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Andrew Shamy
It has been a hard week, and I have had little time for reading or writing, so today I will share only two articles.
Uncertainty and the Christian, by Ephraim Radner
One theme I have begun to explore in this blog is how our current crisis is revealing—it is an apocalyptic moment. Something that has struck me as revealing about my own response to the virus is the degree to which I have been surprised. When I am surprised by a plot-twist in a novel, it is a sure sign that the story I thought I was reading was not, in fact, the real story. I wonder if my present surprise suggests something similar. The story I thought I was living in has turned out not to be the whole story.
I could be misunderstood here. I have not experienced a deep troubling of my worldview or a shaking of my faith in this crisis. It is more like when in a novel a previously ignored character steps forward and is revealed to have a key role, one not previously imagined (the butler is the murderer; the great-aunt was the one writing the letters all along). Fragility, economic worry, Zoom meetings, uncertainty, have all, to my surprise, stepped forward and are playing a greater role in my life’s story than I had imagined they would.
There is a lot to this revelation that I plan to explore in the coming weeks, but one aspect is picked up in an article by Ephraim Radner in First Things on Uncertainty and the Christian.
Radner states, somewhat provocatively, that “Uncertainty is at the center of the Christian vocation.” He acknowledges that many Christians will reject this claim, pointing out all the certainties we do have: “God is in control; God is good; God rewards the faithful; Jesus is Lord, and in him death and sin are defeated; the gates of Hell will not prevail against the church, and heaven awaits us.” Radner agrees, there are “indeed Big Picture certainties,” but he notes that,
the Big Picture isn’t all there is to God’s reality or to the Christian’s life. Small pictures are the bits that make up the Big Picture’s mosaic. In these little corners of reality, dark holes of uncertainty await the unwary, and teeming abysses of confusion stand ready to swallow the complacent.
At the time of the virus, uncertainty has stepped from the wings onto centre stage. But as Radner points out, it is us who are surprised, not Scripture:
Scriptural revelation is riddled with the deepest of uncertainties, often signaled by the question “who knows?” It is a question that both unveils our fundamental ignorance as creatures, and that, in that revelation, turns us to the dizzying grace of God in the place we actually live. One can sort this ignorance into at least three areas: Who knows what will happen tomorrow? Who knows what God will do? Who knows where I will end up?
Radner notes, “The Time of the Virus zeroes in on each of these wonderments,” and he goes on to explore how.
Why does this matter? Our understanding (implicit or otherwise) of the story we belong to guides how we act in life. When we focus only on the Big Picture certainties, and do not acknowledge the small picture pieces (“the dark holes of uncertainty”) our actions will not align with the way the world really is. Radner offers wisdom on what this might mean. An appropriate response to living in a story where uncertainty plays such a central role, is to focus a particular type of attention on today.
Because we do not know tomorrow, we do not know God’s plans or even the depth of God’s character in planning. We do not know how it all adds up, we are stuck firmly in this one place where God has thrust us, stripped of organizing frameworks of meaning based on the plotting of the stars. “Today,” God seems to say, “take stock of today.”
And today is not an empty moment, nor one solely inhabited by the fears or anxieties of an opaque future. “Do not be anxious about tomorrow,” Jesus both warns and encourages his disciples. Instead, “seek the kingdom and its righteousness” (Matt. 6:31–34). To all the questions of “who knows?,” the Scriptures respond with concrete gifts. Who knows about tomorrow? James says, “Be humble.” Who knows if God will be merciful? The prophets all respond, “Therefore repent” (Joel 2). Who knows what will become of us? The Psalmist writes, “Remember who God is!” (Ps. 74:12ff.). Today, simply because God has given it to us, is filled with grace; and the service of this grace today is one whose forms are manifold and beautiful, shaped by the humbled, repentant heart that speaks of God’s great works. That service is our vocation in the midst of uncertainty.
Radner concludes by pointing to the practice of sabbath keeping as a disciple that in an uncertain time rightly orients us toward God and his world.
It is surely unfortunate that Christians gave up the celebration of the weekly sabbath. For the sabbath is the great sign of the “sufficiency of today,” of the fact that God gives himself to us through the things of today—of sitting down at home, of family and sojourner together, of food, of repentance, of remembrance and restoration in the unmerited grace of creation—in which “tomorrow” is but a vague and flickering reflection. These are not “spiritual practices”; they are the root of reality. Psalm 90, which likely describes the plague of Numbers 14, awash with uncertainty, is followed by the anonymity of Psalm 91, wherein the beleaguered Everyman clings to God while the world is crashing around him. But these two psalms themselves find their resolution, as it were, in Psalm 92, the one Psalm written “for the sabbath day.” The sabbath day, as traditional Jewish prayers emphasize, is the day when creation and exodus are proclaimed anew to Israel, and thus granted a kind of permanence within the shifting eddies of time. The world is marked by days, each one the very day of our vanishing (Ps. 90:4–6). But the seventh day is their transfiguration. It is, however, a day nonetheless, because it is “today.”
Radner’s closing line is, again, perhaps provocative, but no less true for it:
“The Time of the Virus is giving us back today. Let us rejoice and be glad in it (Ps. 118:24).”
The Gospel in A Time of Social Distancing, by Casey Cep
We are in Holy Week and one of the deep sadnesses many of us face is that we cannot meet with other believers to mark and celebrate Easter this year. There is considerable debate online about the wisdom and appropriateness of closing churches for public health concerns, and I don’t wish to get into that here, but I found Casey Cep’s article a beautiful reflection on what it is we have lost in not gathering together for worship. It resonates with my experience of worship at/with a small, local Anglican church.
Reflecting on her experience growing up in a “little Lutheran church”, Cep describes the communal life that wove in and around the Sunday gatherings, a life of Nativity plays, church lunches, graduations, weddings, and funerals. She concludes:
This is all to say that our country church was never just a building but a space where we shared joys and sorrows, where our family grew to many more than five, and where, every week, we felt our congregation joined with others across time and around the world.
Worship, Cep notes, “has always been a time when I felt myself turned outward to others.”
This turning outward is harder now and often augmented or enabled by technology—live-streamed services, Zoom Bible studies, WhatsApp prayer chains. There is much for us to be careful and perhaps concerned about in this digital shift, but Cep closes with a hopeful reflection on the fact that “the ability of the faithful to be together when they are not is one of Christianity’s oldest technologies.” She writes:
It’s easy to feel like all that modern gadgetry is the very opposite of spiritual, but the ability of the faithful to be together when they are not is one of Christianity’s oldest technologies. I was reminded of this when I got another church e-mail about this week’s Zoom Bible study, which focussed on the Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones, from Ezekiel (not selected to terrorize us into social distancing but because it is the Hebrew Bible reading for this coming Sunday). As a child, I loved to sing the song “Dem Bones,” and thinking of it made me remember being in the church when my father was an usher and I was barely big enough to help him pass the heavy brass offering plate. He also handed out bulletins in the narthex and delivered the faithful to the altar for Communion, but my favorite of all the tasks he performed was ringing the bell, at the start of worship and at the end, but also near the middle of the service. Later in life, when I took a more meaningful interest in the liturgy and all its components—learning such wonderful things as why we share the peace before the Sacrament of Communion (so that we make peace with one another before God makes peace with us), and why the elements include water for weakening the wine (so that even the poor can bring an offering unto God)—it finally occurred to me to ask my pastor why we rang the bell when we did, during the Lord’s Prayer. In response, he asked if I could name any of the farmers who were not there for worship because of the harvest or recall any of the homebound who could no longer make it to services. We ring the bell for them, he told me, so that they know when we have gathered and when we are sent back into the world, and so that, no matter how far they are from the sanctuary, they can join us in reciting the words that Jesus taught us to pray. For almost as long as the Church has existed, bells have called Christians together when they have to be apart.
Read the full article here.
I gave this talk at a Venn Foundation alumni event a few years ago. The topic was Christian courage and given the current global crisis I thought it worth re-posting. I’ve edited it slightly to read better.
My focus this morning is a story that sits at the heart of the Old Testament understanding of faith. It is a story about an old man asked to kill his own son by God, the story of Abraham and Isaac, of Abraham’s lonely walk to Mount Moriah and his willingness to sacrifice his son there.
It is a strange story. A troubling story. And yet I will argue it reveals the heart of a particularly Christian conception of courage, and offers a profound challenge to those of us today who call Abraham the father of our faith: to be a Christian requires courage because of the God in whom we put our faith.
But I don’t want to start with Abraham. I want to start with Steve Jobs.
Part I: “There is no reason not to follow your heart” (Or, Steve Jobs must really love turtle-necks)
In 2005, Steve Jobs delivered a now famous graduation speech at Stanford University. In it, he pleaded for a certain type of courage to mark the life of the graduates. I want to start with this speech because Jobs was a culturally significant figure whose words capture a particularly modern understanding of courage. Attending to his definition and contrasting it with the picture of courage we find in Abraham—in Part II, I will imagine the graduation speech Abraham might give—will help us understand Christian courage more deeply and attune us to how significantly most of us borrow our conception of courage from Jobs rather than Abraham.
We may say the shape of a person’s courage is determined by how they answer three questions: Who or what they have faith in? What they hope for? Who or what they love? In his speech, Jobs tells three stories which reveal his answers to these three questions and set up his definition of courage.
The First Story: The Land of Promise
Like Abraham, Jobs was told to leave everything and go to the land of promise. For him, this land was college. As a baby he’d been adopted out on the condition that whoever adopted him must promise to send him to college. Unlike Abraham, however, Jobs decided not to stay in the land of promise. Famously, he dropped out. He continued to take courses, but only those that seemed interesting to him, rather than following a prescribed programme. Most famously, he took a course on calligraphy. Ten years later, that course had a profound impact on how he would design Apple Mac computers. Good design is at the heart of Apple’s corporate ethos and success because Jobs took a course on calligraphy after dropping out of college.
This story is deeply significant for Jobs and illustrates a central tenet of his life philosophy. He calls it connecting the dots.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
What does Jobs have faith in? Some type of mysterious ordering of the universe and his gut’s ability to connect to it, to guide him faithfully. What does he hope for? That trusting his gut will create a meaningful life. As we will soon see, these answers underpin his understanding of courage.
The Second Story: On “love and loss.”
Following his gut, Jobs found something he loved, designing computers and creating a business, and he became enormously successful. If we take (just for the moment) money as a measure of success, Jobs once said: “I was worth over a million dollars when I was 23 and over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25.” To put that in perspective, at 25 I was earning $7.50 an hour cleaning rooms in a Vancouver hotel.
But at 30, after 10 years at Apple, Jobs was asked to give up what he loved—he was forced out and replaced as CEO. Love and loss. This was a period of profound testing for Jobs’s commitment to pursuing what he loves. He relates how he spent months in despair before deciding to not give up faith. He got back to doing what he loved and in the next few years started two new companies: NeXT and Pixar. His faith paid off enormously.
The lesson Jobs draws out from this story for the graduates is perhaps similar to what Abraham would say: “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” But the object of faith differs greatly from that of Abraham: “I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love.… If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
Faith, hope, and love. These themes come together in Jobs’s final story and set up his definition of courage.
The Third Story: “My third story is about death.”
Jobs tells the graduates about his first diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and how it changed the way he saw the world.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important… There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Death clarifies. It tests. For Jobs, his hard-won conclusion is “There is no reason not to follow your heart.” This is really what each of his three stories has been about; it is his account of human flourishing. His desire for the graduates is that they live lives where they follow their hearts, do what they love, and he has faith and hope that the universe will somehow respond, a meaningful life will emerge.
This, in the end, is Jobs’s understanding of courage. He closes his speech by imploring the graduates,
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
All our themes come together here: Your heart knows what you want (faith). It will all work out (hope). Courage therefore is to follow your heart (love) even when others disagree, when obstacles get in the way. Everything else is secondary.
Let’s pause here and think about that. On one level, it is an extraordinary statement. Everything is secondary to following your heart—other people? morality? wisdom? reality? It is an extraordinary statement, but also very ordinary. Almost boring. It is the plot of every Pixar and Disney movie. It is the theme of every college graduation speech. This is the water we swim in. This is the default standard by which we judge the success of our lives. When we ask ourselves in quiet moments, am I living well, what we are conditioned to mean is, am I living out of my heart’s desire? Philosopher Charles Taylor suggests we live in an Age of Authenticity. Our fundamental understanding of the human person is,
each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.
Jobs’s speech is from this script. And when we view human flourishing this way, courage becomes following your own heart in the face of any obstacles. This is a modern understanding of courage.
But is it Christian courage? Let us turn to the story of Abraham and put him in dialogue with Steve Jobs.
Part II: A Very Different Graduation Speech (Or, how Abraham bombed)
Let’s imagine Abraham giving a graduation speech. He can match credentials with Jobs. It is said that Jobs revolutionized six industries, well, Abraham is the father of three religions. He’s worth listening too. But do we want to hear what he has to say?
Like Jobs, Abraham has many stories he could tell, but he shares only one: the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. And here his voice grows quiet, and he tells about the time God called out to him and he answered, “Here I am.” And God said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”
All the graduates are listening now. And so, Abraham describes how he rose early in the morning, how he saddled his donkey, cut the wood for the burnt offering, and went with Isaac to the place God showed him. He describes how they walked for three days and how they were the longest three days of his life. He describes on the fourth morning seeing the mountain far off. How he walked with Isaac to the top and Isaac asked him, “where is the lamb for a burnt offering.” And how he answered, “God will provide”, even though he didn’t know what that meant.
Abraham is not yet finished, but already the graduates are confused and a little alarmed. This is not like other graduation speeches. Jobs lived in a world where human persons strode like gods—“I want to put a ding in the universe”—but Abraham appears to be speaking from a very different place. He has faith, but not in the guidance of his own heart as Jobs did; Abraham puts his faith in God, “God will provide a lamb.” He has hope, not that the universe will reward the pursuit of his passions with a meaningful life, but that God will fulfill his promise, that he will bring life even out of death. He loves, as Jobs did; he loves Isaac deeply. But his ultimate love is God. He loves God more than he loves himself, more than he loves Isaac. And these differences lead to a different understanding of courage.
Like Jobs, the climax of Abraham’s speech is about love and loss, about death, and about courage. Abraham grips the podium now, and his voice drops to a whisper as he describes how he bound Isaac and raised his knife. Here he pauses. He wants to let the audience feel something of his uncertainty in that moment. He did not know if God would stop the knife. Here—here is his vision of courage.
The graduates are shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. They don’t like what they hear. Disney and Pixar have not prepared them for this. Abraham asks the graduates what is their vision of human flourishing. He has learned over his 100 plus years that it’s a life given in full allegiance to God. “Everything is secondary” to this. Even the desires of his heart. He implores the graduates, therefore, to live lives marked by obedience to God, even when it’s hard, even when we are asked to give up what we love. This is Christian courage.
It’s fair to say this is not a crowd-pleasing speech. Abraham is politely thanked by scattered applause, but before the auditorium has emptied a petition has already begun for Oprah to be the speaker at the next graduation. When his speech is uploaded to YouTube, it gets only a few hundred views. For a few days there’s a debate in the comments section about whether his story even illustrated courage at all. The consensus is it did not. It was a story about cowardice—living another’s vision of life rather than his own. People pity him, this old man who barely lived. Soon, the debate peters out. No one’s that interested.
But what about us? Two different accounts of courage. Whose do we believe? Before answering too quickly, let us try to understand what is at stake, and what is not. There are ways Abraham can be misunderstood and its worth addressing these before returning to his understanding of courage.
Part III: Misreadings (or, don’t sacrifice your children)
1. This is not a story where the moral is God might ask you to sacrifice your children.
In Abraham’s day, this was something the gods would occasionally ask. Part of the point of the story of Abraham and Isaac is that the God of Israel is not like other gods. He will provide the sacrifice. In Jesus, he even provided his own life.
2. Nor is this a story about not loving anything in the world. Abraham loved Isaac, and this was good. God wants us to care for the world. God himself loved the world. So whatever the moral is, it is not live lives of detachment.
3. This story is the climax of a whole life of obedience and courage. Sacrificing Isaac was not something God could have asked Abraham to do the first day they met. The courage of Abraham displayed in this story was learned, the fruit of his everyday endurance and faith following God through his whole life.
4. The obedience that Abraham shows is not slavish or robotic. This is not a story about not doing anything unless God tells you to. The story needs to be read in the wider context of Scripture, which describes humans as created to bring their creativity and freedom to the blessing of the world. In Genesis 18, we get an incredible scene of Abraham arguing with God and changing God’s mind. God listens to Abraham; he doesn’t just command him.
So, what then is at stake? The real issue is the question of what is our first love. That’s what sits behind the story of Abraham and Isaac. This is the test. It is Monotheism 101: “You shall have no other Gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). Ultimately, the challenge before us is whether we agree with Jobs or with Abraham about what it means to truly flourish. Our understanding of flourishing gives rise to our account of courage. For Jobs, to truly flourish is to follow your heart. Courage, therefore, is following your heart no matter the obstacles life puts in your way. For Abraham, to truly flourish is to put God first, to live toward him and all things in relation to him. Courage, therefore, is being obedient to God no matter the obstacles. What do we believe?
There’s a further point to make, one that takes us to the troubled heart of Abraham’s story. Being Christian requires courage because one obstacle we face in putting God first is God’s own self.
Part IV: Being a Christian Requires Courage (Or, this isn’t your Grandmother’s Christianity…or is it?)
Why does Abraham talk about courage in his graduation speech at all? Well, because I made him. But why have I told the story of Abraham as a story about courage? Isn’t Abraham usually associated with faith, not courage? The point I want to make is that to live out our faith in God in this world will require courage because of our experience of God’s own way in the world.
At one level, the story of Abraham is the story of a God who provides. God promises a child and then provides a child. God promises land and then provides land. God promises blessing and provides blessing. The biblical witness is clear, God provides.
But the biblical witness is also clear, God sometimes makes us wait. God sometimes tests. God promises a child—but Abraham and Sarah have to wait for twenty-five years until he delivers. God promises land, but Abraham and Sarah never get to own it. Nor did Isaac, or Jacob, or Joseph, or the generation of the Exodus. God promises descendants—and then asks Abraham to kill the child of promise. He tests Abraham. And God doesn’t explain any of this. He simply asks that Abraham and Sarah trust him, even when they can’t make sense of him.
This way of God with us in the world is not just found in the Old Testament. The Spirit sent Jesus into the wilderness to be tested. Jesus taught us to pray to our Father in heaven, “lead us not into the time of trial.” Hebrews 11 talks about the experience of many of the great heroes of our faith:
13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.
It is not always easy trusting God in this world. That is the biblical witness, and it’s our experience too. God promises, but he makes us wait. We suffer, and God doesn’t explain. We don’t always experience all the blessings that are ours in Christ. It takes courage to give full allegiance to this strange God who does not explain.
Faith is not a passive thing. It’s not just something we feel in our hearts—it requires obedient action, and when obedience is hard, when there are obstacles, when God is hidden, or God asks hard things, living out faith will require courage. We work out our “salvation with fear and trembling” according to Paul in Philippians 2.
Part V: Closing thoughts (Or, stepping out without guardrails)
I began by contrasting Jobs’s account of courage with that of Abraham. Jobs speaks with the voice of our culture, and his vision of human flourishing is attractive. Abraham speaks with a strange voice, one that sits outside of us, and what he says is uncomfortable. I want to close by saying, however, the courage of Abraham is a better courage, because it is based on a better story of the world.
It is a better courage because it creates space to live a life on behalf of others. Jobs said, “Everything is secondary” to pursuing your heart. Living out of this, Jobs did some amazing things in the world—he did put a ding in it—but he also hurt many people. He abandoned those who got in his way; even his own daughter and her mother. He lived to regret this, but I don’t know if he ever connected this behaviour to the vision of courage he implored the Stanford grads to live out of.
Abraham also hurt people—he too abandoned a child and the child’s mother, Ishmael and Hagar (Genesis 16). But these acts were a failure of his courage, not an expression of it. They were acts of disobedience when obedience got too difficult. God called Abraham to obey because through his obedience all the world would be blessed. We read at the close of Genesis 22: “through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.” Abraham’s courage was on behalf of others. This same courage led Jesus to die for the sake of even his enemies. It has led countless Christians through the centuries to lay aside their own desires to obey a God who loves the world and is working to put it right.
It is a better courage. And this courage is possible because it is a better story. Abraham and Sarah were old and barren—as good as dead, we read in Romans 4:19—and God called out to them and promised them a child. Following their hearts could not produce that child. Following his heart could not save Steve Jobs from death. But the God we are called to give full allegiance to is the God who can bring life out of death. Who created the world out of nothing, who gives a child to the barren, who resurrects the dead.
It was not foolish for Abraham to trust God to rescue Isaac. Isaac’s life had always been a witness to God’s power over death. As we live lives of obedience, we too learn that we can trust this God. That giving our all to him is the source of real life and it is the only way we will beat death.
In his book The Christian and Anxiety, catholic theologian Hans von Balthasar closes with a powerful reflection on Christianity and courage. Alluding to the story of Peter following Jesus out onto the water, he writes Christian faith involves “stepping out without guardrails. Climbing over the gunwale and stepping out into the water.” It requires courage. Drawing on themes I have already explored, he goes on:
Faith, love, hope must always be a leap for the finite creature, because only in that way does it correspond to the worth of the infinite God. It must always mean taking a risk, because God is worth staking everything on.
Faith involves risk, courage, a leap toward God that is willing to leave everything behind, because God is God, because he is worth staking everything on. “And the real gain lies, not in a ‘reward’ for the daring leap, but in the leap itself, which is a gift of God and thus a share in his infinitude.”
Here is von Balthasar’s point: Only through the courage of faith, our staking of everything on this strange God, can we truly flourish, because in leaping out in faith we gain God himself, the source of true flourishing. When we give ourselves fully to God, he gives himself fully to us. God is both the cause and cure of Christian anxiety. He asks us to give our all to him, and in exchange he give his all to us, his Spirit. This is the true source of Christian courage.
So, we return to Philippians 2 as we close:
12 Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.
It is God who works in you. It is God who calls you for his purposes. Follow him, even in the face of trouble. Being a Christian will require courage. But it is the best sort of life.
Many good things have been written about the Covid-19 crisis. Here are four articles that I’ve found helpful or thought-provoking this week.
Celebrity Culture Is Burning, by Amanda Hess
In this article, Amanda Hess reflects on the changing relationship between celebrities and the masses caused by quarantine. Celebrities are beaming platitudes from their palatial homes about all “being in this together” and “staying positive” and we’re not buying it.
Hess suggests: “Among the social effects of the coronavirus is its swift dismantling of the cult of celebrity.” In light of everything that is happening, the inanity of a famous-person sing-a-long to “Imagine” or Madonna sermonizing from a bathtub of rose petals hardly seems worthy of attention, but Hess suggests the change is revelatory.
The famous are ambassadors of the meritocracy; they represent the American pursuit of wealth through talent, charm and hard work. But the dream of class mobility dissipates when society locks down, the economy stalls, the death count mounts, and everyone’s future is frozen inside their own crowded apartment or palatial mansion. The difference between the two has never been more obvious.
Covid-19 reveals that we are, indeed, all in this together; but it’s clear the burden is not equally shared.
Hess’s whole article is worth reading.
Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure, by Aisha Ahmad
On the face of it, it’s a little bit odd. There’s a global pandemic and yet many of us see this as an ideal time to increase our productivity. In this article, Aisha Ahmad speaks from her experience of crises around the world to warn against such expectations.
Global catastrophes change the world, and this pandemic is very much akin to a major war. Even if we contain the Covid-19 crisis within a few months, the legacy of this pandemic will live with us for years, perhaps decades to come. It will change the way we move, build, learn, and connect. There is simply no way that our lives will resume as if this had never happened. And so, while it may feel good in the moment, it is foolish to dive into a frenzy of activity or obsess about your scholarly productivity right now. That is denial and delusion. The emotionally and spiritually sane response is to prepare to be forever changed.
She describes the rest of her an article as “an offering.” In it she outlines practical things we can do to prepare for the days and months ahead. Her chief audience is academics, but her advice will be helpful to most of us.
Coronavirus and the Communion of the Saints, by Bruce Hindmarsh
In this article, historian Bruce Hindmarsh looks at the various ways the Church has responded to plagues and pandemics throughout its long history. It’s an encouraging read, though not without its warnings. Hindmarsh, for example, notes the rise of the flagellants and the persecution of Jews during the Black Plague of the 14th Century, and warns:
These examples provide us with a stark warning that we ought not naively to think that times of crisis are somehow magically “good for the church” or lead straightforwardly to spiritual awakening. Christians have sometimes cared for the sick and dying. But they have also turned sadly to religious extremism, heresy, tribalism, and scapegoating. Fear can drive people to do terrible things. There are real dangers to be avoided.
He concludes, though, with words of hope:
Today, as I write this on the plane, it is March 18th, and the psalms appointed for today are Psalms 90 and 91. As we face the uncertainties ahead, we are reminded (in the cadences of the old Coverdale translation of the psalms), “Lord, thou hast been our refuge, from one generation to another.” And “Whoso dwelleth under the defence of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” This is true even, as the psalm continues, with “the pestilence that walketh in darkness” and “the sickness that destroyeth in the noon-day.” The Lord has been a refuge for the people of God in time past, and he will continue to be so in our generation.
We do not yet know how much suffering will come. But may we all encourage one another to deepen our trust in God as our eternal refuge, and together with all the saints may we love and care for our neighbour like those long ago in Alexandria, “never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another.”
Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It’s Not Supposed To, by N.T. Wright
In this Time article, N.T. Wright warns against Christian attempts to explain what it is God is doing at this time. That’s not what the Christian vocation is. Instead, he encourages us to turn to the Psalms, particularly the Psalms of lament, as guides to our response:
The point of lament, woven thus into the fabric of the biblical tradition, is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow, loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments. Some Christians like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the picture we get in the Bible.
He concludes with this encouragement:
It is no part of the Christian vocation, then, to be able to explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain—and to lament instead. As the Spirit laments within us, so we become, even in our self-isolation, small shrines where the presence and healing love of God can dwell. And out of that there can emerge new possibilities, new acts of kindness, new scientific understanding, new hope. New wisdom for our leaders? Now there’s a thought.
It has been almost six years since I updated this blog. A lot has changed since then. I grew a beard. I’ve had two more children. The world is in the grip of a global pandemic.
It is this crisis (Covid-19, not my beard or three children) that has me writing again. For few of us today is it business as usual. I write this in my garage with my computer perched on an old wooden door serving as a make-shift desk, staring, like the rest of the country, down the barrel of four-weeks of self-isolation. So I’ve decided to blog again. To use this time to share some of what I’ve learned the past six years, and to reflect (hopefully Christianly and theologically) on the cultural and spiritual realities of this current crisis. I also promise to share videos and podcasts and articles and music that I discover along the way and in which I’ve found insight, joy, or comfort.
So, please visit again. And now, let me clear off the dust, and begin.
I’ve been dreaming of line graphs. The perilous upward snaking of them; the longed for levelling off.
My phone tells me my screen-time is up 9% on last week; it was up 15% the week before that. I’ve looped a video of an Italian priest accidentally enabling filters while live-streaming Mass (the star-fighter helmet was my favourite, followed by the joyous sprinkles of light), but I don’t think this explains the increase. My compulsive reading of the news may.
I received one hundred messages in a fifteen-minute window from one WhatsApp group: prayer requests, explainer videos, Italian priests, advice on home-schooling children, news of a friend in a hospital in Berlin struggling to breathe.
These are difficult days. We are unsettled and afraid. Covid-19 has consumed us all.
I’ve found myself re-reading a sermon by C.S. Lewis called “Learning in War-Time.” It was preached on October 22, 1939 at St. Mary the Virgin Church, Oxford, to an audience of university students and dons. War World II had broken out a mere seven weeks earlier and Lewis’s words offer wisdom and encouragement to those seeking to live well in a time of crisis.
Lewis makes a number of helpful points, but here I wish to focus on just one. As he so often does, Lewis offers us perspective. For him, “the war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.” “Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.” “Cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies,” are normal conditions, the war has simply aggravated them. More, human life always takes place in the context of great drama. As creatures, at every moment we are advancing toward eternal realities—for Lewis, either heaven or hell? We have always lived “under the shadow of these eternal issues.” War or pandemic do not make life more dramatic, more filled with serious consequence and risk, they simply make these realities more viscerally felt.
There is wisdom here for us. It is perhaps a peculiar risk of modern life (at least, it was) that many of us can live for long stretches insulated from any real struggle or harm. We expect and demand comfort and control, freedom to do as we please, because this is what we’ve grown to expect. We are at best only dimly aware (and only then in a kind of abstract and theoretical way) of our reliance on God, and we are confident in our abilities to get on and get things done.
To us, Covid-19 comes as a rude shock. But by aggravating and revealing truths of human life and humans plans we prefer to ignore—their fragility, susceptibility to disruption and trauma, their performance under the shadow of eternity—this pandemic provides an opportunity for reflection, perhaps even re-evaluation.
As Lewis concludes his sermon:
“All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us know. We see unmistakable the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it. If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.”
This is sobering. But Lewis can be misheard here. We are not to understand him as calling the students and scholars gathered on the scratchy wooden pews that morning under the grey spires of Oxford University to give up learning; or, for us to abandon ordinary human goods and pleasures—of learning, but also beauty, laughing, cleaning, gardening, cooking, and so on.
For Lewis and for the Great Tradition out of which he speaks, God has given us appetites for truth, beauty, and goodness—and this is a sign that they “have proper function in God’s schema.” The problem is not the enjoyment of earthly goods and pursuits, but when these do not take their proper place. “We are to do all these things to the glory of God,” Lewis reminds us, quoting the Apostle Paul. All earthly goods are given by God to be enjoyed, but only as second things, not first or ultimate things. “Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one: it is rather a new organization” of natural life. We are to live toward God and toward all things in relation to God.
We are in the midst of an apocalyptic moment. The Greek word Apocalypse (ἀποκάλυψις) means “revelation”, an unveiling of things hidden. Covid-19 is revelatory. It makes evident what has always been the case: the fragility of human life and plans, the impermanence of earthly goods; the inevitability of death. Both as individuals and as a society we are prompted by our fears and the disruption of our ordinary ways to ask, what is being revealed to us about our goals, desires, expectations, hopes, comforts, beliefs, securities, and how well these attend to the world as it really is?
The current crisis is an opportunity to consider what it is we have been relying on, to evaluate the order of our loves and to confess where we have put things other than God first. This is not to say that Covid-19 is good, or should not be endured and fought with all our God-given courage and ingenuity, but it is an opportunity, a species of God’s habit of bringing good even out of chaos and death.
And I suspect one of those goods is this video of an Italian priest live-streaming Mass.
This past weekend I spoke at an event organised around the topic of proximate justice. I specifically spoke to the question of What does God expect of us? I used two quotes by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the life of Christ as conversation partners. Afterward a number of people asked for a transcript – the talk wasn’t recorded – so I am posting it here. This is my talk more or less as I delivered it, missing however witty asides. I am not an expert on Bonhoeffer, though I have enjoyed reading and wrestling with a number of his works. The particular take on Bonhoeffer I follow in this talk has been shaped by Chapter Four of John Stackhouse’s excellent book Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. The talk was twenty minutes long, so a lengthy read.
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I want ask a simple question this morning: What does God expect of us?
My plan, perhaps frustratingly, is not to answer the question, but to put some biblical and theological ideas into play — ideas that we might find helpful this weekend and beyond as boundaries within which we seek to answer the question.
I want to do this by looking at the life of Christ and asking what clues does it give us as we seek to answer the question of God’s expectations. By the end of the talk I want to have established four or five boundary markers within which we can seek to answer the question. That’s the plan
As a way of sharpening our question, I want to begin not with the life of Jesus but with the life of another man, German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I don’t want to speak in detail about his remarkable life, but hold before us two quotes of his which create for me a certain creative tension, a space within which we can explore this question of What does God expect of us?
The first quote is:
Who is there…in our times, who can devote himself with an easy mind to music, friendship, games, or happiness? Surely not the ‘ethical man’, but only the Christian.
This is a striking quote for at least two reasons. First, the “our times” he refers to are the horrors of World War II Nazi Germany. We can therefore paraphrase:
Who is there, in a time of war, in a time where we are led by a brutal dictator, in a time where millions of Jews, and gypsies, homosexuals and Christians, are being murdered with systematic efficiency, in a time where the whole world is caught up in a vortex of horror, violence, death and injustice, who in times like this can devote himself or herself with an easy mind to music, friendship, games or happiness? Only the Christian!
The second reason this quote is so striking is that the man who said it also said: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
This underrated church motto is the second quote I want to hold before us. Bonhoeffer himself heeded that call in the most literal way, went to his death as a martyr – hung for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
How did Bonhoeffer live and act between these two poles? Easy enjoyment of the good things in life, and the call to come die, that is, to get involved in the mess of human history, to give up everything for the good of the world? This is for me a question of proximate justice: Between these two poles of Christian living, how do we decide what God expects of us?
Perhaps this still feels too abstract and distant from you. Let me reflect back to you some questions I’ve heard some of you in this room ask over the years.
Is it a faithful option to use my gifts and energies to be a corporate lawyer, or should I seek to more directly help the oppressed, the needy?
How much of my salary should I give away? How should I balance generosity and stewardship? How do I decide?
Is buying works of art works or spending money on beautifying my home OK, when the money could go to feeding someone? What’s the balance?
Is it ok to do things at work I disagree with, when I have no power, apart from quitting, to change anything? And what are the limits?
Should we foster children who need a home, even when we know there will be a likely cost to our own children? How do we decide?
What does God expect of us between these poles of enjoying ordinary life, and giving it all up to die for others? This is the space I want to explore – so let’s look at the life of Christ and see if we can find any answers.
My key assumption is this: to be a Christian is to accept the call to follow the way of Christ in the world. That is what, after all, the word Christian means — little Christs. The image of the church as body of Christ is also evocative — we are the very body of Christ here for the world. To look at Christ, therefore, is a primary way Christians determine what it is God expects of us. This therefore will be a theological reflection, so I apologize if that’s not the space you are in.
So how does looking at Jesus shape our understanding of proximate justice?
Rightly, we often start with the cross. The cross, after all, is the sign of the Christian faith. Jesus said, “Whoever wants to follow me must pick up his or her cross.” To follow the way of Jesus in the world will involve following him in his death, in his costly engagement with injustice and suffering of the world.
My first boundary marker is therefore: disengagement from the world and its problems is not an option.
On the cross we see that God’s own response to injustice and suffering was not to just spout truth claims, not to separate himself off and cultivate his own holiness, not to sit back and condemn, it was to enter in and be affected.
If we are to follow the way of Christ as we seek the good of the world we are going to get our hands dirty, get involved — we are the body of Christ, and that body was broken for the world. Inaction, therefore, is not an option. We are called to act and live in the world in ways that make the world better, which bring more good, more justice.
However, this doesn’t now mean we know the decision to make. The Cross in itself gives us no resources that make sense of Bonhoeffer’s “easy mind”. And it raises some legitimate practical questions: Is it ever acceptable not to suffer with the world? Do we need to be personally involved in fighting every injustice? Should we always die to ourselves? Give everything away, all the time? What’s the long game? How do we decide?
When I was living in Vancouver I found this a real struggle. As Canada’s warmest city Vancouver has the vast share of Canada’s homeless: you can survive a Vancouver winter on the street. Everyday I would walk past men and woman sleeping rough on the sidewalk, begging for money or food. I had friends who moved into homeless shelters to live among the homeless and share their suffering. Was that what I was meant to do? How do I know?
This question took on particular poignancy because so much of my life in Vancouver was so good. Often I would walk out of friends’ homes after wonderful nights of friendship, food and wine, and walk past four or five homeless people on the way to the bus. I was deeply torn by how to respond and act. Could I have Bonhoeffer’s “easy mind”? How did it relate to the call to share in the world’s suffering? The cross by itself cannot answer these questions, we need to go further.
My second big boundary maker is this: to witness in our lives to the way of Jesus can’t just mean witnessing to his death, we need to witness to his life also.
Jesus spent 33 years not dying (something I’ve surpassed Jesus in, just saying). He spent 30 years not in ministry. He was always surrounded by poverty, sickness, injustice, and oppression — all the time. Yet he didn’t heal everyone, didn’t feed everyone, didn’t ever really address roman occupation and its injustice. A lot of time he spent presumably living the life of an ordinary 1st Century Jew.
The call to take up the cross, to come die, cannot therefore mean, because it did not mean for Jesus, that we can’t enjoy or affirm ordinary life: the blessing of friendships, food, family, fishing, wine, all of which the Gospels are clear Jesus enjoyed greatly.
It also cannot mean that it is always wrong to walk away from suffering and injustice having not done anything. Sometimes its ok not to have your awareness raised, not to watch the video that will change your view on something really important.
The God who was on a mission to save the world, who was willing to die for this mission, did not view it as a distraction or a compromise to that mission, to spend a lot of time, frankly the majority of his time, doing normal human things and enjoying them. Nor did he view it as wrong to leave some injustices unresolved.
How do we make sense of this in a way that is helpful to us? I think there are a couple of things going on here that are worth spelling out, and I want to do so using three keywords: thankfulness, obedience and trust, all of which really work together.
Bonhoeffer once wrote this in a letter to a friend:
We ought to find and love God in what he actually gives us; if it pleases him to allow us to enjoy some overwhelming earthly happiness, we mustn’t try to be more pious than God himself.
I love that last line, I’ve met those people. He goes on:
Everything has its time, and the main thing is that we keep step with God, and do not keep pressing on a few steps ahead-nor keep dawdling a step behind.
So thankfulness and obedience work together here. We are to be open to the good gifts God gives, but ready to follow where he calls, when he calls. We see this in the life of Jesus: God called him to go die, and he did; but he also freely enjoyed with an “easy mind” the good things God brought into his life.
This obedience relies on trust. Jesus seemed content to go about the work God called him to within his limitations and powers; content to seek to do some good without giving up because he couldn’t fix everything at once, couldn’t heal everyone, couldn’t right every wrong. He trusted the promise of God that he will one day put all things right, he contented himself to do some good, some justice, within the vocation and power he was given, trusting God for the big picture.
As an aside, it is worth stating that ordinary life and mission aren’t really opposed—I like the way Bonhoeffer put it: “God wants to see human beings, not ghosts who shun the world.” Meals with friends witness to the good world God created and wants to restore; living among the homeless witnesses to the compassion of God who came to live among us.
This is the ad hoc balance I tried to strike in my relationship with the homeless in Vancouver. Sometimes I would stop and buy them a meal; sometimes I would hear their stories. Sometimes I would walk on by and do nothing. Sometimes I would walk on by and then turn around because I felt God say don’t walk on by this time. There was a particular homeless man called Peter who lived near college and who I spent more time with.
I continued to enjoy good times with friends.
I explored for a while the opportunity to work with a ministry that served the homeless in the downtown eastside—but I decided my focus was to be a student for this season. I trusted others were called to that good work, not me for now. I am not sure I got that right. I am not sure I got any of it right. And that’s the next boundary marker I want to lay down.
It’s worth noting that Jesus involved himself regularly in institutions, systems, activities, he knew were deeply compromised by sin. The Temple in Jerusalem is an example. He would have regularly attended and participated in the very activities he later condemned as corrupt.
Rarely in life will we be given a clear morally unambiguous choice.
We live and act in a world that is very hard to analyse, where right and wrong aren’t always clear, where every choice sometimes seems to implicate us in some compromise. The life of Jesus suggests we can’t just expect God to rescue us from this real world of responsibility, he wants us to chose and act.
The story behind Bonhoeffer’s execution has intrigued me for a few years now and relates to this point. He was a pacifist, killing was wrong. But after much wresting he decided the right thing to do was to aid a plot to kill Hitler. His thinking process is really interesting here.
Bonhoeffer recognized that this was a compromise, indeed a sin. He didn’t actually rework his fundamental moral framework. He decided to act in a compromised way, in an extreme situation, in the hope that good would come out of it — he therefore confessed it as a sin, even before he committed it, even as he intended to commit it for God’s glory and his neighbors’ good [I am paraphrasing Stackhouse’s summary here]. For Bonhoeffer, responsible action involves both freedom and “willingness to become guilty.” That is, God gives us the freedom to act, but sometimes the right thing to do will make us guilty of sin.
When I first moved to Vancouver the advice I was given by those who worked with and cared for the homeless was that it wasn’t helpful to give them money when they asked for it, for a number of reasons. This was the advice I followed. But doing this “right” thing meant at times I walked past and ignored a real human in real need. I was maybe right, but I am not sure I was guiltless.
Much could be made of this, but I simply want to say that we need to make tough decision at times, that the way is not always clear, that we will be involved in compromise and must be willing to act even if it involves us not being sure we are getting it right, where we must chose between the lesser of two evils. None of this is a sign that we aren’t doing God’s will, that we are not listening to him. It is the nature of the world God calls us to love and serve, that he himself loved and served.
Being involved in the life of politics, with its compromise and injustice; or the economic sphere, with inequalities and material temptations; or media, with its mixed motives and inanity, cannot be dismissed as automatically out-of-bounds for Christians because it involves compromise, the choosing of the lesser of evils.
In the end, what God expects of us is obedience.
Bonhoeffer was actually suspicious of formal ethics that trusted a system to tell us right and wrong and promised sure answers — the question was for him What does God will? He acted with radical trust not in his own ability to discern right and wrong, his own ethical reasoning, but in the grace of God to forgive him even if he is wrong, knowing that inaction was not an option. In this he followed, I think, the way of Christ. The cross was a risk. I am not sure Jesus knew with scientific certainty that this was the path God was asking him to take. And so on the cross he committed his Spirit, as Bonhoeffer did his, to the grace and mercy of God.
That trust is in the end what God expects of us.
I might have got it wrong to focus on being a student in Vancouver. It was the easier choice perhaps. But it was what I had initially felt called to. I prayed and discerned as best I could, and then I trusted myself to the grace of God.
Here I want to make one more point, lay one last boundary marker: We witness as the body of Christ—that is, as different parts of one body.
The life I am called to is not the same as the life you are called to, except to the extent we are all called to obedience. What is right for me may not be right for you. It was perhaps faithful and obedient of my friends to give up comfort to live among the poor; it was perhaps faithful and obedient for me to focus on being a student. We are one body, but many parts.
Some of us through personality, or history, or opportunity, will witness to Christ in our ordinary life more than otherwise—faithful relating to friends, family, neighbourhood. Others are wired and feel called to get their hands dirty, to be at the coalface, enter into the dark places of brokenness and suffering. And in that they witness to Christ. And yet others here have been given opportunities, and will be given opportunities, to witness in power, to see significant positive change in the world.
We each have different callings, different concerns that God places on us hearts and gives us the skills and opportunities to meet. Some of us care about and are called to address issues of poverty; others injustices of war; others the environment; others bad city design; others sex trafficking; others foreign mission; others education; and so on.
Together we witness as a body.
Jesus had his particular vocation, and it was not mine. Bonhoeffer had his particular vocation, and it was not mine. You have your vocation, and it is not mine. But we are all called to the same obedience.
In reality, we will each at different times, in different seasons, witness to different parts of Christ’s life. I have seen some of you witness in death—in long periods of faithfulness even in the midst of suffering and pain. Others I see seeking to witness in power, in roles of authority, in resurrection and ascension—and I pray you have courage and wisdom, and be willing to give it all away if called.
There is a time for everything we are told in Ecclesiastes 3
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
We must practice discernment, attention to the call of God’s Spirit in our lives, to ask what is the time? What is the season? We are to be open to the generous gift of life, and open to God’s call to pick up the cross.
What God asks of us is not certainty about our decisions, not that we get everything right, but the fearful obedience that is willing to die, willing to enjoy, willing to witness in and out of every season, to seek a proximate justice. A proximate justice that is a witness to the future justice of God which the prophets promise will one day flow like a river.
Thank you.
Religious people speak of God when human knowledge (perhaps simply because they are too lazy to think) has come to an end, or when human resources fail—in fact it is always the deus ex machina that they bring on to the scene, either for the apparent solution of insoluble problems, or as strength in human failure—always, that is to say, exploiting human weakness or human boundaries. Of necessity, that can go on only till people can by their own strength push these boundaries somewhat further out, so that God becomes superfluous as a deus ex machina…. It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the center, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness….God is beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.
Cultural critic Christopher Lasch once argued that we moderns no longer seek salvation, but survival; understood as peace of mind. But I wonder if many of us are happy here, within this limited horizon of expectation and hope? Whether this does not come with a sense of regret?
In Part 1 of this post, I argued that Sia and Sam Smith’s new songs—Chandelier and Stay With Me, respectively—express an important point about how many people experience the secular: they see no real other option, but still wonder if there is another way; they are haunted by regret and longing.
I argued these songs are clearer expressions of the experience of living in a secular age than Dawkins’ atheist bus campaign: “God probably doesn’t exist. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” I am not saying people in the secular age all walk around all the time feeling haunted by the transcendent, marked by longing and regret. But it is significant that this is not, I believe, an uncommon experience. We do at times, maybe the morning after, feel the weight of the “probably” so reluctantly included in Dawkins’ campaign. And this haunting is part of the secular experience.
Douglas Coupland’s novel Life After God powerfully captures the reality of living in a cross-pressured world. It follows the lives of characters living in self-consciously secular Vancouver. One of the characters describes the world of his friends this way:
Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless. Politics, we supposed, existed elsewhere in a televised nonparadise; death was something similar to recycling.
Life was charmed but without politics or religion. It was the life of children of the children of the pioneers–life after God–a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven. Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life–”
Coupland, like Taylor—as well as Sia and Smith—explores the experience of living in the “immanent frame”. He suggests there is, at times, a cost. His narrator goes on:
–and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt. I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line. I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.
The talk of irony betrays the fact that this is a book of the 1990s and Generation X (a term invented by Coupland). But in Coupland’s words I see echoes of Sia and Sam Smith’s experience, an articulation of the point being made by Taylor and Smith. For Coupland, or at least his narrator, our religious feelings must go somewhere; the secular age has not meant the easy disappearance of such longings and impulses:
But then I must remind myself we are living creatures—we have religious impulses—we must—and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion? It is something I think about every day. Sometimes I think it is the only thing I should be thinking about.
God is no longer an option for Coupland’s characters, and so they explore other options, other cracks for such impulses to go: love, sex, drugs, nature, consumption and so on. And yet life after God is not the entirely liberating experience predicted by the likes of Dawkins. The question remains, is this all there is? In a paragraph I have always found haunting, Coupland’s narrator offers this confession:
Now–here is my secret: I tell it to you with the openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God–that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love.
I once read an interview with Coupland where he was asked about this novel. Perhaps trying to distance himself from this seeming “religious turn”, he said he was in a strange place when he wrote it. The argument of Taylor and Smith is, we are all now in that strange place—that’s what it means to live in a secular age.
I once met a missionary who was working in secular Europe. He said he saw his job as the mission to maintain the rumour of God. I’ve always liked that phrase. Perhaps that is our role, those of us who believe in God (even when we too are subjected to cross-pressures)—to maintain the rumour of God: to wisely and creatively suggest to a world conflicted by cross-pressures, haunted by longings and regret they can not fully explain, that perhaps (may we humbly suggest) you long for transcendence because you were made to; this immanent world is not all there is.
I’ve been playing two songs on repeat recently, Sia’s Chandelier and Sam Smith’s Stay With Me. Both songs are beautiful and haunting, filled with regret and longing. They express, at least to me, some of the profound cross-pressures we experience living in a secular age.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been reading How (not) to be Secular, James K. A. Smith’s reflection on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. One of the things Taylor’s book is trying to do, according to Smith, is to nuance certain popular assumptions of what it means to live in a secular age. Taylor takes issues with the picture painted by the so-called New Atheists, of a modern world shorn of the transcendent with no existential consequences. Such a view was captured in Richard Dawkins’ breezy bus campaign: “God probably doesn’t exist. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” For the New Atheist, we live in a world “sanitized of faith and transcendence, flattened to the empirical” (Smith), and everybody is fine.
Taylor takes issue here. In the first instance with the idea that most of us experience this world as completely—and uncomplicatedly—devoid of the transcendent. Instead, for Taylor and Smith, the secular age is not one completely evacuated of the transcendent, but an age of “fundamental contestability when it comes to belief, a sense that rival stories are always at the door offering a very different account of the world” (Smith). Smith points to authors such as David Foster Wallace, and musicians such as Arcade Fire and Radiohead, as examples of this contestability. The secular reality is the reality of experiencing a “cross-pressured” world: claims of “rival stories”—of a world entirely immanent, or open to transcendence—are rarely fully settled for us. This is true for both believers and unbelievers alike. For believers, the claims of pure immanence at times seem compelling and persuasive. For unbelievers who live in the “immanent frame”, a question often haunts them: Is this all there is?
Smith charatcerises this reality in terms of “fugitive expressions of doubt and longing, faith and questions.” And suggests, “these lived expressions of ‘cross-pressure’ are at the heart of the secular.”
It is these expressions I see powerfully expressed in Chandelier and Stay With Me. Both songs are about the experience of embracing the purely immanent, the immediate experience—a one night stand in Sam Smith’s case; binge drinking for Sia—but being haunted by feelings of regret, the question of whether this is all there is.
So Sia sings:
Party girls don’t get hurt
Can’t feel anything, when will I learn
I push it down, push it down
And goes on to say:
And I’m holding on for dear life, won’t look down won’t open my eyes
Keep my glass full until morning light, ’cause I’m just holding on for tonight
Help me, I’m holding on for dear life, won’t look down won’t open my eyes
Keep my glass full until morning light, ’cause I’m just holding on for tonight
On for tonight
She is embracing the immanent, living “like tomorrow doesn’t exist”, but does not articulate this as an expression of Dawkins’ command to not worry and enjoy life. Instead she sings of just holding on, of not feeling anything; she sings “help me”. Sia’s experience is cross-pressured; she embraces the immanent, but is haunted by the question is this all there is?
Likewise, Sam Smith sings:
Guess it’s true, I’m not good at a one-night stand
But I still need love ’cause I’m just a man
These nights never seem to go to plan
I don’t want you to leave, will you hold my hand?
Oh, won’t you stay with me?
‘Cause you’re all I need
This ain’t love, it’s clear to see
But darling, stay with me
Why am I so emotional?
No, it’s not a good look, gain some self-control
And deep down I know this never works
But you can lay with me so it doesn’t hurt
He knows one-night stands don’t work, but what other options does he have? And yet, he is conflicted—he longs for more. Again, Smith expresses the cross-pressured reality of our secular age better than the un-nuanced optimism of Dawkins.
As I will explore in Part Two of this post, the honesty of Sia and Smith actually creates space for the church to work, to maintain the rumour of God.
I’m a big fan of Charles Taylor. His book A Secular Age represents an incredibly useful narrative of our modern times: what we feel and think about the big questions of human life, and why we feel and think what we do. It is a compelling cultural anthropology and my go-to text when teaching on modern identity. However at 900 pages, it’s not an easy, or short, read. Luckily James K A Smith has sought to remedy this. In his latest book, How (not) to be Secular, Smith seeks to make Taylor’s book accessible, offering his shorter book as a guide. Smith is convinced that it is worth the effort. I agree.
As Smith puts it, Secular Age articulates the modern terrain of human identity. Not with the flat and cartoonish sketches of militant atheism on one hand, or religious fundamentalism on the other, but with fidelity and detail.
Imagine a map of our present — of “this present age,” as Kierkegaard once put it. What’s the shape of the existential terrain in which we find ourselves in late modernity? Where are the valleys of despair and mountains of bliss, the pitfalls and dead ends? What are the sites of malaise and regions of doubt? Where are the spaces of meaning? Are they hidden in secluded places, or waiting to be discovered in the mundane that is always with us? Where should we look for the “thin places” that still seem haunted by transcendence? Or have they disappeared, torn up to make way for progress and development? Where’s that yawning existential abyss portrayed with clichéd abandon in Garden State?
It is this map that Secular Age provides and which makes it such an important book for those seeking to communicate the Christian faith into the world as it is, to people as they are. A Secular Age represents for Smith “a cultural anthropology for urban mission.” It avoids the reductionism of a “god-shaped hole” evangelism, while articulating the cracks and crevices where transcendence still haunts our seemingly immanent world.
Taylor achieves this nuance because he defines secularism as focused not so much on what we believe (or not), but on the conditions of belief. We live in a world today which differs from the Christian past not so much in the fact that fewer people believe in God, but in the fact that whether you believe or not, you cannot escape the fact that we live in – according to Smith’s summary – “a situation of fundamental contestability when it comes to belief, a sense that rival stories are always at the door offering a very different account of the world.” Smith goes on:
Taylor names and identifies what some of our best novelists, poets, and artists attest to: that our age is haunted. On the one hand, we live under a brass heaven, ensconced in immanence. We live in the twilight of both gods and idols. But their ghosts have refused to depart, and every once in a while we might be surprised to find ourselves tempted by belief, by intimations of transcendence. Even what Taylor calls the “immanent frame” is haunted. On the other hand, even as faith endures in our secular age, believing doesn’t come easy. Faith is fraught; confession is haunted by an inescapable sense of its contestability. We don’t believe instead of doubting; we believe while doubting. We’re all Thomas now.
I am only a few chapters in to How (not) to be Secular. So far it is a proving a faithful and helpful guide to Taylor’s work. A timely reminder of its importance and perspicuity. I recommend it to you. However, if Smith’s shorter work on Taylor’s longer work is still too long for you, there is always this Youtube clip where he discusses the book. Enjoy!
Imagining Otherwise 