Genji Tales: Lo! the Handmaiden of the Lord

I have cleared my classes for the night and am basking in a much needed evening off. It feels wonderful after a long work day to have an entire evening to myself to devote to whatever I please: in this case, the writing of a newsletter. I must confess that my steady diet of literature and French grammar furnish little inspiration for spiritual writing. As stimulating as good literature can be and as deep, the main focus of my reading as of late has been the 1749 novel Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. It is an interesting, albeit very long, novel: nearly a thousand pages and allegedly one of the first novels ever written. At least, that is what the course teaches us. Truth be told, however, I have heard of a certain Murasaki Shikibu, a Japanese court lady and author who wrote The Tale of Genji around 1010, which the Encarta World English dictionary claims is “considered one of the world’s first novels.” (It too is very long: over a thousand pages.) Perhaps, when my Restoration and Eighteenth Century Literature class boasts of Fielding’s accomplishments, it has a purely Western view in mind. If such be the case, Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales (written from 1387 to 1400) and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) have caused a bit of controversy, though many critics do not feel that these works have adequately met the criteria for a “novel.” (Of course, what that criteria consist of is precisely the source of contention.) Canterbury Tales, as beautifully and imaginatively executed as it is, is said to lack the inner psychological development of the characters; Pilgrim’s Progress is said to be too allegorical. So, that leaves Fielding’s Tom Jones of 1749 the arguable victor, for the central characters are as three-dimensional as most any you might meet in present day novels. In fact, his style reminds me quite a bit of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), a man who can himself easily rival any modern author and who may well have drawn inspiration from Fielding’s work.

Now then, I did not mean to give you a lesson in regard to the first occurrences of the literary genre we know today as the novel, as interesting as that might be in its own right. In fact, the only reason I brought it up in the first place was to complain that when one is immersed in little but reading novels and studying French (at least in its early stages where the grammar is still the primary topic), inspiration to write deeply on spiritual matters can be sadly lacking. To some degree, my Wednesday reading group saves me, though there can be a difference between what one writes about and what one talks about in informal fellowship. Imagine going through your life not being able to enjoy anything for its own sake because you are always looking for a topic to write about, each moment filtered through this greedy lens. I spend far too much time doing this very thing, which translates to several interrelated facts: I enjoy the immediacy and candor of the Wednesday night group too much to want to turn it exclusively into fodder for writing, writing, and more writing. (For every newsletter you read, quite a few more pages are often written in between that you never see: writer’s burnout often lurks less than a step away.) But beyond the Wednesday night group, all people need a chance to occasionally do something just for its own sake, setting the business aspects aside and letting their hair down for a few hours of exquisite simplicity, perhaps raking leaves in the fall for the express purpose of jumping in them or playing tag football or Frisbee in the yard with friends. So how does an author cope with it all? That’s easily enough answered. By writing, of course! But the key is what one writes about. Does he write about what he wishes or merely what is required of him? While the former is often invigorating, the latter can easily become an exercise in exasperation.

As long as I have something to express, writing these newsletters is pleasurable. The problem arises during times like these when my life feels dry and withered, the majority of my spiritual input consisting of French lessons and eighteenth century novels, the bulk of my spiritual output consisting of yesterday’s capital warmed over. Now it might be such a thing that what is to me yesterday’s spiritual capital would be to you a compellingly fresh perspective. The problem is that I am not you and what is more, I am of that peculiar breed of people known as authors. So if I am to write about something, I really prefer it to be personally compelling. I could teach you the lessons I learned in my early days of Christianity, but how much better when they naturally weave themselves in as part of something current and fresh. So then, what happens when the freshness stagnates and I find myself stocking the Le Penseur Réfléchit shelves with leftover produce? That’s when I do what all the great Romantic poets did when they experienced writer’s block: I write about it. I write about my feelings about writing; I write about the spiritual blockage that I feel because that is current and that is what is really going on with me at the moment. I also write on this subject because I hope that by doing so, I can get the infernal blockage melted away and once again helm the prow into waters of a more compelling nature.

Truth be told, I am no superman. I am a rather ordinary mortal, peculiar in his own ways as are we all. I have certain strengths and certain weaknesses and most of the time, my weaknesses are merely my strengths turned inside out and vice versa. What I am definitely not is an inexhaustible wellspring of spiritual knowledge: a treasury house that never runs low. In this regard, I am not alone. Your pastor, priest, teacher, mentor—in sum the men and women of God in your life who oversee your spiritual well being—are just like me. They are not indefatigable fountains. There are no superheroes, only men and women called of God to do their part in the great commission of life, living it well and truly before God and man.

There is, of course, the ideal. And ideals exist to keep us charting a steady course ahead, hinting at possibilities far beyond our current state while simultaneously showing us our inconsistencies and reminding us “there but by the grace of God go I.” The ideal is the perfect: there is no higher ideal than our Heavenly Father who commands us to be perfect even as He is perfect. So there is one side of the equation: the heavenly ideal. The other side of the equation is the earthly actual. This is the real world where “us” mere mortals reside and live and have our being. In this world, pastors, teachers, and spiritual mentors are just like authors: they get burned out. They are not inexhaustible wellsprings of spiritual insight, though we seem to expect them to be and can quickly grow disillusioned when we find that they are not. So what’s a boy or girl to do? There are no superheroes in our ranks, merely men and women of the hour operating on the same resources available to any other mortal. There can be a certain release in this realization.

We are fellow sojourners on the same spiritual journey (though the individual steps will be as different as the individuals who take them); we are all various members of the same body. And this realization is one of the first steps to freedom and spiritual renewal: We all get weak. We all get tired. There are no superheroes. There are, I repeat, men and women of the hour who step up to the plate in the time of need. When one falls another can come along and lift him up again. Brothers helping brothers, sisters helping sisters, sisters helping brothers, and brothers helping sisters. The Kingdom of Heaven, as a friend recently so wisely noted, is indeed within us. It is our hands and feet that our Lord uses to minister: ordinary vessels of clay called upon to do ordinary acts of charity toward extraordinary ends. A cup of cold water, a shoulder to cry on, a listening ear, a kind smile, a word of encouragement when life has broadsided our brother. It usually doesn’t take much: just a bit of time and a will to want.

We don’t have to spend our lives merely reacting to the climate around us. Rather, we can become agents of change, recognizing that true freedom does what it wants no matter what outward circumstances may bring. But this needs an example, for examples often illumine our way most clearly. I once heard a tale (and my readers will forgive me if they recognize it, for I surely do not remember its source), supposedly true, of two friends who were walking down the street together. The first gentlemen stopped at a newsstand to pick up an issue of the daily paper as was his custom. The man selling the newspapers was a surly, crusty old chap, though still rather young in terms of years. Put simply, the vendor had little good to say about anyone and much less to our gentleman of interest. And so, after being rudely treated by this purveyor of papers, our gentleman pleasantly wished the ill-mannered fellow a good day and walked away whistling, accompanied by his incredulous companion. When the two were out of earshot of the salesman, the second gentleman turned and asked the first, “Does he act that way often?”

Catching his friend’s eye, the first man replied simply, “I am not going to let him control me; I will not let him decide for me what kind of day I am going to have.”

And so, we see, that no matter what our outward circumstances are, we always have the power to act as we will “recognizing that true freedom does what it wants no matter what outward circumstances may bring.” But we also must realize that there will be those days where our temper wears thin and our resolve wears even thinner. Those are the days that our purposeful approach to life soon finds itself hanging down over our ears, a lopsided bundle of resolve gone badly awry. The good news is, “That’s okay.” And as long as we resolve to make it right, there really isn’t any bad news, at least that we can formulate into blanket statements to fit the many vicissitudes of life. In any case, we will surely not always live this decided, intentional life: we will fumble and falter far more often than we care to admit. But that is where the world of the ideal and the real come into play.

There are folks, who, like their “politically correct” counterparts, are what I might term “religiously correct.” Such persons will shut down anything that does not have the ring of piety to it for fear that their poor ears might be unduly assaulted? or do I unfairly paint them, in need of remonstration myself? For whatever reason some persons are “religiously correct” (I strongly suspect it has more to do with their personal insecurity), they seem to think it a virtue to deny the real while living in an unreal ideal. But this surely is just backwards to the whole of Christianity. Repentance always precedes the realization of forgiveness. And repentance is an act of honesty that sees clearly the ugliness of the real in order that the ideal may be fully actualized.

So then, we see that we must first see the “real” very clearly. In fact, if we are to move past this point, it doesn’t hurt us a bit to see the real with uncomfortable clarity. But we must not stop here: we must not excuse the “real” away and say that because it is this way, it is the way it ought to be. For surely it is not the way it ought to be, for it is not the way of God, and Scripture clearly tells us to be imitators of the God in whose image we have been created. So the ideal is effected to compare and contrast with the real. It is the measuring stick to show us what needs to be changed and at what point it needs to be changed and even perhaps how it needs to be changed. But, since we have kept the “real” in our thoughts as well, we soon see that the ideal is higher than we. And it is precisely in this moment that the Kingdom of God begins to be actualized within our soul. It is the poor in spirit who possess the Kingdom of Heaven, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. If we are not poor in spirit, we do not hunger and thirst for righteousness; if we are not hungry and thirsty, we shall never be filled.

The first statement in the twelve step recovery program consists of this confession: “We admit we are powerless over our addiction—that our lives have become unmanageable.” What hits me so powerfully is the realization that this admission is not a giving up of anything (for there is nothing to give): it is simply an honest recognition of the truth that has always existed. The fact that it comes from a recovery program has nothing to do with its truth, for the principle is universal. The only difference is that the addict has had the greater gift because his lifestyle has pointed out his inner poverty with deafening clarity. It is precisely at this breaking point in any sinner’s life that the dam bursts and the Kingdom of Heaven comes pouring in with all of its splendor, that the King of Heaven comes riding in with all of His majesty. As the old saying goes, true spiritual transformation is always “an inside job.” Or, as Evelyn Underhill has wisely said: “God comes to the soul in His working clothes and He brings His tools with Him.”

Now then, on a little different thread: there was a fairy tale I remember as a child in which a crafty tailor outsmarted a rather dimwitted giant. Among the pranks he pulled were two involving rocks: the first was to see who could throw the rock the furthest. The giant, of course, was smug that he would win and hurled a big boulder for several miles. The resourceful tailor, however, threw a bird into the air that took flight and disappeared ne’er to return. This impressed the giant and another dual was proposed: Who could squeeze the most water out of a rock? The giant was certain he would get the better of the little man, so he picked up a rock and squeezed with all his might. Despite all his efforts, only a few drops came out of the rock. The tailor, however, squeezed a piece of cheese and won the dual yet again. I don’t remember the moral of the story. I don’t remember how it ended. I just know that in what bit of free time I have managed to wrangle out of my busy schedule (which has amounted to little more than a few drops), I did find a moment or two to read the introduction to Provocations, a sort of “portable Kierkegaard” courtesy of Bruderhof Communities. (To download a free version as a PDF e-book, just follow this link to The Plough: Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and theologian who lived between 1813 and 1855.) I also completed the entry on Kierkegaard in Rhetoric and Human Consciousness: A History by Craig R. Smith (274–9).

Kierkegaard’s thought is at once simple and profound. Perhaps the single-minded obsession that plagued Kierkegaard in terms of authentic Christianity is one of the most difficult questions to answer: “Who am I?” Put differently, we might ask: “Who is this me who speaks of I?” For Kierkegaard, in an insight something like Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum, he felt that the self was the only ultimate answer to life, for it is only with the self that we apprehend anything else—including our Maker. Other philosophers of his day, namely Hegel (and Kant before him), believed that truth would only be known through an objective division of things: an either/or that learned by dividing the world up into smaller sections, by separating this idea from that. Yet Kierkegaard maintained that “consciousness itself transcended these divisions as a reflection of the One” (Smith, 275). In order for there to even exist an “either/or” there has to be a single consciousness to discern the “eithers” from the “ors.” And getting in touch with this essential self—Kierkegaard is not called “the father of existentialism” for no reason—is the path by which one comes into an authentically Christian life. Let’s take a step back and put the pieces into place.

Kierkegaard’s framework assumes three stages in the journey to God and authenticity. The first of the three levels he defines as the aesthetic. Writes Provocations compiler and editor Charles E. Moore:

However, the aesthetic life brings no lasting satisfaction. And it is precisely in the tensions of this surface level of life that some people find the inclination of a higher way. For example, a man might kick his dog in a fit of rage and suffer guilt and anxiety because of his actions. He recognizes that “this is not me,” and there is a tension between his unexamined life and something he recognizes to be wrong. We might say that this was the man’s conscience beginning to awaken. In any case, like the addict who has hit bottom, these sorts of crisis experiences can eventually cause a person to recognize that he is not alone in the universe and that there are consequences for his actions. In the second level of awareness such tensions between the real and ideal can raise, the ethical sense is born, a man’s perception of selfhood continually reexamined and redefined during this period. As each new crisis presents itself, he must either redefine his sense of right and wrong or change his behavior to reflect his beliefs if he wishes to relieve his tension. It is in this stage that one begins to recognize his sense of self: that part of him that “wouldn’t kick dogs” and therefore chooses either to modify his behavior or redefine his sense of morality to make kicking dogs permissible. In effect, he is both shaping himself by his choices as well as discovering who he really is. Yet how can this be? As Christians, we believe we were created for a purpose. Could it be that the man who continually adjusts to align his conscience with his character is ultimately shaping himself into the image his Maker intends? Could this be a further example of the ideal brought to bear upon the real?

The ethical sphere requires reflection, introspection, and the reprioritization of values. This is an often painful process and could perhaps be seen as corresponding to St. John’s “dark night of the soul” and the sense in which the death of ego (also known as the doctrine of “mortification”) slowly occurs of which the Christian mystics speak. But it is through this process, maintains Kierkegaard, that we begin to learn who our authentic self is and it is then, and only then, that we can be honest with ourselves, others, and God Himself. Perhaps the one thing that the honest man will recognize about himself (for humble honesty is the crux of the ethical life) is that he fails to measure up even to his own moral standards, much less those of God. He recognizes rather painfully that within himself he is inadequate. This dawning precedes the final stage of the authentic Christian journey where he takes that infamous leap of faith and surrenders himself wholly to God. This is a necessarily subjective experience, for the workings of God take place in the inner man, the Spirit of God and the man’s spirit become united. There is no objective proof that can be offered for this experience, perhaps part of the reason Scripture doesn’t offer us any. It is clear enough to the man himself, for just as he knows his own spirit, so too he learns to know God’s Spirit that now resides within him. But to the man standing right next to him: well, he might very well taste of his friend’s spiritual fruit, but he will not have his coveted proof, for the Kingdom of Heaven is a subjective, inward experience. It is not objective and outward as one might expect, though we use the terms objective and subjective in a slightly different connotation than is often given: often objective is considered preferable to subjective if for no other reason because it is more readily quantified.

This final stage where the man throws himself unreservedly upon the mercies of God is the religious stage, and as Provocations kindly points out: “This sphere has nothing to do with institutional religion per se.” It has everything to do with “total immersion” in God. He now strives to follow God as his highest ethical ideal, not some external system of standards. But this ethical ideal is not a static set of standards: it is the living God. In one of his best known passages in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard uses the example of Abraham and God’s command to sacrifice his only son Isaac. If Abraham had been living on a purely ethical realm, he would never have agreed to such a thing. He would have assumed he heard wrong, for a kind and loving God would never have asked him to slay his own son. In a word, his theology would have interfered with the workings of God. But because he lived on the religious sphere, God’s command superseded all of his reservations and it was counted to him as righteousness.

Does Kierkegaard have the right answer? I believe we could safely say that he is well on his way; we could also say that he has likely given the subject far more thought than either you or I. One objection that I have turned around in my mind, however, is the inherent danger of such a subjective approach to God. Someone might well ask, “What happens if we believe we are following God and instead it turns out the evil one has led us astray?” What, for example, happens when the Abrahams of our day merely think they are being asked to slay their Isaacs? As I considered this possibility (for it was among my own reservations), I realized it belied my lack of faith and unreserved abandonment to God. It seems to me, as I consider Kierkegaard’s prospect, that I fail to believe that God is all-powerful, all-loving, and all-seeing if I concern myself too long with such questions. Let us assume that an evil spirit does indeed speak to me and I mistake it for the Holy Spirit. God knows the desires of my heart (consequently seeing my desire to follow Him) and absolutely nothing happens without His allowance. So, if He permits an evil spirit to speak to me, He will not let that spirit deceive me beyond what He allows. He will, if you like, send an angel to still my hand before that fateful stroke and it will be counted unto me as righteousness. He is Master over life, what is death to Him? He is Lord of it as well: we have nothing to fear on earth. More often, those requests falling peculiarly upon my inner ear—they could not possibly be the voice of God, could they?—weave strange magic and accomplish the impossible: the woman who has never lain with man heavy with child, the miraculous virgin birth conceived within me: “Lo! the handmaiden of the Lord. Be it unto me as Thou sayest.” If my sole desire is to abandon myself to Him, I have nothing to fear no matter who whispers in my ear, for in doubting myself, I may be doubting Him in disguise: He is in control even of me and my penchant for errant whimsicality. My sincerity will never lead me astray for long, for in God’s transforming economy, no ultimate harm will come of it: no, not only that, but it will work out together for good, in accordance with Scripture. I am reminded of a passage from Hannah Whitall Smith’s classic The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life:

Archive note: See also the two threads on the discussion forum regarding this newsletter: Genji and Once Again

While I believe it is entirely possible to give the devil too little credit, I believe that we, as Christians, often give him far too much. In any case, we have progressed a long way from the thoughts of an author seized with writer’s block: we have taken another peek into the mind of Kierkegaard and concluded a century later with a book written in 1952 by a Quaker named Hannah Whitall Smith. Throughout it all, we have seen the unmistakable fingerprints of God. It is enough that He uses us at all. How much more if He uses this newsletter to speak to your heart. After all, I am simply an author suffering from writer’s block in a world in which there are no superheroes, only men and women of the hour. Yet my prayer will ever be: “Lo! the handmaiden of the Lord.”

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