With apologies to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, our general topic is the reflective Christian sailing in the sea of contemporary culture (and church). A cacophonous sea of competing claims and counter-claims, to which I often find myself responding “neither/nor.” But “what instead?” Aye, there’s the rub, matey. And that’s the white whale we pursue. Boats away!
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
Walt Whitman, “Song Of Myself”
“I discover the holy . . . [by] peering under the edges of the ordinary.”
One of the great challenges of faith is wedding the spiritual to the ordinary. It’s not just the old matter of finding the transcendent within the immanent. That’s hard enough, but since the immanent world about us is often quite fascinating, the challenge is really greater than that. (Gerard Manley Hopkins saw God in the swooping hawk and the beautiful dappled things without any problem.)
I think the greater challenge is to see God in the humdrum things–the really ordinary, every day grind of one’s life. I know some people with the gift for this (Hopkins could see this as well), but it’s not something I’m good at. And yet I’m sure it’s a requirement for a healthy holiness. (Holiness being something practical we should desire, not a rare quality of the few.)
I commend to you a book by Belden Lane called The Solace of Fierce Landscapes. It’s all about the desert and silence and emptying and the quieting of the chatter of the mind in one’s quest for God. For that matter, it’s about ceasing to quest for God at all (seeing God as another “experience” to add to one’s collection) and just being very still before God (not simply thinking about God). It’s an ancient tradition.
Lane is the source of the epigraph above. He also says, “Spirituality is not the sublime transcendence of everything trivial and matter of fact. In the Western spiritual tradition, the journey of the soul in the vale of ordinariness is an equally good, if not surer, route to holiness. This is the way of being wounded, of being committed to the concrete, of being bound to the familiar.”
I like that phrase “the vale of ordinariness” and the idea of the soul as journeying in it. Keats referred to this world as “the Vale of Soul-making” in his letters. And I think that it is the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary, events that shape our souls most of all. What we do and how we think and feel repeatedly, day in and day out, shapes us more than the dramatic events that come now and then. We talk about “turning points” in our life, but I think most turns we take are one degree at a time over long periods.
Which means we should consider how to experience God, the holy, meaning, grace, and so on in the kitchen and at the desk and sweeping the garage and changing the diaper—lest we miss the holy that is all around.
Daniel Taylor
In a copy of The Great Divorce that C.S. Lewis gave to Joy Davidman a couple of years before their marriage, Lewis wrote the following: “There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbours, and the false image of myself.”
As usual, Lewis has hit a nail on the head. There are so many distorted images of God floating around in our heads that to say, “I believe in God,” or “I don’t believe in God,” or “I think that God . . . (fill-in the blank)” is to say something with very little discernable content. It would take hours of conversation and probing and distinguishing, and months or years of following you around and seeing how you live, to even begin to know what you meant by “God” and what your statement might mean—even to you.
This is not an argument for God’s inexpressibility or for saying God is unknowable. It’s an argument for, like Lewis, always interrogating our inadequate understanding of who God is and how God operates in the world and trying to improve it. I find that many who say (and write) that they don’t believe in God have an understanding of God (usually highly cliched and stereotyped) that I wouldn’t believe in either.Unhappily, I find the same to be true for many who say they do believe.
I do not claim to have the accurate view myself. I believe that of course all our images of God are partial and inadequate, but I think Lewis is right not to rest content with his present view, no matter how learned or pious it may be. When we are upset or dissatisfied (or confused) with God in our lives, more often than not we are acting out of some distorted notion of who God is and what he promises.
The same goes, as Lewis indicates, for our views of our neighbors (see Lewis’ essay, “The Weight of Glory,” for a higher view of your neighbor than you are likely to have), and of ourselves. Wisdom is, among other things, seeing things clearly (even if partially) for what they are and acting accordingly. We could all use more of it.
Daniel Taylor
One of the most common questions for (and among) Christians, members of a supposedly “exclusive” religion (which I think is bunk), is “What about those who never hear of Jesus?” or, in another form, “What about people of other religions?” It’s a respectable question–sometimes asked out of sincere concern, but often asked as a way of deflecting Christianity’s truth claims. Respectable and worth discussing, but also highly theoretical and abstract. Good for people who like to debate.
When I think of this question, I also think of this rejoinder, “God only tells you your own story.” (Someone help me: I’ve forgotten where I heard this. I’m thinking maybe it was in one of Tolkien’s letters, or maybe he says it without using “God” in LOTR.) I think it’s disingenuous to use the supposed injustice of God in supposedly condemning those who haven’t heard the gospel as an excuse for rejecting the gospel yourself. You have heard. God is telling you your story. The person who hasn’t heard will be treated according to what they know. So what are you doing with what you have heard?
The biblical passage that comes to mind is Jesus speaking of Peter’s future death at the hands of others, and Peter asking about John, with the suggestion that John might get a better deal than Peter is getting. Jesus answers, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? As for you, follow me” (John 21:22). The vernacular translation might be, “Mind your own business.” And Peter does have important business to mind. And so do we.
I do believe God is telling each of us our story, and showing us how we are part of God’s story. The sometimes frustrating additional fact is that he only tells us the details as we need to know them. We know the overarching plot of our past, present, and future—and that is our hope—but we don’t know how it is going to be worked out today and tomorrow—and that can be our frustration. We’d like to know more. Sooner. But God only says, “As for you, follow me.” It makes for a heck of a story.
Daniel Taylor
I have in recent months been surrounded by people who have good reason to want to know what is going to happen to them and to those they care about—involving health, life and death, jobs, relationships, eternal fate, and so on. This is one (among many) of the story elements in our lives. Our lives unfold to us like a story (because they are a story) and, as when reading or hearing a story, we want to know how things are going to turn out.
There is a ‘page turner’ quality to a good life as well as to a good novel. Our natural curiosity, as well as our sense of self-preservation, wants an answer for “what’s next?” And when that desire gets the better of us, we get anxious, feeling we really need to know, now, the answer to that question. When reading a novel, we can flip to the back of the book, but we can’t do that in our life story. It must be lived each day, even as, for those who do not cheat, a novel must be read page by page and chapter by chapter.
We sometimes think God is teasing us. He knows. He could tell us. He could give us clues. Better yet, he could make happen now the things we want to happen. It may seem a little cruel that he doesn’t.
I’m expecting myself to say at this point that it is better that God doesn’t. And I am expecting myself to come up with an example in which God not telling someone what was next actually worked out much better than the person could ever have imagined. But although I believe this is true and that examples abound, I’m going make another point instead.
The slow unfolding of meaning and significance over the length of a life is a source both of pain and of joy—and for the same reason. Our fallen finitude means that our curiosities, our hungers, our desires, our hopes and needs are never completely fulfilled. As people of faith, we are creatures of the “yes, but not yet,” the “glimpsed, but not fully seen,” the “promised, but not realized,” the “genuine, but transient,” the“once and future king.” Therefore pain. But therefore also joy—the joy of the promised yes and the glimpse, here and there, of its reality.
Tolkien says this ‘joy’ is found in all faery stories and a key to both their attractiveness and their realism. More on that (and eucatastrophe) later.
Daniel Taylor
I am in my home town–Santa Barbara, California–these last three weeks of January. Trying to write, sometimes with a warm sun on my back. Following is what I wrote the day before yesterday. Another rough cut from the ongoing work-in-progress The Skeptical Believer:
Faith is not made up, but it is made. Which is why it does not bother me to call faith a fiction, as long as you let me control the definition of fiction (the one who controls the definitions usually wins any argument).
If you think of fiction only as a synonym for false, or as the opposite of fact, you are not thinking enough. The Latin source for the word fiction meant to make by shaping, molding, forming, or devising. The word also carried meanings such as feign, invent, fabricate. It suggested a maker and a thing made, with the possibility that the made thing was a product of the imagination. That was the sense of the first known use of the word in English in the early fifteenth century and the reason the word became associated with literature in the late 16th century. Today, fiction is generally used to identify novels, as a synonym for false, and seen as the opposite of fact. I would like to preserve its ancient sense as a synonym for a thing which is made.
All life, in this sense, is a fiction—a thing made from other things–an invention even, a bringing together of existing things to create a new thing. On the physical level, we have the many not yet fully identified things (from quarks to muons) that make up the atom, atoms that make up molecules, molecules that make up compounds, and compounds that are brought together to make up increasingly more complex things.
The same is true in the shaping of an understanding of the world and of one’s life. We are, from our earliest moments, flooded with data, input, information—the flotsam and jetsam of moment by moment experience. (What William James called the “great blooming, buzzing confusion” of the newborn, a confusion some feel again when trying to make sense out of their lives.) When one is young, this stream of meanings and possible meanings may be highly controlled—filtered for you by parents, church (or some equivalent), school, and social context. You are offered, implicitly and explicitly, a way of understanding and explaining and valuing that makes sense of everything–or purports to. As you get older, more educated, more experienced, you become aware of other ways of understanding, explaining, and valuing. You negotiate between the way you were raised with and the other ways you find around you and, in a process that may go on for a lifetime (or be settled once and for all without even thinking), you create a way of understanding, explaining, and valuing that allows you to live.
And because you create this, as much as discover it, I think it is a fiction—in the sense of a made thing, with some input from the imagination. I do not think it is necessarily a false thing, or an unreal thing, or a nonfactual thing (though it could be). It may be almost entirely true, factual, and real (my belief in human fallenness requires me to say almost). But it is–inescapably–created, made, formed—from the things that have presented themselves to you in your life experience. (If you want to add, in a process directed by God in your own case, I will not protest.)
All of this sounds very post-modern. I am not a big fan of postmodernism, but like any influential movement it has elements of truth and insight (or it would be much less influential), and I think its assertion that all our ways of describing and living in the world are constructions is true and therefore not something to be fought against, rather something to be used in service of more important truths. Of course my understanding of the world is constructed, and of course others construct a different understanding. And of course none of us can prove—to everyone’s satisfaction—the certain truth of his or her own construction. That is bad news to modernist, rationalistic defenders of this explanatory system or that (including faith systems)—those who feel they fail if they do not prove. It is good news—and perhaps not news at all—to those who see faith as a story which is chosen and lived because it offers, in the individual’s judgment, the best possibility for the things one values most—in my case love, grace, mercy, justice, truth, and shalom.
I have moved, as you see, from the word fiction to the word story. It is both a big and a not so big leap. All stories (including histories) are fictions—created things. All are selective—selecting some things and not others from the “great blooming buzz.” (If there were no selection there would be no story and we would understand nothing.) All stories have the potential to be true—there being many kinds of truth. Some stories are more factual than others, though no competent story is without some basis in fact, even if only in the facts of human nature and the human experience. This whole book is exploring the assertion that the Christian faith is best seen as a story to be lived. Faith is also a fictive thing—something made from the fragmented materials of human experience that both explains that experience and offers hope.
That faith is a fiction, again, does not mean that it is therefore false, illusory, or unreliable. I believe the Christian faith to be true and reliable and real (knowing that each of these terms is a minefield). Consider a wall. A wall is a fabricated but real thing. It requires at least a minimum of imagination to conceive of and design. It is often made out of stones, which are also real, although they are not in themselves a wall until they are joined together by a maker with an imagination. I take these stones—factual things, if you will—and make a wall. Someone else can take those same stones and make a monument. Another will use the individual stones—the facts—as weapons, not joining them together at all, but using them in a way that the person finds desirable. A wall, a monument, a weapon—same stones, different uses, different made things. And some will ignore the stones all together.
This is only an analogy, not a proof of anything. It doesn’t solve the problem of where the stones came from (God? our psychological needs? indigestion?), or whether we have used the stones wisely, or even whether the stones are illusory or real. But I still find it useful for thinking about how I am required, in fact, to make something out of all these things that come at me from moment to moment. Everything I have ever learned or experienced or imagined is potentially a stone in the wall or monument or home I have decided to build. I have chosen these particular stones in this particular configuration to build this thing I call my life. The only alternative, it seems to me, is to sleep while it is yet day (Thoreau).
And so I make my choices. I choose my story—my true fiction—from among the cacophony of stories shouted around me. I both choose it and it chooses me. I both discover it (thankful for those who have preserved it for me) and create it (putting it together and finding my part in it). I piece together a faith that shares, in its essentials, the core elements that define faith in Christ, and at the same time is one that is not exactly like anyone’s faith has ever been or will be. My story is lived in common. My story is absolutely unique. I made it. And yet I didn’t make it at all. It was a gift. One that I accept for myself and offer to others.
Daniel Taylor
Reflecting on the rapidity with which your whole life can collapse (in the context of living in Stalinist Russia where you could be an average citizen one day and in the concentration camps the next), Solzhenitsyn says the following: “The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: ‘You are under arrest.’”
It was true for Solzhenitsyn who was called in from his post as an artillery officer on the front in WWII and arrested for making fun of Stalin in a letter to a friend. But it can equally happen when one hears the words “you have cancer,” or “your child has been in an accident,” or “I want a divorce.” You lived in one universe the moment before and you live in a completely different universe the moment after. How does one learn to live in a new universe?
“Old things pass away; behold, all things are become new.” This sounds good when the new is an improvement on the old. But what about when the new is devastating, when the new makes you wish longingly either for the old to return or for life to end?
What you don’t need is people telling you, “You’ll be okay,” or even “I know how you feel.” No, they don’t know how you feel. Because they aren’t you. And even if they have suffered similar loss, it doesn’t relieve your own suffering to realize, as everyone does, that others also suffer. It’s your universe that has shattered and you are the only person who understands it. And of course you yourself don’t “understand it” at all.
The only thing to do is to continue on without understanding. Understanding is a luxury that life (God) only gives here and there. It’s where Abraham was when he set out from home “not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11). Maybe it’s where Paul was when he prayed, unsuccessfully, to be freed from his “thorn in the flesh.” It’s where countless people have been, though knowing that doesn’t necessarily relieve the pain.
The best that can be said about Abraham and Paul and many others is that they still had a story to live by. That story doesn’t promise them freedom from loss or suffering. In fact it almost guarantees it. It simply offers the hope that this life is not pointless, including the parts that seem pointless indeed.
Paul Elie (as I think I mentioned in a previous post) defines pilgrimage as “a journey undertaken in the light of a story.” That story needs to have a place for shattering experiences. It needs to be bigger than life and death. When your universe is shattered, continue your pilgrimage. Stick to a story that works in every universe—old or new.
Daniel Taylor
My brother-in-law, who has just lost his son and wife, was talking about how difficult it is to care these days about many everyday things, including his work. Yes, after great loss most things seem trivial. I spoke of the process of detachment one often sees in the very old as they progressively feel detached from the things of this world and cast their eyes toward eternity.
I then recalled what his wife, Pamela, had said after Jamie died and before her own sudden passing. “When you lose a child, you don’t think about the past anymore. You think only about the future.” And she wasn’t speaking, I believe, of tomorrow or next year. She too was speaking of eternity, not knowing she would be entering it herself very soon. (Though, in one sense, we always live in eternity.)
It set me wondering about the correct balance for a believer between detachment from this world and commitment to it. Clearly Christianity teaches the value of this world and our time in it. We are to embrace time and the world in which God puts us. At the same time, there is also a healthy detachment that comes from correct valuing. That is, knowing the relative importance and unimportance of things should allow us to be detached from many things that others ardently pursue. (Augustine, I think, called this ordinate love—knowing what should be loved and why.)
I pray that the Pierre family will, in coming days, stay attached to each other and to those things that matter most. Let the other things fall away, brothers and sisters, and think, with hope, about the future.
Daniel Taylor
One of the things I have been wrestling with, given the recent loss of two loved ones, is God’s attitude toward death—and therefore what my own should be. (I know people have written about this but I’m not in a research frame of mind.) My tentative conclusion (not new with me of course) is that God hates death, we should too, and we should be slower than we are to jump to easy phrases like “he/she is in a better place.”
One of the great truths and consolations of Christian faith is that God, through the resurrection of Christ, has defeated death. But it is a victory won with great cost—to Jesus and to ourselves. God’s intention is shalom, which includes an affirmation of this life and a intention that we flourish in it. Death—especially early death—is a strike against shalom and against God. That he defeats death in the end does not remove the fact that death is a perversion.
Consider Jesus raising Lazarus. Jesus does not say, “Don’t worry, he’s gone to a better place.” Instead he is described as greatly disturbed and troubled. The same verb elsewhere in the New Testament indicates indignation or anger. He is angry because death is a symbol of Satan at work, trying to undo the shalom God intends. Jesus knows he will soon destroy the work of Satan by defeating death, but that does not lead him to accept death with equanimity. By raising Lazarus he will give a foretaste of that victory and an indication of how he feels about death. To put it crudely, it pisses him off.
So let’s do two things when those we love are taken untimely from us. Let’s be pissed off. And let us also love even more the one who hates death even more than we do and has defeated it—at great cost.
Daniel Taylor
Planning a funeral or memorial service is a values-clarification exercise–“What was important to him?” It’s also a guessing game of sorts—“What would she want?” Being on the edge of the process these last few days, I think anyone over 18 should plan their own, or at least provide the raw material. Anyone, in a few minutes, can list examples of the music they’d like played, the Bible verses or poems they’d like read, maybe the people they would like to speak (a potential minefield, admittedly), and anything else they’d like included. It would encourage you to think about the meaning of your own life. You wouldn’t have to share it if you didn’t want. Put it in an envelope marked “Funeral/Memorial Service: Do Not Open Until Needed” and make it known that it exists and where it is.
I suppose there’s another point of view that would say a Christian funeral should be less an individualized celebration of a life and more a community’s celebration of the hope of resurrection. It matters less what anyone “wants” at their funeral and more the collective faith we have in God’s ultimate grace to us. I understand that too.
Perhaps the middle ground is a celebration of that collective hope in ways that reflect the shape of the individual life that now is experiencing the reality of that hope.
Daniel Taylor
(What follows is a continuing reflection on the deaths of Jamie and Pamela Pierre, as in previous postings.)
The room is maybe five feet by ten feet, an enclosed porch actually. It was Pamela’s inner sanctum (for better and worse). It has a couple of chairs, a computer on a tiny desk, books stuffed high and low, and tall piles of magazines, clippings, and printouts from online articles of all kinds. It’s where she went to think and search and smoke and read and think some more and smoke some more. It was also her counseling office (by phone and internet) and prayer closet. So it is fitting that Gerard and I, and then Jim, sit there smoking and talking, me on my black pipe with the Scottish tobacco.
We talk mostly about random things, circling back to brief exchanges about Jamie and Pamela. We laugh a little. We are quiet at times. We don’t have to talk about death to know it is what has brought us to this place—this physical place and this emotional and spiritual place. The death of people we love and the pain of those who have been (can we almost say had the misfortune to be?) left behind.
I am sitting by one of the tall stacks of photocopies from the internet. On top of the stack is an article (post) titled, “When You Aren’t Sure What to Do Next” (Jon Bloom, http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/when-you-arent-sure-what-to-do-next). It was posted and printed out on November 25, 2011, twelve days after Jamie’s death, and 6 days before Pamela’s. I think it is safe to say it is one of the things she was reading—and thinking about—in her last days.
The piece reflects on the story in John 21 of the disciples going fishing after the crucifixion and resurrection. They have been crushed by the crucifixion but given eternal hope by the resurrection. But they do not know what to do. Jesus has been telling them what to do (or trying) for three years or so. Now they seem to be on their own. How do you go back to everyday life after you’ve be part of the central event of human history?
They don’t know what to do, so they do what they had always done before. They go fishing (I’m paraphrasing Jon Bloom here). They fish all night. Useless. What a waste of time. No fish. Then Jesus shows up on the shore. “Throw your nets on the other side.” They had already fished both sides and multiple places. Surely also useless. But they do it anyway, sensing that maybe this fellow on the shore is more than a passing stranger. Full nets.
I’m glad Pamela was reading this in her last days. She had experienced a form of crucifixion in the death of Jamie. She had, like the disciples, the hope of the resurrection, both for Jamie and herself and those of us left behind with her. Now she was waiting, not knowing, really, what the next thing would be. In pain, but in hope. Both real. She did not know that the next thing for her would be to join Jamie in death (though she talked about death a lot in those days between Jamie’s and her own).
Now the rest of us are in the same place—a kind of crucifixion mixed with a hope. But not knowing exactly what to do, for those suffering the most in this or for ourselves. We also are waiting, to see what life now holds. We also don’t quite know what to do next. Bloom quotes Elizabeth Elliot’s advice in these situations: “do the next thing.” That sounds right. The “next thing” these last few days has meant opening the door when friends knock, arranging things with the funeral home, picking up brothers and family at the airport, planning a dual memorial service for Jamie and Pamela . . . smoking in Pamela’s sanctuary.
Our pain is real. So is our hope—the hope that after the long night of meaningless fishing, eventually, at the time we really need to know, Jesus will be there to tell us where to cast our nets now. Why do we believe this? Our story tells us so.
Daniel Taylor
We thought we had entered a season of grief and suffering with Jamie’s death in the avalanche. Now, with the death a few weeks later of his mother Pamela—largely from grief I myself believe—we find this season turning into a long winter. The whole family now feels itself engulfed in an avalanche, like Jamie, carried away from solid ground, battered by primordial rocks and free-falling over cliffs. (I, of course, do not pretend to speak for others.)
Being given to reflection and bookishness myself, I tend to process these things through ideas and stories, looking for explanations, contexts, and silver linings. But I have abandoned that for the time being. I will simply grieve among a community of grievers, in this case a community defined by its love of two people—Jamie and Pamela.
Still, I was reading C.S. Lewis a few minutes ago, Pamela’s favorite writer if one goes by her Facebook posts. He says the following in the Preface to The Problem of Pain: “when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.” I find that true, and therefore helpful. This is a time to set abstract knowledge aside and simply practice–the best we can–courage, sympathy, and love.
And when we think of Pamela with Jamie (and father/grandfather Fred), we can even smile.
Daniel Taylor
This post is by Jayne Taylor, in honor of her loved nephew and in gratitude for the love of the body of Christ:
My 38 year old nephew, Jamie Pierre, died this week in a tragic ski accident in Utah. He is mourned by his parents, a grandmother, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, a wife and a young son and young daughter, friends, his church and people all over the world who knew him, saw him, met him, read about him, worked with him, played with him, filmed him, followed him, loved him.
What I have witnessed in these last days is the marvelous way in which the body of Christ, the church, the faith groups, the friends and beyond have been at work.
As his aunt I received calls within 24 hours from dear friends who called expressing their sorrow for my nephew and my family. Tuesday night, while I was absent from my prayer community, prayers are offered up on the behalf of my family in the loss of my nephew Jamie–a person unknown to them. Wednesday morning bread is brought to me at church from a dear friend. “I want you to have this–for you and your family as you grieve the loss of your nephew.” Warm hugs and expressions of sympathy and offered prayers for me–the aunt—on the death of dear Jamie. Arms around me as I weep in worship,
grieving for Jamie and his family. The body of Christ at work.
My daughter Julie receives calls from friends expressing their sorrow for her as she has now lost her cousin…one of sixteen. The body of Christ at work.
My 89 year old mom, the grandmother of Jamie, receives calls from friends and family “How are you Kate? Can I help you?’ Her son Jim and grandson Justin go to her apartment to speak of Jamie dying on the mountain, taken off the cliff by an avalanche. They spend an hour with her—it is the first of 21 grandchildren to die…. yet another loss for her, but a deep, young loss. Friends from church spend the day with her as she tries to understand and absorb this shocking news. They talk. They eat. They pray. They cry. The body of Christ at work.
Gathering people surround the home of my sister Pam and brother-in-law Gerard. People come. Food is brought. People stay. They talk. They walk. They pray. There is an understood quiet in their midst. Facebook messages and e-mails pour into their computers offering condolences and help. Love is felt like never before. The body of Christ at work.
Sister Naomi, who is manning the communications front for the family, hears from friends from the distant past. Prayers are offered. Conversations had. She is loved. She feels it like never before. The body of Christ at work.
Oh the fragrance of Christ. The sweet perfume-the aroma of the life-giving spirit of the living God in our midst. In the deep sorrow, in the deep understanding of loss, our Lord knows and goes. He is the prompter in the body to go and care and console and love. Now. Again later. In ways that can be understood by those prompted. “Go now and be my hands and feet. Go now and give your time, your skills, your love. Go now little body—go now in to the hurting places of the souls of these loved ones. Go now and demonstrate my love in the midst of this great human loss. I will be with you as you go. I will guide you as you go for such a time as this. The body of Christ at work.
Jayne Taylor
A darkness came over the extended family last night with the news that Jamie Pierre—father, husband, son, brother, nephew, cousin, friend—was killed in an avalanche in Utah (Sunday, Nov. 13).
We older people tend to freeze the children of our relatives and friends at certain ages, especially if we see them only rarely. The dominant picture I have of Jamie fixed in my head is as a mop-headed little boy with limitless energy and appetite for adventure. Later snapshots are an extension of that early picture.
I am reminded of words from the great Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from his personal history of the Stalinist concentration camps. It comes often to mind when my children or I walk out the door: “prize above all else in the world those who love you and wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be the last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.”
Loss and pain and grieving are in all our hearts. May God add other feelings as well as the days go by.
We love you Jamie.
Daniel Taylor
Have you noticed that when you learn a new word, you start noticing it everywhere? Same when you write a book. You obsess on something (not literally) for a few years, start seeing the world through that lens, and then catch echoes of that way of thinking in the newspaper, overheard conversations in the mall, and in Seinfeld re-runs.
I’m happy to say that my book came out a couple of weeks ago: Creating a Spiritual Legacy: How to Share Your Stories, Values, and Wisdom. During the short time since it came out I’ve been forwarded (thank you Wanda) an article by David Brooks (New York Times) asking 70+ oldsters to send him stories evaluating their lives, and seen a comment by Billy Graham while celebrating his 93rd birthday (and a new book, Almost Home) about the importance of legacy. At the same time, Matt alerted me to a quote from the book that was posted on John Piper’s website (“Your legacy is the fragrance of your life that remains when you yourself are not present.”), which I have to admit I did not remember writing (but like the sound of it now that I see it).
“Story” has long been one of the main paradigms through which I see the world. Legacy depends on story. So the two are interwoven in my life and mind, and keep showing up everywhere. Watch out for them yourselves!
Daniel Taylor
Skeptics are used to being accused of being too skeptical, even cynical. Many actually hear the charge with a touch of satisfaction (“No one’s going to pull the wool over my eyes!”). But in my view we skeptics are often not skeptical enough.
Consider the age in which we live. (People have long enjoyed trying to characterize the defining qualities of the time they live in.) It is generally thought an age not conducive to belief. Competing orthodoxies include many that are directly or indirectly hostile to traditional religious faith, from various isms (materialism, naturalism, feminism, rationalism, consumerism, postmodernism, defunct Marxism, and the like) to the common “‘ism’ of everyday living” that looks for purpose in life in toys, busyness, pleasure and the pursuit of a killing notion of success.
Once, it is suggested, it was easier to believe. (“The Sea of Faith/ Was once, too, at the full” says the melancholic nineteenth-century agnostic poet Matthew Arnold.) Society and social institutions supported religion. Even the great majority of intellectuals and artists supported religious faith in the west until well into the 18th century. Now, alas, it is not so. Hostility to religion is topped only by indifference, and that makes it hard for someone with a skeptical bent to be a believer.
Baloney. If you are really a skeptic, it should make it easier. Your natural bent toward doubting truth claims ought to help you doubt the confused and confusing claims of your times that cast suspicion on faith at least as much as it causes you to doubt faith. I genuinely believe it is easier for me, personally, to be a Christian in a secular age than it would have been in any century I know of in the past.
As one who is skeptical at least around the edges, I am a natural contrarian. (Especially inside my head. Outwardly I love to get along.) Give me a fence and I’ll sit on it until I know what side you’re on. Then I’ll hop off on the other side. You think the poor are victims of oppression; I’ll think the poor often make the bed they lie in. You think the poor are lazy; I’ll counter that no one in the wide world works as hard as the poor. Same with politics, theology, sports, and snack foods.
So being reflexively contrarian, my tendency in an age of faith would be to be skeptical of a faith that most everyone else supports without thought. Having been blessed by living in a age where faith is often disparaged or dismissed (especially in the academic world I have lived in), my contrarian skepticism often pushes me toward faith. You think religion the opiate of the masses? Then I think it’s peachy. You think no reasonable person could possibly believe this stuff? Then I think no reasonable person could possibly think that reason alone can settle what you should believe.
A very small example. I once contributed an essay on Christian humanism (of which I am a fan) to a volume honoring the memory of a much-loved graduate school professor. The last line of the essay used the word “One” in a not very subtle betrayal of my own faith in God. The academic fellow editing the book called me to ask whether I really wanted to capitalize that word. It clearly irritated him and undoubtedly he thought it reflected badly on me as a scholar. He was giving me a chance not to embarrass myself.
Two things came immediately to my mind. The first was the thought that the man we were honoring (who shared my faith) would not have been displeased, maybe even a bit amused. The second was, “I’m glad this reference to personal faith bugs this fellow. Maybe I should put something in there about being washed in the blood.” I told him to keep it a capitalized One. See—a contrarian (and not always cooperative).
Given that we live in a time that largely believes traditional faith passe (at least in the west), I’m glad I’m a skeptic. It helps me see through many of the confident secular pronouncements about what is reasonable, believable, acceptable and relevant. If it also makes me a bit skeptical about similar pronouncements coming out of parts of the church, that’s okay. I need to discern the spirits there as well.
If I sometimes need to be skeptical about external claims, I also sometimes need to be skeptical about my own skepticism (a point I’ve made before). I need to be skeptical about the many excuses, rationalizations, and self-justifications I use to deflect the call of faith on my life. When I hear myself saying, “Okay, I’m not that great a Christian, but I’m not trying for sainthood—and at least I’m not a hypocrite,” I should be skeptical enough to see that for the feeble evasion that it is. The same holds if I trot out some cliched objection to faith and use that as a cover for my own flaccidness.
Can healthy skepticism be used to diffuse unhealthy skepticism, or does skepticism about skepticism just lead to skepticism squared? In my own life, I think it has been more the former. When I have found myself piling up objections to faith in the past—and keeping it at arm’s length—by own skepticism about my arguments and my motives have often lead me back toward commitment rather than further away. The contrarian within me has addressed my inner atheist and said to him, “Given all your many objections to belief, I see that I need to either fish or cut bait.” Then, after a pause for rhetorical affect (my inner atheist is big on rhetorical affect), I say, “I think I’ll fish.”
So am I too skeptical? Maybe. But then, perhaps I’m not skeptical enough.
I’ve decided I need to lighten up a bit with these posts. Too many heavy topics—hell, doubt, skepticism, Bonhoeffer. So how about a bit on Bob Dylan’s twenty minutes as a Christian?
Actually, I think Dylan called himself a Christian for a couple of years at least, which is better than Kris Kristofferson did (remember him?). The excited word went out in evangelical circles that Kris K–singer, song writer, actor (dubious), and former Rhodes Scholar–had become a Christian (this was in the 1980’s maybe). For some reason that excited a few fans of the Christian celebrity circuit.
I never heard much more until a few years later when an interviewer asked him about it. His reply: “Yah, I got drunk one night and came to Jesus. But I sobered up by morning and that was the end of that.” Oops. (“Time to look for another banquet speaker, Marge.”)
But Dylan was more serious about it, even if relatively briefly. So when I decided to use some of my post-teaching life to read a bio on Dylan (I’m attracted to singers who sound like a cement-mixer), I was especially looking forward to how they were going to treat Dylan’s dalliance with Christianity.
I decided against going right to that part of the bio, figuring I’d work my way up to it and see how his shot at faith fit in the flow of his life. So imagine my consternation when Daniel Mark Epstein in his The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait, after dragging me through minute descriptions of his, his mother’s, and his sister’s reactions to the Dylan concerts they had attended, gets to the Christian Dylan and says, “This is the point . . . where I lost him. Or rather he lost me, and most his fan base. . . .” Epstein, who probes every recess of Dylan’s psyche for hundreds of pages, covers his two years as a Christian in five paragraphs, dismissing the music as “fire-and-brimstone gospel tunes of the most fundamental, doctrinaire, and judgmental ilk.”
Epstein claims it “was not his religion that put me off” but the fact that he let it affect his songs and performances. (Gasp, an artist’s view of reality affecting his or her art! Outrageous!) This is the classic privatizing religion line. “Believe whatever you want, but keep it to yourself—out of the public square and out of your songs.”
Of course Epstein abandons his responsibility as a biographer (he could have titled these two pages as “Dylan’s Icky Fundy Phase”), but it serves to warn me against doing the same thing myself. There are certain causes, slogans, and points of view against which I react instinctively and viscerally. Dismissive words arise quickly in my mind: foolish, idiotic, laughable, benighted (a fine word), and so on. My subculture encourages this. We are among the great mass producers of ‘straw men’—describing people and positions in such a way that we can knock them over with a rhetorical feather.
Here is a good question to ask yourself whenever you find yourself so tempted: “What is it in that person’s life experience and understanding of the world that might have brought them, quite logically even, to that position?” It’s a form of the “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes” principle. Might be even better to ask in the form of “What could have happened in my life to make me see the world the way that person does?”
Hopefully that will keep us from being as “fundamental, doctrinaire, and judgmental” as Epstein is about Dylan’s twenty minutes as a Christian.
Daniel Taylor
“I open the book
which the strange, difficult, beautiful church
has given me . . . .”
Mary Oliver
I once read that when Karl Barth taught, he would write all morning and then read to a class in the afternoon what he had written. I no longer have a class to read to, so I will share with you what I just finished writing. It’s a nice set up. (Responses, including objections, are welcomed.)
God says, “Do this together. You will not do it well, but you will do it better—together.”
Of the three adjective Mary Oliver uses to describe the church, the skeptical believer will most readily identify with the word “difficult.” It is a word with many meanings. The main reason the church is difficult, in the sense of troublesome, is that it is made up of human beings—you and me in particular. Every failing to which we are liable, and they are legion, is also a failing to which the church is liable. Are we hypocrites? Yes, and so, at times, is the church. Are we self-absorbed? Yes, and so the church. Are we liable to be judgmental, short-sighted, contentious, bored and boring, indifferent, culturally captured, obtuse, ad infinitum? Yes, and so the church.
The church is also difficult, in the sense of hard to understand, because it is trying to live out a mystery. Not an “if we investigate adequately we will solve it” mystery, but a “these are things beyond our ability to encompass” mystery. The church lives at the nexus of the immanent and the transcendent, of time and eternity, of the transient and the permanent, the physical and the spiritual, that which is and that which is to be—and that is a place of mystery. It is a place of glimpses and guesses and through a glass darkly. Therefore, difficult.
And therefore also “strange.” If we have been long in the church we may have lost an awareness of how strange it is. It is a gathering together of people who say they are on a pilgrimage with God. Strange. People who call down God to be amongst them. Strange. People who say they love God more than life—and love life because of God. Strange. People who say we will all live forever. Very strange.
All of these synonyms for strange also apply, or should apply, to the church: alien, weird, aberrant, abnormal, bizarre, unconventional, foreign, queer. If we are not queer, we are not the church.
And because the church is difficult and strange and both human and not, it is also beautiful. We are beautiful to God—the bride of Christ. We are good news to the world. We are agents, sometimes secretly, of shalom. We repair the world. We feed the poor, bring sight to the blind, and declare freedom to the prisoner. Sometimes. Often actually. But then, we are also difficult.
I disparage the church less than I used to. It is a gift. It gives me the chance to be—with the help of God and those with whom I gather—strange and difficult and beautiful.
Daniel Taylor
[This is the third of three parts of an excerpt from the work-in-progress The Skeptical Believer. See prior two posts.]
I have been arguing in the last two posts that human beings are inescapably meaning-makers, constantly engaged in trying to make sense of the world—and that pure reason is only one, often tangential, component in the process. It goes on in the darkest of places.
A quick story. Like many people, I have gone to Auschwitz. After the gas chambers no longer poisoned their thousands per day, of course. After the satanicly ironic words over the gate, “Arbeit Mach Frei,” were no longer a death sentence. Auschwitz is a black hole that obliterates (I first wrote “obliviates” and that works too) sense and sense making, and no one should pretend otherwise. Nevertheless, it is also a place where, for evil and for good, people continued to be human.
Within Auschwitz is a wall between two buildings where thousands were executed by firing squad. In one of those buildings prisoners were held for interrogation, torture, and eventual execution. In this building Father Maximillian Kolbe and others were starved to death. I have looked in the room they died in and I can say I was unable to take it in. I lacked, perhaps fortunately, the imagination.
But in a nearby room I saw something more tangible that speaks to what I am trying to say here. It is a rough etching in the wall of the head and torso of Christ. A figure, presumably the image’s creator, clings to Christ around the waist. It floats there, in the semi-darkness, a testament to one person’s final effort to make sense of it all. I do not focus on the fact that it is Christ—though that was essential for the person who etched it. It could have been, as it was elsewhere, a Star of David or a flower or that person’s own face.
I bring it up here because I see it as an emblem of that sense-making hunger in every human being. I know nothing of this person’s life or convictions. All I know is that at its likely end, in a place of evil and nullity, he continued trying to make sense. He found meaning—and hope–in the story of someone who had been humiliated and executed two thousand years before. By etching that image in the dark cell, he showed a commitment to a community of others who had also taken that story as their own. He did not, it seems, give himself to despair or bitterness. He persevered—to the end. And now his story, or at least this sliver of it, is part of my story. And now part of yours.
The influence on me of this visit to Auschwitz is not primarily rational or pragmatic. Scraping marks on the wall did not save him, nor will it me. But it helps us both make sense of things.
Daniel Taylor
(The next few posts will be from my book-in-progress The Skeptical Believer. Each will be a digestible excerpt from a section exploring how we make meaning for ourselves.)
“We use what we call reason to preclude thought.” Marilyn Robinson
We have more words for thinking than Eskimos have for snow—and they have dozens. All of them are attempts to get at some aspect of the ceaseless human process of making sense of things. The following are all words related to some part of the process, and this is the short list: intellect, logic, reason, intuition, judgment, curiosity, experience, evaluation, measurement, calculation, comprehension, creativity, discernment, cognition, weighing, memory, prudence, perception, inference, deduction, induction, explanation, discrimination, understanding and imagination. Also part of the process, embarrassingly to some, are emotions, personality, desires, hopes, aspirations, experiences, fears, will, prejudices, character and guesses.
All of these concepts and activities, and many more, contribute to the ultimate purpose of all thought: to help us survive and thrive in a sometimes perilous world. What we are trying to do, in a phrase, is make sense of it all.
Making sense is messy. It is also at one time or another difficult, wearisome, scary, contradictory, and impossible. At the same time, it can be satisfying, comforting, encouraging, confirming, and thrilling. Some people pretend to give up on making sense of things, but no one ever really does. No day passes in anyone’s life that they don’t engage in some sense-making activity. For the reflective person, the day is filled with moments of trying to figure it all out.
You are probably such a person, or you wouldn’t be reading this. Think over your own life: how often do you read a book or an article or listen to someone in hopes of better understanding some part of yourself or the world? How often do you find yourself turning over ideas in your mind, how often find yourself probing and questioning something that other’s believe without question? How often do you try to put two and two together, how often tie yourself up in mental and psychological knots, with the hope that a little more reflection will untie them?
The messiness of sense-making has certain implications for any thought-filled person, including the skeptical believer. They include the following. [To be continued]
Daniel Taylor
I just completed an interview a few minutes ago for a documentary being produced on the recent controversy about views of hell (Hellbound), prompted by Rob Bell’s book Love Wins and the range of reactions to it. The director wasn’t so much interested in my views on hell (thankfully) as on how people form and defend their religious beliefs. He had read Myth of Certainty and asked questions arising from that book (now 25 years old but still scratching some people’s itch).
One question he asked was “Why now? Why does this topic create such passion among believers and nonbelievers in our moment?” Among my many profound and entertaining answers was this one. Christianity is now a minority position in the western world. Many feel the need to defend it against increasingly vocal detractors. The traditional doctrine of hell is one of the aspects of Christianity most commonly objected to by many, including not a few believers. So it is not a dead issue, nor a minor one, even though I, for one, think it at best a third or fourth level issue. It’s nowhere near the core of my faith, not least because I don’t think the afterlife is something that God cares to tell us a lot about.
I did say that the most common traditional view has something to be said for it in this sense. It claims that hell matters. We can argue, if so inclined, about the details of the afterlife (I’m not inclined), but it does have an important relationship to this life, and it is foolish to be dismissive.
I also said that there has been a sort of sea change on hell. When the issue of hell came up in the past, people used to worry about saving themselves from it. Now they often worry about saving God’s image. People want God to be all love, mercy, and fairness. The traditional doctrine of hell violates their own sense of love, mercy, and fairness, and so they feel pressured to explain hell in a way that gets God off the hook. I know there’s a lot more to it, but that’s going on too and it is a significant shift. I tend to think God can handle himself.
It was an interesting afternoon.
Daniel Taylor
Reason is both a lovely helpmate and a whore. I have been exploring that idea quite a bit the last few months while writing this Skeptical Believer book. (Among other things, I’m looking for a more acceptable word than “whore,” which I am sure is considered offensive on many fronts these days. How about, “reason will serve any master”?)
The basic idea is that reason, while certainly a gift and a powerful tool, is so prone to manipulation by the other aspects of our being—hopes, desires, will, prejudice, fears, etc.—that to claim one’s ideas, views, and actions are governed by reason is hopelessly naïve. Anyone who understands how reason operates in real life (as opposed to in the abstract) understands what a secondary role it plays in the lives of even the most rational seeming persons.
John Goldingay, the Old Testament scholar (whose book, Key Questions about Biblical Interpretation, I recommend), writes “Christian theological interpretation of Scripture is always inclined to come down to the elucidation of our already-determined Christian doctrines” (p. 155). That is, most people have some form of a theology in place as they read the Bible (largely formed by preaching and teaching), and they will interpret what they read in a way that confirms their theology (and personality)—scholars more than anyone.
This is not unique to Christians, however. Anyone with any kind of pre-commitment (and that’s almost everyone), will argue, reason, think, and present evidence with the intention of ending up in the place they want to end up (think politics, economics, marriages). And when, voila, they do end up there, they will say, “I’m simply being logical.” If you want to get to some conclusion, reason will help you get there. If you want to get to an opposite conclusion, reason will help you get there too. “Just name your destination, master.”
This may seem too cynical and a discouragement to holding faith in a rationally defensible way. I don’t think it is. I think by seeing reason for what it is, a useful but limited tool, we free faith from the Enlightenment illusion that “If you can’t prove it, it’s crap.” Keeping reason in its place frees us for a risky, relational, mystery-respecting, story-shaped faith in God. Might also make us a tad more humble.
Daniel Taylor
Consistent readers of this still new blog (that would be me and a certain redhead), will have noticed how often I center a post on a quotation, most often from a book I am reading at the time. Occasionally, I have thought this unfortunate, a clear indication that most of my thinking is derivative, feeding off of others like a piglet at mealtime at the state fair. But then almost all human activities, even the most creative, are derivative in one way or another–and are better for it. Few people are more obtuse (and often boring) than those who believe they are thinking or doing something completely new.
And so I use for this post a passage from Dickens, re-discovered in the very entertaining new book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs (read anything by Jacobs and you will be glad you did). Jacobs cites the scene from David Copperfield in which David sees reading as having saved his life when, as a child, he was oppressed by his life living with the Murdstone family.
David lists the many characters from literature that became his companions—from Tom Jones to Robinson Crusoe, saying that “They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time” (Jacobs, p. 32). He concludes, “This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always arises in my mind of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.”
I love the phrase “reading as if for life.” If it makes no sense to you—and it won’t for many intelligent, good people—then you are not one of The Fellowship of the Book. I am not referring to the People of the Book (though some of us are members of both groups)—a term usually applied to Jews, Christians, and Muslims—but to those read as if their lives depend upon it—because they do.
Jacobs suggests that readers of this kind will always be a minority—in any time or culture. It is the one subset of human beings for whom I have unmixed affection. If you are a omnivorous reader, I will forgive you almost all your other sins (not a power I actually possess, I hasten to add) and ask you to forgive me mine. We are like Kafka’s hunger artist–we do it because we have no choice.
Daniel Taylor
Czeslaw Milosz, the Christian Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner, called the poet “the secretary of invisible things.” Unlike Romantic theories of creation, he said the poet did not create things so much as discover things. The poet is a prober of reality, not its maker. And many of the most important things cannot be seen or touched.
I think believers too should be secretaries of invisible things. Invisible does not mean non-existent, only non-tangible. And often resistant to logic narrowly defined and the scientific method. Saying so opens the door of course to all kinds of abuse, including self-delusion. But then all approaches to reality are subject to delusion.
Dealing with invisible things requires more care and wisdom than dealing with tangible things. That’s one reason poets are so careful with words. We should be as well.
Daniel Taylor
In 1956, JRR Tolkien wrote in a letter, “I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a “long defeat”—though it contains . . . some samples or glimpses of final victory.” I find myself resonating with that view, though I am not entirely sure whether it is because of my temperament, my theology, or my experience of the world. Or maybe all three. I posted earlier about “Christian realism” and Niebuhr, and these are more thoughts in the same direction.
A few observations about Tolkien’s assertion. First, he refers to “history,” not to the life of individuals. He is not characterizing his life or your life, or any particular life; he is talking about the collective human experience. (So he’s not Eeyore grousing in his Gloomy Place–which I have visited, by the way.)
Second, his view is in keeping with a tragic sense of life and with the Christian notion of the Fall. Shalom is ruptured and things are not the way they’re supposed to be (see Plantinga book of that title). One of the more profoundly naïve statements in recent decades (and I thought so at the time) was the senior George Bush pronouncing at the collapse of the Soviet Union that we were looking at a generation of peace. What? Six billion samplings of human nature on the planet and you think there could EVER be such a thing as a generation of peace?
Third, the phrase “the long defeat” comes from The Lord of the Rings, in which the elf queen Galadriel says, “Through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” It is spoken elegiacally as the elves realize their time in Middle Earth is coming to an end. (If Tolkien got the phrase from somewhere else, please let me know.) These words suggests a number of things to which I am drawn: nobility, honor, courage, perseverance, virtue, realism, tragedy.
But, of course, one must balance this with the “glimpses” and the hope (a stronger word than most realize) of “final victory.” At the risk of sounding insufficiently buoyant, I think even the work of Christ and the empty tomb are only “glimpses” of the final victory. They change everything, but we weren’t there (and those who were didn’t understand), and so we rely on the testimonies and stories and reports from the field of believers from over the centuries, coupling these with the more direct but difficult to delineate experiences with God in our own lives. More importantly, the victory of the cross, while accomplished, is also still being worked out, often amidst pain and suffering.
There is, I believe, a kind of permanent longing in faith (and human nature generally) for that which once was and will one day be again—but is not now. Or at least is not now in a way that fully erases the longing. I am willing to admit that this longing may exist only for some kinds of people. Perhaps it is more temperament and personality than anything else. Perhaps it’s reading too many books.
I hear in my ears the rebuttals to what I am expressing here—everything from Christian happy talk to sober theological pronouncements with phrases like “once and for all.” Many will indeed find Tolkien’s view too Eeyore-ish. In some people’s lives, the glimpses are much more than that—they are an unending Hallelujah Chorus. (That’s the balancing truth.) I love the Hallelujah Chorus but The Messiah also speaks of Jesus as the Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief. Long defeat, glimpses of victory—we need to feel the weight of both in our lives.
Daniel Taylor
This post is actually a commercial, brought to you by our sponsor (namely, me). I will be conducting a six week (one evening a week) workshop on creating a spiritual legacy for those in the Twin Cities area from Nov. 1 until December 6, 2011. Consider yourself invited if you live in the area. Details as follows:
The best way to discover and preserve the significance of your life is to tell your stories. It is also the best way to pass on a blessing to those you care about and who care about you.
This six-meeting workshop (ninety minutes each, a week apart) will help you identify the key stories you need to preserve and the values and wisdom that each of them carries. It will introduce the basic skills and strategies for writing about your life, including how to use scenes, provide engaging details, and how to sketch memorable characters. Participants will practice writing and, if desired, receive peer feedback. Advice will also be provided for getting your stories printed. Each participant will also create a spiritual will.
The workshop will meet at Bethel University on Tuesday evenings (7:30-9:00), beginning November 1. The room is CLC109 (near the main entrance lobby on the left by the bathrooms). Cost is $120 ($90 each for couples, one text), to be paid before the first meeting (half price for past workshop attenders). Cost includes a copy of the text, Creating a Spiritual Legacy: How to Pass on Your Stories, Wisdom and Values.
The course will be taught by Dr. Daniel Taylor, author of ten books, including the text, and co-founder of The Legacy Center.
Use the contact page on this website to express a desire to register or for questions.
Daniel Taylor
In the 18th century there was an ongoing debate referred to as “The Ancients-Moderns controversy,” in which one side argued that the present was clearly inferior to the past, especially in terms of art, virtue, and the state of civilization in general. The other side trumpeted the superiority of the present and future over the relatively ignorant past. That debate is still going on.
My instinct is to favor the “ancients” is this debate, but I am increasingly prone to say, with Theobald (Romeo and Juliet), “a plague on both your houses.” It has always been, in my estimation, “the best of times and the worst of times” (Dickens)—and always will be.
That said, I am increasing tired of the “narrative of decline” among conservatives and evangelicals. We are inundated with moaning about how bad things are in light of how good things supposedly once were. I think perhaps R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet I have cited previously in these posts, is on to something when he writes in his poem “Postscript”:
As life improved, their poems
Grew sadder and sadder.
Thomas does not say in the poem who “their” refers to, but the poem seems a subtle indictment of the emptiness of modern, consumerist society. The poem also includes the lines:
Among the forests
Of metal the one human
Sound was the lament of
The poets for deciduous language.
I would like to use Thomas’ poem for another purpose. Why, given the hope we Christians claim in God, grace, creation and love, are we so consistently mournful and pissed-off about the contemporary world–writing sadder and sadder poems, so to speak?
Daniel Taylor
Here is another snippet from the work-in-progress, The Skeptical Believer: Telling Stories to Your Inner Atheist:
You don’t have to worry about hurting God’s feelings—at least not with your questions and doubts. God has heard it all. You have never had a fresh doubt or question. This is not to be dismissive of your questionings; it is intended as an encouragement to get them on the table. God knows your heart and mind anyway, so you may as well be open with him.
The best advice I have heard about what to do with your feelings about God (from Ben Patterson’s fine book on praying the Psalms–God’s Prayer Book) is to “talk to God about how you feel about God.” This includes your doubts that God is even there to hear you. You can talk to others, talk to yourself, read books like this one, but better to God directly? Many skeptical believers before you have done so, and many have been rewarded. Be skeptical enough of your skepticism to risk it.
You have no question to ask as pointed and painful as the question God has asked himself. Consider the question Jesus asks on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (NLT). If one believes, as I do, in the doctrine of the Trinity, then this is a question God is asking himself. If there is, as I believe, an eternally intimate, inseparable, monotheistic fellowshipping among the three members of the Godhead (I’m sure this description is not adequate), then this is an internal question of great significance expressing indescribable pain. There is endless theological richness and mystery in that short question, including putting the lie to any view of God as an impassive Unmoved Mover (see the Greek philosophers and too many modernist Christians).
If God asks himself such questions, why hesitate to ask yours? Why assume God will be shocked, angry, hurt, or disinterested? Make a list of all the difficult questions asked in the Bible—including many which express doubt about God and his goodness (start with the book of Job, one of the oldest stories in the Bible, then move to the Psalms and the gospels). It’s a long list. And, of course, those questions aren’t always answered, at least not in ways that make the questions go away.
Which brings me to ask what kind of answers one should expect when asking questions of or about God. That’s a worth-while question, too.
Daniel Taylor
In his book on the gospel of Mark, The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode writes, “we find it hardest to think about what we have most completely taken for granted.” This causes me to ask myself, what do I most completely take for granted, which is a question about presuppositions. What do I take to be true without feeling any need to prove it, even to myself?
There are a lot of everyday practical things in this category (such as my presumption that the fellow driving toward me will stay on his side of the line), but the question is most interesting when directed toward ultimate things. Do I presuppose the existence of God, for instance, as others presuppose that all reality is physical?
Actually, I don’t. But I think all of us engage in temporary or tentative presuppositions in order to allow us to think beyond what we can prove. I know the idea of God is contested, and I do not, therefore, presuppose it when I build my understanding of the world. But I often begin a line of thought with that tentative presupposition so that I can think about the implications of God existing and the claims that makes on my life. Otherwise, I would always be stuck at the first step.
I believe all reflective, inquiring people do this with all kinds of issues. Scientists and philosophers do so when they reason around a hypothesis. Sometimes the scientist can move on to testing and proof, sometimes not. With philosophers and the humanities, usually not.
Kermode adds a bit later in his book: “all interpretation proceeds from prejudice, and without prejudice there can be no interpretation.” That is, there is no “objective” interpretations of anything, if a human being is doing the interpreting. Which does not mean we shouldn’t interpret or that we cannot say true things—only that we should be as self-aware of our presuppositions and shortcomings as possible. We should show our cards, even to ourselves.
Daniel Taylor