Lear to Luton

”So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh . . .

And take upon’s the mystery of things,

As if we were God’s spies . . .” — Shakespeare, King Lear¹

I am trying to take account of my life, of how I have spent my time, what I have given and received, what I have seen and not understood, what I have understood that has changed my steps. I have often had the prescience—felt more than reasoned—of a vast world surrounding us under a dome of patient silence. That world waits for us with the dignity of ancient headlands fronting the sea, less in confrontation than in invitation. At the “thin places” between our worlds one can step through, even if only for a moment, into a bracing freshness and light much to be desired.

***

I was driving out to church through a pack of police cars, emergency vehicles, cordoned-off areas, and press vans near the entrance to our neighborhood. When I got back, the story was all over our local news. A young man, a recent high school graduate, had been murdered. Details were sketchy, but he had been shot in the early morning hours outside his home. He was a week away from beginning university, the eldest of four boys.

The next morning, when I was returning from a walk in the woods, I met the woman—every neighborhood has one—who knows everyone and everything that happens around our streets. Every day she walks the sidewalks and lanes of our court, constantly on the phone, puffing her cigarettes. She had spent most of the previous day with the family, doing what she could to help ease their pain as relatives arrived from North Carolina and other parts.

“You heard what happened?” she asked hoarsely. I nodded. She told me of the impromptu vigil that had been held the night before, of the media asking everyone for their comments. “Don’t go visit them,” she warned. “They’re in a lot of pain.”

Somewhere, Ellen White urges us to “heed the promptings of the Holy Spirit,” or less didactically, to join the impulse to do something good. In spite of my neighbor’s well-intentioned argument, I was being prompted. The incessant shootings—not only the frequent massacres in public spaces in America, but the steady ratcheting-up of violence toward young African American men—ticked away in my head. I could picture the scene: three shots in the night, the mother recovering from back surgery, but oblivious to her pain as she flings herself down the stairs to where her son lies bleeding out. However belated, however ineffectual, perhaps I could share in that family’s suffering and in some way push back against this madness.

But then my impulse tripped over all the socio-cultural-political furniture strewn about in the living room of my generation. What presumption to suppose that an older white man could understand the accumulated grief of an African American family. What hubris to intrude upon someone’s home. What foolishness to imagine that anything I could say would bring them solace. The paralysis of second-guessing one’s motives. “I assume,” observes Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, “that when an individual appears before others he will have many motives for trying to control the impression they receive of the situation.”² I could only wonder what mine were. Was it inevitable that I had any motive other than “bearing another’s burdens?”

Then I stepped through the thin place and saw things more clearly. When the particulars complicate unnecessarily, go with the universals. The universals, as I saw them, were father to father, man to man, human to human. At some level of working faith, we have to trust that the Spirit will guide our steps in humility and give us the words.

As I approached the townhouse, a boy and a young man were on the front steps. I was led inside, and the father was called to come down. We shook hands. “I am so sorry,” I said. He looked up then and his eyes moistened. He waved his hand and shook his head. “He’d come all this way, no trouble with the police, no drugs, a good boy. Going to university next week. His whole life before him.” He choked up then, as I did, and he turned toward me, tears glistening on his cheeks, and we wept on each other’s shoulders. I asked him if he had a photo of his boy. I saw a young man, bright with promise, forever held in the amber of his high school senior portrait. He thanked me for coming; I walked out into the heat and humidity of the day and exhaled.

That afternoon my wife and I went to see Blinded by the Light, a gem of an indie movie about a young British-Pakistani teenager growing up in Luton, an industrial city just north of London. Amidst the strains of being a child born in England to immigrant parents, Javed faces racial harassment from local skinheads, and misunderstanding and contempt for being a Muslim. In Margaret Thatcher’s era, with millions being laid off, coal mines closing, and the National Front on the rise, it is an anxious and discomfiting time. When his father loses his job at a factory, the burden of paying the bills falls on Javed’s mother, a seamstress. With his older sister preparing for her marriage and his father making the rounds of hiring centers with no luck, the young man is desperate to get out of Luton (and as someone who once trudged across that city in the dead of night after crossing the Channel, I can sympathize) to pursue his dreams of being a writer.

At his sixth-form college he is befriended by Roop, also the son of immigrants—and a passionate fan of Bruce Springsteen. He lends Javed two cassettes of Springsteen’s music. “Listen to them, guard them with your life,” he commands. “They’re by the Boss.” “What boss?” Javed asks, confused. “The Boss of us all,” says Roop.

And he does listen, at first with curiosity and then avidly, as Springsteen’s songs of factory workers, broken dreams, and a will to rise above it all through grit and hope surge through him. “It’s like he was speaking right to me,” Javed enthuses to Roop, who nods knowingly. They are secular psalms that reach him in the pit of his despair and raise him up. His English literature teacher asks to read his poems and journals, and through her encouragement and prodding he begins to blossom as a writer. His dream is to enter the creative writing program at Manchester University.

In one of the best scenes in the film his father asks, “Do you know why I want you to study hard?” “Umm,” responds Javed, “so I can broaden my mind, learn about the world, and be inspired to make a difference?” “No,” his father snaps. “It is to get a good job and make money.”

Springsteen’s father could not understand his son’s driving ambition to make music; Javed’s father cannot understand why his son wants to write. When Javed gets an unpaid internship at a local newspaper his father is both furious and bewildered. “Why would you work and not get paid?” he shouts. “It’s experience, Dad. It’s what I want to do.” Father and son face each other across their own desperation, the father in shame because he cannot provide for his family, the son because he wants so much to know who he is and what he can do.

“Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man/And I believe in the promised land,” is the mantra that impels him onward.

“For the ones who had a notion

A notion deep inside

That it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive . . .”³

He wins a scholarship in a writing contest that brings him to Monmouth College for a conference, just a few miles from Asbury Park, New Jersey, where Springsteen grew up. When he and Roop return home, after a delirious tour of The Boss’s hometown sites, Javed stands up at an awards ceremony at his college to read from his winning essay. But a few paragraphs in he falters, seeing his parents and his sister coming in to stand in the back of the hall. Extemporaneously, he speaks from the heart about what he’d learned from The Boss, what he was growing to be, and how much he wanted to make a bridge between the world of his father and his own rising world.

“I believe in the love that you gave me

I believe in the hope that can save me

I believe in the faith

And I pray that some day it may raise me

Above these badlands”⁴

***

At the end of that day I thought about fathers and sons, about dreams deferred and hopes placed in others. I thought about our stumbling attempts to walk a straight and true path, and the burdens we place on each other from fear. I thought about Life and Art, and how they can be distinguished, but not separated. Like Javed, Springsteen’s music has brought me light and hope in dark times. It is one of the many trails to the Spirit that I have found.

And I thought of the grief of my neighbors and prayed that it could be borne until such time as they could take a breath without pain in remembering the joys of a young man who lived as if to say, “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V, Sc III. ↩
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959, p. 15. ↩
Bruce Springsteen. “Badlands.” Downtown Music Publishing. ↩
Bruce Springsteen. “Badlands.” Downtown Music Publishing. ↩

The Ignored Familiar

“This or that particular, in nature or in a person, which will probably be the ignored familiar, is not to be forgotten or overlooked; it is to be noticed, and maybe (in the world of a great artist) made to glow with light.” — Michael Mayne¹

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard opens up the agony and (occasional) ecstasy of writing. “This writing that you do,” she says pitilessly, “that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.”² The reader comes in from the noise of the street of life, and picks up your book, she says. He or she can’t hear a thing. “It will take half an hour to pick up the writing’s modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.” Learn a trade, she cautions the young writer. Something to support your consuming addiction of laying down a line of words and seeing where it leads.

Perhaps less tongue-in-cheek, but no less heartfelt is George Orwell’s famous admission that “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”³

We who love books can only be grateful that these tortured souls persevered. From their travail is birthed for us flights of imagination, ladders to the sky, that line of words laid down which carves a path through the wilderness. Seamus Heaney, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature (1995), found that “The achievement of a poem, after all, is an experience of release . . . A plane is —fleetingly—established where the poet is intensified in his being and freed from his predicaments.”⁴

At the end of a long journey of false starts, glimmers of light that dance away and fade, rockslides that block the path and countless other metaphors, there is a moment in the bracing sharpness of clean, mountain air. From the summit, one takes in the view with joy and gratitude. However momentary, that is reward enough. Down below, in the shadows of one’s achievement, is the valley which one must traverse on the way to the next peak.

The popular stereotype about writers, that they wait for inspiration, is only half right, but it’s the half that students often claim in the backwash of a late paper. Writers do wait on inspiration, but it’s a waiting that is active. “Arse in the chair,” says Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin, and other bestselling novels. That’s the only way the words will show up, and if no one is home or that writer is mesmerized by YouTube, the moment may pass with nothing to show for it. “You lay out a line of words,” says Annie Dillard, the most basic and necessary move that can be made.

“An intellectual must always be ready to think, that is, to take in a part of the truth conveyed to him by the universe,” wrote the Dominican priest, A. G. Sertillanges, in 1921. “The Spirit passes and returns not. Happy the man who holds himself ready not to miss, nay rather to bring about and to utilize, the miraculous encounter! Every intellectual work begins by a moment of ecstasy . . .”⁵

Sertillanges wrote his book, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, for anybody who wanted to think—and capture those thoughts—in a more disciplined and systematic way. His book, while compact and serious, is not an “elitist” work; that is to say, it does not recognize the great divide artificially constructed by those in American culture who regard “book learning” with suspicion. For him, thinking and studying, writing and art, are avenues of the Spirit. “Listening to oneself is a formula that amounts to the same thing as listening to god. It is in the creative Thought that our true being lies, our self in its authentic shape.”⁶ This takes time. The most mediocre mind, he says, can come up with a brilliant idea: the difficulty is cutting that into a jewel and placing it in a setting that illuminates its brilliance.

Colum McCann’s Letters to a Young Writer, strikes me not only as practical and wise words for writers, but as a witty, philosophical, and tender parallel to the work of faith. Yes—I put those two words, “work” and “faith,” together. More on that later. “Do not allow your heart to harden,” McCann encourages us. “Enjoy difficulty. Embrace mystery. Find the universal in the local . . . Transcend the personal. Have trust in the staying power of what is good.”⁷

***

Annie Dillard’s first non-fiction book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), garnered her the Pulitzer Prize at the young age of twenty-nine. It chronicled a year that she spent in the company of Tinker Creek, a tributary of the Roanoke River in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It is a work of seeing—of regarding, with attention and patience—the life beneath the leaves and the waters. Dillard thinks of it as a “work of theology.”

She notices that a flock of migrating red-winged blackbirds are noisily feeding in an Osage orange tree down by the creek. She approaches carefully—and a hundred birds fly away. She walks closer and another hundred lift off and vanish into the sky. “Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real die-hards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? . . . I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed the creek and scattered. One show to a customer . . . It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open.”⁸

How much is there, just beyond our present gaze, close enough to fingertips, welling into consciousness, if only we are aware! I am beginning to understand how a God who is near to us but not visible, transcendent but accessible through the world and the Word, can be apprehended. Michael Mayne, one of the handful of great poet-priests in the Anglican tradition, writes of the cantus firmus, the deep bass line that anchored medieval plainsong, as being akin to that which we discover is authentically ours and authentically us. He sees it as comprised of three strands: human love and friendship, experience of beauty and order found in art, literature, music, and nature, and “the third strand, undergirding the whole, has to do with those ultimate existential questions that come under the general heading of ‘faith.’”⁹

It is the business of writers, artists, musicians, to notice and to pay attention. That which counts as inspiration—the drawing in of breath—comes as the shock of the new emerges from the “ignored familiar,” to use Mayne’s phrase. The familiar story in the Gospels, read a thousand times until its edge is dulled, comes up fresh and new through the eyes and thoughts of the writer, the preacher, the artist, each of them alive to story as the touchstone for unexpected treasure.

To be sure, this experience is not always a common one. Sometimes we go through the motions, looking but not seeing, reading but not comprehending. This is where the Spirit enlivens us as we are receptive—and that, I think, is key—when we look for the unseen and expect the unexpected. Like a writer, this waiting is not passive, but an active receptive spirit tuned to the faintest vibrations that may come to us. Our faith is our constant experience of seeking and finding, rousing ourselves to “lay out a line of words” in the hope and trust that it will lead us to our story.

Amidst the din of our culture and times, this seeking takes effort. It may seem that the signs around us point in any direction but toward the Spirit. We must be alert; there will be no thunder and lightning, no shaking of the mountaintop. The Welsh poet-priest, R. S. Thomas, muses about the Spirit’s movements, so essential in our understanding as people of faith and as thinkers and writers:

“As I had always known

he would come, unannounced,

remarkable merely for the absence

of clamour. So truth must appear

to the thinker; so, at a stage

of the experiment, the answer

must quietly emerge.”¹⁰

All our seeings—the remembered, the present, the yet-to-be-seen—are blazing portals to the holy. Leaping through, we may glimpse a burning bush, hear “a still, small voice,” squint against the light cast into the desert by a stairway to heaven, and—catapulted forward by centuries—peer through an open door to a room where a man asks for a piece of fish from his dumbstruck friends. All these stories transcribe the notes of the cantus firmus by which we live and sing.

Mayne, Michael. This Sunrise of Wonder. American edition. Cleveland, TN: Parson’s Porch Books, 2012. pp. 175-176. ↩
Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: Harper and Row, 1989, p. 17 ↩
Orwell, George. Why I Write. Great Ideas ed. New York: Penguin, 1984, p. 10 ↩
Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989. p. xxii. ↩
Sertillanges, A. G. The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. Translated from the French by Mary Ryan. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987, p. xix. ↩
Sertillanges, p. xx. ↩
McCann, Colum. Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice. New York: Random House, 2017, p. 4. ↩
Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Bantam Books, 1974, pp. 17, 18. ↩
Mayne, Michael. The Enduring Melody. London: Dartman, Longman, and Todd, 2006, pp. 6, 7. ↩
Thomas, R. S. “Suddenly,” in Collected Poems 1945-1990. London: Orion House, 1993, p. 283. ↩

Beauty and Truth in a Time of Plague

”I recover my tenderness by long looking.” — Theodore Roethke¹

Sometimes it feels like we are in our plague years. Not a plague such as millions suffered in the Black Death or the Spanish Flu, or the thousands with Ebola, but a plague of despair and hopelessness. Having said that, I know that for many people this is a time of ascendancy—not plague—when beliefs they fervently hold are coming true and people in power are making that happen. It is a time of vindication.

Still, if we see through the rising and falling of hopes to the generalized need for hope as such, there is a commonality of restlessness and anger that infects us all. We are creatures who have adapted to the uneven surfaces upon which we walk to such an extent that even when we come upon a level plain, we walk as though we were at sea.

We demand our place, we want our words to strike home—the metaphor, taken literally, is violent in its imagery—we confront, we stand with, we never retreat nor give an inch. In short, we are at war with others and the Other.

It should be evident that things we care deeply about are worth defending. In fact, one sign of a society whose members no longer regard it as defensible is the callous reply, “Whatever,” to matters of importance. But we are crippled by a lack of moral imagination for making a defense that itself does not complicate the problem. In Yeat’s phrase, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

***

Poet Seamus Heaney tells a story from 1972 in Belfast: he and a musician friend were on their way to a recording studio when a series of bombs ripped through the city. Within minutes of them arriving at the studio the air was full of sirens as ambulances rushed to the wounded and the dead. Heaney recalls that they looked at one another in unspoken anguish, his friend packed up his guitar and they left. It seemed indulgent to be doing something so enjoyable. What he called Art and Life—or again—Song and Suffering, had seemingly clashed. And what he and his friend, David Hammond, were feeling at that moment was that “song constituted a betrayal of suffering.” ²

Poets and writers, said Kurt Vonnegut, are our early warning system, the canaries in the coal mine—they are the first to be affected by the deadly fumes of a culture in extremis, and their warnings must not be overlooked. Examples abound throughout the ages, but one that still echoes for me on the fiftieth anniversary of Woodstock, is Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a howl of feedback with a melody line that staggers, backtracks, and spirals, at once raging and raw and yet somehow wistful in the way the notes hang, looking for a safe place to land. In the midst of a tragic war, in a society tearing apart from the disparities between its promise and its peril, Hendrix’s interpretation was a cross-section of a felled tree, revealing the rot at the core.

From the opposite angle comes the sigh of the oppressed, the longing of the exile for familiar hills, and the mockery of captors who demand a tune from back home for their entertainment.

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there
we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth,
saying,
‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?³

Can suffering be healed by beauty? Does it dishonor the gravity of the situation to try?

***

Online discourse in these times falls along predictable lines. Someone posts a provocative article or viewpoint on, let’s say, an anguished response to the mass shooting(s) of the week. Common sense cries out for a ban on assault weapons: the various attack ships uncloak themselves and swarm into view overhead as their troops beam down. “It can’t be done,” “It’s video games,” “Guns don’t kill people . . .”, “Don’t take away my guns,” “It’s a mental health problem,” “Godless people are to blame,” “It’s the Democrats’/Republicans’ fault.”

Solutions are proposed and derided, facts are claimed and scuttled, sweeping generalizations jolt aside private duels over verb tenses. In time, with the battlefield littered with bodies, the survivors limp away to their rendezvous points. Truth, bound and bloodied, is led away captive. Almost no one notices.

After all that, to claim, as Keats does, that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” almost sounds quaint and anachronistic. And yet, there is something in us that wants, above all, to believe that Beauty and Truth are within reach and can be brought into our lives, even in such toxic and arid times.

***

I return to Seamus Heaney who, as a native of Northern Ireland, grew up within the centuries-old sorrows of its history, and who lived through the sectarian “Troubles” that claimed so many innocent lives. The questions he raises about truth and beauty, about being a poet in a time of war, open a way to understand our times—and may also cast a light upon the path of faith through this world.

“In one sense,” he says, “the efficacy of poetry is nil—no lyric has ever stopped a tank.” But recalling how he and Hammond clammed up around the sirens, he wonders again, “Why should the joyful affirmation of music and poetry ever constitute an affront to life?”⁴

I am reminded of the experience of Sting, who had scheduled a concert near his home in Tuscany for the evening of September 11, 2001. When the news of 9/11 stunned the world, he almost cancelled, feeling that such a celebration would border on sacrilege in the aftermath of a tragedy of those proportions. But friends persuaded him to go ahead, assuring him that light and beauty in a dark time would be a kind of prayer for hope. One of his songs, “Fragile,” is forever linked to that time.

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one

Drying in the color of the evening sun

Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away

But something in our minds will always stay

Perhaps this final act was meant

To clinch a lifetime’s argument

That nothing comes from violence and nothing ever could

For all those born beneath an angry star

Lest we forget how fragile we are

On and on the rain will fall

Like tears from a star

On and on the rain will say

How fragile we are

How fragile we are⁵

Heaney’s essay brings forward the experience and the poetry of Wilfred Owen, an English poet and soldier who wrote from the trenches of World War I, and who was killed shortly before the end of the war. Owen was a leader and a soldier, but he was vehemently against the carnage of a war that took the flower of European civilization. His poems are bitter at times, usually melancholy, always directed at deflating the false glory of dying for one’s country. He sought to awaken conscience. “True poets must be truthful,” he wrote. “All a poet can do today is warn.” Art seeking to change Life.

Heaney also points to Mandelstam, a Russian poet of renown, who would not write propagandistic drivel for Stalin’s regime. Mandelstam saw poetry as rising up within the poet like a flood or growing from within like a crystal. He could no more stop writing than he could stop breathing and still live. He went to his death with the view that the creative impulse is its own reason for existing. “For him,” writes Heaney, “obedience to the poetic impulse was obedience to conscience; lyric action constituted radical witness.”⁶

So, Owen writes poetry which rebukes beauty in favor of truth; Mandelstam seems to hold Keats’ dictum that beauty is truth, and truth beauty. “He is a burning reminder,” says Heaney, “of the way in which not only the words ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ may be salvaged from the catastrophe of history, but the word ‘beauty’ also: a reminder that humanity is served by the purely poetic fidelity of the poet to all words in their pristine being, in ‘the steadfastness of their speech articulation.’”⁷ We need both: the hard edge of Truth and the softer light of Beauty. There are moments in our lives when we can only take in one or the other; in time, as it may be, we will be sustained by both.

Poetry gives the attentive reader a moment to take a breath and to give attention, fully and freely, to what is there on the page or in the ear. In a time of war and in a time of social tension, it reminds us that beauty and justice and truth are not at odds.

What is efficient may not always be what is effective. And if poetry, art, and music touch us it is in part because we have entrusted ourselves to their power to lift us and transform us, another kind of faith.

Like calls to like: when we respond to beauty seen and heard, it is a revelation that Beauty is still within us.

Quoted in Mayne, Michael. The Sunrise of Wonder. Cleveland, TN: Parson’s Porch Books, American Edition, 2008, p. 214. ↩
Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose 1978-1987. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, p. xii. ↩
Ps 137: 1-4 ↩
Heaney, xii. ↩
Sumner, Gordon. Fragile. Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, BMG Rights Management. ↩
Heaney, p. xix. ↩
Heaney, xx. ↩

The Getting of Wisdom

”These are but the fringes of his power and how faint the whisper that we hear of him! — Job 26.14 (Revised English Bible)

I had just delivered a lecture to my class in Twentieth-Century Theology and conducted a discussion on Jesus’ cry from the cross of his forsakenness by God. It was my view that Jesus felt his abandonment at the very core of his being, and that far from being an example of faithlessness on his part it reflected, to a depth we can hardly comprehend, the trust he had placed in God. I had quoted several major twentieth-century theologians and noted the origins of their thought as well as the conclusions they had come to. As the class ended, an enraged senior theology major approached me. “You are thinking man’s thoughts!” he hissed. “I stand on the Word of God alone, not on man’s thoughts.”

I was taken aback. Rather curtly, I replied, “But I am a man; how else am I supposed to think?” It was my first year teaching theology and I had made the fundamental error of new teachers in assuming that my students held the associations, assumptions, and inferences that I did. My conclusions were not theirs. In fact, as I thought about it later, their assumptions, grafted into their young trunks without their awareness, were those I had given up for other starting points.

But it was not my place to jerk them out of their seats, grab them by the neck, and force them to their knees in order to submit to my truth.

My truth, as I was coming to understand, was not even the Truth, but a version of a truth I was growing into and, actually, it was not a singular truth but plural truths that branched and leafed and grew in all directions away from each other, yet were tied to a stem that flourished from a root that was planted with a desire to know Jesus, and through him, to know God. How simple it all seemed to me!

***

“Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.” —Proverbs 4:7

Reading through the book of Proverbs feels like threading beads of many sizes on a string. Clearly, it’s a compilation of sayings built up over centuries, practical wisdom tested every day and handed on through the generations. You can almost hear the “Uh-huh” after each one.

Some patterns begin to emerge. The character of the wise person is one who is thrifty, hardworking, honest and fair, does not despise the poor, but also does not fall into the indolence that leads to poverty. Such persons respect their parents, obey the king, worship God, and know their place in the social and divine order. That order can be shaken up when people get above themselves:

Under three things the earth trembles;
under four it cannot bear up;
a slave when he becomes king,
and a fool when glutted with food;
an unloved woman when she gets
a husband,
and a maid when she succeeds her mistress. (Proverbs 30: 21-23)

Wisdom is correlated with insight or understanding in a way that suggests mutual dependency. Both can be admired independently, but neither achieves its end without the other. Ground coffee smells wonderful and a French press is a handy gadget, but either one alone isn’t worth much.

Wisdom is often ascribed to the old—all that experience counting for something beyond mere knowledge. It isn’t chronologically assured though, since an old fool is no better than a young one—in fact, worse—because a young fool can change, but an old fool . . . not so much. The young are inevitably foolish, lacking both the ability to see around corners and the experience to anticipate what they can’t yet see. Hence the need for Proverbs. But we older fools must look elsewhere.

Perhaps wisdom in this form is overrated. Proverbs is most often cast as a father’s advice to his young and ambitious sons. Wisdom is following the commandments; the opposite of wisdom is following a loose woman home. Wisdom is avoiding drink, getting up early, and taking care of business. Check your anger, submit to discipline, don’t be insolent. Wisdom brings long life and satisfaction in its train, for the righteous will be prosperous while the sinners will die in poverty and ignorance. The quick takeaway on wisdom, according to the adults I knew as a child, could be reduced to the notion that it was smart to obey your elders.

There’s much to be said in favor of this; wisdom like this keeps the streets clean and peaceful, employment up, crime down, and business humming, families intact and social roles clear. But this is prudence, not wisdom of the sort that would cause one to sacrifice everything for the ‘pearl of great price.’ It is not the love of wisdom, personified throughout the ages as Sophia and revered as the Spirit of God.

***

Harvey Cox’s The Secular City (1965) intrigued me in high school. My curiosity was triggered by Time Magazine’s infamous April 8, 1966 “Is God Dead?” cover story. Cox predicted the waning of religion in America, something which has not happened. But of more interest to me was his discussion of the roots of secularity and its history as a social phenomenon and a counterfoil to religion. I found the distinction between the sacred and the secular puzzling—were they opposed? were they complementary? did we have to choose between them? could we keep them together? I was struggling to work out a way to be a Christian and to “be in the world.” The thing to avoid, as I saw it then, was being “of the world,” which, in my naïveté, meant my address should be Heaven—and not this world.

I wanted to be someone who could appreciate the beauties of the natural world, as well as the best of art, literature, music, science, and philosophy. Over against that was the imperative of fulfilling the mission to make all people Christ’s disciples—which, in practical terms, usually meant bringing other Christians into our fold. In my case, as a teacher of religion in a denominational college, there was an explicit expectation to keep the ones we had untainted by the world.

I hoped I could find a way to live through a humanized Christianity that unashamedly sought transcendence from within and through this deeply flawed but wonderful world. There was no simple solution to this, of course, “but the waking mind,” as Seamus Heaney says, “desires constantly some clarified allegiance, without complication or ambivalence.”¹

My search is that of anyone who seeks a meaningful life. I don’t want a theocracy nor could I live within a joyless ideology, political or otherwise, that seeps bitterness. Neither would I want a self-indulgent form of religious hedonism that placed my comfort at the center of the universe. To speak in the language of the parables, I wish to be salt and light to the world.

Even that has its traps if we delude ourselves into thinking we’re indispensable or that we’re somehow owed special favors because of our membership in the church or our self-designation as followers of Christ.

***

For many years I taught courses in ethics: bioethics, communication ethics, public relations ethics, journalism ethics, business ethics, theoretical ethics, Christian ethics. Ethics as a discipline has been sliced and diced into a thousand pieces, every field claiming a particular slant of the light all its own. This proliferation has been driven by a belated recognition that moral values are both good business and should be at the heart of human endeavor. Curriculae are developed that offer a feast of courses, each of them claiming their own vocabulary and featuring specialized case studies. These courses become islands of power for their departments and their instructors. Textbook publishers readily oblige, offering expensively updated books every year or so.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed teaching, especially when discussions with students got beyond their reflexive relativism (“Who’s to say what’s right or wrong? Who are you to judge?”) to an informed and thoughtful reflection on their own moral and spiritual discoveries. At those times, the burden of being expected to provide the answers to moral dilemmas eased and I could feel that the students and I were fellow travelers. I could give them historical ethical models of how humans have wrestled with these common dilemmas and then they could try them out for themselves. These were not formulas with a right answer; they were ways to think practically about complex human actions, using fairly simple methods.

***

At the heart of learning is the answering of a call, vocare in Latin, a vocation that lures us onward no matter what the discipline. The calling is from God, God as Subject, calling to us as subjects in a world of objects. There is freedom in the realization that in God’s eyes we are subjects worthy to be loved and to be listened to. “How things are between man and his idea of the Divinity determines everything in his life, the quality and connectedness of every feeling and thought, and the meaning of every action,” remarked the poet Ted Hughes.²

What we know of God is what he has chosen to make known to us. In spite of our limitations, we have spoken in myriad languages, during thousands of years, of the One who calls us to rejoice in our search for transcendence.

In the fullness of time (a felicitous phrase), God enfleshed his Word, that Word which had first been spoken and then reverberated down through the millennia. It appeared among us as Immanuel, God-become-human.

I am more and more convinced that Jesus in Word and Spirit is everything we can know of God. This learning is the deep quest of our lives. Out of the secular, the mundane, the earthly, we form the sacral and lift it to God. Music, art, literature, science, history—even religion—all of this, if we allow it, points beyond itself to a transcendence that calls to the deepest part of us. There is in each of us a homing device for the Garden, for a place and time that is open-ended, fully satisfying, never finished nor complete, ever new.

“How faint the whisper that we hear of him!” marvels Job of God. And yet the consciousness of God fills Job’s spirit and thoughts, first, in the argument he would take up with God and then in the knowledge that everything is, finally, within God’s embrace—the universe, the world, and us.

If I were to encounter that irate student today, with his claim to speak the mind of God, I would say, “Thank you for the vote of confidence! As one of my friends says, ‘I know more and more about less and less.’ But I know that someday I shall know as I am known. Perhaps that is the beginning of wisdom.”

Heaney, Seamus. The Government of the Tongue. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989, p. xii. ↩
Quoted in Michael Mayne, The Sunrise of Wonder. American edition. Cleveland, TN: Parson’s Porch Books, 2012, p. 212. ↩

Dante's Woods

Writing to see what I think . . .

Month: August 2019

Lear to Luton

The Ignored Familiar

Beauty and Truth in a Time of Plague

The Getting of Wisdom

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