Collecting Stamps

31 01 2011

[Author’s note: sometime last week, in broad daylight, I saw myself turn into Mr. Hyde. I’m not quite sure what happened. Apparently there was lot’s of anger, and a few more-than-unkind words to my wife. When I regained my senses, I found myself in an old stamp store, and a gentleman was offering me some type of vintage foreign stamps. Well, since WF aims to include different perspectives, and for lack of better inspiration this week, I thought I could transcribe Mr. Hyde’s scribbles here.]

Are there not some moments when we wish we could get rid of God? C’mon, let’s be frank. Every now and then we need some privacy to commit our pet sin. Or just room to vent and be rude and mistreat people. A little condescension toward others comes so natural, doesn’t it? And oh, there is no aspirin for low self-esteem better than a tasty gossip in the library corner, while crumbs of mini-muffins fall on the rare books collection. It is annoying, if not disturbing, to have a presence of goodness by our side all the time; God would be more convenient if we could turn him off with a remote control. He would be more pleasing still if handed out power and money and wisdom, and stayed out of the way.

I’ve been cataloguing ways to get rid of God. The classic one is to deny his existence , of course. I did try that, but that is so tiring, more tiring than watching ants lift a massive leaf. It requires too many mental gymnastics, too heavy doses of nihilism, and the constant self-reminder that the fresh Saturday morning breeze is not meant to signify anything: it is just a product of chance. Sure, atheism sounds intelligent, but I would rather use my mind to guess how many pistachios George Clooney can stuff in his mouth.

Maybe it is more comfortable to remain uncertain about God. Is he there, or is he not? Uhm, good question, but why fold or bet all chips in? Can’t I make a blank face and stay in the game still? If I don’t choose, I don’t have to deal with fundamentalists of either side trying to convince me I’m wrong. I would rather watch the fight than get a bloody nose myself, so let them go at each other. Yeah, upper punch! Hit him! But agnosticism still requires a decision to not decide, and for a commitment-phobic like me, I still prefer to use less of my precious brain.

Ah, I can still not think at all! I like that. I can feed my brain with an iPod – I’ve heard these days you can upload songs enough to play throughout summer break – and I can get a few hobbies too. Gardening? No, I have a back problem, and it requires bowing down. Make-up collection? That would be nice, if I used make-up. What about fishing? I guess the hobby itself doesn’t matter, as long as it keeps me busy, so let’s go for fishing. There are so many coloured baits around I want to eat one myself. There are also fishing magazines to read, communities to join, junior, amateur, and pro championships to win, then fly-fishing, water-fishing, worm-fishing, world without end. Plus, you have to decide where to go, which bait to use, if you prefer to sit or stand, but then it is nonthinking heaven for a few hours.

Or I can collect stamps. My grandpa used to collect German stamps from the turn of the century, so I can start from there. He used to pick the stamps with all care. Then he would inspect them with a magnifier, pass a protector glue on top of them, and arrange them with an intricate logic. I can do that. I will expand his collection to include also Chilean stamps from the time of Pinochet, and maybe get a stamp or two from Indonesia to spice things up. I’ve heard they have one with a yellow bull looking at you.

But why are we talking about stamps? Uhm… Oh yeah, I wanted to avoid God. I got so into this new little project that I forgot about it. I like that! Bring on stamps on truckload!

René Breuel


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Categories : Tough Questions

How Much Does a Human Being Cost?

28 01 2011

How much does a human being cost? The question is indeed ridiculous; but sadly some people have an answer for it. According to the global movement “Stop the Traffic”[1], there are children sold to slavery for as little as $20.00 each. According to the UN, human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world[2] – $9.5 billion is made through human trafficking each year.[3]

Our natural human tendency is to value those we know and love; whereas we accredit less value than we should to those not close to us. Isn’t that true? Most of us can forget the number of deaths caused by a natural disaster in a few seconds, as the news presenter carries on talking about sports.

The Scriptures, on the other hand, discloses a radical perspective on the issue. They affirm that the essence of human value is our likeness to God. In the first chapter of its first book we read:

“So God created humankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”[4]

Dr. Krish Kandiah, a former tutor at Oxford University, suggests there are three elements that make an image valuable: who made the image, what the image depicts and the price someone will pay for that image.[5] His observations are helpful to a better comprehension of the Christian view on the worth of human life.

First, the fact that every human being has been created by God gives us intrinsic value and identity. One of the reasons why “La Mona Lisa” is so appreciated is the fact that Leonardo da Vinci painted it. The value of our life is not dependent on what we have made of it, but on the reality that God made us.[6]

Secondly, an image’s value depends on what it portrays. Magazines would pay a huge amount for a good picture of a Hollywood star. They wouldn’t pay a cent for a picture of, let’s say, me! As Dr. Kandiah puts it: “the Christian world view argues that we are made in the image of the most significant and valuable being in the universe and this makes human life worth a fortune.” Every person on the planet is no less than a reflection of God himself.

What someone will pay for an image also determines its value. For example, some of Picasso’s paintings are worth more than $100 million because people have been willing to pay this amount. According to Scriptures, God was willing to pay a price to reconcile and reconnect humanity to himself: his own Son’s life – the highest price He could have paid.

When such a high view of human life is embraced, extraordinary things happen in the world – It’s therefore no surprise that the world’s largest humanitarian organizations were founded by people holding these convictions.

How much are we worth?Unfortunately for some it may be 20.00. What do you think? In my opinion, God has the best answer.


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

Sprouts from my Garden

26 01 2011

It is the dead of winter in Indiana, and South Bend last week set a new record for the most snow in a 24-hour period. I shoveled our front sidewalks after it stopped and the snow was at the middle of my thigh. While such shoveling can be rough, the dead of winter is blessedly dead here―for five months nothing grows outside. It is a fabulous break from the never-ending yard-work of summer when, in a single season, weeds can easily get over six-feet-tall with stalks so thick that one wonders if they are weeds or saplings. But, even in these snowy months of much-appreciated rest, the gardener in me is beginning to plan for spring, staring at snow-covered beds and imagining tomatoes, crook-neck squash, beans (variety still to be decided), okra, maybe some rhubarb.

My own aspirations for this spring seem small, however, when compared with some friends in Sydney: the “funky frontyard farmers” grow a tremendous variety of crops and  this January the family of five have taken a week and lived solely out of their front-yard garden. Reading through their blog, I felt exhilarated and envious that Australians get to have backyard chickens to supply their families with eggs, while I am limited to by city restrictions to growing only fruits and vegetables.

My deep chicken-envy and all this thinking about gardening leads me to a very basic question: But why is it that I―a relatively well-educated woman living in a developed country―want to grow my own food and raise chickens? What is so appealing about being tied-down by a garden and chooks all summer long?

In the creation narrative recorded in Genesis, we read that God placed humanity in the garden to “cultivate and care for it.” Some translations use the word “work” or “tend” rather than “cultivate” but all three get at something that goes against the grain of the West’s fast-paced, convenience-loving, and frequently throw-away cultures. In the Genesis narrative, humanity is created to care for things in a particular place. We are designed to be tied-down to the particular needs of the plants and animals, soil and water, children and adults who make-up a given place.

Freedom from responsibility to a place and its things shapes our culture: in the glamorization of frequent, exotic travel, ever-changing fashion demanding new things each season (now for one’s home as well as one’s body), not to mention planned obsolescence in technological gadgets, disposable diapers, plastic forks, paper plates and napkins. New, fast and work-free is better than old, slow and work-filled. But we are increasingly forced to recognize that such living not only destroys our planet but destroys our souls as well.

In cultures apparently intent on killing themselves (and everyone else) to secure their own convenience, the biblical worldview offers a different understanding of what makes for human contentment. The Genesis narrative suggests that our tending and caring for the world ― down to the most basic acts of weeding our front garden ― are life-giving and life-fulfilling actions. Such work may not be hassle free but it is good. And perhaps that is the reason I find myself longing for spring and a bag of seeds.

Jessica Hughes


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

Why did God allow that rape?

24 01 2011

Now a refugee in Italy, Sayid is running away from his past. He fled his Middle-Eastern home when charged with blasphemy – a sentence which carries a death penalty in his country – after he confronted an Iman who often abused sexually a boy. As part of a religious minority, Sayid faced unnumbered little indignities and persecutions, but one looms large in his past: he witnessed his wife been raped and killed in front of his eyes. What struck me hardest when I heard Sayid’s story is how, as a Christian, he makes sense of the violence he has suffered. He believes all that took place was God’s will, and that his wife’s rape was some kind of punishment for his own sins.

One can understand how Sayid’s polarized context contributed to his strange conclusion. When part of a besieged, suffering minority, people feel the need to have quick, solid answers. In a context of insecurity and suffering, we need all our defences up – social, psychological, theological – and there can’t be room for doubt or ambiguity. There is also the social pressure to conform, or at least respond, to the outside context: if Allah’s defining characteristic is not his love, wisdom or grace, but his strength, and one sees displays of Allah’s strength in Mosques and burkas and music and uniformed police everywhere, one needs the Christian God to be just as strong and unquestionable, even if his other characteristics as a good, gracious God have to be disfigured, and one ends with a vindictive, yet still strong, God, a mirror of Allah.

To be clear, Sayid’s conclusion is obviously out of sync with the Bible. The book of Job – forty-two chapters of complex poetry – is entirely dedicated to refute the idea that the suffering we experience is a punishment for sins committed. In another instance, when a blind man was brought to Jesus, and people asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”, Jesus answer was: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”[1] And Jesus healed the guy and made him see. For Jesus the point was not the origin of his blindness, but the good that could come out if it.

But if the rape and murder of Sayid’s wife were not the result of his sin, how are we to make sense of this atrocious act? Why did God allow it? I guess one could answer Sayid in a number of ways. We could say that God did not intend that act, but that it was instead an act performed by wicked people, who need to be confronted and judged. We could encourage Sayid by saying that God brings good out of evil, pointing for example that the abused boy’s suffering was stopped thanks to Sayid’s courage to confront sexual violence. We could express that God abhors evil, to the point of almost destroying the world when he flooded it in the time of Noah, and that he subjected himself to unspeakable suffering on our behalf, when Jesus died on the cross.

But why did God allow this specific act, this rape? As weird as this would sound to Sayid’s Middle-Eastern ears, and as weak as it sounds to Western skepticism, I would say: I don’t know. The Bible is filled with examples of people ranting at God, clueless about their suffering, expressing the full breadth of their distress and rage and doubt. Jesus himself screamed just before dying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”[2]

Why did God allow this evil act? I don’t know. But if God suffers with us to forge a perfect paradise out of this mess, offering his life to save undeserving people, and we have experienced all the breadth of his care for us, and feel in our guts that he is not cruel – no, not at all – but pervasively good, I guess it is ok not to know.

René Breuel 

[1] John 9:1-3

[2] Matthew 27:46


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Categories : Tough Questions

Wondering Fair at 30,000

21 01 2011

Wondering Fair starts off 2011 with 30,000 visits! From elephant art to the problem of evil, from sex and politics to a spirituality of beauty, WF has sought to convey a thoughtful, dialogging voice on matters of life and faith in the internet. We are thrilled with our first months in 2011, and would like to thank you for being part of this journey. Here are a few ways you can contribute to our conversation and make Wondering Fair even better in 2011!

Help us spread the word: we would love to extend our Wondering Fair community even farther. You could help us make WF useful for more people by recommending it or specific articles at Facebook, for example. Or you may be talking with friend about spiritual matters, and a WF article could help to express some insight or drive the conversation further, so shoot him/her a link.

Send us feedback and suggestions: what do you like best about Wondering Fair, and what can we do better? Is there a specific issue you would like to see addressed? A good blog we could link with? You can write in the comment areas or to wonderingfair@ymail.com.

Write an article: if you feel compelled about the way we try to dialog with culture and discuss spiritual matters, and you have an insight or perspective to share, consider crafting an article for WF! There are regular contributors to start the conversation, but we would love to see greater interaction among everyone, so give it a shot.

In order to not finish this post without giving folks something to think about, here are a couple useless quotes:

“The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.” Somerset Maugham
“Humor is a reminder that no matter how high the throne one sits on, one sits on one’s bottom.” Taki

René Breuel


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Categories : Housekeeping

Does Art Speak?

17 01 2011

Is a postscript to Lolita, a defensive Vladimir Nabokov responds to criticisms leveled at his novel about a man who seduces a 12-year-old girl. He distinguishes his novel from pornographic literature. He explains why publishers did not want to take the book in America, and did so only after its success in Paris. He asserts that the novel is no defence or critique of perverts, of the American setting where it is located, nor a disclosure of some of his own personal experiences.

Anyhow, the interesting assertion that emerges from those tortured pages is about the nature of art and literature. For Nabokov, good art is pure art, that is, art which takes no interest in truth or a point of view. A good book of fiction is a story that entertains, and nothing else. “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” To defend this ideal, Nabokov is merciless to any kind of literature which attempts the communication of some moral or message: “all the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash in huge blocks of plaster…”[1] Nabokov’s assertion here is similar to that of Nietzsche, who defends, in his Will to Power, “the reduction of morality to aesthetics,” and who exclaims “Art and nothing else!”[2]

Nabokov is certainly right about the aesthetic and transformative power of works of fiction. When we enter a story and experience it through the eyes of its characters, we are capable of envisioning the world anew, and we grow in our ability to empathize with other people and points of view. Our minds and hearts are enriched, and we understand better our own experiences in light of someone else’s story.

Yet to affirm that literature should never attempt to communicate any kind of truth, lest it be topical trash, is to assert that there is no meaningful truth to be conveyed. If our most elaborate pieces of art – the shiniest gems of emotion and beauty we can produce – shy away from incarnating a message, even at some instances, it is because at bottom we believe there is nothing worth communicating. We may well be indifferent to the stories of men preying on girls, or to the pornographic literature Nabokov promptly dismisses.

But I think there is a deeper reason why Nabokov is in the wrong here: the stories which afford us the highest levels of aesthetic bliss, the plots and characters which move us deeply, are precisely the stories which interconnect with reality and which convey incarnated truth. They are the stories which, though talking about matters countless, acknowledge the architecture of benevolence of our universe, the frameworks of good, evil and shady greys which battle for our hearts, the countless moments of courage we need to face the truth about ourselves. They are the stories which, if we may use biblical language, acknowledge that ours is no ordinary history, no loose succession of events, for our universe has been penetrated, once Truth became flesh, and dwelt among us, and after that - though we enjoy romantic endings, dreams achieved, and tensions relieved – no story can move us like the story of the Author entering our plot to give his life for the bliss of his people.

René Breuel 

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Penguin, 2006), 359.

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, La Bellezza Salverà il Mondo: Wilde, Rilke, Cvetaeva [Les Aventuriers de l’absolu] (Milano: Garzanti, 2010), 30.


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

On Writer’s Block (sort of)

14 01 2011

This last week has been brutal. Let me explain. I was in Wales on vacation (or holiday as they call it here in the UK) in a beautiful cottage on the stunning Hafod Estate with my wonderful family and some dear friends for a full week. That’s not the bad part. That’s just me bragging. The problem is that I had writer’s block or, as I would say in France, writer’s block. (I can’t speak French.) Compounding this relatively common issue is my tendency to fixate on problems. So, as I have been able to think of nothing else for the last week or so, I decided to go with it.

Writer’s block (Latin: block scriptoris). For those fortunate enough to have never experienced it, writer’s block is the bizarre phenomenon when the otherwise abundant well of grammar, syntax and concepts has dried up and a normally expressive person stares with a blank gaze that mirrors the state of their waiting page (or screen). You start a sentence. You erase that sentence. And you repeat this for hours. As I was pondering this authorial irritation, I wondered if anything like this ever happened to the biblical authors or editors. Before you roll your eyes and chalk this post up to too much holiday ‘celebration’, hear me out.

Look at Mark 1:1 for instance: “The beginning of the gospel [or good news] of Jesus Christ.” That’s the whole first sentence. It’s not even a complete one. It’s a phrase. In the tradition of great opening lines, this one falls short of the grand “in the beginning” from Genesis 1:1 (which John thought was so nice he used it again to start his gospel) or even the subtle and brilliant, if less religiously significant, “call me Ishmael” from Melville’s great work. I can just picture Mark sitting at his desk, [1] tapping a freshly cut stylus against his frustrated chin with a fresh, blank roll of papyrus mocking his mental inertia. How should he begin such an important work, the first ever written narrative to try to portray the life of Jesus? Days into the project, Silas walks into his office [2] to see the same blank roll. “Why not just start writing and add the introduction later?” he suggests. Eager to move forward Mark just writes the phrase that now stands at the beginning of the second gospel. Apparently he never got around to revisiting the opening.  Unfortunately for Mark, this was not the last of the writing problems he faced.  Look at the end of his gospel (Mark 16:8). It’s like he forgot to add a conclusion.  It seems so obviously truncated that a later Christian scribe tried to fill out the end. Who knows, maybe the longer version was indeed Mark’s original ending and he just wasn’t much of a closer.

Oddly enough these imaginations are encouraging to me. First, it’s always comforting to project my problems onto other people and then claim that I’m normal…I mean, how else do you think that Freud came up with the so-called “Oedipal complex”? On a slightly more serious note, that a perfect divine being would deign to descend to become one of us and then use other people to transmit his story and truths – other people who were prone to writer’s block and grammar errors like the rest of us – is amazing to me. It is all part of being able to worship a God who knows us both as our creator and as a fellow human, knows us inside and out.

To sum up: I had a nice holiday, writer’s block is a b****, Mark has an odd beginning and ending, Freud was weird.

The end.

Ben Edsall

_______________________

[1] Note: Mark, like most ancient writers, most likely did not use a desk to write…even if he owned one.
[2] Note: Mark likely did not have an office if by office we mean a dedicated room for work where one sits at a desk to work.


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Pastel Dreams and Apartheid

12 01 2011

Desmond Tutu has a little children’s book called God’s Dream.[1] In soft pastel paintings of kids from all nations, we discover that God dreams about people sharing and caring, “that we reach out and hold one another’s hands and play one another’s games and laugh with one another’s hearts.” Yeah, right. Tell that to victims in the Soweto riots or Sharpeville massacres: “Sure, the big boys were a bit rough, but brush it off, accept their apology, and play together as good kids should.”

Facing legitimated racism, ‘forgiveness’ seems naïve at best, and unjust at worst.  Such religious drivel enshrines platitudes in place of pragmatism. What we need—sceptics and sufferers alike insist—is cold, hard justice.

What are we to make of such objections? Did Mandela take a wrong turn in appointing Tutu to chair the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC)?

The TRC, you may remember, was established in 1995 to investigate politically and racially motivated human rights abuses during apartheid. It sought to restore victims’ dignity through recompense and rehabilitation, and grant amnesty on a case by case basis to any person—whether black or white, to avoid “victor’s justice”—who confessed the full extent of their atrocities. This had to be done within a grace period, after which point the full weight of the law would fall on the head of the impenitent.

Was the TRC warm-hearted but soft-minded; the kind of fairy-tale we tell our kids but ignore as adults?

I think not. As Tutu once said, “Children are a wonderful gift.  They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.” Cold, retributive justice may be one such sham, as both the African and Biblical understanding is “far more restorative—not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knocked askew.”[2] But if we reject the icy logic of retribution, what hope have we of reaching final restoration? How can we not slip into weak sentimentality and passivity before evil? Tutu, I suspect, would see truth and grace as South Africa’s two feet on the long walk to reconciliation.

First, truth. Tutu experienced apartheid. He knew first hand that “God does not force us to be friends or to love one another. … Dear child of God, it does happen that we get angry and hurt one another. Then we feel sad and very alone.  Sometimes we cry, and God cries with us.”[3] Reconciliation is never at the expense of truth. We don’t move forward by forgetting the past.  God is “notoriously biased in favour of those without clout,” so the TRC disarmed the powers by bringing all injustice into the light.

Second, grace. Forgiveness follows admission of fault. It is both altruistic, and “the best form of self-interest” as Tutu explained. For in forgiving, you are no longer locked in victimhood, chained to the perpetrator. But this grace—returning good for evil—goes deeper yet: “When we say we’re sorry and forgive one another, we wipe away our tears and God’s tears too.” Why? Because “God dreams that every one of us will see that we are all brothers and sisters—yes, even you and me.”[4] Judgment begets judgment, but what if “my humanity is bound up in yours”? What if “freedom is indivisible,” and that the enemy is in reality another child of God: family? Surely, then, even as judgments must be rendered, our arms should remain ever open to embrace the other as part of ourselves. In Xhosa, this is called ‘ubuntu’ (oo-BOON-too): I am what I am because of who we all are. As the “rainbow people of God,” ubuntu extends to all.

The TRC’s resolution, as novel as it sounds, was not new. It was always God’s dream to reconcile all people to Himself as one family (2 Corinthians 5:14-21). And this dream moved from platitude to pragmatism when the Creator of the Universe called down from the cross to his crucifiers, “Father, forgive them, for they do not understand your dream.”[5] Truth declares our solidarity in sin. Grace offers amnesty for a time to the truly penitent. Justice is ultimately delivered to all who refuse to turn from their complicity in evil. And God’s dream of reconciliation is eternally realized for all those humble enough to forgive and be forgiven. May we in 2011 live toward this dream depicted in Tutu’s children’s book, that one day we will all join hands and play together under the tree of life from which flows healing to the rainbow nation.

Dave Benson

[1] Desmond Tutu, God’s Dream (Melville, SA: Jacana Media, 2009).

[2] Tutu, “Recovering from Apartheid,” in The New Yorker, 18 November 1996.

[3] Tutu, God’s Dream.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Desmond Tutu, “God Suffers for Us,” in Children of God: Storybook Bible (Malaysia: PrettyInPress, 2010).


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Categories : Making a Difference, The Heart of Faith

The Fear of Reentry

10 01 2011

These weeks easily have to be some of the most difficult, anxiety-ridden weeks of the year. For most of the people I know, the last two weeks of December involve taking substantial time off from work, reuniting with friends and family, traveling back home or perhaps to some exotic locale, enjoying fun holiday parties, and eating good food. But once the New Year ball drops, all these winter wonderland activities cease, and it’s time to reenter the real world of work and ordinary responsibility. Add to this the fact that many of us make wildly idealistic New Year’s Resolutions that we probably won’t be able to keep (mine involve self-taught French and banjo lessons), and it’s hard not to feel like the helpless Sisyphus perpetually pushing the boulder up the hill, only to watch it fall again at the end of 2011.

One of my friends who goes to The Wharton School in Philadelphia calls this dreadful feeling “The Fear” and says that It usually grips him on Sunday nights when a fun weekend is sadly over and a large pile of work looms in the distance. Of course, The Fear is nothing new and applies to more than just graduate students. The jarring transition between rest and work, or what Walker Percy calls “the reentry process,”[1] often causes sadness, despair, and frustration. In fact, it’s probable that Jesus experienced The Fear too. When he left a wedding at Cana in Galilee, he traveled a few days later to Jerusalem where he cleansed the temple courts.[2] One day Jesus is enjoying a festive wedding celebration with friends and family; the next he’s witnessing morally corrupt money-changers exploit others’ finances in the holiest of all Jewish settings. Such an abrupt transition must have brought about a fear of reentry and contributed to Jesus’ righteous desire to chase out the money-changers.

But where does this leave us? How can we face the invisible yet still monstrous Fear as the year starts and Monday arrives? I, for one, tend to create diversions for myself; procrastination sounds delightful when I’m on the brink of responsibility. The French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal explained this human tendency more eloquently: “All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement.”[3]

Battling The Fear this time of year is difficult. Finding myself under its sway, occasionally I will use Augustine’s advice for help. Having spent almost his whole life experimenting with one attraction or idea after another—across several cities, relationships and worldviews—Augustine finally came to the conclusion that “our hearts are restless until they rest in God.”[4] This time of year we hear self-help gurus, weight-loss magicians, and modern-day money-changers promise to save us from what we fear and make our lives richer. But I would rather stick to Augustine. I would rather rest in God, knowing that with Him, even though piles of work loom large, all is well, and I can tackle one thing at a time.

Paul McClure

[1] Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux), 1983. 141-159.

[2] John 2

[3] Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. #136.

[4] St. Augustine. Confessions. Book I. Chapter 1.

 


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Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Dinner Party Politics

7 01 2011

Sex, religion, and politics: three inexhaustible yet potentially awkward and provocative topics of dinner party conversation. I addressed the first two topics in earlier articles for Wondering Fair, so with this submission my theological three course is complete.

Why is discussion of politics deemed unacceptable at dinner parties? Sex is typically and appropriately a private matter. Religion too involves personal and private expression, but while sex is rightly confined to the bedroom not the boardroom, both religion and politics involve public expression, the latter as a matter of course. So if it’s alright to wave a placard at a political rally, why not chow down on the latest political hot potatoes at dinner?

Again, the answer is because political discourse too quickly becomes heated and divisive.

Interestingly, much of Jesus’ discourse was also political and therefore divisive. His claim that ‘my kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:36) had, and continues to have, political ramifications. The fact that he has a kingdom signifies that he is ruler or sovereign over some spiritual or physical territory, the laws of which originate in a person or place beyond this world. However, the ruler and source of this other-wordly kingdom—Jesus himself—has claims to make on the rulers, citizens and systems of this world.. Here lies the tension for Christians: how to be good citizens in a world and society that has yet to acknowledge Jesus’ sovereignty and kingdom, and therefore persists in making decisions without reference to him.

Christians pray, “Your kingdom come…” Like politics, Christian faith requires public expression and participation as a matter of course. Christians should be model citizens both of the state and of Jesus’ kingdom, but the glaring truth is that we struggle to be good citizens of either. It’s hard to know what to think about politics, hard to know which political party to support when all are flawed, and it’s hard to love our neighbour when that person at church is so irritating. For some, the best option is to retreat and engage with wider society as little as possible. For others, political affiliation is so important as to be practically indicative of one’s faith, the implication being that this party is the party for Christians and that party is not.

Perhaps it would be helpful to recall that while Jesus’ kingdom is for this world it is not of this world. Jesus’ mandate was a mandate to love and to do everything out of love: love for neighbour, love for stranger, love for enemy. Something radical and different is going on when a political leader makes those kinds of demands, demands on people’s hearts. I’d say the world needs that kind of leader. I’d say the world needs that kind of kingdom. And I’d say it’s worth ruffling a few feathers at the dinner party to profess allegiance to them both.

Madi Simpson


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