Anxiety, Healing and the God of Provision

These are thoughts inspired by a wonderful sermon I heard by Luke Powery of Duke Divinity School.  I appreciated everything about his sermon, but I was left thinking that there were still some unaswered questions.  Listen to the sermon first, if you like:   Calvin College Symposium on Worship--Luke Powery Sermon, Saturday.

Succinctly put, my internal response to Powery's sermon was, "There's a deeper aspect to this that I'm not quite hearing."  Powery masterfully demonstates how anxiety is an enemy to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.  The more anxiety, the less room for faith, hope, and love.  The less room for God, and the less room for love of neighbor.  He also talks about the "contagious" aspect of anxiety, how anxiety can spread from person to person if you aren't careful.  In addition, he menions the addictive side of anxiety--how anxiety can become so all-consuming and central to one's life that it actually becomes idolatrous--that it displaces God at the center, and people actually go out of their way to maintain their high level of anxiety.  Why?  Because they've become so accustomed to it, they don't know how to live without it.

To me, that's not terribly shocking.  Most of us, when doing significant psychological and spiritual work that entails a major change of life, both interiorly and exteriorly experience the jarring cognative dissonance of adjusting to a "new normal".  Sometimes this "new normal" is so foreign it feels wrong for a while, or in some cases, people feel a loss of identity--they are so used to thinking of x dysfunctional or broken aspect of themselves as being a part of who they really are, they don't know what to do when that aspect disappears, changes, or becomes healed.  There is a period of time in which you have to fumble around until you adjust to the "new you" who is actually just a "more healed you".  In any case, I think I've seen lots of people "worship at the altar of anxiety" as Powery says, sometimes in more or less superficial ways.  He says this can ruin your relationship with God because it really is idolatry and you can't serve two masters.  I have seen it take over personalities and compromise one's sense of identity because x person cannot imagine not living without being the one in control of the cosmos (and I've seen that in myself).  His is the more serious point, though--he's describing one who has really lost the battle of idolatry and is in some serious need of rescuing.
   
Powery goes on to contrast the picture of the anxious soul with the picture of the Providing God.  God is the one who has given himself to us in eucharistic gift and eucharistic sacrifice--he has given us himself, he has guarded us against the tyranny of the devil.  So why don't we believe him?  Why do we have such little faith in the presence of such a great God?  Why do we end up having "theological amnesia", as Powery puts it?  That, by the way, is a great way of describing what happens to someone who is truly consumed by anxiety--the anxiety is just so overwhelming it swallows up the knowledge of God and annhilates it in the anxious soul.  We just don't and can't remember anymore who God said he is and what he is like when we're drowning in anxiety.
 
But why the drowning aspect?  It is one thing to be embroiled in conflict with anxiety, and quite another thing to be overwhelmed to the point of drowing in it.  (This isn't an altogether inaccurate description of what some composes some forms of depression.)  Yet another, perhaps, to give up and just fall down and worship the false god.
 
I am sure there are any number of explanations and some of them are probably just fairly cut-and-dry theological accounts of both idolatry and pride.  When we are at the center of our own cosmos and self-reliance is our default mode, frankly, anxiety is just realism.  Fearfulness and anxiety are normal responses to a chaotic and unfriendly world . . . if human beings are the ones with the most chance of having control over the world.  It takes a lot of work to root out this idea and replace it with a lived doctrine of creation, where God is the God of order and the origin of all things--such that he is in control by virtue of being the Creator, and by virtue of the world being ontologically dependent on him for existence.  (I will explain that more in another post sometime.)
 
But there's also a side to this that is both about formation and development, and is also relational, and for that I speak out of my own experience of reflecting on God's provision for several years.  I've known for a very long time that I've had issues with God's provision.  When I was younger--say in my early college years--I used to have this invisible roller-coaster ride with God that it took me a long time to see properly, and then begin to understand.  It would go something like this: I would find myself drifting away from God (in the emotional sense) and becoming angry with him.  I would avoid prayer and Scripture reading until it made me miserable.  At some point, perhaps a few weeks later, I would inevitably find myself at Psalm 104, weeping, with little understanding as to why.  And the cycle would repeat itself, and did repeat itself about twice a year for two years or so as I slowly began to realize that I didn't really believe in God's provision.

In my heart, what I really believed is that I was left on my own to cope with all the craziness of life.  While most of the time I had enough optimism and naivety and natural resilence to find this exciting and adventuresome . . . deep down inside, my soul was suffering because God never made it to cruise about the cosmos on it's own.  We are made for God, and we are made to live with God, from the deepest and most inward and invisible parts of our hearts to the most external and visible parts of our lives.  Every moment is suppose to be caught up in both dependence on and partnership with God, and while I didn't understand either very well, I was especially clueless about the former.

At some point after college, I went to a parish retreat that was a real step forward in healing in this area.  Unbeknownst to me, there was a real blockage in my ability to understand God's love for me and his provision because "deep down inside" I thought he was unwilling to help me and resented my dependence on him.  I had picked that up from some unfortunate family dynamics, which brings me to my point about development and formation.  From an early age, we all learn what "love" is from our families of origins--and sometimes those families of origins have either broken or wicked definitions of love, which we absorb in childhood without the ability to reflect on what we absorb.  We carry that into adulthood and oftentimes we project these definitions onto God--and sometimes even, we hate God because we imagine he is like the earthly people who failed to love us in the ways that we needed to be loved, or failed to provide for us in the ways that we needed to be provided for.  Oftentimes, we don't even know this is going on, and we certainly don't understand the maelstorm of anxiety and anger that rises from needs being unmet and for generally being maladjusted to the world around us.

The answer to this I think is both theological and experiential--like most healing.  Central to this is genuine reconciliation with the True God, which involves renouncing all the idols and all the lies that consume our imagination about our Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who love us very much.  That task really is theological, because it is only the study of theology that can correct our ideas about him.  But this is also relational--for obvious reasons.  If you've been "friends" with someone who you thought was a jerk for years, and the friendship was equal parts tolerance and affection, only to find out after ages and ages that the person wasn't the jerk you thought he was and was in reality a great deal better and nice than you had imagined . . . well, that would change the nature of your relationship with that person.  It would open up things because you'd be able to trust that person more.

One could sum up my supplementum to Powery in this way.  There is an element to combating anxiety that is the cognitive side of faith: we are all in need of theological therapy at one point or another, and "believing the right thing" can make a difference.  But we also need a deeper change of heart, a deeper reconciliation with God, and a deeper experience of God's provision: it is these things that result in true healing for those who are drowning in anxiety, and this is a costly transformation that is the work of years in relationship with the Lord.  And we don't talk enough about the spiritual work that takes years to accomplish.

The Spirit of Martyrdom

        Is this a slender proof of the impotence of death, do you think? Or is it a slight indication 

        of the Savior's victory over it, when boys and young girls who are in Christ look beyond            

        this present life and train themselves to die? Every one is by nature afraid of death and 

        of bodily dissolution; the marvel of marvels is that he who is enfolded in the faith of the cross                 

        despises this natural fear and for the sake of the cross is no longer cowardly in face of it.

              ---Athanasius, On the Incarnation, ch. 5 "The Resurrection"

This post is written as something of a reflection on the killing of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida this past November.  After learning that the shooter was pleading self-defense, claiming that the teenagers were armed and that his life was in danger, although there is at the moment no evidence that this is the case, I began the principle parts of this reflection.  A few other elements of the killing also got my attention.  (1) The killer Michael Dunn was 46, well-employed, apparently a collector of guns, while the victim was a 17 year old.  (2) Michael Dunn was also white and the victim (and possibly his friends?) were black.  (3) Dunn fired 8 rounds total--there is no evidence of return fire from the alleged-armed victims.  (4)  Dunn was under the influence of some amount of alcohol, though whether enough to impair his reasoning is unclear. (5)  The shooting happened at night, in the dark.

I claim no particular insight or knowledge "about what really happened that night", but as an outsider, it is easy to imagine what could have happened, and what I suspect did happen, though I freely admit that my personal suspicions are not very valuable and do not really matter in this particular case.  But for the sake of my reflection, let us for the moment assume that my imaginative suspicions about "what really happened" is correct.  

I imagine the following:  I imagine that Dunn was slightly intoxicated--enough to make him suggestible, perhaps a bit sleepy, perhaps careless, perhaps more prone to anger because of whatever amount of alcohol he consumed.  I imagine that he was in a strange place (in Jacksonville, not his home town), and going to a liquor store and came across a car full of black teenagers listening to loud (rap) music and that he became unduly apprehensive and perhaps even paranoid because of all these factors.  I imagine he thought he had a right and a duty to defend himself and use lethal force if necessary (because who carries a handgun who doesn't believe that's true?).  I imagine he had a nasty altercation that involved lots of yelling and anger and curses from both parties, and that in his anger and partly racially motivated fear, and in the dark in a strange place . . . I imagine that Dunn heard Jordan Davis and his friends threatening him, and took them literally, and that Dunn imagined that Davis had a gun and was going to try to kill him.  So Dunn does what is necessary of course, shoots and kills Davis, and pops off eight rounds total just to make sure he had vanquished his foe, whose status as a deadly enemy was almost entirely fabricated by emotion and imagination.  That is what I imagine.

But regardless as to what I imagine, what I see is fear: fear of death.  Fear of losing one's life to someone else.  Fear of being robbed of what one deserves, fear of dying in a worthless altercation (better make sure--I'll get him before he gets me!  I won't let them take me that way!)  I also see a judgment made--better to kill than to be killed.  Better to protect one's own.  Better to exercise one's power where one can and fight for one's rights.  Better to be a killer than a coward or a fool.  I see the world's perspective on life and death.

What I suspect in Dunn, I've heard right out in other people in other ways: a self-protectiveness and devotion to self-love (incurvatus in se, perhaps) that chills me.  What chills me more is when I hear it in Christians, for it is the warning bell of a love of God and neighbor that has grown cold.  I hear it in the obnoxious birth-certificate "controversy" with Obama.  People absurdly hate him both for his liberal policies and accuse him of being a Muslim at the same time--don't they know that if he were a Muslim fundamentalist, he would not be a liberal in any sense?  But they are so ignorant that all they can do is fuse ignorant fear with ignorant fear--they have the now socially incorrect fear of black people and the socially ambiguous fear of fundamentalist Islam--and the masses to which this fear appeals know next to nothing about these things and no one who is either black or Muslim.  Thus, they join them both together into one great fear.

I hear it in the fearful bigoted speech of people who are "afraid" of black people or more often now, "afraid" of people from the Middle East.  I imagine if I lived in a different part of the United States, I would also hear about "immigrants", but thankfully I don't hear about that.  But the fact of the matter is, if I am afraid of someone else and have not conquered that fear with love and courage, I am going to treat someone or a class of people very badly.  History bears that out, though I am not presently going to prove my case by history.

What most of these small, fearful bigoted people (and heavens, perhaps I am one of them at times?!) have in common is that they want security in life: they want to secure what is theirs, secure what they have.  They want to secure their rights, their protection, their prosperity, their well-being before "those people" take it away.  What a miser or a miserably selfish person seeks to pursue for herself alone, a bigot pursues for "us" and "ours".  A selfish person only loves himself enough to act, a bigot has got far enough in love of neighbor to love their nearest kin alone.  A selfish person will sacrifice for no one but herself, but a bigot will sacrifice for his kind and not for what is not perceived to be his kind.  Thus, a very imperfect love has the capacity for terrible vice and sometimes terrible evil.  

My family particularly is prone to "tribalism"--they love their own and extend to their own every grace, courtesy, kindness, generosity--but little of this can be seen outside the family unit.  In fact, given the charity shown to insiders, it is really shocking to see how "outsiders" are treated.  It is rarely natural for us to extend this self-giving, other-preferring  love to the full extent to which Christ meant for it to be extended.  And by chance we learn to love all our neighbors, all the kindreds of the earth very well for Christ's sake, noticing and taking note and regard for his likeness in them all . . . Jesus has still asked from us a step further: we also must love our enemies.  It is this love that Christ exemplifies most fully in the Gospel--he loves those who betray him and those who put him to death.  Having loved his own, he loves them to the end, even if still they walk away from him or stab him in the back for 30 pieces of silver, or personally see to it that he dies in shame on a tree in agony as a criminal.

   

But back to bigotry.  It is this preference for the things that belong to "us" and "ours", and especially the security that we feel we are owed or entitled to by life or by the government or by the moral law or by whatever justification we seek and find that helps us justify some of our least Christ-like behaviors.  Because security under the perception of threat from a group that is "other" will make people do all sorts of crazy things that they ought not do.  It is the combination of "threat" and "other" ("not-me") that lets either a lone person or a nation think about preemptive strikes and "getting him before he gets me".  And the conviction that I (or we) deserve my own life and security is what makes self-defense necessary.  The one who deserves his life and his rights naturally feels that he must cling to it, and that it is only right to defend it.  If one is so thoughtlessly devoted to oneself and one's own good and one's own deserts and consumed with oneself, how is one to put one's own self aside to love one's neighbor, or more importantly, one's enemy? 

The Christian has been made free from self-defense.  We are not required to defend ourselves.  My life was once given to me in Creation by a gift.  Robbed from me by an enemy, and restored to me by a Friend.  But in restoring my life to me, my Friend did it in such a way that I need never cling to it again.  Jesus gives us Life Eternal that cannot be taken from us by anything or anyone, and thus we are freed to hold on to our own lives very lightly.  I don't have to cling to my life and protect my rights, because my true life is hidden with Christ on high and will one day be revealed in splendor.  What we see now isn't everything that is to be seen.

Tertullian once said that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.  It is my prayer that the spirit of the martyrs would fill the Church, so that it would be very obvious that we don't need to cling to our lives and our security like the world and our flesh tell us we must.  Athanasius was once able to use the lives of the martyrs as proof that Christ's Resurrection had truly taken place, and that the power of death had truly been beaten.  The saints, the people in the Church, were martyred so often and showed such disdain for dying (which normal people are afraid of) the only logical explanation, says Athanasius, is that something has truly changed.  That with Christ there is something truly different, and that difference is freedom from fear of death and being set free to truly live.  Athanasius (contra mundum!) writes,

        Even so, if anyone still doubts the conquest of death, after so many proofs and so many martyrdoms in      

        Christ and such daily scorn of death by His truest servants, he certainly does well to marvel at so great 

        a thing, but he must not be obstinate in unbelief and disregard of plain facts. No, he must be like the 

        man who wants to prove the property of the asbestos, and like him who enters the conqueror's 

        dominions to see the tyrant bound. He must embrace the faith of Christ, this disbeliever in the conquest

        of death, and come to His teaching. Then he will see how impotent death is and how completely 

        conquered. Indeed, there have been many former unbelievers and deriders who, after they became 

        believers, so scorned death as even themselves to become martyrs for Christ's sake.

        

        (29) If, then, it is by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ that death is trampled underfoot, it is 

        clear that it is Christ Himself and none other Who is the Archvictor over death and has robbed it of its 

        power. Death used to be strong and terrible, but now, since the sojourn of the Savior and the death and 

        resurrection of His body, it is despised; and obviously it is by the very Christ Who mounted on the 

        cross that it has been destroyed and vanquished finally. When the sun rises after the night and the whole 

        world is lit up by it, nobody doubts that it is the sun which has thus shed its light everywhere and driven 

        away the dark. Equally clear is it, since this utter scorning and trampling down of death has ensued

        upon the Savior's manifestation in the body and His death on the cross, that it is He Himself

        Who brought death to nought and daily raises monuments to His victory in His own disciples . . . .

        If you see with your own eyes men and women and children, even, thus welcoming death for the sake 
        of Christ's religion, how can you be so utterly silly and incredulous and maimed in your mind as not to 

        realize that Christ, to Whom these all bear witness, Himself gives the victory to each, making death

        completely powerless for those who hold His faith and bear the sign of the cross? No one in his senses 

        doubts that a snake is dead when he sees it trampled underfoot, especially when he knows how savage      
        it used to be; nor, if he sees boys making fun of a lion, does he doubt that the brute is either dead or 

        completely bereft of strength. These things can be seen with our own eyes, and it is the same with the 

        conquest of death. Doubt no longer, then, when you see death mocked and scorned by those who 

        believe in Christ, that by Christ death was destroyed, and the corruption that goes with it resolved and 

        brought to end.

I pray, not for the martyrdom of blood (though this happens today so much in our Church, albeit not so much in the United States), but for the "white martyrdom", the bloodless martyrdom, that the monastics went out in the desert to seek.  That the people of God would be joined to Christ in a death like his, so that they also may join in his Resurrection and shine the light of God's glory and freedom and power over the world and over death.  May our freedom and our life in Christ be so powerful that death and the world and the flesh are seen to be scorned and mocked by our people.  May the light of the glory of God shine in our faces as we are changed into the likeness of Christ's own face and image.

Ecclesiology Begins in the Heart of Love

Aristotle thought that young people (under the age of 30) shouldn't study philosophy because they could not be wise or practiced in the virtues.  When I first learned that as an undergraduate studying philosophy, I at first thought that terribly unfair, and I generally countered his thought with this verse from Psalm 119: "I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.  I understand more than the elders, for I keep your precepts."  And of course Paul told Timothy, "Let no one despise you because of your youth."  It never occurred to me that the Psalmist's words and St. Paul's words were rarely applicable.  For a long time I believed everyone surely must love wisdom . . . they just aren't very good at it, that's all!

Also in college I learned that some students of theology were irritating and perhaps Aristotle had met young people like them, and that was why he thought the young should not study grave subjects.  These young people were irritating to me for very particular reasons: they were more interested in the way in which advanced-sounding subjects like "systematic theology" made them appear intelligent than they were in actual learning.  They were more in love with their egos than they were in love with the study of God.  I found this very difficult to understand--for although I was no stranger to love of ego, it seemed stupid to study theology to show-off.  Why not study something less important?  The love and study of God seemed too important to trifle with.

It occurs to me even now that we can all study theology or write theology or advocate for theology for all the wrong reasons.  We can do it with something other than love in mind.  We can study our books and write our papers and have nothing of real value in mind--we can completely miss the service of the Church and of God in favor of something else.  What a waste that would be.

I was praying the other day and decided to do something I hadn't done in a little while: use some Ignatian methods of prayer with imagination.  As I often do, I "imagined" Jesus with me and waited for him to say or do something.  To my surprise, he didn't do any of the things I normally expect from him, instead he just sat there, slumped over, and clearly sad.  I waited for a moment, and I think I said something like, "So . . . what's up?"  His response was, "I'm sad about my church.  I am sad about the brokenness of my church."

I couldn't really think of anything to say in response.  Of course Jesus is sad about the brokenness of his church.  One would have to be a fool not to be sad, at least on some level, about the brokenness of the church.  But on that particular day, I wasn't feeling terribly sad about the denominational aspect of the church's brokenness, so I was a bit surprised that He said something about it.

It took me the course of the day to realize that Jesus wasn't really talking about the divisions between denominations--as heartbreaking as that is.  He was actually talking about the kind of brokenness that means people shut out the love of God.  While I hadn't been doing very much reflecting lately about ecumenical issues in the church, I had been consumed with thought--and some grief--about the ways in which people don't want to be loved.  How much some people (Christians) don't want to be loved.  How much they ignore or turn away from God's provision of love, or his own outstretched arms of love.  How much they would rather have things other than love.  How much they are consumed by idolatrous desires for approval, for acceptance, for importance in the eyes of their brothers and sisters in Christ or of the world, and how much they simply are not able to believe and receive the gifts God wants to give them.  How often are our hearts cold and hard because we don't want the good things God has for us?  We'd rather play around with our addictions and diseases and our own death than be healed and forgiven and accepted and loved.  We play in death all the time.  And that makes Jesus sad, yet we do this all the time and the adherence to saying the Nicene rather than the Apostle's Creed will not compel you otherwise.

So . . . it occurred to me that in all my thoughts about ecumenism, I had really forgotten about something the same way my college irritants had forgotten that they were studying theology because God is beautiful and worthy to be loved and adored.  They had forgotten that worship is at the heart of all theology, and I had forgotten or never quite knew that love is at the heart of ecclesiology and ecumenism.  Theologians occasionally differ (peaceably I think) as to whether they say that the Church was born out of the blood and water which came when Christ's heart was pierced by the spear or whether she was born when the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost.  Either way, the Church is born when the love of God is poured out for us, the Holy Spirit is Love, and the blood poured out for us at Calvary is love.  The Church is born of Love, of the Bridegroom for the future Bride, and our meditations both on the nature of the church and on the ecumenical call to peace and reconciliation must begin with the identity of the Church as She who is Loved, the Beloved of God, the loved one in the Song of Songs.

I was thinking about ways in which I wish the ACNA would structure its conversations on the controversial matter of the ordination of women.  What I would really like to see is our Church come together about our identity first.  And I would like to see us come together in a way that is real and tangible, not just paying lip service to things we are supposed to believe.  I would like to have us have theological conversations in a matter befitting to Christians.  I would like to see them begin and end in love--knowing that the Church exists as living witness and proof of God's love, born out of his love, and born to the great purpose of one day being united to him in perfect wholeness, perfect peace, and perfect joy.  I would like to see a celebration of the nature of the Church as one loved by God, in which we are all striving to do what we can to show that love to one another.  And I would like to see us commit to love one another deeply from the heart, and to stop having theological conversations until we have done the first duty of loving our neighbors.  How can we reason about the things of God if we will not obey him?  And if we hate and resent our brothers and sisters about such small things, and intend to quarrel about power and doctrine, what good is it to pretend to talk to one another?  I want us to love one another first, and settle questions of theology later.  Maybe that means a lot of healing and reconciliation first, I imagine it means growth in trusting God to settle things rather than giving into our own fears and anxieties about what will happen if someone else does something or believes something we think is wrong or unjust.  I would like to see Jesus Heal in our Church, and offer that healing to our world.  I would like to see us awake to our identity in Christ and offer the world an escape from worshiping dead idols.

Love, real love, is heartbreaking.  It is hard and difficult and looks like the Cross and not like the Hallmark channel.  I think really learning how to love our neighbors as ourselves--or perhaps just beginning to love our neighbors as ourselves means the destruction of a whole lot of the "person" I think I am--the false identity, the false refuge of self I have created for myself in which I can hide.  Love will break you down and break you apart and overturn everything that seems right to you (Jesus died and the apostles didn't understand it at all), but Love turns the kingdoms of the world upside down and puts the right Man on the throne.  I really hope that the ACNA takes up the mantle of calling Anglican Christians and especially Anglican Christian leaders to the humble, patient, inglorious calling of love rather than to whatever thing the Episcopal church was seeking after for the last fifty years.  Was she searching for acceptance for the world, for recognition, for power, for relevance?  I don't really know, but I think her face was turned to the world and away from God.  If she had sought those things in God, she might have been weak and despised in the ways of the world, but strong and mighty to the casting down of strongholds in the name and power and will of God.  I hope we have the courage to embrace the latter destiny rather than the former.  I hope we have the courage to embrace shame and distress and irrelevance and smallness because we are so sure of ourselves in God, and so sure we are loved by Him, and chosen, and called according to his purposes.  We certainly can't do it without his love.  And if we don't know we are possessed by the God who is Love, we don't really have anything, and we don't really know anything, and we have forfeited our identity and mission as the Church.

Why not enact an ecclesiology and a call to unity and a call to theological conversation based on 1 Corinthians 13:4-7: "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."  The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live out these things in fullness and in perfection and impart their bounty to us: we need to be about the business of receiving all that God is, so we may give him away to every one we meet.

Wonder, Worship, and the Imagination . . . and Dr. Who

I made a sketchy deal with my good friend Rebbiejaye the other night. I think there might have been whiskey involved on her end, but I have no such excuse--I don't drink and never have. At a friend's birthday party we somehow got on the topic of the wonderfulness of fiction and the imagination and how essential fantasy and science-fiction are to forming one's conception of God, blah, blah, blah, and she looks at me expectantly and says, "That's why we have to agree to write one fiction book for every non-fiction book. Deal?" I opened my mouth and stuck out my hand to seal the deal before my brain caught up to my excitement about the conversation. I ended up hemming and hawing and dithering a bit about how I tend to have extremely long fiction projects and how I didn't know if I could keep up with that production speed. But I found I believed in what she said so much that with a gasped, "with the Lord's help" (I think I was cringing and gritting my teeth at the same time) I sealed the deal. "Deal," I said firmly. "You know what that means, don't you?"

"What does that mean?" she replied.

"It means we'll really be like the Inklings." I say "really" because Rebecca and I have been in love with the life of the "Inklings"--C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others--since we were in undergraduate together. I read the biographical book The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter back in high school and went green with envy at reading about the life of people who spent much of their time in "imaginative academia." I dreamed of cozy philosophical conversations around a fireplace before I had ever studied philosophy and of writing stories that really mattered before I really understood what was important about stories. (One is always learning more about such things.) But it certainly is amusing when life catches up with dreams. In high school I really had no idea what the life of a writer or an academician might look like--PhDs don't exactly run in my family--but something about it fired my imagination.

Fast forward about ten years and I find myself in my last year of a master's of divinity program after having studied philosophy and theology in my undergraduate degree pondering PhD programs and making deals with my friends about writing fiction. How some things do stay the same! One thing that has remained constant in my life is the need I have to retain a sense of wonder about the cosmos in which I find myself living and a sense of how imagination influences my ability to think philosophically and theologically and my ability to relate to God at all.

Mystery is a key concept in Christianity. If you cannot understand mystery--the mystery of God, the mystery of salvation, the mystery of sin, even--you will have no room for the Trinitarian God of Christianity or anything he's up to either in the Scriptures or in your own life. And "mystery" does not mean theologically what it means in common parlance. Usually when modern Westerners use the term "mystery" they mean something that has yet to be explained but that undoubtedly will be explained by someone who is very clever.  People read mystery novels or watch movies or television or even go to dinner plays. But this is not at all what the word means in the context of God, the church, sin, and the world. Here, "mystery" means the ineffable--something that is in fact intelligible, inherently logical or able to be understood, but also inherently incommunicable or incomprehensible to human beings, i.e., possible to be understood, but not by us homo sapiens. Thus theologians will say that God is "intelligible" but incomprehensible and this isn't simple nonsense. One could sum up the book of Job by saying that it is a book devoted to capturing a good man's very real struggle with the mysteries of human life--both the beautiful ones and the ugly ones. Job was found to be more righteous with his friends because he could name the mystery and wasn't afraid to be angry about all the apparent contradictions of human experience. His friends were rebuked because they tried to pretend that the mysterious was comprehensible and easily managed.

Heretics in the early church provide us especially great examples of people who sought to explain too much, to have everything figured out, neatly categorized and easily referenced, to have God in control and nicely inside their philosophical systems--they were people who lost sight of the mystery of God: of God's everlasting capacity to surprise us, to go beyond our imagination, to exceed everything we could ask or imagine. What's more, when humans beings lose the ability to accept and respond to mystery, they lose the ability to be flexible and to cope with the depths of goodness and the depths of tragedy in their own lives and the lives of others.  Wonder, I think, is our response to the presence of the ineffable, the mysterious.  Wonder, I think tends to move in one of two directions: when the thing of mystery is seen as beautiful or good, we respond to mystery with love and adoration and extreme attentiveness.  When the thing of mystery is seen as something bad, we respond with horror or hatred.  In either case, wonder and mystery take us beyond the every-day and the humdrum and into something deeper.

On a more personal note, I wither and die when I lose touch with wonder. I fall out of touch with the world, my calling, my happiness. Things become dull and grey and I can't really function all that well. The petals of my flower come to bits and fall off and I conclude of the universe, "it loves me not." I imagine that many people do not have such a dramatic reaction to losing their sense of wonder, but it is nonetheless a discouraging thing.

But what does one do when the world suddenly contracts into something explainable, predictable and entirely two-dimensional?  How does one recapture a sense of wonder that has flitted away or get back  to seeing what is more than the eye can see?  There are many things one could do or say about this, no doubt. I will relate to you a story of a couple of different ways in which God jump-started my imagination in the past year and dwell for a bit on the second of those encounters.

The first part of my saga began last fall when The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader came out in theaters. There are many things to say about this movie, perhaps, some good, some critical--one could note the insertion of a completely extraneous "video game" style plot, for instance--and spend some time grumbling about how "Jack" would not be pleased. However, the thing that struck me the most, the thing that they got absolutely right was the sense of wonder at being in Narnia, especially seen through the eyes of Lucy Pevensie. The movie is visually stunning like her predecessors and very nicely captures the magic and beauty of life in Narnia--which is fully half the charm of Lewis' stories in the first place. Watching Voyage of the Dawn Treader reminded me that all of life was supposed to be beautiful and mysterious and imaginative and more than meets the eye. It started me questing to recover an attitude of wonder that I had lost.

But the thing that has truly inspired me over the last few months is the unexpected acquisition of another beloved science-fiction show, that is, the long-time British favourite: Dr. Who.

I have to make a few caveats. One, I gave up on science-fiction television after The X-Files went off the air in 2002. Little did I know about what was happening on the Sci-Fi channel--I had no idea about Stargate and I somehow missed Farscape and Firefly. (I also had a grudge against Joss Whedon for many reasons.  I have more or less repented.  Mostly.) It wasn't until I started seminary--ironically--that I picked up Stargate and with it some of the more recent sci-fi shows. Second, I was prejudiced against Dr. Who since high school: one of my friends who had notoriously bad taste in movies and television absolutely adored Dr. Who and I knew that meant I needed to avoid it.

Third caveat: when I saw the pilot of the reboot "Rose" I was not impressed. Evil plastic creatures enlivened by an evil plastic monster bent on enslaving humankind was not conversion material. I was fully prepared to be only "tolerant" of Dr. Who, but I been introduced to it with a group of fellow sci-fi nerds, so we ended up watching the second episode "The End of the World" which in which the principle characters of the show, the Doctor and Rose, are transported 5,000,000,000 years in the future to the day the sun goes nova and destroys the earth.

Just from watching the trailer I knew I was in completely new science-fiction territory. No other show has done this, I said to myself. In fact, no other show would do this. Its too risky--if you do something this dramatic and important and absolutely insane you feel you have to reduplicate your success. With few exceptions (Joss Whedon I now recognize as exceptional in this regard), science-fiction/fantasy shows tend to hoard their creative energy for the grand finale. There is reservation and moderation about the futures or possibilities that writers envision in order to maintain suspension of belief. You don't want to ruin something by doing something completely unbelievable.

But somehow through some magic charm or muse Dr. Who manages to break every single "rule" of the industry and get away with it. Dr. Who is a show whose creative potential seems absolutely limitless--they will tell a story about absolutely anything they can think of and somehow it always seems plausible. Somehow at the beginning of the episode and at the end of the episode I find myself saying, "Why not? Why not? How would I know? Why couldn't that be true?" And then, as the 9th Doctor likes to say, "Fantastic!"

Part of the reason why Dr. Who works so well is because of the attitude of the principle characters--especially the Doctor, but also Rose--in the first couple seasons of the reboot. The characters know the world they live in is absolutely mad and full of every kind of possibility and they are bursting at the seems with excitement that they have a chance to encounter it all. No one pretends like the things that happen aren't insane--they are insane, delightfully and sometimes dangerously so--and that's the whole point of being happy about the adventure in the first place.  And they understand the value of a "relative good".  Aristotle thought that shame was a relatively good thing in a world of people whose behavior was oftentimes blameworthy--feeling shame in certain contexts is better than not feeling shame.  C. S. Lewis once said something similar about "pain"--pain is God's "megaphone to rouse a deaf world" and thus is sometimes good.  I think he would agree that adventure and especially danger share that same status--in this mad world, its absolutely insane to encounter no danger.  Thus the Doctor and Rose are absolutely right to pursue such adventure in the face of many dangers. 

I think this taps into something we are sometimes hesitant to believe about what it means to be human. Being human involves being a part of a world in which absolutely anything could happen at any time. It involves living in a cosmos that we are hardly on the cusp of understanding the least detail of and it involves facing the unknown at every moment. We struggle mightily but labor in vain to form a construct of the universe in which everything is easily understandable and nicely under our control, but deep down inside we know that even if the cosmos is not a chaos, it is certainly not under our control and we really don't know what's going on in most of it. Modern life with all of its industrial abstraction sometimes provides for us an illusion of a life as a contained system capable of mastery . . . but that's really just boring. Life gets really interesting and really beautiful when we see the mystery and the unknown as beautiful and get excited about it.

This is why Dr. Who is such good stuff and such food for the imagination and for the soul. My current favorite set of characters are (cliche, I know) Rose and the 10th Doctor (played by David Tennant). What is absolutely riveting about these two is their mutual joy in seeing what the universe has to offer. They are constantly beset by danger and adventure as they roam about time and relative dimensions in space, but somehow they have a sense that in spite of the danger it is worth it to see what life has to offer. The Doctor is a person who has spent hundreds of years roaming the cosmos and he is still thrilled to death with the newness of it all, and his friendship with Rose consists in the fact that they love it in the same way.

There is one scene that sum up nicely the sort of spirit of adventure that is at the soul of Dr. Who. One is a conversation at the end of the episode, "the Christmas Invasion" between Rose and the Doctor.  Right at the end of the episode Rose, her mother, Mickey, and the Doctor have settled down to eat Christmas Dinner only to discover that its snowing outside.  They all go out to look.


Rose: It's beautiful! What are they, meteors?

The Doctor: It's the spaceship breaking up in the atmosphere. This isn't snow. It's ash.
Rose: Okay, not so beautiful.
The Doctor: This is a brand new planet Earth. No denying the existence of aliens now. Everyone saw it. Everything's new.
Rose: And what about you? What are you going to do next?
The Doctor: Well... back to the TARDIS. Same old life.
Rose: On your own?
The Doctor: Why? Don't you want to come?
Rose: Well yeah.
The Doctor: Do you though?
Rose: Yeah.
The Doctor: Well I just thought... 'cause I changed.
Rose: Yeah, I thought 'cause you changed you might not want me anymore.
The Doctor: Oh I'd love you to come.
Rose: Okay!
Mickey: You're never going to stay, are you?
Rose: There's just so much out there. So much to see. I've got to.
Mickey: Yeah.
Jackie: Well I reckon you're mad, the pair of ya. It's like you go lookin' for trouble.
The Doctor: Trouble's just the bits in between! It's all waiting out there, Jackie. And it's brand new to me. All those planets, creatures and horizons—I haven't seen them yet. Not with these eyes. And it is gonna be... fantastic.**

(Quotations Courtesy of http://www.planetclaire.org/quotes/doctorwho/christmas-specials/christmas-invasion.php)

The "War of Art" and the War of Life in Contrariety

Today I happened to be reminded of a book I ran across in high school: Steven Pressfield's The War of Art. The premise of the book goes something like this: Art--the creative process--is the battle of waging war against all the factors that militate against you in order to quench your creative potential and output. You have to fight yourself and the powers that be--the everyday distractions and the karmic energies that all seem to conspire against you to keep you from writing. He describes how the daily battle against all these forces must be waged in order to safeguard one's muse--one's openness and ability to act creatively. It is a fascinating read that is helpful for any writer or artist and does contain some of the most heartfelt and apt profanity I have ever read. And when I was 16 and read that book I was quite the moral crusader against cursing. I still thought it was apt.

However, my musings as of late have steered my thoughts in quite another direction: what a tricky, evil little monster discouragement about one's voice can be. I remember reading (also in high school) an article by Carol Gilligan called "In a Different Voice" that was about how young women's process of moral decision-making tends to be different than men's and tends to be overlooked or dismissed. The use of "voice" in this manner has certainly been abused, trivialized, and made cliched and deathly boring in a multitude of ways . . . and yet "abuse does not negate proper-use". I was forced to begin to rethink my dismissal of this concept (or at least, the phrasing of this concept) some months ago when I began to have a rather peculiar experience in prayer.

A moment of explanation: inner healing has been one of the most important ways Jesus has shown me that he is real and has power over absolutely everything and that he knows me and knows what he is doing with me. He has healed me from stuff that I never expected to be healed from and didn't even think was broken. One of the ways in which He sometimes shows me what He's up to (He doesn't always and that's His prerogative) is by giving me a very particular physical sensation that localizes what is wrong and what he is doing about it. For example, a few years ago I heard a sermon on the parable of the sower and was challenged to discover what things in my life were falling on good soil and what was falling on rocky soil or being choked out by thorns, etc. In the weeks that followed, when I prayed I had the recurring sensation that there were these huge boulders in my soul that Jesus wanted to take out and deal with. That should have been my first clue to go to counseling! But alas, 21 year-olds are often proud and stubborn and naive about their ability to handle everything and I was no different. Jesus certainly dealt with that rocky soil and those "stones" are now gone. But it wasn't pretty because I tried to do too much by myself.

In this case, the sense I had was of vocal constriction. When I prayed sometimes, my vocal cords felt tense and tight and when I was praying about certain things the feeling worsened. And I knew instantly what it meant: I knew that it meant that I was having trouble speaking--that I was compromised in my ability to speak the truth about myself of all things. In short, I knew Jesus was revealing to me that I was having trouble with my voice--and as a singer, that meant something doubly significant to me: it struck home as a metaphor dramatically for me because I have spent years working to make something beautiful come out of my mouth when I open it. The meaning here was inescapably obvious to me: I was having trouble with voice, I was having trouble with myself and that this was a problem Jesus wanted to address.

Address it he did: The first thing Jesus had to tell me was that he actually liked what I will call "the prophetic personality". The truth is, there is no such thing as a prophetic personality and that all Christians are called to embrace the call and sacrifice of a prophetic to one degree or another when we do everything we can to proclaim Christ's good news to the world and are hated and rejected for the sake of His name and His word. (It goes without saying--though I will say it anyway--that when we are hated and rejected because we do hateful things, that certainly has nothing to do with prophetic suffering.) However, it is also true that Jesus makes us all different and He makes some of us much more comfortable with external conflict, external resistance, going against the grain, going against the status quo, resisting the system and ignoring the crowd. There are many different definitions of what it means to be a "contrarian". I am a purist on the subject. Some people think being a contrarian means simply "doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing". I have always thought the true art of contrariety consists in refusing to be moved by the crowd--meaning, if the crowd is right, you engage with it, if it is wrong, you resist it. Contrariety is about being full engaged and being fully alive and not resting on your laurels and waiting for someone else to tell you what to do or how to think. It is about embracing one's responsibility to find the whole truth not just the part of it that we are partial to or comfortable with.

Yet, the contrarian lifestyle has its drawbacks. People really resist being made uncomfortable and they will do everything in their power to create space for themselves to be wooed back into dogmatic slumber. And they will call you names and if you are a Christian they will tell you that you aren't meek enough or humble enough or gentle enough (and if you are a woman) submissive enough . . . just to get you off their back and to get themselves back to their comfty-cozy nap they were taking when they were undisturbed by your rabble-rousing after the truth. What's worse is that they will undoubtedly be at least partially correct--if you are a true contrarian (or any sort of human being at all) you will have your virtues and your vices and your weaknesses and some of them will be that you aren't extraordinarily gifted with meekness and gentleness. Regardless as to whether you are passionately devoted to loving your neighbor, it may not look like the kind of love that someone who is invested in their own comfort wants to receive. We are so picky, after all. Its not good enough that love be love--it has to look the way I want it to for me to acknowledge it or receive it or heavens help us--appreciate it. We are very fragile creatures.

C. S. Lewis once said something about the lot of us not being strong enough for heaven--how the joy in heaven with God is much too powerful for us to bear. That is why we must be changed into God's own image and participate in His own life--so that in Him we do have enough strength to bear all the goodness of God. Without becoming partakers of His divine life, we wouldn't have a chance. Instead of being the bush that burns but is not consumed by the fire (which is the destiny of Israel in the Exodus story and our destiny in Christ), we would be consumed. This is why we are so often threatened by the virtues of those who are different from us. We are not strong enough to bear them yet. Moreover, if someone--like a prophet--has the power and Spirit of Christ in them, they don't just have virtue, they have supernatural virtue, they have "spiritual superpowers". Spiritual superpowers are hard to bear--which is exactly why the people who hated Jesus when they saw him make the lame walk or the blind see or wipe away the tears of the grieving--that's exactly why they hated him as much as they did. Jesus had all the power of God to do good in the world, to do supernatural good--and it was too much for their feeble flesh to bear. They had a choice: they could either let the fire invade and consume all their dross and stubble and be saved only by the power of God working in them or they could resist and close themselves off to it and save their lives only to lose them. We are confronted with these choices nearly every moment of our lives and are oftentimes tragically oblivious to this.

All to say, there is something about trying to be the kind of contrarian that Jesus himself was. Some of us don't have a choice. Some of us are like Paul--we are a fiery, driven, dangerous mess of wrong until Jesus gets a hold of us and turns us in the right direction. Then we are on our way to being a fiery, driven mess of the Holy Spirit dangerous only to the powers and principalities of this world and this age, though that transformation is the work of a lifetime. Jesus takes us each on different journeys to become like Him. Who can say what that will be until you walk down the path after Him? And we ought to stay close behind: there are twists and turns that we cannot possibly anticipate from the beginning.

In the beginning of this post I mentioned that discouragement from one's voice is a "tricky, evil little monster". Until sometime after college, I was a happy little contrarian, oblivious to the world of self-doubt and discouragement until something happened that sent me spiraling downward into Cartesian-grade skepticism about who I was as a person and what I had to offer to the church, to the world, to my friends and family, and to God. Looking back, it is a real shame that I got bamboozled into that kind of radical skepticism about myself. Not only was it a real waste of time, its just a shame to doubt God like that. But the kicker for me is for much of that time I was questioning and doubting some of my best qualities and refusing to engage with them because I was scared it would be fruitless or that I would hurt someone. Some of my friends and family members tried to talk me out of it, but I was committed to my Cartesian methodology.

One of my favorite things that the Lord ever said to me about this that helped shake me out of it was (and this is for the philosophers out there), "You are a figment of my imagination. If I had not loved this idea, I would not have have reified it." (Reify=to make an idea concrete or real.) Granted, God does not love my sin. But he does love and delight in all my feistiness and in every gift that he breathed into existence in me, from the smallest bit to the largest. And He will save and redeem every aspect of my personality that he made and turn it to His use and for the glory of His name. So he will do with all of us. This is also the reason we must seek to love the good in our neighbor without qualification, no matter how tempting it may be to be threatened by it or indifferent to it.

We have to fight for this perspective, I think. A friend of mine has a thing about "magnanimity"--"great-souledness": the call of us all to love and serve our neighbor so they can be the greatest and best creature under God that they can be. I have a thing about absolute freedom: to learn how to so embrace the freedom of Christ that we fear nothing and are set free to be and to do absolutely everything Christ has for us. But this is war, peeps. Spiritual warfare, in fact--of a more intense variety than even The War of Art. The last thing that those spiritual powers that fight against God want is for God's creatures to rise up in the full power of Christ knowing who they are and how they can be Christ for the world with everything they have. So they will take advantage--if that means getting you lost in fear or self-doubt or whatever. It doesn't matter what it is, the enemy takes every advantage.

Now the question is, do I have my voice back? The answer to that: Jesus is working on it. Every once in a while, I feel something in my throat that reminds me of ways I need to learn how to speak again. And I say to myself: "I can't do that, how on earth is Jesus going to do that?" He manages--even through my cowardice and sloth and weakness, he miraculously manages to lead me to a better way of doing things, to being stronger and whole and not so ruled by fear. "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." There are many "yokes of slavery". Galatians 5:1 was talking about the slavery of the law. Fear is another yoke, and so is thinking that change is up to me or that one can set oneself free. We don't fight the spiritual battle with our own power and we don't have to know or understand how God is going to change and heal and save us. We just have to trust that He can because of what He has already done and ask so that we may receive.