From Above and From Within

While walking through a neighborhood in Rancho a few days ago, I had an interesting thought. From the hiking trails there, which take one up into hilly areas, one can see the city from a sort of bird's-eye view. It's a very commanding, fascinating way to view your own community, and gives one a good idea of the lie of the land. At certain point on one of the trails, though, a concrete stairway leads down directly into one of those neighborhood. I took that route and ended up wandering through Rancho's neighborhood for an hour or two. Then I was able to see what each house looked like instead of seeing a sea of red tile roofs interspersed with some other buildings. What occurred to me is that both views, both experiences, had shown me something that the other could not. The commanding view from the hills showed me how the city was planned and where it lies in terms of Southern California geography, but it could not show me what walking down the neighborhood streets did: the character of each house, and how life progresses at the individual level.

It is probably an obvious conclusion, but I think that to view life, the world, faith, and any other important thing properly, one must similarly come at it from both perspectives. We hear of generals or statesmen who have singular ability in seeing the big picture, or in their minute administrative abilities and attention to detail. It is probably rare when a man possesses both in equal measure. And is it not so that we have a God who is both above all and in all? Unlike the polytheistic deities, who work within the natural world, God is independent of His creation and understands it (because He made it) from a planner's perspective. Yet unlike Islam's impersonal Allah, He also became a man, as an infant laying His eyes first on the rough walls of a Judaean stable. I cannot think of a more grounded, earthy perspective on life than this: growing up, as we presume, learning carpentry; reaching out to the poor, the sick, the corrupt and the unlovely; staying in the homes of friends and countering the specious arguments of the smug religious establishment with truth and common sense. God is not merely the world's engineer, or its judge. He is these things, and He would not be God if He were not. But He has also known what it is to be its tenant. To walk in the Columbia Gorge or around Trillium Lake or over the foothills of the Saddleback Mountains is quite another thing than looking at them on a map or a satellite image. But without looking at maps we could easily become lost, trapped by the limitations of seeing things only from the ground. Happy for us that we have a God who does both perfectly.

Lessons from Sloths

Last school year I read and did a presentation on a book called Life of Pi. Written by a Canadian author in roundabouts 2001, this is the story of a young Indian boy who survives a shipwreck and drifts through the Pacific in a lifeboat for an incredible amount of time (at least a couple hundred days) with a tiger, a hyena, an orangutan, and a zebra aboard with him. Finally it is only he and the tiger and they must survive together in a kind of symbiotic relationship, while in the meantime he instructs the reader in some gooey postmodern hash about understanding animals, and relativism, and how every major religion is just wonderful and should learn to get along.

I bring up this book because it starts by talking about sloths. As I recall, it praises their slow-moving and contemplative natures, encouraging the reader to step back and take a look at life and the world and all that typical guru stuff. This is a common call. Close your eyes. Step back from the rat-race. Contemplate nature. See deep inside yourself. Get in touch with the good energy out there.

I thought about something this morning that was very convicting for me. Recently, in how many concrete ways have you expressed your faith? I knew that the number was painfully and ridiculously low. I knew also that the ways in which I had expressed concrete actions or thoughts contrary to my faith were very many, whether laziness or selfishness or gluttony or any number of other things. The point being, that if someone analyzed my life over the last two weeks or month, other than attending church and reading the Bible a few times they would find it hard to point to something that explicitly identifies me as a Christian.
This was, as I said, a convicting thought. And it made me think of those sloths.

I think it is a great error and even a great heresy to teach that the key to right living and healthy spirituality lies in severance from the world. It lies in severance from the actions and attitudes of the world and the total embrace of the actions and attitudes of Christ. Let's take a doctor as an example. Christ said that He came to heal the sick, so I figure it will make a decent analogy. Doctors strive through any means possible to prevent death by repairing the body and treating unwholesome symptoms. They themselves do not partake of the disease if they can help it. Infecting yourself with rabies does not in the slightest help a rabies victim. But ignoring rabies and letting it rage unchecked in someone's system will not help any more, and in the end that doctor will be held accountable for making no attempt to save his patient's life.

I feel that this latter option is what the proponents of a "batten down the hatches" spirituality are doing. I'm thinking of more than just Christians here, although of course I would apply it most specifically to them. Various Eastern religions seem to contain aspects of this as well. But I think we know best those Christians who interpret the Bible's words about being "not of this world" as meaning that it's okay for them to just sing praise songs and to preach daily, not to the lost, but to the found. It's like a trail guide running around the shelter at the end of the trailing, joyfully shouting to those inside: "You found it! Isn't it great! We're such privileged people because we found it! Now let's warm our hands over the fire."

Meanwhile all over the forbidding country outside the shelter men and women are struggling through dark forests, drowning in bogs and falling into pits. It's not wrong to rejoice with someone at having found the light--in fact, the Bible commands us to--but we need to rejoice together as we go out into the world and use our unique talents to show that light to others. What does Jesus say about putting your light under a basket? He says it's not the way to do it. Not only is light smothered under something of no good to anyone else, it is swiftly no good to itself either: it runs out of oxygen to burn and snuffs out.

There is plenty of room for contemplation. In this land of plenty, this America, we have plenty of time to ponder the wonder and glory of God and the universe and the imago Dei in man if we simply take the effort to make that time. It is the helter-skelter, submissive, uncontrollable activity that these gurus are warning against, the Eastern mystics who want us to just close our eyes and breath: senseless activity, a scrabbling for nothing, appointments and deadlines and 8-hour jobs that ultimately have no meaning or purpose as we descend into retirement and then finally into death. A tale full of sound and fury.

But, though they are right to dislike purposeless action, they are not right to advocate the life of the hermit, the life of distance and separation. There is another kind of action that is crying out for fit instruments for its application. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then this kind of action is worth a million. It may not be a missionary journey to Cambodia (though I'm sure they need missionaries there), but it had better be something, friends. It is action born not of selfishness or the inability to control our schedules, but of the belief that there is work yet to be done, work that cannot be left to others. Others will work, sometimes more and sometimes less, but that couldn't be less important for our own duty to join in. If my friends, or my family, or my pastor--or almighty God--were to take a review of any given week in my life, what would I want to hear? Would I want to hear, You blew it? Would I want to hear, Good talker but not a deed to show for it? Or would I want to hear, This man lives, speaks, thinks, works, worships, helps, hinders, as he ought?

Here's the tough question: what would you hear?

Trading Homo Sapiens for Homo Ignorans

This is something I posted in my academic blog, The Quintessence of Dust, and I figured I would post it here as well, since the topic is suited to Musings. The text I quote is The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Anthony Keller, the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, New York.

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So, I've been musing a bit about this passage in Keller on page 117:

All Christians believe all this--but no Christians believe just this. As soon as you ask "How does the church act as the vehicle for Jesus's work in the world?" and "How does Jesus's death accomplish our salvation?" and "How are we received by grace?" Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians will give you different answers. Despite the claims of many to be such, there are no truly "generic" nondenominational Christians. Everyone has to answer these "how" questions in order to live a Christian life, and those answers immediately put you into one tradition or denomination or another.

Christians seem to struggle with this a lot. It can be somewhat embarrassing to declare that you have been led to find the truth and then admit that others teach a radically different practical application or interpretation of the same truths. Some Christians teach that grace is so predominate in salvation that our actions do not matter. Others teach that works can of themselves produce meritorious results and grant us a better place in heaven. Still others teach something in between. This is only one of a host of disputes, ranging from whether infants should be baptized to whether salvation can be lost.

Both Keller and Miller are not concentrating on these disputes for obvious reasons. Since they are trying to convince non-Christians of the basic veracity and authenticity of the Christian faith, a detailed description of doctrinal disputes would be distracting and probably bewildering to much of their intended readership. Christianity can be boiled down, so to speak, into its most basic tenets, those truths which the Bible unmistakably teaches. I am not, therefore, blaming either author in any way for avoiding these sticky issues, given their stated intents.

But the subject of intramural disputes got me thinking. Are Christians the only people who disagree as to the practical application and interpretation of their faith? Certainly not. I am not familiar with all the 'denominations' of all the world religions, although I know that Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims have tended to disagree on a few things. Even atheists tend to agree only to the extent that they deny the existence of any deity (and often hate the very idea of his existence). Keller cites the atheist scientist Stephen Jay Gould disagreeing with fellow atheist Richard Dawkins on a key belief of many atheists, that religious faith and science are incompatible (90-91).

No animal is uncertain of how to live. Apes do not form anti-vine-swinging lobbies, nor do lionesses debate hunting methods. Fish do not have various schools of thought as to how one should best swim, or whether swimming is necessary at all, or whether every fish simply dreams that he swims but in reality always remains stationary. Humans are the only living things that debate how to live: whether they should be humble or arrogant, meek or aggressive, hungry for power or eager to help others, whether to worship themselves or something outside themselves, whether something they hear is true or false. Keller and Miller would be out of a writing job if this were not so. And this is also, I think, a compelling argument for both truth and goodness. This may seem a logical leap, but this impulse is absolutely unique to humans. We are the only creatures who can reorder our lives based on something other than external circumstances, and we are constantly trying to do it, either because we have failed to live up to a particular standard or we have become convinced that a different standard is more worth achieving. I do not believe that we would do this if there were not some sort of ultimate standard to which all humans know they must attain.

As I recall, C.S. Lewis (whom, I notice, both authors we are reading seem to quote frequently) makes a similar argument in the first chapter of Mere Christianity. He calls it an appeal to 'fair play' or some kind of moral standard. We do not feel offended that someone has stolen our property for no reason at all. We recognize that something outside of ourselves has been violated. We may be more properly categorized as homo ignorans than homo sapiens, but this is what the Bible would lead us to expect. We are born piloting the ships of our lives without a map, and most of our lives are spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, in seeking a light by which to steer. In this case ignorance may be the first step toward truth.