Staking Claims and Naming Names

I must say that my dialogs with the pagan friend I have written about on several occasions now are never dull, each serving to knock the dogmatic rust off my beliefs. This past week, I was lamenting the seeming lack of absolutes and how difficult it is to know anything with certainty. To some, this might seem a surprising admission from me, for others, you understand the college environment and in particular the world of philosophic thought and artistic endeavor. My reading has been wide and varied and while it is easy to adhere to indisputable absolutes when you merely play in your own neck of the woods, it becomes quite another matter when you venture further into the forest and encounter creatures of a different sort. That I live in at least three separate worlds—church, college, and work—doesn’t help matters any; the representative views from each are not always so easily reconciled.

My first semester in college I took a philosophy course taught by a “mean-spirited” professor who had the audacity—imagine!—to make us choose a side on controversial topics such as abortion and publicly defend our position. Seeing that my opposition had a face, real feelings, and intelligent arguments made me all the more aware of Christendom’s unfortunate tendency at times to characterize those “outside the fold”: to become polarized, an “us” versus “them” mentality inadvertently rearing its ugly head.

Be this as it may, my interest today is not in criticizing the church but in setting the stage for the topic at hand. Counting a flesh and blood pagan among one’s closest friends certainly keeps one on his toes. (For the sake of clarity, I will refer to my friend here as Jonathan, though this is a name taken to protect his identity.) Jonathan is directly responsible for more fodder for the thought served up in these newsletters than any other single source, excepting perhaps the extensive reading that propels us both ever onward in our mutual journeys in the pursuit of truth and the contributions of my Christian friend Ed, of whom I will speak more in a moment. The United States may indeed be a post-Christian nation, yet when I speak I still represent the majority of American sympathies, whereas Jonathan is not afforded such luxury. His choice of faith automatically brands him the heretic, the scarlet letter “P” (for “pagan”) emblazoned on his chest. People perceived as practitioners of witchcraft and the occultic arts are generally not well received, at least here in the more conservative Midwest where I live and call my home. Yet his rituals are in themselves little different in spirit from our own; he is not a practitioner of witchcraft as Christians perceive the term, though of course some pagans are.

To take us up to the present, I have been reading a book that my Christian friend Ed gave me: Christianity on Trial by Colin Chapman. Given Ed’s interest in philosophy, psychology, and theology and his ardent love of literature, we both push the other forward in our pursuit of intellectual excellence, as well as concerns both practical and spiritual. He is also a major influence in regard to what I present in these newsletters, each of us introducing the other to new thinkers and new ideas. In the end, there are no Lone Rangers in the assembly of Christ: we are one body with many parts, each integral to the other, indispensable and uniquely gifted by his Maker.

Christianity on Trial presents an unflinching look at the arguments from a number of noted thinkers both pro and con to the Gospel message, and encompasses the aspects of Biblical Christianity, Authoritarianism, Rationalism and Romanticism, Agnosticism, Christian Existentialism, and Mysticism, as well as the thoughts of other thinkers and other faiths, taking each in turn, allowing the reader to arrive at his own conclusions, as must we all in the final consensus. Needless to say, the brave Pilgrim who ventures upon this voyage soon finds the Christian Mayflower buffeted and tossed about, his faith at times taken to the point of being broken on the breakers.

Having just read a bit of this book, my head still swimming, my insomniacal self suffering (for I do not believe in going to bed at night), I looked at Jonathan through bloodshot eyes at 7:20 in the morning and proceeded to lament that there was little that was truly knowable beyond the shadow of a doubt on God’s green earth. To make matters worse, my Christian friend Ed had lent me Charles Williams’ spiritual shocker The Place of the Lion, a book that in itself will turn your nice, Christian conception of the world on its head. Flannery O’Connor only plays with the world Williams’ employs, the shock value of his books enough to startle even the most senseless into sentience. From the mouth of the book’s main protagonist, Mr. Anthony Durrant, concerning his friends, who, “like most of religious people he had met,” . . . “probably liked their religion taken mild—a pious hope, a devout ejaculation, a general sympathetic sense of a kindly universe—but nothing upsetting or bewildering, no agony, no darkness, no uncreated light” (74–5) we get a foretaste of Williams’ often bizarre storyscapes. In the world of Williams, faith and religion might be a lot of things: mild certainly isn’t one of them.

Before I once again return to my discussion with Jonathan, let me say a little more about Charles Williams. He was one of the fellow Inklings with C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the other twenty some odd members of this London-based group of Christian authors. Tolkien hated Williams’ novels; Lewis loved them. Lewis was in the process of writing a letter to Williams congratulating him on The Place of the Lion, the very same book that I have just completed; Williams was in the process of writing Lewis congratulating him on his Allegory of Love. It would seem that their letters crisscrossed in the mail, a moment of serendipity that forever forged a lasting friendship that presumably continues on somewhere beyond the starry expanse to this very day. (For more on Williams, see The Lost Club Journal’s excellent literary analysis The Novels of Charles Williams.)

But if we keep discussing the books I have been reading, we will never get back to the conversation with Jonathan, and that is what I most wish to address today. Earlier in the week, I had taken a rare moment to shut my own mouth and hear him out, listening to his cosmology from start to finish without interruption or clarification. This forged a closeness and an empathy greater than any we have shared thus far, and helped further contribute to my own ambivalent rush of emotions, for I was somewhat surprised at the internal consistency of his ideals and the conviction with which he held them. He acknowledges the same tenets as I concerning “love thy neighbor as thyself”—these are not new. The incarnation of Christ, however, is not so readily accessible to reason. If Jonathan is ever to change his ways, it will have to be such as is revealed to him. It is not my obligation to change him; my best bet is to take my hands off the matter altogether and let the Holy Spirit work as He wills. This allows the relationship to breathe, allows the sweet winsomeness of Christ to work as it wills on its own timetable and not until. We do not have to help it along; all we have to do is live it as it lives through us.

Far too often, we fail to tell our friends how much they really mean to us; Jonathan and I are rarely moved to great emotional expression. Our conversation that day was emotionally deeper than it had ever gone before, and I was expressing my heartfelt gratitude over having such a good friend, thinking of a section I had just read in Williams’ The Place of the Lion where the central character Anthony Durrant is speaking of his own friendship with Quentin. Though my quotation was a paraphrase, I felt moved to mention it to Jonathan in that moment of rare reverie. In these passages, the character Anthony is caught in a moment of sober contemplation of the friendship shared between himself and Quentin:

After paraphrasing this account and relating it to our own friendship, Jonathan replied, himself strangely affected as well, “I suppose, that with your way of believing, you would say our friendship was ‘meant to be,’ that God has ordained it?” To which I replied, “As sure as you are standing next to me, I am certain.”

But before it had reached this level, our conversation had more naturally unfolded, the usual pleasantries being exchanged, the game of give and take kicked off, the players charging down the field, intent on the mutual object of their attention. Soon enough, our conversation began to settle and we soon found a level playing field. In a world of possibilities where little is ever completely certain, we concluded that there were absolutes that all peoples could agree on, regardless of their respective faiths. These absolutes take the form of virtue, for, as the famed U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Junior so appropriately states in Stride Toward Freedom: “A religion true to its natures must also be concerned about man’s social conditions. Religion deals with both earth and heaven, both time and eternity. Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal. It seeks not only to integrate men with God but to integrate men with men and each man with himself.” Of what use is a religious system if it only focuses on castles in the sky without any saving grace here on earth?

No, we agreed that the pursuit of virtue was universal with any faith worth its weight in salt. (Incidentally, did you know that cliché comes from the days when the Roman army paid its soldiers in salt because of its relative scarcity?) Jonathan told me of a park official who spoke highly of a kindred of his Asatru brothers. The man said that while he did not personally adhere to their beliefs, if all Asatru representatives conducted themselves as the two kindreds he had let use the facilities, the door stood open to them any time they wished to hold an assembly on the grounds. He was struck that the park did not merely look as good as it did when they came, but even better after they left, noting that many other groups, including Christians, had left the place strewn with litter.

Not in the least surprised to hear that my own brothers and sisters in Christ had acted irresponsibly, I told him the story of “Reverend Deacon John Gillam, the Third,” my fellow Bible study teacher in Utah, a sixteen-year-old brother in Christ, so nicknamed because of his love for titles. John was indeed John III, a deacon in the Brothers’ and Sisters’ Church, a non-denominational congregation in Los Angeles where he hoped someday to be Reverend. It was always humorous to listen to him mimic the preaching he heard there, for like the bulk of the congregation, he was black and had grown up listening to the “singsongy” and spirited art form the churches of the South have long held as one of their greatest claims to fame. John once told me, “Brother Eric, you can write about me in your book if you want to,” as I was working on part of my autobiography during this period of time. And so, while this is not “my book,” I am taking him at his word; hopefully what I say will meet his objectives, for either of us would freely admit that in such close quarters there were many times we were ready to wring the other’s neck—and our respective race had nothing whatsoever to do with it, though John used to like to try to cite the infamous “race horse,” a euphemism he employed often. Neither of us, however, believed it for a minute.

The two of us and a small band of ragtag Christians paraded around on the campus, and, perhaps because at twenty-four I was several years their senior, I often felt like the chaperone. Except for our faith, we had nothing in common, and you couldn’t ask for a more misfit band of vagabonds. On many occasions, my fellow Christians embarrassed me, showing myself and the rest of the world as well that Christians are indeed “Not perfect, just forgiven.” We should all take a moment to thank God that our Heavenly Father is so very patient with us!

Deacon John had a penchant for drinking soda pop from Styrofoam cups, and then nonchalantly dropping the ice-filled container wherever he happened to be walking at the time. I used to ride him about this, making many subtle innuendoes he laughingly brushed aside. One day, however, I finally got through to him. I told him, “Look, John. Your salvation is not going to be lost if you drop Styrofoam cups along the sidewalk; the planets are not going to suddenly veer off their courses because Deacon John Gillam the Third dropped his drink. However, you are a bible teacher, a man of God, and the people here look up to you. As a spiritual leader, you owe it to the people you lead to take responsibility for your actions and go the extra mile. There are a hundred and fifty thousand trashcans around this campus: is walking another ten feet with an empty cup going to kill you?”

John may have been a lot of things, but when he saw the need to change—even if motivated in part by pride—his heart’s desire was to be a faithful servant to his Lord and God. From that day forward, the gentlemen (and especially the ladies!) were charmed as they watched Reverend Deacon John Gillam the Third striding across campus, swishing his ice-filled cups artfully into the wastepaper cans as he passed by—and, may I add, stooping low to pick them up on the rare occasion he missed! (Deacon John, should you ever read these words, my friend, know that I love you, even if I did squabble with you more times than either of us care to count. I have made sport of your winsome ways, but underneath it all, the world knew that you were—and are—a man after God’s own heart. You went far deeper than this account might lend my readers to believe, and since you are now surely past the age of sixteen, perhaps you will give me a little more leeway as you look back and remember. Besides, I owe you one.) ;)

I went on to tell Jonathan that I too have not always been so careful with my litter. While still a married man, Amanda was always on me about throwing trash out the car window. I couldn’t understand why she was making such a big fuss over nothing. It wasn’t polluting my floorboard anymore, now was it? I mean, nobody wants all that trash piled up in the car, right? And so, I became increasingly skillful at discreetly discarding my trash at seventy plus miles an hour when she was turned the other way, which was so much the merrier. What she didn’t know didn’t hurt her, now did it? ;) And it goes without saying, this married man was not even remotely pretending to be a man of God, for such thoughts couldn’t possibly have been any further from his hedonistic mind.

From here, I went on to talk of the quotation from The Wise Woman by George MacDonald:

We soon concluded that virtue—any virtue—could be acquired by practicing it until it becomes a habit, freeing us to move onto other things in our behavior that need to be modified or changed, for in the course of a lifetime, we will never wont for lack of maladies to mend. Among many instances I could have cited, I used the example of how difficult it was for me to stop cursing, but how barbaric such language now sounds to my ears; only on rare occasions when I am feeling particularly short-tempered does it even present itself to my mind. My Social Psychology text this semester further bears out the adaptability of habits: while attitudes do affect behavior, contrary to the popular notion that “morality can’t be legislated,” research has consistently shown that we more often work our way into a new way of thinking, than think ourselves into a new way of acting. When assuming any new role or rising to meet any new expectation, we at first feel awkward and phony, but soon enough our role “becomes us,” as comfortable as an old familiar pair of jeans. And our culture often dictates these roles, just as our legislators dictate culture with their laws and regulations; these eventually become the social norms and mores that govern all people.

Interestingly enough, research has shown that our actions do not always parrot our beliefs. We do many things in life on auto-pilot—greeting the acquaintance with an automatic “Hi,” whether we feel friendly or not, answering “Fine, thank you,” to the question of how we are doing even when we feel like death glazed over—never considering how they tie into what we claim to believe until we are forced to think about them. When something forces us to be self-conscious, like the mirror above the store display discourages the would-be thief, we become acutely focused on minding our manners. The moral of the story is, of course, that when we are forced to think before we act, our actions match our attitudes; this is not necessarily always the case when we take our world for granted—as many of us do.

I told Jonathan that I could easily believe that my Christian brothers and sisters in Christ were careless in trashing up the park, because (among other reasons) we, as Christians, are still a relative majority, and we can bask in our relative popularity, mindlessly assuming the world should bow its knee to us, because, after all, we are Christians, we know the truth, and the world knows we do—ah yes, and the world knows it too! And so, with noses in the air, we walk about priggishly unawares. However, with Jonathan’s kindred, they have learned that the world doesn’t curtsy to their every custom, and hence they don’t take for granted that their welcome will never wear thin. Ever mindful, they are compelled to rise above, a lesson every Christian would do well to take to the bank, cashing it in before the offer expires.

We agreed that in order to cultivate virtue, one must first become aware of the need. As I have said before, à la Edie Brickell in reverse, we don’t know what we don’t know—if you know what I mean. To cite an example that I have used many times in speaking to people, I understand that Thomas Kinkade, the famed “Painter of Light,” always hides his wife’s first initial somewhere within the strokes of each of his romanticized paintings. I have yet to find it, yet I have always thought that if someone were to point her initial out to me, I could never look at the picture again without being acutely aware of its existence. It would then seem obvious to me, and if I were like most of the people I see, I would wonder why it was that you could not see it too, forgetting, of course, that it wasn’t so long ago that I couldn’t see it either, so apparent to me has it now become.

In a similar fashion, I used to wonder if these newsletters of mine actually did any good. But through countless conversations with Jonathan, and particularly this last one, I am realizing that by identifying something, we then are in a far more favorable position to change it. He has assured me many times that indeed, the world does not think as I do, and that he himself evaluates people much more keenly than what he did previously, having never given psychology so much as a second thought, much less its philosophical underpinnings. Now he finds himself perplexing over others’ behavior—and pondering the same in himself. As Socrates is reputed to have said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” a statement I think has a great degree of wisdom to it, depending on how we apply its implications. The truth I see can be found in a statement issued by the 6th century B.C. Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, best known for the Pythagorean theorem dealing with right triangles (a² + b² = c², where a and b are the sides that form the right angle and c is the hypotenuse). Pythagoras writes: “Let sleep not close your eyes till you have thrice examined the transactions of the day: where have I strayed, what have I done, what good have I omitted?”

Williams offers an interesting thought in The Place of the Lion, the spiritual shocker mentioned earlier, in which he calls on his own occultic experience with A.E. Waite’s Christian Rosicrucian order, The Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. One of the metaphors he uses in this strange novel is that of Adam naming the animals, and thereby gaining dominion over them. I am not sure how literally he means this, whether he is turning to occult philosophy as a means of flamboyant hyperbole, or if he is referring to occultic philosophy as the actual truth behind the metaphor. Apparently I am not alone in this, as his critics are sharply divided amongst themselves as to the nature and intent of Williams’ work.

When we “name” something, we do have power over it in one sense. Just as once I have been shown Nanette Kinkade’s initial, I am now aware of it, so too, once I am made aware of something that is already in existence, I stand a greater chance at gaining mastery over it, if indeed mastery is at all possible. We unlock a similar power when we read our Bibles, “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). It discerns our hearts, for it identifies the sinfulness that lingers within by putting a name and a face on our folly.

We would be in bad shape in a world without names to help us wrap our minds around concepts. Like the famed Oxford professor of mathematics Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, we would all enter into “the forest where things have no names,” in the funny land of Wonderland where logic and reason have taken their own capricious flights of fancy in an indiscernible sea of comparative relativity. Yet, if we take this idea of having power over something by the “name it and claim it” philosophy, we are charting into waters of equally questionable dependability. Occultic philosophy would tell us that the supposed “God within” has the power to call into being that which is not, just as God Himself is the Creator of everything that is, from the nothing that was not. Besides mixing our metaphors, confusing imago Dei—in the image of God—with the fallacious notion of “God within”—we are asking the impossible. These powers are not afforded to man, only to God.

In one sense, it could be said that we create a reality that has not previously existed: if I am lost, intent on finding my way out of the forest, the knowledge my house is to the west orders my steps and soon enough brings a reality into being without my being consciously aware of the individual steps taken; that is, when I set a goal, I am likely to achieve it as if by magic, for my steps tend to naturally “order themselves.” If I obsess over money, I will plot and connive until I conjure forth my fortune, stepping on whatever and whomever I must to reach my goal. So too, if I think that my cute classmate is romantically attracted to me when she is not, my own perception may bring into being such a romantic attraction, because she perceives an interest in me, thereby arousing a curiosity within her. We do influence others—the Bible never denies that fact (Proverbs 27:17 stands in testament) and further, as I stated before, we tend to assume any new role, practicing it until it becomes a natural extension of our personality. We could also say, as I do, that just as Michaelangelo liked to jest that he had only to chip away the stone until he found the figure trapped in the “slate” of granite, so too, as I watch new turkey cutters fumble and falter with their knives at the factory where I work, I tell them that there is a turkey cutter hidden somewhere deep within and together we will draw it out. And so, together, we search for their “inner turkey cutter,” that mysterious “turkey cutter within” that manifests soon enough in all but the most graceless.

We do not, however, have the power to create that which does not exist in the same way that God does; we cannot name something that does not exist and thereby call it into being, nor can we compel God to so much as lift His little finger if He does not so choose. God is not the proverbial genie in a bottle; our wish is not His command unless He wills it so. Our most creative artists and minds at best simply mold and rearrange matter; they are “makers” not “creators”; humans do not truly create anything (alter yes, create no)—only God creates. (For a full treatment of this topic, see Faith, Doubt, and Suchnot—also, as a much later note (6/08/04), while I do not disagree in essence with what I have stated about makers and creators, I do disagree with this particular dichotomy.) If what we mean when we speak of “naming to hold power over something” that at such time as we become consciously aware of something we did not previously realize existed (though it has been there all along) we gain some degree of control over it, we will have realized a great truth.

All these thoughts and more (though perhaps not in so many words) were expressed in the conversation with Jonathan, and I will not even pretend to put them into any kind of cohesive order beyond what I have written here. I am content to name them, leaving them here in this newsletter which would violate nearly every rule I have ever learned in college about the writing of well-constructed papers, for this newsletter, like any moment in my own life, is without a clearly defined beginning or a clearly defined ending, or for that matter, even a unified whole. Life is an experience, a day by day process of growth, and tomorrow is another day. It is already well past the midnight hour and morning always comes far too early in my world; another somnambulistic conversation awaits me tomorrow: we shall see what else Jonathan and I “name and claim” in our desire to make the most out of life and acquire the virtue we both so long to possess. And there may come a day, some day, when Jonathan finds it within himself to name the Name that provides the ultimate claim: the Name above all names that ensures the Claim beyond all claims: the Name that secures the living of life once the living of life here on earth is done.

Perhaps next week, I will be more cohesive (perhaps less), but it my prayer and my desire that there was something here that wormed its way into your mind, something that will weasel its way down into your heart, and form the catalyst to create the same in others around you. And now, if you will excuse me, I desperately need to get some sleep. This weekend has found me writing so many college papers, I shouldn’t wonder why this send seems so scattered, the pellets of thought falling about your feet in their own haphazard manner, and I am in no frame of mind to do the slightest thing about it, for I can scarcely collect my wits, much less anything more. Goodnight!

“Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself. But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.” (Galatians 6:1–4)

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