Self Immolation

Response to Simone Weil’s “Human Personality.”

From Simone Weil: An Anthology

“The chief danger does not lie in the Collectivity’s tendency to circumscribe the Person, but in the Person’s tendency to immolate himself in the Collective.”

In this essay, Simone Weil, an early twentieth-century French thinker, deals with the place of the “person” within larger “collectives.” I capitalized both nouns in the quote because the English word “person” is an unattractive cousin to the French personne, which can mean “anyone” as well as “that individual.” It is not as synonymous with “individual” as is the English word. Capitalizing it may not quite do the trick, but maybe we can tweak it thereby into a Bigger Idea.

“Collective” is Weil’s word for the group to which a Person attaches oneself, such as a political entity, corporation, church, union, etc. I capitalized it, too, to give it the same level of emphasis.

To put the quote into slightly more understandable terms, Weil is saying that it is less dangerous for a group (community, church, labor union, political party) to restrict (or ultimately silence) individual expression and freedom than it is for Persons to so completely devote themselves to the will of a group that they surrender their voice–and will–to that of the group. She goes on to say that the two errors are doubtless connected. In other words, the suppression of the Person by the group may be related to some level of voluntary self-supression in the Person. Either way, It is that self-supression that worries Weil so much.

With good reason. The statement of Weil’s caught my eye because of her use of the term “immolation.” The word is old, iderived from a Latin term for sprinkling meal on meat about to be sacrificed. In French, as in Latin, the word became synonymous with sacrifice. But because Weil, who died in 1943, did not live to see the Vietnam War, she would not have been familiar with the English connotation of the term as “self-sacrifice by fire.” One particular Buddhist monk, protesting government policy in the war, poured fuel on himself and lit a match, burning hiimself alive. I remember seeing a photo of this self-immolation as a teenager and being horrified by it. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. Malcolm Browne’s award-winning photo may have single-handedly shifted our understanding of a word.

Self Immolation of Thic Quang Duc, photo by Malcolm Browne

I had this photo in mind when I was writing my dissertation in 1994 and included the term “self-immolation” as a way of describing an extreme level of self-censorship in social and public interaction.

All of us self-censor in social settings. Those who lack the ability of self-censorship in public are either small children (with horrendous questions or commentary in the checkout line) or have Tourette Syndrome, whose afflictees cannot always control what they say. But the rest of us have a lot of things going on internally at any given moment, much of which gets set aside when we engage in conversation or when we find ourselves speaking or performing in a public setting. Sometimes we might be shutting off the never-ending flow of inner psychological drama. And at other times, we may just choose not to say something we’re thinking. The other day during commencement festivities, I was speaking with a person whose nose was flaming red. It was so red it was impossible to ignore. And all the while this person and I were speaking, a little monologue was going on inside my head: “Does he know? How can he not know? Why didn’t he do something about it? Does he care? Good grief, that’s red!”

Often when I am teaching a class or speaking in a larger venue, I see things going on in the audience, many of whom are under the impression that they are invisible, that beggar some sort of comment. But to tell someone to wake up or to put away the cell phone or stop doing homework for another class would have a negative impact entailing ripple effects that, to me, aren’t worth the momentarily satisfying assertion of authority. Therefore, I self-censor.

But there is another level of self-censorhip that has more to do with Weil’s statement than the normal social maintenance I’ve just talked about. We also self-censor in order to show our allegiance to certain ideas, ideals and groups. Whenever we become part of a group, whether it be as an employee, a disciple, an amateur enthusiast, an artist, or even as the natural result of a shift in status (the Country Club as opposed to the YMCA), we naturally learn the Language of the Tribe the better to fit in with that group. In learning the new lingo, two things happen. We acquire new terms, so that we can be perceived as using them smoothly and knowingly “I pwned you, freakin’ newb!” And, conversely, we begin to shed, to prune, to self-censor terms that don’t harmonize with the Tribal Tongue. In church, we sing “Wonderful Words of Life,” not, “Your Body is a Wonderland.”

All of which gives rise to a question: Is it truly a thing to be feared when someone self-censors to such a degree that they have, for all intents and purposes, eliminated themselves? To what extent was/is this happening for those adherents of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in El Dorado, TX (think uni-brow and antebellum peasant fashions)? Or to what extent is this happening with suicide bombers in Baghdad?

FLDS Yearning for Zion–

Certainly ideological self-immolation creates these extreme cases. But Weil’s question, and mine, is concerned more with those who do not perhaps belong to some extremist sect in the middle of nowhere or in some terrorist training camp, but those who live and breathe among us who have allowed some Voice of Authority to silence their thinking, their reason and their ability to see beyond the confines of some mental prison they have created for themselves. Would this describe, for instance, the people who let their 11-yr-old daughter die of treatable diabetes last year because they thought God was going to heal her? Does this describe the senior citizen who sends her life-savings, pension checks and social security to a complete stranger who has persuaded her that this TV ministry is God’s best hope for humanity?

Does it describe people on the political fringe who seem to live on the intellectual equivalent of a liquid diet–consuming only the kind of news, opinion and information that affirms a pre-selected point of view, right or left?

The answer to that last question, though it might surprise some, is no. While subsisting on the impoverished dogmas on the fringe does involve a harmful level of self-negation, it is not as absolute a condition as immolation. There is something inherently destructive and even deadly about immolating oneself for a Collectivity. The consequences are always catastrophic for someone.

But the fringe-dwellers, though heavily “negated,” can and do function quite well in society, though typically flocking in groups around mega-personalities or ego-saturated agenda-setters. Yes, I am speaking of the likes of Rush Limbaugh on one side and Michael Moore on the other, both of whom left their senses years ago but whose ardent fans have failed to see the vacancy signs. The devotees of Limbaugh fail to realize he is neither conservative (nor Christian), and the disciples of Moore fail to see he is neither liberal (nor socialist). They are both super-inflated grand-standers carried along by the inertia of their bloated personalities, with no safe harbor in sight. Their adherents, while deceived, are in no real danger of capsizing their own lives by bombing clinics or getting handcuffed for civil disobedience. Most of their biggest fans are fully functioning members of society whose personal lives represent the best and worst of living in an affluent, unreflective culture. It is only their intellects they have chosen to deprive.

Nevertheless, the specter of intellectual and spiritual self-immolation looms–not that rank and file hard-liners such as those I just mentioned are susceptible. I doubt seriously that they are. Those trapped in an immolators’ fate got there by other means, usually involving either an involuntary or semi-voluntary stripping down of their persons and psyches brought on by want or need. The benefit of affluent middle-class life is that, while it doesn’t guarantee against a near-fictitious understanding of the world, it does tend to insulate against radical extremism. Be that as it may, we find ourselves compelled to deal with the immolators. They have a tendency to crop up from time to time, whether it’s Jim Jones or Branch Davidians or FLDS in our backyard–or people who come over and commandeer or airlines. We cannot afford to ignore them.

Hamartia and the Self

Response to Thomas Merton #2

From No Man Is an Island Chapter One:

“Love must be based on truth. A love that sees no distinction between good and evil but loves … merely for the sake of loving is hatred rather than love. To love blindly is to love selfishly. It is not interested in the truth but only in itself. f we are going to love others at all we must make up our minds to love them well. The first step to unselfish love is the recognition that our love may be deluded. The truth I love in loving my brother … must be at the same time supernatural and concrete, practical and alive.”

In the film version of Remains of the Day, Mr. Stevens the butler, who is the central character played by Anthony Hopkins, shows a frustrating inability to relate to people as people. For him, everyone fits into a prescribed, pre-determined role, and he defines them and his relationship to them by almost mechanistic principles. His rigidness in this regard forces him to distance himself even from his father, who seems to have taught him to see the world in that way. And the possibility of a genuine, human relationship based on love passes him by. Only when the ordered universe upon which he has built an artificial sense of security turns out to have been a deluded farce does Stevens look back and see his personal wasteland of lost opportunities.

Mr. Stevens with his father

Stevens is almost a Jungian archetype. He represents a selfistic principle that governs a large chunk of human thinking–judging by world history, anyway. The saints among us would argue that they try, really try, to be “selfless” about things. A cynic, such as myself, might ask–isn’t it true that the more we enjoy a sense of self-sacrifice in a value-system that makes us feel good about it, the more likely it is that we are trapped in a selfistic mesh even when we are being noble? Perhaps some have sprung the trap. But the quote from Merton suggests that we may stray on two equally deluded fronts–that we may appear to be both partial and impartial yet remain deeply selfish either way.

Try a “for instance.” William lathers compliments like margarine on a muffin, but with a view toward getting something in exchange. Kate, on the other hand, cannot bring herself to praise anyone. She tells herself that she behaves in the interest of “fairness.” In either case, the issue isn’t about the virtue of giving or not giving compliments, is it? The issue is how the Self figures into the equation.

It’s refreshingly easy to condemn Self-ism in all its grossest forms, commonly demonstrated through the Seven Deadly Sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. These are the Vaudeville stars of Sin that get all the good lines and all the bad press, like Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. These are the inheritors of fire and brimstone from countless pulpits around the world.

But Merton’s quote should give us pause. He suggests that Selfism is more subtle than the Big 7 and that sin bred of Selfism isn’t always of the neon-sign variety. In fact, most selfistic sins may not be visible as sin at all. Most of it, in fact, may be more like cracks in the wall beneath the paint.

What if most of what we really need to worry about regarding selfistic behavior isn’t heinous harlotry at all, but almost-accident? What if it constitutes behavior that somehow “misses the mark,” to use the word in the original Greek sense of hamartia?

Hamartia is the Greek word often used in the New Testament for “sin.” Our English word “sin” comes from a Germanic root that simply meant “guilty”–a “state” rather than an activity. The Hebrew has a lovely array of words for sin, but one closely mirrors the Greek concept of Hamartia. It is the word Chattah (the same word would make its way into the Aramaic spoken by Jesus and Paul). “Chattah” is the word used in the sacrificial language of the Tabernacle and Temple as being what the sacrifices were meant to address. Chattah and Hamartia were both originally used of an archer who missed the mark.

From allposters.com

On the surface, the idea of “missing the mark” suggests an unintended action, and that’s probably a good enough way of looking at a one category of wrongful things we do. It would accurately describe the action of the kid who demonstrates a karate kick on his bedroom door. His intent is to demonstrate his prowess to his rapt audience of friends, not to kick the door off its hinges. But to his parents, who have to pay for the repairs to the door, the hinges and the doorjamb, the unintended consequences are substantial.

I’ve heard sermons that refer to the Biblical concept of Sin with a capital “S” as a Sin Nature, something that clings to us like an alien substance, and the “all things new” of redemption changes us, delivering us from the Sin Nature, ridding us of Original Slime, to paraphrase St. Augustine. After our glorious deliverance, we are still forced to deal with the nagging commission of small-letter sins. These require a steady regimen of repentance and forgiveness, like dealing with the weeds in our flower garden of righteousness.

But I am beginning to wonder whether Hamartia is a more subtle concept altogether, one which the Armor All of standard salvation sermonizing doesn’t actually cover because it doesn’t address the fundamental issue. It’s like giving a starving man a four-course meal, only to discover he is on death row. He will fry, but at least he’ll be full.

Okay. So I pushed the analogy too far. It sounded too cool to pass up.

The more I think about Hamartia, especially as it appeared to the Greeks, the more I begin to wonder whether or not the Apostle Paul and the others who used it intended it as more than mere linguistic spackle.

I don’t know enough Hebrew language and culture to be able to unpack the full meaning of Chattah. But there has been a lot of writing about the Greek concept of Hamartia, and it suggests a substantial alternative to our normal thinking about what it means to “miss the mark.” The archer fully intends to hit the target. But, for whatever reasons–a cramp, a gust of wind, a flash of light, a lapse of skill, Robin Hood misses and does not split his competitor’s arrow down the middle.

What then? To the Greeks, Hamartia was the “flaw” that led to tragedy in human affairs. College students have endless trouble trying to figure out how this comes together in Oedipus. “Okay. Explain one more time just what Oedipus did wrong that made him unwittingly murder his father and sleep with his mother?” The message of Oedipus is neither fate nor guilt. The message of Oedipus is that human frailty mixed with uncontrollable circumstance equals “Bad things, man. Bad things.”

I’m beginning to think that the New Testament writers, following Christ’s lead, had a profound appreciation for this mix of things that resulted in human’s “missing the mark” in general, that this was the starting point of all human discourse and interaction. It did not entail finger pointing and leveraging of shalts and shalt nots, nor did it involve juridical pronouncements designed to find the location of the flaw. Instead, it created a deep-seated recognition of unworthiness and propelled an understanding of sacrifice. It was as if, in sacrifice, the supplicant recognized that no amount of cleansing, washing and sanctification could erase Hamartia. In fact, Hamartia never goes away. It is with us always, even in the lives of the redeemed. It passes from me personally only in death, but its traces linger on after me, in all the mix of the consequences of my actions as they have intersected with the lives of countless other people. In sacrifice, I ask God not to count Hamartia against me, as Christ said in the Lord’s prayer, commonly translated as “lead us not into temptation,” but actually saying, “Put us not to the test.”

Though we intend to hit the mark but miss for any number of reasons, Hamartia is not without a source. The source, ultimately, is the Selfism with which each of us is born. We all strive. We strive to excel, to do better, to be mediocre, or maybe even to be left alone to our own devices. We are all protagonists in our own stories–the root of that word being “agon,” conflict. Our striving is born in the complex breeding ground of motives, and our motives cling to the skin of Self in ways we rarely examine or even see, as we struggle for identity, for purpose, for the consent and approval of others. Our frailty then, our Hamartia, is closely linked to the mere fact that we are Selves, that we exist as separate beings living in the same limited space. And when you take my Hamartia and combine it with yours, it’s a wonder we don’t mess up any more than we do, though the state of the world at any given time may suggest otherwise. That is the ultimate reason for sacrifice. Sacrifice s supposed to represent as much nullification of Selfism as I am able, with God’s help, to manage.

Oedipus, in despair over the consequences of his Hamartia, puts out his eyes so he won’t have to see his tragic reality. His blindness, as Merton says, is useless. His act is utterly Selfistic. Our only hope, according to Merton, according to Christ, is to do what we can, without self-disfigurement, without self-emolation, without a self-destructive distortion of the truth, to love. Christ demonstrated that only love, only an appreciation of Others as Other Selves, manages the consequences of Hamartia. It’s that part in His Prayer that says, “Forgive us as we forgive.”

Note: I realize this is really dense. I’m sorry for that. I just needed to get it down. I’ll build on it from here, unless the overwhelming cries of “heretic!” convince me that I’m full of beans. Thanks, if you made it all the way, for courageously hanging in there with me. It took three months to write.

With all your mind….

(Presented at Dixon Center Alternative Chapel 9/18/08)

It’s possible that you’ve heard the following terrific quote:

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use.”

That’s from a letter written by Galileo Galilei, the dude from the early 17th century who suffered a lot of persecution because he had the audacity to assert that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak today about the question, “How do we worship God with our minds?”

When we talk about worship, we come to the table with a number of preconceived notions, many depending on our own worship traditions. For most of us, the idea of worship is largely confined to the walls of a church building. During the week we live and move and have our busy little beings. On the weekend, we take some time out of our hectic existence to make ourselves somewhat presentable, file quietly and reverentially with a lot of other presentable people into a place set aside for worship, a place that is frequently referred to as “The House of God,” and we alternately sit and stand, sing and listen, clap and/or be quiet in the various rituals and practices that, for most of us, define what it means to worship.

While we find that Scripture does in fact support this definition of worship, we also discover that our Sunday behavior is only a small part of what worship is supposed to involve. The Apostle Paul, for instance, says in Romans 12: 1 “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship.” And in Matthew 22 Christ identifies the two greatest commandments in this way: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

One of the most pivotal moments of my own life occurred when I was 19 years old. I had just come out of a horribly oppressive and ultra-conservative Christian sect hidden away in a rural part of southeastern Virginia and I was on my way to a small Bible College in the suburbs of Dallas, TX, when I had a remarkable encounter along the road. The Bible has a lot of these roadside marker experiences, which would make a great study subject, I suppose.

On my way to Dallas, I stopped in Fort Worth to visit one of my many uncles and there I had a chance meeting with a man named Manuel, a total stranger whom I met that day and have never seen since. Manuel described himself as an agnostic existentialist. He might as well have swatted me across the face with his gauntlet and challenged me to a duel. I went after him like a fly to a cow pie. My intention was to dismantle his agnosticism then and there and bring him, all trembling and weeping, by force of my all-powerful arguments, to the very throne of grace.

But, oh my! I had no idea what I was in for. In short order, Manuel took me apart, line-by-line, statement-by-statement. He unhinged my confident arguments and overcame my secure defenses in much the same way Hurricane Katrina swept over the levees in New Orleans. I soon found that not only did I not know what I was talking about I really didn’t even know what I believed myself. By the time Manuel left that evening, I was the one left weeping and trembling, wondering how this could have happened to me and even angry at God for leaving me in the lurch.

In retrospect, it was exactly what a mentally driven young person like myself needed, and I’m convinced today that Divine Providence put Manuel in that place on that day to meet me and to blow my false certainties apart.

I have to confess that I didn’t get the message. My initial reaction to this distressing experience was to search for more certainty, to spend hours and hours of Bible reading and study in an attempt to exorcise the constantly questioning demon that tormented my soul. One of my favorite passages of Scripture became Jeremiah 29, where it reads,

11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you,” declares the LORD, “and will bring you back from captivity.

And in the true spirit of appropriating scripture to fit my need, I felt that this message to the nation of Israel was God’s secret code, placed there just for me, and I saw my captivity as my ceaseless wrestling with the truth and saw that searching for God with my whole heart meant devoting my time and energy to this pursuit of Certainty, the Holy Grail of my existence. At one point, I was like a Jewish Hasid at the Wailing Wall. I would pray standing up, rocking back and forth, resorting to groanings that cannot be uttered to express the cry of my heart. That was all while I was in college.

Fast-forward a couple of decades. How does this story progress? If this were one of those terrific standard stories such as you find in the works of John Eldredge, I would tie it up in a nice little ribbon, tell you about the time I received the powerful thundering revelation from on high that settled it all for me and answered my riddles, like Robinson Crusoe being rescued at last from the desert island.

The truth may come as an unwelcome shock to a lot of people here today. The truth is that over the intervening years from then to now, nothing has essentially changed. I never succeeded in answering my questions conclusively. I never attained the promised land of absolute certainty. But along the road, I did make a remarkable discovery, and that discovery is the heart of what I want to tell you today, the heart of what I believe it means to worship God with our minds.

What I discovered was Faith and what the medieval Christians called the Mysterium Tremendum, which translates to the “Tremendous Mystery,” but sounds a lot cooler in Latin, so we’ll use that instead. In my discovery of faith, I have come to believe, and I think Scripture supports this very thoroughly, that God is not to be found in the answers. He is to be found in the questions. That God is not in the certainties, but in the ambiguities. That God is not to be found in all the noise and clamor of the clearly identifiable wind, fire and earthquake of our harsh declarations, but in the much less identifiable soft, whispering murmur that we refer to as the still, small voice. He’s in the burning bush. He’s in sound of the cool breeze in Genesis 3.

I’ve always found it curious that devout Jewish believers insist that the true Name of God cannot be said, that to try to pronounce it is an act of deep disrespect and disqualifies you from having any part in him. And I’ve often wondered, as I am sure you have, why Christ seemed to spend more time telling stories with open-ended interpretations than he did declaring certainties.

I believe the reason is that God wants us to use our minds to engage him with questions. Once upon a time I thought this was a marked lack of faith, but now I think the opposite, that God expects us to wrestle with him, like Jacob at Piniel, like Isaiah in chapter 1:18, where God says, “Come let us argue together.” Is God threatened by our questions? No. I think He welcomes them.

I saw a movie recently called Smart People in which a widowed college professor on his first date in years spends the evening lecturing his date about literature. Eventually, she leaves in disgust. He asks her what he did wrong and she calls him a pompous windbag, “You never asked me a single question about my life,” she says as she stomps off.

I wonder how often what we call worship actually does the same thing the professor in the movie did. It seems we spend a lot of time informing God of what’s going on with us, then we tell God who He is, just in case he doesn’t know, then we clue Him in on other things we know about Him, all the while showing proper reverence and gratitude. I doubt there is anything wrong or bad about any of that, really. But do we pause long enough to ask? Do we stop long enough to engage him on that intense, personal level in which we are willing to bring to the fore the questions we have been afraid to ask, but that He is more than willing to hear?

For while I can’t say that I have absolute answers to all my questions, I can say with more certainty than many other things that I have met God, and that while I may know less about Him than I once thought I knew, at least when I have shouted my questions, I have heard that soft whispering murmur that says not only that He is there, but that He smiles when he hears from me.

I’d like to conclude with a quote from Thomas Merton, who writes in his book No Man is an Island: “One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.” Let’s not be afraid of the questions. Let’s love God, not just with our heart and soul, but also with our mind.

Insufficient Answers

Response to Thomas Merton I

No Man Is An Island

From the Prologue: “…anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. And there is a far worse anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions–because they might turn out to have no answer. One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.”

Those who ask the right questions, especially in communities of faith, tend to be unpopular. The very act of asking questions, the hard questions, the “anxious” questions, tends to elicit offended expressions. I think, though I can’t be sure, that much of the offense comes from the deep-seated anxiety to which Merton alludes. Perhaps the more anxious a person is the more likely he or she is to be offended by questions that heighten anxiety.

But for some the lack of clear answers is a serious cause of perpetual angst. This state is often aggravated by other things: first among them is that the sort of questions that create this internal tension don’t seem to upset many other people. (That in itself creates another layer of nagging questions.) Also, this particular kind of personal anxiety stirs little supportive understanding from the general class of public conversant. Doubt is often viewed as a quirk of personality or is simply emphatically unwelcome. The angst-ridden questioner becomes a leper of sorts and must find ways to adjust to this fate. Trying to explain this painfully interrogative state to someone who just wants to sympathize is like walking underwater–lots of effort to little purpose.

But perhaps it is the precise role of some to be perpetually asking questions and just as perpetually to be angling for answers, like the fisherman on the sports channel who labors so hard for so long to land a beautiful fish, finally snags the coveted prize after a great struggle, admires the catch for all the viewers to see…then lets it slip back into the water, free and clear. Perhaps some are meant to believe and not-believe at the same time, if only to keep the rest of us honest.

The pale light of insufficient answers, as Merton indicates, is the curse, perhaps even the bane, of many whose still-born thinking ends in sweeping judgment and a loss of genuine human compassion. The once deeply spiritual, yearning drive within them shrivels into a need to belong to a group, an exclusive social club complete with support structures, financial incentives, high-grade coffee and child care.

The questioner finds him or herself herded, like so many others, into these huddled masses but never really belongs and may decide to cut and run at the first available opportunity, only to be caught in another herd or, perhaps, to go rogue, feeling like an outcast.

In the end the questioner has to evaluate whether or not the social structures of the huddled group are in themselves worthy not only of preservation but of tolerant, even loving, support for the good they awkwardly and imperfectly manage to spread. Sometimes it’s like watching a monster tractor trundle along with a hand-hoe attached at the back rather than a genuine rig. But perhaps it’s not always as much about the insufficient answers as it is about being with real people in a real world. Sometimes the trade-off creates an almost intolerable strain, but it does not absolutely require the suspension of the one thing that must not be suspended under any circumstances….

Someone still has to ask the unanswerable questions.

A Cure for Self-Importance

Brand new video from an unmanned Japanese lunar mission called Selene (moon). Yeah–that’s us. The Earth. All of us. Watch it through to the setting and think about how big we really are.

Waking Thought

If you saw The Matrix you will recall that after Neo takes the red pill, he awakens into a world far more grim, grimy and perilous than the one in which he had been sleeping.

Some awakenings have that effect.

In another movie, A Beautiful Mind, John Nash finally comes to grips with his delusions, and without fully losing them he finds a way to recognize them and avoid their siren song.

Some awakenings require work to maintain.

In Atonement, one of this year’s Oscar nominees, young Briony wakes up from her world of make-believe only when it’s too late to take back her mistake.

Some awakenings are late.

But when all is said and done, it’s far better to be awake than asleep.

I’m not into self-revelatory blogs, so I’m not going to spin this one out in self-indulgent fashion. But I have had an awakening of sorts recently, one of those slow, astonishing awakenings that jars, frightens, depresses and delights one all at the same time. I gather that an awakening probably isn’t real unless it does all those things.

The permutations of this awakening continue to jolt me on a daily basis as things unfold. I wish I had the time and the talent to write it all down. Maybe someday I will–when my beard is as white and as long as Gandalf’s.

But the most interesting aspect of this revelation is that it is not regarding anything amazing, sensational or even earth-shattering. I find that when the implications play out in the real world, my newfound realizations are little more than what everyone else has already known for some time. By comparison, I’m an infant.

Much of this has been prompted by two books I’ve been reading simultaneously: Anna Karenina and Difficult Conversations. And what they have been hammering home is that my obsession with my own point of view has been far more absolute and ironclad than I ever could have dreamed. This will come as no surprise to those who know me best.

To refer to yet another film, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s hard not to feel as if I have been shot with the Point-of-View Gun.

The Point-of-View Gun

In a nutshell, this is my discovery: Obsession with one’s own point of view is akin to being in a coma. The body is functioning; the heart is beating; digestion is working; synaptic connections in the brain are firing. But you aren’t actually relating to anyone in any meaningful fashion. The people with whom you do “interact” are kind enough to fill in the blanks for you, which is a gracious and lovely thing for them to do, but ultimately it fails to disturb the coma. Some are painfully aware of your coma and so walk away, pretty much resigning you to your gurney.

I could say more, but I’ll leave it there for now. Thinking about all this stuff is making me second-guess the advisability of posting about it. Some readers are wondering where the other shoe is going to be. It’s there. And it weighs a ton. But for now let’s hope there’s some profit in a brief introduction.

A Drought of Perspective

Rainbow from my office window

I can’t say that I have ever cherished the sound of the rain as much as I have the last couple of days. Yesterday was nasty by all standards–a fine, cold drizzle just hard enough to get you thoroughly wet and certainly colder than the 45 degrees that my official vehicle indicator said it was.

But I loved it. I felt a little like C.S. Lewis who used to go out on days like that just to celebrate the foul weather for its own sake.

Normally I would have complained, of course, since complaining is one of those things for which I love to arrange words in particularly telling fashion. We bought our Christmas tree in the miserable drizzle and I hauled it out to the pickup and lugged it onto the bed, soaking my clothes and fairly freezing my unacclimated hands. And I had forgotten to wear a hat.

But I loved it. And I love the sound of it now in the dark night outside the window.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not normally so positive about these things. But perspective has a way of shifting under special circumstances. And the circumstance that changed my perspective this time was the drought.

I’ve lived in the Northwest, where there were only five days of sunshine out of 80 days in the winter. That threatened to bring on a madness all its own. But thankfully we moved away, moved to the blessed South where the maxim of Ecclesiastes reigns supreme–to everything there is a season. It rains when it should. It’s hot when it should be hot. It’s cold, for a little while anyway, when the world turns on its axis and points furthest from the sun. And the leaves change and fall in the Autumn. The variety is a wonderful thing.

Normally. But we spent an almost rainless summer. The yard somehow managed bravely to retain some green, though in a somewhat embarrassed threadbare fashion. And the few little thunderstorms that tore through and vanished did very little to relieve the monotony.

But when it finally did really and truly rain, rain that hung around for more than an hour or two, rain that stripped the leaves and soaked the ground, it was wonderful.

This led me to wonder how much we operate from a Perspective of Plenty. That is, to what extent do I feel I have the right to want for nothing? When I get upset by the price of gasoline, when I reach for my favorite brand of granola bars at Wal-Mart only to discover they are fresh out, when I fret because it’s impossible to buy a Wii video game system, am I not operating from this Perspective of Plenty, this notion that I have a right to have everything I need and want in stock, on time, and at low cost?

These thoughts occurred to me around Thanksgiving time, which is now come and gone, but still appropriate. A Perspective of Plenty is not a thankful outlook. It presumes that I am deserving of things for which I made no special effort to be deserving, for which I built nothing and to which I contributed nothing. But I deserve them anyway.

I guess I should say here that we are staggeringly blessed, that we are fairly a-swim in blessings, that our lives, compared to the impoverished islanders of Papua New Guinea, are rich with goods and have need of nothing. And that would be a nice ribbon to tie to these thoughts.

But am I really better off, with my “deserved” Nikes, my Nissan, my Perrier, my I-Pod, my Dockers and my Portfolio than the Papuan who lives in a hut and barely subsists on fishing and farming? Is my life more blessed than that person’s just because I sit atop the civilized world, corrupt though it be, and read Time and Cosmo? Is it possible that the comparatively untroubled Guinea fisherman, hauling his catch in a basket and selling it at the local fish market is just as blessed?

Certainly the Enlightenment French thought so. Rousseau and Voltaire and others elevated the ideal of the noble, uncomplicated and simple being who lives in a harmonious tribe and amply satisfies simple wants. The telling irony, of course, is that while these angst-ridden socialites praised the virtues of the simple savage, they chose to remain firmly in the embrace of their own complex, perfumed and hypocrisy-friendly civilization. When it came down to it, they preferred their comparative state of blessedness to that of the utopian native.

As do I. No need to wax philosophical about it. I am a product of my culture and find a hefty dose of materialism goes down sweetly after all.

But I hope that, in the end, I may be thankful for the things that I enjoy, grateful and not so mean of spirit that a momentary denial of my otherwise constantly filled desires does not produce anger, wrath and ill-advised accusations against God Himself.

May I be thankful in plenty as in poverty, and especially at all times for the rain.

Fall leaves looking toward my office

The Golden Compass

Is it true?

Can it be?

Would they really do that?

It is, it can, and they would make a children’s movie based on a children’s book written by an avowed atheist, a book written as the atheist’s answer to C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.

I first heard of Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass some years ago when I was listening to the radio in my basement, something I used to do when I worked out down there. We’ve since moved the exercise equipment–and the radio–out of the basement. So that’s as good an excuse as any for not working out at all. Which is why my girth grows greater every day.

But back to the radio. I can’t recall whether it was NPR to which I was listening or Christian radio. Check that, by process of elimination, it was most certainly NPR. But there was a report on an award-winning children’s series that was gathering a lot of comment for its controversial treatment of Christian traditions. I only half heard the report, and about the time my subconscious told me that I should have listened more closely, the report was ending. I could only remember tidbits–an Oxford professor, a fantasy series for young adults, religious controversy.

Fast forward several months. I was in Paris (yes, Paris, France), on a university-sponsored trip. I was shaving or trying to shave in the postage stamp sized bathroom in a three-star hotel room. And I had the television on the BBC channel (because I had some difficulty with French). And this Oxford professor named Philip Pullman was being interviewed. And he was talking about his books. I made a note of the name, and also about a comment he made then, unless I misunderstood. He said something like, “I really am not attacking Christianity per se, but religious nonsense in general.” That, I thought, is something I might like to see.

So, sometime after returning home, I checked out the trilogy (His Dark Materials) from the library and read all three books in about five days.

I was pretty seriously upset after I read them. Two things bothered me. One was that Pullman had not been entirely forthright in the interview, for it was Christianity very specifically that he targeted in his books. Secondly, the fact that the story was quite good–at least until the second half of the last book, bothered me immensely. A story so full of disbelief isn’t supposed to be so good. It’s supposed to be crap.

But the story is good. It has all the elements of great myth, even though it’s ultimate goal is to destroy myth. Pullman even borrows heavily from the same saintly sources of the past, from Milton and Dante and Spencer and Homer. The gradual revelation of what the story is building to is masterfully done.

Then, in the second half of the last book, Pullman pulls away the cloth and behold–there’s nothing there.

That’s the hardest thing, and I won’t deliver any spoilers just to vent my spleen, but I can’t recall a more disappointing payoff, unless, of course, you include the third movie of the Matrix trilogy. I actually laughed out loud. Take down all the piles and plies of myth and, well, what’s left? That would be a creative crisis for any novelist, so it’s hard to fault Pullman if he failed to deliver. At least he tried.

Regardless, some important people who give important awards thought so highly of Pullman’s grand effort that they showered him with accolades and rewards. And 15 million or more copies have sold.

And now the movie is upon us and it promises to be a fantastic offering. The casting is dreamy, even inspired, if I may be so bold. The trailer is hypnotic. CGI abounds, and it looks to be magical.

The irony is that a myth cannot be displaced without another myth. Perhaps Pullman didn’t count on that.

At any rate, I wouldn’t have any qualms about going to see the movie. Christians will succeed in getting a great many more people to see the film than might otherwise have gone, though the billing will be very hard to ignore in any case.

Why see this film? Religious people, Christians especially, need to see how they are seen. I’ll wager most people won’t get the symbolism, just as they didn’t with Chronicles. They’ll enjoy the story as terrific narrative, and guess what? Atheism isn’t catching, like the common cold. You won’t have to take your spiritual vitamins to keep from contracting apostasy. You won’t have to sprinkle holy water on yourself to keep from falling into the abyss of unbelief.

How much garbage, on TV and elsewhere, have people consumed without the slightest thought for who made it or what messages they might have been assimilating?

But if, like me, you believe in the sacredness of the earth, then the joke is on Pullman. He might succeed where others have failed and reveal that when you pull the curtain of myth back far enough, the truest of the true is still there.

Bearing the Burden of Proof

I was in third grade when I had my first serious debate about God. It was in the lunchroom at Alanton Elementary, the year before desegregation, not that it had anything to do with the discussion. My opponent was a kid name Mark, a fellow Roman Catholic, smart as a whip and prim as a priest, with slick short dark hair and button up shirts. I liked button-up shirts, too. I had a holy aversion to pull-overs. Don’t ask me why. I was eight.

Mark was the same kid who started the only lunch riot in which I have ever taken part. “We want milk!” we demanded, slamming our fists in unison against the table top. We had our whole area going along, a couple dozen kids. The rebellion was stamped out swiftly and efficiently, however, the lunch monitor turning into a veritable Crassus crucifying the offenders against the wall for the rest of the period. But the stares that came our way were not stares of derision or jeering. They were looks of awe. We felt like heroes.

Crassus

I wonder what ever became of my friend Mark.

We debated the nature of God and the brotherhood of man (yes that antiquated, sexist concept). I don’t remember what our claims were or how we thought we knew what we were talking about at that age, but I remember we were pretty intense. I had a tendency to cow other people quickly with the force of my convictions. It gave me a sense of superiority that probably compensated for my pronounced lack of physical size or strength. But Mark, who was smaller even than me, would have none of it. I recall the pleasure I drew from having someone with which to argue. Because in the end, that was all we were doing.

As I learn more about atheists against theists and vice versa, I am becoming more convinced that arguing for its own sake tends to characterize a lot of the discourse. I mentioned something about this tendency before, I think. It’s almost as if either side is more interested in scoring imaginary points in an imaginary boxing match than they are in arriving at a faithful truth or two.

Toward the end of the second chapter of his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins takes the theists to task for sliding out from under their obligatory burden of proof. For those who don’t know, the Burden of Proof, as it is called, refers to the responsibility carried by the person opposing the status quo, or “the way things are.” The side that attacks the status quo is the side required to prove its case. In a court of law, under the “innocent until proven guilty” mantra, the assumption is in favor of the defendant (in most cases). In other words, the burden of proof lies with the prosecution, not with the defense. In fact, the defense usually recommends that the defendant keep his or her mouth shut in order not to give the prosecution any ideas. The prosecution must prove its case “beyond a reasonable doubt” in jury trials. This is common knowledge.

What is not so common knowledge is where to locate the burden of proof in debates that deal with abstract issues (All men are created equal) or questions of value (Captain Crunch is better than Fruit Loops) or questions of disputed fact (more than one person was involved in JFK’s assassination). The problem in these kinds of debates is that the status quo is under just as much debate as any of the other assumptions.

Dawkins wants to wrestle the status quo from the Theists. If they are going to declare that God exists, the burden of proof is on them. They have to prove it. So there. The status quo is that there is no deity, that the infinite universe bespeaks no such being and the assertion that some supreme intelligence put the stars out there is merely so much pop delusion. Pop delusion, by definition, cannot claim the status quo. Ding ding! Score a round for the atheists!

“Words, words, words,” to quote Hamlet, my favorite impotent fury.

Hamlet and Words

In the other corner, the theists claim that since God is unprovable, there is no need to prove His existence. Right to the gut, yeah, baby! Deal with that!

The fact is, in this debate, the status quo cannot be reliably located. The Burden of Proof rests squarely, not on one side, but on both. Theists do have to prove God’s existence. And Atheists do have to prove that the universe exists independently (Naturalism–or whatever they want to call the idea that scientifically observable stuff is all there is).

But can they? Is either side up to the task? The Noncognitivists (or ignostics–somewhat new to the scene) assume that neither side can prove its claims and that the entire discussion is therefore meaningless. Are these outsiders correct?

It does seem awfully easy, taking one side or the other, to dismantle the arguments presented by either one. The inherent absurdities, contradictions and general incoherence of the Naturalists have been dissected beautifully by people far more able than I (see C.S. Lewis Miracles, and Alvin Plantinga’s address on the topic.). And the arguments of the Theists are just as easily shown to have enormous gaps and leaps of logic. Get them in a corner and they resort to the “God is unprovable” chant.

What then? Is it just that neither group has discovered the silver bullet, the ultimate combination of ideas and proofs that will convince even the most doubtful?

The elephant in the room is the verifiability/falsifiability problem. The Noncognitivist claim is that what cannot be verified is meaningless. This smug assertion would be laughable if people weren’t so serious about it. It represents a classic case of abstraction obsession. The truth is that there is very little in our lives and in the universe at large that can be verified or falsified. Even propositional statements, which seem to form the core foundation of the “unknowing” philosophy, are merely symbolic representations of something else–achingly close to and desperately separated from reality itself. The “existence” of every proposition is perilously contingent, lacking its own quiddity. The artificial objectification and dissection of propositions (such as “God exists,”) is sorely misdirected at best and a sterile undertaking at worst. This is getting pretty technical here, and I apologize, so I’ll try to get back to more general thinking.

We are left with having to prove our positions as best we can. And so the debate goes on. And will continue to go on, because that is what we humans do. Those who seek conclusive proof one way or the other, however, will find themselves caught in a labyrinth with no exit. That labyrinth has proved to be the undoing of many people who have gone crazy in their search for certainty.

Is it possible, however, that the uncertainty is the key? Can we build on evidences that do not demand or bring us to certainty, but that bring us to a very real and exciting “probably”? I think so. But next I have to deal with the whole probability issue.

Sounding Roland’s Horn

Quoth Charles: “I hear the horn of Roland cry! He’d never sound it but in the thick of fight!” From The Song of Roland.

Way back in 1985 I was listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 on my cheap Emerson rip-off of a Sony Walkman (I was a poor college kid) when something I read in study hall made me guffaw aloud. It was from a book I was required to read at my small Bible college in Dallas, TX. The title of the book was One Nation Under God, by Christian activist Rus Walton (died in 1999).

I cannot recall the exact quote, but it said something very much to the effect that, aside from the Holy Bible, the United States Constitution was the most sacred text penned by men.

Yes, I was at a Christian Bible College and I was at that time a member of the exuberant Reagan Right, but Walton went too far for even me.

And Walton wasn’t the only one. We students were being spoon fed large helpings of Christian revisionist tripe. A thriving industry of these books and videos and tapes were rallying (mostly white) Christians with politically-charged historical material aimed at proving that the United States was a Christian nation founded by Christian men to be a Christian beacon in a pagan world. In short, the “US of A” was the new chosen people, tapped from on high to spread the Good News of God and Good Government to the rest of the planet. WIth Reagan, we did it with a twinkle in our eye, a toothy smile and big silos full of ICBMs.

Those were the glory days, but I wasn’t a lock-step member of the Right even then. Unfortunately for my ideological future I was a stickler for historical accuracy, as far as accuracy can be maintained, and I deeply resented the revisionism that ignored the fully human dimensions of our nation’s founding and the tendency to pull out selected quotations that made even avowed deists like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson appear as Bible-thumping televangelists. Hooey, I thought then. And I still think so.

That resentment carries over to RIchard Dawkins now, attempting to pull the same stunt in the first chapter of The God Delusion, but for the opposite cause.

I should preface the forthcoming spleen by saying that by attacking this all-too convenient straw man in Dawkins’ arguments, I am fully aware that it has nothing at all to do with his larger statements pertaining to the existence of God. I just need to get this out of my system.

What set me off was Dawkins’ statement, “Certainly their writings on religion in their own time leave me in no doubt that most of them (the Founding Fathers) would have been atheists in ours” (43). Then he proceeds to pull out a lovely array of mostly isolated, non-contextual quotes from Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Madison demonstrating the deep-seated suspicion these men carried of “Christianity” and “religion” in general. One discovers quickly that these quotes seem largely drawn from Christopher Hitchens, Dawkin’s good friend and fellow devangelist, author of another popular book, God is Not Great as well as a revisionist biography of Jefferson.

Jefferson

A few pages down the road, Dawkins vilifies an argument Bertrand Russell (one of history’s greatest atheists) called “the parable of the celestial teapot.” This is the use of claims impossible to disprove, such as, “there is a teapot in orbit around the sun between Earth and Mars.” If I were to stand smugly and challenge anyone to disprove my statement, I would smile for a long time because the claim is patently unarguable. What interests me is that Dawkins on page 52 attacks this tendency among Christians (and other religious people) and makes the exact sort of teapot claim on page 43.

For that is precisely what his claim about the temporal-shift atheistic Founding Fathers is–a cheap shot as unprovable as it is proof-proof. And, as such, it is worthless.

More helpful is his claim that the Founding Fathers were much more secularists than they were religious. For some men, this is readily provable, particularly for Jefferson and Franklin. But it would not describe either Madison or Adams, if one is to judge by their own non-selective and extensive writings. I cannot in this limited venue go beyond that unsupported claim, but hopefully in a larger context I can address that.

Dawkins, as a British scientist, can be forgiven I think for not being terribly well read in American history. I really don’t say that as condescendingly as it sounds, but the fact remains that he should at least have read his Tocqueville. Contemporaries worship (if I may use the expression) at the feet of Jefferson and Franklin, who are represented fondly as the most forward-thinking men of their age, and one can certainly accept that these two, at least, had embraced more of the French Enlightenment than any of their peers. The French Enlightenment figures were far more critical of the entrenched religious institutions of their time. Jefferson and Franklin were both lionized in France, where they lived for some time as diplomats.

Given short shrift is the Scottish Enlightenment, a much more diverse intellectual field of English speakers with whom many of the Founding Fathers were quite familiar, Scottish works dotting colonial bookshelves. Among the Scots were a broad range of lights, from skeptics like David Hume to pragmatists like Adam Smith and on to moral thinkers like George Campbell. The ideas of most of America’s Founding Fathers can be seen to reflect the Scottish thinkers more readily than those of the French (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and the atheist d’Holbach).

David Hume

Also forgotten, for whatever reason, is that the 18th century had more than its fair share of religious zealots who wanted the United States to be a Christian nation, and who were loud in their advocacy. One has only to read the lively debates surrounding the adoption of the Constitution to hear those voices, voices that were eventually overcome by saner thinkers.

That the United States was founded by religious men with a very high sense of moral and ethical rectitude is undeniable, and a group of atheists, I am sorry to say, would not have been up to the task. That’s a claim almost as big in the opposite direction as Dawkins’, but I’ll stand by it out of sheer cussedness and defend it if I must.

That the United States was NOT founded as a Christian nation is also undeniably true. Many, if not most of the Founding Fathers were what one might call “Ciceronian” Christians, that is, they were faithful church goers who practiced strong community values, values derived largely from a synthesis of biblical ideals and Ciceronian ethics (his “On Duties” was one of the most widely read and followed works of the time). Ciceronian ethics defined the virtuous, educated citizen who devoted himself to the local body politic. In fact, Cicero coined the term “communitas” to describe this concept. This practical synthesis was the rock bed foundation of the constitutions of the individual states that became the foundation in turn of the federal constitution. And, for better or worse, that particular synthesis has all but evaporated, which is one reason it’s so hard for people like Dawkins and Hitchens to understand, not to mention Robertson and Falwell.

What both uninformed groups have been doing instead is to sound Roland’s horn, metaphorically speaking. The Song of Roland is as terrific a piece of propaganda as was ever crafted to justify a religious war against the infidel, the Muslims in the Holy Land. Read it and you’ll see how it fits. Ironically, the central character of Roland is mentioned only once in historical record, as a minor military figure in charge of a supply train that was ambushed and wiped out by Basque guerrillas around the year 800. Yet, by sheer artistry, he becomes the heroic centerpiece, the poster-child as it were, for the kind of righteous fervor that sent the ignorant in their masses to war. The writer of the immortal poem featuring Roland made use of a hero who never actually existed in the form presented.

Today Roland’s horn is a tinny horn, though, representing a logical fallacy known as appeal to false authority. Perhaps I should not have spent so much time and effort on it, since, as I said before, it’s not really central in any way to Dawkins’ argument. I apologize if it was wasted effort.