Coming to Terms

Pressed metaphors and other signposts
at the intersection of positive and negative theology

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I don’t have an answer to the problem of evil. But if Job was answered by the presence of God, then the only thing we can offer is to be the presence of God in someone’s life. The quiet, loving friend, the tender mother, the faithful wife. It doesn’t solve the insoluble, and it won’t make anyone applaud you for being right or winning a war. Nobody becomes president of a seminary or makes the best-seller list by holding the hand of someone in pain.

But it says that God is good. Here, here is goodness: baked and covered in this casserole dish, shining in this stack of clean laundry, ringing in that phone when you’re lonely. God is good, my letter says, even if the words aren’t printed on it. God is good, I hear in that familiar joke from a much-missed friend, who suddenly stopped by. Not watch me win, but God is good.
Sharon L. Holland: More than being right

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At this, that villainous creature [Gluttony] lost all hope, and tried to hang himself. But Repentance managed to bring him to his senses, before he could go through with it, and this is what he said:

‘Keep the thought of mercy in your mind, and beg for it—mercy—with your mouth! Remember, “Misericordia eius super omnia opera eius” [Ps. 145.9]—God’s mercy is a greater thing than every other one of his works. Every possible evil human beings could perform, or even imagine, can no more survive before the mercy of God than a glowing ember that falls into the ocean. And so, always keep mercy in your thoughts; and as for material wealth—I say, renounce it!’
William Langland, Piers Plowman, Passus V (c. 1360), Schmidt trans., p. 52

“ … one of those things that is too big and too near to see.
Anthony Esolen, When Drab Is a Favorite Color


reblogged from
preciseandtowering
“ The three [worship, learning, and action] are one, and we must go all three ways to reach the one destination. For this is what Israel discovered: the God of nature is the God of history, and the way to know Him is to do His will.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, 31. (via preciseandtowering)

“ There is no secret. Or rather, the secrets are buried in platitudes. That is to say, it has something to do with love, commitment, and family.
Walker Percy, interviewed on the secret to the success of his marriage, in Signposts in a Strange Land

“ ‘We can do our science, or our painting, or our doctoring quite well without Christ’—that sounds a very reasonable thing to say, if we forget or were never told that Christ is precisely the truth we are discovering, the beauty we are expressing, the life we are restoring, and the energy and skill we put to all these things.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Letter to the bishop of Coventry, June 26, 1944, Letters vol 3, p 26


Enemies of the Mere

Several years ago I was able to see a performance of a play by Peter Shaffer called Lettice and Lovage (1988). I was reminded of it again today thinking of poor Thomas Kinkade, who was arrested for DUI. What strikes me about the play is its reminder of where we are as a society. It doesn’t excerpt well, but here are a few snippets.

Lettice Douffet, a tour guide for Britain’s Preservation Trust and one of the two protagonists in the comedy, complains that now “we live in a country that wants only the Mere. Mere Guides. Mere People. Mere Events!” We live among people with no concept of greatness—or courage.

We have greater technologies than our forebears, but we have paid a price. The color and drama, the sense of purpose, is leaching out; what remains is too often gray as concrete. Later in the play, Lotte Schoen, the other protagonist and the personnel director of the Trust, tells her that “There’s no one left now with any spunk at all.”

Lettice responds: “Just the Mere! The Mere People. They’re all who remain.”

Shaffer saw this playing out not least in architecture, which was going through a horrible period (British brutalism, they call it). Lotte tells of looking at a new modern monstrosity of a building in London: “It was nearly finished: a great dead weight of Not Trying. Not Trying and Not Caring!”

As the play ends, Lotte joins Lettice as an enemy of the Mere, who offers “Enlargement for shrunken souls—Enlivenment for dying spirits—Enlightenment for dim, prosaic eyes.”

The ideologues and marketers and politicians of the modern world would narrow us to consumers or victims or cube dwellers—or just animals. Who can be surprised at the results; boredom and high rates of suicide. Surely there is more than this. Mere survival is not enough for the human spirit. But pushing for anything more requires creativity, imagination, and vision—and the courage to stand up for them.

And that is the real tragedy, for me, of someone like Thomas Kinkade, who could offer something larger, but instead offers mere sentiment. Certainly beauty takes work, but nothing less can overcome the mere.


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Yes; for to hold a thing with the intellect, is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by.

… ‘Do I believe or feel this thing right?’—the true question is forgotten: ‘Have I left all to follow him?’ To the man who gives himself to the living Lord, every belief will necessarily come right; the Lord himself will see that his disciple believe aright concerning him. If a man cannot trust him for this, what claim can he make to faith in him?

… Get up, and do something the master tells you; so make yourself his disciple at once. Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because he said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe in him, if you do not anything he tells you. If you can think of nothing he ever said as having had an atom of influence on your doing or not doing, you have too good ground to consider yourself no disciple of his.
George MacDonald, The Truth in Jesus

“ [Scientific] Laws manifest themselves with different “emphasis” in different contexts; they can be understood more as expressions of the character of such contexts than as one-sided determiners of them. Nothing delivers us from the necessity of learning what sort of context we are dealing with.
Steve Talbott, letter on The Logic of Science, The New Atlantis

A complex system cannot be controlled, it can only be managed

One of the topics in which I am interested at the moment is the modernist ethos of control. It’s a product of hubris. It is literally lethal and ultimately unworkable because it is based on a false view of the world. It includes a quixotic pursuit of certainty and a presumption that we can stand outside the world and not be affected by our actions. But while the physical world is controllable to a degree, human persons are not.

A 2005 speech from the late Michael Crichton on complexity theory helps to explain why. It seems to have disappeared from his official site, so I’m going to post some of the core text below.

Even if we can know with certainty (and we cannot), we can never know enough. The world is too complex. Knowledge may bring power, but power is not knowledge. And power is not sufficient.

Against control, I guess we would have to posit stewardship, or cultivation. (Gardening metaphors work nicely.) Crichton’s “management” is close, but that concept has been corrupted. The Hebrew concept of Yada’ —knowledge connected with love and responsibility—is better. In any case, the attitudes to cultivate, as Crichton notes, include humility and responsibility.

One useful concept below: “One complex system that most people have dealt with is a child.”

Also see: quantum theory; orthodox Christian theology (subcategory: idolatry); history of human civilization.

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