November « 2011 « Wondering Fair

Rootedness in a Transient World

30 11 2011

In the six and a half years that I have been married, we have moved seven times. Eight for me if you count moving in with my wife when we first got married. Throughout my life (and including my various undergraduate moves) I have moved house roughly eighteen times. It almost feels as if I’ve become nomadic, moving with my food source…of course the “food source” in this analogy refers to various degree programs and the search for cheap housing (but not cheap housing, if you know what I mean).

On top of changing houses, my wife and I have been in three different countries on two different continents in the last few years. And, given that my current program only lasts about another year and a half, another move is looming – perhaps another drastic one. I might as well be in the military. (Okay, I know that I wouldn’t do well in the military, but you get the point.)

What I long for at this point is a place, somewhere I can settle down with my family where we can become stable members of the community. Or, from another angle, I want rest: rest from the upheaval that comes with moving, rest from the effort that entering a new community requires, rest from feeling torn between where I was and where I am.

Of course, as I mentioned, I don’t see this coming my way any time soon. And, if I’m honest with myself, this sort of settled rest may well make me unhappy in other ways, such as feeling guilty for having too much. I find myself drawn to Jesus’ declaration to some would-be followers, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man [=Jesus] has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20; Luke 9:58). Still, the longing for place and rest persists, whatever objections I may raise. In this way, I am not alone.

The Bible (in both the Old and New Testament) recognizes this need for place and rest. However, it also affirms the elusive quality of these things in the here and now. One place where these themes are clearly brought out is in the book of Hebrews (one of the lesser read books in the New Testament).

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents” (Hebrews 11:8-9a).

Earlier, the author discusses the entry of the Israelites into the promised land under Joshua in terms of rest. Joshua, he claims, did not ultimately lead the Israelites into rest (as the book of Judges abundantly illustrates) but rather the rest was still to come (Hebrews 4:8).

For the the New Testament generally, true place and rest will come, but only with the end, when the earth is made new and we dwell with God in his city. As Hebrews says about Abraham, “he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10).

So, yes, we may long for true place and rest, but this longing will not always be frustrated. The New Testament holds out this hope to us in the hands of Jesus Christ.

Ben Edsall

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: Abraham, Book of Hebrews, home, Joshua, moving, place, rest, rootedness, transition
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

A Beautiful Life

28 11 2011

What if I’m wrong?

Whatever space we happen to inhabit on the worldview continuum, this is a question that is bound to occur to all of us. As human beings we simply do not and cannot know as much as we would like prior to deciding upon ultimate matters. And I suspect that the “what if this is all a colossal mistake?” question occasionally occurs to even the most settled of minds.

At the end of Miroslav Volf’s Free of Charge there is a brief chapter entitled “Postlude: A Conversation with a Skeptic.” After coming to agreement that the life of Jesus was good, beautiful, and worthy of emulation, Volf records the following hypothetical exchange around what would he do if he found out that the whole notion of a generous God who gives and forgives and who expects us to do the same, was nothing but an enormous lie:

Skeptic: “What if your dark thoughts at night—and my sober observations!—are true? What if you are waking up to a dream?”

Volf: “Well what?”

Skeptic: “You’d be wrong.”

Volf: “And I would have lived the right kind of life, the life you called beautiful.”

Skeptic: And have lived a false beautiful life! Wouldn’t that matter to you? Can a false life ever be good?”

Can a false life ever be beautiful? Can it be good? And what, if anything, does our answer to this question have to say about the worldviews we adopt?

Some would suggest that our worldviews are simply the result of the culture we happen to have been raised in. We are all socialized into and inhabit a particular “plausibility structure”—a taken-for-granted way of thinking about and living in the world which privileges certain kinds of answers to certain kinds of questions. At its most extreme, this view sets forth a kind of sociological determinism where our cognitive and behavioural options are completely determined by our social environment. Is it even possible to just accept a different way of looking at and living in the world given what we know about the nature of belief formation and the myriad sociological and psychological factors that contribute to the process?

Obviously it is. People do, after all, change their minds about matters of faith. But when they do, it seems that more often than not it is the quality of someone’s life that proves most compelling, as opposed to the comprehensiveness of their facts or the logical rigour of their argumentation. People respond to well-lived lives—to “beautiful” examples of forgiveness, grace, compassion, kindness, patience, and joy. The beauty and goodness of human lives can and do lead people to the conclusion that the foundation upon which such lives are based just might be true.

What is the connection between truth and beauty? However we answer this question, I think that the fact that we seem to be hard-wired to expect, even demand that the two be linked is suggestive. Is it possible that a genuinely good and beautiful life would have no connection to what is ultimately true about the world? If so, what would we be claiming about the nature of the world? About human beings? About God?

Sociologist Peter Berger has said that “to have faith is to bet on the ultimate validity of joy.” I think that it is also to bet on a deep and permanent connection between truth and beauty—between our deepest aspirations and intuitions and the way the world “really is” and will one day be.

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: doubt, faith, Miroslav Volf, religion, truth, worldview
Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1 Review

25 11 2011

Warning! Massive spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen the movie yet, and don’t like ruined surprises, skip this review!

Up until now, I’ve found the whole Twilight saga a little too dominated by angst. But I actually found the latest one to have some fascinating themes, in particular related to Jesus’ atonement. This installment finally sees the handsome vampire, Edward, marry his girlfriend, Bella. For the first half-hour or so, it is an agonisingly tedious wedding, complete with unsatisfied “third-wheel” and werewolf, Jacob, grumbling away. Then the couple go on their romantic honeymoon. Upto this point, it’s frankly pretty dull.

All that changes.

Astonishingly, Bella becomes pregnant to a vampire-human hybrid. Edward immediately begins to discuss how they “can get it out of you”. Edward’s concerns are quite understandable. When an old woman at their resort sees Bella is pregnant, she simply says, “morte” (“death”). Simply put, Bella must choose between the life of her child, and her own.

At that point, the movie became an abortion debate. While the movie is obviously very “pro-life”, focussing on that might mean the deeper theological symbolism going on here gets missed.

The old woman’s prophesy begins to come true. Before long, Bella grows seriously ill, to the point where she becomes horrifically emaciated – the foetus is literally sucking Bella’s own flesh and blood away. In fact, Edward’s family, who includes a vampire-doctor, constantly tell Bella that the baby is killing her.

But despite the almost-certainty of death, Bella refuses to abort the child. This is not because the child has given her anything, or done anything for her. Indeed, all it seems to do is hurt her. Yet Bella’s unconditional love for her child is enough for her to insist on going through this physical agony.

This culminates in Bella going into labor. The vampire-doctor has been forced away because of other circumstances, so Edward and Jacob must perform a gruesome caesarean to get the child out. Unsurprisingly, almost immediately after she sees her baby daughter, Bella dies. And despite Edward’s desperate attempts to turn Bella now into a vampire, so she can gain vampiric super-powers of recovery, she seems irrevocably dead. It is a poignant story of self-sacrifice and love.

The links between this story and that of Jesus Christ should be obvious. Like Bella, God had no reason whatsoever for saving us from death. Indeed, while Bella’s child was unintentionally hurting her simply as part of its own gestation, we wilfully ignore, reject or try to hurt God. Yet Jesus, the second Person of the Triune God, focusses on our need for life rather than the cost to Himself. He endures similar horrors to Bella’s gestation through His earthly life – political and economic oppression, for example. Ultimately, he dies a grotesque death, simply because of His unconditional, unquenchable love for us.

And of course, Bella somehow comes back to life again, to become a vampire. Jesus came back to life again, His self-sacrifice vindicated in His resurrection through the power of God the Father.

The other fascinating thing about the story is how influential Bella’s loving self-sacrifice is. By supporting her pregnancy, Edward’s vampiric family are considered to have broken a truce with the local werewolves (for reasons too complicated to go into here!). All they would need to do to save themselves a nasty war, is simply hand over Bella and the child to be killed in their place. Yet they are willing to sacrifice their own lives for a woman and child, one of which will most likely die anyway. Even Jacob overcomes his anger at Bella’s rejecting him, sacrificing his own status in the werewolf community in order to save first Bella, and then the newborn child. Similarly, Jesus’ self-sacrifice has been an infectious force throughout history, calling others to sacrifice everything, even their very lives, for those around them.

This has obvious ramifications for those women who find themselves in a similar situation to Bella, carrying a child who ultimately will destroy them, and for those who have lost loved ones in the process of childbirth. I certainly am not here making blanket judgement-calls on what should be done in such situations (these are complicated issues). But I am saying that, recognising that such an event is an example of Christ-like self-sacrifice and love, may give a degree of dignity and meaning in the midst of such a tragedy.

Matt Gray

Comments : 5 Comments »
Tags: abortion, atonement, cinema, ethics, movies, pregnancy, Twilight, vampires, wedding
Categories : On Anything and Everything

Was John Stuart Mill Wrong?

23 11 2011

Ever heard of John Stuart Mill’s famous Harm Principle? Maybe you don’t recognize Mill’s name, but my guess is that you hear this principle really often. In his treatise On Liberty Mill says, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” This principle has been absorbed into the modern psyche as, “You can do whatever you want to do in life as long as it does not hurt other people.” Today this philosophy ends up being the defining moral assumption of college students. I often hear from students here in New York that they are free to do as they please as long as they do not injure others. What I do in the privacy of my own home or with people that are consenting adults doesn’t matter to people who aren’t being directly affected by my behavior. So what if I eat what I want to eat, or act the way I want to act? If it doesn’t harm others, why do people care?

College students like the harm principle because it professes to be self-evident. This principle suggests that we can all see what is good and bad equally, and therefore, we need no particular history, heritage, or religious assumption to navigate moral choices. This was John Stuart Mill’s whole premise: we can be free from religious or social norms that bind us to a particular moral structure, because truth and morality are self-evident and common in all humans.

The principle actually works quite well until we realize that we all mean different things when it comes to “harming others.” What one person defines as harm may be rejected by another. One college student thinks looking at pornography in his dorm room does no harm to others, while another individual will insist that, in fact, it does do harm because it changes the viewer’s attitude towards the opposite sex by objectifying and commercializing the human body. The way you eat does no harm to others, until your weight cause healthcare problems that the state and those who pay taxes to it have to support. Our simple individualistic actions end up being a lot more complex then with thought. Whose definition of harm do we go by? Who gets to say what it means to hurt others? In other words, what is supposed to be self-evident ends up not being so clear after all. Not only are our actions more complex then we tend to believe, but our ability to agree on what harms society is also suspect.

What is one to do? Clearly morality and truth are not as self-evident and obvious as we once thought. While it seems simple enough—do the greatest amount of good to the greatest amount of people, and do the least amount of harm as possible to others—this is not so simple. Multiculturalism—the idea that cultures can co-exist next to each other and be promoted equally is an offshoot of this principle. World leaders today agree (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9s5zmOuVmc) it hasn’t worked as well. Let’s acknowledge this experiment has failed—self-evident truths are actually not self-evident but rooted in particular competing and different historical locations. The sooner we acknowledge this, the sooner we can decide, which particular cultural set of assumptions is best suited to love and care for others.

Michael Keller

Comments : 4 Comments »

Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Wondering Fair at 100,000!

21 11 2011

The internet can be a restless place. I often find myself wandering, eager to feel an enlivening presence on the other side of websites and articles. I start the day with news websites to help me feel connected to the wider world: cultural trends, economic crises, wars and rumors of wars. I open my Facebook account and catch up a bit with friends. I read about politics or sports and feel entertained and part of epic battles. I open my email account, eager to return to work and dreading the long list of unanswered emails. If I’m still feeling lazy, I go read some how-to blog or website to feel that I’m at least sharpening a skill here and there.

Still, as my eyes skim paragraphs and process logos, links and pictures, I notice my brain up and running but my soul yawning big time. There is so much to absorb and learn, and yet there is so little that nourishes me. I see events, faces, and products popping up unannounced, but it is hard to glimpse soul food amidst the online desert.

That is why I’ve been cherishing Wondering Fair so much. I don’t know how you experience it, but for me Wondering Fair is like taking a break with a friend across the table. The article of the day may be a big-picture discussion or a personal story, it may deal with the latest culture development or with long-gone authors, but at Wondering Fair I feel engaged, nourished, settled. I hear a friend throwing an idea across the table – gracefully, thoughtfully, using words like little gems that shine. I hear ideas that matters, that often cross the line of social conventions and address faith and heart issues with candor, and I can hear the voice and feel the presence behind the words too.

Sometime this week we will celebrate Wondering Fair’s 100,000th visit. Our community has been picking up speed, and now we have about 500 visits a day, from all over the globe. Maybe you’ve just arrived here, or maybe you’ve been with WF since our first days, but thank you for being part of this journey. We’re thrilled that you’ve been around. Feel free to send a suggestion, place a comment or craft a WF article. We hope to keep WF a meeting place online, and we count on you to keep enriching our conversation.

René Breuel

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: blogs, connection, internet, media, online, restlessness, Wondering Fair
Categories : Housekeeping

When the Living’s Uneasy

18 11 2011

A friend of mine, married with two children, once confessed that he felt a bit guilty about buying a three bedroom house in a leafy, desirable London suburb. It wasn’t that he felt it was the wrong place. On the contrary, it was exactly the right place. Almost too right; a more comfortable, more suitable and more desirable dwelling than the majority of people in the world could ever afford or even imagine calling ‘home.’ My friend had previously worked in Africa and come face to face with serious impoverishment. How now could he justify his well paid job and comfortable lifestyle? What was he supposed to think about these things? And how was he to escape his sense of unease?

There’s a fine line between living well and living rightly. The problem is not that wealth doesn’t satisfy, the problem is that wealth satisfies way too much. It fulfils so many human longings—security, comfort, influence, choice, identity… it seems to make everything ‘alright’ but it can blind us to the fact that hardship is the norm for most of the world’s inhabitants. Too much comfort and security can push us away from those who have the opposite, from those who have less or nothing, and who live in fear as a result of material lack.

A parallel problem is that Jesus chose to identify himself with the poor. This means that, for Christians at least, the extent to which we remove ourselves from the poor is, in some sense, the extent to which we remove ourselves from Christ, from God.

My friend was concerned about all these things. Some kinds of tension are incompatible with Christian spirituality, but some tensions, I believe, are entirely appropriate. It’s not a bad thing to worry that one’s house is too big or one’s personal expenditure too large. Perhaps they are! And perhaps they can be used differently. Uneasiness on its own does nobody any good. But if unease becomes the seat of fresh vision, and if that vision effects positive change, then there is a place for disquiet in the Christian life.

Madi Simpson

Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: Africa, home, Jesus, lifestyle, living, London, mission, poverty, suburb, wealth
Categories : Making a Difference

Nanna’s Rainbows in the Tears

16 11 2011

There is no guarantee how suffering will shape a soul. As C.S. Lewis, the imaginative author of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, once noted,

I am not convinced that suffering has any natural tendency to produce such evils [as] anger and cynicism. … I have seen great beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers.

One such “great sufferer” must certainly be Nell Hodgson. Across a lifetime of adventures, she had faced loss of loved ones, a near-death experience while giving birth, and three bouts of cancer, not to mention numerous rounds of chemotherapy. Yet as a child, I knew none of this. Nell—or ‘Nanna’ as I knew her—was to me an imaginative storyteller … a living, breathing “Wardrobe” offering a gateway to my own Narnia.

Recently I was jogging through Noosa National Park with a Canadian friend, pointing out the great diversity and character in the surrounding trees. In place of uniform stands of pines were paperbarks and gnarled gumtrees. Nanna quickly came to mind. Trees like these were features in many of her paintings, and her poems. Nanna loved nature. She used to tell tales of fairies in the garden, replete with intricate details of what each would wear and how they would move. The banksia bush had a larger-than-life personality in her imagination. At the least opportune time—like when picking me up from a friend’s place—Nanna would quietly slip out of the conversation, leaving us all wondering where she’d gone. After looking around, we would find Nanna on her knees, crawling through the garden bed. She was scraping off bits of bark from the base of a gumtree—“It’s for my bark paintings,” she explained. For Nanna, this was normal.

Yet as an adult, I wonder how to integrate the playful person I knew with this scarred woman who suffered so much. Many others would become bitter given her lot. Yet Nell had an insatiable appetite for life. Her life resembled the gnarled yet glorious gumtrees she immortalised. Perhaps in the title to her final collection of poems we can find the answer: Rainbows in the Tears. For when love looks through tears of pain, a vision of hope will emerge.

Storm Rainbow Of all the books that Nell had read, it’s no secret that her favourite was the Bible. In this “book of books” we find a recurring theme growing to a climax in the person of Christ, like the lapping of waves on a beach as they reach toward full tide. It is the pattern of grace, fall, and new grace.

This book begins with God’s grace as He paints a paradise and plants humanity in the midst. Yet our forebears overreached and fell, weeping as Eden became a wasteland. Yet God extended new grace, covering our shame in love and pointing to the day when all our sad stories will come untrue.

Or take Noah. Noah was the only righteous man among peers as people took pride in enacting every evil desire. So God judged the world in a flood, preserving Noah, his family, and a good deal of biodiversity in that floating safe haven. Grace had given way to fall. What would new grace look like? In Genesis 8-9 we read of the ark settling on Mount Ararat, this strange parade evacuating the vessel to see a land decimated by (super-) natural disaster. As they recalled what was, I’m sure that tears must have flooded their eyes. Yet precisely at this moment of despair, in the wake of immense suffering brought about by broken humanity, God gives us a sign. Whenever storm clouds gather, look up, for there you will see the rainbow—that even if life falls apart and flood waters rise, yet my new grace will preserve this beautiful creation in loving covenant. The rainbow is what love looks like when it refracts through this planet’s collective tears.

Nell was known as a woman of faith. But this was not “faith in faith” or some subjective impulse to trust beyond reason. Not at all. Instead, my Nanna trusted in the one true Go Rainbows in the Tears d, who was able to take the worst suffering, and the greatest injustice, and turn it into new grace and hope for all humanity. At the Bible’s climax we see God Himself in the person of Jesus, left high and dry as He opened His arms to embrace a world gone awry. Love is cruciform. And love is passionate, where passion literally means to “suffer with.” So Nanna had faith in the God with scars. When Nanna looked through tear stained eyes at the resurrected Christ, she knew all her sad stories would one day come untrue. And the result was art fuelled by hope.

This is how ‘imaginative Nanna’ and ‘suffering Nell’ fit together as one. Suffering can be redemptive: there are rainbows in the tears. In my playful grandmother I’ve seen the vitality of a passionate God. God has suffered much. And yet He is ever young, always crawling through the garden beds of this world alive with wonder. May we meet Him there?

Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: art, attitude, grace, hope, imagination, joy, pain, poetry, rainbows, redemption, Story, suffering, tears
Categories : On Anything and Everything, Spirituality for the Rest of Us, The Heart of Faith, Tough Questions

Yearning to Make Sense of Things

11 11 2011

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.

Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: Alister McGrath, nature, signposts, spirituality, yearning
Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

Eloquent Silence

9 11 2011

“Shimon, the son of Gamaliel, says, ‘All my days I have grown up in the midst of the sages [or wise men] and I have not found anything that is good for a person except silence” (Avot 1:16[17])

Shimon actually goes on to say that “anyone who multiplies words brings on sin.” I do find it slightly ironic (and quite funny to boot) that the son of the very famous Rabban Gamaliel (who, incidentally, may have been the teacher of the Apostle Paul) has such seemingly negative things to say about talking. I wonder if he ever brought this up in conversation with all those sages or if he just sat apart from the circle wishing they would let him go hang out with his friends.

Poor attempts at humor aside, there is something very valuable and timely in Shimon’s statement. Silence is something of a scarcity in today’s western culture. For the majority of most of our lives we are within easy earshot of traffic of some sort. There is construction noise in our perennially-renovated cities. Airplanes fly overhead, dogs bark, phones ring (and sing and chime and beep, etc.), and––the absolute top on my list of worst noises ever––car alarms blare the fact that a squirrel has just scampered across the hood. To drown all this out we turn on music, watch TV, put in headphones and just generally surround ourselves with other noise. In fact, there is a whole industry for “white noise” that is an attempt to surround oneself with sound that is less jarring and offensive than the noise of the world around us. We are inundated by noise.

If you are anything like me, this noise is very distracting. (I am definitely one of the multitude in the library with earphones in trying to alleviate the aural chaos with some controlled musical input of my own.) One side effect of all the noise, is that the physical assault on our eardrums carries with it a sort of social noise as well. We are flooded by our “entertainment” media with news of pop stars and celebrities, the latest gadgets, new trends in fashion, and a million other things that promise to make us the person that they tell us we want to be. As I noted in a previous post, the messages received here can cause us to become dissatisfied with our lives as they are; indeed, many of the messages are designed to do just that.

In this culture of noise, the words of Shimon ben Gamaliel are a clarion call for something different. [1] It is good for a person to have silence: silence from our noises and silence from the messages our noises bring. This gives us a space to separate ourselves from the compulsions of our society, if only for a moment, to reflect, to pray and to reconnect with our creator. When God spoke to Elijah in the wilderness (1 Kings 19:9-18), there was great and strong wind, an earthquake and fire (large, noise producing events), and what does it say? “The Lord was not in the wind”––a fact stated again with respect to the earthquake and fire. Instead, God spoke to Elijah in the subsequent silence. Perhaps we ought to find some silence of our own, going to a “wilderness” (where the consuming noise of our society cannot fill our senses) thus making space for another voice entirely.

Ben Edsall
_______________________________

[1] I should probably note that this post is a free reflection on the value of silence rather than an exegesis of Shimon ben Gamaliel’s saying. Avot 1:16[17] is more concerned to emphasize the value of performance of the commandments than to advocate silence in the midst of this modern and aurally inundated society: “Study [of the commandments] is not the root but rather doing them.”

Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: celebrities, Elijah, Gamaliel, Music, noise, propaganda, silence, traffic
Categories : Bar Conversations and Cheap Advice

Durable Legacy

7 11 2011

One afternoon in 1912, Sigmund Freud was enthralled by a statue. It captured his imagination for hours, and returning home from his trip to Rome, he poured himself over pictures and descriptions of that sculpture, analyzing its details and drawing sketches, until, after visiting it still other times, he wrote an essay interpreting it.

The statue was Michelangelo’s Moses, the marble masterpiece which Michelangelo regarded as his most life-like sculpture. Moses sits majestically, with intensity beaming from his face and flexing his muscles. The flow of Moses’ mantle and beard contrast to the robustness of his body, as Moses holds the tablets of the Ten Commandments, looking outraged to the idolatry of his people, who adore a golden calf just below Mount Sinai. The marble statue is so intriguing and realistic that there is even a story that Michelangelo struck Moses’ right knee and shouted, “now speak!”, as he saw it finished. There is actually a scar on the knee, thought to be a mark of Michelangelo’s hammer.

What is it that struck Freud so deeply about this statue? It could have been the skill of the artist, and his mastery of human anatomy and the human soul. It could have been the sculpture’s setting: the central piece of a grandiose tomb pre-ordered by Pope Julius II while he was still alive, anxious to align himself after a great spiritual leader. It could have been the character of Moses himself – the father of the Hebrew people, a looming giant in the arenas of history, law, and religion – or it could have been a combination of all these aspects.

Whatever diverse interests captured Freud attention, I imagine Michelangelo’s Moses got Freud thinking at least a bit about his own legacy. (Freud wrestled with Moses’ legacy throughout his life, and his very last book, written well into his eighties, is called Moses and Monotheism.) One of the greatest artists of history portrayed one of the great leaders of history to – Freud hoped – a great interpreter of the human psyche. Moses left behind a liberated people which, from a loose grouping of slave clans, became an unified nation, with an entrancing vision of the one true God, a legal system and self-identity that would last for millennia. Michelangelo, on the other hand, left behind exquisite pieces of artistry, to inspire, instruct and influence future generations. What would Freud leave behind? He was already a leading proponent of psychoanalysis, and was forging a new school of thought, but the question must have cross Freud’s mind: what would his final legacy be? Would it last like’s Moses’ people or Michelangelo’s art?

I guess no matter which talents move our hands, no matter which dreams transport our imaginations, the trio Moses-Michelangelo-Freud leaves us an eloquent joint legacy: ideas have consequences. What we believe matters. Moses is only remembered, and was only depicted by Michelangelo, and influential upon so many and upon Freud, because he holds stone tablets in his right hand, and looks with indignation to his left: because Moses believed in an omnipotent God, invisible but truer than a calf of gold. Moses’ convictions were fundamental for his vocation and the cornerstone of his legacy, as it is for everyone else. The durability of our legacy is sculpted with the concreteness of our beliefs.