Crossroads

3 09 2010

Travelling through Gambia in 2001, I came to a crossroads:  four lanes converging, traffic lights at the intersection, cars and commotion. It happened to be one of the country’s latest civil engineering accomplishments and the traffic lights here were in fact the first and only of their kind in the country. However, the lights were not the only noteworthy characteristic at this crossroads. No more than twenty yards beyond the intersection, the tarmac for each of the adjoining roads simply ended, merging with featureless dirt as far as the eye could see. Only one road to the crossroads was paved and that was the road I had arrived on. Suddenly I felt lost. On arrival at this junction, anyone’s hopes for a smooth journey beyond it were severely curtailed. Either one hit the rough, Thelma and Louise style, or turned around and simply went back.

Notwithstanding this conspicuous lack of navigable road, numerous drivers approached the crossroads from various other routes, bouncing along the potholed earth to arrive at, and continue through, the only traffic lights in the nation.

Perhaps, like me, you sometimes see that the road ahead is not going to be as smooth as the road behind.  At least for us who set to follow Jesus, rarely is the ‘straight and narrow’ of the Christian life easygoing. (“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me….”, Luke 9:23).  An encounter with Jesus and what follows can even be rougher for the one previously travelling safely than for the one previously living dangerously. Think of the different people who encounter Jesus in the Bible: sinners are redeemed, religious elites condemned; the humble and poor are exalted, the rich turned away empty-handed; prostitutes approach in turmoil and leave in peace, priests approach in confidence and leave perplexed. Whether they chose to follow Jesus or not, people often left on a different and unexpected road to the one that took them to him.

So what of my Gambian crossroads?  When I set out for them, I didn’t expect to have to turn around there.  But like the prodigal son whose crossroads moment in the pig sty causes him to come to his senses and head home (Luke 15), sometimes the only way forward is back.  Thelma and Louise kept going, purposefully driving off the edge of a ravine to their deaths. In doing so they turned their backs on the justice and mercy held out to them.

Some of us need to travel back. Or forward, or maybe need a sharp turn of direction. Maybe in the end it’s not about which direction we go in, rough or smooth, east or west, but about travelling with the one who can truly provide guidance, justice, mercy, peace and home.

Madi Simpson


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

A Label I’m Learning to Embrace

1 09 2010

No one likes being called names: Ignoramus, Incompetent Boob, Fundamentalist, Fatso. Often the abuse has a scintilla of substance, albeit couched in an ad hominem that distracts from one’s own shortcomings. But the latest label thrown my way really hurt: Luddite. That’s right, someone called me a ‘Luddite’.

How would you feel? I was shocked. Partly because of the scathing tone: “Llluddite!” But mostly because I had no idea what it meant.  My self-image as a walking lexicon was shaken.

So I did some research. First, context. The detractor applied the label when he discovered I have no mobile phone. (Or cell phone for my North American counterparts!) “Who in this day and age doesn’t have a mobile? … You Llluddite!” Ouch. So I’m guessing this was a not-so-subtle technological swipe.

Second, history. Resisting the urge to google this insult, I reached for a copy of Technopoly sitting on my shelf.  Social critic Neil Postman might shed some light. (Pause for page flicking.) Ah, the Luddite Movement began with the actions of a youth named Ludlum.  (An unfortunate start to be sure.) His father asked him to fix a malfunctioning weaving machine, but instead Ludlum destroyed the devilish device. Devilish, because between 1811 and 1816, this contraption had replaced skilled fabric workers, resulting in wage cuts, child labour, unemployment, and widespread discontent. In Postman’s words, “since then the term ‘Luddite’ has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naïve opposition to technology.”[1]

“Could this be me?” I wonder. Am I a Luddite simply because I neither possess nor know how to use a mobile phone?  Granted, I have broken electronic equipment over the years; recently I ran my friend’s iPod through a washing cycle before hanging it out to dry, still secure in his jeans pocket. But I’ve never intentionally destroyed any device.  Maybe not owning a phone was such a countercultural stance that I should be considered a naïve opponent of technology?

Postman continued: “But the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naïve. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws, and customs had given them justice in the older world-view.”

Perhaps there was some substance to this stinging attack.  Now, I’m not judging others for having a mobile. If I worked as a courier, a cell phone would be indispensable. And I don’t believe I’m a hypocrite to borrow a friend’s phone and tell my wife I’ll be late home. But I do resent how we unthinkingly adopt the latest and greatest without ever asking how it affects all our lives.

In many ways, I liked life better BME (before mobiles existed). BME my yes was a yes and my no was a no.  I was organized enough to turn up when I should; I wouldn’t hold off to see if a better social offer came my way, forcing last minute changes of plan. BME I could hold a sustained conversation without interruption, eye-contact and all, without my best friend glancing under the table to text his girlfriend. And BME you could still track me down in the case of an emergency. I was accessible, but not so convenient that you would divulge trivial details better kept to yourself, or treat me like a tool to accomplish tasks truly your own.

In this age when I’m already a digital fish swimming in radio waves, occasionally I need some shelter. I wonder if there is such a thing as “too contactable”—leave a message for me at the Coffee Club if you must, but don’t make out like the world fell apart because I wasn’t a text away.

Thus endeth my rant. Though I do think there is something more significant at stake than destruction of a weaving machine or avoidance of a mobile. Identity is the issue. In subtle ways, we all begin to reflect the technology we use. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or, as Postman extends the truism, “To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer, everything looks like data.”[2] And to a person with a mobile, everything looks like a text message. I’m not made in the image of a phone.  But I do believe I’m made in the image of a loving God, who respects people as people, and objects as objects. And never shall the twain meet.

Maybe one day I’ll purchase a mobile, and then “Luddite” will give way to “Sell Out.” But until that day, I’m learning to embrace this label. My only wish is that the way I use technology will magnify rather than mutilate God’s image in me.

David Benson

[1] Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 43.

[2] Postman, Technopoly, 14.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

The Last Generation on Earth?

30 08 2010

Why don’t we just stop having children and become the last generation on earth? In a recent New York Times editorial piece, Princeton ethicist Peter Singer wonders whether, given the suffering we experience in this world, it is reasonable to bring more children into existence.

Singer quotes a book entitled “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence,” to defend that if we stopped having children we would not only avoid their potential suffering, but we would also not feel guilty about caring for the planet on behalf of future generations. We would reduce the suffering new children would fell while maximizing the careless joy of our own generation. From his point of view, we would be ethically right to avoid inflicting pain on innocent children, while enjoying the bonus pleasure of caring just for ourselves. So he proposes in jest, “So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!”

I’m not sure if he really means these words. Singer looks like the kind of scholar who learned to dance according to the market’s tune, knowing that provocative statements will sell more newspaper copies than conscientious ones. But the question behind this article is an important question nonetheless, even it is framed with an almost Nazist logic: “How good does life have to be, to make it reasonable to bring a child into the world?” Singer believes in a kind of evolutionary improvement, which would reduce human suffering to minimum maybe one or two centuries from now. But in the meantime, his answer is a categorical negative: “If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.”

Curiously, I came across this article while my three-months-old son was having his milk breakfast in my arms. It was my turn to bottle-feed him early in the morning, so I went to his room, painted last week in blue, and Pietro welcomed me with a goofy smile. He laughed, waved his arms, and I took him to the living room to feed him.

After I finished Singer’s article, I looked to Pietro to see what was his reaction to it. He looked satisfied enough with his milk banquet. I tried to weight the amount of suffering he has had so far with the amount of joy he has experienced. I recognize he’s has had his share of pain – the agony of being born to a new world is just a primer – to the point that I think he started to curse. For some days he had this cough, and after he exerted all his effort to cough four or five times, loud and with no politeness to cover his mouth, he uttered an indignant complaint – ieoodadubaaaaa!!!! His’ may not be a mean curse, and it may not offend someone’s mother or family grave, but it sure sounds like a grumpy disapproval, protesting the careless way his parents took him outside in the evening without covering his ears.

But is his existence an overwhelming fountain of suffering and meaninglessness? No, of course not. He suffers, like we all do, but a meaningful life is not a life without pain. Suffering is part of life. We cannot evade it. To exclude suffering from our notion of an ideal, happy life is to remain with an artificial notion of happiness. It is to cage happiness in the realm of unreality, for suffering colors every day of our lives, and every happy moment too. To exclude suffering is to exclude life.

René Breuel


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

Can You Hear the Music?

27 08 2010

It was rush hour at the metro station L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C. Hundreds of people were heading to their work on that cold January morning. Suddenly, a man wearing a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a baseball cap takes a violin out of its case and begins to play. He leaves the case open, in front of him, depending on people’s generosity to receive some money for his performance. He starts with ‘Chaconne’, composed by Johann Sebastian Bach and described as one of the most complicated violin pieces to master. Three minutes went by until the first person briefly stopped to listen.

The man played a number of extraordinary classical compositions for approximately 45 minutes. In total, 1097 people walked by him during his performance. Only 6 people stopped to listen for a while and 20 more threw some money in the case, but kept walking. At the end, he had collected US$ 32.17.

The violin player was Joshua Bell. Have you heard of him? He is one of the finest musicians in the world and played at the station with a violin worth US$ 3.5 million. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold out at a theatre in Boston and the seats averaged US$ 100.00.

Bell’s ‘concert’ at the metro was actually an experiment conducted by the Washington Post, a respected North-American newspaper, and recorded by a hidden camera.[1] The underlying purpose was to identify whether we appreciate and recognize beauty and talent in an unexpected context.  If you happened to be at the L’Enfant Plaza station on that morning, how do you think you’d have reacted? As I naturally tend to be late for my commitments, I’d probably have walked by!

God tends to communicate beauty and splendour through unusual situations and in unexpected contexts. The Bible overflows with narratives of people who were touched by God’s music in places and conditions they never expected. Elijah is one example. On a certain occasion he was frightened, tired and depressed, standing on a mountain called Horeb. So, according to the biblical account, ‘[...] a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.’[2] And then, only then, God spoke to Elijah.

Bono, U2 vocalist, describes this in this way:  “…God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives…”[3]

This perception has challenged me. I suppose the question is not whether God is playing, but whether I am willing to recognize his music on the metro stations of life. God seems to be playing the violin where we generally wouldn’t expect. What if we actually stopped to listen?

Hélder Favarin

[1]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

[2] 1 Kings 19:11-12.

[3] Keynote address at the 54th National Prayer Breakfast, Washington D.C., 2006.


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How should we respond to ecological crisis?

25 08 2010

Among the numerous critics of human industry in recent years, one held a particularly noteworthy place in the headlines: the Unabomber. In part of his manifesto attempting to justify his acts of violence, the man who sent bombs by mail over a period of 20 years suggests: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Kirkpatrick Sale, a Neo-Luddite critical of modern technology, was quoted as saying that the Unabomber represents “a rational man and his principal beliefs are, if hardly mainstream, entirely reasonable.”

Dubious personalities and actions notwithstanding, critics of industrialism often point a finger at Christian theology as a major culprit for the failures of modern society to anticipate and address issues such as pollution, natural resource exploitation, consumerism, and waste. The idea was perhaps most famously put in a 1967 article by the historian of technology Lynn White Jr., titled “The historical roots of our ecologic crisis.” While White offers a complicated historical argument, it tends to get replicated in a simpler form today, i.e. the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) offers a mandate for humanity to subdue the earth and dominate its creatures, and this is a key inspiration for the undiscerning modern love for industry.

Indeed, some Neo-Luddites suggest even that we need to abandon our technological society (and in some cases, our religious faith) in order to recapture a sort of pre-modern harmony. Yet, as a quick trip to a natural history museum will reveal, from the earliest record, humans have been making and improving tools. As I suspect many folks sense on an intuitive level, too extreme a version of this anti-technological vision really asks us to stop being human at a basic level.

But we’re not off the hook, as the recent gulf oil disaster reminds us. Yet in contrast to the idea that Christianity is the source of the problems of industrialism, and counter to the suggestion that a secular answer is the best solution, I’d like to briefly suggest that Christian faith actually offers some of the best resources in navigating our way out of the troubles that society finds itself in. Perhaps there is some truth in what Sale suggests, in that the Unabomber’s criticism and violence are rational actions for a world which consistently denies its creator and consequently denies its own created-ness. But what if we began not with the concern for self-preservation, which seems a common mantra for so much of both radical and conservative movements today, but rather by a another starting point: “the earth is the LORD’S and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it…” (Psalms 24:1 NRSV). This seems to call for a radically different economy. One which, begins by affirming that we have a good creator, and then proceeds to affirm that love should determine our response to industry and its consequences. We are left with recourse not to violence or inaction, but rather to the peculiar way of Christ. This calls instead for repentance and willingness to sacrifice when we learn that we are implicated in issues of injustice and an economy which treats the creation as if it were a commodity to be used and not the creation of God.

As we watch the news and are reminded of the many ills and obsessions of modern society, maybe it is worth considering how the affirmation and worship of a creator – indeed one who receives and absorbs our violence –  might shape a different, redemptive response.

Jeremy Kidwell


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Categories : Making a Difference

A Novelist’s Narration

23 08 2010

Literary critics widely regard Gustave Flaubert as the father of the modern novel. Features like a well-chosen, eloquent detail; a high degree of physical observation and description; a search for truth even if it unpleasing; or the portrayal of good and evil from a neutral perspective – though features certainly seen in previous authors – come to full bloom in Flaubert’s prose. Paris becomes a spectacle of sights and sensations, for example, as when he describes, “In the back of the solitary café, the lady at the counter yawns amidst her filled decanters; the newspapers remain in order on the tables of the reading rooms; underwear rustles to the blow of the tepid wind.”[1]

Yet the author of Madame Bovary is noted above all by his use of the narrative voice. Flaubert’s is an unnoted narrator, who hides his brilliance behind the eloquence of his details, and who does not stand in the way of the reader’s appreciation of the story. It is an undetected narrator; shy, even. “The author must be in his work like God in the universe: everywhere present but nowhere visible,” advises Flaubert in a letter.[2]

Everywhere present but nowhere visible. Literary skill notwithstanding, it seems Flaubert captures here an insightful observation. God feels indeed like a modern narrator: active, all-searching, omnipotent; a master of texture and detail as well as of round characters and social moods; present in every page and every turn and every tragedy, and converging plots and subplots to a masterful climax; yet invisible, imperceptible, undetectable; an artist inferred from the eloquence of his work; a gentleman secure enough of himself to let his creatures shine on their own; a genius crafting his masterpiece from behind the scenes.

God’s hiddenness is one of his most unnerving qualities. We would be in bliss if he lifted the veil from his face, if he came forth decisively in our midst, if he wooed us with his presence and splendor. We would have our questions answered and our hearts filled, like a character in a novel that could transcend the pages and meet its author face to face. As Anselm of Canterbury voices the human protest, “I have never seen thee, O Lord my God; I do not know thy form. What, O most high Lord, shall this man do, an exile far from thee? … He is eager to find thee, and knows not thy place. He desires to seek thee, and does not know thy face.”[3] Other people infer even that an invisible God must be an inexistent God, for “a god who is all-knowing and all-powerful and who does not even make sure his creatures understand his intentions — could that be a god of goodness?”, as ponders Nietzsche.[4] From the agony of Job and the psalmists in the Bible, to the protest of the searching agnostic nowadays, we do all seem to want a more visible, more extravagant, less modern God.

That is not the God we get, at least for the moment. We believe of course that one day we will meet him face to face, when the sun will be no more and God’s glory will illuminate us.[5] We wait for the moment when time will flow into eternity, evil will be undone and we will all stand in God’s presence. Now we protest and question and beseech our Creator to make himself known, and wait in silence. Yet we can go on living, because if God maybe be nowhere visible, he is still everywhere present. He is available and at hand. And we can rest assured that things may be dark and painful but are still moving to their climax, for someone is at work behind the scenes, an author is crafting a masterpiece, and one day we will be able to sit on his lap and listen he read aloud the story of us all.

René Breuel

[1] Gustave Flaubert, L’Éducation sentimentale, quoted by James Wood, Come Funzionano I Romanzi [How Fiction Works] (Milan: Mondatori, 2010), 31-32.

[2] Ibid., 32.

[3] Daniel Howard-Snyder and Paul Moser, “Introduction: Divine Hiddenness”. Divine Hiddenness: New Essays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Revelation 21:23.


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Categories : Tough Questions

Green Grass Fun

20 08 2010

“Be joyful,
Though you have considered all the facts.”
–Wendell Berry, “Manifesto: Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front”

My husband and I bought a Great Dane puppy in March. She’s now a 6-month old, 70lb (32kg) puppy―and still growing (think of Marmaduke or Scooby-Doo if you’ve never been around a Great Dane and you have a good idea of what we’re dealing with). Every morning since we bought her, we take her for a walk, usually along some abandoned railroad tracks behind our house. As she’s grown, we’ve explored more and more of the tracks that go through the woods, through a Catholic retirement community and then to St. Mary’s College.

Ziva (that’s the puppy’s name) loves these walks: since she spends most of time “off-leash” she can explore all sorts of interesting things like rabbits and groundhog holes, mostly empty beer cans, chocolate bar wrappers, and brambly thickets that (apparently) smell very interesting. As fun as the woods are, Ziva’s favorite part of the walk is the many-acre lawn at the entrance to St. Mary’s. After passing through a second bit of the woods that separates the retirement village from the college, the trees open upon a stately expanse of weedless grass, always perfectly raked and mowed to about 3 inches long. Since we walk in the morning, the grass is usually heavy with dew and sparkles in the sun, which is just starting to peak over the trees. Edged by thick woods on one side and the lovely brick architecture of St. Mary’s, the wide grass is a fabulous place for Ziva to run and play.

Since she has been big enough to walk that far, Ziva has loved arriving at this lawn. As she sits there, looking across the grass and waiting to be released, her hind-legs quiver with anticipation. The minute we say “OK” she starts down the small hill, nose to the grass, sniffing the earth and licking the dew. Then, burying her nose deeper, she rubs her head in the long, wet grass and does a somersault―a full-on, bum-over-head flip in which she lands on back and then wriggles into the grass before getting up and starting all over again. Across the entire lawn she will repeat this process of rolling and wallowing in grass, looking up at us after each flip and panting with joy.

Watching her pure puppy delight in the wet, grassy newness of the morning, day-after-day, has got me thinking about the whole idea of “praise.” Typically, I think of praise as a verbal affirmation of something, usually a sort of respectable singing to God, telling him how great he is. It can seem a bit removed from reality: an intellectual exercise of affirming the divine in his divinity (as if the almighty needs to hear me tell him he’s great) and an affirmation of my own righteousness (after all, I am singing praise to the divine in an approved religious manner). Or I think of Job: “Though he slayth me, yet shall I praise him.”  Or I think of the tradition that all our work and lives are praise but I’m never quite sure what that means, in practice at least. While singing ― in good times and bad― or working with all diligence are perhaps types of praise, Ziva’s rolling in the grass seems to be praise of a different order: it is a visceral delighting in the immediate goodness of creation, as if wallowing in the wet grass, face covered in dew is an active “YES!” to the open lawn stretching out before her.

While it is quite true that the world frequently sucks and terrible things happen pretty routinely, watching Ziva has made me want to adopt a more puppy-like approach to the world I am faced with every day. It would be good to learn to nose-dive into a full, bodily celebration of the good at hand, even when it is as simple and routine as dew and a nicely mowed lawn.

Jessica Hughes

Photography provided by shootingforyou.com.


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Yearning to Make Sense of Things

18 08 2010

It is a truth of nature that we yearn to make sense of nature, often with the profound sense that there is more to things than meets the eye. “Religious faith”, wrote the celebrated psychologist William James, is basically “faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained.” Human beings long to make sense of things – to identify patterns in the rich fabric of nature, to offer explanations for what happens around them, and to reflect on the meaning of their lives. It is as if our intellectual antennae are tuned to discern clues to purpose and meaning around us, built into the structure of the world. “The pursuit of discovery,” the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi noted, is “guided by sensing the presence of a hidden reality toward which our clues are pointing”. Small wonder, then, that men and women have pondered what they observe around them, alert to the possibility of deeper levels of meaning lying beneath the surface of experience.

This quest for meaning transcends historical and cultural boundaries, even if cultures and individuals within them may offer very different accounts of what that meaning of life might be. For example, based on extensive personal interviews, psychologist Roy Baumeister suggested that basic needs – purpose, efficacy, value, and self-worth – appear to underlie the human quest for meaning, understood as “shared mental representations of possible relationships among things, events, and relationships.”

So why is this quest for meaning so important? Social psychologists Stefan Schulz-Hardt and Dieter Frey suggested that three main reasons may be identified as lying behind the universality of this quest. First, it gives stability to existence, allowing people to orientate themselves in life. Second, it offers a rationale in the face of a perceived threat of meaninglessness, which can overwhelm individuals and leave them unable to cope with life. The perception of meaninglessness can thus lead to distressing negative outcomes, such as depression, attempted suicide, alcoholism, or addiction. And third, it can be understood as the subjective response to an objective reality, in which we attempt to realign their internal world to conform to a deeper order of things, which is believed to exist independently of us. The subjective quest for meaning is thus grounded in a conviction that such a meaning exists objectively, and can be discovered by those with the will and ability to do so.  

Indeed, history reinforces our appreciation of the importance of this quest for meaning for human identity. Our distant ancestors studied the stars, aware that knowledge of their movements enabled them to navigate the world’s oceans and predict the flooding of the Nile. Yet human interest in the night sky went far beyond questions of mere utility. Might, many wondered, these silent pinpricks of light in the velvet darkness of the heavens disclose something deeper about the origins and goals of life? Might they bear witness to a deeper moral and intellectual order of things, with which humans could align themselves? Might nature be studded and emblazoned with clues to its meanings, and human minds shaped so that these might be identified, and their significance grasped? The emergence of the discipline of semiotics has encouraged us to see natural objects and entities as signs, pointing beyond themselves, representing and communicating themselves.

To find the true significance of things requires the development of habits of reading and directions of gaze that enable the reflective observer of nature to discern meaning where others see just happenstance and accident. Or, to use an image from Polanyi, where some hear a noise, others hear a tune.

Alister McGrath is Professor of Theology, Ministry and Education at King’s College, London, and author of The Future of Atheism, with Daniel Dennet, and A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology, among several other books.


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Thank God we have bodies

16 08 2010

The other day a robber took an elderly man by surprise, grabbed his wallet and briefcase, beat him up and left. The man remained on the ground, unable to lift himself, defeated and hurting. Eventually someone passed by and offered him a hand.

People search for numerous ways to avoid this kind of tragedy. Yet a simple if unfeasible solution could be proposed: so many of these hurts and tragedies could be avoided if we simply did not have bodies, if you think about it. If we were just souls, just immaterial beings floating around and communicating hermetically, we would not be able to stab a knife into someone’s chest. We would be pure and clean, hygienic like the air, without surfaces to shower or polish. We would be minds free of the animal nature that binds us to the earth and to mortality. There would remain the abstract pleasures of the mind and soul.

This disembodied bliss is actually what many forms of spirituality offer. Considering the material world inferior or evil, they teach that spiritual progress consists in emptying oneself until we merge with the void. This is how Elizabeth Gilbert described her experience with Eastern spirituality, for example, in her bestselling Eat Pray Love, just released as a movie. “I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, I stepped through time and I entered the void. I was inside the void, but I also was the void, all at the same time.”[1] The height of spiritual advancement is a move beyond matter into the emptiness of nothingness.

Yet a move beyond the body would also mean a move beyond the pleasures of the body. Immaterial souls would not be able to ski down a white mountain, feeling the hush of the wind against our cheeks, smelling the fragrance of snow, arriving weak enough to be restored by a hot bath together with strawberry ice-cream covered with generous chocolate brownies and Rocky Balboa’s triumph song in the background. We would not be able to kiss, to shake hands, to eat, to pee, to communicate with a look more than we can with our words. We would be impoverished.

And that is exactly what Christianity affirms. The most material of religions, as William Temple described it, considers that God created this world and called it good. He fashioned matter and delighted in it. He became a man himself, someone whose first miracle was to turn water into wine. Jesus experienced death, as every other human does, and when he rose back to life, he came not as an immaterial ghost, but as a true body, with nail marks in his hands. Heaven will not be less material still, but we will be raised up in bodily form, and there will be a new earth.

Matter is good; God created it. So let’s care for the environment. Let’s alleviate hunger and cure bodies, instead of meditating our way past them, because God took a body too. Let’s study nature and make science. And let’s enjoy the world as God created it, the material world with its perils and its pleasures, a place where we can climb on trees, offer someone a hand, and of course, eat and pray and love.

René Breuel

[1] Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (New York: Penguin, 2006), 264-265


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On Repetition and Meaning

13 08 2010

My wife and I were walking through the local cathedral the other day and I was struck by a war memorial that I had seen several times before. It is a simple wooden arch leading into an open chapel commemorating the British soldiers who died in WWI. Looking back out from inside the chapel you can see the words (painted in three panels) “FEAR GOD / LOVE THE BROTHERHOOD/ HONR THE KING.” Being a New Testament student, I recognized this to be from 1 Peter which runs “love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the King” (1 Pet 2:17).

The reason I was struck by this is not my interest in European history (which is considerable) nor my appreciation of fine wood work (of which the memorial is a great example). No. What struck me was the fundamental difference in context between the statement in 1 Peter and its use on the cathedral monument.

Peter and his audience, in the second half of the first century CE, were far from being in the majority. Christianity was a small Jewish sect founded by a backwater provincial named Jesus and their compatriots seem to have been less than favorable to the new group. Peter was concerned that the Christians to whom he was writing not stir up unnecessary problems by appearing revolutionary or subversive. They were to “conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge” (1 Pet 2:12). For Peter, that involved loving fellow Christians, fearing God and giving honors to the King, regardless of his treatment in return.

Fast-forward about 1,870 years. Britain was an imperial superpower (though admittedly in a bit of an economic slump). Instead of honoring a king who knew virtually nothing about their religion, the Brits had George V, the latest in a long line of (at least ostensibly) Christian monarchs. Those who considered themselves Christians were no longer in the minority. Indeed, in the name of Christianity, the western powers had long colonized India and Africa (and points East).  Also, the term “the brotherhood” in an early 20th century military context (like that on the monument) refers not to fellow Christians but to “brothers-in-arms,” a meaning surely foreign to Peter’s letter.

This brings us to an incredibly dense quote from Jacques Derrida.

Once inserted into another network, the “same” philosopheme is no longer the same, and besides it never had an identity external to its functioning. Simultaneously, “unique and original” philosophemes, if there are any, as soon as they enter into articulated composition with inherited philosophemes, are affected by that composition over the whole of their surface and under every angle.[1]

For Derrida, there can be no true repetition. To cite in one context something said by another person in another context is, in fact, to say something new. (And, yes. I am well aware of the irony involved in quoting someone to make this point.)  The meaning of a statement is a function of its total context––literary, historical, cultural, social, etc. This means (and the example above shows) that quoting someone is not reproducing their meaning. For some, this is merely a way to sound clever at a party. For Christians (and for other religions with sacred texts), this is a big deal.  To say, “The Bible says [insert quote here] and that’s why we should (or shouldn’t) do (or believe or say) this thing” is not actually providing a defense of a given position. It is merely an observation about a set of words in a book. Saying and meaning, though intimately related, are not the same. Rather, it is much more important that we understand the total context or, to use a metaphor, the whole story in which we can find ourselves and act according to the total narrative, rather than a few isolated bits.

Ben Edsall

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[1]  Jacques Derrida. 1981. Economimesis. Diacritics 11 (2): 2. Translated by R. Klein.


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