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October 20, 2004
Hello everyone,
As you may recall, in the last issue we spoke about wisdom, looking for it, among other places, in the Meno by Plato. Still, we could not escape the conclusion that “[T]he beginning of wisdom is surely this: to realize that I am creature and He is Creator.” You know, it is ironic that many of the things I write become prophetic of my own life but few truths prove as immediately applicable as this one has. Shortly after sending Wisdom: Socrates, the Psalmist, and the Serpent, I reached an all-time low. Most of it can be traced back to the disproportionate amount of time I spend in a secular academic environment and the mental taxation involved that leaves little time for true reflection and spiritual renewal. As such, it is easy for me to lose sight of the fact that God is God or that He even exists at all, or at least that His existence has any practical intersection with my own day to day affairs.
The very day that Wisdom: Socrates, the Psalmist, and the Serpent was mailed, I was bickering with Angela, a Christian friend you’ve “met” before, over the subject of American politics, of all things. As you probably well know, there are few issues on earth that can be more divisive than a person’s politics, particularly when someone feels very impassioned as to the truth in such matters. Perhaps to make up for lost time (for I generally avoid such topics like the plague), I was particularly vehement in my points, stacking argument upon argument. Most of my political thoughts are what might be called “meta-politics,” for my interest is not so much with the candidates or the political parties themselves but in how we, as believers, do approach—or at least should approach—the very topic. Far too often, at least in America, a person’s political affiliation is seen as a litmus test to determine his level of faith and anyone who deviates from that standard is an easy target for slanderous accusations. There is nothing Christ-like in such exchanges and the net result is often to divide the brethren while simultaneously making the Christian faith very unattractive to others. A Christian, as a citizen of his country, does well to conscientiously vote according to his convictions. But if he expects that by so doing, the world will be won to Christ, I believe he has placed too much emphasis on an admittedly powerful tool and not enough on passages like “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 4:6). But I do not want to discuss politics and I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if I haven’t elevated the blood pressure of more than one person already. In fact, I have some serious reservations about even leaving what I have written, written. Suffice it to say that my only real point for the sake of this newsletter is that I was arguing with Angela over such things and was not being the most diplomatic about it, piling argument upon argument and playing a vicious devil’s advocate. In fact, I was ranging far beyond mere “meta-politics.” After two days of such volleys, she asked me if I was okay, because I didn’t seem at all my usual gentle self.
Truth be told, I was not okay. I generally am not that interested in politics anyway and what I was ultimately doing was expressing the discontent I felt in a sort of cryptic form. I had lost my sense of perspective and grown numb, viciously lashing out, ugly on the outside because I was feeling so ugly on the inside. In fact, I think the same is generally true of mean-spirited people. Mean-spirited people are generally very unhappy people trying to relieve their own unhappiness on a scapegoat, thus fulfilling the truth that the people who are the hardest to love are those usually most in need of it. In any event, I did not respond to Angela’s question immediately, because I knew that the poison was already seeping through my veins and frankly, in such a state of mind, I had nothing constructive to say. I knew the minute I opened my mouth, my tongue would slice her to shreds before I could catch my breath, not because of anything she had done, but because I was wrestling so mightily with my own personal demons. That evening was bible study and I felt surly, getting very little out of our study. I sat very quietly and tried to go through the motions of normality while seething on the inside: it seemed everything irritated or angered me. However, noticing that I was not at all myself, my brothers and sisters who love me in Christ were not about to let me off so easily. They intervened and prayed over me and while I cannot say that the dark presence left totally, over the course of the next several days, it began to dissipate more and more, likely the result of the amount of prayer that was being offered on my behalf both through them and other prayer channels. My Christian compatriots and I have often noted that anyone in a position of leadership—anyone whose voice influences a significant portion of the populace—is a prime target: attack the shepherd and the sheep will scatter.
There was a certain resolution that was reached as my friends allowed me to talk freely about the poison that had welled up in my soul. We began to collectively realize that much of my issue was a steady onslaught of secular study and not nearly enough time to pull away and regain my perspective and my sanity. For those of you who have attended, or currently do attend, college, I am certain you can relate to those times in which you were so overloaded and overwhelmed, you scarcely knew which end was up. The next morning (two days after the release of Wisdom: Socrates, the Psalmist, and the Serpent) I penned a note to Angela which I will excerpt here in part:
I believe last night I had a breakthrough that gelled before the morning light (or at least before I got out of bed). I had never really understood what it meant not to lean on your own understanding—I mean, what it meant to really accomplish that fact—to apply it “for real” in my life. But you know how medical research shows that what a patient believes often becomes manifest? If he believes he has a disease, he may well at least develop symptoms if not the full-blown thing. Conversely, how the patient who tenaciously clings to life, believing he will get better, often does?
It would seem that human beings are creatures of faith and we are quite capable of shaping our own worlds. Whatever it is that saturates our mind will become its own reality. My mind has been saturated by a lot of relative topics such as bioethics and philosophy of law. In these arenas, men do shape their world to the best of their understanding. But the problem is that their understanding is frequently as varied as the stars of the sky and with as many contradictions one from another. You can only imagine what this does to one’s mind as he searches for truth. If one spends his days feeding on the many and varied opinions of men, who, while likely doing the best that they can and seeing with what eyesight they possess, nonetheless lean on their own understanding. I start getting the message that not only can I invent the rules but that I must—and I am always learning but ever uncertain of the truth. This morning it occurred to me that by faith, I must daily rely on God to show me what is true and what is not true: to help guide me through the maze. Basically, I realized that is part of what it means to be utterly dependent upon Him, at least in the contemporary Information Age in which we live and move and have our being.
The latter reference to the Information Age was inspired by a quotation I had sent her the day before. Not suprisingly, it was found in one of the source articles I had referenced for the newsletter:
A glut of information can be a kind of Catch-22. While it adds to our knowledge, it can be a block to our wisdom. We can be so busy trying to process more and more information, that we don’t have the time for the quiet contemplation that is essential for the development of wisdom. Without contemplation, we lose perspective and can lose our grounding. Without our bearings we lose a sense of place. Confused, we are more easily swayed.
It is essential then, that we learn to let the unwanted information we receive go in one ear and out the other and to get the knowledge we need, to stop somewhere in between. It is interesting that armed with mountains of information, we have turned arguing into a national pastime. It seems one can always provide more information to support a claim. We begin to think might makes right—more is better. In turn, relationships fracture as we go off with our own tangential, myopic views. We lose perspective. (Where is the Wisdom We Have Lost in Knowledge?)
Needless to say, the first paragraph is plainly true for all of us who live in this age and the second paragraph was very prophetic of the political argument in which I had engaged Angela the day before. Might—an avalanche of information to support my arguments—made right and the relationship suffered because I went off on my “own tangential, myopic view.” The first paragraph reminds me very much, in fact, of a much older source of wisdom:
The words of wise men are like goads, and masters of these collections are like well-driven nails; they are given by one Shepherd. But beyond this, my son, be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body. The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person. For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:11–14)
In any event, I concluded the note to Angela with a quotation I had found while browsing around further on the Yumbrad blog I referenced in the previous issue. Citing Brent Curtis’s and John Elridge’s book The Sacred Romance, Bradley quotes:
… Two years ago, worn out by three years of spiritual battle, I found myself asking the question this way: “Jesus, if your Spirit abides in me in the person of the Holy Spirit, who is my Comforter, why do I so often feel alone and you seem so far away?” What came in response were Jesus’ words in John 15:5, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” Jesus was saying, “Living spiritually requires something more than just not sinning or doing good works. In order to live in the kingdom of heaven, you must abide in me. Your identity is in me.” (Qtd. in the The Sacred Romance entry: emphasis in blog)
By Tuesday of the following week, my thoughts had settled enough that I was able to frame them much more exactly when I posted a rather lengthy follow-up response on the discussion forum in which I both replied to Karen’s post as well as somewhat obliquely betrayed the very crisis I’d been weathering. I write:
I am taking four philosophy courses this semester in addition to my third semester of French and I can assure you that my life can quickly become lopsided if I don’t actively counteract the influence of the thousands of words I am compelled to read for my classes. (More on those words in a moment.) To a very large degree the words upon which we feast our mind—whether by choice or compulsion matters little—become our reality. We are, after all, creatures of faith, and faith comes to a large degree by hearing, or, put in other words, faith is manufactured from the substance (or lack thereof) upon which we feast our minds. If what we feast our minds upon is wholesome, our faith is solid and centered squarely on the shoulders of reality. If, on the other hand, what we feast our minds upon is in some way errant (and often this has more to do with balance and degree rather than with truth or relevancy), our faith will truly be a “manufactured” faith. (Response to “wisdom”)
I also go on to clarify in the post the two predominant ways in which an anti-Christ spirit is made manifest: on the one hand we know of the obviously blasphemous and antagonistic spirit that sometimes pervades; on the other is a quietly deceptive spirit that speaks the lesser truth as distraction from the greater truth. In my case, the latter led to the former: my secular studies—an otherwise good thing lacking proper balance and degree—crowded out the place of Christ in my life (effectively taking the place of Christ, which is the central component of an anti-Christ spirit) and the result was an extreme discontent that manifested in ways that frightened me. In sum, bitterness and malice turned my fickle heart against the Lover of my soul. Alas, I fear my heart has such a tendency toward wandering: a thousand lesser lovers vie for my attention and if I am not careful, I crane my neck too far after every adulteress that walks across my path. Indeed, I can honestly say that I am undeserving of this grace and the God who supplies it; the God who sacrifices everything to buy back His soiled Beloved from bondage and the slavery of the sordid. The thing I am left to do is cry out for mercy and pray, “Shackle my heart, O God, with Thy love. Ravage my soul and encompass me in Thy all-consuming flame. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. For I do not yet love Thee as I ought.”
No, indeed. Most of us do not yet love God as we ought, but surely we love Him because He first loved us and gave Himself to die for us that we might live again. That is, after all, the simplicity of the Gospel message: “No greater love have a man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Yet we were not even His friends when He laid down His life for us. But so often this message gets drowned out, sometimes by the myriad siren songs promising beauty false and fair, at other times by the mundane affairs of life wearing us thinner and thinner, one drip after another until the mountain imperceptibly melts away. None of us are immune to wandering or straying away; we have all been unfaithful lovers. But surely we can say that “[T]he beginning of wisdom is surely this: to realize that I am creature and He is Creator.” But we shouldn’t stop there when we do. We should also say that not only is He Creator, but He is a good Creator. We can trust Him. And we should love Him: He loves us even when we are unlovable. He asked nothing of us save our trust; He does not ask us to purify ourselves before we come to Him; He is not ashamed of our scruffy appearance and the stench of our bodies. He simply invites us to come—just as we are—and He will bathe us in His love, cleansing us and making us pure. Only our Lover can wash the tallow from our souls, making them “white as driven snow, and even whiter than that.” And, just as in East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon—the fairy tale from which our imagery is drawn—“‘I will marry you,’ said the Prince.” And He and His Bride lived happily ever after.
It would seem there is more wisdom in fairy tales than the grumpy world of grown-ups is often willing to admit. Perhaps if I spent less time with my philosophy books and more time with the treasured stories of my youth, I would not only be happier but wiser too.
God bless,
Eric
“And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
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