Sometimes Iona Seems Far Away

This week, my daughter and granddaughters are returning from Ireland. 

They have been living there for nearly a year while my son-in-law has been trying to finish his master's degree. Naturally, I am overjoyed. But my joy is tempered from knowing that on the other side of the Atlantic, Austin will watch his wife and children get on a plane. He will then go back to Galway to complete his degree. He won't get to see his wife or children until then. 

I know what it feels like to put loved ones on a plane and I know what it feels like to be the loved on getting on the plane. The years have not made it easier to forget.

So I'm  thinking tonight about all the families of soldiers, immigrants, and missionaries who face the agony of separation. I am thinking about families dear to me who have said a final goodbye to their loved ones, knowing full well that they will never see them again in this life.

In the light of those more serious separations, what my son-in-law faces isn't so bad. Even in the light of the recent past, when a journey abroad involved months or years, what he faces is a relatively small thing. 

I remember moving to South America, watching my grandparents forcing themselves to remain brave for our sakes. I didn't know what they were feeling back then. 

Now I do.

I know all of that. My children know it too. And yet … 

Pain just doesn't yield to reason.

I am thinking tonight about the times I have read a post on Facebook about someone else's pain and how thought, “good grief, “what drama! That's my reaction when the pain belongs to someone else.

Two weeks ago however,  I was the one who posted about how upset I was that my daughter in Phoenix had been robbed. It was Ash Wednesday. I was getting ready to go into one of my favorite services of the year, receive communion and begin what is for me a blessed time of the year. Then a call, and I hear my daughter’s voice and from the first word – “Dad” – I know something’s wrong. 

“My house is a wreck. They went through everything. They took Kendall’s iPod.”

So I posted my anguish online. 

Why did I inflict my emotions on you? 

I don’t know.

I sometimes read the most terrible things on Facebook. Someone has lost his mother. Someone’s house has burned. Someone is going through a divorce. Someone has lost a job. I get worn out by the drama I read on Facebook. 

And yet, I think you will have the patience to read about our stuff.

Our family, like most American families, is scattered. We don't see one another for months at a time. 

Some people think this is natural.

I don’t. 

There’s too much Latin in me to accept this erosion of family and what it does to the individuals in them as "normal." Too many little American children grow up without grandparents or aunties. Too many grow up without a sense of home. Too many live in a house to which they form no attachment because they know they will soon leave it behind for another one, somewhere else.

We call this progress, this constant shuffling about from hither to yon. But if it is progress, why are we stuffing our brains with antidepressants and our stomachs with junk food?

In the middle of all of this madness – for that is what it is – we have discovered a way of shouting our anguish into the night, into the vast nothingness of cyberspace.

It’s a form of prayer, I suppose, forming our emotions into words, throwing the results out into the digital sea in hopes it will wash up on soil far away.

We check the computer through the day to see if anyone got the message. We see a thumb or two pointing up or down, read some short word – ‘praying for you’ – ‘I went thorough that once’ – ‘can I help?’ – or perhaps a cartoon to make us laugh -- and we are relieved somehow.  Someone heard us. We are not alone after all.

It’s a communion of saints and sinners, this cyber jungle. It’s a collection of people who by turns seem mad as hatters, these otherwise reasonable, sane, honest people sputtering and spitting out bits of woe into the ether. 

When not facing any particular trial, I actually get pretty judgmental and condescending about social media. ”Grow up,” I shout at the posts that keep scrolling down the page.

Then my turn comes. 

In isolated suburban mansions that would have made our grandparents gasp, hidden behind remote control garage doors, utterly disconnected from others -- without even the prop of a sidewalk to help us pretend we have neighbors – the television shouts some insane claim about the miracle working power of toothpaste – we open up our computer to tell someone, somewhere, that life seems difficult today. 

Most of the time it’s an overstatement. Tomorrow, things will be fine. A few months from now, my daughter’s family will be reunited. In two weeks, I will see both of my daughters and their children. I’m OK. So why do I inflict this momentary personal drama on you?

In past times, I would have sucked it up. I would have gone on to bed. The next day I would have gone to work. I would have had a cup of coffee and walked through my day with no one the wiser. 

So, is this better? I don't know.

My son-in-law is such a good man. I have watched him walk through things that would have destroyed most people. So I know he will make it. But I hurt for him and I can't help talking about it

My other granddaughter’s dad is in Afghanistan and will be there for months. I will get to hold his daughter in a couple of weeks. I'm counting the hours. But should I post that on Facebook, knowing he will hurt when he reads it? I know he will be glad for me, but still ...

What a strange new world we have entered. Its not quite like our old villages, but not quite unlike them either. Back then we shared our lives with the people at the general store and with the mailman. They carried our news to others until it often reached the ears of people who barely knew us.

If things were bad enough, our neighbors would show up with a pie and a prayer. Even our distant cousins and their in-laws would come and let us know they cared.

I guess, they still do. Only now they show up on this little screen, at this strange meeting where we gather each day for a few moments to let each other know how we are doing.

The social media world makes the challenges of every body's life into a little melodramas. At least that’s what it looks like to the rest of us.

But now we know the truth: that every home faces its own battles and victories that in the past were hidden behind social grace and forced smiles. What looks like melodrama from the outside is some one's private pain.

Here, in this digital village, the agony of homes separated by wars far away, and, in our case, by a few months of study, and yet others, by migration of a loved one to find food and a better life for the family left behind, gets splattered on the wall for all of us to see.

We laugh at these emotional outbursts. Sometimes, we are even disgusted with them. But sometimes, we comfort ourselves by joining in.

On this Lenten journey we are in, we meet and, too often, ignore one another. But then later, when we recall the kind words and brief acknowledgements of our joys and distress, we remember that our heart burned within us. We realize then that these tenuous connections formed by electronic wizardry from a community, that however weird, is sometimes enough to keep heart and soul together.

To all of you who have paused a moment to read these words, but especially to those who are lonely tonight because they are separated from loved ones -- God's peace to you all.

Nothing can substitute for a loved one's physical touch. A cyber ‘poke’ doesn’t even come close. But it is not nothing. And for some, it is all they have.

For a believer it is the perfect picture of Lent. We pause here to grieve things that have passed, anticipate something that is coming, and acknowledge a Presence that comforts and soothes the lonely soul  making his way home.

A cyber blessing, a cyber touch to you all until we can sit down at table and laugh at the silly ways we coped while we were apart.

Why I Observe Lent

Every year,  Evangelical friends tease me about observing Lent.

Well, some do more than tease but we will leave that for now.

They want to know why I do such un-American, unProtestant, uncool thing.

So I'll try to explain. 

The first time I came across the word ineffable was while  reading Abraham Joshua Heschel’s, God in Search of Man. The book was was such a literary feast  that I kept ignoring the terms in it that I didn’t understand. Among those was Heschel’s favorite – ineffable.

He used the word a lot. He believed that worshiping God involved words that lead us toward an spiritual encounter beyond words. “Worship is awe,” Heschel says, “and where there is no awe, worship has not occurred.” Therefore, according to the sainted rabbi, worship sooner or later leads to the ineffable.

                    

It only gradually dawned on me that ineffable meant something too great to be expressed, something that leaves one speechless.

Thee are many human experiences we might label ‘ineffable.” If anger becomes ineffable it gives birth to rage and usually to violence. When romantic love becomes ineffable, people usually “make love.” In both of these instances, words gives way to actions and, even to sounds that although expressive, communicate meaning difficult to describe in words. These two human experiences are proof enough that humanity, as opposed to computers, requires at least occasional experience of things beyond words.

In fact, we must have the ineffable to endure the pragmatic and practical. No one should be so irresponsible that they make love when they should be preparing their income tax. However, if they are so responsible that they would rather prepare their taxes than make love they probably won't be married very long --or have many friends, for that matter.

So we need ineffable experience, or mystery, which is, as Dennis Covington once said in his book on Snake Handling, “not the absence of meaning but the presence of more meaning than one can comprehend."

Heschel says that too, in a thousand brilliant ways. He pleads with us to move on into the presence of God. He says without God’s presence, biblical religion degenerates into mere philosophy and moralism. He woos us to open our soul to the presence of the Almighty, where we may become speechless. He fears that modern rationalism, including the great reaction against rationalism – fundamentalism – has eroded our capacity to meet God. That’s why we fill up worship time talking about God instead of meeting God.

Because I believe Herschel is right,  I do not believe that modern Evangelical worship accurately represents the faith once and for all delivered to the saints. Evangelical worship is, at its best, a rational, emotionally detached and pragmatic approach to spiritual life. At its worse though, it is a bad therapy session for people who read self-help literature. 

( I read self-help literature, but just saying ...)

I am an Evangelical and I affirm all that Evangelicalism affirms. It is what Evangelicalism ignores that I cannot live without, especially its neglect of sacramental life in worship.

I am grateful that a well prepared Evangelical teacher address the scriptures with integrity. That gives me food for the journey. I will even say that this is perhaps the most important element in spiritual life.  It’s just that Evangelicals rarely offer a way to respond to the Word except with more words.  They rarely offer anything ineffable. I am tempted to say that Low Church Evangelicals put on a wedding and asks us to sign a marriage certificate but seem to have no idea that lovemaking may occur sometime after the preacher stops talking.

Our faith teaches that “in the beginning was the Word.” So, Evangelicals are right to insist on the primacy of the Word. Furthermore, the postmodern smarty-pants concert-as-church crowd, claiming to move us beyond Evangelicalism, actually represent an erosion of our faith. Heschel talked about the ineffable and Aquinas once said that “theology is straw,” but they were not intellectual sloths trying to fit into the world they were called to save.  They moved through and beyond theology but they didn’t skip the class, laughing about how irrelevant theology is between gulps of beer.

And yet, the emergent crowd reveals the hunger of soul often found even among very informed and committed Evangelicals.  This crowd exist because something has been missing from Evangelical spirituality that no amount of lights, videos, clever stage productions or good coffee can provide. None of these cute things are ineffable which, I would argue, is what the emergent crowd really crave. Because they are children of Evangelicals, they were born rejecting history as a source of anything spiritually significant. They can't bring themselves to believe that the past may contain something vital to their faith, so they look to the secular world, to the god of progress, to provide their spiritual needs.

The Word of God is, as Evangelicals insist, enough. But the words of man about the Word of God are not enough. The words of man are too feeble to carry the Word of God, even though we are saved “by the foolishness of preaching.”  For this reason, the church has historically connected the words of man about the Word of God with sacramental experience. The service of the Word was followed by the service of the Table.  The two services worked together to lead believers on a journey from their day-to-day lives into ineffable experience, and, from there, back into the world to serve. Believers tasted the powers of the world to come, remembered who they were, and then returned to a fallen world as representatives of the Kingdom of God.

The service of bread and the wine; the waters of baptism; the raising on one’s hands in prayer, the speaking in unknown tongues; tears; oil; tithing; kneeling – these things usually employ words. However, the purpose of words in sacramental contexts is not so much about explaining something as it is about pointing us to something beyond explanation.

“With this ring I thee wed” makes little sense unless it points to something beyond its literal meaning. The same can be said about the words, “this is my body and my blood.” This is not prose; it is poetry. And spiritual life requires both. Poetry is unfit for writing a contract because it contains too much meaning; people read into poetry what is says to them. Prose exists to eliminate some of that meaning so everyone who reads it can understand the same thing.  If that fails, we resort to lawyers. 

Prose for contracts; poetry for love-making.

Sacramental actions and words are reflections of the Eternal Word. In their humble way, they work to make the Word become flesh and dwell among us. And, they open our minds and hearts to receive human words about the Word of God.

That long introduction brings us to these final words about Lent. 

Observations like Lent are not biblically mandated.  In fact, the apostle Paul forbids us to make celebrating any day or season compulsory.  Not even the Sabbath is compulsory in the New Covenant. Clearly then, such observations are offered to God’s people rather than imposed upon them. However, altar calls, Sunday schools, and even musical instruments are in that same category. They are aids to worship that can, if we are not careful, replace the object of worship. However, because we are people and not angels, we require processes, events -- means by which we can incorporate biblical knowledge and spiritual experiences into our everyday lives.

We can repent without Ash Wednesday. We can also observe Ash Wednesday without repenting, for that matter. But we are much more likely to repent if the church reminds us that without repentance we will perish. A revival meeting can do that too. So, I suppose a revival meeting is a Lenten seasons of sorts. That would make sense of the fact that revival meetings emerged in non-sacramental churches.  So Ash Wednesday and Lent are not essentials of the Christian life and there are other ways of getting to where they try to led us. However, because these  traditions developed over many centuries, they seem to transcend time and place in ways that allow people from all kinds of backgrounds to walk together and support one another in the walk toward sanctification.

In the Ash Wednesday service, the church calls us to examine ourselves. We think about what should be eliminated (or added to) our lives to bring them more into line with the ways of God. The church urges us to search the Holy Scriptures in a more intentional way during this season, to set aside times of prayer, and to observe what needs to change in order for us to move Godward.

Believers then go forward to receive a small amount of ash on their heads. As the celebrant places the ash on our heads, he or she says, “remember, from dust you came and from dust you will return.” Or, perhaps, “God grant you the gift of repentance that leads to life.”

Then we receive communion.

In Communion we are assured that human life, like wheat and grapes, can be radically transformed. We  are not yet all that we shall be but something of what we shall be can be experienced already, in this life. We must keep expecting to become new creatures in Christ, not just in the by and by, but today.

I am a Protestant. That doesn't mean that I am hostile to Catholicism, though. I am a Protestant because I believe in things like justification by faith, the centrality of scripture in Christian life, and that God saves us because of an act of grace. I am Protestant in that I agree with the Reformers about such things. But Protestantism does not require a disdain for those communal acts that work together with private piety to open the soul to the presence of God. I am a Protestant like the early reformers, even like Wesley, but not of the sort that rejects comunal, sacramental spirituality.

After thirty years of observing Lent, I have found that this season often pushes me to stop doing things that have been hindering my spiritual life. It also encourages me to do start doing things that will support my spiritual life.


I find it helpful during this season to do these things in the company of others who are doing the same things at the same time. 

So I offer you these words about why I celebrate Lent. But like eating chocolate and making love, sacramental life is difficult to explain. One must taste and see.

Lent is one of the ineffable things of spiritual life, and words fail me when trying to explain why I observe it. 

Reflections on Mastery

Every reader knows that some books are alive. When one reads such books, he has the weird feeling that they are also reading him. The words of those kinds of books leap off the page. They grasp the reader’s thoughts, demanding them to justify their existence and utility.

Books like that don’t allow the reader to merely read from some detached place. He must either throw them down or enter into a struggle with the ideas they launch at him, like missiles.

For me, The Beginning of Wisdom was like that. At first, Leon Kass wooed me. For the first hundred pages, I meandered through the words, rather bored by his long winded articulation of the obvious: “God is not human, human is not animal, God is not the universe, male is not female, but creation exists as a unity that consists of difference and distinction.”

Well, that’s safe enough for the Bible student who wants to know more about Genesis. He can keep reading from a sense of duty and smug self-satisfaction that he is smart enough to read such a book.

Then, unexpectedly Kass goes on the attack. Midrash becomes a weapon. He forces the reader to defend his grounding in modern secularism. “What if Genesis really is a word from beyond,” he seems to shout? “If it is, why do believers as well as unbelievers live as though it is not?” And, finally, he forces one to give an answer to Genesis itself. “If Genesis is so much fiction, well then just say so,” Kass implies. “If it is not, your life must change.”

After reading Kass, it becomes impossible to hold Genesis at arm’s length – or the rest of the Bible, for that matter.

Well, this blog is not about Leon Kass. (However, if I woo a single reader into his web I will be delighted.)

This blog is about Robert Greene, who probably would not think much of either Genesis or Leon Kass, though I am not sure about that.

Greene is a humanist, in every sense of the word. He studied the classics, which makes him dangerous to begin with. (I know this is true. My son-in-law is one of those strange people, the kind who mutter on and on about syllogisms, logic, Euripides, literary chiasms and the like. When you argue with them, you will understand why the Athenian government demanded Socrates to drink hemlock.)

Greene, who knows about what happened to Socrates and has evidently decided to avoid his fate, offers his ideas in everyday language and tells amusing and terrifying stories to prove his point. Once you get that point, he has moved on to a safe place.

To tell the truth, I have always avoided Greene’s books. The few times I causally glanced through them, I didn’t find a reason to keep reading. But then my friend, Dan Miller, highly recommended Mastery. So I wrote it down and went on my way.

Later that week, I clicked the magic button at Amazon.

After a month of walking by the book, I realized it was shouting at me, like the kid in Augustine’s garden, “Pick it up. Read it!”

The forward is a test. If you read the entire forward, Greene will allow you to read the rest of the book. If not, he will declare you unworthy and not entrust you with what comes next; which is, in a word, wisdom.

In story after story about people who made a great mark on the world, Greene drives home their common qualities: willing and unwilling mentors, humility coupled with courage to pursue the truth however uncomfortable, willingness to stand alone if that is what is required coupled with high levels of social intelligence that allows one to wade through pettiness without getting trapped, learning from adversity and boredom, accepting tediousness for long periods of time if that is what is required to master one’s craft or skill, a steadfast commitment to one’s path and passion to the point of obsession and so forth.

This book is not for those unwilling to be challenged and changed. It is not a sweet little story; it is a tornado. It will rip into your guts and churn. If you read it, every page, until the end, you will stare at the wall for a few days.

In some ways, it is rather like John Irving’s, A Prayer for Owen Meany. That book also haunts. It makes one ask whether or not he has a vocation, or is merely finding a series of occupations.

Mastery is not for those who don’t care about things like that.

But if you have already decided that you do have a vocation, or at least that you wish to discover yours, this is your book. Greene will give you a map – if he determines you intend to really use it.

I am going to rank Mastery in the category with Man’s Search for Meaning (Victor Frankl), The Beginning of Wisdom (Leon Kass), God in Search of Man (Abraham Joshua Heschel), A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving), and the Unabridged Far Side Collection (Gary Larson), as books that have helped me find my way.

If you read this blog, you're the sort of person who will profit from Mastery. Treat yourself. Buy it. Then start reading. And don’t stop until you finish.

If it helps you make millions of dollars, do the honorable thing and pay my way for a month in Italy and one in Greece, so I can immerse myself in what I like doing: mastering languages while eating healthy, Mediterranean foods. 

While the picture here has nothing to do with Robert Greene or Mastery, it has something to do with my mood, ambition, and intrest and, according to Greene, I must remain obsessed with that if I ever intend to master my field.