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.

Doh.

So, I'm working on memorizing T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." I just Googled a quote Eliot uses to see where it's taken from. Here's what I searched:

"on whatever sphere of being the mind of a man may be intent at the time of death"

And Google kindly provided me with this suggestion:

Did you mean: "on whatever sphere of being the mind of a man may be internet at the time of death" ?

Irony is a beautiful thing.

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.)

Poetic Self-Mockery in Prose

Last summer I started to write a poem about catching fireflies. It was going to be this ambitious double-meaning thing with a metaphor for learning. I was going to say how you can’t catch them if you only look for the light pulses; you’ve got to learn to see them when they just look like bugs, and (just as a matter of fact – this part wasn’t particularly worked into my symbolism yet) to do that you have to angle yourself so the fireflies are between you and something light-colored. Such tactics I remembered from the summer delinquency of my childhood, and seeing a couple of fireflies in the yard brought it to mind. But I thought I ought to catch some fireflies with this strategy before I wrote the poem. Real-life details and writing from experience and all that.

I couldn’t catch any. I don’t know if there was a firefly plague that summer or what. I didn’t see many, despite frequent predatory dusk ventures. When I did see them, they flew over fences and into bushes and too high. I couldn’t reach the fireflies and only slapped bloody mosquitoes, muttering apologies to John Donne. I still maintain that my firefly-catching strategy is sound. It just didn’t work. So I didn’t finish the poem.

And I don’t think I will, because of what it did to me at the end of the summer. After I had striven for authenticity – yea, shed my very blood for this poem – it deliberately betrayed and humiliated me. I’d just about given up on catching fireflies that summer. I’d gone to bed for the night. I came downstairs for a drink of water. And there, on the carpet at the foot of the stairs, I saw a slow, yellow, pulsing glow. It was dying. I picked it up and examined the real-life details: the shiny black legs, squirmy abdomen, and the translucent orange stripes on its back armor where the light came through. It kept lighting slowly, and I carried it to the back door and shook it out of my hand into the grass.

Now I can’t possibly write the poem because of what this has done to the symbolism. It can’t be about the pursuit of knowledge anymore, because I just stumbled on the firefly; it can’t even be about how true knowledge comes best when you don’t pursue it, because the firefly was dying; and it can’t be about the destructive effects of analysis, because my earlier pursuit had nothing to do with this firefly’s tragic demise. In short, the poem annihilated itself. It spontaneously combusted in a puff of irony, leaving me on the back porch in poemless, pajama-clad chagrin.