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August 13, 2003
Hello everyone,
As most of you know, I took the last four weeks off in hopes of getting some rest and relaxation. I have not really had a chance to sit down yet, though perhaps my problem is not so much an issue of hectic schedules as it is of spiritual poverty. My primary complaint was that I was feeling burnt out and I intimated that spiritual fuel was in short supply to keep writing the words that I write. I have not lost that hunger. There has been a trickle here, a crumb or two there, but my diet has still been rather sparse. I am not sure, however, that this has been such a bad thing.
Among the things that have contributed to my spiritual renewal is a new, short-term Sunday school class that is projected to last for only a few more weeks. It is essentially serving to fill in the gap between a class designed for potential new members and another on spiritual gifts that will soon be starting. However, the last two Sundays have been particularly challenging to me.
Last week, our discussion revolved around the idea that our conception of God effects virtually every other aspect of our lives. I have often said that the primary issue that I had in my rebellious days of drugs was not chemical dependency: it was the sense of despair brought about by a worldview without God and therefore devoid of hope. This is why I frequently refer to myself as a “disillusioned idealist,” a commonality I share with many musicians who compose the popular songs of our day. The angst-driven lyrics lament the problem of evil, crying out against “the good” for creating a world which has so many atrocities in it. Pick up a newspaper if you would like specific examples: the problem of evil and suffering is well documented. But what do songs like this really tell us?
If we really believe the world is a place without hope as we claim, what would be the point in bothering to express our frustration and anger against it? Do people get angry when they are truly apathetic? I maintain that musicians are compelled to write lyrics of this sort precisely because they are idealists who secretly believe that the world should be a much nicer place than what it is. But what compels them—or anyone—to feel this way? Do they believe on some level that the world should be a good place? What gives them this notion? If “the good” is really so bad, why do they still entertain disillusionment over its apparent loss? It would seem that they have unwittingly sided with the good even as they denounce it, like the person in love who puts forth an impressive display of “not caring” when their affections go unrequited. In both cases, this fact is most likely veiled even from themselves, though in the latter case, most people on the outside can clearly see the real motivation. Still, what prompts such high expectations that lead to such a devastating sense of loss? Why do we secretly believe that the world ought to be a better place than what it seems to be?
For the time at least, I will leave these cliffhanger questions exactly as they are. I could spoon feed you involved answers, of course, but in the end, I would merely fulfill the prophetic words of British novelist E.M. Forster (1879–1970) quoted in the London newspaper The Observer: “Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.” The simple fact is that there is nothing in this world that is going to provide us with easy answers. And, as my spiritual poverty has demonstrated, there is little within me that is going to provide any answer either. It is as Frank Perretti jestingly said in a lecture entitled “What We Believe”: “If you are looking for answers, don’t look inside yourself. You’re the one who’s confused.” I think that we could make too much of such a statement: I believe that there is some degree of goodness within us, though I am not convinced that the pop gurus who preach finding oneself by looking inward are exactly on the right track either. We find a mixed bag within ourselves that Christianity claims is the result of imago Dei merged with autonomy gone awry: willful little rebels created in the image of the unchanging God.
The fact is, if there is going to be any kind of answer to these questions, it is going to have to come from somewhere beyond. In its most basic format, the answers to life take on one of two forms: either we declare as an act of faith that the universe contains no answer and is ultimately without hope or meaning or we declare as an act of faith that our desire for hope and meaning points to something that exists beyond ourselves and this world to fulfill it. When we find ourselves at the crossroads of doubt, our rope run out and our options exhausted, we must venture out on faith in one direction or the other. Do we declare as fact that the world is without answers or do we conclude that there are answers and it is worth our time and effort to pursue them? The strange thing that I have noted is that for many of us, if we have truly reached that point of despair where everything in our world has crumbled to dust, very few of us settle for the answer that there are no answers.
On my way back from the Kansas City International airport this afternoon, I was listening to some recorded messages from Ravi Zacharias. In the second part of his series “Why I am not an Atheist,” Zacharias noted that in the trying times of life, such as when we are standing at the bedside of a dying loved one or next to the graveside of someone dear to us, rarely do we turn to the philosophers for answers. In fact, he continued on, even Albert Camus (1913–1960) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) admitted that death was the ultimate problem for philosophy. And when it comes down to it, none of us can claim that the answers we have are irrefutable. In the face of certain death, we maintain hope of something more, and often we cling to hope against the surface evidence that speaks to the contrary. But something deep within does cling to hope; the strange thing about faith and hope is that both often thrive best in the barren desert of spiritual poverty. I suppose this is only to be expected: as a friend of our family’s always jokes after enjoying a fine meal: “A funny thing happens when I sit down to eat: I always end up losing my appetite.” Indeed, it would seem that the old proverb still holds true today: “Hunger is the best sauce.”
I have done some thinking in the midst of my gloomy feelings. Giving up or giving in simply are not options for me, at least not for the long haul. When you give up your hope and your faith and let go, to whence do you fall? When I am already feeling low, why would I wish to go lower? My real problem is that the disillusioned idealist in me rises again: secretly, the direction I really wish I could head is up. However, my self-absorption frequently keeps me in bondage, for I either believe I do not have what it takes or try to convince myself otherwise. The reason I mention the latter is I have often heard our spiritual struggles described as smokescreens that camoflauge deeper issues of the heart. If this is true, as I am inclined to believe, then this revelation would suggest that the question raised in this week’s Sunday school lesson is the determining factor: from whence do I derive my fulfillment?
Let us suppose for the sake of an argument that my surreptitious sin can provide me with the satisfaction I secretly believe it will afford. If this is true, why the regret I feel afterward? Is it merely because I have been so programmed to believe that this behavior or thought pattern is wrong? or is it because on some level deeper still it truly does not satisfy me? In my own case, at least, I have merely to take a look at empirical evidence: probability, statistics, first-hand experience, and the like. If this sinful pattern of behavior is merely a culturally conditioned taboo and not ultimately wrong, why does it breed so little satisfaction for the masses? If it were merely my own upbringing, that would be one thing, but when it breaks cross-cultural barriers? Why is it that those who engage in this type of thought or behavior—whatever it happens to be—find so little happiness? Could it be that it is a lie I have chosen to believe, that just as a dog returns to its vomit, so too I return again and again to my vice of choice thinking it will fulfill me, forever forgetting that the pleasure is always short lived? Is this why humanity universally does such dumb and diabolical things?
Here we are faced with an awesome dilemma. We can sermonize all we want, but it does not change a thing. In fact, the Apostle Paul speaks of it when he asks what or who can rescue him from his body of death, for he does the very things he knows go against morality and right behavior and yet he persists in his behavior. The answer Paul gives is the same answer that any pastor or preacher would offer: “Thanks be to Christ.” The problem, I suppose, is that we often chafe under this yoke. Admitting that we are spiritual paupers, unworthy to be called sons and daughters of God, is lethal to our ego and sense of pride. We like to think of ourselves as being rather spiritual and if we must confess to having patterns of sin and guilt in our lives, we prefer to put it in the past tense, “I know because I have been there and I struggled through. But that is all behind me now—it happened months ago. Now that I am on the other side, let me take your hand and help you up sister, brother.” The problem is that for many of us, we live here. The façades that we erect may fool others, may even fool ourselves—“You can fool some of the people . . .”—but in the end?
So you see, taking a month off from my newsletter writing did not result in the kind of spiritual renewal I expected. I am perhaps even more impoverished than when I left off writing. The big difference is, in spite of the continuing frenetic whirlwind of the past several weeks, I have not had the newsletter to hide behind. Maybe the newsletter is a good thing: in fact, usually it is, I think, for it keeps me accountable at times when nothing else would (and I would like to believe that it is an encouragement to others as well). How can I continue to write words that are bold-faced lies and live with my own smoldering conscience? However, I have not had this added level of accountability the past four weeks; in fact, I have had few persons to whom I must answer for anything I have done. What I have discovered, once all the props have been discarded, is that I am guilty of “selective service.” If I excel in a spiritual virtue of my convenience here and another one well suited to my personality there then I can smugly join the list of spiritual superheros: the Richard Fosters, the Brother Lawrences, the Mother Teresas, the Saint Francises of Assissis. I think you will find, however, that the one thing these giants of the Christian faith all had in common was a recognition that they were but paupers. They did not chafe under the yoke but instead swallowed their pride and got honest with themselves and with God.
As you may have inferred, this need for honesty is the ultimate reason I took my hiatus from writing, for when the connection is firmly established, writing flows out of me even when my schedule is exceptionally limited. Frankly, I do not feel qualified to write this week any more than I did when I left off writing four weeks ago. But it would seem that is just the point. I am not qualified. I am not a saint in the popular sense. I am not the illustrious man of God filled with perennial piety. I am what I am: an ordinary man convinced of the truth of Christianity, yet struggling with its particulars. I am a man who goes through many false starts and stops. I am a man disillusioned in many ways with organized Christianity, a man who tends to distrust clergymen and women and anything that parades around in the name of piety. On the other hand, I am a man who is caught up in the very system he denounces, a man who hungers for something deeper and something more, something that transcends (and hopefully transforms) manmade institutions.
I have noticed time and again that when I start criticizing the church for its failings, it is almost always the result of my own spiritual poverty. When I am hungry for the bread of heaven yet feel I feast on fistfuls of dirt, I am often at my most critical of “organized religion.” I would dare say that the vast majority of the skeptics I encounter—the skeptics you encounter—your own skepticism—is the result of the disillusioned idealist within that has a vague, half-formed notion of something more—a sense of something missing—that feels the anger of frustration that it does not seem to be found in the institution that claims to contain it. I wish to defer for a moment to a brilliant essay I read while sitting in the airport terminal today, one that reminded me somewhat of Plato’s allegory of “the cave”:
Let us construct a fable. Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon walls, the straw on the floor, and a little patch of sky seen through the grating, which is too high up to show anything except sky. This unfortunate woman was an artist, and when they imprisoned her, she managed to bring with her a drawing pad and a box of pencils. As she never loses the hope of deliverance, she is constantly teaching her son about that outer world which he has never seen. She does it very largely by drawing him pictures. With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities, and waves on the beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon. At times he succeeds. On the whole he gets on tolerably well until, one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. For a minute or two they are at cross-purposes. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. “But,” she gasps, “you did not think that the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?” “What?” says the boy. “No pencil marks there?” And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense of the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition—the waving of treetops, the light dancing on the weir, the coloured three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes at every moment with a delicacy and multiplicity which no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. In reality, it lacks lines becomes it is incomparably more visible. (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. “Transposition,” p. 68–9.)
Lewis uses this analogy to talk of Transposition (of things above translated into “lesser” things below), but I do not think it is at all out accord with his essay to suggest that it can be carried over into any incarnation or institution of Christ. For our purposes, I am using this analogy to suggest that when we critique the church, not in an effort to improve it, but merely because we are feeling cynical, we are guilty of a thing similar to that of the boy. We have been taken in by the lines, not imagining that however imperfectly they may have been drawn, they might actually point to a reality that does answer the question for which we search, the thirst we seek to quench, the nagging sense of something more we try to appease.
Lewis is arguing against a skeptic’s view of spiritual reality, first discussing his own discomfort with the concept of glossolalia, the theologian’s “shop talk” for speaking in tongues. The skeptic will discount all incidents as being merely mania and hysteria, and, Lewis notes, perhaps with good reason. But he maintains that this is not always the case, noting that the skeptic may here cite Ockham’s razor (or “Occam’s,” as the Lewis spells it). Simply put, Lewis says that while glossolalia can perhaps be explained as “an involuntary discharge of nervous excitement” in the vast majority of cases, what about those instances that remain? Is the Christian such as Lewis who is made uncomfortable by such manifestations prepared to dismiss Pentecost as a “nervous fabrication”? What about the skeptic who, as Lewis points out, may accuse us of multiplying hypotheses, of standing in violation of Ockham’s Razor? What about ourselves, if we sit in the skeptic’s seat?
Put in the most general terms, our problem is that of the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which, it is claimed, are spiritual; the reappearance in what professes to be our supernatural life of all the same elements which make up our natural life and (it would seem) of no others. If we really have been visited by a revelation from beyond Nature, is it not very strange that an Apocalypse can furnish heaven with nothing more than selections from terrestrial experience (crowns, thrones, music), that the devotion can find no language but that of human lovers, and that the rite whereby Christians enact a mystical union should turn out to be only the old, familiar act of eating and drinking? Hence cynics very plausibly challenge our civilised conception of the difference between love and lust by pointing out that when all is said and done they usually end in what is physically the same act. They similarly challenge the difference between justice and revenge on the ground that what finally happens to the criminal may be the same. And in all these cases, let us admit that the cynics and the skeptics have a good prima facie case. The same acts do reappear in justice as well as in revenge; the consummation of humanised and conjugal love is physiologically the same as that of the merely biological lust; religious language and imagery, and probably religious emotion too, contains nothing that has not been borrowed from Nature. (Ibid., 56–7)
This observation gives a new kind of twist to Bulgarian-born writer Elias Canetti’s statement that “All literature wavers between nature and paradise and loves to mistake one for the other” (The Agony of Flies).
From here, Lewis talks about the physiological parallels between pleasure and pain and how these both affect the body in the same way, but in the one case, the physiological manifestation becomes pleasure, in the other, it becomes a part of the pain. He builds a self-described empirical case from his own introspection and a passage from Pepy’s Diary, but I marveled at the fact that psychological studies have in recent years empirically demonstrated the same on a much more formal level:
Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer (1962) developed a theory of emotion that gives cognition a strong role. They agree that emotional events produce internal, physiological arousal. As we sense the arousal, we look to the external world for an explanation of why we are aroused. We interpret the external cues present and then label the emotion. For example, if you feel good after someone has made a pleasant comment to you, you might label the emotion “happy.” If you feel bad after you have done something wrong, you might label the feeling “guilty.” Schachter and Singer believe much of our arousal is diffuse and not tied to specific emotions. Because the arousal is not instinctive, its meaning is easily misinterpreted.
To test their theory of emotion, Schachter and Singer (1962) injected subjects with epinephrine, a drug that produces high arousal. After volunteer subjects were given the drug, they observed someone else behave in either a euphoric way (shooting crumpled paper at a wastebasket) or an angry way (stomping out of the room). As predicted, the euphoric and angry behavior influenced the subjects’ cognitive interpretation of their own arousal. When they were with a happy person, they rated themselves as happy; when they were with an angry person, they said they were angry. But this effect was found only when the subjects were not told about the true effects of the injection. When subjects were told that the drug would increase their heart rate and make them jittery, they said the reason for their own arousal was the drug, not the other person’s behavior.
Psychologists have had difficulty replicating the Schachter and Singer experiment but, in general, research supports the belief that misinterpreted arousal intensifies emotional experiences (Leventhal & Tomarken, 1986). An intriguing study substantiates this belief. It went like this: An attractive woman approached men while they were crossing the Capilano River Bridge in British Columbia. Only those without a female companion were approached. The woman asked the men to make up a brief story for a project she was doing on creativity (Dutton & Aron, 1974). By the way, the Capilano River Bridge sways precariously more than 200 feet above rapids and rocks. The female interviewer made the same request of other men crossing a much safer, lower bridge. The men on the Capilano River Bridge told more sexually oriented stories and rated the female observer more attractive than the men on the lower, less frightening bridge did. (Halonen, Jane S., and John W. Santrock. Psychology: Contexts and Applications. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999. 358–60.)
While Lewis used a quotation from Pepy’s Diary to demonstrate in lieu of this type of formal empiricism, his point remains: “If I were to judge simply by sensations, I would come to the absurd conclusion that joy and anguish are the same thing, that the thing that I most dread is the same with what I most desire. Introspection discovers nothing more or different in the one than in the other” (58). He believes that the reason for this is that our emotions are “higher” than our physical responses.
. . . I believe that if anyone watches carefully the relation between his emotions and his sensations he will discover the following facts: (1) that the nerves do respond, and in a sense most adequately and exquisitely, to the emotions; (2) that their resources are far more limited, the possibilities of sense far fewer, than those of emotion; and (3) that the senses compensate for this by using the same sensation to express more than one emotion—even, as we have seen, to express opposite emotions.
Where we tend to go wrong is in assuming that if there is to be a correspondence between two systems it must be a one-for-one correspondence—that A in the one system must be represented by a in the other, and so on. But the correspondence between emotion and sensation turns out not to be of that sort. And there never could be correspondence of that sort where one system was really richer than the other. If the richer system is to be represented by the poorer system at all, this can only be by giving each element in the poorer system more than one meaning. [. . .] If you are to translate from a language that has a large vocabulary into a language that has a smaller vocabulary, then you must be allowed to use several words in more than one sense. . . .
He gives several more examples of translations from high to low and then makes a fascinating observation. The relation between speech and writing is that of symbolism: the sound that forms the word and the way it looks on the printed page are merely arbitrary conventions. In fact, it was none other than the Swiss linguistic pioneer Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) who spoke of a sign, defining it as consisting jointly of both the signifier and the signified: if I speak of an orange, the printed word on the page and the vocal sound I make to form the word are the signifiers, the picture that the signifier forms in my mind is the signified. However, it is interesting to note that even the signified is merely a psychological construct: if an orange exists in the speaker’s presence, it is only incidental to the arbitrary use of language and its resultant mental conceptions: no such tangible reality need be present to communicate the point. I visualize a concept based on prior experience with a type of fruit I can peel and eat, getting its juice all over my beard and making a terrible mess. I doubt you have an orange next to you right now. How is it then that you can imagine someone with juice in his beard?
In another example Lewis gives of a painting of a landscape, it goes beyond symbolism, for the painting is itself part of the visual world and relies on the same light; it also exists in dimensional reality, though it relies on the bulk of its flat surface to portray three dimensions. It is more than simply a sign, it is in a sense a part of the same visual medium. This he likens to sensation and emotion: sensation is not merely symbolic of emotion but part of the same system, though a “lower” level representation. He also mentions the difference between thoughts and the often undetectable difference in neural activity from one thought to the next, thoughts transcending the gray matter with which they interface.
. . . Our problem was that in what claims to be our spiritual life all the elements of our natural life recur, and, what is worse, it looks at first glance as if no other elements were present. We now see that if the spiritual is richer than the natural (as no one who believes in its existence would deny), then this is exactly what we should expect. And the sceptic’s conclusion that the so-called spiritual is really derived from the natural, that it is a mirage or projection or imaginary extension of the natural, is also exactly what we should expect, for, as we have seen, this is the mistake that an observer who knew only the lower medium would be bound to make in every case of Transposition. The brutal man never can by analysis find anything but lust in love; the Flatlander never can find anything but flat shapes in a picture; physiology never can find anything in thought except twitchings of the grey matter. It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible. (64)
He leads out of the above paragraph with the sentence, “Everything is different when you approach the Transposition from above, as we all do in the case of emotion and sensation or the three-dimensional world and pictures, and as the spiritual man does in the case we are considering” (64). He then speaks of those who engage in “the deliberate refusal to understand things from above” when such is possible, likening them to a dog’s level of cognizance who, when its master points a finger, misses the meaning of the gesture entirely and instead stares stupidly at the fact of the pointing finger (71–2).
I think that the case is well made for my conception of the church here on earth. It is a both a symbol as well as in some sense a part of the reality of Christ, yet it will fall sadly short if its reality is all we see. I fear that I, like nearly all of my skeptical friends, often see only the manmade institution and fail to see the reality to which it points—or more importantly fail to realize such an incarnation in my own life. The symbol of the church, however, is double sided. Its corruption and fallibility points us to its human nature as bride of Christ, forcing us to realize that grace and forgiveness mean the bestowing of royalty on penitent paupers, not on qualified dignitaries. If salvation were the subject of a job application, many would be turned away because they were “over-qualified,” not because they were truly over-qualified, but because they multiplied words upon words on their résumés, expecting that their previous experience and expertise would win them “heavenly thrones of gold”—or perhaps for the more modest merely ones of sterling silver. :) None of us like to admit that we are sinners and that even as spiritual men and women, the roots of selfishness and a mixed bag of motives will plague us until the day we die. There are two warring natures within us all and to the man or woman of God willing to get honest, Christ is the only equalizer: no one may boast.
The second prong we overlook in the symbol of the church, however, is the outpouring of grace and the manifestation of spiritual fruit. It will not be perfect, of course, and a Christian man or woman will by and large resemble any other man or woman, yet there is a subtle difference. This difference may become obscured by the sinful nature of the church, but one is more likely to find it here than in the world at large. Seekers may very well abound in both arenas, but at some point it is the hope and conviction of the church that the search has found its object and now the seeking has become specific: a quest for Christ as opposed to the search for an unknown something. Because the church represents seekers seeking Christ—even if these seekers have lingering sinful tendencies—it manifests His higher reality in its commonality, thereby providing encouragement and support in spite of the flaws and fallibility of its overarching auspices.
Whenever I feel rebellion welling up within me as I have of late—whenever I turn to something other than Christ to fulfill my needs—I not only begin to feel distant from God, but distant from the people who assemble in His name as well. I often do not really notice what is happening, for I feel justified in pointing out organized Christianity’s faults. The same is true for the married believer who begins to see the small, annoying, and petty details of her mate and family members. Whenever we are miserable on the inside, we tend to become more critical, which prompts the conventional bit of wisdom that the harder a person is to love, the more he or she needs it. We all know people who lash out at love, distrusting it—we all have been (and are) those people in some form or another—and when we see such persons as Christ sees them, we recognize their unsightly ways are borne of inner pain.
A strange paradox always results when we get honest. When we stop trying to dress up for the masquerade and simply stand in tattered rags, pride melted in the desperation of the destitute, dirty, tears streaming down our face, ribs sticking out and our hair matted and filthy, we will then reflect the glory of God like never before. In the end, we are all ragged urchins underserving of the white bridal gowns of unmerited righteousness that we, Christ’s bride and God’s children the church, will wear on the day of that great wedding banquet. We may rail against the church until we turn all the colors of the spectrum, but in the end, if the church lacks beauty it is because of people like us who refuse to drop the pretexts, thinking it is more spiritual to feign piety than to admit poverty. I do not know about you, but I am hungry, poor, needy, and not in the least qualified to do what I do. If there is any power at all in these newsletters, it is because of their jagged edges. And on this inelegant and inglorious note, I will simply stop typing and sign my name.
God bless,
Eric
“He raises the poor from the dust, He lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with nobles, and inherit a seat of honor; For the pillars of the earth are the LORD’S, and He set the world on them.”
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