Stories

Over on a friend’s blog, I saw some musing which included comments about the purpose of stories, and it got me thinking. I actually stopped reading, mid-paragraph, so as to see where this thought would lead me, so here it is, after mulling for a few days. I’m going to make a rather sweeping generalization, but I think I can defend it. Here goes.

The purpose of every story is to create community.

Each of us, as a human being, which is to say, an animal that talks and thinks in words, or, if you will, is reflective of the Divine act of creation that begins with a Word (as above, so below), lives inside a story, or really a vast cycle of stories, partly of our own making: The story of my life, my family, my tribe, my town, my county, my valley, my nation, my planet, my dog, my dreams. This personal story in all of its particularities is what we are talking about when we talk about personal identity. It is of the intersection of personal stories that community is forged, and it is the overlapping of communal stories that creates a sense of individuality. We tell stories, we hear stories, and a person who does not have a story does not yet feel like a person, does not yet have a place. Some stories are powerful, and shape us. Religions and mythologies are essentially the stories that are broad enough that hearers and tellers see themselves as living inside of them; the same with political ideologies.

Of course there are larger stories and smaller stories, just as there are larger communities and smaller communities. Stories within stories. Variations, versions. But having a story in common is what binds people together. Marriages dissolve when the story of his life and the story of her life begin to diverge from one another into mutual unrecognizability, it is said, then, that they have become estranged.

When the stories a person tells himself are unintelligible by anyone else, that person becomes —has become — isolated, alienated, alone. When such a person is able to bring someone else into the circle of those who can understand, you have something else: a new community, a cult, perhaps.

Integrity redux

Just some random thoughts on a Friday afternoon….. in preparation for Sunday.

I’m thinking about the 24th Psalm:  “Who shall asscend to the hill of the Lord? And who can stand in his holy place?  He that has clean hands, and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol, or swear by what is false.”  This sounds like the search for integrity.

Clean hands:  That’s the behavioral part of ethics. It recalls to mind those things that are prohibited in the behavioral portions of the Big Ten;  murder, theft, adultery.  While motivation is of utmost importance, behavior is here listed first.  Good intentions are no excuse for careless actions.  Short cuts lead to trouble.  Over in the New Testament, an apostle says: “avoid every appearance of evil.”  This can be carried too far, as some focus so much on appearance that the next, more necessary part, gets ignored; but at a bare minimum, a person of integrity should have, as is said, his “act” together.

Avoidance of obvious contamination, however, goes only a certain distance.  Next comes the really hard part, a pure heart.  These two go together.  As Kierkegaard observed, “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.”  His essay by  that title goes on to demonstrate how it is that it is not possible to will one thing, unless that thing is “the good;”  contrasting it with “double-mindedness,”  recalling the admonition of St. James.  Here is where our search becomes a search indeed.  Who knows his own heart?  Who can say that his or her own desires are, let’s say, completely unselfish?  I can’t.  That is, I can’t until I enlarge my vision, and begin to truly pray as we are taught:  “Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  If the will of God is for peace, prosperity,  and health to prevail, I am double-minded so long as I care for those things with regard to myself, but not for others; but also if I seek them for others while pretending that I don’t want them for myself.  So my sense of my own need must expand to include all of my neighbors, even my enemies (as Jesus taught), and at the same time must acknowledge that I too am one of those whose need requires a divine action.

This leads us to the next thing:  who does not lift his soul up to an idol.  I’m thinking of an idol, in this instance, as anything partial, anything less than the good of the whole, as St Paul said, “worshiping and serving the creature more than the Creator” — even though we are to desire good things for every creature, none is to take on absolute significance. Idolatry, then,  is treating what is secondary as if it were of first importance; and since we cannot see the full picture, nothing we can see or understand can be of first importance. Not myself, not my cause, not my family nor my country, least of all wealth or comfort, belongs in the place of the God who wills the best for me in relation to all of these.  Always remembering that my current picture is partial, again as is said, “Now we see through a glass darkly,”  can I truly value any of these good things rightly.  So often we think that an idol must be something obviously false and wrong, to be forsaken utterly; whereas more often it is likely to be something good and even worthy of much attention, which nevertheless falsely takes the first place, ahead of all else, distorting our view of the rest of the world, never mind that of our Creator.  Which leads us to the fourth matter in this progression:

“nor swear by what is false.”  What is false is exactly this wrong relationship of God’s creatures to one another, when one or another takes absolute precedence.  In my search for integrity I have to acknowledge that I, myself, some of the time, am what is false, in those instances where I have taken the smaller view, forgotten my neighbor, failed to see Christ in the one who is hungry or homeless or imprisoned— or simply when I have taken the easy road, pretending that actions in one arena do not have consequences somewhere else.

The Psalmist presumes that such people as he describes exist.  If they do, these are the ones who never cease in their own search for integrity.  They, he says, shall receive blessing from the Lord.

Possible Sermon Outline

From some scribbled notes:

By scripture we are INFORMED
Of wondrous acts that God PERFORMED,
So that, no longer CONFORMED,
The church can be REFORMED,

And we — and through us the world — TRANSFORMED.

Resurrection

Richard Rohr’s meditation for today.  I think it is particularly fitting on the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Resurrection      

Question of the day:    How do I join in the liberation of the victims and executioners?

The good news of the resurrection is not that the poor victims of this world will finally triumph over the executioners, while the executioners will be fittingly punished. That is our petty notion of justification.  If the resurrection is truly God’s great answer and God’s good news, then God is telling us that Jesus died and rose not only for the victims but also for the executioners. God is not just liberating the liberated and saving the saved.  The new righteousness, the good news that is too good, is that God is somehow seeking to free the executioners too. 

from Near Occasions of Grace

More on Christians and Politics

Over on the RedBlueChristian blog, our friend Andrew Jackson has offered “10 biblical guidelines” for how a Christian might engage in politics “without losing your soul”.  Here’s one of them:

RedBlueChristian
4 – Christians must always remember that our ultimate security is in Christ and in the unshakeable kingdom of God, no matter what presidential candidate or party wins (Hebrews 12:26-29). One of the dangers that many Christians seem to often fall into is that we begin to elevate the outcome of presidential elections to an apocalyptic status. In other words, if our presidential candidate or party does not win, we begin to see it as the end of the world.

I recommend the entire essay.

On government authority and Christian responsibility

From the e-mail archives: Thought I’d revisit a response I gave to a thoughtful discussion starter back in 2004. I should first say that the writer of the original comment regularly provides fair-minded, well-thought, balanced answers to many difficult questions and actively encourages others to think things through and not just take his word as gold. It was in that spirit that I wrote this response. Here it is:

I have a comment about your answer to the question at this link:

http://www.seriousfaith.com/question_detail.asp?questionid=718 (“A Jehovah’s witness told me that they do not vote or do anything with the government. Does the bible teach us not to vote?…”)

It’s very important, when dealing with scriptural questions, especially on matters of some controversy, to keep in mind some principles, and proceed accordingly. I’ve never forgotten an old saw that I heard many years ago: “A text without a context is a pretext.” This cautions us from being too free with pulling isolated texts from different places, stringing them together in support of an idea, and calling the result biblical doctrine. Closer to home is an Old Testament principle that is affirmed in the New Testament: “By the mouth of two or three witnesses let every word be established.” A strict application of my first principle above will quickly reveal that this has to do with what constitutes valid testimony (on the part of an accuser) in a court of law, but I take it that this is also helpful in biblical understanding, since “in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.” Thirdly, we learn from the Revelator that “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy,” and from Peter (in his sermon to the household of Cornelius) that “to him [Jesus] all the prophets give witness.” and as Jesus says concerning the scriptures themselves, “It is they which testify of me.” I give you these principles, Brent, just so you can have at least an inkling of where I am coming from and on what basis I am thinking about these scriptural matters, since I will be disagreeing with you on certain things even though I also agree with you on many things and enjoy reading your devotional.

Now, in your response to the questioner, you provide a serious and reasoned answer with regard to voting, and bring in, additionally, some material of your own that the questioner did not ask about. Nevertheless your way of framing the question is legitimate and open-ended: “”what is our duty to the government and the authorities as Christians?” What I want to get you to think about more closely is whether or not a single answer covers all of the categories that you then identify: voting, saying the pledge of allegiance, serving in the military and general civic issues. You cite three passages (Romans 13:1-7, Matthew 22:21, and 1 Peter 2:13-17) to make your point (fulfilling the “two or three witnesses” requirement; good for you!); all of them deal with general issues of whether or not to submit to what is a clearly unjust, pagan government that is persecuting or oppressing the people of God. We know this by applying the context test: in this case, the historical context which is known to us. It is within this same context that you provide yourself a bit of balance with a fourth reference (Acts 5:29). I want to look at the textual context of each of these, one at a time, and draw some observations.

Taking the Wright approach

Yesterday, Barack Obama arrived late to a Philadelphia podium to give a speech that, if he failed to exceed expectations, could have effectively ended his political career. The issue of the day was being spun as: “Will he or won’t he put a sufficient amount of distance between himself and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his pastor for twenty years, his spiritual mentor, who has been shown on videotape saying outrageous, offensive and in some cases just plain untrue things? Will he both reject and denounce the man who led him to Christ, officiated at his wedding, and baptized his children?” The political class loves a good pile-on, and it was hard to see how this was not going to balloon into a ruination of a colossal order.

I watched that speech with considerable interest, tinged with skepticism

Spiritual amphibians

About a year and a half ago, I stood at the graveside of a near relative and tried to provide some inspired words of comfort for the gathered family and friends. At such a moment, short on sleep and feeling quite vulnerable, it pays to look to Divine inspiration rather than one’s own genius (although anyone who has admired the works of William Blake might well argue that the two are indistinguishable: a discussion for another day). Be that as it may, one of those curious things that happen from time to time occurred on this occasion also. As I spoke, groping for words, what seemed an apt image appeared before my consciousness, and without any time to analyze or filter it out, I just let the words come. I hope my readers will not be offended at the result, in which I compare the likes of you and me to, well, frogs.

What I heard myself say was that we as humans are a sort of spiritual amphibian, belonging both to time and to eternity, in more traditional terms to earth and heaven, but because of that, exclusively to neither. It is that image that I’d like to expand upon for a moment or two here. Call it a parable, or an imaginative metaphor. Let’s see where it takes us.

We live in time, and we are destined to live in eternity.

Epistemological Modesty: An Interview with Peter Berger

Epistemological Modesty: An Interview with Peter Berger

The history of Protestantism has shown that real faith, which has to do with God and Christ and redemption and resurrection and sin and forgiveness, is not just a psychological or a political activity, and also that you can have real faith without being in some sort of narrow orthodox mold…

Schleiermacher has always been a theological model not so much in the content of his thought as in his basic approach to faith, …with the understanding that one cannot simply swallow the tradition but has to enter into a reasonable dialogue with it. In one of my books I call this the “heretical imperative”–you have to choose….

…Epistemological modesty means that you believe certain things, but you’re modest about these claims. You can be a believer and yet say, I’m not really sure. I think that is a fundamental fault line.

Having read Berger’s book The Heretical Imperative more than thirty years ago (and Schleiermacher near the same time) my current observation is that even within a given congregation there are essentially two kinds of religious enthusiasts, and the difference turns on this question of tolerance for uncertainty: Some find paradox intriguing, while others find it appalling. Maybe this is what separates faith from fundamentalism. The fundamentalist has a driving need, a fear-driven need I would say, to know for sure.

what is faith?

Alan Watts

On FAITH    Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

This is exactly right. There is a common saying in some circles: “When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.” I’ve never believed that. Rather, when you get to the end of YOUR rope, just let go, for “underneath are the Everlasting Arms.”

Personal note:  my best beloved and I are about to “let go” from our quotidian responsibilities and do the unheard-of thing of going on vacation for ten days.   This exercise in faith promises to afford us the very sort of delight which by all accounts is most to be associated with genuine faith.

 Further addendum:  This idea of “letting go” as essential to faith is closely reflected in the Christian notion of forgiveness, which  in a literal reading of the Greek word at the root of the concept, also  has the essential meaning of letting go, of release.   To live a  forgiven and forgiving life, then, is to be released from the bondage of sin (another very traditional image) and also to release others, as in, not “hold” their offenses against them.  The reader is encouraged to chew over these concepts for a while.