Like Shards of Shattered Stained Glass

Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable

Love is itself unmoving

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless…

        ~ T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

This is my third year teaching at an inner city middle school. My common refrain when asked what it’s like to teach is it’s exhausting but never boring. I often tell others the most overwhelming challenge I have faced in life is the emotions of a middle school girl. I previously did not even have categories for the appropriate responses to their occasionally incongruous behaviors. This has led me to be uncomfortable, anxious, and downright turned about at times in my role as a teacher, authority figure, and role model.

When I started teaching I had no notion or intention beyond the present need to have a job and hopefully do something which gave me some purpose. The long term desire was always to do something grander- namely go back to school and do something more than just teach 8th grade math and science. This was and is the desire of my heart.

I have enjoyed teaching and the relationships I have formed, but what has always made me uncomfortable about my job is disciplining students. I often enter into it with fear and anxiety. My thoughts run like this: “You are disrupting my class and wrecking any peace we (I) might have enjoyed here. I need to stop this.” What follows, almost invariably, is a classic mistake of teachers. We do not realize how well students can read our emotions. In these cases the student either reciprocates my fear or anxiety with his own or simply shuts down and detaches. Even if the behavior is corrected through coercion, there is no ground gained in character or relationship, and we percolate along in our functions without growing. There is intrinsically within the personal desire to regain control a tyranny of the moment which gets in the way of transcendent change.

In the previous two years I had taught 6th through 8th grade math, but this year I only teach 8th grade math and science. This has created the chance for me to teach the same 20 kids all day, students who I have taught for going on three years. By now they know my middle name, my pet peeves, and just about every emotional expression I have. They are hyper aware of even the slightest change in my temperament. Also, the way I relate to them personally has changed almost without me realizing. There is more than simply a nice hope that they might improve or grow. The welfare of my students has grown into and through my own personal desires. I only realize this and act on it in flashes of broken moments like the shimmer of light off the jagged cut of shattered stained glass.

Two weeks ago one of my students had an emotional reaction to something she was asked to do and stormed angrily out of my class. This was a reaction characteristic of her strong-willed, vitally independent personhood which has shown up in sporadic, irrational outbreaks of defiance that are shattering to my classroom’s peace and also harmful to herself in the form of ensuing consequences. These incidents have occurred over a three year period with me, and as a result of disciplining of her, I have grown very close to her. This time, in the moment of her explosion, I did not feel the usual anxiety and fear which generally accompanies her outbreaks, instead I felt only heaviness. I felt sorrow.

When I spoke to her later, my words felt thick, my eyes began to water, and the thought dominating my heart was a worry for her: she was self-destructing in these meltdowns and the continuance of them would not only hurt her relations with others but also her chances of pushing beyond the boundaries of poverty around her. The initial and usual response of defiance in her eyes faded into a reciprocated sadness. In front of me was a lost child. She was aware of the deeper emotion in my eyes of sorrow over her brokenness. I have known this in the eyes of others looking at me when I was so far gone I thought I could not be rescued, and here I was with my eyes full of the same emotions with a girl so different than me yet so much like me.

The reflection in her eyes stirred the stillness of indifferent love beyond my present volatile and inconstant desires. The timelessness of love momentarily overwhelmed my temporal desires. I spoke as honestly and deeply as I have ever spoken to a student.

The truth is I don’t really love people. I am often affectionate, kind, and even generous towards others  but rarely without an ulterior motive. I have not cared for anyone in my life with the charity of God which the puritans described as “benevolent indifference.” But in this moment, I felt the stillness of indifferent love.

Near the end of the school day, after I had meted out the discipline for her actions, she stopped me as I walked by her in study hall. I sat down next to her. She immediately apologized to me with sincerity for her actions. I choked up, hardly able to say anything in response. As I walked back to my room tired and at peace, I was reminded that in our broken friction, in the destructive collision of our obese, selfish desires, we are vulnerable to the entrance of timeless, co-inhering love. Into our time-filled world, in these messy moments enters the God who is pursuing us.

We like the shards of shattered stained glass are brought back together, one crude edge fitting the next, to form the reflection of our Pursuer. He, who in his love let us shatter ourselves and sustained us in our wrecked state, weaves us back together one to another into the unity of a living body, organic in its diverse, messy flesh, and glorified in the binding coinherence of love that threads us to a living-in-love triune God.

My role in this world, however shoddily I accomplish it, is to reflect this all encompassing, pursuing love. I uncover this only in gasps and stabs.

The Pearl of Great Price: Seeing on a Road Trip to Canada

I was driving through the flatlands of northeast New Mexico the other day. I was on one of those highways that extended undisturbed for miles — where your gaze catches and holds a glimpse of the puddles which evaporate in the heat of your approaching presence. On either side of the highway, fields shone with the dull yellow of hibernation, intermittently and rarely splattered with ancient houses, bustling with life or empty, in shambles or recently renewed. It can be hard tell.

The wind blazed from the north, ever so slightly pressing against my small car, but only noticeable when my imagination obsessed about splashing the distant puddle on the lonesome mailbox with the same expectant joy I would have in the back seat of my mom’s suburban, when, as a child, I urged her fervently in the pouring rain to drive through the puddle congregating in the bustling queue of the storm drain.

Stirred by the wind, I snapped out of my layered imagination. Unbound from the road ahead, I noticed a crow hovering above, striving with intent and might into the wind. Now, I have experienced this type of phenomena before – a bird fighting against the wind. Sometimes, the bird inches forward, sometimes the bird is thrown backward, and he loops back around to fight the same wind from the same plane, but just from a different part of the plane.

But, this was quite different. It was as if the wind stretched out its arm, opened its hand, and placed it firmly on the head of the flapping bird. The wings of the bird swung with such might, trying to knock down the wind, but the only thing which moved was the persistently violent wings. The body floated motionless as the wind laughed at the bird’s attempt for revenge and freedom.

I found myself in this part of New Mexico because I was wrapping up a road trip with a friend from Dallas to Vancouver, British Columbia. We headed out towards San Francisco first, then made our way up the coast to the border, and then cut across the country diagonally back toward Texas. After dropping my friend off for a medical school rotation in Utah, I made the final trek through Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico alone.

I go on these types of trips often – alone or with others – really for one reason: to see. The things I hope to see are not really anything at all. I hope, in viewing the enormous height of the red woods or the deepness of the Grand Canyon, I see through them to something that is unseen but nonetheless present. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on this quest to see, even if the object of my desired sight is unknown to me. I just know, or I just believe, it will be seen and it will be beautiful.

Interestingly enough, as I view things that are in their own right beautiful and obviously reflect the creatively gracious strokes of our Creator, I see and feel nothing. Annie Dillard, in her Pulitzer Prize winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, experiences this same disconnect between seeing and her desire to see:

I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing…

It’s not that this revelatory way of seeing is unattainable; it just can’t be manufactured or forced. In some ways, it is a form of grace transposed on you from the transcendent. Dillard goes on to say,

The secret of seeing is the pearl of great price…although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought…although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise.

Clawing and scratching in distinct places for pearls found by other people, I was surprised to excavate it in the desert and in the vision of a grotesque bird trying, and failing, to find its next meal. And, I almost missed it. I almost missed it because of the mirage – a mirage which we all know tantalizes but leaves us parched nonetheless.

So then, what was it that I actually saw in the bird? What unseen thing did I see in the seen?

Peace. The peace of God. Knowing at some point the wind would relent, and the bird, fatigued from his seemingly motionless journey, would lower himself to the ground, below the tearing wind, and enjoy the thing which brings life and sustenance…and peace. All with the knowledge he would go fight the wind again.

What to Make of God’s Absence

I took one of my quarterly walks the other day. There is always this hidden prompting which pulls me out of my habitual life and into the cloaked darkness of the gentle breeze. I don’t necessarily feel shamed into putting on my running shoes and my special long-sleeve t-shirt with a busty woman advertising my favorite café from Eureka Springs, but instead, a real sense of longing compels me down the familiar road.

What I hate about these walks is the expectant dread of what might become clear to me; from past walks, I remember the terror of the coercive wind filling up my being and manipulating my synapsis and soul to propel me this way and that. These seemingly harmless strolls have bullied me into fleeting jobs and unfinished degrees.

Yet, I continue to step freely into the tearing wind as it whistles and hums through the crack of my bedroom windowsill.

Just as it always seems to do, the wind directed me down a particular path. In the silence of the rustling leaves, while the vacant cars hugged the curb and the curious dogs squinted violently through the planks of their domain, the wind filled me with the hope of absence. The “this way and the that way” ceased.

It seemed to say, Stop and wait. This is where you are to be.

“The story in which God does his saving work arises among a people whose primary experience of God is his absence…[but] for most of us it doesn’t fit into what is ‘normal’ in our understanding of salvation” – Eugene Peterson

I proceed through life with a preconceived idea of what it means to live well – and in particular, what it means to live my life for the glory of God. So, I actively and anxiously pursue the fulfillment of living out this idea, and I do so with the hope of experiencing what I think to be the grace and peace of our loving God. I follow a simple equation: if ‘x’ is defined as such, I must do ‘y’, so I can experience ‘z’, the goal of ‘x.’

As I have aged and matured, the structure of the equation has remained constant, but the particulars are constantly in flux. ‘Z’ was never what I thought it would be, so something must have been wrong with ‘x’ and ‘y.’ I mix things up and change ‘x’ based on the latest fad which naturally derails my understanding of ‘y’. Yet, ‘z’ never tastes as sweet as I hoped it would. Dejected, but with even more zeal, I configure the variables hoping the answers meet my specified requirements.

But, at the very core of the equation, something is wrong. The equation itself. God does not necessarily work in the realm of equations, and if he does, it is foreign to our finite understanding and imperfect application. Not only that, but the very application of an equation for the purpose of attaining God renders God useless and fails to achieve the communion with God available to us. Our use of an equation places a distance between ourselves and God because what is needed is the equation and not God himself. What we find, then, is a misplaced desire matched with an imperfect formula and a God out of reach.

At this point and in a present state of pain and dissatisfaction, God just leaves us within his absence. Naturally, we curse and scorn him, and I think the Psalms can attest to the righteousness of our vitriol. But, instead of seeking to claw our way out of the uncomfortable silence through some prescribed form of spirituality to some goal of manufactured formation, I think we are actually called to wait alone in the darkness. As we experience this, we might only be able to describe it as our sliver of hell on earth, yet God can confidently and lovingly describe it as a means to a grace we can’t even fathom or perceive.

That frightening night, the wind filled me up like a child’s balloon, and instead of carrying me instantly to something new, he tethered me to the tree and whispered, Wait and see. For my creativity is wild, and my goodness is sweet, but oftentimes, it looks quite differently than you think.

My Destructive Addiction

“We were positively encouraged to create for ourselves minds we would want to live with. I had teachers articulate that to me: ‘You have to live with your mind your whole life.’ You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with. Nobody has ever said anything more valuable to me.” – Marilynne Robinson

Weston Priory

Susan, a sixty-five year old woman, picked me up in her grey late-90s model Toyota Camry from the bus station in New Hampshire. She was tasked by the brothers at the Weston Priory to drive me to their monastery nestled in foothills of the Green mountains in Weston, Vermont. We shared a little bit about our lives during our hour long drive together – how she moved to Weston from New York to serve the brothers once she retired, and how I found the monastery on Google. Two peas-in-a-pod, me and Susan.

Susan knew the lay of the land well. After we arrived and I met the brother in charge of hospitality, she drove me to my cottage in the woods – a mile away from the dining hall and chapel. To eat my meals, I had to walk to the dining hall; to pray with the brothers, I had to walk to the chapel; to work (my payment for room and board) with Brother Daniel, I had to walk to the sheep pen which was near the dining hall. I was isolated in a place of isolation, and the only way to interact with others was to walk a mile.

It was late April. Even though Vermont experienced a mild winter that year, it still controlled the ebbs and flows of each day. The sun rose on the dreariness of past months and set on the chill of what should be long past. Two birds, chirping a familiar song to each other, yet slightly different in pitch, hiding in the trees along the gravel path between the cottage and chapel, were the only signs of the striving spring. Their persistence and cadence on each trek, to and fro — my solace in the miscast season.

In between the moments of prayer, food, and work, I found myself in my cottage, attempting to pray, read, and reflect on the goodness of God. I opened my bible to Luke, and flipped to the next blank page in my journal (which was probably page 2), and entered into the presence of God. After 10 restless minutes, I grabbed my phone and turned it on. Nothing. The Green mountains, hugging both sides of the priory, blocked the information of the outside world to my cellular device. So, I shuffled hopefully to the window and checked again. Nothing. I raised the phone just a little bit more, slightly over my head, and pressed it up against the chilled window. Nothing.

I spent three days and three nights restlessly pursing God and hopefully expecting a ding of notifications. My only peace? Hearing the birds sing to each other and imagining them finally meeting – both birds perched high upon leaf strewn branches, so close to each other in the vast forest that the next call must make it evident of the other’s place, head swiveling from the east to the west, from the north to the south, finally catching a wave, the wave, eeking through the leaves along the way, a slight silhouette of the one they had called all those days finally becoming clear in front of the setting sun, just peeking up over the tip of the mountains. Finally…

-Hi, my name is Justin McGee, and I am a phone addict.

-Hi, Justin…

The comfort wrought from the potentiality of my cell phone, that in some way it replaces the touch or encouragement of another or the joyous sounds of birds, is a destructive fallacy. It tangles my consciousness and trips my mind into believing – this is good; this is right. It sees “a cornfield…late in the year, all the stalks dead where they stand” without noticing “the dim shine of sunlight on the leaves, and how the stalks were all bent one way, to tops of them” (Robinson, Lila)

Freedom in Christ allows us to see the unveiling light, not just the dead stalks; freedom in Christ reminds us we are no longer slaves to our sin, but free to live in the righteousness of Christ– that joy is found, not in the façade of our destructive comfort, but in being grafted into the family of God; freedom in Christ allows us to break away from our addictions, and see how God used its corresponding sorrow to shape us more into his image; the freedom of Christ mysteriously transforms our addictions into blessings.

Then the reasons that things happen are still hidden, but they are hidden in the mystery of God…Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings…This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. — John Ames, Lila

Indeed, it is marvelous. The birds proclaim it in their meeting.

On Marilynne Robinson’s New Book — “Lila”

At The Vicarious Life, we talk a lot about the dual nature of life — how the seeming incompatibility of brokenness and grace actually weave together to form the very essence of our experience and existence, and how art is a (the?) means of communicating this tension to ourselves and our current culture.

No current author seems to understand and depict this tension more clearly than Marilynne Robinson. This week she is releasing her latest novel, Lila, which is set in Gilead, Iowa with the same characters from her previous two novels, Home and Gilead.

What makes Robinson so unique is her ability to reveal the brokenness and grace of humanity — not with condescension or fear, but instead, with images that unveil a world beneath the surface of perceived truth, plunging painfully and compassionately into the realm of interior reality shaped by transcendental truths.

If you have never read her novels, I really encourage you to pick them up. These three novels are tied to the same story and families, but written from different angles. Each novel is independent, yet, if you read each novel, you glean a little bit more insight about the character’s life and faith.

At the very least, check out this interview about her latest book and catch a glimpse of Robinson as a person and artist.

“The idea that there is an intrinsic worth in a human being. Abuse or neglect of a human being is not the destruction of worth but certainly the denial of it. Worth. We’re always trying to anchor meaning in experience. But without the concept of worth, there’s no concept of meaning. I cannot make a dollar worth a dollar; I have to trust that it is worth a dollar. I can’t make a human being worthy of my respect; I have to assume that he is worthy of my respect. Which I think is so much of the importance of the Genesis narrative. We are given each other in trust. I think people are much too wonderful to be alive briefly and gone. . .” — Robinson

Part III: Living the Vicarious Life and Vulnerability

Part I and Part II of our most recent vicarious life series, spurred on from Sam’s most recent post, “Our life and death is with our neighbor”, has been a strange endeavor for me. It has consumed my thoughts and left me restless at night – not an unfamiliar phenomenon – but one I thought I discarded in the doldrums weakly built by a sensory addiction to my smart phone and tablet. Oddly enough though, there is a pleasant familiarity to the persistently obtrusive obsession of the mind. A comfort in the discomfort, so to speak. A strange place to be, I must confess, but one I missed, yet hope to one day manage.

I think the last two posts represent this a bit. There is a distance. There is a missing thread connecting the two. Or maybe the thread is so miniscule it seems non-existent. World history uncomfortably merged with the history of a woman. Russia meets the West, or maybe it doesn’t meet. It is hard to tell. An imperfect attempt to reveal the nature of an un-vicarious life…

History, philosophy, art, and stories of the past 200+ years were funneled to the final, almost passing point, of Part II – as if the tip of the iceberg was unimpressive and the hidden parts needed no further examination. Because of the ultimate failings of the past, our culture, including Christians, have embraced

…a radical form of individuality – that in and of myself, I determine the truth either through my use of cognitive systems, ironic wit, or seasonal whims of desire. In other words:

The antithesis of the vicarious life.

There is, though, another option…

Another option. Ha! It seems silly, even detestable, to suggest that another option would be more suitable and capable of correcting or redeeming the sins of our generation and the sins of our fathers, our grandfathers. Aren’t there enough options out there??

I know the simple option to living the vicarious life in many Christian circles is the tried and true response, the one all middle school students use during breakout sessions at their youth group functions: Jesus. There is no doubt that the simple option is foundational, and that the vicarious life is predicated on the recognition of who Jesus truly is, the son of God, the second part of the Trinity, whose life is interwoven with another, the Father, the Spirit, and the heirs of his kingdom; he is our advocate to the Father and our Savior.

But, the “Jesus” option must be rightly oriented. As seen in the unsatisfying philosophical and artistic history of the past few years, the flourishing seed which has infected all aspects of our life, even our theology, is the cult of individuality. In Christianity, our personal, rigorous piety is the sole marker of a life well lived in Christ. It is not that these philosophies are entirely wrong and useless in our lives and the lives of the world. I would say my faith has grown through the creative agnostic work of the 20th century. But, if it is our foundational framework, it leads to an crippling isolation untethered from the Gospel.

Jesus is the means to redeeming our time and the things of our world (oftentimes he is doing it unbeknownst to the artist and world, but it is evident through the lens of Christ), but it doesn’t occur through the individuation and might of our personal faith. The vicarious life of the Trinity is the very life we are called to live within.

When Jesus walked this earth, he explicitly distinguished himself from the pagan gods of the ancient world. In ancient Greece and Rome, the gods essentially used man for their own benefit, whatever the cost. They were jealous and vengeful, all to perpetuate some selfish, destructive goal; they were self-absorbed. Jesus throws everything on its head with what many commonly call the institution of an upside-down kingdom.

Brene Brown, a sociologist from the University of Houston, defines vulnerability as allowing oneself to be truly seen, and it is reflected in an honest attempt to connect with others. Is this not what Jesus did for us? How he differentiated himself from the gods of old? Did he not make himself vulnerable, did he not connect with us, so we could, in turn, be connected back to our Father? Did he not fully reveal his humanity – through compassion, righteous frustration, suffering, and love – so we could experience what it means to be fully human?

If this is true, then why do we cling to the philosophies of our post-enlightenment days as if they are the components that bring life? Why do we choose them and the subsequent isolation and individuality over the vicarious life that Christ himself lived and promised? Why do we hide ourselves out of fear of rejection, even from the people who truly care about us– who wouldn’t use our weakness to destroy us or wouldn’t be swayed by the dark recesses of our soul?

I’ve lived most of my life under the assumption that people genuinely don’t care about your life or mine. I’ve misconstrued St. Paul’s mandate to be all things for all people in order to hide my true self. I’ve become a master of post-modern deconstruction in order to elevate my own status amongst perceived subordinates; I’ve attempted to use art as a means to put together the pieces of my own fragmented soul, so that I can avoid the shame of unveiling the darkness behind the curtain of my life to those who love me; I’ve rationalized it all within the framework that God will sanctify me through the silent, secret work of the Holy Spirit – that others are not needed for the work to be done; I’ve withheld myself from others because of this intrinsic, incredibly human, imperfection we all have and experience on this earth – a natural consequence of our fallen world.

As Brown put it, I have wanted

to go in there (relationships) and kick some ass — when I’m bullet proof and perfect. That is seductive. The truth is, that never happens…when you got in there [as “perfect”], that is not what [others] want to see. We want to be with you and be across from you…

This is the vicarious life – to be with others and to be across from others. This is the life Christ lived. This is the life he called us into — to press into the lives of others and to allow others to press into our lives. As Sam mentioned, “Every life is forever tied to the lives before it, past lives are lived on in our being, and our present lives are intermingled with every other living soul.”

So what are we going to do? What am I going to do? Will I live the vicarious life?

Will you live the vicarious life?

Part Two: Irina and The Vicarous Life

Part two of a series discussing the vicarious life — a personal anecdote. Part one extensively detailed the historical framework leading up to our current state in regards to the vicarious life.  

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I met Irina on the Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, Russia. She walked briskly next to her husband, Jim, who sported the cautiously situated orange hat on the crown of his head – a hat forever seared into my memory. It was a young marriage of old lovers: a gentle retired US navy man joined to a fiery native artist.

Irina was reared and educated in Soviet Russia under Stalin and those who followed him. In the 20th century, Russia was experiencing an identity crisis (I guess you could argue they still are). Were they going to follow the philosophical and economic norms of the advancing west or cling to the mythic Russian-ness of their fathers?

As the proletariat, the peasants, the poor folks struggled for a fair way of life, they hitched their wagons to the enlightened Marxist philosophy adapted by Lenin. Those in leadership attempted to merge the pre-modernist philosophy that inherently marginalized traditional core values (Orthodox Church) with the famed culture saturated with religious iconography and allusions. Over time, this system failed the proletariat and turned into an oppressive vehicle used to suppress those it intended to free. On a personal, individual level, the economy of Soviet Russia fed upon the rich faith of the Russian people; it masterfully subverted it, and directed it unto itself.

While this sets in contrast to some of the western notions of the post-modern world developing after WWII (destabilization of meaning, questioning of reality, high value for parody and irony, distrust of theologies and ideologies), one large parallel remains: the deconstruction of religion, one through irony, the other through force.

Irina attended school in atheistic Russia and was ironically required to read the great spiritual works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin. Somehow, someway, these theological treatises on the psyche and sanctification of man were stripped pedagogically from their very essence. Nonetheless, she absorbed her Russian-ness in the midst of her enlightenment, unaware of the Truth oozing from the ink stained pages.

During her youth, the only people teaching the faith of her ancestors were the babushkas — the older women at the tail end of their life. Overwhelmed with the peace of Christ and on the brink of Glory, they had nothing to fear in opposing the nationalistic gods. Yet, while regarding their words of love with care, to risk her life and join the babushka ranks did not appeal to her.

She dabbled with Christianity in college. College seems to breed rebellion of one sort or another in every student. Naturally, those forced to adhere to an anti-religion construct, the rebellious fad was to experiment with Christianity. But, for Irina, it was just a phase, a series of transactional moments void of any real transformation.

Later in life, the books of her youth reappeared. She began to pour over the Russian kings of culture and spirituality. As she immersed herself in these stories and characters, forgotten fragments of her childhood and young adulthood assembled themselves into a desirable whole. The passionate words of the babushkas, the condescending discourse from the secret meetings in college – the temptuous siren song of Orthodox Christianity through the heart of fiction compelled her to belief in the midst of disbelief. These works of fiction brought life to the Life in Christ. The Vicarious Life.

David Foster Wallace, in his brilliant essay, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky”, discusses the power of Russian literary figures, and in particular, Dostoevsky:

[He] wrote fiction about the stuff that’s really important. He wrote about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being – that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.

Dostoevsky and his contemporaries confronted Irina in the midst of a philosophical black hole – one that devalued man and raised the government to god-like authority. They forced her to face her humanity for the first time, in all its bleakness and grace. In truly seeing humanity and its relation to something outside of it – the divine – she found herself in the traditional church of her homeland – the Russian Orthodox Church. While individually transformed by a solo encounter with solitary souls in particular stories, she united with a vicarious form.

A foundational sacrament in the Orthodox Church is baptism. Baptism is a covenantal act binding an individual to a community with the expectation that God will sanctify them through the body. In contrast to the evangelical notion of an individual baptism representing a strictly personal faith perpetuated at the turn of the 20th century, Irina finds God in the union with a people and church predicated on the triune principles of co-inherence – the principles Sam discussed in his recent post.

Her faith was inherently related to that of Christ, his people, and his Church. The power of a well told story brought her into the vicarious life.

Currently, in the 21st century, we find ourselves in a myriad of places in regard to the vicarious life:

1. Modernism and Post-Modernism has had no effect on us. We are strictly products of the Enlightenment – rationality and scientific understanding is the only means to truth. This was Irina pre-conversion.
2. We are de-constructivists. We tear down any and all ideologies, but build nothing in its stead.
3. We are relativistic. Instead of tearing down or choosing rationality as our god, we gorge on the buffet of spirituality.

All three of these lead to a radical form of individuality – that in and of myself, I determine the truth either through my use of cognitive systems, ironic wit, or seasonal whims of desire. In other words…

The antithesis of the vicarious life.

There is, though, another option…

Part I: Why We Don’t Live the Vicarious Life — the Historical Lens

This is part one of a series examining the reason why we struggle to live the vicarious life that Sam so poignantly discussed in his post, “Our life and death is with our neighbor.” Today’s post examines the historical background, mainly in regards to art, while the next post will examine where we currently are and how we can press into faithfully living the vicarious life.

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Every life is forever tied to the lives before it, past lives are lived on in our being, and our present lives are intermingled with every other living soul. – Sam Turner

World War I is the seminal event in the development of our current culture. Leading up to the assassination of the Austrian Arch Duke, the Enlightenment philosophy of the 18th century seeped into nearly all of Western culture. Rationalism and realism determined the viability of art. Creativity and originality took a back seat to efficiency and scientific understanding. Even the church became susceptible to it, as seen in the formulaic approach to evangelism: quick, efficient, soul saving.

Naturally, industrialism formed from these foundational Enlightenment tenants – ideas which increased productivity through the use of machines and systems. Cities began to grow and the agricultural and rural communities shrank, alongside their traditional values. As the city became the hub of the industrial boom and its efficient characteristics, man’s value began to diminish – i.e., man was no longer a necessary commodity. Technology and the requisite means of operating them well replaced the individual and his personhood.

Now, whether this was completely intentional or not (a few years later, there were reports during the Third Reich of German leaders propagating the idea that man and machine are equal), the destruction of over 37 million human souls in WWI from industrial crafted weapons at the whim of enlightened minds, speaks to, at the very least, an unconscious infiltration of extreme rationality determining how and why certain decisions are made (land, power, culture > man).

On the cusp of WWI, peripheral pockets of the art world attempted to unleash the Enlightenment’s grasp ton the culture. Dostoevsky, The Impressionists, the Expressionists, Picasso, and Stravinsky, just to name a few, tried to reveal the danger of this philosophy. Few, if any, listened to them. Yet, no one could avoid the bleating from the atrocities of The Great War. No longer could anyone close their eyes, head slightly bent forward, fingers firmly entrenched in their ears, and silently whisper, “lalalala” when the clamor arose. The shrill of rationality was incessant and unbearable and destructive.

As the Enlightenment philosophy crumbled at the foot of WWI, modernism swept in, desperately trying to put the pieces back together. T.S. Eliot states it as such in his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

The particulars Eliot referred to encompassed all of the human experience, not just those vetted by reason and scientific discovery. In order for the artist to synthesize these experiences, they alluded to great works of the past (Eliot), assimilated sacred rituals and religions of “barbaric” peoples into their art (Stravinsky, Picasso, Gauguin), and developed new forms of their art to communicate this compound Eliot longs for (Picasso, Braque, Faulkner, Joyce).

Yet, lo and behold, the valiant effort of the modernists fell short. Hitler and his cronies arrived on the scene, soon followed by Stalin and his oppressive ideology, and wreaked havoc on the West’s attempt to redeem the error of the Enlightenment.

In Russia during this time, poet Anna Akhmatova assumed a new role, one much more passive than that of Eliot and his modernist counterparts. Orlando Figes, in examination of Akhmatova’s most well know poem, “Requiem”, claims her role as a poet is to “share in her people’s suffering” by remaining in the Russian darkness. Her willful participation enabled her to put the pieces together in a different way, by singing “a dirge for the dead sung in whispered incantations among friends.” This passive retelling of her people’s pain “in some way…redeemed that suffering.”

Poet Boris Pasternak, who was loved by the Stalinist regime, longed to suffer alongside his fellow artists, to redeem the time by bearing “the guilt for the suffering of those writers whom he could not help through his influence. [Yet] He was tortured by the notion that his mere survival somehow proved that he was less than honourable.” The Russian poets on the backend of Modernity believed that to suffer with those who suffer is the means of putting together these new disheveled pieces wrought from the second Great War – at least, this is the Russian sentimentality. Yet, the pieces don’t come together into a nice, new unified whole – in Russia or the West. It is too modernist, too traditional, too in touch with the passive, peaceful resistance of the Christ. His teachings don’t seem relevant in this unstable, fragmented godforsaken world…

Our life and our death is with our neighbor

Our life and our death is with our neighbor – St. Anthony

Our lives are unraveled from strings of DNA passed down from maternal and paternal ancestors. The beating heart of my father’s father is shaped and flawed like my father’s heart and likely mine. The overlapping pinky toe of my mother’s father is my overlapping pinky toe. My full name, Samuel Rice, is taken from both of my grandfather’s middle names. Every life is forever tied to the lives before it, past lives are lived on in our being, and our present lives are intermingled with every other living soul.

Each moment our lives are vulnerable and present to the power of others. In the activities of everyday life, we put ourselves in each other’s hands, quite literally when the slightest turn of a steering wheel by another’s hands could end our life. The life of everyone near me is interminably interwoven into mine. Even as I write this late at night completely alone, I cannot leave off thinking of another’s eyes viewing it. Almost everything I do comes into relation with someone else either in my mind or in actuality. One of my best friends whose life is forever written into mine loves to quote this passage from the novel Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts: “We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them.” When defining our purpose in this life, it’s impossible for us to escape each other. St. Anthony of Egypt whose quote heads this post was an early church monastic father who spent much of his life alone in the desert, and yet, he understood his life and every other life in this world is given to everyone else in it.

If we reject this and try to find meaning in only ourselves, we find hell. The first Charles Williams’ novel I read was A Descent into Hell. While I loved the book for its portrayal of substituted love, the descending into hell part of the book is a single character’s descent into himself. Because of an unrequited romantic desire, this character rejects the City, which is life’s naturally interwoven state with its sorrows, suffering, and love, and instead lives only unto himself and descends into hell. The natural state of our life is interdependence. It is this way because this is our Maker’s life. He is living for and from another in a united, triune life of love. To reject this state of co-inherence with your neighbor is to reject Him.

In our death, we are gravestones and grandsons, but we still live in the lives of everyone we have touched. As we remember the dead in our many memorials, we turn back and remember our lives are interwoven into theirs. On Memorial Day, We honor our fallen soldiers because their lives live in our freedom. At funerals, we recall our dead friends and find the burning ink of living memories slipping down our faces in the form of tears and recording for us the life we will always have in them. If death were final, we would still understand and know this truth as present in our world. A past life will always live within the lives it was given to or for. Yet, the Christian hope is that death is not final, but instead, it is an ultimate union in Christ. This kind of death is a sundering of all the barricades separating us from each other and the Creator of life.

Our moment is to choose this life in each other or to reject it. Every space of our individual lives is full of this tension. Will I pray for the life of my enemy today whose life is in mine? Will I even speak to the homeless man living behind my apartment whose life is in mine? Will I forgive the offense of another or harbor it as a seed of separation which will grow between my soul and all those around me? Will I seek to uncomfortably love the other across racial and cultural lines? Will human life be protected by me so that I may find more life to live in, from, and for? Will I give my faith to a faithless fellow soul and seek to remind him of his life in mine? And will I live for others or myself in this space between grandfathers and grandsons?

Already but Not Yet: Creativity, Depression, and the Kingdom of God

Some thoughts spurred on from Robin William’s tragic death. For other thoughts on depression — specifically my own battle with it — see one of my previous posts.

“My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.” Edvard Munch

Psychologists Paul Verhaeghen, Jutta Joormann, and Shelley N. Aikman recently conducted some research to determine the causation between creativity and depression – i.e., can depression cause creativity (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Vol.8 (2) US : American Psychological Association pp. 211-218.). The examination between these two things is by no means new, but they were hesitant of previous findings that reported depression caused creativity. If depression depresses the desire to do, to make, to live, how then can depression itself enable and facilitate creating and doing?

To differentiate themselves from other studies, they look at what foundationally leads to both creativity and depression. They essentially boil it down to this: rumination. Stated another way, self-reflection. But, they break it down even a bit further. They decide rumination associated with depression is brooding (self-criticism) while rumination associated with creativity is positive self-reflection (true self-knowledge).

They conducted their research on a handful of college students (I’m no psychologist so I’m not sure if this is or isn’t a perfect system/sample. Nonetheless, it is interesting.) and determined the rumination associated with depression, in fact, does NOT lead to creativity. Only positive self-reflection leads to creative expression. Yet, they admit, if one tends toward the positive self-reflection, one might also tend toward brooding. They are likely interrelated.

So, essentially, depression does not lead to creativity, but someone who is creative, has a tendency toward dysphoria.

Over the past few years, I have come to believe as Gregory Wolfe believes,

…that authentic renewal can only emerge out of the imaginative visions of the artist and the mystic…Just as Christians believe that God became man so that He could reach into, and atone for, the pain and isolation of sin, so the artist descends into disorder so that he might discover a redemptive path toward order.

If the renewal of our world in Christ is to come through beauty, creativity, the arts, what then do we make of the brooding? The depression? The darkness that sometimes leads to death?

Our very nature, in faith and in life, is paradoxical. A bunch of seeming contradictions, somehow, someway, holding all things together in a perfect, unknowing, disparate wholeness. God brought life through the death of his Son. We gain fullness of life when we lose our life. Our gift of leadership oftentimes leads to abuse of power. Our intellect can be used to oppress. Naturally, there are positive and negative ramifications to the paradoxes of life.

Our mandate to create, to participate in our created image, can lead to depression. What makes man uniquely man in comparison to his animal counterparts? His ability to create something out of nothing for the sake of beauty, just as the Creator did when all he created was “good”; to bring order out of the chaos and to bring life out of the darkness, the formless, and the void. Being created in the image of God, yet undoubtedly fallen, produces a horrible and terrible paradox which leads some of our most creative to fall under the very curse of their creative genius. The creative work brings life – something out of nothing – yet, in extreme cases, causes death. The very best and worst of life bound up in a solitary act, an act meant for worship, yet sometimes ending in shame.

Such is life in the kingdom of God which is already but not yet – where we strive and pray for the freedom from brooding and for the freedom to self-reflect, yet the tension still remains; where we hope artists renew our time through the creative act, yet all the while risking the inverse affects. In our hopeful hopelessness, we are compelled to pray:

Our Father in heaven,
   hallowed be your name,
   your kingdom come,
   your will be done,
   on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
   as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
   but deliver us from the evil one…