arch17 - The Presbyterian Church of Plumville

Growing in Faith Together

November 1, 2006: Act it as life

Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put.

He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

Have we the patience to find the answers that are around us? Any good detective story, from Sherlock Holmes to CSI is founded on the premise that the truth is found in the evidence and the only barrier to finding that truth is simply “seeing” the evidence. In the modern world we accept the fact that there is a great deal of evidence we cannot see with the naked eye or at first glance. The television show CSI uses graphic zooms to take us to the world inside a corpse or underneath a microscope. Flashbacks, animation and computer graphics reconstruct the evidence into visual scenes that we more easily understand. What happens though when we turn our consideration to the metaphysical? What happens when we begin to contemplate things for which visual corollaries are lacking? We are faced with hieroglyphics, foreign language, foreign forms of writing, a mystery on the wall of what we perceive to be a tomb.

Emerson states that these hieroglyphics can be deciphered, in the same way that we unravel scientific mysteries, they simply require enough context. In science, the way we obtain context is through observation, through meticulous testing and recording of procedures and results. In the metaphysical milieu the way we obtain context is by spiritual development, the steps of which are prayer, Scripture and living in accordance with God’s plan. Emerson says that we should “trust the perfection of creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy.” This turns out to be eminently true in the world of science, if we find an incongruity or an apparent paradox; it is only a matter of time and observation before we observe the order that solves the paradox and makes congruity out of the unknown. In the spiritual realm this is true as well, except for the fact that some of the mysteries will not be solved in the mortal sphere.

Christians hold the faith that death is simply another step in gaining perspective on our existence. Paul says that, “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13: 12) We will look back on our life and see things and events that made no sense to us within the veil of life but which resound as moments of great importance in the kingdom of heaven. The spiritual path emphasizes faith, which is the ability to believe without proof, to be shaped by the unseen and unknowable truth of God’s kingdom. We “act it as life,” meaning we make our choices, follow our best understandings and generally muddle through. Often we gain a small bit of hindsight, which will either confirm or deny that we have made the right choices. Often it is the wrong choices that teach us the most about truth and wisdom.

What we must apprehend as the great truth is the fact that God is the source of the “order of things.” If we want to have as much understanding as possible on this mortal coil we must account for the meta-narrative that God is creating on the face of the universe. We may not be able to understand all the details as meticulously as a crime scene investigator but we must account for the unknown and simply live by what we know. Science progresses by steps, we spent several centuries in working out the truth of Newtonian physics before Einstein discovered his exception to the rules, things sped up considerably in light of his discovery but now quantum physics is discovering exceptions to the exception. But we all still begin learning Newton and his laws of physics. In science and in faith we must not neglect the basic truth and laws and think we are making progress. The basic truth of God’s love and involvement in our lives is what helps us to act in life so as to gain the utmost apprehension of truth. We may often actually experience and apply Newton’s laws: we experience inertia, entropy, friction, force vectors, and such in our daily lives (often in both physical and spiritual forms). But since we never approach the speed of light we don’t fully experience the impact of E=mc². Since we can hardly conceive of quarks and gluons we can’t understand quantum mechanics except on a mathematical level.

The world of the spirit is both more real and less quantifiable than any science. The spirit is what allows us to decipher the hieroglyphic of our condition but it requires both patience and faith. There are no technological gimmicks that will help us to zoom into the inner life of the spirit; it takes obedience, prayer and dedication to develop a life of the spirit. Spiritual truth is operative in the “perfection of Creation;” it is, in fact, the source of the sort of patience and contentment that finds in each day a blessed order. Spiritual truth is founded on the sacred relationship of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are invited, even called, into this relationship. Maybe we don’t “apprehend” the full truth yet, but if we “act it as life,” in God’s grace, one day we will truly see face to face.

September 29, 2006: The Power of Words

For we are fallen like the trees, our peace

Broken, and so we must

Love where we cannot trust,

Trust where we cannot know

And must await the wayward-coming grace

That joins the living and the dead,

Taking us where we would not go-

Into the boundless dark

When what was made has been unmade

The Maker comes to His work.

-Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir, 1985.II

I love words. It is no mistake that I have found my vocation as a Pastor to be rooted in the use of words and in the understanding of God’s Word. I never “got” poetry until fairly recently. I appreciated the mastery of Milton and Shakespeare before, the Psalter spoke to my heart in a certain way but my love of words was much more prose oriented. I remember being taken with a phrase of Kurt Vonnegut in one of his books where he described the earth as a, “salubrious blue-green orb.” The word salubrious, which means health giving and lively, just rolls off the tongue but it s a word that most people don’t know. It always struck me how rich our language can be, and how powerful. It also struck me how poorly and unimaginatively most of us use this powerful system of symbols and communication. I began to read books like a drug addict looking for a fix, in prose I turned away from trite fiction and sought out the sublime, that this search coincided with my theological studies was actually quite helpful. During this scouring of the prose world I began to stumble across poets here and there. First I had a re-acquaintance with Milton, Dante and Shakespeare, then a sort of broad exploration of poetry in general, an intensive exploration of Eliot’s The Wasteland, leading up to and surrounding my brother’s death (I will show you fear in a handful of dust rings in my head like iron bells). Yeats, Tennyson, Blake, Whitman, they all followed in waves of poetry.
            I now read poetry because I need it. I now seek the sublime in the words of poets in much the same way as I seek truth in Scripture. I wish, for all the world that I could have known such words at a younger age. I wish for all the world that somehow this journey of exploration was what education was all about. But I was almost all the way up the educational ladder, completing a Master’s degree, before I ever got more than an inkling that words, mere human words, could be so sublime. I first read Wendell Berry as an essayist, I found his prose to have much of the quality that I seek, and insist upon in my reading. I discovered that he also wrote poetry, these Sabbath Poems that I have been reading through for the past six months or so. Berry fits where I am now, he is a farmer, I am a Pastor in a rural community, he writes of nature, how it can be balanced but is mostly harmed by human interference. He writes in accessible verse that rings with the truth of Christian faith and good old common sense, but which is also tinged with that often melancholy understanding of our human condition. That combination creates beauty, which speaks to my heart.
            I found, in the above stanza from his second Sabbath Poem of the year 1985, a combination of words reminds me of the sheer wonder of language. The lines of the poem become expansive in my mind. “We are fallen like the trees,” have you ever walked through a clear cut or a large dead fall in the forest, have you seen an enormous and stately tree, lying ignominiously on the ground? You then know what we are: fallen from grace, not what we were intended to be. We have become estranged from God, our Creator, “our peace, broken.” So we must act in the following ways, and this is where Berry hits Christ-like ethics right on the head, “Love where we cannot trust, trust what we cannot know, and await the wayward-coming grace that joins the living and the dead.” Love your neighbor as yourself, even if you cannot trust him, love your enemy, who you certainly can’t trust, didn’t Jesus try to teach us these things? Trust God, whom you cannot know, in fact, given our fallen condition, God is the only thing we can trust, He’s also the thing that we absolutely cannot “know” in any human sense, apart from His grace.
            Finally the description of sanctification as an un-making of our fallen condition, not only echoes with Scripture (Jesus telling Peter that others will take him where he does not wish to go) but with some of my favorite images from literature and elsewhere (the two that spring to mind are C.S. Lewis’ description of Aslan “undragoning” Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Yoda telling Luke he, “must unlearn what you have learned,” in The Empire Strikes Back). To follow Christ we do step “into the boundless dark,” we die to ourselves and seek to follow Christ. “When what was made has been unmade,” when our fallen condition is undone and we start again as spotless beings, children of God, then and only then will we be raised up into glory, “The Maker comes to His work.” These thoughts that have unfolded like an oriental fan in my mind, and I feel that life is richer for having read those words. What makes your life richer? Can sublime words and beautiful thoughts stop you in your tracks? They should; after all, John’s Gospel says that Jesus is the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Our use of words is perhaps the truest way that we are made in the image of God and it seems to be no secret that The Maker will use words to do His work.

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy

And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain

-William Blake, The Four Zoas

William Blake was a self-educated man who rose from the lower class in a time when the English aristocracy was still all but ironclad. Blake was more renowned as a painter than a poet during his life but the same themes emerge in both his visual and verbal art. Scholars trace two primary sources of influence in Blake’s work: Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, and the Bible. We can certainly hear echoes of Proverbs’ teachings on wisdom in the above quotation. Blake considered himself (and Milton) to be the type of poet with something to say, akin to Ezekiel, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The boldness to call oneself a prophet and the ability to back it up in your writing is a combination that few would even aspire to, and yet Blake did and to some extent succeeded. What measures a prophet is not whether he made predictions and had them come true but whether his words ring with the truth of God’s kingdom. Blake stands as a poet who spoke a word that sometimes rings with that truth and thus we should listen to the word that he has spoken.

What does Blake tell us about wisdom? That it doesn’t come easy and that the majority of people are not terribly interested in trying attain it. Wisdom is often earned at the price of failure; something we did not wish to happen results in a valuable lesson learned. The marketplace of experience is desolate because the cost is often too high. We human beings generally want to take the path of least resistance, to follow the laws of our base nature. In order to earn the costly virtues, wisdom being one, we must elevate our minds beyond the Darwinian “rules” of existence in nature. If one takes the position that we have a soul then one believes in the supernatural, in something that is not accounted for in biological schematics. No matter what your position on God, creation and the like, if you believe in the existence of the soul then you must place value on virtue, on wisdom. Yet no matter how obvious the need for wisdom is, the marketplace remains desolate, for the experience that it takes to gain much wisdom is indeed painful and difficult.

Football season is upon us and the air of Western PA is charged with expectation of a defense of our beloved Steeler’s Super Bowl title. In the preseason though dreams of glory are far off, injuries are the only real event of preseason football. The price of wisdom that will be used in late December and January, seems high in the heat of August. One of the peculiar things that I noticed this preseason is the allocation of certain injured players to the Physically Unable to Perform (PUP) roster. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the acronym and its relationship to the much debated Peace, Unity and Purity (PUP) report adopted by the General Assembly earlier this summer. My opinion of the report from the first time I read it was that it was an exercise in deliberately standing on the sidelines because if you get in the game you might get hurt. The state of the Church today (not just the PC(USA) but the entire church is much like that of a football player past his prime. Young, unproven players usually just get cut, it is mostly high draft picks or older, one time star players that get allocated to the PUP list. The equivocal statements, the vague pleas for discernment, the call to dialogue, seemed to me to be statements of a church that is afraid to fail and wants to cushion its landing if it falls. We seem to be heading in the direction of the sidelines. That always seems to be the way that older running backs start to lose it. Once renowned for his “north – south” running style, where he was always moving towards the goal, through holes and creases opened by his mammoth offensive line, the great Dallas Cowboy running back (if there ever was a "great Dallas Cowboy"), Emmitt Smith finished his career running sideways with the forlorn Arizona Cardinals because he no longer had the physical strength (or the great offensive line) to keep moving vertically through tackles or the speed to hit those holes and seams that only opened for a split second. If you can’t make those cuts and push through those tackles you are not far from the PUP list and the permanent sideline. The PUP report is not exactly running to the wrong goal, it is simply running sideways. This is wisdom that no one wants to buy but which remains true nonetheless.

Football is a tough game, it is a game for the young, for the fearless and for the strong, the way of the cross is even more difficult and there is no off-season. The American Church is definitely playing with some injuries and maybe some time on the sideline would do us some good. The problem is that the sideline is not a desirable goal in the race of faith. Paul made no allowance for pushing on towards the side it was towards the goal or nothing. If a running back injures his knee he gets medical attention, maybe even surgery to get back to playing. What surgery does the American Church need? Perhaps PUP is the right place for some players. Is PUP the right place for the Church? I hope not. Are we past our prime and ready to stand on the sidelines? The question that arises in the face of the American Church is do we want to go the direction that most of the western European Churches have gone? To sort of stand on the sidelines and lend moral support to the younger players (say the Latin American, African and Asian Christian movements) or do we want to be in the game. Can we put aside our creaky knees and divided hearts in the hopes of winning another yard or two in the journey towards the Kingdom? If we want to get back in the game and be productive we need to recover our “north-south” running style or are we going to finish our career running sideways or on the PUP list?