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January 17, 2007
Hello everyone,
Donald Miller, author of the 2003 bestseller Blue Like Jazz, has compared life to a stroll. Specifically, he writes: “Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll. This is how God does things” (217). That has certainly been my experience: God rarely ever seems to be in a hurry and often the only thing that we can do is sit back and wait, with God’s help contenting ourselves with whatever comes our way in the meanwhile. Those spiritual seekers who do not learn, sooner or later, that this is God’s way, are fated to repeat many of the same painful lessons over and over again. This process is far from pointless, however: it is yet another example of life being on its leisurely stroll: we may learn to slow down enough ourselves to enjoy it, or we may wear ourselves thin trying to get ahead, ending up right back where we started, exhausted. As for those who care nothing for spirituality at all, the level of exhaustion may at times even leave them bordering on lunacy.
A friend and I were recently in conversation regarding the stir that the famous Oxford biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins has been making, particularly with his new book The God Delusion. As we were discussing such men and their peculiar brand of faith, I was reminded of a quotation another friend of mine used to cite by G.K. Chesterton from Orthodoxy. I had only remembered the first few lines, but when I actually reviewed the quotation in context in preparation for this newsletter, I noted that Chesterton was more solidly on target than I had even initially considered. Specifically, after suggesting that it is materialism that makes a man mad because “he begins to think at the wrong end,” he writes:
. . . Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. . . . (Chapter II: The Maniac)
Along similar lines, we mulled around why the personal philosophies of men like Dawkins fails in our estimation to adequately account for reality. My friend mused that he has personally found much of life to be out of his control, for in this life, there is only so much that we can directly influence and direct. It is madness to believe otherwise. In fact, we recently noted in Seeing Clearly: Ephemeral Reality in Spiritual Relief that Buddhism offers a telling insight in its insistence that the one constant of the universe is its transience and a great deal of humanity’s misery comes from its inability to let go: it attempts to make permanent the evanescent and fails repeatedly. There are things in the world we cannot control; there are things we can, the theme of the last issue’s musings. There exists the danger of overlooking the simple truth known to every addict familiar with Step 1 in “The Big Book”: “We admitted we were powerless over our addiction”—one could just as easily replace the words “our addiction” with half a million other things in life out of our control—“and that our lives had become unmanageable.” Micromanaging life, whether physically or intellectually, only gets us so far, for life is on a stroll, blissfully unaware that we wish to take off and run and dogged in its steps when we so long to lie down and rest (for indeed, until we learn to pace ourselves, we shall be perpetually out of step).
It appears that men like Dawkins attempt to rigidly order the totality of life from top to bottom—if not physically then mentally—sealing their logic airtight and in the process entrapping themselves in an unreality. My friend and I concluded that it is this tendency that ultimately leaves the philosophies of men like Dawkins in the realm of unreality until they repent and confess their powerlessness over a universe they did not create, into which they brought nothing, and out of which they shall exit with the same. For when we try to change the things that cannot be changed and logically deduce the things beyond our reason, we are endlessly frustrated and find no peace, for we are not living fully in reality. Thus, Chesterton continues the thought in his inimitable way:
. . . The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say “if you please” to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural health. As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers. (Chapter II: The Maniac)
As with most things in life, the failure of the “morbid logician” is one of honesty. It is not particularly pleasant to admit just how powerless we are, particularly when we secretly feel so vulnerable already. But in one of life’s numerous paradoxes, when we can admit that we are powerless, there can be a great sense of comfort, peace, and joy gained, especially if in so doing we learn to rest in the infinitely extended arms of the cross. It is not all that odd, really, that we should find it comforting to admit that we are powerless, for it obviates us of a terrible responsibility. We have not been asked to run the universe, merely to trust the God who does. Yet Chesterton would say that men like Dawkins “think at the wrong end”: by faith, they say there is no God; by faith, they end up unable to uphold their own creed much less to enjoy the respite of a creed that upholds them. By faith, the believer says there is a God and that the God that is is good. By faith, the believer’s creed upholds him, upholds her. The faith of which we speak does not have to be blind, though in an examination of one’s fruits, things may not be exactly as they might at first seem. For as my friend suggested, he admires the sheer dedication to virtue and goodness that many atheists uphold. And it is a fact that if by faith we believe the universe to be without its God, that can strongly motivate us to bring about peace and justice in the here and now, for the here and now are truthfully all such a creed can promise us.
The believer would be wise to take notes from the atheist on these points; stewardship in the care of the earth and especially in the consideration of its citizens has long been a Christian virtue and one too easily neglected at times, in part because of the great hope the believer holds. I suspect that the real reason of such neglect, however, comes not so much because of any great hope regarding any life to come, but because of opulence and comfort in this one. I suspect, in many instances, the atheist concerned with peace and justice on the earth has given greater care and thought to the life to come than the believer who appears to care for little else besides his own well-being and security, eternal or otherwise. It is a bit like the man who is wealthy and wise: he, being warm and well-fed, can in time grow complacent with all his wealth, wisdom, warmth, and well-fedness. The man who possesses none of these things cannot afford such luxury; he may, being the last upon this earth, be among the first in the Kingdom of God. It is possible for the man who is warm and well-fed to cease seeing fire and food as great goods and grow cold; it is also possible for the man grown cold and hungry to treasure not only the fire and the food but to look beyond in sheer gratitude to their source. It is, then, entirely possible for the atheist to be more honest than the believer, even if the believer’s creed makes greater sense on its surface. It is not really so much what we profess with our mouths, for words come rather fast and freely in some sectors, cheap on all accounts. It is rather a matter of what we truly say, for we learned as children that our actions speak with greater clarity than the noises we conjure in our throats and parse through our lips.
If then, there is a difference in actual quality between the living embodiment of the things God values versus an empty profession of the same, then we must be fair in our assessment of fruits. We should call goodness good wherever it is found, and we should most especially be aware that we ourselves are not particularly good. For really, as bold as my own words might be, I fail to consistently embody them myself. Even here I am dependent, for as the creedal response suggests whenever I am challenged in my faith and called upon to go that extra mile: “with God’s help, I will.” With God’s help, I will practice virtue and show kindness to others in the forms of food, fire, and whatever else I may have to offer, including the simplest and most gracious gift of all of guarding my tongue and refusing to speak ill of my brother and sister even when I feel peevish and malcontent. As the quotation, variously attributed to such unlikely persons as Plato and Philo, suggests: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” (I find it especially difficult to believe that these are the words of Plato, not because he was unkind, but because I have read a good many of Plato’s works and it just does not ring authentic. That being said, I have often wondered upon reading some of Plato’s dialogues if they were not a source of inspiration for the Apostle Paul, who most likely would have been studied in them along with his advanced knowledge of the Torah. That to say that the ancient Athenians had some of the most profound things to say about virtue out of all the various people-groups who have gone on before, and some of the dialogues remind me a great deal of portions of the Apostle’s epistles, though of course timewise, if there is a connection, it would necessarily have been the dialogues first and only later the epistles.)
Now then, we have spoken of being kind and said that with God’s help, we will strive to show a greater love for the things God loves. In this spirit, let us recite one more creed before we return to Dawkins; this one should sound very familiar to some of us; repentance is and always has been the beginning and the end of authentic Christian spirituality:
Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us;
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your Name. Amen.
(Book of Common Prayer. “Penitential Order I,” 320.)
If we are to see anything clearly at all, we must first be honest. We must be honest with ourselves that we did not create the world and have only limited control over what goes on within it. Beyond that, we have to be honest that we do not always exercise what control over it we do have. And we have to be honest that sometimes those who appear to care nothing for the faith nevertheless display true goodness; we should never shy away from calling it exactly that: true goodness. The old truism that “All truth is God’s truth” can just as readily be translated as “All goodness is God’s goodness,” or “All beauty is God’s beauty.” The Apostle himself reminds us the reason all of these expressions are true, for in God “we move and breathe and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Even when animated from within, all light here on earth is reflected light; all creatures great and small are derivations as is all virtue and all truth. As E.B. White might say, “it is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars” (The Ring of Time).
In the final analysis, our creeds have different levels of honesty. The creed of Richard Dawkins may suffer from far less hypocrisy than the creed of many believers where the greatest hypocrisy of all is the failure to admit our own hypocrisy. Dawkins is not so much different than any of the rest of us. He has chosen his creed. We have chosen ours. And until our creeds start getting more honest, not one of them will support the weight of the world: all break down at some point or another. But in the apportioned slice of the universe served with a classic twist of irony, the last will be first and the most flawed creeds of all—provided they are honestly flawed and fully aware of their own limitations—may in fact be the least flawed of all.
God bless,
Eric
For more reading, see Time’s recent God vs. Science in which evangelical Christian and director of the National Human Genome Project Francis Collins and Dawkins are interviewed. Also of interest might be The Revealer’s South Park Takes On Richard Dawkins.
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