The Sky Does Not Speak

Warning: unapologetic religion, of the Christian existentialist variety. You have been warned.

In his short essay “Pascal’s Sphere,” Jorge Luis Borges traces the history of the sphere from Xenophanes’s declaration that God was an eternal sphere to Plato’s insistence that the sphere is the most perfect shape, from Bruno’s description of the Copernican universe as an infinite sphere—its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere—and finally to Pascal’s very modern despair in such a view:

In that dejected century, the absolute space that inspired the hexameters of Lucretius, the absolute space that had been a liberation for Bruno was a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He hated the universe and yearned to adore God, but God was less real to him than the hated universe. He lamented that the firmament did not speak; he compared our lives to the shipwrecked on a desert island. He felt the incessant weight of the physical world; he felt confusion, fear, and solitude; and he expressed it in other words: “Nature is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.”

I do not know how accurate a description of Pascal this is; I do know that much of this description is fairly accurate when applied to me. I too yearn to adore God, but God is less real to me than the universe; I too consider our lives to be like those shipwrecked on a desert island; I too feel the incessant weight of the physical world, and respond with confusion, fear, and loneliness. I find myself alienated from that to which I declare allegiance, and I see this alienation—acknowledged or not—in all of us. A labyrinth and an abyss indeed.

But there is one way in which this description is inaccurate: I do not hate the world and I do not lament the silence of the firmament. Oh, there are many things about the world which I find deserving of hatred: the world is filled with limitless suffering, more than I can imagine or bear, and my scant incomplete knowledge of this unremitting suffering sits like a hole in my chest. But I cannot bring myself to hate the world, and its speechlessness in particular I find lovely. I look at the mountains piled above Vancouver, distant and stony; I look at the hummingbird flitting about my feeder, dependent on the sugarwater my neighbours and I provide but thoroughly indifferent to us; I look at the toiling ants on the pavement and the silverfish swimming across my bathroom floor, incapable of even perceiving me; and I am enchanted by them. Their indifference to me is the twin of my incomprehension of them, my inability to imagine myself in their place. They are wholly other to me, and in this they free me from my suffocating self-concern. In this they also remind me of the distance of other people, people with whom I am tempted to exaggerate my empathy and affinity. And they also remind me of God, the distance and self-sufficiency and ineffability of God. I am not sure why, but these reminders calm my soul. I bask in their otherness and at least feel connected, in this way, to the otherness of God. God may feel distant, but at least God's distance is near to me. The firmament does not speak, and for that I love it.

This is my reminder to myself: I can try to cross the silence of the sky, but I shall never truly know it; I can try to read the silence and the speech of friends and strangers, but I shall never fully understand them; I can reach out into the absence I perceive God to be, but I will never totally plumb those depths. And yet my failure to succeed perfectly does not encourage a failure to try. There is a beauty in trying.

The sky does not speak, and I shall listen.

Who Can Afford Sanctification?

or, Can We Get There From Here?

In my last post, in which I wrote about Terry Eaglton's Why Marx Was Right, I shared Marx's claim that we cannot really engage in praxis (that is, activity that we do for its own sake and not as a means to our economic ends) and cannot really actualize our potentials (I'm not always sure what the means, but bear with me) if we are unable to meet our material needs, or even uncertain in our ability to do so. This leads to a pretty simple conclusion: the bourgeios are able to self-actualize and the proletariat are not. Further, the bourgeios are often able to self-actualize through their work and the proletariat cannot; while a CEO could very well work as hard as the person bussing tables at three different jobs, the CEO is working on themselves and not just at their job, which can't be said so easily for the serving staff.

Abraham Maslow has made a similar observation in his hierarchy of needs: meeting basic needs like food and physical security are preconditions for self-actualization. Pure Land Buddhism also contains a similar idea: true enlightenment is not available in this world, but there is another world in which a meritous practitioner can be reincarnated called the Pure Land in which our material needs are all met, allowing us to focus on attaining enlightenment without the distractions which weigh us down here. There are traditions, then, both psychological-sociological and Vedic, that ask what precisely the material conditions of enlightenment are.

All this stands in stark contrast to my experience and understanding of Christianity. The Beatitudes, which are generally considered to be part of the heart of Christianity, bless the poor rather than the rich, and Jesus tells us that it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Indeed, there is a tendency in Christianity (or, anyway, progressive Christianity) to conflate Christ with the poor, likely because Jesus tells us that we are treating him as we treat the hungry, thirsty, naked, and imprisoned. I'm fully aware that there are other trends in Christianity, which conflate wealth 'n health with divine favour, but the sort of Christianity with which I am familiar suggests that Christ-likeness might look a lot like homelessness (cf the Franciscan and Benedictine monks). I do not mean to deny the close ties between Christ and the poor, or the serious challenges wealth can present for spiritual well-being, but I do want to suggest that Marx's insight--that pursuing activities for their own sake rather than for your stomach's sake (and this probably includes a lot of religious transformation) is a whole lot easier when you aren't starving--is one that it might help us to remember.

I think that I can pretty uncontroversially identify "becoming Christ-like" with praxis and self-actualization. Given that, I have a few ideas, but I don't know how or if these ideas work together.

On the one hand, we Christians can maybe celebrate the fact that we have strategies for acheiving praxis without having all of our material needs secure. Indeed, it's perhaps easier for progressive Christians to imagine sanctification among the poor than among the rich. I'm also reminded of Hinduism's provision for the labouring class, in which they can shed karma through their work (the yoga of labour). At least for the moment, it would be incredibly prudent for us to consciously develop what it means to become Christ-like when we have urgent material needs calling us in other directions. Even in the most successful communist society imaginable, we would still have material needs and we would still be vulnerable to illness and injury, so these strategies for praxis-in-privation will still come in handy. I should say that lots of folks are already working on exactly this project, but I think we would benefit from recalling Marx's insight more explicitly.

On the other hand, we Christians are called to feed the poor--that is to say, help them meet those material needs. Now, Jesus didn't say to what ends we should help them meet those needs; it certainly doesn't say we should feed the poor because it's easier for rich people to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for poor people to do so. The trouble is that when I was reminded of the yoga of labour, I was also reminded of how the yoga of labour was used as justification for serious economic and social inequalities in the caste system's later incarnations. So, sure, on the one hand it's probably a good idea to find ways for poor people to work out their salvation which don't rely on the luxuries of wealth, but that work can often be a distraction from the other work we should be doing to help the poor not be poor. I'm not saying it's inevitable that one leads to the other, but it's awful tempting.

The way forward might be the one I expect you're thinking of already: one of the things we do to become Christ-like is feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned, etc. My becoming-Christ-like, my self-actualization, consists at least in part of helping out poor people. Hopefully, if we're taking sanctification/praxis/self-actualization seriously enough to tackle the self-actualization-for-the-poor thing, we will automatically be working on the helping-the-poor-not-be-poor thing. (But maybe that's excessively optimistic.) It might be disconcerting to think that we have one kind of praxis for the rich and another for the poor, since by definiton the poor cannot help themselves not be poor and call it praxis, and bending down from our privileged pedastals to dictate a strategy for praxis-in-privation could become paternalistic and patronizing really quickly, but it's probably squeamishness that's freaking me out on this inequality rather than actual concern for justice. The poor have to roll differently because their lives really are different. So I still think there's a link here, where helping other people pursue Christ-likeness or praxis is, itself, the pursuit of Christ-likeness or praxis. At any rate, I promise to think more about it.

Envy for Sisyphus

I do not often write emotionally; as I've said before, I rarely feel the need to express my emotions to other people. But today my soul cries that its anguish be spoken and my soul's anguish happens to be on topic. I apologize in advance if this emotional display is unseemly.

Eve Tushnet suggests that I seriously underestimate the dangers of paralysis in the face of making a decision. Her concern with critical thinking is that it will keep you in the anteroom when you hate being in the anteroom. (Seriouly, go read the post.) This is a fair but false accusation. It is fair because, based on anything I've written, you wouldn't know how familiar I am with the agony of uncertainty. But the trouble is that, for me, it does not matter whether I've accepted or not, whatever that means; the doubts, as Eve notes, never go away. There are many many times that I would give anything--ANYTHING--for certainty. I feel lost, perpetually. I sometimes feel as though I have no purpose; this may come from the fact that I no longer know what career I want to pursue. I want a quest, you know? I want some sort of project that will give meaning to my decisions: I don't care whether I find a career or write a novel or take up a cause or fall in love or whatever. I am jealous of those children who stumbled upon Narnia, yes, but I am jealous even of Camus's Sisyphus; he may be faced with a meaningless task, but it is his meaningless task, and he knows he must do it and how it is to be done.

I know that my depression is making this worse right now. Stephen Greenblatt writes in "Invisible Bullets" that Shakespeare's Prince Hal is a reverse Midas, that everything he touches turns to dross. That is how I feel right now; any project to which I turn my hand appears worthless soon after I begin. But it's not just a recent thing. I've always felt this way, to an extent. In my undergraduate I met many people who believed that God had a special plan for them and they had some access to this plan; they claimed to feel the voice of God within the stillness of their souls. Try as I might, I could never hear this voice, but I wanted a special plan so badly (even though, really, I suspected that they were all fooling themselves). I convinced myself that my special plan was to develop a spirituality for those whose only experience of God was as a terrible and ringing silence, because such a task could only be completed by someone who had no personal experience of God but nonetheless believed (ie. me). In the end, though, I couldn't even believe that sorry sort of plan: if God has a plan for me, I do not presume to know what it is.

So if my reaction to what pretty much anyone else is saying on this seems, I don't know, bitter, it's because I am a little bitter. Not toward God, who I don't think has an obligation to explain himself to me or anyone else, but toward anyone who has made me feel like I need to be certain of things (or, to anyone who has acted like I have an obligation to explain myself to them). Maybe there is something in our culture which reprimands people who are overly certain, I don't know, but our culture isn't homogenous and there absolutely is something in our culture which has no sympathy whatsoever for those in the anteroom or, for that matter, those like me who presume to be in the main chamber without having a clue what they're doing there or whether they are even in the right building. It's not just that that's an uncomfortable position to be in; quite a lot of people make it an uncomfortable position to be in. I don't begrudge anyone their certainty, but I have seen so many people use their certainty to shame others, or at least justify the shaming, that I fear certainty makes it easy to weaponize beliefs. So the thing behind my tentativism, maybe, is terror. Terror that I will be excommunicated for my heresy, terror that I will be steamrolled by someone else's special plan, terror that I might be the one trodding on another as I pursue my own glorious purpose, terror that someone might hallucinate the voice of God demanding my sacrifice. And horror too that many people are experiencing these things even when I am not. And maybe I'm wrong, but I cannot imagine that any of these things would happen if the perpetrators were just a little less sure of themselves.

So I say I would give anything for certainty, for a purpose, for a quest, but this is not true. If there is something I am certain of, it is that I cannot tell anyone else's story, that I have an obligation to do no harm (or at least as little as possible), that I have an obligation to empathy. I will take on whatever agony I must to maintain these principles, and so if this means that I suffer uncertainty--for there is suffering in uncertainty--so be it.

This is what I say when I feel brave. The other side of the coin is that uncertainty seems to be part of my disposition. It is not a thing I chose in the first place. Do I think I am a better person for my uncertainty? Yes: the less certain I am, the less of a jerk I am. (Though I take Eve Tushnet's point that uncertainty doesn't combat oppression very effectively, and it should be noted that I am certain about some things, especially w/r to feminism and environmentalism and other causes that don't have handy names.) Do I think the world would be a better place if pretty much everybody was more willing to concede that they might be wrong? Yes, I do. But I will not pretend to have chosen this for myself; all I have done is accepted it, or owned it as they say. And I really cannot blame people for abandoning an openness to truth as they grasp for certainty, because I know as well as anyone how miserable uncertainty can make you.

But I know I have also celebrated uncertainty and postmodernism and so forth in the past, and while I have trouble celebrating it at this moment I still know that it is worth celebrating. In a way I've written about it a bit already when writing about fantasy novels. There is a joy not just in discovery, but in knowing that there is more to find than can ever be found. And instability can be just plain fun; when things are open to change, you can play with them, you can create, you can experiment. There is suffering, and today my soul screams for the kind of certainty others have and I do not, but if the possibility for certainty was extended to me, I would be tempted to take it and I would still turn it down. And I shall try to remain the joy it can give to keep me through until I am better able to experience that joy again.

Now, look, other people can write all they want about this, but for the time being I'm utterly sick of the topic so unless I've already told you personally that I'll answer your questions, I reserve the right to ignore your question. I'm not saying I will ignore it, just that I reserve the right.

Note: When I say "certainty," I mean more than just certainty about particular facts. I mean something closer to "metanarrative," or "certainty in a worldview," or "an idea that you know how to live a good life." I don't mean "feeling like you know all of the answers," but I do mean more than the sense of certainty in saying, "I am certain that there is such a thing as gravity." So I acknowledge that I'm not even sure myself exactly what it is I'm objecting to, and I promise I'll think about it, but I don't promise that I'll come back with answers. I can't promise that at all.

A Thought on Justice

The other day I was thinking about justice, which in the Christian theological tradition has historically been contrasted with mercy. On the one hand there is justice, which requires that all people receive what they deserve due to the content of their actions. On the other hand, there is mercy, which requires kindness to those who are suffering. To fully embody these two qualities is our goal, but it is impossible for humans and for human institutions. Only God can do so and God can only do so on, or through, the cross.

What if we have justice wrong? What if it doesn't mean that all people receive what they deserve? (For one thing, I have difficulty explaining this mechanism of "deserving.")

I tried to think of what I mean or imagine when I think of justice. I discounted the first few things I thought of, because those were phrases with the word in them--Justice Department, Justice League--or metonyms--scales, swords, paladins. The best and closest articulation, one which encompasses the realm of justice departments but also social justice issues, was this: justice is the action towards creating and maintaining a fairly ordered world. (This is not "fairly" in the sense of "rather" or "reasonably", but more like "equitably".) This is of course not a perfect definition because we then fall back to what "fair" means--it might evoke deserving again--but I'm going to use it to make a distinction.

This history of ideas is located firmly in the armchair-philosophy position, but in lieu of extensive research I'm going to offer it regardless. I wonder if we have fooled ourselves about justice from quite a long time ago, around the time people developed law. In the pursuit of a fairly ordered society, communities resorted to punishment models of enforcement. That is, in order to deter crime and therefore promote a fairly ordered system, those who committed crime were given predictable punishments so that they would not want crime. Punishing crimes then became an instrument of justice, and the activity of that punishment became an organ of justice. But societies did not have (perhaps, initially, did not need or could not produce) other forms of justice, such as universal health care or financial accountability or anti-heterosexism initiatives. As a result, the law enforcement system became the entirety of the justice system, and humans developed the idea that justice was identical to the punishment of crimes (and perhaps the inverse, the reward of good deeds).

Let's look at the famous introduction to Law and Order: "In the Criminal Justice System the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and the District Attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories." (Dun dun.) Even noting that this refers specifically to criminal justice, what I notice is that there is no sense whatsoever of reparation to the victim. There is no consolation. No healing. And there is no healing for the offenders, either; there is no concern for rehabilitation. There is also no concern for the prevention of crime. There is only retribution. This is only a small part of the movement towards a fairly ordered society. There is law, yes, and a certain kind of order, but that order seems to only be a legal one.

So I'm wondering if retribution is even a necessary component of justice at all. It has been a part of justice, necessarily, in the past. But is it one necessarily, in the philosophical sense? I don't think so; it seems only to be a component of justice insofar as it is a move towards a more fairly ordered system. If my suspicion is correct, then it seems to me that we need to rethink a lot of our political, legal, moral, and theological formulations.

Lenten Sonnets (Second Post)

This will be the third religious post in a row. I try to avoid that, since I know I do have some non-religious readers (and readers for whom reading about religion might be boring, which may not have the same members as the former group). But anyway, here's another sonnet, one that is maybe more accurate in sentiment than the previous one I posted.

3

And when you fast, he said, do not look dreary,
Like hypocrites, for they deform their faces
To show the world that they with fast are weary;
They have received at least their promised places.
And when you fast, put oil upon your head,
And wash your face, so that your fast may not
Be seen by others, by the Father read
Alone, who will reward you with your lot.
But God, complaint is my preferred expression;
Moaning is my wine, griping my bread.
I publicize my woes as harsh oppression
And groan until the time of fast has fled.
I ask you, God, to turn my pouts to graces
And fashion patient psalms from painful traces.

Summer Reading List

or,
An Account of my Absence

I realize that the last post I wrote here was one promising activity. It was written about a month ago. I can explain.

In early May I returned to Fort McMurray to visit friends and family. I've been here since then and will be here a little while longer before returning to the beautiful British Columbia. While here I have been treating reading and writing like a full-time job, putting in eight hours a day, five days a week. At first I wrote an early draft of an article for a journal which I have sent to a professor for feedback, and since then I've worked on creative writing. For the first little while I journalled and wrote letters on top of these eight hours, but after a while I realized that I could not physically take it: my eyes and knuckles were in pain by the end of the day. Since then I have absorbed journal- and letter-writing into this schedule.

Needless to say, with all of this writing my blogging has suffered drastically. While I have continued reading blogs and commenting periodically, I have not felt interested in or even capable of producing posts of my own. For this reason I will henceforth include blogging in those eight hours, so long as I do not exceed one day per week.

Because I cannot share what I have been writing, I will instead give you my reading list so far.

1. "Against Literary Darwinism" (Jonathan Kramnick, Winter 2011)
Because I doubt many of my readers care about literary theory, I'll try for brevity: Kramnick is arguing that a particular school of literary analysis which calls itself Literary Darwinism is bunk. LD claims to be trying to draw literary analysis out of relativist irrelevance and into hard, stable science. Sadly, says Kramnick, the science they are using as a base is an older form of evolutionary psychology which is far from universally accepted in the current scientific academy (it suggests that all traits are selected for rather than merely selected, failing to recognize the possibility of byproducts, or spandrels). Further, it fails on the literary end, since it is unable to isolate the universal formal traits of literature which it seeks to identify, instead slipping into universal themes of love and triumph which, the LDs say, rehearse evolutionary pressures. Universal themes are not universal forms and so they fail to provide what they claim to provide. It's an interesting article, but because it's written mainly for a literary analytical audience it doesn't go into what's wrong with universal themes (since any literary analyst worth her salt already knows why), so if you aren't immersed in this discipline's theory you might wonder why that isn't addressed.

2. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (Wade Davis)
One River details the travels of the author and his colleague Tim Plowman (an ethnobotanist) through the Amazong rain forest in search of the origin of coca, the plant used to make cocaine (and Coca-Cola); it also details the botanical biography of their mentor Richard Schultes and his own journeys in Oklahoma, Mexico, and the Amazon rain forest (I realize I'm jumbling catgories there; all I can say is that it reflects how Schultes travelled, not how I conceptualize these places). I spent a lot of time with this book; its seeming endlessness may unintentionally replicate the Amazon itself. Despite what the title suggests, it does not seem to be especially about one river. Each time Davis announced that someone will embark on an exploration of yet another uncharted river, I would reflect on the irony of this title. This book is not for the faint of heart. And, yet, it was absolutely worth it, not just because I learned a lot about psychoactive and medicinal plants in the Amazon basin or about the rubber trade during the Second World War (which is incredibly fascinating, by the way) or about the customs and contact histories of numerous aboriginal peoples, but because I learned a lot about knowledge production itself. One River is about, among other things, an enormous taxonomical enterprise, in which the description and classification of plants make their discovery. That is, it is only when you can describe a plant and then place it in a larger categorical web (taxonomy, bionomial nomenclature, genetic lineages) that you can claim that such a plant is known and further work on it can begin. In a sense, One River helped me understand how taxonomy, the part of biology I liked most in high school and was least respected by biology and biochemical student friends in undergraduate, is integral to the very basis of biology and is also that point which most reveals how the field is organized. But this book is also about the weakennesses of western, post-enlightenment science (anyone mind if I stop capitalizing "enlightenment" as a historical event?) next to the botany of the aboriginal peoples of the Amazon, the numerous inheritors of Incan science. While Schultes changed botany, Davis has changed ethnobotany: some of his encounters suggest that the vast pharmaceutical knowledge of the South American peoples was generated after the Spanish arrived on the continent. That is, this is not ancient wisdom passed down after millenia of slow growth, but a (relatively) rapid generation of new empirical knowledge in response to the new diseases that the conquistadores brought with them, a knowledge reflecting social conditions and resources. This casts the indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of inflexible tradition but active creators of working medicinal practices. This is an important distinction to make.
Anyway, I could keep going on about this book: I could launch a substantial argument that it is an ethnobotanical epic just as the Iliad is a Greek national epic and The Faerie Queen is an English national epic, or I could discuss homosociality and the gendering of science as it appears in the chapter entitled "The Blue Orchid," but I'll forbear. If you want to see other books by Wade Davis I've discussed, you can look at this post where I talk about The Wayfinders or this post where I talk about The Serpent and the Rainbow.

3. The Problem of Pain (C S Lewis)
I see that Leah has recently read this as well. I always feel calmer after reading Lewis, but I presume Lewis only has this effect on Christians, and even then only on those of a certain bent. I'm not sure I think that this is quite sufficient as far as theodicy goes (note: theodicy is the branch of theology which accounts for evil and/or suffering in the world), especially as I'm not willing to follow Lewis down particular paths. (I always have trouble when he starts talking about drives and instincts because, quite frankly, I can easily postulate models which overcome his objections--mere hierarchy of drives usually does it--and I'm sure cognitive psychology can do the trick quite fine and with more empirical clout than my postulated models have.) This being said, Lewis' book does have a lot of value in the observations and discussions that he develops alongside his theodicy. For instance, I was fascinated with his idea of the necessity of an impersonal, causal world outside of human control and not subject to frequent miracles; we require separation from the other to recognize the other as something outside of oneself. If we were all so perfectly psychic as to immediately experience our neighbour's thoughts, we would not recongize those thoughts as someone else's. This, I think, is fascinating. I also find it fascinating that in this book Lewis clearly comes down on the side of evolution (though he has a twist of divine intervention in his story which I suspect Pullman borrowed and inverted in his Dark Materials trilogy).

4. Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones)
In Howl's Moving Castle, the young protagonist Sophie is cursed by the Witch of the Wastes so that she appears to be an elderly woman and, in order to be free of the curse, must seek the help of the wizard Howl, owner of a moving castle and eater of young girls' hearts. What this book may lack in deep insights about human character and social ills is amply made up for in the inclusion of unique main characters: the female lead, while nominally young like in most young adult books, appears to be and acts as if she were elderly for most of the book; the male lead, a powerful and older but nonetheless young- and handsome-looking wizard, frequently emasculates himself and gets through the book primarily through dashing cowardice. Also included in the novel are Sophie's sisters who for the time being go by the same name and appearance, a dog which seems to have once been a human being, a very determined scarecrow, a petulant fire demon living in a fire place, and a young apprentice (about the only generically recognizable character outside the Witch of the Wastes). Given the similarity of many YA and fantasy protagonists, especially when compared within gender lines, these characters offer refreshing alternatives. If you want something that plays a lot with generic conventions while somehow fulfilling them, you may want to look at this book.

5. An Acceptable Time (Medeleine L'Engle)
Polly O'Keefe is visiting her grandparents in a house recognizable to readers of the Time Quartet (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters), when Zachary Gray appears. With him seems to come a time portal, drawing Polly into the New England of 1000 BCE, where she interacts with the People of the Wind, an aboriginal group who have absorbed two exiles from Britain and their druidic teachings. Like all L'Engle books, Polly attempts to negotiate through a world both intellectual and relational, linking science, religion, literature, hope, and forgiveness. I quite enjoyed this book (notwithstanding the fact that my apparent taste in female-oriented YA continues to erode any sense of my own masculinty), though I am really starting to question L'Engle's protagonists' tastes in guys. I was a little uncomfortable in two places, though: first, the book tends towards a romanticization of indigenous peoples, though it's far better than many of its alternatives; second, Polly on occasion is taken for a goddess, and as uncomfortable as she says this makes her, she seems willing to use it to serve her goals. I'm not too keen on such behaviour.

6. Disappearing Moon Cafe (SKY Lee)
Before I begin, I want to state that I'm not sure why the author insists on capitalizing all of the letters in her first name. But she does, so I'll follow suit. (The Wikipedia page is not as accomodating.)
The professor I had for my Asian Canadian Studies class first semester recommended Disappearing Moon Cafe when we complained that there was no literature on the curriculum. I bought it at the end of that semester but did not get much past the prologue until last week. It explores four generations of the Wong family, Asian Canadians located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, proprietors of the eponymous cafe. The narrative skips around time periods, structured not chronologically but rather revelationally, attempting to hold back the secrets which continue to trouble the narrator, Kae Wong of the fourth and last generation of the Wong clan's Vancouver branch. Only as the novel progresses do you discover the disturbing occurances lurking in the Wong family's past. It's a good book, if written in a perhaps over-ornamented style replete with modifiers. Some people like that sort of thing, of course. It's a little preoccupied with incest, however, so if that bothers you, you might want to pass. This is not an "easy" book either in prose or content, dealing as it does with feminist and Asian Canadian issues, and employing a lot of Asian Canadian colloquial language.

7. "Discourse in the Novel" (Mikhail Bakhtin)
I've started this but not finished it. It's the next installment in my literary analytical readings.
Bakhtin is an important and brilliant if sometimes underrepresentated and misunderstood literary theorist. His ideas about carnivalesque and heteroglossia have strongly impacted the English department but (at least according to my colleagues in my Reported Speech course) nonetheless remain poorly understood, having been twisted somewhat to fit the agendas or frameworks of contemporary theorists. As such, I have decided to become more familiar with this thinker. (I was also supposed to have read this for class and failed; further, I realize I lack the theoretical backing that many of my peers can profess and I think Bakhtin might be a good, more unique investment.) "Discourse in the Novel" outlines how a more dialogic understanding of the novel is necessary; this genre is situated perfectly, thinks Bakhtin, to reflect and use the contrasting unitary and heteroglossic forces in language and the perpetual fact of literature as located amongst other utterances. (If this seems rather technical, that's because it is.)

*sigh* You should never get me started on books, because then I tend to go on. I had planned to write more posts today but am running out of time. With luck I will get a few done.

Worth Reading

If you are in the area because you are interested in religious things, or if you are in the area for other reasons but are nonetheless interested in reading about a religious position you likely have not heard before, I highly encourage you to read Richard Beck's posts on why he holds a universalist soteriology/eschatology. To cut through the jargon, this means that Dr. Beck believes that all people will eventually be saved from sin and death through Christ, not just those who God chose (Calvinism/Reform) or those who freely believe (Arminianism). All people will be resurrected.

I'm not posting this because I intend to stake this out as my own theological position; rather, I am soteriologically agnostic, at the moment, and am considering whether this is a position worth holding. If anyone has any ideas about universalism, or wants to mount a defense of Calvinism/Reform or Arminianism, I would be happy to hear them. I would suggest you read the whole series, though, before entering the discussion.

Santa, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit

In a recent blog post Leah at Unequally Yoked asks Christians whether or not they would raise their children to believe in Santa. Does lying about Santa make children wonder whether they're folks lie about God? Or does belief in Santa differ from belief in God? Below is what I posted. I might expand later.

Believing for a time in Santa actually improved my intellectual faith. I thought that Santa gave toys not to children who behaved but to children who believed in him. My folks warned me that some other people did not believe in Santa, and they would try to convince me to disbelieve, too. I wasn't to listen to them; they did not believe, so of course they would see no evidence, because he didn't bring them presents any more. I was to examine the evidence I received. Eventually I realized Santa was a physical impossibility. For a while I believed in him anyway, but some time in the middle of elementary school the evidence in favour of "my parents are Santa" outweighed "Santa physically exists". Since my Dad was usually the school Santa, and was sometimes identified as Santa by small children, I might easily have believed that my Dad literally was Santa... but the evidence pointed to my Mom, really, so that didn't jive. Instead, I believed that "the spirit of Santa", derived perhaps from St. Nicholas but perhaps instead for a concentration of jovial kindness, inhabited generous people like my parents and made them give gifts. Some point later I believed that Santa was a social reality if not a physical one (not that I'd have articulated it in that way, but the idea was there), and later I disbelieved entirely.

Losing Santa was a process, not an event; my belief in fairies, leprechauns (how I wanted to see one of those!), the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, the Travel Fairy, pre-Ark dragons and unicorns, and assorted other things went as part of a general questioning of beliefs. (I had an ontological house-cleaning, if you will.) My Christianity transformed many times over since then (from materialism to dualism to other things), but the lessons I learned from my Santa apologetics stuck: there are multiple ways to believe, I had learned in my child-brain, and so I never lost Jesus altogether. (And, anyway, the closest I ever came was to falling from the church was over moral questions concerning salvation, not over metaphysical/epistemological concerns of possibility.)

For me, as a child, the physical Santa helped me understand Jesus; the ethereal Santa helped me understand the Holy Spirit. That process helped me hone apologetics, and I learned early on that other people's beliefs ought not to interfere with mine. For me, Santa, whether or not he exists, was and always will be a servant of Christ.

A Protestant Sort of Angst

I am titling this "Protestant" because it seems to me that this is a particularly Protestant conundrum... but perhaps Catholic people struggle with this, too. Please take no offense at any exclusion I may inadvertantly imply through the title, and also let me know of my error.

I also realize that not all Protestants will share this experience. It's a free will versus determinism sort of thing.

Angst, when used in English, is a term drawn from existentialism. It refers to the feeling (often of horror) that accompanies a person's realization that she is utterly free to self-destruct. Nothing is stopping her from leaping off of a metaphorical (or literal, for that matter) precipice. As much as we all seem to desire freedom, when coming face to face with full free will we experience this angst, a psychological shock. The fear is not that we might fall of the cliff's edge, but that we could leap off of it. This wasn't a feeling I was familiar with. I could imagine it, but I couldn't recall experiencing it.

Many people who were raised Christian, especially those who've had a falling out with the church, report that they feared damnation. This, too, is not something I'd ever felt. (I know. Lucky me.) I have, since I've known the concept of Heaven and Hell, felt fairly sure that I was bound Heavenward. Fearing damnation never made a whole lot of sense to me, since if you believed in such a thing as Hell (enough that fear of it would be worth reporting), you wouldn't have any reasn to think you'd be going there; if you didn't believe in Heaven and Hell, you may well be headed to the latter, but you wouldn't think you were, so why be afraid?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have news: I can now report firsthand the feelings of angst and the fear of damnation.

I was reading the Bible the other night (this was a few weeks ago; I've taken my time getting to this post) and I came upon one of the numerous difficult Old Testament passages. I don't mean "difficult" in the sense of being a cure for insomnia, though there are a few of those; I mean "difficult" in the sense of God-sponsored genocide. If you're not much of a Bible person, that's going to sound a little indicting. Unfortunately, mass murder does come up every so often. In reading, I was faced with the necessity of reconciling the God described here, who insists that every living thing in Town X be slaughtered without mercy (women, children, livestock, pets, pests, and infants all included), with the God I worship weekly, who built a wonderful world and endorses love so much that he underwent humiliation, torture, death, and damnation to redeem a bunch of ingrates. On the one hand, murder; on the other hand, love. How?

Theologians throughout Christendom have given explanations and reconciliations on this point, but that's not what I'm talking about here. The important thing is that the only reconciliation I knew of at the time was Bonhoeffer's, and I haven't found this one convincing. So I could believe that God did this thing, God sponsored hatred and destruction, or I could believe that the Bible is wrong on this count. Not wrong through and through, of course, but wrong about this. Maybe Joshua did kill a bunch of people, but in actual fact God was all like, "Dude, go easy on them, ok?" and Joshua just didn't listen. This last choice is a popular one.

It's also, apparently, a dangerous one. Because if the Bible is wrong about this, how do we know that it hasn't got the rest of it wrong? How do we know it isn't wrong about Jesus, too? How can we be sure?

I've said before and I'll say again that not many people come to Christ through the Bible; usually, they come to the Bible through Christ. It's because they believe in God and Jesus that they believe the Bible has authority. But then what this means is that we believe in Christ by hearsay and by faith alone. Which sounds good when we know that "faith" is invested with such high standing, but is that enough? Very quickly our whole support system begins to fall away. What can we rely on, after all?

So I believe in Jesus not for any reason, but merely because I do. If this is the case, then there's nothing stopping me, nothing at all, from going apostate. I could become an atheist in seconds. The possibility exists, the door is open, and all I need to do is step through. I suddenly recognized my freedom to become an atheist. This was angst.

It horrified me. I felt extremely uncomfortable. I could even see things on the other side of the door, see how life as an atheist would begin. I could see the gateway into that territory, and I already had quite a few of the maps in my back pocket (His Dark Materials, The God Delusion, and suchlike). To an extent it would seem like such a relief to walk through that door. It would be easier, for sure; I wouldn't have to constantly worry about the door being there. The decision would be over. But if I stayed on this side of the door, the temptation would always be there. It would never go away. Never.

But I didn't cross the door, and so I also saw--or at least suspected--the yawning throat of Hell lay that way, too. I'm not certain that Christ offers the only path to salvation, but I'm not certain that there are others, either. From this side of the door, I knew I didn't want to take that risk. But what if, years later or weeks later or minutes later, I went through anyway, a sort of spasm of the will? Could I come back? No longer believing in hell, would I come back? Does the door slam shut? What would happen to me? (You might note that at this point my sense of free will started ebbing away... I feared that I was not in control of my own will. I have to wonder whether this is an element in any feeling angst, this subtle, quiet suspicion of free will's existence even when our realization of that freedom is what brought us to this point.)

It was a fast slope to this point; I was reading the Bible, and bare minutes later I was on the naked edge of apostasy. Was it all this fragile? Was it all this frail?

A passage from Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life came to mind, one which I had previously had trouble with, one worth quoting in full: "In the early years of his ministry, Billy Graham went throuh a time when he struggled with doubts about the accuracy and authority of the Bible. One moonlit night he dropped to his knees in tears and told God that, in spite of confusing passages he didn't understand, from that point on he would completely trust the Bible as the sole authority for his life and ministry. From that day forward, Billy's life was blessed with unusual power and effectiveness." In the next paragraph, Warren writes, "Decide that regardless of culture, tradition, reason, or emotion, you choose the Bible as your final authority."

I could have tried something like this, but it didn't appeal to me at all. I've been skeptical too long to do something as (I thought) deliberately hamstringing as this. Why pray to God for blind belief in the Bible if the Bible does turn out to be ridden with errors after all? I don't think God would want that of me.

I did pray for help, though. I can't recall if I specified what kind of help I wanted. I don't think I did. I think I just asked for help. And, whether it was an act of God or my psychology's refusal to entertain cognitive dissonance, I suddenly felt peace. Free will or no, I realized, I would never give up belief in God. I may have to live forever with atheism a step away, but I would never cease to believe. This doesn't mean that I'll believe in any earthly authority at all, but God... no, God's here to stay. My faith might be lukewarm, too, which isn't a good thing, but it would always be there. Elizabeth Esther has observed of herself that she simply can't not believe, and I feel the same. To an extent, this unrootable belief bothered the skeptical corner of my mind almost as much as Warren's prescription did: was the sense that I couldn't disbelieve justification enough for belief? It's really poor apologetics, barely more than a tautology, but it's there nonetheless. Every a priori premise in philosophy is similarly a tautology, but somehow this is what makes them such reliable proofs.

So I believe, even though that door may always be open before me. I believe, even though I don't know why. I believe, even though I don't always know in what, exactly. What seems in the end to matter is that I believe.

Since that night, I've read more apologetics and am feeling more comfortable with belief. FYI. And I'm also aware that a number of these experiences argue for determinism of some degree... something to think about.

The Secular Fallacy: Part II

When I ended the first part of this discussion, I asked if my fallacy wasn't such a fallacy after all. Perhaps some people think all things are divine, but don't most people separate the holy from the non-holy, the good from the evil, or at least the religious from the non-religious? Church might be holy, but surely you wouldn't say that a pub is, right? Church is sacred; the pub is profane.

And I said, Of course my fallacy is a fallacy. I wouldn't be writing this if there wasn't more to it than that. If we look back you'll see that I defined the Secular Fallacy as saying that people divide their lives into the sacred and the profance. Even people who rigourously categorize things based on the sacred and profance do not divide their lives according to such things. Consider the Gnostics: they very certainly thought some things were sacred (ideas, the right books, fasting, Jesus, wisdom) and some things profane (food, sex, bodies, Earth, most people, the God of the Old Testament). Every decision they ever faced was made on this framework. If two courses of action came before them, they would ask only, "Which brings me closer to the world and which brings me closer to Sophia (their name for Wisdom)?" They would then choose the latter. It did not matter whether it was Sunday or Monday. It did not matter whether they were worshipping or working. It was always Sophia, never the world.

I'll give you an example of how this might look in a modern, Christian context. Let's say it's a Friday night. Staying up all night won't interfere with going to Church for a regular service, and it's not a holy day by my religion. My friends say to me, Let's go out to the pub, and so we do. There we talk about things, and I have the opportunity to bad-mouth someone. The bad-mouthing will make me more popular among my friends and they will be happier in general if I do. There are some folks who'd say that this decision is not a religious one at all. It has to do with everyday morality. It has to do with weighing the consequences of my actions.

I will from the outset agree that it has to do with weighing consequences. The scary thing is, those consequences are eternal ones. Our lives are a pilgrimage to the Divine. Each decision we make brings us further or closer, though often we don't understand how or why at the time. Those consequences are also world-shattering. Each day of our lives is a battle between evil itself and good itself.* We are both the battlefield and a combatant, and, if the truth be told, we fight for both sides. We are traitors to the good and to the bad; we are traitors to our allies; we are traitors to ourselves. Just because I am in a pub does not mean that there is no war going on. Just because we are not talking about God or religious-seeming things does not mean that I am not choosing between cowardice or heroism. The spiritual conflict is on all fronts. You cannot ignore half of them and hope to wn the war.

A different metaphor may here be suitable: Each decision we make is one between contributing to a war or contributing to peace. We can either fight for some piece of property, or we can try to make peace. If we fight, we might win, but each enemy we slay has a brother who will seek revenge. Eventually, we will die in this war. If we try to make peace, we will likely be killed, but in the event that we aren't killed, we have contributed to peace. If enough people contribute to peace, perhaps the war will end, and we won't all die. This decision is not just sociological (think of The Bomb), but also spiritual, and it literally inhabits every decision we make. We can fight for war, or we can work for peace.

How can whether or not I am sitting in a bar make the slightest bit of difference in such a situation?

If you look at this worldview, whether or not you believe it, you can see that I do not separate my life up into things that are religious and things that are not. Hopefully, you can also see that I cannot divide my life in this way. All decisions affect who we are, and who we are affects how we relate to the divine, and how we relate to the divine is all that matters. Sunday might be a holy day, but that doesn't mean I'm free to do whatever I like come Monday.

And yet the secular world expects me to divide my life like this. It wants me to live a double life. Well, it wants me to live a singular life--the one it offers--but if I won't do that, then I had better keep my religious life separate from my public one. For example, I shouldn't talk about my religion in public, or really even act "religiously" in public. When I write papers for university, I better not base my arguments on the existence of God, though I can base my answers on premises that presupposed the non-existence of the Divine because that's still secular. Universities will frown upon religiosity in papers, and I have learned to write 'closet-Christian' papers; these are essays which say something quiet and 'secular' if you don't read for religious things, but will grow into something much more significant once you add God as a premise. (For instance, I wrote a paper about rationalism as an origin theory for mathematics; I attempted to put that theory into such a position that it could only be 'saved' by the acceptance of some sort of God, even a Diest one.) People will criticize others for "being too Christian," and religious symbols are banned in some public places. The secular world believes that we, the religious, can live this double life, privately religious and publicly non-religious. In many cases we try, but in all things we must be secretly religious. Some of us have learned to be silent about our motives, but these motives must always be spiritual ones. (Others, of course, are not so silent. I sometimes have problems with their methods.)

The Secular Fallacy is not that we do separate our lives into the religious and the non-religious. It's not that we should separate the religious and the non-religious. The Secular Fallacy is that we can separate our lives into the everday and the divine. In truth, the everyday is divine.

So when Jon asks me to list the "infinite" times in my life, but to exclude the religious ones, I must say, "There are none." Properly seen, all things in my life are religious. If the academic world requires that I sort all of my ideas into 'religious' and 'secular' boxes, the secular box will be empty. Now, before you go any further, I fail at doing this. My life is full of the secular. I am terrible at remembering the consequences of my actions. I am always forgetting just how eternal we are. I do divide my life into religious and non-religious sections. The trick of it is, this division is accidental. I just forget sometimes. But forgetting doesn't change anything: my life is whole, whether I want it to be or not. Everything belongs to God. The key to life is to remember that.

Christianity is not the only faith that operates this way. Every religion I have ever studied operates this way. Atheism seems to operate this way--rational materialists seem to seek reason in all things. Religion is about the foundations of our beliefs, our worldviews, our decisions. How can we separate our lives from their foundations?

Bonhoeffer says about Christ's commandment not to look upon a woman in lust: "Jesus oes not impose intolerable restrictions on his disciples, he does not forbid them to look at anything, but bids them look on him. If they do that he knows that their gaze will always be pure, even when they look upon a woman."

The idea that we can make decisions outside of our religion is a fallacy. We can have a secular government, one which is not institutionally bound to organized religion; we can have secular schools, which do not compel us to believe a particular thing. But even in these 'secular' spheres our religions will always intrude, because institutions have members, and those members have religions. When citizens vote, what they believe about God will influence their choices. When students think, what they believe about God will influence their theories. This is true for Christians, atheists, formal agnostics, Muslims, Jews, Toaists, Buddhists, Confucians, Shintoists, practitioners of Vodoun, and Theistic Satanists. Society is built by our behaviours, and our behaviours are steered by belief. We can have a secular state, but we cannot have a secular society. We cannot have secular lives.

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*I realize some people may be tired of or troubled by using war as an analogy. It is of course time-honoured, used by the Old Testament, by Paul, by C S Lewis, and others. Perhaps that's why it seems exhausted of meaning to some. Unfortunately, it seems perhaps like the best analogy we have. There isn't much room for Satan in diplomacy, and we can't quite leave him out of the picture.

The Secular Fallacy: Part I

or Why You Can't Separate Religion from Society (or Anything Else, for that Matter)

I think it's high time for another installment in my unofficial "Understanding Christians" series.

I don't mean to pick on Jon, but something he said once seemed symptomatic of a persistent myth about religion that I have encountered among the non-religious. I have been meaning to expose this particular myth for some time now, so I think its time has come. This myth I am calling "The Secular Fallacy."

The context of Jon's comment is irrelevant, so I'll leave it out. He suggested that I compose a list of moments during which I "felt infinite." He also specified that I try to avoid listing religious moments, but rather stick to non-religious ones. Jon went on to say that he realized I might take this as blasphemous, but then, "what do you expect from a heathen?" (His words.)

Of course, such an exercize is, for me, impossible. I wasn't even remotely insulted or offended by what he said for, I think, three reasons. 1) Jon himself pointed out that this might go against having a religion at all. 2) I know Jon, and I know that he isn't anti-religion, so I knew that his suggestion was not meant as anything offensive. 3) I recognized that the particular flaw in his suggestion was pandemic to contemporary areligious thought, so he can hardly be blamed for having committed it.* I would like to add a fourth reasons, that being that I do not get offended when people say silly things about religion, but that would be lying, which I generally file under "Don't Do This."

What, then, is that flaw? It's one that has been around for quite some time, at least as far as North America is concerned, one that is built right into the constitutions of both Canada and the United States. It seems to me as though most people who do not themselves follow a religion, well, religiously assume that a person divides their life into two distinct categories: the sacred and the profane.

"Wait," I hear someone cry from the back row, "don't most academics who have devoted their lives to the study of religion state that one of the defining features of a religion is the division of the world into two realms, namely the Sacred and the Profane!? And have they not provided solid evidence of this fact!?"

Yes. It is true that some religious studies scholars believe such a thing. It is true that there is some evidence pointing to such a division. It is also true that some people, perhaps many people (see the Gnostics, for instance), separate the realms of the world into the Godly and the unGodly, the holy and the carnal, the spiritual and the material, the visible and the invisible, the good and the evil. Many religions do have, implicit or explicit, a list of things that are holy or not-holy. But the thing is, it doesn't seem as though every tradition has this sort of ontological dualism (see, for instance, this essay I wrote on why some Aboriginal groups do not call themselves religious). So some scholars do not put the sacred/profane divide into their definition of 'religion'; rather, they talk about things like 'meaning' or 'transcendent reality.' If you want a really nice word for it, Otto once coined 'numinous.'

Numinosity refers to a quality of an object or place. This quality is hard to define. 'Holiness' comes close, but haunted things are also numinous. The best one can do, I think, is to say that a numinous object at once is whatever it physically appears to be, but also reveals or signifies a transcendent reality that lies behind it.** The lay lines are numinous, as are the sites (or paths) of pilgrimage. More importantly, numinosity demands an emotional and even physical response: a numinous thing provokes awe (according to Otto, "trembling") and commands attention.

What I think we can say with certainty is that all religions have some idea of the numinous. Each religion understands and frames itself around numinosity very differently, of course; some religions, like Buddhism, will eschew numinosity in the physical world, while others locate numinosity in virtually every aspect of our day-to-day lives. As a Christian who does not participate in the theology that the physical world is inherently evil***, I am willing to see God in everything. If you truly believe that God is both transcendent and immanent, that God works through the world, that God made the world both intentionally and lovingly, then I think you must say that all things reflect some element of God's nature. I'm not, of course, saying that everything is a sacrament, and neither am I saying that all historical events are as God willed them to be (the Holocaust is the most frequently cited example). What I am saying is that, to the person willing enough and blessed enough to see it, all things can be numinous. And every Christian who is trying very hard to have a relationship with Christ is, whether they know it or not, an amateur mystic. Practicing Christians are bound and bent on finding the numinous. To those who are looking, God is all over the place.

But I must concede that there are some people who do not see God in all things. I suppose, in truth, I don't myself. I may wish to see him in most things, but to an extent I must say things like, "Drunkenness does not for me contain a path to God." Thus we can say, provisionally, that someone like me puts sobriety under the sacred category and drunkenness under the profane category. There is some sort of a division going on after all. I think this is a fair thing to say. So, does this mean that my fallacy is not such a fallacy after all?

Of course not. And I'll tell you why in a later post.

See Part II.

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*Do not take this to mean that Jon is atheist. What it is that he does or does not believe had better be taken up with him, but the last time he mentioned it to me, he said, "Oh, I believe there's a God. I just don't know what he's like," or something like that.
**I realize "transcendent reality" is a big term. I'm sorry to say this, but we're dealing with big ideas--the biggest of all ideas, actually--and so sometimes all we have to work with are big terms. "The supernatural realm" is a very poor substitute for "transcendent reality." Basically, what I and most religious scholars mean when they use this term is that part of the world that is just so true, just so real, that we can't access it directly. This seems like a post-Platonic idea, but, if Huston Smith is right, that's exactly the sort of worldview that indigenous peoples hold, too.
***The physical world was made by God. This does not mean that it cannot be evil--Satan was made by God, too--but it does mean that the physical world started good, and since it was not omniscient upon its fall, it cannot be all evil. When it distracts us from our holy purpose, then it is acting for evil. But while we do not live on bread alone, Jesus did hand out a lot of it. Food as a general category has Jesus' stamp of approval, and that's good enough for me.

An Advent

[To the folks from Elizabeth Esther's blogstravaganza: this current post, "An Advent," won out over a close competitor for the monthly carnival slot. That other post is featured here. It represents what is perhaps another facet of my blogger-personality, appearing as differences in topic and perhaps style. In this case, I am discussing the intersection between people with disabilities and cultural ideals of sexiness. I talk about Aimee Mullins, conjoined twins, where 'sexiness' comes from, and moral reactions to these things.]

Today is the first day of the liturgical year, beginning with the season of Advent. If you are interested in what Advent is, I will yet again encourage you to visit Conversion Diary, which is quite likely one of the Internet's best wikis on all such things, even though it's not officially a wiki. I won't be talking too much about Advent as a general topic, though. Rather, I want to talk about this Advent, which marks or is marked by a unique advent for me.

(In case you didn't visit Jennifer Fulwiler's blog, I should at the very least tell you that Advent is the first season of the liturgical year and one during which we prepare ourselves for the birth of Christ, celebrated on 25 December. The end of the liturgical year, a season known somewhat anticlimactically as Ordinary Time, is the time in the liturgy during which we recall Christ's reign on Earth. Thus in the turning over from this last Saturday to today, we move from Christ's reign to a pre-Christ's reign time, a sort of harkening to the Old Testament which is itself a preparation for Christ. That's not a pre-Christ's reign time in that during this season the sacrifice is somehow moot and we're all for the next few weeks damned. No. It's rather a symbolic sort of thing, a remembering sort of thing. Anyway, Advent is a time of New Year's resolutions--or positive personal change--as we prepare ourselves for the coming of Christ, both as born in Bethleham and as returning again at the end of all things.)

This Sunday, you may recall, is the first Sunday that I became a server at Saint Thomas' Anglican Church. If I were asked to give my denomination, I would say either that I was baptised and confirmed Lutheran or that I am non-denominational. I recall three churches of which I would have called myself a regular member of the congregation: the Lutheran one (St. Paul's) previously described, the evangelical/non-denominational/student church (Bethel) at school, and St. Thomas' here in Fort McMurray. Bethel did not have an alb-clad worship team, but St. Paul's did and during the last two years of elementary school and to a lesser extent the first year of high school, I served there as an acolyte. (I was also Assistant Minister once, but I don't remember much about that.) Anyway, one thing I missed when going to Bethel was the ritual, the altar space, the formal roles, and, as a sort of crystallization of all of that, the alb itself. Here at St. Thomas' we have both the energy of Bethel and the ritual of St. Paul's, and when they called for servers (of which 'acolyte' is in the Anglican church a subtype), I volunteered.

I completed server training a few weeks ago, but in the first two Sunday's following that the other new servers served, and then last Sunday there was a baptism and so one of the girls from the more experienced lot served for that. This Sunday, then, was my first day as a server. It is my luck (solely a figure of speech, I'm sure) that my first day as a server was the first day of Advent, and thus the first day of the liturgical year. Truly a day of firsts.

As far as St. Thomas' itself goes, this is also a time of turn-over. It doesn't match up as neatly as my first, but it's still interesting. Rev. Fraser is going to be consecrated as a Bishop soon and presiding in Athabasca. Thus St. Thomas' will be out a priest. (Rev. Leslie Hand will still be 'our' priest, but she can't always make it Sundays due to commitments at another church.) Today was the second or third worship that I have attended which Rev. Fraser did not himself attend. Rather, the deacon and one of the lay-readers (David and Lori respectively) made up the worship team with myself. Fraser will be back for some more Sundays, but not many more. The sort of service we had today will be more and more common, and so while it's not an actual first, it is among the first and is a taste for what will follow in a few weeks.

However, this leads into a more human story. That is, because Fraser was absent, we did not have communion this Sunday. The sort of service I prepared for was a communion service, and the cues I was watching for were communion service cues. This means I got awful lost and confused when I realized that a central part of the ritual would simply not be there, and so I had no idea when to do things. For instance, in the three songs before communion, you prepare the table during the second song and receive the offering during the third song. So I know that when the priest starts getting ready for the sacrament, I should be getting out the bread box and then the flasks, and then on the song after that I will get the offering plate, receive the offering, and place it on the altar. But since we had no communion, the pre-offering liturgy would be different and my other cue (the priest preparing the sacrement) would be missing. So I was lost.

After some fumbling, though, and some kind guidance from David, I got everything done on time. The good news also was that Lori hadn't led service very many times before and she was nervous too, though she certainly didn't show it.

There were other fumbles than that, but not major ones. David and Lori were very nice (and presumably still are) and it all worked out, and likely no one in the congregation was the wiser.

In a way I was disappointed that there was no communion. I would have liked to have helped prepare the host. It seems magical to me, and I wanted to be part of that. Now, I dislike your common Christian sayings because I fear that through overuse they have lost their meaning. Notwithstanding this, it occured to me during service that this disappointment is another instance of God's plans superceding our own. I had wanted to be part of communion as a way of strengthening my own bond with Christ through that ritual. The whole process was something that I craved, and I craved it solely because I wanted it to make me feel more connected to Christ. This I did not get. Rather, I served during a service without a communion. My focus was on other things then, like singing loudly enough and praying loudly enough and getting my cues right. I was forced to trust that David and Lori, and through them God, would help me perform this role properly and help me help the congregation worship during a time of transition.

I am not saying that I was in the main disappointed, but it wasn't what I was expecting. And don't get me wrong: I have not walked away from this saying, "Now I can trust God and trust the worship team! I am now focused on helping the congregation and not myself, and I can now find Jesus in the service elsewhere than in the host!" It would be nice if these were true, but they aren't really. I don't trust well at all and I barely think of the congregation and on a bad day I have a hard time finding Jesus anywhere, even in the host.

I knew that my peformance as server would not transform me from someone feeling lost and distant from God into a zealous and whole 'little Christ' who is pumping the Spirit out to the congregation. While I am sure that the sow's ear can become a silk purse as much as water once became wine, the transformation from me into Super-me nonetheless seemed a little unlikely even in light of that. I was, however, hoping for some magical connection, some sudden and undeniable affirmation of my community in Christ. Rather, what I did learn, if it was learning, was a lesson that is integral to Advent: that I am not there yet; that I need preparation and that my change is a process, not an event; that I have a long way to go.

I read Narnia books and see how exciting it is that Aslan comes in at the end and turns them into heroes. What I conveniently forget is that Edmund had to wallow in the Witch's prison. That Eustace had to become a dragon (or become disabled and disfigured, which you get by reading what it's like for him to be dragon) and then undergo what amounted to torture at Aslan's claws. That Aravis and Shasta had to trek across the desert with lions hot on their heels (like Jonah, in a way). That Polly and Eustace had to fight a losing battle amidst sorrow at the ends of times. That they had to do all of these things before they became knights (or friends) of Narnia.

The question, of course, is what sort of change is needed? I don't know, but I suppose neither did Edmund, or Eustace, or Aravis, or Polly, or Abraham, or Hosea, or Peter, or Paul. What I do know is that I will start paying better attention to the liturgical year. I don't know what to do to observe that, but at least I will keep an eye on it. And I will stop expecting magical transformations at the appropriate time, not because they can't happen but because they likely won't if you're looking for them.

Doing the (un)Desirable

One of the myths about Christianity (and any religion that has rules) is that its behaviour codes limit the pleasure of its practitioners. That is, that Christians forgo happiness for some other reason (usually, according to the legend, to get into heaven, where they will be happiest of all). This sort of thinking is unfortunately advocated by such mechanisms as Pascal's Wager (if you don't know who Pascal is, don't worry about it).

Another version of this myth is that Christianity limits some happinesses (sexual pleasures, drunkenness, etc) and offers others (community, networking, comfort in the face of death, sense of purpose, etc). In a sense this is seen as a sort of "If you give up such-and-such, we'll offer you this" deal. Membership rules still inhibit happiness, but some this-world sociological or psychological benefit is given in return for that membership. This sort of thinking is advocated by Durkheimian analysis (if you don't know who Durkheim is, don't worry about it).

Now, from a non-Christian perspective, either of these could be true. I am not going to say anything to make a non-Christian believe that these are false. Rather, I am simply going to illustrate how Christianity does not see itself as offering either option, but rather a third (and better) one. That is, a religion's perspective on rules is radically different from an outsider's perspective.

To a Christian (or, at least, to some Christians), the rules are most certainly there to test our obedience. God has put down these rules, and if we break them, we've "failed" the obedience test. But let's think about this. We knew from the outset that we'd fail. God knew from the outset that we'd fail. No one in the whole of Christianity has ever claimed otherwise. So obviously there is a lot more to these rules that simply testing. We aren't getting into heaven based on our obedience, so that rules-as-entrance-exam story can be promptly defenestrated.

To a Christian (or, at least, to some Christians), the rules are most certainly there to keep our community intact. I don't think we deny the fact that these rules have to do with social normativity and conformity. Oh, no one phrases it like that. But in Philippians, Paul asks us to "strive side by side," to "do everything without murmuring and arguing," to be "of the same mind" and love with "the same love." We frequently say that if the congregation (and especially the elder committee) doesn't follow the rules, the church falls apart. The rules are clearly there to keep the community together, unified. Social normativity or conformity: these are good things, in moderation, and I don't think any Christian who's really thought it through would argue that the rules aren't there to keep us from falling into chaos.


But that, again, is not the whole story. If the rules were so repressive of pleasure as people sometimes seem to think, people--and therefore communities--would erupt far more often than they do. Communism fell for this reason; Westernized colonies frequently experience bouts of spirit possession, witch attacks, and other rebellions against the normalized, scientific doctrine imposed on them. That these eruptions only rarely occur in Christianity indicates something in particular: it indicates that the rules are not universally repressive.


To a Christian (or, at least, to some Christians), the rules are there to help us be happier. They are not fundamentally tickets into heaven. They are not fundamentally prerequisites to church membership. They are rather guideposts to earthly happiness. We are not to get drunk (that isn't abstain entirely; that's not get inebriated) because God knows better than we do that drunkenness leads to unhappiness. We are not to engage in pre-marital sex because God knows better than we do that these relationships will hurt us in the long-run, as we play havoc with our chemical emotions through acts of intimacy with people who we are uncommitted to. We are to refrain from arguing because it will prevent us from exercising our pride, and we are to avoid pride because it pride makes us pig-headed and therefore stupid. We are to watch our anger because anger is poisonous--and I'll note that this is physiologically true, in that adreneline destroys our bodies and the physiological mechanisms of anger give us minor short-term advantages and major long-term damage.

The idea is that we do not know what is good for us; we learn from mistakes, but sometimes these mistakes can be so destructive that it's very hard to repair the damage by the time you've learned the lesson. God, knowing those mistakes that are most common to the most people, has encoded warnings against these mistakes in rules. Now, because He's God and we need to trust Him, it's wrong for us to disobey these rules. Many of the effects of these mistakes damage others or the church (because a hurting person is a dangerous person), and so most certainly these rules enforce certain norms and protect the church. But these both stem from the fact that, fundamentally, these rules are to prevent each person from hurting his or her own self.

Have you ever known that something will make you happy in the long run, but right now you really don't want to do it? For me it's exercise. I am happy once I'm exercising, and I'm very happy after I've exercised. But before I start, I really don't want to do it. For others this may be dieting or giving up alcohol or quitting smoking. The short-term pleasure is far easier to account for than long-term pleasure.

That's what the rules are like. It may look unappealing at first: limits on sex, limits on alcohol, limits on gambling, limits on swearing, limits on anger, limits on arguing, limits on pride, limits on selfishness. This is only because we are looking entirely at the short-term pleasures of a buzz or a quick orgasm or a nicotine kick. These pleasures, if improperly handled, will destroy us. That is what the rules are for: to control these pleasures.

Now, if you're a non-Christian this whole spiel may not convince you that the rules given by Christianity are the right ones; that's not my aim. What I hope I have successfully done is indicate how believers understand these rules, and why believers think it's valuable to follow them. Hopefully, it will give you a new perspective on the role of rules (unless you already understood all of this).

Personality Test

At Navs tonight I took a personality test. Usually I see a personality test and think, "I put in information; it gives a label; I look at what the label means and discover it means that I put in this information. Sum information gain=0." What surprised me was most tonight was that the answer surprised me.

The quiz concerned how we most frequently/effectively connect with God. I was expected "Comtemplative" or "Intellectual" to be up there. I didn't actually know what the labels were until I finished the quiz--Dan had us not look at the tally sheet, and wouldn't even give us the label key until we were done--but I had a fairly good idea that at least one of them would be on there when I was answering the questions. But get this: they were both among my lowest categories. No, what I scored highest in were "Serving" and "Creation." This means I feel most attached to God when I am serving others and when I am creating something or admiring Creation. The last one I could have guessed; the second I should have guessed, but hadn't.

It made sense, though. I read the description for Serving and everything it said was true. Now, I'm fully aware of the Horoscope Illusion: each prediction or description is tailored to apply almost universally, and yet appear too specific for that to be true. I suspect personality tests do the same; at least, very few categories in personality tests appear totally unrelated to me. So I read the other categories, and, lo and behold... they didn't describe me. I could not 'resonate' with them (I don't like using that word, but I can't come up with a suitable alternative at the moment). I don't worship with people so well; I mean, I like being in a crowd of people who are utterly invested in worship, as in Praise and Power here at school, but interaction with people hasn't ever struck me as particularly holy. I suppose it can be, but I haven't felt the energy, though. Unless, of course, I'm serving...

It said of me, "You feel uncomfortable if you don't have a role to play." That's true. I've known it to be true, as well; I have to contribute somehow. I get antsy if I don't. It also warned that I have to recall that serving is an act of worship. True, that. Once I get started I serve easily, but somehow I forget sometimes.

Now, why was I surprised? I've been aware lately of how much I get from helping people. If you ever want me to do something, appeal to my altruism. Don't try to make something sound good for me; that never works. Make it sound like the right thing to do, and I'm yours. The thing is, I'm terribly concerned I'm not serving enough. Do you know how many opportunities to serve I see, and how comparatively few I take? The gap is huge. I am so far from being a servant of God that it's overwhelming.

And yet I realize, as I look around me, that I am serving more than your average Joe is. I volunteer two hours at Run&Read (3 hours in walking there and back); I have an English buddy, a first year student I'm helping learn the ropes of the English department; I edit people's papers pretty much pro bono; I hold open every door I can, and offer to carry things for people whenever I remember to; I give pretty near all of my pocket change to beggars when I walk down Princess Street; I give to almost every charity that asks, buying from bakesales when I'm not hungry or giving whatever's in my pocket to the deaf-mute people who come door to door. (And I wonder why I'm short on money?) This isn't even the complete litany, either. I'm not including my work facilitating Navs or the one-off volunteering I do through them sometimes, or my work on colloquium (though CV-padding is part of my motive on that one, let's be honest).

This isn't to make myself look better. This is to illustrate that, yes, maybe I do have derive worship from volunteering and didn't notice. It also illustrates what I need to be doing more often; I have to find somewhere to volunteer over the summers. I really do. It's soothing to me.

Related to the distance between what I'm doing and where I want to be: it seems to me that each time you advance along a certain path towards building the character you want to be, you find that your ultimate goal is further off than you had wanted. Say you're an average person, so far as politeness goes. Say you want to be more polite than you are. So you do those obvious things: you say "please" and "thank-you" when you ought and you try to be more diplomatic. But as you start to do these things, you see more gestures you could perform that you hadn't thought of. Once you've completed this, you see more manners you ought to keep; these manners, however, are a little harder to do. Maybe holding that door open isn't convenient right now, as you're late for class, but good manners indicates you ought to nonetheless. Maybe you forgot you had that assignment and you could really use the evening to work on it so it wouldn't be all crammed into your weeked, but you said you'd go to your friend's poetry reading. Sure, everyone else is going, so she doesn't need your support in particular--but you did say you'd go. Each time you become more polite, you realize how woefully far you are from being truly, perfectly polite. Each step you take, the longer you see the journey is. That is maybe why I see that I am not serving very much at all, while others think I am serving a lot. I am further down the road, and from this vantage I have a better sense of how little of the path I've traveled.

The "creation" part I wasn't surprised about. I already knew that making things is a passion of mine--absurdly so; I make maps in computer game editors even if I doubt anyone will ever play them--and I've dabbled in devotional poetry. You can dig in my archives to find some not-very-skilled results. I swear I'm better now. I ought to do more of that. The flip side is that I also enjoy veiwing creation, and this too is true. I love learning about the technical aspects of art. How does one animate (my brother fills me in on that)? How does one practice photography? What are the theoretical implications of sculpture? What defines musical genres? How does one act, or design a set? Also, how can one harness these to worship God, process the Revelation, spread the Gospel? Also, being outside, walking in the world--natural is prefered, but urban will suffice in a pinch--is a deeply calming and meditative process for me. I process through walking. Walking is key. Also, animals of all stipes (and spots and bumps and phosphorescent wrinkles) focus me. This isn't artistic creation of course, so much as capital-c Creation. I don't know how much these two elements should be connected; it seems like a play on words more than a logical connection, metaphor over metonymy. But look at the Romantics, look at Aristotle, look at Indigenous peoples, look at Taoist paintings. They fuse art and nature all the time. It seems one cannot exist without the other, for them. Creation and creation; both things I love.

Perhaps I'll post the quiz on here tomorrow, when I shouldn't be getting ready for bed. Perhaps you'd like to take it, if you're at all interested in learning how you connect with God.

Guessing Game--Glove

G'day.

The other night I was praying, and an image that I thought was particularly apt came to me. It was of me as God's glove. More accurately, I was asking to be God's glove.

Now, if you look at the title, you'll see it's a guessing game. The game is, can you guess what this image means? It's an extended metaphor, of course, so try and think of ways in which Christians might want to act as a glove of God.

It'll likely never catch on as a popular image, but I like it. It would ease my concerns over 'prayer warrior,' which I expressed previously. Though, actually, if we think of it in a C. S. Lewis' theological context, where we are the underground in occupied territory, then 'prayer warrior' makes a lot more sense. Actually, I'm starting to like that... prayer as a weapon against Satan and sin...

(This is all a manifestation of my English-major training: I am obsessed with symbols, narratives, allegories, analogies, and metaphors. It seems my essay-writing skills are not kicking in though: I'm venturing way off topic!)

I'd give the winner something, except that there could be multiple winners. If someone gets one aspect and someone else gets another, then it'd be a mutual win, right? And I can't very well send prizes...hmm... Well, if I like your answer, I'll come up with something.

On Praying for Other People

Last night I did something which I ought to do more often, yet do not: I prayed for other people.

Usually, I approach prayer almost formulaically: I offer repentence and ask for forgivenness, with some thought towards a particular transgression I committed that day, understood as a token of my transgressions as a whole; I offer thanks for at least two things for which I am grateful that I experienced that day; I ask to be an agent of God in the world; I ask for particular things I feel I need the following day, most often patience, strength, dedication, courage, and other forms of self-control. Sometimes I also ask for direction, if I feel particularly lost. Last night, though, I didn't do even one of those things.

Last night I prayed instead for individuals and groups, as they came to my mind. Surely I could have thought of others to pray for, but I just let the thoughts come up and I prayed as they came. I prayed for a recently evicted man I meant that night, who had been kicked out of his apartment for allowing a homeless man to take shelter there. I prayed for a girl who said she was trying to resolve thoughts about God. I prayed for someone else who I felt was uneducated about other religious traditions, a problem that I feel is rampant among the Christian community. I prayed for the students of the school I volunteer at, of another school in the city with the Read and Run program, and of my mother's school--and also for the teachers at these schools, whose views of life must be impacted by the financial or emotional poverty of some of their pupils. I prayed for others, too, who gave no particular indication that they needed prayer over the course of yesterday, but that occured to me could use it, even if they didn't ask for it or would be upset if they found out that I had been praying for them. (I here nod to Inara from Firefly--either episode two or the second part of the pilot episode.)

At the end of this prayer I was struck by the serenity in which I rested. Sure, I managed to get antsy and uncomfortable later in the night, obstructing my attempts to sleep, but immediately afterwards the sheer rightness of the experience, the spiritual fulfilment, was overwhelming--and I use this word denotatively. It occured to me that this is what I ought to be doing all the time. I need to integrate this into my nightly prayers. Praying for other people--authentically praying for them--is a necessary part of a Christian lifestyle. It is an act of charity, and a profounder one than the ease of giving it may suggest.

This indicates to me that this is a skill that I need to cultivate. This includes both nightly private prayers and praying aloud for others in those opportunities I have for doing so--not too infrequent, given my weekly participation in a few Christian communities. This involves being publically available for prayer requests, cultivating an image as someone who can provide this service--though not in a bureaucratic or commercial way, despite my word choice. I have occasionally heard members of my Christian communities use the word 'prayer-warrior'; I have always through that there was something both apt and perverse in that phrase. Whether I like the terminology or not, I must become one.

Inversely, I must also make available the opportunities for others to pray for me. If I find others-directed prayer to be liberating, then it seems to make sense that those I encounter might also find others-directed prayer to be liberating. Instead of being vague about my prayer needs, perhaps I ought to be more specific, ought to give someone a real sense of how they can pray for me. Of course, telling someone your prayer needs makes you very vulnerable, and I fear vulnerability almost as much as I fear disappointing people. However, this vulnerability is a fair sacrifice to make, I believe, for giving someone the opportunity to provide this form of charity for you. I can think of bigger sacrifices that have been made in Christian history.

Whether I will maintain these new initiatives is yet to be seen; I am not a very good Christian, to be honest, and often fail to deliver on both Christian-community-expected behaviour and, much more importantly, peronally or Biblically expected behaviour (though I'm not bad at hiding these failures from public sight). This is not to say I do not believe this discovery is true or that I will not continue to believe it is true. It is instead to say that I am as flawed as anyone else, and my revelations do not always impact behaviour, regardless of what Freud may think. Despite what happens, I felt that this experience, this new understanding, is valuable, and worth sharing through this medium, even if only a few people come upon it. Perhaps you already knew this; perhaps prayer is foreign to you, and the effects of it are not something you can yet relate to; perhaps you are new to the game and are exhilerated by some new territory that you could explore. I know that, despite having prayed since I've known how to speak, I am new to the game of prayer. Every time I am asked to pray in public I can feel my amateur status. Whatever your position, whatever my limitations, I hope that this one-sided discussion has in some way illuminated some part of your social or spiritual life.

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In a radical framework shift, I want to encourage you to read my blog posts textually, literarily, formally, deconstructively, post-colonially, archetypically, new historically, anthropologically, marxistly, femininely, queer theoretically, heteroglossically. In many ways I have written my blogs with these criticisms in mind, choosing vocabulary specifically to allow you, as readers, to interpret, analyze, and even criticize in a scholarly fashion. This includes otherwise personal, even spiritual, passages such as this. Essentially, I am becoming familiar with the myriad of ways people tease meaning out of texts, and so I am attempting to frame and in some sense control the processes of that teasing, much as people make jokes at themselves to prevent others from teasing them. As a writer, I cannot predict how you will recover that meaning, but I can predict how might, and work with (against?) that.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I think too much about everything, including myself. I hope that, if nothing else, this makes for interesting reading.