We Need Him Every Day

The title of this article carries with it a simple message that was kneaded into the dough of my soul this past Friday. I’m sure I could’ve preached a sermon or two about it before this episode, but an experience of it is worth much more to me than a sermon, memories and tears so much more than maxims and syllogisms. For you, my reader, who must take it in second-hand, I pray God gives you some measure of what I have tasted and seen.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THIRD PERIOD, while my kids were taking a test and I was doing the rounds, a student raised his hand to ask for a sharpened pencil—a common request from those who are about to be caught with no classwork done. I padded my right side. Nothing but my keys. I reached into my rarely used left pocket and found a pencil, which I removed quickly, pulling along with it a few shredded Kleenexes, once wet with tears but become crusty. A potent thought popped up. I handed the student the pencil and continued my rounds, fingering the Kleenexes. They reminded me of something that I thought I ought to write down. From the podium I grabbed the clipboard on which I’d been keeping a rough record of my students’ behavior throughout the day. In the middle of the top sheet was a prayer, or maybe a note-to-self: “My God, my God, your mercy is so great.” (When did I write that? It must have been during first period.) I recorded the left-pocket discovery just below it, and then threw the Kleenexes away discreetly. Why jot down this event? Why bother continuing to recall this morning’s tears when I could just destroy the evidence of them and move on?

Because these had been the tears of God.

EARLIER THAT MORNING, when I entered the copy room, I encountered one of my colleagues whom I would often find in this very place before school. Despite efforts to appear ready to tackle the day, she could tell that I had been crying.

“Oh! What’s wrong?” she asked feelingly.

I told her that I had been crying all morning, but that my tears were a good thing. “I don’t know if you’re a believer or not, but God speaks, and when he speaks it can be hard to hear.” After a moment I added, “The tears are a good thing, this morning.”

She nodded silently. Not a believer. We went about our business.

EARLIER THAT MORNING, I stood in my kitchen dressed for work. It must have been just before 06:00. I slowly poured coffee into my travel mug. In the dimness, it looked like ink. The half-and-half, next, softly trickled in, forming at first little storm-clouds against the blackness. They billowed and grew. Eventually these clouds overcame the whole sky in the mug, even the unseen realms behind the sky, and transformed the little world in there from night to day.

Suddenly, after the coffee whitened, a prayer escaped the trap of my fleshly mind: “God, if you don’t give me grace today, I won’t make it.”

By the time I had the lid on the mug, I was crying. So little time had elapsed. I had not spilled my coffee. I had not remembered some past frustration. I had not thought ahead to a dreadful future.

These were the tears of God.

I cried because God spoke.

To tell the story well and rightly, I should not yet put what he said into quotation marks, because I didn’t sort it out or force an articulation of it until later. In short, he impressed upon me my weakness and foolishness for such a prayer. “God, if you don’t give me grace today, I won’t make it.”

Weakness. My flesh raged at this. The first tears were hot and angry, aware of my inadequacies, waiting at the edge of my eyelid and threatening to announce my failures to the world. I couldn’t make it on my own, not even for one day, a Friday.

Foolishness. My spirit broke at this. Those first tears were pushed off the edge into the oblivion on my cheeks, followed now by genuine, liquid sadness. Of course I couldn’t make it without him! Fool!

These first words from God and the corresponding tears threw me into darkness. And then, just as suddenly, a drop of cream. A new word poured into me, forming at first little storm-clouds against the blackness. They billowed and grew. They mushroomed until all of me was changed, homogeneously tainted by grace as coffee is whitened by cream.

This is the picture of revelation.

These were the tears of God.

Beatitude. My spirit revived. The rest of my tears spoke of mixed gratitude and pleasure. Not a day goes by that his grace isn’t here with me; every day that I “make it” is a day that he has made.

Eventually my housemate noticed me in this state. He had been waiting on me for a ride to school. He tried to comfort me, and then the whole matter burst out of me in a few words: “We need him every day.” He agreed. We shared this thought for the next thirty minutes on our way to school. I cried the whole way there and tried to sop up my tears with those Kleenexes. He prayed before we  went into school to make copies. And I knew without a doubt that these were the tears of God.

Jesus Christ said, “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing” (John 15.5).

From the Notebook: against “new” spirituality

[From an old notebook entry.]

…It’s like the opening to Walsch’s Tomorrow’s God. It starts with a dichotomy between the “new” and “old” god. The next page has the dichotomy between individual and societal prosperity. And then free will and slavery on the next pages.

Beware of sophistical presentations that ignore the third option. It is not necessarily the case that the philosophical problems Walsch has with deity can be solved in new versus old, societal versus individual, free will versus determinism. In fact, these dichotomies have been floating around among the debaters for a long time, such that the new is also old, the societal dream only attested to by individuals, and both freedom and determinism challenged by the behemoth of probability-mechanics. Walsch is behind the times, and so is whatever demon he speaks to.

A Brief Thought on Expectancy and the Faith of Abraham

One of my bosses gave an introductory speech today in front of the first-year teachers in the Mississippi Teacher Corps, the program through which I am living and working in the Delta for the next two years. He said he disapproves the language “high expectations” and “low expectations.” We should not have any expectations, he advised.

Now, upon reflection, I see that it is impossible not to have expectations. It is even good to have expectations. But what my boss is driving at, if I am to agree with his advice at all, is the question of that about which we have expectations. He was saying, I think, that we should not have high or low expectations about the kids we’ll be teaching, the conditions under which we’ll be teaching, etc.  But I don’t like the language of high and low expectations, nor can I see myself, in any honest way, having no expectations.

So I would like to abandon my boss’s language in an attempt to take in (at least in part) his advice.  I’ll turn instead to Kierkegaard: “He who always hopes for the best grows old and is deceived by life, and he who is always prepared for the worst grows old prematurely” (Fear and Trembling, Eulogy on Abraham).

As I recall my past self to my present self, I see that I have been like the latter kind of man depicted here, like him for a long time, since I was around sixteen. Maybe as a boy I was otherwise, and maybe as a boy I decided to be like this man, always prepared for the worst, grown old in heart so early. This would be like the man who has low expectations, in my boss’s language. This would be someone who had moralized and learned to despise the world in a sophisticated way—a La Rochefoucauld who tries to turn all virtues into vices. He sounds like a wise old man, but is only old (in heart) and not necessarily wise. It is sadly what I became.

The first man, who hopes for the best, would be like the man who has high expectations. This man is doomed to a different kind of failure, a failure to genuinely live and experience and grow, though he grow old in his disappointments.

“But Abraham had faith,” writes Kierkegaard, “and therefore he was young.” The old man and the prematurely old man, then, are the unfaithful. The one unfaithful because he believes according to his own wishes, puts trust in a self-made lie, and the other because he only trusts himself, if even that. Abraham trusted in the promise given by God. In my boss’s language, Abraham had expectations neither high nor low, but he did indeed have some expectancy; he expected exactly what was promised to him, something no one without faith could ever expect. The measures of high and low are within the realm of what is possible. Abraham expected the impossible, for what was promised was impossible when it was fulfilled.

So I must fight against that prematurely old man in me, the one who hopes for worst in order to defend himself against the heartache that comes from infidelity, the pain from disaster, and the wretchedness from failure. I must have faith, joy, be at peace, be young. And I must not let myself become the self-deceived man who refuses to acknowledge heartache, pain, and wretchedness. I must have faith, joy, be at peace, be young. This faith means that I will take heartache, pain, and wretchedness for what it is: there should be no defense against it, and no excuse to brush it aside.

Now my next step is to listen, to hear what God might promise me in Mississippi, so I’ll know exactly where to aim my expectancy—not high, not low, neither to the right nor the left, but right at what has been promised.

Face to Face with the Gods

Only tonight did I finally finish Till We Have Faces, a novel by C. S. Lewis that draws upon the myth of Eros and Psyche. Rather than write a book review, I will simply give my recommendation, and share some tangential thoughts of my own gained from the reading. I think this is a book for anyone, regardless of any other like or dislike for Lewis and his other works. And anyone, in this case, means just about anyone, but I’ll add this caveat: as I find often with Lewis, the prose is simple enough for young readers, but the content is (how to put it?) adult, mature, full, extreme, intense, not for most young readers.

I noted some clear similarities in TWHF to The Four Loves and The Great Divorce, especially in dealing with the perversion of “mother love” and the conflation between love and devouring. Very compelling. I have more thinking to do on the matters of love, or (to follow Lewis a little closer) on the matter of loves. I think some of the stuff from TWHF will enrich my reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, which is next on my list.

What has my head spinning is the tension and conglomeration, as delivered by Lewis, of “paganism,” historical “Christianity,” myth, and the nature of the gods. The power of this work rests somewhere between, on the one hand, the failure of the philosophic account of the gods and, on the other, the inanity of obscure, sterile, merely allegorical myth—or more to the point, the inanity of merely allegorical interpretation of myth. Here, between philosophy and allegory, is the place where men and gods meet each other face to face. And what about this meeting? The gritty ugliness of pagan worship has, for Lewis (and for me), a kind of tangibility and truth above the sophisticated contemplation of the “Divine Nature” that is at once obviously Greek and also recognizably part of the history of the Christian religion. A god untouched by human art has a power of speech, a connection to what is visceral in us, that a beautiful marble statue cannot have. This latter god, crystallized by poetry, by sculpture, by theology and explanation, by moralizing, by merely allegorical myth—humans have so veiled and covered this god with their art that he does not meet with them, for this refinement of the image of the god is also a self-veiling, a hiding away, a denial of what is visceral and therefore the height of all dishonesty. They fashion a face for the god and lose their own faces, so that even when they come to the new god they have themselves no eyes to see and no ears to hear.  And I think Lewis would be on track to point at modern and historical Christianity and say that we, or some of us, in our sophistication and high art, have exchanged the truth about God for a lie, the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things….

Let’s see what Kierkegaard might say to this.

A Thought on a Trend, or Sentiment, within Psychology

Driving much popular interest in psychology is the quest for the natural absolution of our sins.  And this is, in effect, nothing other than the attempt to absolve ourselves of God’s grace.

Philinte the Misanthrope

Philinte of Molière’s Misanthrope.  He is the true misanthrope, who forgives humankind in the comparison with beasts.  O Christian, avoid utter misanthropy.  Forgive with the authority of God.  Forgive in the comparison with yourself.  Love, for you have been loved.  Forgive much, because you have been forgiven much.  To treat them as God treated you: this is godliness, imitation of and participation in God’s work.

Reflection on Nietzsche’s “Free Spirit”

They looked at this man, this not-man, this murderer, with disgust and horror.—“Is he a psychopath, or just utterly unsympathetic, apathetic, a not-man?”—They cannot understand him.  He must appear masked to them—“What are his motives?”—Why do they care about his motives?—“He is evil, and does he not see it or care?  Without care!”—He is unintelligible without his mask.  He does not play by the rules but, as it is, has enough strength to endure a little while before an enforcer of someone’s rules crushes him with a penalty.  He has risen from a deeper ruin and is rearing his ugly head here.  Is this his convalescence or his last writhing motion before death?—“What is this monster?”— If there is an end for the sake of which humankind exists, then he more than any has failed to meet it.  If there is no such end, he is a god among men.  As a monster or a god, either way he is a not-man.  Behold the free spirit.  If he is not a god, he will die more wretchedly than any man.  If he is a god at present, and does not die, then his is a living death without love, and eventually lacking feeling, lacking pleasure, and lacking consciousness as much as he lacks conscience.  If he is becoming a god, this is worst of all:—not merely having nothing, but being nothing.

A Maxim: criticism

Criticisms often come without council; a person breathes out accusations to knock down another’s “house of cards,” but almost never teaches his tongue to edify.

On a related note, Ephesians 4.25-32, English Standard Version, italics added:

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

On Augustine’s Confessions: his early encounters with Ambrose

As Augustine moves closer to submission under biblical authority, which is accomplished in the Milanese garden at the end of Book VII, it has already been noted that a certain “wager” in the midst of his suspicions put him in a place to receive catholic teachings about and from the Bible before the garden scene. An important detail in Augustine’s wager was skipped over, and must be revisited.

Before the wager could have happened, Augustine had to be given the smallest glimmer of hope with regard to the Bible. Even though something may promise infinite gain for the gambler, if there is no likelihood of achieving it, then there is no wager: if the Bible were to have no possible refutation for the Manichæan attacks, then the Bible and the Church that teaches from it are not at all an option. But in Book V, Chapters xiii-xiv, just before Augustine becomes a catechumen, he takes the words of Ambrose to heart. Ambrose’s influence on Augustine’s thinking, especially with respect to the Old Testament, cannot be passed over.

In brief, Augustine listens to Ambrose only because the latter is a renowned rhetorician. He wishes to hear how well Ambrose speaks, and does not care of what. But in the listening, what is said eventually takes hold of Augustine and infiltrates some of the Manichæan strongholds, undermining their attack on the Old Testament’s validity.

This brings up the earlier consideration of style and content in the episode about Cicero’s Hortensius. Just as in the reading of that book, here with Ambrose he approaches him desiring to get some great rhetorical training; and just as with that book, the content of some of the words slips in. He weighs the words carefully, and finds Ambrose to be worthy of his fame. And despite trying to keep his mind off the content, he is able to note the effect of Ambrose’s message, at least in retrospect:

And verily with the sweetness of his discourse I was much delighted: which, however it were more learned, yet was it not so pleasing and inveigling as Faustus his was, the manner of the oratory I mean, though for the matter there was no comparison. For Faustus did but rove up and down amongst his Manichæan fallacies; but Ambrose taught salvation most soundly. But salvation is far enough from sinners, such as I was at that instant; and yet I drew little and little nearer toward it; but how, I knew not.

At least twice before—the reading of the Hortensius and the refutation of Faustus—has a great rhetorician changed Augustine’s mind, he being quite unable to explain how. The Hortensius gives him beautiful words and yet dissuades him from the career path of a lawyer, in which Augustine has been planning to put such words to money-winning use. Next Faustus gives him beautiful words and yet simultaneously shows the inadequacy of Manichæan thought behind the words. And here again Ambrose gives him beautiful words whose effect on him is unanticipated.

In a previous post the effect of these words was described as the deciding factor in the wager to become a catechumen. What is of interest here is the role Ambrose the human teacher has in relation to the Old Testament, which consists of supposedly “God-breathed” words, as at 2 Timothy 3.16, whose authority is the question of most of the Confessions. Of Ambrose there is no question that Augustine thinks of him as an angel of God: “To him was I led by thee, unknowing, that by him I might be brought to thee, knowing it.” According to God’s own plan, it seems, Ambrose is a necessary part of Augustine’s journey. He is responsible for changing Augustine’s views of the Old Testament, at least just enough to expose him to the remainder of biblical doctrines and allow for a non-literal hermeneutic. The Bible, though, apart from Ambrose, would have forever been subject to the abuses of the Manichæan interpretations and dismissals. It, being in need of interpretation at all, was unable to defend itself in the world. So we return to the point brought out in Plato’s Phædrus about writing.

With this instance, it seems that the Bible is need of defending. It seems that even it, as a text, is not exempt from the dangers associated with writing. Does Augustine also think of it as merely an excellent specimen among the infinitude of books?

From the Notebook: freedom

Freedom is not a matter of will.  Freedom is a gift from him who opens and closes all doors.  The one who is free is the one who has open to him the doorway that is impossible for him to open, and this one must also have the desire to walk through such a doorway.  We are free who are both called to do the impossible and longing to do it.