a grouchy grammarian on religion vs. relationship

So, I think the "It's not a religion, it's a relationship" line is a bit silly. [Edit: If you need it, here's a quick example of what I'm talking about.  But be warned, it will try to play music automatically.  Christians of varying tones (and varying degrees of web-savviness) use similar arguments, but this was just the first thing that came up on a Google search for religion and relationship.]

Part of the insistence on relationship terminology is well-intentioned.  I think it's meant to help reach out to people who have been burned by religion as such, and that's a noble goal.  And I'm also all for emphasizing our relationships with God and other people -- I think that's what it's all about.

However, I don't know that shunning the term religion in favor of the term relationship is always helpful.  Semantically, I think making a big deal of the switch is equivalent to proclaiming about one's life with a spouse, "It's not a marriage, it's a relationship!"  -- Ok, yes, true, it's a relationship.  But that could mean a lot of different things, and our language has all these handy extra words to specify what kind of relationship.

And on the level of interpersonal relationships, we need that specificity because there are different behavioral expectations for different types of relationships -- I have a professional relationship with my boss, which entails reports on how my work is going, and I have a sibling relationship with my brother which entails hugs with a running start (which would knock over any normal person).  Not a good idea to confuse these, even though they're both relationships and that's lovely and all.

Anyway, the point is that religion is a perfectly serviceable English word to denote a particular kind of relationship among many others.  It's a kind of relationship where people worship God and try to figure out what that does to all the other relationships.  Maybe there are some situations where the substitution of terms (relationship for religion) is helpful, but I think it can often mean a loss of clarity.

I think there's even more of a problem, though, in the way people sometimes use this relationship language rhetorically to distinguish themselves from other religious folks -- the implication being that religion is not a relationship and that therefore those professing relationship instead are authentic and are offering something totally different from religion.

Ok, I agree with part of the point here: I think it's true that there are some people who participate in religious activities but are not truly cultivating transformed relationships with God and other people.  This is a legitimate concern.

However, I think the terminology switch doesn't really fix the superficiality problem and can also involve some polemics that aren't fair to other religious people.  The assumption that religion and relationship are mutually exclusive makes it easy to dismiss people whose religious practices are different from one's own (and therefore more apparent as religious practices -- relationshippy folks still have religious practices).  In many cases, these other people would see themselves as pursuing a relationship with God through the elements of their religious practice.  And no, you don't have to agree with others' practices -- but I think that talking about religion as necessarily separate from relationship can often lead to a superficial way of shutting down other groups (often in the absence of their competent defenders) rather than engaging the issues respectfully.

Chapel and Other Theophanies

Chapel is sometimes pretty inept. I'm all for making it as good as possible, but I also think that those of us who don't have much to do with the decisions there could do better at making chapel a worthwhile experience even when it's poorly done.

I'm beginning to see this as one of the fundamental challenges of Christianity: Receiving Jesus through whatever we encounter. Not that we rub out the initial reality of what we see and chalk Jesus in arbitrarily -- but that we look carefully, not denying the stupidity or sin or whatever else is there, for how Jesus is trying to reach us through what we see, and how he's present in the people with us.

Oh hey, I do have a blog.

So, I'm reading Ian McEwan's Atonement now. I'm not sure what I think of it just yet, but here's a really neat part near the beginning. This is where a thirteen-year-old aspiring authoress is digesting an existential epiphany.

"She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value."

This is one of the main reasons literature is worthwhile. As humans trying to interact meaningfully (and trying to obey a specific order to love our neighbors as ourselves), we have to try to think of other people as just as real as we are. And that's hard to do, because we have the senses and details of our own existence, but not anyone else's. And it's also hard because it means we have to deal with other people's needs as well as our own, and that's a lot of work. But literature helps with this, because we get to practice experiencing other people's existential realities. We get to go into what matters to another person and how her psyche deals with things when we read what she's written. And once we get used to doing that in reading, I think we can do a better job of it in real life too.

Drastic Acts of Faith and How to Avoid Them

Ok, it's blog-sermon time. In college class at church this morning, we were talking about the story where Jesus asks the rich man to sell everything and give it to the poor.

I think we often miss the point when we talk about stories where people do (or are asked to do) something drastic for their faith. When we talk about somebody who abandoned everything or suffered torture for God, we're really good at finding ways to make it irrelevant.

We can make drastic faith irrelevant by a yokelish dismissal of the unusual -- just blink very emphatically and refuse further consideration because it's so extreme. Which is silly, of course. The unusual is not the impossible; somebody really does this, and if it isn't us, whose fault is that?

Or, similarly, we can neutralize stories we don't want to be part of by the generous and broadminded strategy of calling them metaphorical and/or highly instructive for our lives and stopping there. But metaphor and instruction point somewhere, so if we want to use those labels to get out of anything, we're just stalling. "Sell everything you have and follow me," if it's a metaphor, probably isn't a metaphor for "Go to church a couple times a week and give 10% of your money." And Mother Teresa's life, if it's instructive, probably isn't teaching us, "Watch documentaries about the poor and feel piously queasy." We can't dismiss scary faith stories as instructional but not actually pertaining to anything scary on our end.

A far more cunning evasive strategy is to go head on, take the most daunting moments of sacrifice to be our example, and then search the tortured depths of our own psyches for the strength to give up absolutely everything -- while in fact giving up absolutely nothing. That makes us feel like we're for real, but it keeps the combat safely psychological. We've got the guts to consider seriously the possibility of martyrdom. Whoo. But how does that help anybody? It doesn't, of course, and it doesn't help us either (if we stop there), because if we don't think we could do it, we'll be discouraged, and if we do think we could do it, we'll be proud. Considering whether we could do things that we're not actually going to do in the foreseeable future can be a convenient dead-end.

Considering what we can do now is more hazardous and more right. Whether or not we think we could die for God if it came to that, there's no question that we could show our loyalty to him in less climactic ways. It is right sometimes to consider whether we could give it all up, but no matter where we get with that, we can go on to do something real. If we think we couldn't do anything really dangerous for God and that's discouraging, we can build strength by doing small things. If we think we could give up everything, but no breakneck Godquest is in sight, we can prove our willingness by small sacrifices -- and that attempt tends to bring humility.

This last bit may seem like another cop-out, but I don't think it is. Doing small things doesn't mean that total sacrifice is out of the picture at all. It could still come up, or we could still actively pursue a more drastic life of service. But it seems to me that the people who express dedication in the details are the most ready for total sacrifice. And I think that's what the parable of the talents is getting at -- we've got to be faithful in small things before we're entrusted with big things. Which is why serving in the details is doubly hazardous: First, it's real work by itself (unlike the aforementioned shirkings), but then it also might give God room to ask us for something even more dangerous.

But it's what we need to do if we mean our faith. Yup, pretty much. I even try doing it sometimes in rare fits or courage or when I haven't thought it through. :-p

(P.S. I don't think I have a career ahead of me in motivational speaking.)

Mother Deities

So, this last week I've encountered two songs that refer to meeting one's mother in heaven. One of them ("Poor Wayfaring Stranger") says in one verse "I'm going there to meet my Father" and in another verse "I'm going there to meet my mother" (note the capitalization). God takes the father role, but the mother is just a human mother rather awkwardly placed as a heavenly figure.

The divinity of fathers is understood to be metaphorical and refer imperfectly to God's divinity, but mothers don't have anywhere to pass the buck in protestant culture. I'm taking Victorian Literature, and the strain is especially acute in that period. Victorian mothers are supposed to be superhuman agents of goodness, taking care of their own work and everyone else's, and generally glowing with virtue. I'm not saying mothers or anyone else ought to slack off on virtue and goodness, but the expectations were pretty ridiculous and still are in many subcultures.

If we have a psychological or cultural need for a divine mother, promoting earthly mothers to the position isn't a fair way to deal with it. And it's not healthy for them or those around them. A mother who thinks she's supposed to be an angel or goddess is likely to be acutely disappointed with herself, or self-righteous, or both. Idealizing human roles gets messy very quickly.

So maybe we need to recognize the mother aspect in God more. Mothers should be able to see what they do as a reflection of (not a substitute for) the mother in God. Then mothering is meaningful but allowed to be imperfect, and mothers can respect themselves and be respected for what they are.

A Paradox

So, in my Philosophy of Religion class Friday, we were talking about the importance of philosophy, and I got started thinking about how some things can be significant and insignificant at the same time. Chesterton (in Orthodoxy) talks about Christian paradoxes, and this is similar to some things he mentions.

Some examples of the paradox: It's important to think about things in religion and have coherent systems of thought. If we're going to believe something, we need to think about it somehow so that we can keep it real on all levels (love God with our minds, as Karyn was saying). And the positions we take on intellectual issues make a difference; some fights about theory are really worth fighting. Philosophy matters. But then, what's a lifetime's abstract study of God worth in comparison with one act of sacrificial love to another done for God's sake? What does philosophy matter in comparison with practical obedience to God?

Or another one, close to home for me: What's the good of spending so much time and energy making a line of poetry work? Why agonize over whether this alliteration is too much or how to make this image consistent, when you could be doing something of more impact? Maybe five or ten people are ever going to read the poem, and maybe a couple of those will get something out of it. It's a lot of work for something insignificant. But then it is significant too. It's hard to find something more significant than communicating a complex truth beautifully with another person.

Or struggling to be better: Our practical moral victories are lame and insufficient, but we break our hearts over them anyway, and it's right that we do.

Or even ourselves: We're ridiculous little people, but we're also the brilliantly significant objects of God's love.

This last one leads to something that might help to understand the paradox: We're valueless compared to God, but we're deeply valuable in relation to God. So maybe the issue is to relate things instead of just comparing them. By comparison, any human act can be insignificant, but by relation, any human act can be significant.

But anyway, seeing the paradox of doing things that are both significant and insignificant gives an interesting (and, I think, healthy) attitude. Because of the significance of minute things, we can do what we do passionately. Because of the insignificance, we can laugh at ourselves and eschew pride. I think we can work with awareness that what we're doing can be a life-and-death matter and a joke at the same time, and quite genuinely and undilutedly each.

God and Pain

How God could create a world knowing there would be suffering and not intervene is one of the fundamental questions theists have to confront. A pretty intellectual answer is definitely not going to make it all better, but here's something I've been thinking about that I haven't heard before.

Suppose existence itself is a positive good, and a very big one. If that were true, the suffering in the world -- even the real evil in the world -- wouldn't be able to make creation a bad deal.

We often tend to think of existence as sort of a neutral state, not really worth much unless something ostensibly good happens to it but not harmful unless something bad happens. But God creates things. (I'm working with the assumption that God is good and wise here.) God creates things that don't experience pleasure or pain, so far as we know. God creates things that will probably never touch the experience of humans. The universe is huge, maybe infinite. Creating things seems to be a positive expression of God's energy good in itself, not a good subordinate to that of generating happiness among created things. Creating is God's happiness, it's not just used as a means to human happiness.

The point of that isn't, "Suck it up, the music of the spheres doesn't care about your drama." (Though I suppose that's probably true.) God can create because creating is good and still care about the human condition. But if creating is good -- if it's just fundamentally better for things to be than for them not to be (exit Hamlet) -- then that gives a different perspective to the way we see our condition and make sense of suffering.

If existence itself is an intrinsically good thing, then it could outweigh a lot of bad things. If it's very good to be, then maybe the things we see as bad aren't bad enough to make the answer come out negative. Maybe a person could be starving and still be blessed to be at all. Saints and martyrs have believed that God and God-given existence are still richly good even in painful circumstances, and maybe that applies to the whole world even if we don't recognize it. Perhaps being, and with it the potential for infinite quality of life and fulfillment in God, itself is stronger than the evils that often seem to encumber it.

Disclaimers: The maybes and perhapses above are not rhetorical -- I'm speculating and I know it. Also, I understand if my dear readers (all 4 of you) wish to smack me for propounding such a sanguine philosophy of life at this time in the semester. ;)

Columbus

In American lit, we've been talking about the early interactions between Europe and America, and I've always found it interesting that Columbus bumped into our continent accidentally when he was looking for something else. He was trying to get to spices and silk in China, and his theory of going around the earth was sound -- except for the obstructing landmass.

I think we often do that same thing. We have some goals in mind and some good theories -- even brilliance and courage, on occasion. But things work out completely and disorientingly different from what we intended, because the earth (or life, or God, as the case may be) is bigger than we thought. And the continents that come between us and our goals can be wonderful, if we accept and use them for what they are and snap out of the idea that they're a shortcut to what we wanted in the first place.

(This thought may eventually try to become articulate and profound and turn into a poem, or it may accept its humble status as a cheesy devo blog.)

When Theological Arguments Aren't

I've noticed recently that supposedly theological arguments are often really more based in aesthetics or mental comfort than in theology. People don't connect on the issue because they really disagree about a framework of aesthetics or mental comfort rather than about things derivable from the tangible evidence.

For example, responses to the question, "Does God cause suffering or just allow it?" are based on the concepts of God seen in each option and how mentally comfortable or irksome those concepts are to people. Most people I know want to say God allows suffering but doesn't cause it, and (I think) this is because they can't stand the idea of God as some kind of sadist or experimenter poking at humanity, even if it's for our own good. But other people say God causes whatever happens, (I think) because they want the reassurance that suffering, coming from God, is good and is under control, not just something random that happens while God stands there and declines to intervene. The groups both want to see God as good, but they have different aesthetic (that's not quite the right term, but it'll do) frameworks, and so they end up in very passionate opposition, both trying to defend the goodness of God from repulsive dishonor (as they see it). The first group of people will promptly direct us to the book of Job, where God allows Satan to cause Job suffering. The second group will also go to Job and quote, "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." Elsewhere in scripture too, there's evidence for both takes on the issue -- but people are selective and dogmatic because they're violently repelled by some images of God. (That was a long example; I hope it made the intended concept clear and wasn't just distracting in itself.)

But very often, people's supposedly theological arguments really get their bitterness and immobility from underlying problems of aesthetics or mental comfort rather than from any evidence that surfaces in the discussion. I was reading a little from John Calvin recently for a class, and he thinks that believing predestination allows people to appreciate God's undeserved bounty much better; he gets a more satisfying God image from predestination. Other people, of course, think the God image you get from Calvinistic predestination is disgusting. But presumably, Calvin doesn't get the same image of God from his views as those of us who react indignantly.
(Any alarmed modernists still with me should take a deep breath here and try not to panic. I'm not saying it's all subjective and all views are equally valid. I do believe that many of the issues are real issues, and it's possible to be wrong on them, and the objective evidence matters. But I am saying that there's a lot below the surface that we usually don't address, and what is subjective is not therefore irrelevant.)

So the main point is, we could improve communication if we better addressed the underlying aesthetic frameworks to theological questions. Often, we get an image that's repellent to us, and we say "Eww" (or perhaps some expression that sounds more like a mature indignation than that but signifies the same thing) and then try to find evidence for our own position under the impression that we know the other one is wrong, because God isn't icky like that. But I think it would be better if we took more time to understand other people's aesthetic frameworks so that we could approach the evidence more cooperatively and with less emotional volatility. And if the aesthetic framework is what's flawed, we could try to reason about that directly instead of dragging theological issues down with it. This method sounds a lot harder than what we normally do, but I think the attempt would be worthwhile.

Thoughts?