Adventures in "the Bible as literature"

There's maybe one more thing I have to say about poetry and grief, but I am going to take a break from that to throw out two little symmetries in the Bible that I've been thinking about:

• The Incarnation as an ironic fulfillment of the serpent's false promise: not that we shall become like God, but that God will become man! This is laid out right there in the text, of course, in the "he shall bruise your head / and you shall bruise his heel" bit.  But thinking about it in light of the serpent's own words makes him (the serpent) a bit a Greek tragic hero, in the sense that his hubristic words outline his own downfall.
• Calvary as an inversion of the Flood.  Flood: everyone is sinning, kill them all except this one righteous man.  Calvary: everyone is sinning, kill the one righteous man.

So tell me, Ben, are these parallels Seminary 101? I won't lie, I was a little proud of intuiting them, but surely others have pointed them out before.  I think these things are neat, but can we draw any theological notions from them? Let's converse!

Poetry and grief, pt 2: what we talk about when we talk at funerals

A curious side phenomenon of death in the family: for a while there I was surrounded by three distinct vocabularies.  There was the sterile, intensely neutral language of the medical world—stiff latinate ways to describe terrible things (hemiparesis, glioblastoma multiforme, cerebral edema) or else ultramodern made-up words for treatments that sort of help (dexamethasone, gamma knife, Keppra).  This is a form of comfort.  What is being experienced has a name, it is documented, it can be spoken of as an abstraction that exists outside your own story.  Ultimately you play a passive role.  This tumor behaves this way because tumors always do so.  The medicine will relieve these symptoms because its chemistry is designed that way.  The impression is of impersonal forces struggling somewhere only vaguely connected with the sterile room you're in. This vocabulary mitigates anger, makes it understandable when the impersonal struggle concludes with the familiar TV doctor's line: We did everything we could.

Contrast that with vocabulary #2, the clanging triumphalist imagery the evangelical church uses to speak of death.  Where medical jargon uses the passive voice, this is intensely active.  Illness is rewritten as battle, death as reward, the departed inevitably 'brave,' whether or not the speaker has any idea how they faced their suffering.  Because the personal narrative—I once was lost but now am found—is the driving force of evangelicalism, there's an intense pressure to put positive closure on tragedy, quickly.  We forget the pains Paul takes to remind us that death is the last enemy to be destroyed.  Hence the martial metaphors, mentions of glorified bodies and reunions in the afterlife, and ceaseless references to God's plan.¹  All of this encourages the crafting of a sentence whose fulcrum is the word 'but'.  Its crudest form goes something like, "life is hard, but God is good."  That little conjunction becomes a lifeline.  It marks the difference between sympathy and reassurance.  In nearly every conversation I had with someone from my parents' church, I felt a expectation to produce some variation on this sentiment, to add that 'but' clause.  And when I did, I imagined I could see my interlocutor's relief.  It was like resolving a dissonant chord.

These vocabularies are not, of course, universal, but there are always layers of language around death.  The actual raw data of the event is discussed (maybe) by the eceased's inner circle and by those outside it—"What happened?" "Really? Shit."— but never between the two.  Every other conversation is buffered, filtered through some narrative: the story the bereaved tell others, the story those others tell the bereaved, the story packaged for all involved by disinterested outsiders.  This last varies.  It could be and has been communal myths, rituals, orders, and liturgies.  Yet in America one type of external narrative is encountered by everyone but everyone, regardless of nation, color, or creed, in the third vocabulary, the flourescent pastoralism of the sympathy industry.  To interact with undertakers is to fall through the lookingglass into a place where everything looks like a (respectfully muted) Thomas Kincaid painting .  "Respect" is a big word in this world, as are "dignity," "fullness," "honor," "legacy," and so on.  Like the triumphal language of Evangelicals, this cant owes something to the military, or even better, to politics.  These are big words, they belong to a very public type of rhetoric, and as such they have been ballooned out to cover whole generations, people groups, and nations.  It is very hard to get them to shrink down again to the size of a single person.  They have lost whatever elasticity they might have once had.  They might work in a funeral oration in Shakespeare, but when a business applies them across the board² to people who by the nature of the enterprise could not have been known to them, well, it's like listening to a lush orchestration of "Chopsticks."  All of this is made more disconcerting by the constant back-of-the-mind fact that someone's making money from this.  The prayer card, for example, is obviously mass-produced.  You leaf through a book with about 200 options, each painting more saccharine than the last, the possible texts nauseating and false.³  You can see the focus group coordinator in her purple knit sweater: What words do you think of when I say 'memory'? How about 'compassion'? Can you arrange these pictures in order of most to least comforting? (We chose a simple picture of praying hands b/w Psalm 24.  They messed up and we got Psalm 23 instead.)  The really wild thing about this is that there are no other options.  Rules of supply and demand indicate that Kincaidiana is what I want, is the language I wish to speak in time of sorrow.

I'm unclear what was worse, the thick ironies that seemed to keep me from actually feeling anything during this time, or the fact that so many people around me seemed to feel this olla podrida of sentiments is totally normal.  Or the deep and gnawing intimation that I am somehow self-narcotizing, that I am truly missing something, not 'in touch with my feelings,' as the grief booklets say.  It is a source of tremendous comfort that Dickinson went down this road long before me.  But so at the time my mom died, those three vocabularies were clonking around attempting to lay claim to various pieces of my heart, and the whole thing started to feel like a bad postmodern dream, the ridiculous dining out on the sublime and vice versa.  That is to say, exactly like an Ashbery poem.⁴

[Footnotes after the jump, I'm experimenting with HTML.]

Where Mark's brain has been, pt 1: The mooring of starting out

Jacobs has talked about the blog form as an opportunity for writing essays in installments.  I want to try something along those lines:

---

When my mom died, around a year and a half ago, I started reading a lot of poetry.  I hadn't done much of that for some time.  But I expected poetry to be a source of solace, and it was, and still is.  Maybe, initially, it had something to do with the fact that many poems are short, and thus look suspiciously like Easy Answers.  But the exact source of solace I ended up locating, or at least a home for the confusion and anxiety of grief, was a surprise: I started reading a lot of what you’d maybe call difficult poetry.  By which I mean poems of seeming anti-meaning that don’t yield their secrets easily if at all.  Not the bleeding experimental edge, mind you.  No, the stuff I'm dipping into is relatively tame; stuff that's always threatening to coalesce into meaning or melody—Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham, Kenneth Koch, and most of all John Ashbery.

One would expect the mourner to look for poems rife with clear Truths, gentle cycle-of-life meditations about the Body Of The World and the Overwhelming Splendor Of It All.  Poems of comfort.  Things like this, or this, or this (all picked, I swear, at random from last few months of WA archives¹).  So much of the language my family heard from friends and cards seems to hustle us in that direction, to offer alchemical formulae to transmute loss into meaning, and pronto.  But the poems I read and listened to (courtesy of the magnificent Penn Sound Archives) don’t seem particularly interested in catharsis, or even legibility—they don’t give a fig about my personal grief.  Their starting point here is—well, I don't know.  Sounds, yes; arresting juxtapositions in the surrealist tradition, sure; certain ideas about the act of artistic creation, probably.  But there's no embarking from any spontaneous overflows of powerful emotion, and if something is being recollected, it is difficult to discern whether from a state of tranquility or what. Still, like the creation myth where the world is made of scraps idly swept from the gods' table, these guys write such dense stuff that certain lines and half-lines can't help but cloak my own rejected thoughts in alienated majesty.

For example, take the delightful moment in Ashbery's very, very long poem "The Skaters" where he announces, "It is time now for a general understanding  / of the meaning of all this."  In a 1964 recording of the poem, this line is received with laughter.  It is hilariously straightforward, but perhaps the laughter contains a little relief as well—if he's making a joke about meaning, he must know that this poem is difficult.  Up to this point, we were worried that maybe, just maybe, we were missing some point that was obvious to everyone else.²    Of course what follows is only an explanation of why he won't explain anything, and it's not easy even to get that out of it.  But then there's a startling sort of aside:

...Except to say that the carnivorous
Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving
Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still.
Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to get up and be off themselves.

I do not believe Ashbery intended to evoke the feeling of grief's tapering off, the guilt at sliding back into normal life.  Nor was he trying to describe the anxiety that I'd forget my mom's face and voice.  But when I hear these lines, I can't not feel those things, rendered as crisp and perfect as if Raymond Carver had done it.

Which sounds a lot like I've snuck the sympathy cards’ grubby scramble for Meaning into the avant garde, doesn't it? What a hermeneutical faux pas, especially in a poem that, if it's about anything, is about 'skating' blithely across the surface of meaning.  Hypocrite lecteur! Surely this is a shallow and limited way to read a poem, just naked projection, right?

If there's a defense of this method, it's that the fractured and dense nature of the poems I'm talking about keep these moments from coming too easy or too often.  Any measure of comfort is found, paradoxically, because the poet isn't generally offering any comfort.  There's some scrounging on my part to find it, there's no takeaway in big pastel script.  And in that it seems so much more like messy real life than any tidy, epiphany-driven 'grief' poem.  What I wanted in the months after mom died wasn't kindly sages to illuminate my path—that feels (to me, which may reveal more about my attitudes that the poets') patronizing and facile.  Instead I found myself looking for fellow-travelers, other voices in the dark to articulate and give texture to its darkness, as Brecht describes:

In the dark times,
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times. 

¹While the Keilloriana of Good Poems has been kind of a drag, some of the hoariest bits of the canon have come crawling out of high school anthologies to make new sense: Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins; even musty old "Dover Beach" and its midnight anti-epiphany turned out to be kind of profoundly moving when I read it after mom's funeral while my wife slept beside me.
²If we do miss the point, we're in good company: Auden awarded Ashbery the Yale Younger Poet's Prize, then later claimed not to have understood a word of the manuscript.

Built Me A Pub...

What do you do if you can't afford beer at the Local, and long to live in a world where there is a charming, homey Pub just down the road (cf. 19th c. Britain)? Build your own!

http://blog.nashotah.edu/blog/2011/11/10/the-cellar-nashotah-houses-very-own-pub/

You're welcome, Nashotah House :)

Turning the tables...again.

So, I remember being rebuffed in theology classes at Wheaton for "allowing anthropology to inform my theology." That is - ascribing to God characteristics that are characteristically human. Bad, young theologian! We got it the wrong way around - what we need is a theological anthropology!

I took the rebuff and have since tried to avoid this error of humanifying the Godhead.

BUT - I just realized the other day as I was reading Ireneaus' robust account of humans-as-Image-bearers (in 'On The Apostolic Preaching') that this table turns on itself. I mean - if we fully allow our understanding of what a human is to be primarily informed by theology - then we claim that we humans bear the very image of what is true about God. That is, something about how we function and what we're made of (e.g. the fact that we have a body and a spirit, etc), is like how God is in godself.†

So - if this is a given (a dogmatic presupposition, of course, but that is the realm of the presenting rebuff i recevied, so, not inappropriate), then we actually can learn what God is like by looking at what is human. In more boring language: if our anthropology is theological, then our theology can be anthropological! So - maybe when the first person of the Godhead is referred to as 'Father', this is not just some metaphoric (or even analogic?, any readers know how S.Thomas parses this one?) ascription of a human concept on to an ineffable 'God-concept', but rather - God made humans in such a way—by having us be born from eachother, to have fathers, each of us, etc.—that it shows us a living example of how the Unseen functions. So when we profess - 'Eternally begotten of the Father' in the creed - it is like, literally, how we know Fathers to relate to Sons - that sons come from fathers, etc. likewise, The Son comes from The Father.

Boom! take that, Wheaton prof's! I intend on reflecting on this idea further - I have a feeling some gems might come of it.

I also like it as a sort of rationale for the lines I find myself thinking along, especially on this here blog.

†Furthermore - when the second person of the trinity assumed humanity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth - even fallen humanity became once and for all brought up into the God-head, and as we are being re-made into the image of righteousness by the Holy Spirit within us, we (who are, at the first and as a base-line, already image-bearers), are being made into the very likeness (a category higher than 'image', as developed by several church fathers, i think Didymus the Blind chiefly among them) of Christ - the second person of the Godhead. That is - we are even closer to looking like God now, thanks to the work of the 2nd and 3rd members of the trinity.

Bright and Vivid

I have seen a handful of YouTube videos in recent months that I realize, upon reflection, are actually visions of the Kingdom. That is - of how life can be now, and how it will be in the Age to Come. So here they are, i don't mean them (the content of the videos) literally per se, only that they are sort of living-parables of that ineffable joy and overflowing goodness that I believe is to be found only in YHWH; brief but vivid glimpses into what we hope for:

- So there's this,

- this (minus the sappy soundtrack. Ok, maybe with the sappy soundtrack :))

- and lastly, an oldie (in internet-time) but a goodie. I know you've seen it before, but watch it again, at least until the weeping-breakdown at 1:05. Gets me everytime.

I heard the phrase "an embarrasment of riches" today - a phrase I had forgotten till I heard it oncemore - and I just love it (the phrase). And i feel like it sums up something of these videos, too.

Uh oh - crazy thought (that also ties several other blog-thoughts together, too)

So, I just picked up this book of sayings of the desert fathers. You know - figured I'd take a gander - see what they have to offer. And - it's CRAZY. These dudes were so severe, and it's all demons and devils and what not. I am tempted to dismiss it out of hand as just the "hallucinations" resulting from weeks with no food and little water and an incessant desert sun. And then somewhere between these thoughts I realized its not really ok for me to think along such lines (of dismissal based on the interpretation of 'hallucinations'). I keep using quote marks around 'hallucinations' because that is just what we neuro-scientists categorize them as, when, on the contrary, the phenomenon presents itself as: In order to be able to see the spiritual realm, you need to fast. Clear and simple with no neuro-schmeuro nonsense. This surface (yet deepest [eidos]) interpretation is also far more compatible with the world the New Testament speaks of. So - all of the sudden I am left dumb-founded that maybe it's all real: all the monks' stories, all the crazy demons and what not. And if this is the case - then I need to re-adjust my life accordingly! For starters - maybe giving fasting a try. (So bloody difficult!) Also - reading classic Christian texts with much more credulity than my skeptical modern eyes usually afford them. But most of all - clinging ever tighter to the Christ who is my savior!

I have now lived 25 years on this earth

And how happy I am for all these years of life. Vis-a-vis this blog - how happy I am to have had these several years of dialogue and friendship with you, Mark, and all ye readers with whom I have likewise enjoyed the rich pleasure of armchair philosophizing.

Also - in recognition of this quarter century, and because of the hundreds of COPD patients I have seen at the medical hospital - I quit smoking! About 36 hrs ago. Didn't sleep a wink this night, but am over the moon about my new status as a non-smoker.

Remember those nights where we would get a bit tipsy, and then in the middle of the night I would stumble awake and throw away our cigarettes? Well I am finally honoring that uninhibited impulse once and for all. :)

I changed my profile pic in recognition of this.

Also, as eager as I am to put this in writing to seal the deal, this shall also be the last you will ever hear of it from me. Nothing more annoying than that guy who always talks about how long he's gone without, etc. How he "used to be one of those" etc. Yuck.

Also, to any of ye readers ever looking to do the same, I highly recommend this book (hat tip: my dear friend Tony Kaehny). Takes all of 20 minutes to read, but is an amazing tool which I am leaning on in these first couple weeks while the physical withdrawals subside.

Psychoanalytic findings as myth-making

On a couple occasions lately I have been speaking with someone who (over)shared some snippet of their past as it relates to their future. Y'all know of what I speak - like, when someone says, "well, I have deep trust issues because when I was 8 my Dad forgot to pick me up from soccer practice". Ok, that's a rather demure example, but that sort of statement. Anyway - while I have no doubt that our current ways of thinking and acting are formed by our experiences in the developmental years, when people pin it down to specific incidents, or specific people that 'wounded' them, I have this gut-sense that the thing they are labeling as the offender and the cause of their problems isn't really the cause of the problem. Rather - the things we latch on to that we use to explain current psychological problems actually are just the myths that we create for ourselves in order to comprehend our own story. That is - in the same way the greek myths help to explain things - even if only in a sort of chthonic, vague way - like, Cupid (romantic attraction) is the child of Eros and Psyche, etc. likewise - identifying and creating a narrative of our own childhood hurts, help us to conceive of our real, deeper hurt. I need to clarify a little: not that the pain-stories we tell (or discover when psychoanalysed) are made-up (although - I reckon they can be, and can still be useful), indeed they can be very real instances of abuse, neglect or false-standards, but when we label these things as the cause, we miss the mark a little. I think these things are not the real root of our pain; but rather - our specific painful memories allow us to point to and to access a deeper, more original pain (original sin?) that we all really do have. That is - there is some deep hole or scar or something in all of us, which we are doomed to live out of regardless of how our childhoods were. The myths we tell then, do allow us to describe the specific form our original-pain has taken as it has unfolded in our lives, but we err if we label the myth itself as the thing.

Secondarily to this - we all know some people who are just totally stuck on the painful elements in their past. Now, if their childhood was one full of trauma - this is entirely understandable, however, I think the problem here is that they have chosen their pain-myths as the most foundational narratives to their identity. This is problematic. Let there be no mistake - it is absolutely necessary to process past trauma, if there is some, with a therapist, and this can of course take years to fully work out, but if - even through the course of therapy (and this is the problem with the pop-version of psychoanalysis that is wide-spread) - these pain-stories are allowed first place in the category of 'stories that define our lives', then we will inevitably be stuck in our pain (and also think that the myths are the real source of it all - rather than something more original, that I was arguing earlier). I think this is where the Christian story has something very real and practical to help we, the hurting (that is - all of us): God has revealed that what is most true about us is that we are made by God, and that we bear God's image, and that this has been restored to us in Christ. That the truest thing about us is the glory we bear. C.S. Lewis comes to this a lot (Weight of Glory, the lessons in the Narnia stories), and he is right. Our pain - the primal, original kind; that is, the ache in all of us, and the specific pains we experienced and that effected our development are a secondary element to our identity.

Anyways, you buy it?

cosmic curiosity

I just don't know what it says about God that in creation we find inter-filament (a filament is a collection of super-clusters of galaxies) voids that are areas of space with NOTHING in them for spans of 500 million light-years! in case you forgot your math - that's 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles, WITH NOTHING - NOT EVEN DUST - IN IT!
That's just crazy amounts of space. And for some reason it freaks me out. Such large quantities of absence just don't fit with the character of YHWH as he has revealed himself in specific revelation, no?
Anyways - it troubles me.

Brain-Chemistry is Lame, pt II - an anecdote

As an example of how much better it is to not have the language of brain-chemistry littered in our conversation or understanding, compare this Orwell passage on a cup of tea (1946), with how people these days brashly talk about "caffeine":

First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.

(Taken from this excellent essay)

Damn you, Neuroscience!

This will be a brief rant, i promise.

I am just so bloody annoyed at how the claims and lingo of neuroscience have invaded both common speech and journalistic writing!

I feel incensed the way Blake was at the rationalists of his own day: How dare they demean happiness by calling it just dopamine! Do they really think that bliss is explained by seratonin?

I am of course not doubting the observations of the neuroscientists—of course, when we observe someone who is happy we also are able to observe an increase in dopamine. But observing the fact that they happen at the same time does not mean that we have found a sufficient explanation for happiness! Here again, scientists, and the masses who assimilate their ideas, have confused the question of 'how?' (as in, ''how does the brain work?") which is the quest of science, with the existential and spiritual question of 'why?'

I am not very dextrous with Aristotelian terminology, but to rephrase it as such: Science has partially described the material cause of human workings, but it does not—indeed, structurally cannot—touch the other three causes that make up the being of a thing! That is, what it's aim is, what it's orignal source is, etc. (see here for a primer on what I am talking about)

And yet—so many claim (more often tacitly than explicitly) that it does explain the human condition fully.

And I am torn with both pity and anger for all those who speak in such a way. That they think the depths of a human's heart can be encompassed with the names of a few chemicals. And anger - because they seek to demean my own being-in-this-world.

Ok, if i let the anger subside for a moment, I think I can see how this came about. In part because of an ever-increasing materialist outlook which has been devloping since Darwin. In part because of the proliferation of psycho-tropic medication which only imparts a chemical, and yet does effect an emotional change, but both of these things are understood too simply! Regarding meds, they do effect a degree of change in the taker, but unless the taker supplements this temporary boost (for they all of them wear off over time) with the hard-work of an existential quest to find meaning and happiness - they will remain despondent!

(I bet there are studies out there to back me up on this, but i don't know of them off-hand)

Also, I am stunned that people think the observations of neuroscientists are profound! We see some headline of 'when x people experienced y phenomenon, we noticed a difference in z part of their brain!'

Oh, really! you mean there is somthing mechanical happening as a result of actions taken by the will? Ok, that's kind of cool that we can see it, but when people think that the material happening is the explainer of the experience, they are just putting the bloody cart before the horse!

Mock on, mock on, MRI and CT scans.

On Belief

The latest thing that keeps coming up in my mind when I am feeling ponderous is this idea of Scripture being our "norming norm". I have tried to read some stuff on this (Grenz, et al.) and most of it is in pretty abstract theological terms. As in – scripture should be the primary informer of our (the Church's) theology. I.e. the truest theology is biblical theology.

But I am interested in a further application: the world the scriptures inhabit should be a norming world for our own.

Here's one example, that in thinking about I am struck by: The words of Jesus and the letters of Paul are unequivocal in the idea that what is necessary for salvation is belief. Just believe that Jesus is Lord and redeemer, and you are saved! now, evangelicals & fundamentalists have latched on to this and emphasized it (and rightly so, as I am about to argue), but it sounds outrageous to most modern ears. How could laying claim to something in my mind have any bearing on my eternal destination? Taking for granted the johannine theme that all belief should exemplify itself in works, I am thinking of situations like death-bed conversions, the impetus for street-evangelism, etc.

It just doesn't really register. What happens in my mind—witnessed only on a neural level*—surely cannot have consequences in the physical and meta-physical realms.

I think this idea is foundationally present in much of the multi-faith/religious-inclusivity/universalist dialogue—that what counts is what is visible (charitable works, peaceful demeanors, etc), not what is in our brains.

And yet, the bible seems to say clearly otherwise, and so I want to allow this world of the bible—where personal belief; intellectual assent is paramount—to correct the worldview that exists within our culture, and which is my own go-to paradigm.

So, contra "common"-sense, I choose to believe that personal belief is crucially significant.

Moreover, this move then further reforms my understanding of what a self is, in that it places much more weight on what one believes. That is, it opens up a philosophical discussion on the relationship between self and mind, and between what is in us, and what is of consequence in the world of the tangible. In our culture's eyes, the connection is slim, if existent at all (and here of course I can point to the over-travelled road of discourse about the false claims of an isolated cartesian self, etc, etc.); but through the lens of the world as we have it in scripture – what is in your head matters, has substance.

And I like it!

*i am speaking here in the language our culture uses - language I think is deeply problematic; see my next post.

Baring-Gould, pt. II

I just have to share this awesomeness.
I feel I have found in Sabine a real kindred spirit in history:

An account of the Eucharist in the first three centuries
A collection of Fairy Tales
Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets
An old English Home and its dependencies [a collection of origin-stories of elements of village life]
Strange Surivials [a collection of origin-stories of the basic elements of survival]
A collection of folk-ballads in the English oral tadition

I'll say it again: What. A. Man.
Also - Thank you, book digitizing projects! (Google, Gutenberg, et al.)

Two W.H.'s on Indian Spirituality

"I think there should be holy war against yoga classes. It detours us from real thinking. It's just this kind of...feeling and floating and meditation and whatever. It's as tourism in religions. People all of a sudden becoming Buddhist here in Los Angeles" --Werner Herzog (in a great GQ interview)

"[the] deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India." --Wystan Hugh Auden (on Yeats' poetry)

Even as one who has enjoyed the relaxing effects of yoga, I am inclined to agree!

also, for the definitive scholarly take-down of the "ancient yoga" mythos:

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/living/not-as-old-as-you-think