Tag Archives: faith

Bonheoffer, the Fall, & Time/Space Continuum

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(I posted this yesteday but forgot to include a title!)

 

Several days ago I discoursed re the time/space continuum and the human dilemma of being trapped (i.e. “lost”) therein. This is a very abstract notion and I recognize it probably sounds like a lot of non-sense to some. But I’d like to refer you to the work of Dietrich Bonheoffer who was one of the noted theologians of the 20th century; I think I could even safely place him in the evangelical pantheon of that era. In his book, Creation and Fall, he interpreted Genesis 1-3 and explained the extent of “the fall” in a similar vein to how I did in the aforementioned posting.

He posited the notion that the fall left mankind in this “time-space continuum” and that reason is itself a reflection of this fall and is intrinsically tainted by the experience. But mankind thinks he can “think” his way out of this existential predicament, not realizing that ultimately faith and hope have to have a role in the process if his rational quest is to have any ultimate meaning. Here Bonheoffer describes the circular reasoning that is the essence of this narcissistic endeavor:

…the thinking of fallen man has no beginning because it is a circle. We think in a circle. We feel and will in a circle. We exist in a circle. We might then say that in that case there is a beginning everywhere. We could equally say that there is no beginning at all; the decisive point is that thinking takes this circle for the infinite and original reality and entangles itself in a vicious circle. For where thinking directs itself upon itself as the original reality it sets itself up as an object, as an object of itself, and therefore withdraws itself behind this object again and again—or rather, thinking is antecedent to the object which it sets up.

Now I know this is convoluted. Let me try to interpret what he is saying. Bonheoffer is is echoing the words of Paul Tillich who said that “A religion within the bounds of reason is a mutilated religion.” And neither of them was disavowing reason (thinking); they were merely emphasizing its limitations. As long as mankind can keep his experience “reasonable” then he is safe in his illusion that he is in control. Spiritual teachers over the centuries have taught us that the experience of being “out of control”…momentarily, at least…is redemptive as it is in those moments that we can find an Anchor that transcends the mundane which is paradoxically immanent therein. But it/He is found only when we relinquish control and to the degree that we have done so.

And it is this “out of control” moment that teaches us the presence of a Beyond which graces the whole of our day to day life, a Beyond that gives meaning to all facets of human experience, including reason! Without this knowledge…and experience of this Beyond…we are reminded of the words of Goethe in Faust, “They call it Reason, using light celestial; just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

And again I am brought to a perfect object lesson in my country, the United States, and its current political impasse. We have so much confidence in “reason”, in “common sense”, in our political, military, and economic might. But we don’t pay any attention to this “Beyond” to which I make reference. If our leaders would pay the faintest attention to this Ultimate, they would at least be able to cooperate with each other well enough to address our issues like mature adults and not like two school-yard groups of thugs. Ultimately, our national issues…just like our personal issues…are resolved in the realm of the Spirit.

Is there “No Exit”?

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We are lost. Yes, just as the Christians teach us, we are “lost” though I differ with them on what that means. We have “fallen” into a world of contingency, the domain of cause and effect (time and space), and we are often at our wits end. We don’t know what to do. To cope with this tremendous anxiety, the vulnerability that comes from being a mere mortal, we have created culture (including myths) and we cling desperately to this culture to hide our nakedness. Yes, we cling to our fig leaves.

In the following poem Jessica Goodfellow so beautifully and elegantly describes this dilemma that we are in. We are always tempted by the hope of a “beginninglessness” or its counterpart, an “endlessness.” But either extreme is perilous. For, reality is merely that we are here, we are in the “in-between”; we are caught in this parenthesis of time and space. As Sartre noted, there is “No exit.” This realization is the point at which we can opt for faith, the belief (hope) that something Wonderful is underway in this void that we live in and that we are part of it.

Navigating by the Light of a Minor Planet

The trouble with belief in endlessness is
it requires a belief in beginninglessness.
Consider friction, entropy, perpetual motion.
And the trouble with holding to both is that
belief in endlessness requires a certain hope
while belief in beginninglessness ends in the absence of hope.
Or maybe it’s vice versa. Luckily,
belief in a thing is not the thing itself.
We can have the concept of origin, but no origin.
Here we are then: in a world where logic doesn’t function,
or else emotions can’t be trusted. Maybe both.
All known tools of navigation require an origin.
Otherwise, there is only endless relativity and then
what’s the point of navigation, in a space where
it’s hard to be lost, and even harder not to be?
Saying “I don’t want to be here” is not the same
as saying “I want to not be here.” It rains
and it rains and it rains the things I haven’t said.

“Work out Your Own Salvation…”

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The Apostle Paul admonished us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” And, as we diligently attempt to do this, any “salvation” that might need to come to others through us will take place without our manipulation, intimidation, and coercion. Here is this notion expressed beautifully by a contemporary poet:

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is yours alone to sing
falls into your open cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world so worthy of rescue.
(Martha Postlethwaite)

And, this brings to my mind the lovely poetry of William Wordsworth who also appeared to understand divine workmanship in our lives:

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society. How strange, that all
The terrors, pains, and early miseries,
Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused
Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part,
And that a needful part, in making up
The calm existence that is mine when I
Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!

 

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly, and “The Fall”

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When I first discovered D. H. Lawrence, my intent was pornographic! And, “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” fulfilled that ambition and would do the same for any young man today of similar inclination! BUT, I’ve since then discovered that it is a fine piece of literature, reflecting DHL’s astute, elegant grasp of the human condition. Here is an observation he made in one of the early versions of “Chatterly”:

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table. It is a question, practically, of relationship. We must get back into relation to the cosmos and the universe. The way is through daily ritual, and the re-awakening, the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water.

I think the detachment Lawrence noted here is one dimension of “the fall” of the book of Genesis. We fell, or were banished, from Eden and by the nature of life are cut off from our Source. Thus, one could say that we are “lost.” Being “found”, i.e. “getting saved”, involves rediscovering our body and nature and its connection the universe; and this whole experience is the process of relating again to our Source.

 

Rabindranath Tagore’s Prayer for His Country

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Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; whee words come out from the depth of truth;where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

This beautiful prayer from the thoughtful Indian artist/poet/musician of the early 20th century reflects such wisdom and insight about the human predicament.  I really liked that thought about the “stream of reason” needing to not “lose its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.”  Reason is such a gift but it can sure be misused and often is; in fact, usually is.  When reason is devoid of Spirit, “dead habit” always takes over and we then become arrogant, overbearing, and even violent.  This reminds me of a word of caution from W. H. Auden re the peril of “mere habits of affection freezing our thoughts in their own inert society.”  And then Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

 

The elusive captivity of Truth

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Several days ago I quoted a Carl Sandburg poem about the elusiveness of Truth, a poem which concluded with, in fact, “My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.” (I will quote the whole poem again shortly.)

I’m captivated with the notion that Truth is an “elusive captive.” Sandburg recognized that Truth is a process that is always underway, that it is always present, but it always eludes our grasp when we attempt to own it. This makes me think of something Roland Barthes (I think) said, referring to someone who is “in love with the thing which recedes from the knowledge of it.”

Jesus said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.” He did not say, “Blessed are those who find righteousness.” The “blessedness” comes as we hunger and thirst for that elusive prize, desperately seeking to own it, only to realize at some point in our life that there is no need to fret and stew, there is only the need to surrender to it. There is only the need to realize that, though we don’t have Truth, it (He) has us and is at work in our lives.

We learn to live with the anxiety of “not-knowing” as with the gift of faith we confidence (and hope) that we are Known. We then proceed with the task of “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling” (i.e. anxiety and doubt).

Yes, this elusive Truth is actually a captive! We have it and always have had it. We can’t escape it though we can escape its efficacy in our day to day life by desperately trying to avoid the doubt without which faith is not possible. We can opt for a specious certainty which is only a delusional system.

WHO AM I?
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I’ve talked to God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading, “Keep off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

Carl Sandburg & “The Passionate Seizure of Beauty”

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I live and I write on the surface of things. My heart yearns to swim in the depths of life’s mysteries but that does not appear to be my calling. I know about these mysteries but I know about them with detachment; or, to borrow a line from Hamlet, I “stand in the rear of my affection, out of the shot and danger of desire.” I am not diminishing myself. I am what I am. Or, as Popeye put it, “I yam what I yam!”

But as I meet dear friends in the blog-o-sphere, I deeply admire those of you who have such creative power and can write with such elegance and poetic brilliance. You are at home in the “sounding foam of primal things”, you “dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible”, and you know “the passionate seizure of beauty.” These lines are borrowed from a Carl Sandburg poem which I now share:

WHO AM I?

My head knocks against the stars.

My feet are on the hilltops.

My finger tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.

Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.

I have been to hell and back many times.

I know all about heaven, for I’ve talked to God.

I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.

I know the passionate seizure of beauty

And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading, “Keep off.”

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

Boundaries and “I and Thou”

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On Friday a man in New York City demonstrated his belief that we are one with nature by jumping into a lion pit, explaining afterward that he wanted to be “one with the lions.” Well, he almost accomplished this purpose as one of them proceeded to chew on him.

I also feel that boundaries are a nebulous construction and that we do need to realize that we are one with the world, with the animal world, physical world, and the human world. But we must never carry it to the extreme that he did and will do so only at our great peril.

One dimension of this “object separateness” issue is drawing the social distinction between “me and thee.” Where do I end and you begin? If I err on either extreme there will be major psychopathology. In the early months of our lives we begin the process of formulating a “me” (and ego identity) and if this task is impaired, our life will be very challenging. But if our “me” is defined too rigidly, it will also pose problems. Ideally, it will have an age-appropriate rigidity at first, a rigidity which can be relaxed with maturity so that our “me” can recognize that the distinction between “me and thee” is not as rigid as the social contract would have one believe.

Martin Buber wrote a marvelous book about the process of discovering this boundary subtlety—I and Thou. He also delved into the spiritual nature of the process of making this discovery and the spiritual nature of life itself. Our Source, he suggested, is found only in the “In-Between”, in that space between “I” and “Thou”, in what Deepak Chopra terms “the gap.”

Here is a marvelous poem by Edgar Simmons about this matter:

THE ART OF BROTHER KEEPING

the instant you can

accept the colon

you are christenened

in the right compromise

that no things are alike

but are related.

the greatest

the necessary

the most powerful leap of metaphor

is when I decide

I am you

the result is

a birth

a

metaphysical differentiation

carried out and on

not in flesh but in spirit–

prophetic fact in time

more than children of our flesh.

St Augustine Opines on Being and Nothingness

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St. Augustine and I are pals!  I never would have thunk it!  This is a profound observation about the majesty of God and his creation.  (This was posted this morning on (http://lowellsblog.blogspot.com/)  By the way, I intend to do a better job of giving credit for where I “steal” some of this stuff!

 

My brothers and sisters, where does time go? The years slip and slide past us, day by day. Those things which were, no longer are; those things yet to come, are not here. The past is dead; the future is yet to come, but only to pass away in turn. Today exists only for the moment in which we speak. Its first hours are already over and behind us, the remainder do not as yet exist; they are still to come, but only to fall into nothingness.

Nothing in this world has constancy in itself. The body does not possess being; it has no permanence. It changes with age; it changes with time and place; it changes as a result of sickness or accident. The stars have as little consistancy; they are always changing in hidden ways, they go whirling into outer space. They are not stable, they do not possess being.

Nor is the human heart any more constant. How often it is disturbed by various conflicting thoughts and ambitions! How many pleasures draw it, one minute this way, and the next minute, that way, tearing it apart! The human spirit, although endowed by God with reason, changes; it does not possess being. It wills and does not will; it knows and does not know; it remembers this but forgets that. No one has unity of being in himself.

After so much suffering, disease, difficulties and pain, let us return humbly to God, to that one Being. Let us enter into that heavenly Jerusalem, that city whose citizens share in Being itself.
Augustine,Commentary on Psalm 121 (Hebrew Ps. 122); CCSL 40, pp. 1801-3; quoted by Robert Atwell,Celebrating the Seasons, Canterbury, 1999, p.416

Lowell

 

Auden on the Incarnation

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The Incarnation is the story of the Word being made flesh, the “enfleshment” of the Holy to provide us a model for our life. This incarnation has many dimensions. I like to think of it as the process of “coming down” from our head into our heart, dwelling in our flesh, the mind-body duality finding some degree of resolution. In some sense “coming down from on high” is coming down from our head into our guts, the Word being woven into the fabric of our day to day life. The Gospel becomes experience, no longer consisting of mere dogma that we have imbibed from our Christian culture. Read the following excerpt from W. H. Auden about this process, especially that powerful notion of “flesh and mind being delivered from mistrust.”

If…like your father before you, come
Where thought accuses and feeling mocks,
Believe your pain: praise the scorching rocks
For their desiccation of your lust,
Thank the bitter treatment of the tide
For its dissolution of your pride,
That the whirlwind may arrange your will
And the deluge release it to find
The spring in the desert, the fruitful
Island in the sea, where flesh and mind
Are delivered from mistrust.
(W. H. Auden “The Sea and the Mirror)