Drawing
Every sketch is a question about what God sees.
If you treat your sketchbook as a book of answers you’ll suffocate from the presence of the inner judge, who will demand a certain finished quality to those sketched answers. No, see your pencil as a questioning stick. It is a divining rod, doodling among the surface textures of what you see in front of you, stopping to drop deeper into the picture when it passes over the pixel that really pulls at your attention.
So your drawing is questioning and answering all at once and you are utterly given up to the process. Whatever the page looks like at the end of the day is the right answer.
It might be that what God sees in the treeline at dusk is not what you see. We are not pantheists. But we are also not docetists; it is certain that your path to seeing what God sees runs through your own vision, and not around it.
Memorial Day 2008
see also Memorial Day 2007.
So God enters human flesh under a military dictatorship. During His short mortal life the freedom fighters try to enlist Him but He declines; He has other interests. This lack of interest in political freedom is one of the things that gets Him tortured to death. He does not resist His torturers. He had taught His followers to not return violence for violence.
His chief follower wrote letters to literal slaves and was not interested in talking to them about freedom.
Two thousand years later the Christian churches celebrate in their services “those who died to protect our way of life”. In my church this weekend we literally studied the passages in Revelation describing the martyrs, who submit to the sword for their confession that Jesus is king. We study the martyrs, who do not resist, and we celebrate those who kill to protect our freedom to live and work where we want. We would die for Jesus, but kill for everything else.
Ashcan Christianity
Ashcan authenticity: “The most ugly version of anything is the most authentic one.”
The term “Ashcan” comes from the school of painters, I think. These painters felt they should show the seamy and ugly side of the subject.
Many disciplines have gone through this reactionary stage. As a corrective, a stage on the way, it is not always completely dumb. It can be healthy IF the good, true, the beautiful are not drowned out in the process. Because, after all, any worthwhile discipline was born to love the good, true, or the beautiful, and still exists solely for that first love . When the work of such love becomes lazy and focused on a superficial prettiness it can be good to expose the bone beneath the skin, to infuse new vigor into the school of dilettantes. But the mistake is to extract this one occasional, purgative stage from a dialectic and transfix it on the blackboard as a static and unbalanced definition of reality.
One of the cliched emotions of adoloscence is a rejection of the values of your elders in a defiant embrace of what they consider degenerate. The bitter teenager denies the truth of the elder, and proclaims that the foul is really the truth. This proclamation has all the volume and cleverness of every 16 year old who is discovering his own fascinating mind. It’s the Satan-complex. Intelligent people should be tired of this by now.
But the avant-garde in every discipline is largely comprised of this tired, bourgeois sentimentality, which nurtures a cult of “authenticity”, obsessed that the ugly is the sum of the truth. Goodness is no longer believed, and indeed the very possibility is mocked. It is most obvious in secular art. Hollywood, for example, hates virtue. They want “complex” characters, which means they want a corrupt thread in the heart for every twinge of goodness. Entire movies are dedicated to defending the viewpoint of Milton’s Satan, that goodness is unfair and cruel and fake, except for the good of self-actualization, which trumps all. Think Pleasantville; Eden is sepia, we all need to Fall, into technicolor.
What are the roots of Ashcan Authenticity?
Studeo: eager to study
First Things » Blog Archive » One College That’s Getting It Right
Like many of us reading these pages, I was in the middle of that spring migration known as “bringing the kid home from college for the summer break” (and, we hope, the summer job). My daughter and I were having breakfast at the local diner with seven of her friends (who had helped us schlep her gear to the car–always a good idea to reward cheap labor), and I was asking them about their first year in college. What did they like about it? What didn’t they? What were the big surprises, how were the roommates? All those kinds of questions I’ve learned are fairly innocuous ways to get to know 19-year-olds and to pick up a little local flavor and some entertaining gossip. After a couple of sentences complaining about the food, they were ignoring me and talking between themselves. Talking about Aristotle. And Plato. About the nature of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics and how Verdi captured love of country in “Va pensiero” from Nabucco. (“I’m not Italian, but I cry every time I sing it,” one of the girls said.) And what they were most excited about was coming back in the fall and studying the Bible. And the Gospel of John. In Greek. Like I said, I was stunned.
These kids loved ideas. And they spoke knowingly about them, but without arrogance or a pretended sophistication. They weren’t showing off for the visiting daddy professor; they were just doing at breakfast what they had been doing since September: thinking, and thinking about important things seriously but happily, too. (The importance of “fun” was part of the discussion.) The talk hadn’t been pushed in that direction, it happened naturally. These young men and women were truly college students. Studeo, from the Latin, “to be eager or zealous for.” They were eager for understanding. They had just finished their freshman year at St. John’s College in Annapolis—and they could hardly wait to get back.
Progress, by Chesterton
Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without being infallible — at any rate, without believing in some infallibility. For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same degree doubtful about the progress. . . . I do not, therefore, say that the word “progress” is unmeaning; I say it is unmeaning without the previous definition of a moral doctrine, and that it can only be applied to groups of persons who hold that doctrine in common. Progress is not an illegitimate word, but it is logically evident that it is illegitimate for us. It is a sacred word, a word which could only rightly be used by rigid believers and in the ages of faith.
In the word, the thought
Athanasius:
“the Son is in the Father . . . because the whole being of the Son is proper to the Father’s ousia, as radiance from light and a stream from a fountain; so that whosoever sees the Son, sees what is proper to the Father and knows that the Son’s being, as from the Father, is the Father and is therefore in the Father. For the Father is in the Son, since the Son is what is from the Father and proper to him, as there is in the radiance the sun, and in the word the thought, and in the stream the fountain: for whoso thus contemplates the Son, contemplates what is proper to the Father’s ousia, and knows that the Father is in the Son.
Leithart quotes Athanasius, and finds the nugget phrase: “in the word, the thought”. Now that’s full, but you can’t draw a mental picture of it. If you came to this passage looking for a more clear spatial metaphor for your Trinity category, you didn’t get it.
When the Fathers are doing this thing, this attempt to exegete theology, they are not doing what we’ve been doing since the Scholastics, and doing feverishly since the Enlightenment. They are not trying to draw a diagram. What they are doing is poetry — but not what “poetry” means to you.
Not “poetry” in the sense of “expression of feeling as opposed to thought” or “escape from rationality into mysticism” (yuck.) These are modern dichotomies. These are post-line-of-despair categories (cf Frances Scheaffer).
They are doing poetry the way David Hart fills out the word “rhetoric”…RATIONALITY THAT IS SO FULL AND GLORIOUS IT MUST SPILL OVER THE STRUCTURES OF PROSE. So the theological work is not intended to give you a diagram, but it is meant to help you understand it better, by giving you the same truth in a different language.
If you know the English word for “tree”, and the elvish word for “tree”, you are able to see the tree better. The two words are not the same nominal sign, they are two signs to the one thing. So, poetry is not translatable into prose, and theology is not translatable into diagrams. This does not mean theology is not true — least of all does it mean theology is directed at “faith” instead of at “reason” (yuck.) — but that theology is directed at the synthetic faculty, as opposed to the analytical faculty. God is bigger than your mind, so to talk of Him we must rhapsodize, so that He is not falsified to your intellect.
The Sound of One God, clapping
internetmonk.com » Blog Archive » The Jonah 4 Club
The iMonk asks this question:
Can you find places in scripture where someone had to drastically revise their idea of God in order to know and follow the true God?
And I think this goes to an experience of God in the Bible and now that the preaching and writing of the church shies away from…that God may be perfectly consistent when viewed from a, well, divine perspective — but He is often experienced by mere mortals as a blatant contradiction. And not just an intellectual contradiction, a moral contradiction.
I think Michael’s question goes beyond just looking for moments when somebody had to learn something new and scary about God. It makes us sort all the experiences of God in the bible into two qualitative categories: 1. those that may stretch and challenge you, but further in the same direction your God had already started in, and 2. those you experience as spinning your psyche around in a brutal contradiction of the god you thought you knew.
These are both high-stress experiences, but they are fundamentally different types of stress.
Alice Walker’s distraction
You remember that book “Intellectuals”, by Paul Johnson? The one where he studied these famous ideologues to see how their private lives were so narcissistic and destructive, despite their public theories for re-arranging everyone else? (Think Karl Marx.)
Well, add Alice Walker to the list. Seems like a pattern for famous feminists in particular.
What about the children?
The ease with which people can get divorced these days doesn’t take into account the toll on children. That’s all part of the unfinished business of feminism.
Then there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: ‘I’d like a child. If it happens, it happens.’ I tell them: ‘Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.’ As I know only too well.
Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They’ve missed the opportunity and they’re bereft.
Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.
But far from taking responsibility for any of this, the leaders of the women’s movement close ranks against anyone who dares to question them – as I have learned to my cost. I don’t want to hurt my mother, but I cannot stay silent. I believe feminism is an experiment, and all experiments need to be assessed on their results. Then, when you see huge mistakes have been paid, you need to make alterations.
I hope that my mother and I will be reconciled one day. Tenzin deserves to have a grandmother. But I am just so relieved that my viewpoint is no longer so utterly coloured by my mother’s.
I am my own woman and I have discovered what really matters – a happy family.
Bonhoeffer: The church as a sociological failure
The renewal of the church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount. It is high time men and women banded together to do this.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Nearly every Christian blogger and preacher thinks that the renewal of the church means getting those other Christians to think different or believe different or “love” each other in some shapeless improvement. Bonhoeffer is more clear.
The last thing you cannot touch in American christianity is the modular family in its singular dwelling. It is sacred. All the debates now flapping back and forth about what “church” looks like assume that “church” is what happens when “family” is not happening. It’s all a struggle to work around the family, which is the real ground of the sacred — the sociological sacred. The function of “church” is to clean the conscience, and the debates about how to do that are wide, centuries long, and fierce.
But when Jesus walked up to Peter and said “follow me”, Peter did not experience it as a religious problem, a soteriological problem, or a crisis of a bad conscience. He was not “convicted of sin”. He was confronted with a sociological disruption: How do I leave my work and my family?
This is not our problem.
Peter Leithart: Wedding Sermon
Peter Leithart: “Wedding Sermon” is just magnificent:
….As the Spirit joins Father and Son, so He joins fathers and sons across the gap of generations. No generation can be healthy if it is dominated by one spirit. A generation dominated by the spirit of sons breaks from the past in revolution, and a generation that drinks only of the spirit of the fathers is hidebound, and tyrannical. A healthy generation partakes of the spirit of the fathers and the spirit of sons, and must learn to join these spirits into one spirit. The Holy Spirit is the One Between who unifies the past and future. As the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, the Spirit joins the hearts of the fathers to sons, and of sons to the fathers….
….Our prayer for you, on this Saturday after Pentecost, is that the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the true Spirit of joviality, the One Between, will fill the gaps in you, in your marriage, and in your home, drawing you into the unity of the Son and the Father, from this day to your lives’ end. This is our prayer, because the success of your marriage depends entirely on the grace of God, the grace that is the Gift of God, the Gift that is the Spirit of God. You’ll find, if you are honest, that marriage is impossible, but our prayer is that that you will also find that with God the Spirit, the God in between, nothing is impossible.
