.A. Smith observed, “The world is the environment in which we swim, not a picture that we look at as distanced observers” (Desiring the Kingdom 49). Picasso’s painting affirms this truth as the women’s piercing stares place me beside them. My unwillingness to swim in the truth of my place in the painting, in turn, unwittingly constricts almost all aspects of my present and future life. In reality, it makes me less human and less real and practically unable to be in true, intimate relationships with others. Hiding who I am, trying to rationally attend to and barricade my brokenness, leads to my inevitable isolation which furthermore leads to a misconstrued identity.

Donald Miller believes “If our identity gets broken, it affects our ability to connect” and he “wonder[s] how many people are withholding the love they could provide because they secretly believe they have fatal flaws.” These concealed brothel flaws generate fear and blocks intimacy with God and others. Withholding our true selves hinders our ability to be in real relationships, and man, at his very core, is meant to relate to others. This foundational reality of our identity can be extended to its foundational level.

Man is fully man when he love, and conversely, man is fully man when he is loved.

A Plea for Ashes

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lenten season. For a simple and concise explanation of Ash Wednesday and Lent, check out this article from my church. 

The Old Testament passage from the daily office today comes from Jonah 3 and 4. Leading up to his passage, Jonah had already been swallowed up by the big fish for skirting God’s call on his life, and he is begrudgingly and bluntly spreading the news of the Ninevites fate (let’s just say, it is not good) at the hands of God’s wrath. Surprisingly, the people faithfully repent as the news reverberates against their souls. The king catches the wind of change amongst his people, so he issues a decree to his subjects:

By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.

The sweet aroma of repentance rises up to God, so he decides to stay his wrath on Nineveh. Their radical commitment to the ways of God rendered the people holy and pleasing in his sight, and their communal recognition and repentance of their incendiary transgressions saved them physically and spiritually. They were now his children.

Ash Wednesday (the springboard to Lent) causes us to face the reality of our sin; we are brought face-to-face with its inherent death. It is as if Jonah is walking through the gates of our souls and communities decrying our upcoming upheaval — “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

This Sunday, a subtle line in my church’s sermon compared this season to the fervent evangelical revivals – a time for man, for the church, to remember their natural state detached from the Father and be called back into communion with him. It’s a time of mutuality, where each and every man recalls their common baseness.

The Lenten season, introduced by the placement of ashes upon our brows, necessitates a response from us. As we come around to this time, I think we often respond as Eliot’s narrator does in his poem, “Ash Wednesday”:

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn…

We wrestle with this tension of transformation – knowing God can mold us through our sacrifice, but also not wanting to sacrifice what it takes. Our inability to submit as the Ninevites did reveals our lack of hope. We know God has moved in our life, but we feel as if we are too far away for him to do so again. Why risk everything during Lent (and life) if our hope might be found wanting?

The progression of the first part of “Ash Wednesday” seems to suggest that Eliot’s narrator doesn’t feel or really want to hope any longer, and he doesn’t want the sacrificial life of Lent to leave him at a loss. He “pray[s] to God to have mercy upon us / And pray that I may forget / These matters that with myself I too much discuss / Too much explain / Because I do not hope to turn again…”

There is this story which hides beneath his desire to forget the past, to not think about the hard spiritual realities which plague his mind and heart. Yet, he ends the first part of the poem with a very distinct and common prayer; he clings subconsciously to last lines of the “Hail Mary” and recites them as if they are a part of his very essence, whether he likes it or not. His unawareness in this response is not merely rote, irreligious repetition, but the overflow of something true. It is the spiritual means of recognizing the transformative power of entering into the rhythm of the church calendar – the sacrificial life which expects the work of the Spirit to bind us back to the Father during Lent:

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

Ash Wednesday reminds of us this death, and Eliot’s prayer is the expectation of life in Christ renewed in Lent. While there is a sense of hesitation, the same hesitation we all experience as we plunge into this purging season, the hope is found in the sacrificial life – a life embodied and reflected by the Ninevites.

As we enter into this sacred time, will we allow ourselves to recognize our common brokenness and sinfulness, or will the mark of the Cross upon our foreheads be a mere formality, a box to check in the laundry list of items “required” by our church? Will we plunge ourselves in the uncompromising trust of our Father to save us from the fate of Nineveh, or will we continue in the shroud of sin’s darkness? Will we follow the unknowing path of Eliot and lift up a hopeful prayer, or will we let our fear of missing our perceived mark of faithfulness hold us back?

Personally, I hope and pray for the former.

The Choking Vines and My Greatest Fear

“Remarkably, the most common regret of the dying was this: they wish they’d had the courage to live a life true to themselves and not the life others expected of them…

“I wondered how many opinions I’ve wanted to share but held back for fear of criticism; what love I’ve wanted to express but stayed silent for fear of rejection; or the poems and stories I’ve never released because I didn’t think they were good enough for publication…

— Donald Miller, Scary Close

My greatest fear in life is that I would disappoint or hurt someone I care about because I failed to meet their expectation of me – whether relationally, vocationally, or spiritually. Almost every meaningful decision I have made has had, at its very core, this fear. At some unknowable point in my life, this seed took root and slowly grew and covered my entire being in its choking vines. While I thought the complete and utter negation of myself for the “edification” of others was an honorable quest, the slow, overwhelming constriction of the fully germinated seed withered the life away which fought underneath to catch a glimpse of the nourishing Light trying to peek through.

The perpetual desire to please others completely masked and marred the image of God buried long before this wretched weed. I’ve withheld my heart, my thoughts, my beliefs, and my desires because of some self-righteous, controlling way of living – a way completely void of a vital life.

A way of life predicated on the avoidance of physical, emotional, or spiritual fear is not much of a life at all. For me, I’ve been in emotional hiding; My emotions are the brick wall overrun with the vines sprouting up from the ground and up until the last few months, I had no idea my true self in Christ was unseen.

The most frightening thing about all of this is what follows. The slow and painful process of ripping up the roots leaves me with the question – who am I and who am I going to be? If at my very core I am an image bearer of the Father and not a pleaser of people, then where does that leave me?

I think Henri Nouwen puts it best:

These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God’s eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief.

What if we allowed our belovedness in Christ to free us from our fears? What if we trusted the Holy Spirit to free us in our relationships and other’s expectations of us? What if, as God prompts us one way or another, we were free to act within the truth of his gentle, loving hand? What if, instead of shrinking from potential or perceived conflict, we entered into it with courage and grace?

Donald Miller makes the case, which I tend to think is true, that true intimacy with others (and God) is impossible if you withhold your full self to others. Attempting to please others out of your own fear only crushes who God wants you to be and stifles the potential for meaningful relationships.

Miller asks the question, then, “How can we be loved if we are always in hiding?”

I think it is fair to say that it is impossible.

Will you join me (in healthy ways, of course), in ripping out the vines that choke and constrict us in order to reveal to those around us the Imago Dei buried deep within?