Creideamh

In a bizarre twist of reality, I have an article published in the wonderful and stupendous The Other Journal. It is all about Karl Marx, human rights and how Christians should engage in political discussion. Even more bizarre, it means I’m published alongside three of my theological heroes, Jason Goroncy, Luke Bretherton and Daniel Bell and the remarkably gifted author I keep telling you all to read, D.L. Mayfield.

Your Correspondent, Convenor of the association of Gay Witches For Abortion, so you wouldn’t be interested.

What Has Christmas Ever Done For Us?
I obviously don’t have the beard, vocabulary or learning of David Bentley Hart and so let me be oh-so-very tentative in suggesting that our culture has been impacted and shaped and formed by the celebration of Christmas.

And I don’t even mean the way that the festival is celebrated in the modern era where Christmas’ most significant social role is as a sort of consumptive pick-me-up for retail sales. If we go back even to a pre-commercialised Christmas, back to a time before a Coke-drinking Santa Claus rode a polar bear to get some elf-themed sexy underwear for his wife, back to a time when good, decent Presbyterians actually suspected the festival as a devious Romish plot.

What difference does it make to our culture that Christmas became the highpoint festivity of the year?

Of course, Easter is always the centre of the liturgical year and when Christians think straight, they take that to be much more important than the passing months named after Roman deities.

We could speculate that the content of the Christmas narrative informs certain base beliefs in cultures where it is regularly practised. For example, the idea of Incarnation does give a rather exalted status to human beings. What God becomes, God redeems. It may be a long and meandering river, but surely there is a chain stretching from the songs and prayers and parties of Christmas down to the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

What The Hell Is Pentecost Anyway?
But what would our culture look like if the contingencies and coincidences and the million little factors that made Christmas so significant in Europe and America had actually fallen in favour of Pentecost?

Pentecost is one of the few major Christian holidays that has resisted commercialisation. If people can find a way to profit from a Jewish man being tortured and murdered by an expanding militant army, I have no doubt that the forces of Mammon could twist some dollars out of the strange stories found in chapter 2 of Luke’s book, the Acts (of the Holy Spirit). Pentecost marks the end of the seven weeks of Easter. And it is a very strange story.

The scene begins with the followers of Jesus still huddled in groups, scared presumably of further recriminations for their allegiance to this false prophet Jesus. Suddenly, a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven (which doesn’t mean “from the sky” but from out of a different realm of reality entirely) and this force somehow fills the hideout they are occupying. They begin to speak, but in all the languages of the world.

The Jewish festival of Shavuot (Pentecost is from the Greek word for 50th since it marks the 50th day since Good Friday but Shavuot marks the seven weeks from Passover) was in full force outside. Diaspora Jews and God-fearing Gentiles were all over the city and the followers of Jesus went out to preach to them, emboldened by this heavenly force. As they spoke, the words that came out of their mouth were from the languages of the people who heard them.

Luke, with his typical openness, admits that the crowd were amused and mocked the apostles, declaring that they were drunk.

Then Peter stood up. And from this point onwards in the narrative of the first generation of the church, Peter remains a key figure. Peter stands up and answers the mocking voices with a response so pragmatic and true to what we know of him that it must be authentic: “These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It’s only nine in the morning!”

He addresses the crowd, recapitulating the entire story of Israel as if it climaxed in those blood drenched activities at Golgotha 50 days before. He makes this audacious argument that what the crowd were now seeing was the long awaited fulfilment of all Israel’s hope. The Spirit of God had come upon him and his allies. And if the Spirit had come, there must be a Messiah. And if Peter and his allies have the Spirit of God and are followers of Jesus then that means that Jesus is the Messiah. And if Jesus is the Messiah, then that means that God must have somehow, mysteriously, willed the crucifixion. And if God willed the crucifixion, then the crowd must listen again to these claims of resurrection. And if the Messiah has been resurrected, has been crucified, has actually come among them and they missed him, then they must make amends.

Luke compresses this drama into a simple phrase:

“When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart.”

They ask Peter what they must do and Peter responds with words that are still used by Christians today:

“Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

About three thousand people, claims Luke, accepted that invitation that day.

What If Pentecost Were The Central Festival?
So much for Pentecost.

But if the accidents of history that meant that Christmas took up such a disproportionate part of our imagination had actually placed Pentecost at the high point of our holidaying, would our culture look differently?

We always have to ask what is happening under the surface of any Biblical text. These texts were composed in conversation with what had come before. And an attentive reading of Acts 2 as Scripture would lead us to the conclusion that Luke is suggesting that seven weeks after Jesus was crucified, at a particular point in a square in Jerusalem, the curse of Babel was undone.

You remember Babel. It is one of those early Bible stories. It is one of those stories that has echoes in the mythologies of surrounding cultures. Technically it is an etiological tale, a mythological explanation for how the many different languages of the world arise.

Statistically, if you read a blog about the tale of the Tower of the Bable, you are likely to be reading some angry internet atheist decrying the fact that this can’t actually literally have happened. Yes, yes. And so what?

The Tower of Babel remains one of the most profoundly accurate stories we tell because it says that the differences between people groups are caused by our proud desire to be dominant.

And at Pentecost, what we are told is that the first thing that happens after Jesus ascends to sit at the right hand of God, as Lord of the Cosmos, is that the pride that separates one people from another is undone.

The rabidly nationalistic rural Jew Peter stands up and speaks in the languages of defilers and polytheists and pig-eaters. Christianity doesn’t begin by exalting the supremacy of the culture from which it arose. Christianity begins by subverting its culture of origin.

If Pentecost was the centre of our secular culture’s festive excess, nationalism would be a very difficult idea to uphold. Cultural supremacy would be constantly undone by the Pentecost carols we would sing. It is hard to build an empire if you begin by surrendering your rights to colonise.

Conclusion
I’m not trying to do proper theology here. Rather, I am just trying to draw out some of the ways that our cultural view will be impacted depending on which religious narratives gain our attention.

I suppose what I am trying to do is to think through Pentecost by attempting to sketch the way in which the body of Christian believers in a society invariably, unconsciously, tug a culture in a certain direction. When the wider culture follows that tug, regardless of how officially secular or theocratic they are, formative beliefs will drip down into the very essence of public action.

This has happened with Christmas. You can call it Festivus all you like but the suggestion that God would move into the neighbourhood has now penetrated into the core of the culture and that is a humanism that won’t be eradicated by rebranding or an avalanche of crass commercialism. (Corollary: Christians don’t ever need to worry about any “War on Christmas”.)

And if it had happened with Pentecost, the impact could have been greater still. The story that we tell on Sunday is very peculiar, very radical and very challenging. We should not let it pass as just another May morning.

Instead, with every fibre of our being we should pray:

Veni Sancti Spiritus, Come Holy Spirit, comforter, guest of the soul, consolation.

Your Correspondent, He thought we were going to be lighting spiders on fire.

On the way to my final exam in moral theology a stray thought crept into my head. It’s been a while since I have watched Groundhog Day so please remember I am working here from memory and I might want to take this back when I give it another goo and in that case you must never talk of this again.

But, Groundhog Day is the definitive Christian, even better, Biblical comedy.

I’ve probably made you like this wonderfully likable film just a little bit less as a result of that mere sentence but hear me out.

In Groundhog Day, Phil spends an eternity trying to achieve enlightenment. When he achieves it, he is rewarded with an escape back into the *real world*.

Most of our culture sees enlightenment as something that bring you escape from this world. Groundhog Day sees it as an escape into this world.

Within the film, the cosmic response to perfection is the resumption of everyday, ordinary, terrestrial life… only seen through entirely new eyes that are able to love. In other words, Groundhog Day is the wittiest introduction to the Gospel of John that you can ever find!

Your Correspondent, For your information, Hairdo, there is a major network interested in him.

The marks of human unrighteousness and ungodliness are crossed by the deeper marks of the divine forgiveness.

- Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, p. 95.

Karl Barth was born on this day in 1886. If you are one of the few readers of this blog who aren’t theologically inclined, Barth may be a strange name to you. It is a funny thing, that the most influential theologian since the Reformation is still largely unknown, even within the church.

The story of Barth’s conversion to Christianity, if I can be so unapologetically and atrociously evangelical about it, has been told in many places, far better than I could. Broadly speaking, he was schooled in the finest theology of his day, which was German liberalism. He sat at the feet of scholars like Van Harnack, who had a cultural and political influence that it is hard to imagine any theologian possessing. The generation before him had, it was thought, successfully integrated the Enlightenment with German Protestantism and thus adapted Christianity to the realities of the world. Speaking with a tabloid anachronism that obscures more than it reveals, these boyos had out-flanked any potential new-atheist style attack on Christianity.

How they managed this is interesting, not just as a piece of intellectual history but because the lingering effect of such approaches can be found in all corners of Protestant Christianity, the liberal and conservative sides. In short, they build on the foundations of Schleiermacher who argued that religious experience was a domain beyond the objectively knowable on one hand and the mysterious unknowable on the other.

Barth drank deeply from this well. He was a brilliant scholar but he was gripped by the ability of the Gospel to bring about social change and so he took up parish ministry in the little Swiss town of Safenwil. Then in the summer of 1914 he opened up his newspaper to find that over 90 leading German intellectuals, including all his theological teachers, had signed a public declaration in support of Kaiser Wilheim II’s war policy.

That morning, Barth realised he did not know what he thought he knew. It seems it wasn’t until the summer of 1916 that he came to know what he needed to know. What happened in the interim was that, plunged beyond doubt, into a territory of chaotic uncertainty, he searched for some semblance of meaning in the ruins of the rational palace of the intellect he had inhabited. He found resolution in the most surprising of places: the Bible. It was a “strange new world to him.” Preparing for a sermon series he was due to deliver on Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians, Barth had a series of epiphanies that in effect, constituted him as a new man. Since the World War had been declared, he was no longer confident of human reason. Now he was no longer lost in self-referential circles. What he discovered reading and re-reading Romans was that God was God.

God is God.

This sounds like a tautology. It is actually a revolutionary proposition. It was revolutionary in 1916 and it is revolutionary today. God is God. There is an infinite qualitative difference between God and man. Human reason cannot work its way up a ladder to find God. As Barth’s later student, Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, a God we can prove is an idol.

In other words, for all his genius as a preacher, Schleiermacher was spoofing. A strange warming of your heart is not evidence for God. A code of laws and a functioning society of people who get on well together and happen to sing hymns in a special building on Sunday mornings is not evidence for God.

Barth found language to take God seriously.

In 1918 his commentary on Romans was published. It dropped like a bomb on European theology. I was not brave enough to widely cite it when I sat in seminary classes on Paul’s writing. After all, the study of Paul has moved on magnificently since then. But when I preach on Romans it is my first book, well thumbed and heavily marked. It is dense and cyclical and startling.

God is God. Man is not God. But God is man. The heart of Barth’s theology is that in Jesus, God is revealed. Without Jesus, God is hidden. With Jesus, God is revealed as being for humanity. God gives the gift of himself to us. And in becoming man, Jesus brings all humanity into the life of God.

If you aren’t a Christian that might seem dense and meaningless. Arguably that is because we still live in a world ruled by the thought processes of Van Harnack. If you are a Christian it might seem obvious. Arguably that is because Barth has left his impact on every significant Christian theologian of the last century. If you are a theologian that might seem deficient and dreadfully shallow as a summation of Barth. Arguably that is because I am writing this off the top of my head while distracting myself from exam study!

After the Romans commentary, Barth was called into the university. He worked in Bonn and Gottingen and then back in his hometown of Basel. His major work is the Dogmatics. There is no way to over-state the importance of this work. Barth’s refusal to separate doctrine from ethics has simply redefined what theology is. His insistence that the revelation of God in Jesus through the Spirit is the subject matter of Christianity rebooted us out of the dead-end we had worked ourselves into. Barth leaves us with very little to say that is simple. But we had made a dreadful mistake when we imagined that Christianity was just the logical conclusion that a good man, well informed would arrive at.

Barth was one of the first to identify the demonic nature of the NAZI movement. He pretty much single-handedly wrote the Barmen Declaration, which continues to be of importance as Christians try to figure out how to relate to power. He was an invited guest at the Second Vatican Council and an influence on many of the key theologians who helped draft those documents. In the post war world he was a constant critic of nuclear armament, of Cold War disputes and a regular visitor to the local prison where he would preach on Sunday mornings and then hang out with the prisoners smoking cigars he brought with him. As the years go by, it is this angle of Barth that I appreciate the most – his theology is joyous and expansive and inclusive – and he said that this was because his theology was a theology of prayer.

So on Barth’s birthday, I urge you to track down Evangelical Theology or Dogmatics in Outline and taste a bit of this fine Swiss goodness.

So on Barth’s birthday, let us end with a prayer from Barth:

Dear Father in heaven, we thank you for the eternal, living, saving Word that in Jesus you have spoken and continue to speak to us human beings. Do not allow us to hear it only in a cursory fashion and to be too lazy to obey it. Do not let us fall, but remain near each one of us with your comfort, and between each one of us with your comfort, and between each of us and our fellow human beings with your peace.

Let dawn continue to break a little in our hearts, in this institution, at home with those who are dear to us, in this city, in our nation, and throughout the whole earth.

You know the errors and misdeeds that make our current situation once again so dark and dangerous on all sides. Let a fresh wind blow through it, that might at least scatter the thickest fog from the heads of those who rule this world, but also from the heads of the peoples who permit themselves to be ruled, and above all from the heads of those who make public opinion.

And have mercy on all of those who are sick in body and in spirit, the many for whom life is suffering, those who are lost and confused through their own or other’s fault, those who have no human friends or helpers. Show our youth also what true freedom and genuine joy are, and do not leave the old and the dying without the hope of the resurrection and eternal life.

But you are the first, who are concerned about our sorrows, and you are the only one who can turn them to good. We thus can and want only to lift our eyes up toward you. Our help comes from you, who made heaven and earth.

Amen.

Your Correspondent, Just rubbed his armpits with air fresheners; new car.

WordPress won’t allow me to format quotes of dialogue from a play so instead allow me to present the relevant quote in an image:

Aidan Mathews, Exit/Entrance, p. 53. Itallics added.

The play Exit/Entrance was first performed in 1988. I have no idea when it was last performed. It is a play about love and marriage and hope and regret and death. And Hesiod. I wish I could see it live but until contemporary Irish culture wakes up to how simply terrific Aidan Mathews writing is, it is unlikely. Hauerwas’ First Law is: “You never marry the right person.” This interchange between Charles and Helen is a dramatic depiction of the truth of that law. It comes towards the end of the play, which is towards the start of their life together. It is wonderful. Marriage may be, depending on who you listen to (I don’t quite agree), a sacrament; an expression of God’s grace in time and space and material form. It is a heavenly thing, perhaps. But because of that (not in spite of that) it must be an earthly thing made on the ground upon which we stand and from the ground upon which we stand.

Your Correspondent, His favourite exercises are woodworking and sex

1.
Right here in the prologue, let me give you my verdict:

This is a film you should track down and watch.

Especially if you are one of the very many Christians who read this blog: please, track down this movie, put your phone away, close over the laptop, draw the curtains, exile distraction and watch this film.

In the rest of what follows, spoilers (if such a term applies) will be shared so come back to read this after watching the film, if you’re the kind of person who thinks movies are ruined by being able to tell what comes next.
2.
In our age, films involving priests as primary characters are rarely satisfying. They are sometimes very good but they usually involve two key character dynamics and one major over-riding point. The character tensions are: how hard it is for a principled individual to work under a hierarchy and how impossible it is to commit to celibacy. The major over-riding point of films involving priests tends to be anti-clerical. Priests are bad and worse, priesthood itself is bad.

3.
In White Elephant you have the character tensions but you do not have the major over-riding point. This places it in a rare group of movies which includes the greatest film I’ve ever seen about vocation, Of Gods And Men, and the recently over-looked Malick movie, To The Wonder. White Elephant tells the story of two dear friends who happen to be priests. The older friend has brought the younger friend, recovering from injuries sustained in a largely undiscussed massacre in the Amazon where a colleague was martyred, to work with him in a massive Argentinian slum, based around the carcass of an unfinished, half constructed super hospital.

4.
The film depicts three communities, interwoven together, overlapping and inter-penetrating. At the heart of the film is the community of priests, centred around Fr. Julian. It includes a volunteer named Cruz who teaches the boys of the favela practical skills, and a driven, compassionate social worker, Luciana, who is played brilliantly by Martina Gusman. These are people of faith* who are possessed by a missional purpose. They want to see the young people of the slum rise out of it. They want to see the dignity of the older people in the slum restored. They want to be enemies of no one. They pray together and they eat together. This is a rare, unflinching look at Christian ministry in community.

The second community the film records is the slum itself, the district of Villa Virgin. The depiction of the city is neither tuned to evoke a sentimental response nor used as a menacing piece of exotica. It is what it is – the result of human beings living close together. There are good things and bad things quite independent of the horrendous decay.

We might called the third community the “Enemies”, although the point of Fr. Julian and Fr. Nicholas’ work is that the people we want to blame must instead be embraced. So the State in the form of an obstructionist city council and a brutal police force are included in this number, as are the two rival drug gangs that vie for control of the district. The plot of the film is nothing more than the interaction of the three main character, Fr. Julian, Fr. Nichols and Luciana, with the different communities that make up Villa Virgin.

* The notes on the film from the Cannes Festival last year describe Luciana as an atheist. Unless I passed out at some point, this is never suggested in the film. In fact, prominently placed above her desk in her office is an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. One might speculate that this shines light on what faith means in a secular age. Many jump to a conclusion that because a character doesn’t appear in scenes where “devotion” occurs, we imagine that they must be irreligious. The underlying idea revealed in this assumption is that religious faith is a gloss that sits on top of a more primal, universally shared idea of what it means to be a human. Unless I missed some explicit signal somewhere, the reviewers** who have come to this “Luciana is atheist” conclusion are reading stuff into the film that isn’t actually there in a way that allows us to read out of their reviews a lot about the hidden assumptions of our age.

** One could further speculate that the critical dullness elicited by To The Wonder is also at work in responses to White Elephant. An idea of faith as a set of outmoded metaphysical commitments that some people have and that might possibly be of social benefit in some settings can be found again and again (good example here). This is a serious journalistic deficit. Imagine how crippled a film reviewer would be if they believed politics was nothing more than elections?

5.
The film does fall into the trap of nodding towards the hierarchical structure of the Catholic church as an obstacle to the ministry being carried out. However, this nod is restrained. Fr. Julian and his team seek to work under the authority of their bishop. This is at times frustrating. The depiction of hierarchy is still negative, but it is viewed realistically.

6.
The film also falls into the trap of depicting celibacy as almost impossible. This is a pity. But the way that it is done is wonderful, if just taken for what it is. Fr. Nicholas doesn’t fall out of celibacy because celibacy is a horrendous burden, but because friendship is desirable. The sex scene and subsequent relationship scenes that ensue are actually profoundly touching because what is communicated is the hunger for the other, not in some tacky counterfeit idea of a physical urge that can’t be resisted but in the sense of an attraction to the beauty of the other self. Falling out of celibacy is not a torturous existential crisis so much as a thing that happens because he loves his friend and desires her and she him. It is not a deficit in the path he is walking but a surplus in her beauty that possesses him. The falling out of celibacy creates internal contradictions but it doesn’t destroy his vocation.

7.
The reason why I want my Christian friends to watch this film is threefold. Firstly, it is a very good, gripping, thought provoking drama. It is superbly acted, it is restrained, it is interesting. These are rare and good things.

8.
Secondly, the film is an informed attempt to show us what it means to do Kingdom of God work embedded in a community. The protagonists are embedded in their community of faith but they live and dress and speak like the community that makes up the favela. Christians mis-use the word incarnational when they are describing this kind of work. What White Elephant offers us is a depiction of what this kind of community based ministry should look like. It is representational, not incarnational. Worship and mission and social justice work are not segmented. It is integrated. This film manages to do all this without being in any way propagandistic.

9.
Thirdly, the film shows us what our right stance should be towards politics, power and the State. We do not resist the State, any more than we seek to resist the drug dealers. We neither want the State overturned nor see that as our job, regardless of how unjust it is. Equally, we neither want the drug dealers extinguished nor see that as our job, in spite of the damage they inflict. Rather we witness to the State that we are citizens of a different Kingdom. The Argentine flag is a recurring motif in the film. Everyone except Fr. Nicholas is Argentinian and his Belgian origin is much discussed because to be foreign is to be strange. But the Christians in this film demonstrate in their words and their deeds that they are holding the State we call Argentina to account by the standards of the in-breaking Kingdom of God, which is their true home and the entity to which they owe allegiance. If that higher allegiance means they must shelter those that the law of the land deem criminal, then so be it. If that higher allegiance means that they must seek to restrain violence against the State even when they wish they could lash out, then so be it. If that higher allegiance calls them to martyrdom, then so be it.

10.
Final point: The soundtrack kicks in with some stirring stuff at important moments.

Your Correspondent, A cool name for his dog would be “Bark Obama”

I had coffee with a scholar buddy, B^A, earlier this week. As two people fairly committed to Christians getting on well together, we got to talking about ways in which different Christian traditions have different strengths. I suppose we were playing a sort of Denominational Top Trumps, where us evangelicals were very good with handling the Bible and Catholics are very good at prayer and the Church of Ireland is very good at showing up at wine receptions hosted by powerful people.

I apologise to my Anglican readers. I obviously still have a lot of work to do within myself in Foundational Ecumenism.

Our conversation touched briefly on a curious aspect of Catholic teaching which appears to Catholics to be very wonderful and appeared to us to be very problematic. The specific aspect is the Catholic tendency to have a view on everything. Presbyterians or Pentecostals can’t have a view on everything because the “official line” in those traditions and traditions like them is so diffuse that it is a wonder they manage to have a view on anything. What is simply impossible for Presbyterians seems to be irresistible for Catholics.

The existence of an authorised teaching office means that the Pope has words to say on world peace, on evolution, on condoms as well as on you know, the Resurrection. In Ireland today there is a fascinating story that can be pointed to by considering a couple of vectors. Firstly there is the decline of Catholic practice in the country. Secondly you need to chart the increase of people who want to declare themselves in some serious way as “non-religious”. But the final line it would be great to have some way to chart is the large batch of people within the first group that still consider themselves Catholic in more than some kind of weird political-national identity way.

In other words, Ireland is for a short time going to remain among the most Catholic countries in the world as measured in terms of attending mass and going to confession and baptising babies. But soon a tipping point will be reached where there are more people who do not participate regularly in the worship and practices of the Roman Catholic Church than that do. And the thing none of us can make sense of yet is that there will still be a Catholic majority in the country because a huge number of Catholics are Catholics in rebellion.

There are competing ways of explaining this. My hardcore Catholic friends in seminary would just say that if you don’t follow the Magisterial teaching and perform the sacramental aspects of the religion you can’t call yourself Catholic. There are hardcore atheist friends on the internet who would trot out an equally blunt and equally simplistic argument that this just represents the inexorable march of reason and progress, which requires the dimming and then extinguishing of all religious light. There is a third approach that B^A and I were trying to work out. It would basically involve the Catholic church taking back some of the things it has said.

Specifically, I think that if they found a way to take back Humanae Vitae and redescribe why Catholics are asked to be suspicious of contemporary sexual morality as it is presented today, then a huge gulf between the official church and the (non) practising believer on the ground would be closed. Of course, we might just be Protestants who don’t understand how Rome works here but we were struck with relief that as leaders in churches we would never have to offer a systematic and complete position on how every married couple should approach their family planning. Of course, we might be foolish enough and arrogant enough to propose such a system but we would be shot down in our hubris by the sheer fact that our congregations would ignore us.

It seems to me that if a theologian or pastor outlines a moral theology that simply cannot be lived out in the real world, that would be a pretty sure sign that the moral theology is deficient. I am not saying that our theological ethics ought to be shaped by the prevailing norms of the culture we live in. Rather, I am trying to remember that Christianity is a liberation movement. The teaching we advocate is counter-cultural and it will get into fights with other systems and approaches and it will be difficult and require worshipping, virtue-forming communities to sustain it. But if your teaching is almost universally ignored and in effect discredits your doctrinal teaching, your Gospel preaching and your worshipping, then you need to go back to the drawing board.

But when you have set yourself up as the Teaching Office, then going back on yourself is a tricky task.

Often in the last year I have had cause to reflect on how common it is that I need to take my words back. In the past, I have stuck my foot in my mouth with alarming regularity. I think that a year filled with more pastoral work and preaching in a range of different churches and the humbling effect of living life in the complexity of the world that I live in has made me far less likely to shoot from the hip (to use a phrase I despise because it is almost always an insult hidden as a word of wisdom). Even when I do, I know I can declare fallibility and without hesitation change my mind (which is after all, a literal description of what the word “repentance” means).

As a preacher I take 1 Peter 3:11 very seriously: ” If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God.” The bit of that hard sentence that gives me the comfort and solace needed to keep preaching is “do so as one” who speaks with divine authority. That “as one” is an aspiration and a stance and an attitude. It doesn’t assure me of infallibility. The responsibility of being a teacher in the church is grave and we should aim to speak with prophetic and revelatory force. But in our private life and in our public ministry, how delightful it is to be able to take back what we’ve said.

Your Correspondent, Can do more with one foot than most people can with three.

Plato’s anamnesis meets Tom Cruise and robot drones.

Your Correspondent, Remembers writing this before

Earlier in the week I attend the annual Corish Lecture in college. The speaker was Dr. Morwenna Ludlow of Exeter. She gave an interesting talk arguing that early Christian literature was useful and beautiful. It isn’t hackery to score some religious points and it isn’t spiritual propaganda. I frankly don’t know how anyone can suggest writers like Augustine and Tertullian are anything less than supreme masters of the literary arts. Dr. Ludlow chose the example of Gregory of Nyssa and to flesh her point out in the time allotted to her, she focused on a single chapter of a single work: chapter 3 of On Virginity.

Here is a blurry picture I took. In my defence, I got the phone 15 minutes before I cycled down to the lecture, so I didn’t know how to use it yet.

What has been understood in the past is that Gregory’s On Virginity was a sort of advertisement brochure for his brother Basil’s monastic communities. People have read chapter 3 and rolled their eyes like Liz Lemon because it does seem as if he rather over-eggs the pudding somewhat on the downer aspects of marriage.

Dr. Ludlow sees it otherwise. This isn’t “a purely rhetorical exercise” that slavishly copies literary forms (specifically the epithalamion style) familiar at the time. Rather it is “a systematic attempt to stand the epithalamion genre on its head. When Greg introduces the glowing bride to be and then quickly reminds you THAT SHE WILL DIE he is playing all kinds of sophisticated games. For one thing, the wedding chamber, the thanamos, becomes the tomb, thanatos when your wife dies. Besides literary gloss, the point is forcefully made that the beauty that we love in our wives is “merely ephemeral… all that transient grace.” He goes on to argue that the life of virginity is not an individual enterprise but a new form of community and through his remixing of the common imagery around water he is actually forging an entirely new way of writing artfully that is theologically substantial.

I hope you are still with me because I don’t want to redescribe the lecture. I couldn’t. It is not my area of expertise and I probably have already butchered the scholarship the poor Dr. Ludlow has been slaving over for years.

What I want to say is that when I read Greg’s infamous chapter 3, I didn’t want to roll my eyes. Instead I wanted to hug him. He put into words an embarrassingly intense feeling I had after I got married that I have never seen alluded to or replicated anywhere.

I grant you that the language is flowery but he gets us to imagine the perfect marriage:

Shall we begin with its choicest sweets? Well then, is not the sum total of all that is hoped for in marriage to get delightful companionship? Grant this obtained; let us sketch a marriage in every way most happy; illustrious birth, competent means, suitable ages, the very flower of the prime of life, deep affection, the very best that each can think of the other, that sweet rivalry of each wishing to surpass the other in loving; in addition, popularity, power, wide reputation, and everything else.

Short of illustrious birth, power and wide reputation, this is genuinely what I experience(d) in marriage. He goes on to say that let us imagine the impossible and even envy does not afflict this couple. Still, pain mars this relationship. Why? Because they are going to die.

I affirm that this very thing, this sweetness that surrounds their lives, is the spark which kindles pain. They are human all the time, things weak and perishing; they have to look upon the tombs of their progenitors; and so pain is inseparably bound up with their existence, if they have the least power of reflection. This continued expectancy of death, realized by no sure tokens, but hanging over them the terrible uncertainty of the future, disturbs their present joy, clouding it over with the fear of what is coming.

When I first got married, I hated to be parted from my wife. I had a fear that dreadful things would happen to her. She would have an accident or the building she was in would collapse or a flipping sea monster would drag her down to the depths. It was utterly irrational and inescapable. I have never yet feared death for myself. But I dreaded it for her. It brought me the entirely new feeling of being clingy. It is so morbid I fear you will think less of me. But when Gregory writes as he does, I can answer him loudly:

When he marks all those charms which to youth are so precious and which the thoughtless seek for, the bright eyes beneath the lids, the arching eyebrows, the cheek with its sweet and dimpling smile, the natural red that blooms upon the lips, the gold-bound hair shining in many-twisted masses on the head, and all that transient grace, then, though he may be little given to reflection, he must have this thought also in his inmost soul that some day all this beauty will melt away and become as nothing, turned after all this show into noisome and unsightly bones, which wear no trace, no memorial, no remnant of that living bloom. Can he live delighted when he thinks of that?

NO! There is no delight in that. The sure and certain hope of the Resurrection counted for nothing through the months of that first Autumn together. I had to work long and hard hours. My mind would wander off in traffic or at meetings to concerns about where my best friend was and whether she was safe.

Jokes commonly begin with a sentiment like “marriage has brought me many new things to fear.” I am not joking. Marriage gave me so much to value in life that for the first time ever I feared death. Her death, not mine, which in its own complex way is pretty selfish.

Gregory is such a buzzkill that he goes on to imagine the joy of imminent parenthood being cruelly whisked away by death in childbirth. He then says, even if the baby gets born, they still die eventually, as do you. Cheery as an embolism is our G from Nyssa. But also in a weird and rare way, right. We do die. Death stinks. David Bentley Hart talks of “its intrinsic falsity, its unjust dominion over the world, its ultimate nullity…”

And it is only in death’s ultimate nullity that any of us can ever have hope or Gregory might suggest, ever have lasting joy. Hart continues:

… the knowledge that God is not pleased or nourished by our deaths, that he is not the secret architect of evil that he is the conqueror of hell, that he has condemned all these things by the power of the cross; the that God is life and light and infinite love, and that the path that leads through nature and history to his Kingdom does not simply follow the contours of either either nature or history or, or obey the logic immanent to them, but is opened to us by way of the natural and historical absurdity – or outrage – of the empty tomb.

- David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea, p. 101.

Resurrection hope is the only thing that makes communities of virgins coherent. It is also the only thing that makes communities called marriages coherent. It is the wonderful key to the Cosmos. As Gregory says elsewhere:

Concepts create idols;
only wonder understands anything.

Your Correspondent, Better to have loved and maintained than to have never lost at all

It is probably fair to say that Wife-unit and I are not outdoor types. My nickname in college was Allergy-boy. She doesn’t even like reading that kind of detailed prose about verdant scenery that secure awards for first-time novels.

There is at least one place where we are more than happy to leave our books, screens and duvets behind and get out into the great wide open. In the middle of north Cork, in the south of this island, there is a valley called Gougane Barra. If you are one of those quaint old fashioned people who read websites directly and not through Google Reader, you can see a crude depiction of this valley on the banner image of this blog. The valley is home to a lake and a forest. The lake has the kind of crystal clear water that means that even when it is cloudy, drizzly and overcast (as it often is in this part of the world), the sky is still reflected in an uncanny mirror image. Crystal clear water like that isn’t simply beautiful on its own. It gives you a second glimpse of everything else around that is beautiful.

My parents always loved this little patch of the globe. And when my wife and I finally made it down here we understood why. It was quiet and calm and green, a Platonic ideal of Ireland, nestled in the hills of Munster.

I’m waffling. Forgive me.

The main thing I need to say is that there has been a Christian presence in this valley for about fifteen hundred years. If Celtic Christianity ever existed, this is the kind of place it flourished.

Today the church in Ireland is in decline. We attribute this to all kinds of reasons. The abuse of children that was so widespread in churches and in church-run institutions plays a massive part. Something called secularisation is also at play, but I am trying to ban every Christian leader from using that phrase until my friend Eoin O’Mahony finishes his phenomenally interesting PhD.

I was thinking about Eoin on our trip down to Cork because about an hour from Gougane Barra, on winding country lanes, I came across a different kind of historic site that got me thinking. One of the founders of the Irish State was Michael Collins. He looked a lot like Liam Neeson and he was friends with Alan Rickman, or at least Hollywood told the story that way. Collins was shot dead during the Irish Civil War at a place called Béal na Bláth. There is a disappointing monument to him.

Notice what has gone on here. A revolutionary leader, whom the Empire declared was a seditious terrorist and who was killed by his former allies in an ambush, is commemorated by a crucifix bearing the outstretched arms of a man the Empire declared a seditious terrorist, who was ambushed by his natural allies. The first man was an admittedly brilliant military strategist. The second man was the saviour of the world. In this piece of public architecture, those two roles have been confused.

This strange monument gives us a glimpse inside why the Irish church is in such poor health. Quite literally, the foundation stone upon which the cross bearing Christ rests is engraved with the name of a founder of the State.

The present state of the Irish church is largely attributable to the fact that the Irish church has spent the last century (at least) being a wing of the State.

The past of Irish Christianity lay in monasteries. Their ruins are dotted all over the countryside. I can cycle to two from where I sit and be back home again in half an hour. Some of them are gargantuan sites of scholarship and some of them are insane sites of asceticism and many of them aren’t even in Ireland. But Gougane Barra shows us what the future of Irish Christianity looks like. It is monastic.

That doesn’t mean it is withdrawn. It doesn’t mean that it will be made up of intense specialists, huddled over their sacred texts or famished in fasting-fuelled prayer. The future of Irish Christianity is found in ordinary radicals, whose monasticism is a state of mind that can thrive in the state of the art. David Bentley Hart has described it better than I ever could (when is that not true?):

It may be that ultimately this [monasticism] will again become the proper model of Christianity in the late modern West. I am not speaking, of course, of some great new monastic movement. I mean only that, in the lands where the old Christendom has mostly faded away, the life of those ancient men and women who devoted themselves to the science of charity, in willing exile from the world of social prestige and power, may perhaps again become the model that Christians will find themselves compelled to emulate. Christian conscience once sought out the desert as a shelter from the empire, where those who believed could strive to cultivate the pure eye (that could see all thing as gifts of God) and the pure heart (that could receive all persons with a generous love); now a very great deal of Western culture threatens to become something of a desert for believers. … Even so, it may be the case that Christians who live amid the ruins of the old Christendom – perhaps dwelling on the far-flung frontiers of a Christian civilization taking shape in other lands – will have to learn to continue the mission of their ancient revolution in the desert, to which faith has often found it necessary, at various times, to retreat.

- David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, p. 241.

Your Correspondent, His aspirations are wrapped up in books