April « 2011 « Wondering Fair

Waiting for another Wedding

29 04 2011

The world awaits the unveiling of a new princess. The much-expected wedding between prince William and Kate Middleton will be celebrated today, with all the pomp and glory of a royal family and a modern fairy tale story. For months magazines have been covering the details of their ceremony, and millions of viewers are expected to follow the wedding live. The glory and luxury of the feast seem irresistible. There are castles, crowns, thrones in play; there is a British tradition that dates back for centuries. In a world secularized of almost all enchantment, the event that forges an actual princess draws us with a seductive pull, and something alive only in fairy tales takes place in reality. The future king has chosen his princess, and the whole kingdom will be there to watch.

Not only the enchantment, but a whole pull of identification also attracts us to this royal wedding. We enjoy the splendour vicariously as if we were getting married ourselves, at least in our own minds. We too want to sit on the throne and woo the kingdom with our magnanimous hand, noble as King Arthur and brave as Richard the Lionheart. We too want to wear a luminous white dress and see all women envy our ascension. We would love to have our romantic kiss stamped in magazines and to set the ideal for a generation of Barbies and Disney movies.

But I guess there is a deeper reason we look up to grand weddings and royals ceremonies like this: one day we too will be a glorious bride. In an enigmatic but captivating metaphor, Scripture tells us that Jesus is preparing a royal feast, and that one day he will receive his bride, the church, as his own, and place a crown of jewels on her head. As the new creation unfolds in the end of Revelation, a voice mighty like the roar of many waters cries out, “Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure.”[1] It is a beautiful image, even if talk about being a bride makes guys like me cringe a bit – we prefer more macho metaphors like the building of a new city or victory over evil.

But what makes this grand wedding still more entrancing is the dubious origin of the bride. Kate Middleton may be a “commoner,” not somebody from the traditional aristocratic circles for princesses. But Jesus’ bride goes even further: she does not resemble a princess nor is she the fairest of all. The Bible compares God’s people instead to a prostitute, who rejects her groom and opens herself to all kinds of other gods, heavy on lipstick and available to whoever arrives with attraction. The church is feeble, unstable and prone to other loves. Yet one day it will be “bright and pure,” not because of its noble birth, but because of its extraordinary husband: a king who lowers himself and conquers the freedom and faithfulness of his bride; a savior who wears a crown of thorns so one day his people can wear a crown of emerald and jasper; a God who identified with our sin and lowliness so that one day we can identify with his purity and nobility; a husband full of seeking, persistent love, who waits patiently for our arrival and prepares a banquet before the whole of creation, and who erects a new city where we can – now with words that are finally true – live happily ever after.

René Breuel

[1] Revelation 19:7-8

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Tags: Kate Middleton, marriage, Prince William, royal wedding, wedding
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us, The Heart of Faith

Good News for Cutters, Old and New

27 04 2011

“UGLY.” In seven slices with a razor-blade up her arm, Lauren summarized her life. I’ve done youth work for over a decade now, and self-harm is something I struggle to ‘get’. Why would this popular, vivacious, and attractive girl take to carving up her body? Upwards of one-in-five adolescent females self-harm, with males now comprising up to 35 percent of overall cases. ‘Cutting’ is common. And cutting is confusing.

More times than I care to remember I’ve sent youth group leaders in with first aid kits to patch up teens who’ve cut while hidden away in the toilet block. I’ve spent countless hours talking with girls like Lauren about their addiction to self-harm. One girl was hospitalized after inflicting 60 cuts to her upper arm and thigh in a night.

Why do they do it? Well, choose your theory. From a biological perspective, cutting induces an endorphin rush, implicated in addiction. From a psychological perspective, cutting concretely expresses pain when psychic distress is overwhelming or one feels numb; anger turned inward on the self in this way can produce an emotional catharsis. From a sociological perspective, cutting can help a powerless teen gain a sense of control, and elicit support and care from others.[1]

But what about a spiritual perspective? This same literature almost reluctantly reports that cutters cut to punish themselves for being bad and failing to live up to some ill-defined standard. “UGLY” is an aesthetic label pointing to a deeper dissonance within Lauren: she senses her whole life is deformed. In almost every instance of self-harm, I’ve heard girls describe a kind of release and almost primitive placation that comes with the shedding of blood. A totally non-religious adolescent even used the word “cleansing” about how she felt when that red-fluid flowed. What should we make of this?

Perhaps another primitive practice will shed some light. While working through a course on world religions, I was struck by the almost universal practice of “atonement.”[2] In most ancient tribal religions, people would regularly placate—or propitiate—the gods with sacrifices; the bigger the transgression, the greater the slaughter. A white lie?—then slaughter a chicken. Stepping on sacred ground?—then slaughter a bull. You dishonoured the gods and took a life?—then sacrifice a life. Almost without fail, blood is the key ingredient in placating the gods.

Granted, this seems barbaric. But we recognize that when rules are broken—or worse, a relationship is severed—some form of costly “placation” is essential. We know that some sacrifice must ‘make up’ for when we ‘fall short’, whether a spouse offering flowers for forgetting the anniversary, or a gang offering a guilty member to be beaten for infringing another gang’s territory. In the lecturer’s words, “We sacrifice what is important to us, and a rough equivalent of us.”

Interestingly, tribal religions typically recognize some “Sky God” who created all that is, and with whom we have lost relationship in the distant past. So, the focus shifts to placating the local and lesser gods with ever-escalating blood sacrifices to pay for infringing their ill-defined standards.

Ancient ‘cutting’ then, makes more sense than its modern counterpart. As we watch contemporary and fictive portrayals in movies like Apocalypto and Clash of the Titans, we can see a kind of barbaric logic to the Mayan and Greek spilling of blood in human sacrifice. In contrast, Lauren is agnostic and morally relativistic. Like nearly half of Australian youth, she isn’t convinced that there is a God from whom she is relationally severed, or that there are any objective standards to transgress.

Yet “the voice on the skin” doesn’t lie.[3] All the biological, psychological, and sociological theories in the world will never get to the heart of the problem. For Lauren, as with us all, has fallen short of the standards of a just God. Inbuilding her life around something other than God, her life has been bent out of shape. She is broken, and she breaks. She is severed in relationship. And “the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”[4] From a spiritual perspective, this toying with death and letting of blood is of one piece with ancient efforts to placate the gods.

What, then, can be done? Let me suggest something radical. The “Sky God” is different. The need for atonement is real. But unlike these lesser and demonic gods, the Creator of all is not hungry for our sacrifice. Instead, in love, this Sky God has taken the initiative to step into our blood-thirsty world. And on the Mountain of Crucifixion, this God—made known through Jesus of Nazareth—has offered a one-time sacrifice that covers all our failures. He absorbed all our “ugliness” so we could be made beautiful again. He shed His blood so we wouldn’t have to. And when we accept His perfect placation, then the Laurens of this world can lay down their razor-blades of self-harm and disapproval, and find life to the full in relationship with the God who also bears scars. This is truly good news for cutters old and new. In the words of Robert Low’s stirring hymn,

What can wash away my sin? …
What can make me whole again? …
Oh! Precious is the flow, that makes me white as snow.
No other fount I know, nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Dave Benson

[1] Victoria E. White Kress, Donna M. Gibson, and Cynthia A. Reynolds, “Adolescents Who Self-Injure: Implications and Strategies for School Counselors,” in Adolescent Psychology, 5^th ed., ed. Fred E. Stickle, 178-183 (Columbus, OH: McGraw Hill, 2007).

[2] John G. Stackhouse, Jr., “World Religions,” Regent College Audio, session H07 on Tribal Religions.

[3] Janice McLane coined this phrase to describe self-mutilation, in “The Voice on the Skin: Self-Mutilation and Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Language,” Hypatia, Fall 1996.

[4] Hebrews 9:22, TNIV.

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Tags: addiction, Adolescent, atonement, Blood, cross, Cutting, sacrifice, Self-Harm, Sky God
Categories : The Heart of Faith

Running Toward Life

25 04 2011

I was flipping a book at a friend’s house one day – one of those fancy editions that even smell well – when an image took hold of me. It shows two men running early in the morning, with their hair bowing to the wind, and one of them holds his hands tightly together. But what grabbed me was their eyes: a complex pool of doubt, hope, faith, bewilderment, surprise, perplexity, amazement. They are the eyes of two men running into something.

The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Sepulchre on the Morning of the Resurrection, has been the most celebrated painting of Eugène Burnand, and for a good reason. Burnand has been able to condense in a moment something of the range of emotions of someone who hears that the master they’ve just seen suffer and die two days before has actually come to life. It is a charged moment. A difficult faith, a wondrous impossibility. Bits and pieces of conversations and profecies come into place, but with an unexpected twist: a risen Savior, gushing forth life out of an empty tomb.

I can only imagine something of thoughts flowing in Peter’s and John’s minds as they race to check out the news. An empty tomb? Has someone stole the body? Maybe the women are too emotional with the whole thing, or they went to the wrong tomb. Hold on, Jesus talked something about rising again one day. And he talked about eternal life too. Oooohhh, eternal life. But can it really be, back from the dead?

It is hard to imagine the intensity of that moment, the smell of the cemetery,
feeling the texture of the white cloth lying in the tomb by itself. At the same time, I think we have our own set of questions as our minds follow Peter and John in that morning. Risen from the dead? A tough swallow, but sure, I guess I believe in that too. It is a nice inspiring story. Easter at grandma last year was great, I loved her potatoes. The while chocolate egg was phenomenal too. But why doesn’t Jesus’ story ring true – to me? Why is eternal life more like a metaphor than a reality more urgent than the chocolate egg?

I guess we have our own set of complex emotions. Our faith bumps into surprise and dances with doubt, like Peter’s and John’s. It is shaky and shallow; it forgets and gets distracted. But the texture of our faith is not what matters most, I’d say. What matters is the ground on which it stands: an empty tomb, a risen Messiah, a conqueror of death. A reality transfixed with new, overflowing life, a world charged with magnetic hope. We may worry more about food or impressing people or the next Facebook update, but Jesus rose from the dead, and that is news radiant forevermore.

René Breuel

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Tags: death, Easter, eternal life, Eugene Burnand, Jesus, life, resurrection
Categories : The Heart of Faith

A Look into Ourselves

22 04 2011

[Editor's note: today we have an excerpt from a classic argument by John Locke, the seventeenth century philosopher, to shake things up a bit]

I think that it is beyond question, that man has a clear idea of his own being; he knows certainly he exists, and that he is something. He can doubt whether he be anything or no, I speak not to; no more than I would argue with pure nothing, or endeavor to convince nonentity that it were something. If one pretends to be so skeptical as to deny his own existence (for really to doubt of it is manifestly impossible,) let him for me enjoy his beloved happiness of being nothing, until hunger or some other pain convinces him of the contrary. This then I may take for a truth, beyond the liberty of doubting, that he is something that actually exists.

In the next place, man knows, by an intuitive certainty, that bare nothing can no more produce any real being, than it can be equal to two right angles. If, therefore, we know there is some real being, and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something; since what was not from eternity had a beginning; and what had a beginning must be produced by something else. This eternal source, then, of all being must also be the source and original of all power; and so this eternal Being must also be the most powerful.

Again, a man finds in himself perception and knowledge. We have then got one step further; and we are certain now that there is not only some being, but some knowing, intelligent being in the world. Thus, from the consideration of ourselves, and what we infallibly find in our own constitutions, our reason leads us to the knowledge of this certain and evident truth, – That there is an eternal, most powerful, and most knowing Being; which whether any one will please call God, it matters not.

If, therefore, it be evident, that something necessarily must exist from eternity, it is also as evident, that that something must necessarily be a cogitative being: for it is as impossible that incogitative matter should produce a cogitative being, as that nothing, or the negation of all being, should produce a positive being or matter.

John Locke

This excerpt is slightly abridged, from Francis Collins, Belief: Readings on the Reasons for Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 53-54, 57,

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Tags: evidence, existence, faith, God, humanity, John Locke, reason
Categories : Tough Questions

Why Does God Allow So Much Evil in the World?

20 04 2011

I don’t know. That’s the bottom line, so let’s just face it now. I don’t know. And, so far as my research has taken me, nobody else does, either. But here are some thoughts that help me make at least some sense of what God is up to.

I have concluded that we do in fact live in a good world, and “good” in two crucial respects: (1) it is a world that conduces to our benefit, and is meant by a good God to do so; and (2) it is pretty effective in conducing to our benefit.

What it isn’t, to be sure, is perfectly conducive to our happiness. If God’s main objective in creating and maintaining this world was the same as my own objective usually is—namely, to maximize happiness—then he is obviously doing a terrible job. So either we believe God is, in fact, doing a terrible job—either because he means well but is in some great measure incompetent (the argument of Harold Kushner’s bestselling When Bad Things Happen to Good People), or because he is not really as good as we are hoping he is (and resembles Zeus or Shiva instead)–or God doesn’t exist at all.

But happiness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World (a book that deserves better than its fate as a mandatory high school text), makes it clear that a drug-perpetuated happiness is not what most of us aspire to. And God aims higher than that, also.

God aims, in fact, much, much higher. God aims at shalom—which gets my vote as one of the best words I have ever encountered. Shalom doesn’t mean merely “peace,” but flourishing, and in every respect, along every axis. Shalom means that each individual becomes an excellent version of itself; every relationship blossoms; every group realizes its potential; and the whole cosmos relates lovingly and creatively to God [...].

I realize this answer isn’t complete. I don’t understand why God lets a deer die an agonizing death in the woods (even as one of my students pointed out that the deer’s cries serve the good of warning others away from the wolf pack). I don’t understand why God doesn’t terminate the life of my mother, who is dying even as I type these words in confusion and sadness and bitterness. I don’t understand why God allows AIDS/HIV to ravage Africa, or toxic waste to pour down a Hungarian hillside, or earthquakes and floods to destroy the lives and livelihoods of millions.

But I do see, if I catch my breath and look, that good does come out of these irrefutably evil situations. Sometimes, it seems, we are so resistant to doing what is right that somebody does have to die at the crosswalk for the city council to finally put in a traffic light. Sometimes, it seems, millions have to die before countries change their public health policies and drug companies change their pricing practices. And that’s not God’s fault, is it?

If God is not going to simply reach down and make us all good by sheer reprogramming, but instead wants to treat us as the freewill agents he made us to be, then he has to work with what he’s got. And I’m afraid that my own life experience shows me that I am so evil in certain respects—not all respects, of course, but some!—that if God does not resort to teaching me the hard way, I don’t learn at all.

So he does. Because he loves me. And he loves the world.

John Stackhouse (This article is part of John’s answer to why does God allow suffering in the world. For his fuller response, see here.)

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Tags: AIDS, Aldous Huxley, evil, God, happiness, Harold Kushner, love, pain, providence, shalom, suffering
Categories : Tough Questions

How can we be free from our past?

18 04 2011

A friends’ friend killed himself last year. Taylor (let’s call him that) saw his life turn into a nightmare after he stabbed a guy to death, and the story was broadcasted in the media and became a national scandal. Taylor was apparently in love, and killed his friend out of jealousy. He spent some time in jail, and was now waiting at home for his trial, but it was very hard to behave as a normal person. Virtually all of Taylor’ friends abandoned him; many of them were also friends with the guy he killed. He was not accepted at any job once people found out what he had done. He tried a distance university course but that did not go well, and he of course gave up the prospect of finding someone who would accept and maybe marry him. So he pretty much stayed at home. He saw his life being taken from him the moment he took someone else’s life. Last year he jumped off the sixth floor.

Yet Taylor is just an extreme case of someone looking desperately for something we all crave: redemption. We may not plan to murder someone, and I think he did not intend that either, but we all wish we could go back in time and undo something. We all have words we wish we had not said, or good actions we wish we had performed. We all have a first experiment we wish we had not tried, now that it became a vicious habit and sucks out our joy. If we were brought before a time machine, and had the chance of visiting the past once, I bet most of us would not journey back to watch Napoleon’s coronation or the 1970 World Cup final. We would travel back to change our past, and thus change our present and our future. We would fashion a new history for ourselves.

Past actions have a molding quality: they stand tall and cast a shade over our horizon. They fit our complex existence into their simple, unchangeable molds, and leave us afraid we will not be able to perform any better than we have done in the past. Regrets threaten to imprison us and hold us captive, and we long for some form of liberation, for a breath of life that will give us a fresh start of life and a renewed direction. We want to be free from our imprisoning past.

Jesus told a paralyzed man once that he forgave his sins, and that, as proof of this, the man from then on could also walk, which he did. Everyone at that day was marveled at a man who said he could forgive sins, as if he were God, and several of them decided to kill the madman who uttered absurd things. The ability to forgive others is indeed outrageous; what about people’s guilt, responsibility, consequences, accountability? How can society then administer the politics of blame, punishment and scapegoating? How can a forgiver of sins be kept safely in the past, relegated to the outpost of nice yet inoffensive religious symbol, and stop to interfere with us? How can we prevent succeeding powers from manipulating and profiting from an ability to sell forgiveness?

No wonder someone who made such a claim ended up crucified. He became an object of scorn then and since. Still, some of us know no better. We don’t know anybody else who can offer us redemption, and we cannot sidestep the fact that we need it. Faith in Jesus may be regarded as politically incorrect, cheesy, retrograde; but who else can truly redeem us? Our sinfulness cripples and overwhelms us, and charms suicide as an easy exit, yet here comes someone who looks us in the eye and tells us to walk. And off we go, limping, failing, questioning, but walk we do, for we get our life back the moment we embrace Someone else’s life, and now remains a fresh, eternal start.

René Breuel

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Tags: forgiveness, Jesus, past, redemption, suicide
Categories : The Heart of Faith

Hearing the Silence

15 04 2011

Despite all our highly rational arguments for or against God’s existence, a lot of the time, the issues are far simpler – more an experience than a theory. That experience is simply this: God doesn’t walk into my living room, sit down on the couch and talk to me.

Of course, this absence, or silence, is cause for a rational argument against God. God seems to only “reveal” Himself in highly ambiguous ways: “a still small voice”, interesting coincidences, an ancient book (full of stories of a time in the ancient past where He supposedly did come to humans more tangibly). It’s all so vicarious. If He does exist, why can’t God just be direct, come out, and show Himself, now? The logical answer is, because He doesn’t exist.

But truly, those rational arguments aren’t the real problem surrounding the Silence of God. It’s an experience. It’s the experience of people telling you there’s a God that loves you, you looking around for Him, and not being able to find Him. That hurts. Amidst all the arguments, it comes down to the heart – “He doesn’t talk to me, so I won’t talk to Him.”

Actually, Christians sometimes face that silence, too. When it comes, we question if He was ever there at all. I go through times like that. In one of those times, I found this quote from a Cistercian monk: “Silence is the very Presence of God – always there. But activity hides it. We need to leave activity long enough to discover the Presence – then we can return to activity with it.”[1]

Silence is always around you, it does not leave. It is merely hidden. Ironically, silence is muffled by sound. It does not disappear. It merely waits. It waits for you to stop the noise, and to listen.

Out of all the people in history, we today are the worst at finding silence. I’m terrible at it. I have music, TV, work, cars, my friends, my wife, my kid, always going in my ears. And the few times I could have silence, my mind is noisy – all those things leave a mental “echo”, as my brain recalls song lyrics, conversations. Perhaps my mind sees the silence as an opportunity to get more done. But I suspect sometimes my mind keeps destroying silence, because I’m afraid of it. Silence is so strange, so alien to my life. And it is scary, because if I am not all those things, am I anything at all? I fear silence is a suffocating vacuum.

And what of God? Could God be like the School Teacher, standing silently at the front of the classroom, waiting until the class “settles down” before beginning the lesson? I resent His silence, but is it really there not because He is silent, but because I refuse to relinquish my nice, familiar noises?

There are two solutions for this problem in the Christian tradition. One is the Cistercian monk’s solution. It is to slowly drive the noise away, and wait for the Presence, hovering hopefully, terrifyingly in the Silence. Not long after the previous quote, the monk says: “… I went out on the balcony… The Lord came in power. My whole being longed to be dissolved and be in complete union…. I finally went to bed and continued in the Presence. How I wish my every moment could be in this painful, sweet state.”[2]

That seems to work for him. But it’s very hard for most of us to get there. The other solution is to use things that God has traditionally given people as a “megaphone”, to “amplify” His Presence and drown out the noise. These things include the Bible, worship in Christian community, and good books – the Cistercian’s book has been one of those for me.

The point is, the Presence is there, always there. He is merely waiting for you to hear Him in the Silence. Face the fear of losing all the noise, and enter that Silence.

Matt Gray

[1] Basil Pennington OCSO, The Monks of Mount Athos: A Western Monks Extraordinary Spiritual Journey on Eastern Holy Ground (Woodstock, VM: Skylight Paths, 2003)

[2] Ibid.

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Tags: atheism, doubt, faith, God, prayer, presence, silence
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Is God Against the Imagination?

13 04 2011

Is God against the imagination? Curiously, many people respond with an affirmative yes. The second of the Ten Commandments – which asks us to not adore any image of God or of any other being – seems to imply so. If we are not allowed to use own imagination for the most sacred of purposes, is it forbidden then, or polluted? And what does this negative perspective imply for our art?

Obviously, there is nothing inherently wrong with the imagination. One glance at the world God created reveals the wonder of imagination—of what can be created out of nothing. God is a creative God, who conceived shrimps before the oceans existed, and who made us creative beings as well. Imagination has given birth to the works of Shakespeare, the art of Picasso, medical advancements, and technology. Any invention – of electricity, roller coasters, or the smart mop of the infomercial – depends on a previous mental picture of what the final object will be like.

Yet, while imagination can be a wonderful and powerful thing, it can also be destructive. Like every human gift, it can be used for good or for harm. For example, there is an increasing market for clinics and counselors set up to help children cope with internet and video game addiction. These children are so wrapped up in the imaginary world that they are unable to cope with and participate in reality. A more subtle, but equally harmful phenomenon occurs when we maintain an inaccurate view of ourselves, be it an image that is too positive, too negative, or just distorted, and can’t seem to see our potentials and limitations objectively.

The complexity arises when we attempt to conceive of a God whom we cannot see face to face. Though God gives us tools in Scripture to better know and understand his character, we must to some extent rely on our imaginations to conceive of him. The problem; however, is not that we conjure an image, but that we create a God in our minds who is limited to what we want him to be. For some of us, we grab hold of the notion of a loving father, but ignore the aspects of a wrathful God of justice. For others, we cling to the God of the Law, but flee from the emotional aspects of a God who would die for his people. We place limits on God’s character by making him into a God who serves our needs and ideals.

Instead of a condemnation of the imagination, the second commandment brings us instead to reflect about who our God is, how have we come to conceive him, and, more importantly, if we are atheists or skeptics, who is the God we have rejected. Why is it that we strive to create a God who is limited to our own faculties? Should we not want a God who is bigger than our minds can conceive of—who is more than we are? If we worship a God who is merely what we can conceive or want him to be, than are we not simply worshipping ourselves?

The issue the second commandment appears to address is not our imaginative powers per se – which are a wonderful gift of God, and which fosters beauty and art and epic stories and good thinking. The issue, however, is about how we construct our idols by means of how we conceive of God. Essentially, this commandment cautions us to be careful with our own personal projections, lest we become incapable of visualizing the true God, behind the colourful yet inaccurate image we’ve made of Him.

Michael Keller heads City Campus Ministry, at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, in New York, United States.

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Tags: art, God, idolatry, imagination, Picasso, projection, Shakespeare
Categories : On Anything and Everything, The Heart of Faith

Marilyn Monroe’s Dream

11 04 2011

Marilyn Monroe had a disturbing dream in 1955. She recollects in fragmented sentences how her psychoanalyst and her acting teacher had her in an operation room, and started to open her up like surgeons. “They cut me open … and there is absolutely nothing there – Strasberg is deeply disappointed but even more – academically amazed that he had made such a mistake. He thought there was going to be so much – more than he had ever dreamed possible in almost anyone but instead there was absolutely nothing – devoid of every human living feeling thing – the only thing that came out was so finely cut sawdust – like out of a ragged ann doll.” To Marilyn, the conclusion her psychoanalyst reached in the dream was obvious: “The patient (pupil – or student – I started to write) existing of complete emptiness.”[1]

One can only guess how many expressions of appreciation we need to hear before we believe in our own worth. A hundred? A thousand? Three or four a day? Who knows. Yet no matter how much people affirm us – Marilyn Monroe surely had as many fans as anybody else – there is always the lingering doubt that people have not yet known us truly. If only they could see all my facets, we reason, the admiration would crumble like sand. If only they could see past the smiles, giggles, waving of skirts and of hair, and could see inside her, feared Marilyn, they would discover a raggedy ann doll. Despite all captivating appearances, the source of information about who we really are, the solid truth about our worth, the verdict of appreciation of someone who has seen all our mysteries and depths, is to be found elsewhere. We appreciate the nice compliments along the way, yet we long for a true judge’s voice.

Our contemporary hunger for truth eats us alive. With all the talk about postmodernity and its denial of truth, my hunch is that we long for truth more than we have ever done before. We crave stories which are, above everything, truthful: stories which portray the world as it is, which do not shy away from complexity, which present torn, nuanced characters, which reveal our inner motives, which end up truthful to its plot and to the world, even if it is not a happy ending. In a world of fabricated images, of always upbeat tweets and Facebook updates, we want to cut through the layers of artificiality to the bare truth about ourselves and about the world.

The million-dollar question, then, is this: where are we to find truth? Who is to say – definitively, with our total assent, with that shared atmosphere of finality – who are we? Some say truth is to be found inside ourselves, after much probing, and with the probable help of a psychoanalyst. Others say after long journeys, after years in different countries, after visits to many gurus and bestsellers. Still others defend that such ultimate truth is not to be found – against the very hunger of our hearts – and is instead just a social construction.

My conviction, however, is that, though we learn good truths by journeying inward and outward, our grand truth arrives only with a definitive encounter: only when we meet our Creator. Like a good nuanced climax, we both fear and desire this encounter. But only after we lay ourselves bare before God, only after the ultimate existential step is taken, will we be washed by truth and clarity and confidence and grace. Only after meeting our Creator will the universe make sense, and also our place in it. As Jesus put it, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”[2]

René Breuel

[1] Marilyn Monroe, Fragments: Poesie, Appunti, Lettere [Fragments: Poémes, Écrits Intimes, Lettres], ed. Stanley Buchtal and Bernard Comment, trans. Grazia Gatti (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2010), 97.

[2] John 8:32

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Tags: identity, Marilyn Monroe, searching, self-image, truth
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Call Me an Expert

8 04 2011

I’m an expert.

Whatever you want to know, just ask me. A quick trip to Wikipedia, a glance at a news website and some soundings in the blogosphere (which, by the way, is a word that I detest) and any topic is mastered. Information on Libya? I’ve got that. The current economic crisis? I have solutions. Need a translation of something in Arabic (or Chinese, or Russian, etc.)? I can rough that out for you. Ideas on the current state of physics? Loads of ‘em. The latest celebrity scandal? I’ve seen the pictures. As I said, I am an expert.

The amount of information available today at the press of a button is unparalleled by any other period in history. With faster and more accurate language technology, even the age old language barrier is beginning to break down. The technology and information industries are growing at an exponential rate and we – rulers of our domain with our all-powerful laptops, iPads, and smart-phones – can access it all.

But there is another side to this information blitzkrieg in which we all live, something that Jacques Ellul touched on about half a century ago. While we have access to all this information, we don’t have mastery of it. Ellul, in his book Propaganda: the Formation of Men’s [sic] Attitudes, argued that western society (and, thanks to the internet and a more ‘globalized’ context, I think we can safely extend this to the rest of the world) is overrun by the information we possess such that we rely on preconceived value judgements and arguments to give us consolation, the illusion of mastery. In this way, the more information we have, the less able we are to digest it ourselves, thus leading to the feeling of being overwhelmed by our lack of knowledge and our need for ready-made answers to help us feel secure. This is a vicious circle, since in relying on the analyses of others to form our attitudes on a given topic, we do not cultivate the ability to critically consider the issues. We are taught, both explicitly and implicitly, to store/retrieve information and react rather than to understand and act.

The above mode of living is strikingly different from the biblical view of knowledge. For the biblical writers, knowledge worth having was knowledge of God and the way in which a person interacted with the world around them. Knowledge, in other words, was considered in terms of wisdom––it was maintaining right relationships with others, the community, and God. There is not even a word in Greek or Hebrew that has the same connotations as the English “information.” It just wasn’t a concern. In the book of Psalms it says that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (111:10) and in Proverbs it says the same thing about knowledge (1:7). The internet and news channels didn’t seem to factor into the equation then.[1] In later rabbinic tradition, a wise man was described as one who does not speak before someone who is wiser, doesn’t interrupt their colleague, is slow to make an answer, sticks to the relevant points, and when they don’t know they simply say “I have not heard.”[2] I like how this sounds in Hebrew: lo shamati. This seems not so far from Socrates’ wisdom, “I know that I do not know.” It seems a world away, however, from our current sound-bite and propaganda driven lives today. Sometimes we need to be reminded that it’s okay not to know, not to have an opinion on a current event, not to have it all figured out. Let’s all strive for wisdom, for right relationships with God and others. Let’s all practice together now: lo shamati.

Ben Edsall
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[1] I say this with tongue firmly in cheek.
[2] This is a paraphrase from Mishnah Avot 5.7.