Death, the Resurrection, the Second Coming, the end of the world: There is much debate about all these matters in religious circles. It is enough for me to know that my Heavenly Father loves me and teaches me and gives me trials and gives me comforts according to his wisdom. He moves me along in his paths, and on those paths he has placed a special creature with a special mission.
When as a child I first encountered this creature, I quickly mastered it-or so I thought-and then, over the years, I learned how widely adaptable it was to human uses. I learned that it hunts for us, herds our sheep and our cattle, guards our flocks and our crops, searches for us when we are lost, rescues us when we are buried in the rubble of an earthquake or in the snow of an avalanche, protects us in our homes, warns us of danger, guides us if we are blind, makes announcements to us if we are deaf, searches out our enemies, greets warmly our friends, sniffs out bombs and other dangers, and unfailingly welcomes us home with wild enthusiasm that is never tainted by resentment or petulance.
We call the creature, dog, and we commonly live with this animal as an afterthought, a sideshow, something just there. By some archeological accounts, this relationship goes back 120,000 years. Dogs have been justthere for a long, long time.
Our Creator has limited the dog’s lifespan to something under 20 years: Long enough for us to acquire the great bond and to forget, for the most part, the grief that comes with this bond. But the grief does come, and if we become loyal to the species, it comes again and again and again.
Somewhere along the trail on which dogs appear and disappear, we learn something exceedingly important: We learn to endure loss. If we endure well, we can acquire the courage to love without reservation-a thing dogs do without effort. We can learn to love in this way even though we know that the object of our love can be separated from us in the blink of an eye or, in the case of our dogs, at the end of a predictably short span of years.
I did not know it at the time, but the first dog in my life spoke to me. He said, “I am here to teach you love and loss. You cannot have the one without the other, but you do not know this. I and others of my kind will teach you this. We will do so by establishing the great bond. Then we will simply live and die, over and over again, as you watch. Be worthy of this lesson.”
Mormons believe that the Resurrection will include all created things:
23 And the end shall come, and the heaven and the earth shall be consumed and pass away, and there shall be a new heaven and a new earth.
24 For all old things shall pass away, and all things shall become new, even the heaven and the earth, and all the fulness thereof, both men and beasts, the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea;
25 And not one hair, neither mote, shall be lost, for it is the workmanship of mine hand.
-Section 29, Doctrine and Covenants
I believe this. My dogs await my return. I must live a little longer on this side of the veil, for I have more to learn, more to repent of than they did.
I consider with a touch of humor the anagram imbedded in the name for their kind. Then I try to imagine a Heaven from which they are banished. It is futile. Such a heaven fails by definition. God is not done with me here, nor will he be done with me on the other side. My dogs know this, and they know I will need them.
Other people have different creatures placed in their lives to form the great bond and teach the great lesson. Still others learn by entirely different means.
Perhaps by now you have guessed the truth under all this: It was never about the dogs. It was always about the bond and the lesson learned while in the grip of this bond.
It was always about love.
We give them the time we can spare, the space we can spare, the food we can spare, and the love we can spare. …and in return, dogs give us their very all. It’s the best bargain that man has ever made.
This began as a letter to one of my daughters. By agreed tradition I write one such letter of advice to her each month. Only one. She writes back how she feels (not what she thinks) about each topic I address. This exchange of letters (true letters, US Postal Service objects, in paper envelopes with actual stamps on them) helps spare her from my grand notions the rest of the month, while it satisfies my aging fatherly instincts. Most important, however, is that this exchange helps me to know my daughter better, and it helps her to know me.
It is a good discipline.
Here is what I said in May of 2009.
Opinions
There are many definitions of the word opinion. Webster’s New World Dictionary (1980) offers this:
1. a belief not based on absolute certainty or positive knowledge but on what seems true, valid, or probable to one’s own mind… 2. an evaluation, impression, or estimation of the quality or worth of a person or thing….
He warned us about the beam in our own eye that we ignore in our enthusiasm for pointing out the speck in another’s.
He traced in the sand and sent away those who would stone the sinner. He then simply said to the woman, “Go and sin no more.” He did not pontificate about the past or the future; he issued no judgment on what had or had not taken place; in short, he offered no opinion.
When Pontius Pilot asked Jesus to explain himself and save his life, Jesus was brief or silent or elliptical: “Thou hast said it,” he replied at one point when asked about his godhood. This could mean “yes” or it could mean literally what it means: “You said what you said.” Jesus was a man cleansed of opinion.
Opinions should be labeled with a blinding neon light that flashes on and off in jarring repetition, “This is an opinion!”
Instead, we go the other way, giving in to the insatiable urge to dress up our opinions in the clothing of facts and evidence and so-called rational conclusions.
Opinions are aggressive little fellows: They are always bucking for a promotion.
Beware of them.
Facts
Facts are fine, but opinions frequently masquerade as facts. Great care is necessary. There is evidence, and from it we conclude “facts”.
This is a brand of necessary foolishness.
We are flawed instruments of perception. Human discourse is full of long and noisy disputes about what is and what is not a fact. These disputes frequently derive from the same body of evidence. Things grow curiouser and curiouser.
Be thoughtful when someone claims a fact. Examine the axe they are grinding. Then inquire about whose ox will be gored when this “fact” or that “fact” prevails over another “fact”. Be especially thoughtful when you believe you have the facts. Ignore people who claim to have all the facts. They are just silly.
Remember how difficult it can be in the afternoon to remember “facts” about the morning. Events are fleeting, and so is our perception and understanding of them. Be humble about what you think you remember; you may be making it up. In fact, we are all making it up, trusting a sensorium whose reliability is highly questionable. Yet, to a degree, trust it we must. This is the human condition.
Opinions are often put forward as facts. Imaginings are often put forward as remembrances.
Beware.
Evidence
What people call evidence is frequently a collection of opinions masquerading as facts that are thought by some to point one way and by others to point another way. Listen for the underlying premise, the thing for which no evidence is offered.
Be playful about evidence. Pursue it lightheartedly. Ask for evidence of the evidence. Ask for evidence of the evidence of the evidence. And so forth until someone admits that Emperor Opinion indeed wears no clothes. Be of persistent good cheer in this, and the agenda will be revealed.
Opinions are often put forward as evidence.
Beware.
Conclusions
Conclusions are honest, responsible things. People, however, are not.
In a perfect world, when someone says they have reached a conclusion, they are taking responsibility for their unique arrangement of facts and evidence and calling the arrangement by the correct term: conclusion.
This is not a perfect world. Sometimes we claim a conclusion when we have arranged neither facts nor evidence, but instead have arranged only our opinions, put party dresses on them, and put them forward as some grand logical construct.
Opinions often dress up as conclusions.
Beware.
Assertions
Assertions, like conclusions, are honest, responsible things. People, however, are not.
In a perfect world, when someone asserts something, they are taking responsibility for their unique arrangement of facts, evidence, and conclusions and calling the arrangement by the correct term: assertion.
This is not a perfect world. Sometimes we claim an assertion when all we are offering is an armored opinion. There is often little intellectual muscle, bone, and sinew beneath the armor.
Opinions often strut like assertions.
Beware.
The Escape
There is no way out of the opinion trap and knowing this is the way out. When this paradox is freely accepted, joy floods over the dam. Happiness ceases to be the object of our striving; instead, it becomes the accompaniment to it. The war of words becomes a delightful and often humorous dance.
Faith, hope, love, humility, kindness, courtesy, obedience, service, sincerity, and simple courage-these are ways out, but we never embody any of these virtues perfectly-so we are never fully “out”. We are always encumbered by lower order thoughts and feelings, by opinions, judgments, evaluations and the compelling need to be right and to be in control. Truth is left waiting outside the door when we enter the house of opinions. But truth does wait, and we are blessed by his patience.
When this, the human condition, is fully accepted and then embraced, something wonderful happens. We enter into pure becoming. Shame falls away and we cease to justify or condemn ourselves or others-if only for a moment here and there.
This is the imitation of Christ. This is how we come to Christ: line upon line, precept upon precept; here a little, there a little.
The idea that scripture reading can lead to inspiration and revelation opens the door to the truth that a scripture is not limited to what it meant when it was written but may also include what that scripture means to a reader today.
Dallin H. Oaks
“Scripture Reading and Revelation,” Ensign, Jan. 1995, 8
There are many interpretations of all but the most plainly factual scriptural writings, and I am always perplexed when any particular interpretation is offered up as the one-and-only true interpretation. Perplexed: not aroused or put off or challenged or set on edge. Perplexed and, I suppose, a bit curious.
The printers art is fascinatingly complex. Every letter on the page of a newspaper or a book is not a letter at all, but a collection of dots arranged and laid down in a way that causes us to see the appearance of a letter. The white space between and around the dots (background) is every bit as important as the dots in producing the appearance of a letter (object). These letter appearances are arranged in order, left to right (in English at least), to form the appearance of a word, and these word appearances are arranged to form a sentence, and sentences to form paragraphs, and so forth.
The most sacred writings pass through this filter of dots and spaces on their way to our souls.
I will spare you a similar description of the filter formed by human lungs and vocal cords in cases where wisdom is conveyed by word-of-mouth. That there is always some sort of filter is my point.
Add to this filtering the fact that what is being filtered is entirely symbolic. The letter T, for example, is merely a linguistic convention: It has no intrinsic meaning or value. Its meaning and value lie entirely within you and me: We have an agreement about T . We agree that a vertical line crossed at the top with a shorter horizontal line makes a T. We further agree that T is the first letter (symbol) in the Greek word (symbol) Theos. We further agree that the word symbol Theos stands for God (the word symbol in English). And we finally agree that God is….
Do you begin to see the problem?
An incredibly complex collection of symbols is required to form the simplest human thought. An incredibly complex collection of filters are employed in transmitting to others our simplest thoughts or receiving from them their simplest thoughts. These collections of symbols and filters form a dense matrix. Confined within this matrix, we are sometimes facilitated and sometimes thwarted in our efforts to hear or be heard by our fellow human beings.
To say nothing of God.
Which brings me back to the counsel of Dallin H. Oaks: “…scripture is not limited to what it meant when it was written but may also include what that scripture means to a reader today.”
This assertion lifts me out of perplexity. Original meanings (if they can be arrived at with reliability) are very important, but we are not limited to original meanings, as important as they may be. If a “reader today” can take no meaning today from the “original meaning” of an ancient (or modern) scripture, that reader is adrift without wind in his sails or a rudder by which to steer should a wind arise.
All the wise and painstakingly argued commentary in the world is of no use until we ourselves take scripture in hand today, read it today, ponder it today, and listen today for the inspiration and revelation that today can come to us from the Spirit of the living God.
Much of what I read in scriptural commentary strongly implies that the commentator, a human being, is placing limitations on Deity: “God said this in this verse so He could only mean this other thing in this other verse and this is confirmed by the original Greek found in this ancient text and all this together means that God could never do this (or will always do some other thing).” I have heard sermons offered with great fervor and sincerity in terms such as these, and I have been perplexed.
Do we think God is dead or can no longer speak? One man speaks to another: Do we deny that God, if he chose, could not do the same? Do we think we have stuck a pin through Him and mounted Him like a dead butterfly in the musty stacks of some theological museum? Do we think we can know Him by studying Him in this fixed state? Do we think that words and books and sermons and emotional impulses are the sum and substance of the legacy of Christ? Do we think we must delegate to clerics the responsibility for connecting us to a distant and incomprehensible God?
I think not.
Our work on earth is not done. Christ and our Heavenly Father are not silent religious ancestors, aloof, lying over the universe like star clouds, given form and substance only in our holy books. No, they are here and they are now and they are speaking to us today.
We have but to listen, like hungry wolves near starvation in the harsh middle of winter.
If we do, heavenly food will come.
We have been commanded to pray always. My success in obeying this commandment is uneven. In part this is because obedience for me means more than kneeling at the side of my bed and speaking a formal prayer each morning and evening. It means I must strive continually in all that I do to hear and be heard by my Heavenly Father. I have tools for this: Holy scripture, certain religious disciplines, the wise counsel and support of church leaders, enlightening instruction and biblical commentary, books, art, music, sunsets, welcome rain falling on my upturned face, towering redwood trees, the bow of a kayak silently splitting the still water of a high mountain lake.
But I take great care not to mistake these tools, which are so very real and tangible and present, for the God I seek.
Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.
Richard Holloway, Anglican priest Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations,
compiled by James B. Simpson (1988)
As a fine art photographer, I am tempted to take in the whole scene when I find myself in fresh, dramatic surroundings. This is a mistake often pointed out by my dear wife.
Teri looks over my shoulder at the computer screen as I labor in post processing. I sense her there, studying what I have done. “What is the subject?” she asks. Her words are more statement than question, and she is right: I am foolishly caballing together all the elements of the scene, making them look their best with adjustments to white balance, brightness, contrast, and a myriad other settings, all carefully balanced, one against another. Very complex stuff. You should appreciate this.
But there is no subject.
I hit the delete key, and we are all the better for it.
My wife’s question is a kindness. She really is saying that I am missing the point, or worse, there is no point, no subject, and I should move on. I may have a collection of beautiful pieces, like the pieces of an unconstructed jigsaw puzzle spread across a table, but I am best to scoop them into the trash…and move on.
Photography, like sculpture, is in many ways a subtractive art form. The oil painter and the watercolorist add to blank spaces, while the photographer and the sculptor subtract. This is hard work, and I often experience a feeling of loss while engaged in it. First I throw out my precious beauties that offer no hope (I delete them completely lest I be tempted to turn back), then I crop the rest. Cropping, taking away, is one of the photographer’s most powerful tools. So much that seems grand is merely superfluous, a distracting collection of beauties with no story to tell. This casting out is painful, but it is necessary. I cast out a beautiful tree here, a glowing rock there, a smiling child, a handsome animal—all to arrive at the subject, the singularity.
In my religion, in all religions, there are many words, many elements, many representations. Books, commentaries, sermons, warnings and promises abound. It can be difficult to plumb the depths, arrive at meanings, and then, beyond meanings, the truth. It can be difficult to find the Way.
Within the Christian world, disputes rage about which translations of given texts are truest to the original documents, which are most useful to the seeker, which are most doctrinally correct, which are most politically correct, and so forth. There are disputes about which texts constitute scripture and which texts do not. Martin Luther did not care much for the Book of James. He wrote that he considered it to have been erroneously included in the New Testament. Many consider the Book of Revelations to be doubtful, and I have heard a few Protestant friends assert that the Gospels are less reliable than the Epistles.
Some Christians consider the Old Testament to be little more than historical background, now that they have the New Testament. Others take both testaments quite seriously. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints consider the Book of Mormon and other extra-Biblical texts to be scripture along with the Bible, much to the dismay of biblical fundamentalists. To compound matters, these higher level disputes broil over a seathing substrate of disputes about the meanings of particular chapters, verses, phrases, and words in whatever texts are accepted as scripture. Many things are not settled, and no amount of pretending will change this fact.
Secular humanists, atheists, and many scholars chuckle at this chaos and point to it as evidence that religion is essentially myth. A comforting myth to many, but myth nonetheless.
I hold another view. Like C. S. Lewis, I see the myth, but consider it to be a myth that is true. In particular, the Christ myth is different from all others in that it is a myth that is true. It happened, and that it did happen is for me an article faith.
In a way, we are all religious photographers. We see many things; take many pictures; and, if we are dedicated to doing our best, we seek the simplicity, clarity, and singleness spoken of by the Anglican priest, Richard Holloway. I submit that even people who deny religion are seeking for this simplicity, clarity, and singleness. I submit further that they, like those who have embraced religion, are seeking fundamental operating principles. When they think they have found one or several or many of these principles, they organize them, publish books about them, in short make of them a religion.
I do not condemn such people. Some, in fact, I greatly admire. We all take things in, form opinions and have beliefs about them, and move on. I wrote in an earlier column about the necessity of belief, of faith, to merely take in a drink of water or drive down a country road. We all live by faith, just not all by what is understood as religious faith.
We cannot, indeed should not keep all the pictures we take along the way. Some are of people and events better forgotten. Some are poorly exposed, unseeable, junk. Some were taken just right, but are now irrelevant distractions. Some are no longer true. Pictures like these should be cast off, shed like old scabs over old wounds, some like broken tools, some like old analogue television sets that will soon receive no useful signal.
We can be spiritual packrats. It is hard to delete old files, to cast away familiar distractions, to crop pieces of our lives, to shed the superfluous.
All of us came from somewhere, all of us are here now (if you are reading this), and all of us are going somewhere when we cease to be here. The specifics of “somewhere” and “here” and “now” are disputed, but the essential truths are unassailable. We are part of the caravan, playing our role in it, and the caravan moves on. As it does, let us be among those making beautiful things, giving one another beautiful gifts marked by simplicity, clarity, and singleness.
We are Christians for two thousand years. Every nation is what it remains, not what it used to be; not the past glory is important but the height of the present existence.
Father Nicolae Tanase Romania, View over the Top (December 2008, p. 12)
There can be no progress without a departure from tradition, but not all departures from tradition are progress.
Neither a bird nor an airplane can take flight unless there is air above and earth below. Air and earth are the inescapable traditions of aeronautical flight, however fast or high we may go.
When we go high enough, however, we escape the traditions of aeronautical flight, and there is no more “high”, only distance from our home, the earth, and there is no more air. Movement through the vacuum of space requires passing through the traditions of aeronautical flight and then letting them go in order to enter a new realm, one that has its own, quite different, traditions.
We know these things, but appreciate them only casually. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is called that because the realm of aeronautics and realm of space are so very different. It is called that also because these two are for us at this time inseparable. We cannot, as yet, achieve the realm of space except we pass through the realm of aeronautical flight. And we cannot from space return safely to our home of earth and sky unless we re-acquire the previously cast off traditions of flight through air.
So it is in our spiritual lives. We may pass through many realms of religious tradition, but we must one day return home. If we have lost where home is, we may not be able to return there. Indeed, we may die in a spiritual vacuum, like an astronaut who has lost the ability to control his space craft or know where it is in relation to the place from which he came, in relation to home.
The introductory quotation came from an article in a Romanian magazine loaned to me by a Presbyterian friend who lives in Colorado Springs. My friend does missionary work in Romania and other countries. The magazine article is an account of an interview with Nicolae Tanase, a Romanian Orthodox priest and champion of the unborn in Romania.
Pause for a moment, and consider how many traditions are addressed in the previous paragraph. I count at least ten.
Yet the words spoken by Father Tanase express a single tradition implicit to one degree or another in all ten of the others. It is that overarching tradition that I am seeking to address here.
In the magazine where I found Father Tanase’s words, each article appears first in Romanian and then in English. The English articles are clearly translations performed by someone for whom English is a second and not-altogether-mastered language. The translations are awkward, so awkward in some cases that they are humorous.
I read, chuckled, and finally arrived at Father Tanase’s words:
We are Christians for two thousand years. Every nation is what it remains, not what it used to be; not the past glory is important but the height of the present existence.
What does it mean that a thing or a person or a place, in this case a nation, “is what it remains, not what it used to be.” At first this sounded like nonsense to me, the product of an awkward translator. However, being a lover of nonsense, I was captivated by the statement, and I read it again. My eyes came up from the page, and I smiled just a little as a profound truth intruded on my thoughts:
Ultimately, you and I are not measured by what we once were or what we once did, but by what “remains” of what we once were or once did. “Past glory” is nothing. The “height of the present existence” is everything and then, in the twinkling of an eye, the “height of the present existence” becomes “past glory” and thus nothing,…unless…unless something is carried forward, unless something “remains” upon which the next “height of the present existence” will stand, making it just a little higher than before.
What “remains” is what makes progress possible. Indeed, it is the substance of progress. Without this remainder, we are locked into a never-ending cycle of numbing equality, getting and losing in precisely the same measure. We are marching toward extinction as long as we are locked in this cycle of equal getting and losing. We must hold on to the precious remainder. Our survival, indeed, our salvation depends upon it.
I believe that this remainder is cumulative; that we are given free will to choose what remains; that part of our salvation depends on choosing what is right; that, inevitably, we will sometimes choose what is wrong; and that the rest of our salvation depends on accepting the Atonement of Christ.
I am reminded of the words of James A. Lovell, commander of the Apollo 13 mission to the moon. When it appeared that the fates had conspired terminally against his space craft, he reported simply, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
The Apollo 13 story is all about remainders, one mounted haltingly, uncertainly upon the other until the crippled space craft was returned safely home.
Had Father Tanase been an astronaut, he might have said, “Every space craft is what it remains, not what it used to be; not the past glory is important but the height of the present existence.”
What astronaut James A. Lovell actually did say was this: “Survive we did, but it was close. Our mission was a failure but I like to think it was a successful failure.”
May it be so for each of us as we take the perilous journey home.
Conversion requires an alteration of the will, and an alteration which, in the last resort, does not occur without the intervention of the supernatural.
C. S. Lewis God in the Dock, (“The Decline of Religion” [1946], paragraph 9, p. 221)
Conversion, particularly religious conversion, has widely diverse manifestations. Some people experience it as a straightforward change from one set of beliefs to another with little or no emotional fanfare. Others experience conversion as a blindingly powerful surge of love that occurs at a particular point in time. This surge forges an unbreakable bond that is thought to require little or no performance to maintain. Still others experience conversion as a process beginning imperceptibly and proceeding gradually. This process requires considerable performance to maintain. In such a conversion, there may be no particular moment of recognition, or the moment may be experienced casually, as in the case of C. S. Lewis:
I was driven [in the sidecar of a motorcycle by his brother] to Whipsnade [Zoo] one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought…. It was more like when a man, after long sleep… becomes aware that he is now awake. (Surprised by Joy [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955], p. 238).
I delight in Lewis’s understatement: “When we set out I did not believe…when we reached the zoo I did.” Finally, it is that simple. Simple, but not easy.
My own conversion experience is as inaccessible to me as Lewis’s was to him. I must speak around it. I remember thoughts, feelings, the welling up of conviction, and finally the still small voice of the Spirit whispering, “Go forward, at this time, in this way.” But the essence of my conversion is ineffable. It is like my face: I can only see it in a mirror and what I see is a mere reflection of something much, much more.
Lewis was clear that conversion for him was both an event and a continuing process. He warned against encouraging too much excitement about the commencement of conversion. This commencement comes with a few moments of joy perhaps, but then the real work, the lifelong process of conversion, moves forward. Nothing is easy in the old way after conversion begins. Christ has work for us to do.
What is this work that Christ would have us do, and how would he have us do it after our conversion? I hear the words of my charge, “Bring souls unto Christ,” but I do not know how to do this. I do not know precisely how my own conversion came about, so how can I be expected to bring about that of another?
What comes to mind in the wake of this question is the surgeon’s pledge, primum non nocere, “First do no harm.” I earnestly consider this pledge when I feel religious zeal rising up in me. Care must be taken. I must not rob someone of their sustaining faith when I cannot be certain they are prepared to replace it with something better. The greatest harm is done by tyrants who consider it their duty to force upon others their particular brand of “better” according to their particular timetable. In this use of force, religious tyrants are the ugliest tyrants of all.
When I witness religious bigotry, I am briefly tempted to abandon my own evangelism for fear of becoming what I am witnessing. But this is not the Way. What good man, finding the pearl of great price, would not share it with those he loves, and as his capacity for love grew under the influence of the pearl, with the whole world? Love withheld is lost. I must find a way to extend a loving invitation to partake in the pearl, or I risk losing the pearl altogether.
But when the metaphor is exhausted, I am left with a very practical question: How should I participate in the conversion process?
Certainly not by “convincing” anyone of anything. A person convinced by my small measure of eloquence or charisma or even wisdom will remain convinced, that is, remain converted, only until someone with a greater measure of eloquence or charisma or wisdom takes them in a new direction. A person merely convinced of their faith is in a state of spiritual dependency, vulnerable to every change in the religious winds.
I can teach a few things, answer a few questions, provide a flawed example, offer a meal, assist with an errant child, but I cannot provide a relationship with Deity. I cannot pour my faith into another’s cup. We all must find our own way.
It takes faith to find faith. Many are paralyzed by this paradox: They would be willing to believe, at least tentatively, if only they did not have to believe to believe. They hear the promise: “Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matthew 7:7), but they see that the asking, the seeking, and the knocking require some measure of believing.
Pride, cynicism, disillusionment, fear, and the other spirit killers are resident in the human condition. We must reach for something, or rather some One, outside this condition. Lewis suggests this when he says, “Conversion requires an alteration of the will, and an alteration which, in the last resort, does not occur without the intervention of the supernatural.”
We must reach for what we cannot see. We must believe a little to know more. We must inch upward, here a little, there a little until we reach the higher elevations and can see what could not be seen below. Some of the spiritual handholds will fail. It is, after all, an adventure, and what defines every adventure are the risks: the things not yet known, the places not yet visited, the people not yet met.
But it is an adventure worth the risks, for in it we become acquainted with God.
I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw….
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Biographical Note, Summa Theologica (Great Books, vol. 19, p. vi)
Is faith a mask over the face of ignorance? Is it a salve over the festering fact that we all must die? Was Karl Marx correct in writing,
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Marx, K. 1976. Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Collected Works, v. 3. New York)
Some smart people-scientists, scholars, philosophers, political thinkers, even theologians-hold exactly this view. They think themselves wise and courageous for holding it.
But does that make it true?
I have never found the unlink-point between truth and faith in the human experience. I have heard many argue earnestly, intelligently, and even compellingly that truth and faith can be-indeed must be-unlinked for human knowledge to progress. Yet at the base of all inquiry, waiting patiently, is some fundamental premise for which there is yet no proof, some hypothesis that is yet untried, some question that is yet unanswered.
It is the great unanswered questions that thrill scientists; yet some of them, while thrilled by the questions concerning star formation or the life of a virus, turn disdainfully away from questions concerning Deity. In my opinion this constitutes what is referred to in scientific circles as “bad science.” It closes the door on a certain brand of possibility and limits the potential for scientific discovery. With this door closed, the greatest questions of all cannot be addressed, and the root of the root of the tree called life cannot be fully examined.
I am a partisan in this matter. My experience makes me so. In the areas of my greatest confidence, where I think I have all the facts, I must still reach out with faith. I have exercised faith for hours at a time on lonely two-lane country roads-faith that a double yellow line and the rational self-interest of oncoming drivers will enable me to reach my destination, faith that the turning mechanism on my truck will remain intact for the period of my journey, faith that my faith in these conditions is warranted. Faith in my faith that my faith in these conditions is warranted. And so forth: an endless recursion of…faith.
It seems silly to me to deny faith. We cannot live without it. We cannot perform any task without it. Without faith, we could not drink a glass of water in an emotional state other than abject terror. Yet, with hardly a thought, we do drink, and in so doing, exercise absolutely blind faith in an unknown person charged with measuring bacteria levels in a distant water treatment plant.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1).
This definition of faith, attributed to the Apostle Paul, is a perfection.
Paul’s definition, however, is very often read and spoken within a narrowly religious context. This has led many to think of faith as a strictly religious abstraction, one that can be usefully discarded in these enlightened times. Many secular humanists seem comfortable with faith kept in its place as such an abstraction. The compassionate among them will grant that some people require a comforting “belief” or “faith”, even though its object is a myth.
We Christians can play into this condescension by distinguishing ourselves with terms such as “person of faith”, “believer”, and the like. This use of broad labels to define narrow meanings constitutes a form of jargon. It constricts the view of the original concepts and can render them-and the powerful realities they represent-inaccessible. The initiated may feel quite at ease; meanwhile, the uninitiated are turning quietly away.
Faith is the first principle of power, both temporal and spiritual. Christ assures us that if we had it in the smallest measure, no more than a mustard seed, we could move mountains (Matthew 17:20). As fact or metaphor, these are strong words. Faith is a serious subject. Handle with care.
Thomas Aquinas was one of the greatest theologians-some say the greatest theologian-in the history of the Christian church. He was a prolific writer and teacher. But near the end of his life, on December 6, 1273, all that changed.
While saying mass that morning a great change came over him, and afterwards he ceased to write or dictate. Urged by his companion to complete the Summa [Theologica], he replied, “I can do no more; such things have been reveled to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life. (Biographical Note, Summa Theologica [Great Books, vol. 19, p. vi])
Aquinas died three months later.
Some scholars speculate that it was a nervous or physical breakdown or a stroke that caused Thomas to cease writing. These are fair speculations, but I think they reflect a compulsive rejection of the spiritual.
I speculate differently. In that moment on December 6, 1273, Thomas Aquinas-the indefatigable scholar, teacher, writer, and Church Father-became Saint Thomas Aquinas. In return for a lifetime of devotion to his Creator, Thomas was given a particle of the beatific vision. In that blinding flash of faith-become-pure-knowledge, he saw that his work on earth was finished and that what he had accomplished was as a piece of straw. So much more lay ahead.
I am sure he smiled as tears of joy welled up in his old eyes.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V
Religion is a difficult topic, and theologians are frequently the first in line to become atheists.
People who advance well in their faith, who achieve a kind of humble understanding of the part their God wishes them to play, seem not to be so full of topical dialogue as they are of quiet practice, of gentle example. The words and phrases and so-called meanings of their religion are less interesting to them than the tools and opportunities it offers. Such people take quite seriously Christ’s warning that “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40). There is a “doing-ness” at the forefront of the lives of such people. For them religion is not a topic; it is a tool.
This is not to say we can dispense with the dialectic. We cannot. We are speaking animals, and we are social. We live in communities, and language is the glue of these communities. I am speaking to you now, reaching out to you with words as carefully crafted as I am able, reaching out to communicate what may be of some good.
There is an intimacy in this. Let us proceed with the care and respect warranted by this intimacy. What a different world it would be if our speaking to one another was in the spirit of “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
In saying this, I am not sending an invitation to somber piety. Nor am I making a subtle demand for agreement with what I might say in this or future columns. On the contrary, I hope that together we might create a suspension of agreement or disagreement altogether. The truth is not partial to the winner of any argument; it lies beyond the success of anyone’s logic or the fine rhetoric in which it may be delivered. At their finest, at their most precise and poetic, words can only point. They are never the thing itself; they are not the truth at which they point.
The sign along the road to Paris is not Paris. We all have to keep going.
As obvious as these simple truths may seem, you and I often do not live them. We must recite them again and again or we trip and tumble into the well of religious correctness. Having tumbled into this well, we look up from the bottom and see a tiny circle of light, the opening through which we fell, and we think we are seeing all creation. Confined long enough by comfortable certitude, we stop looking up at all and by increments come to believe that the universe and the God who created it are delimited by the enclosing walls at the bottom of our precious little well.
Eric Shuster established the Foundation for Christian Studies to provide a space where people with diverse theological understandings could find intellectual stimulation, spiritual enrichment, and respectful fellowship. When he asked me to write for the Foundation, we agreed that the space of debate, pontification, and condemnation was filled to overflowing on the Internet and in religious literature. Neither of us had any wish to add to this glut.
We live in a world compulsively polarized between vicious religious debate (sometimes assisted by force of arms) on the one hand and exaggerated ecumenism (often indistinguishable from secularism, the no-religion religion) on the other. In such a world, how can we participate fruitfully with one another in matters of faith? How can we do this without abandoning our own deeply held convictions or requiring others to abandon theirs? How can we exercise our own evangelical impulses while allowing others to exercise theirs?
Can we quiet our minds long enough to hear a “still small voice” (I Kings 19: 11-12) that is anything more than our own self-talk? Can we know ourselves without formulating an enemy against whom to take our measure?
We shall see.
In the meantime, consider this a preamble. We begin here a new kind of inquiry, one that humbly admits there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.
