The Stories Of Life Are Far From Over (Jonathan Martin)

For if there is a God who not only creates but sustains and resurrects, then there can yet be life on the other side of death for all things. Then there is hope, not only for the yearning in you to drive you into union with God, but to be realized in union with those others. If death is not the final word, and chaos produces creation rather than destroys it, then many of the stories of the life you thought were long over are far from over yet.

How To Survive A Shipwreck by Jonathan Martin, p 70

Creatio ex Nihilo and The Cosmic Christ (Jurgen Moltmann)

Ever since reading God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo by David Bentley Hart, the theological idea of creation ex nihilo has become an important one for me.  Subsequent readings, along with a few other essays (Theodicy, Hell, and David B Hart by Brian Moore being a notable one) have cemented it as foundational and formative.  The eschatological themes of heaven, hell and the destiny of creation, the connection between protology (beginnings) and eschatology (ends), the moral themes of theodicy and suffering, and the ultimate question of 'Who is God?' are all intimately germane to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

For me, this doctrine (as implication of the Gospel) provides reason for hope and the occasion for faith.

I came across the same themes recently in the work of Jurgen Moltmann.  Moltmann, however, doesn't explicitly use the language of creation "ex nihilo".  Not here anyways.  For Moltmann, this line of thought falls within his theological expositions on "The Cosmic Christ".

The connection is amazing.  When we are talking about the meaning of Creation ex nihilo, we are talking about the cosmic Christ, the Alpha and the Omega.

Both of the citations below are taken from Chapter 6 (section 3) of Jesus Christ for Today's World by Moltmann.  The chapter is entitled 'The Cosmic Christ'.  Have a look:

If all things are created by one God, then a transcendent unity precedes their diversity and their historicity. It is not a matter of many worlds belonging to many gods or powers. This is the one creation of the one God. If all things are created by the one God through his Wisdom/Logos, and if they are held together in that, then an immanent unity in which they all exist together underlies their diversity in space and time. Their unity is not the outcome of some subsequent process, emerging from their relationships and the warp and weft into which they are bound. Everything has its genesis in a fundamental underlying unity, which is called God's Wisdom, Spirit or Word. The fellowship of all created beings goes ahead of their differentiations and the specific forms given to them, and this is consequently the foundation underlying their diversity. If God withdraws this foundation, everything disintegrates and becomes a nothingness. If God lends it fresh force, the various forms are renewed (Ps. 104.29f.).
--(Kindle Locations 996-998).


The Hebrew word roach is often translated Spirit, as it is here; but a better translation is 'wind' or 'breath'. The Hebrew word 'rahaph' is generally rendered 'hover' or 'brood'. But according to Deut. 32.11 and Jer. 23.9 it really means vibrating, quivering, moving and exciting. If this is correct, then we shouldn't just think of the image of a fluttering or brooding dove. We should think of the fundamental resonances of music out of which sounds and rhythms emerge. So in thinking about 'creation through the Word', we shouldn't think primarily in metaphors of command and obedience. A better image is the song of creation. The word names, differentiates and appraises. But the breath is the same in all the words, and binds the words together. So the Creator differentiates his creatures through his creative Word and joins them through his Spirit, who is the sustainer of all his words. In the quickening breath and through the form-giving word, the Creator sings out his creatures in the sounds and rhythms in which he has his joy and his good pleasure.
--(Kindle Locations 1004-1010).

What is the 'Kingdom of God'? (Jurgen Moltmann)

In the summings-up of Jesus’ message we are also told again and again: “The kingdom of God is at hand – repent.”  But what does the word ‘repent’ really mean according to these parables?

A sheep has gone astray and is found and the finder is delighted that his search has not been in vain.  The lost coin could do nothing about either its loss or its finding: the joy is solely and entirely the woman’s.  The lost son, finally, was not merely ‘lost and found; he had actually been ‘dead and was alive again’.  So if we look at these parables, what is the kingdom of God?  It is nothing other than God’s joy at finding again the beings he created who have been lost.  And what is the ‘repentance’ which the sinner has to ‘perform’?  It is nothing other than the being-found, and the return home from exile and estrangement, the coming-alive again, and the joining in God’s joy.  We are experiencing God’s kingdom when something like this happens to us, something where we flower and put out fresh growth like the flowers and trees in the spring, and come alive again, because we sense the great in exhaustible loves from which all life proceeds.  When we experience God’s exhilaration in his joy over us, and our own vitality reawakens, the kingdom of God cease to be some remote and alien rule; it is the very source and fountain of life.  Then the kingdom of God is the wide space in which we can unfold and develop, because it is a place without any restrictions.  Once we experience God’s kingdom like this, we discover afresh the wealth of our potentialities for living.

Jurgen Moltmann, Jesus Christ For Today’s World

The Efficacy of Prayer as a House of Cards

Imagine you wanted a promotion at work.  So you prayed to a milk jug for two weeks and then applied for the promotion.  If the promotion came through, would you say it happened because the milk jug answered your prayer?  Most people would not.

Most Christians say that God answers prayer in three ways: yes, no, or wait.  If God says yes, you get whatever you were praying for.  If God says no, then you don't.  If God says "wait," then you keep praying for your desired outcome, knowing that God's timing is different from your own.

But the problem is, that covers every possible outcome.  Things either happen now, later, or not at all.  There's no other possibility.  How can you be confident that prayer works if there's, literally, no scenario that could prove it to be false?

Finding God in the Waves by Mike McHargue, p 50

Free-will, Freedom, Universalism, and the Allure of Love (John A.T. Robinson)

It is probable that the mental picture usually conjured up of the relation between divine omnipotence and human freedom is that of two irresistible forces each pulling in opposite directions. If, per impos­sibile, one were to gain a painful inch here or there, it could only be at the expense of the other’s loss: submission to the power of God must involve the abandonment of the freedom of man. But have we any rea­son to think that this is at all an accurate picture of what happens when will meets will in the personal relationship of love? Surely, it is grossly misleading.

We all know times, when a man or woman really shows his or her love for us, whether it be in some costly manifestation of forgiveness or self-sacrifice or in some small act of kindness or consideration, that we feel constrained to respond—we cannot help ourselves, everything within us tells us that we must. Our defenses are down, the power of love captures the very citadel of our will, and we answer with the spon­taneous surrender of our whole being. Yet, at the same time, we know perfectly well that at such moments we can, if we choose, remain un­moved; there is no physical compulsion to commit ourselves. Everyone may point to instances in which he has been constrained to thankful re­sponse by the overmastering power of love. And yet, under this strange compulsion, has anyone ever felt his freedom infringed or his personal­ity violated? Is it not precisely at these moments that he becomes con­scious, perhaps only for a fleeting space of time, of being himself in a way he never knew before, of attaining a fullness and integration of life which is inextricably bound up with the decision drawn from him by the other’s love? Moreover, this is true however strong be the con­straint laid upon him; or, rather, it is truer the stronger it is. Under the constraint of the love of God in Christ this sense of self-fulfillment is at its maximum. The testimony of generations is that here, as nowhere else, service is perfect freedom. When faced by an overpowering act of love, we realize how absurd it is to say that the freedom and integrity of our moral personality are safeguarded only if we set our teeth and determine not to allow ourselves to be won to its service. If, then, we do not lose, but rather find, our freedom in yielding to the constraining power of love, is there anything to be gained for the cause of liberty by demanding that when it is under the control of self-will it shall in the end be stronger than when it is under the control of love? May we not imagine a love so strong that ultimately no one will be able to restrain himself from free and grateful surrender? If the miracle of the forcing of pride’s intransigence—which is no forcing but a gentle leading—can be achieved in one case (St. Paul would say, in my case), who are we to say that God cannot repeat it in all? One by one, may not each come to the point at which he finds himself constrained to confess in the words of Charles Wesley:

I yield, I yield,

I can hold out no more;

I sink by dying love compelled

To own thee conqueror!

In The End, God…, by John A.T. Robinson, p 105-106

Theodicy, Death, and the Laws of Nature II (Thomas Lynch)

The set of events (rather pointless to call them "unlikely") that resulted in the death of a young girl named Stephanie are provided on p 55, just prior to this section.  To briefly summarize, the family was driving through Kentucky on their way to Georgia for vacation.  Some local Kentucky boys, mischievous but not malevolent, were messing around in a local cemetery for fun.  They stole a headstone.  Getting tired of carrying it, they decided to toss it off the overpass.  It was at just this moment that Stephanie's van passed under:

The stone shattered the windshield, glanced off Stephanie's father's right shoulder, woke her mother riding in the passenger seat and, parting the space between the two front seats, struck Stephanie in the chest as she lay sleeping in the back seat.  She had just traded places with her younger brother who cuddled with his two sisters in the rear seat of the van.  It did not kill Stephanie instantly.  Her sternum was broken.  Her heart bruised beyond repair.

Words provide little comfort.  No explanation can dull the reality of it (I assume the story is true).  But Lynch cannot help but cycle through the various explanations:

Sometimes it seems like multiple choice.
    A: It was the Hand of God.  God woke up one Friday the 13th and said, "I want Stephanie!"  How else to explain the fatal intersection of bizarre events.  Say the facts slowly, they sound like God's handiwork.  If the outcome were different, we'd call it a miracle.
    Or B: It wasn't the Hand of God.  God knew it, got word of it sooner or later, but didn't lift a hand because He knows how much we've come to count on the Laws of Nature - gravity and objects in motion and at rest - so He doesn't fiddle with the random or deliberate outcomes.  He regrets to inform us of this, but surely we must understand His position.
    Or C: The Devil did it.  If faith supports the existence of Goodness, then it supports the probability of Evil.  And sometimes, Evil gets the jump on us.
    Or D: None of the above.  Shit happens.  That's life, get over it, get on with it.
    Or maybe E: All of the above, Mysteries - like decades of the rosary - glorious and sorrowful mysteries.

Each of the answers leaves my inheritance intact - my father's fear, my mother's faith.  If God's will, shame on God is what I say.  If not, then shame on God.  It sounds the same.  I keep shaking a fist at the Almighty asking 'Where were you on the morning of the thirteenth'?  The alibi changes every day.

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, p 56

Theodicy, Death, and the Laws of Nature (Thomas Lynch)

I'm reading Thomas Lynch's The Undertaking for Lent this year.

No way around these haunting realities:

But my father had seen, in the dead bodies of infants and children and young men and women, evidence that God lived by the Laws of Nature, and obeyed in statues, however brutal.  Kids died of gravity, and physics and biology and natural selection.  Car wrecks and measles and knives stuck in toasters, household poisons, guns left loaded, kidnappers, serial killers, burst appendices, bee stings, hard-candy chokings, croups untreated - he'd seen too many instances of His unwillingness to overrule the natural order, which included, along with hurricanes and meteorites and other Acts of God, the aberrant disasters of childhood.

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, p 45-46

“Just” a body? (Thomas Lynch)

Thomas Lynch, poet/undertaker, will be one of my literary companions this Lenten season.

Perhaps a proper Lenten beginning entails burying (pun intended) the idea that we should ever piously place the adverb “just”  prior to the noun “body” when we talk about the life and death of a human being.

"So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize as it would if we were to say it was “just” a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy.  Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised “just” a body from dead.  What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins?  What if, rather than “just a shell,” he’d raised his personality, say, or The Idea of Himself?  Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that?  Done the Crusades?  Burned witches?  Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.  If he’d raised anything less, of course, as Paul points out, the deacon and several others of us would be out of business or back to Saturday Sabbaths, a sensible diet, and no more Christmases."

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, p21

Moderate Giftedness in a Globalized World (Kurt Vonnegut)

I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives - maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most.  And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on.

That's what I think.  And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that.  A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to do into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness.  A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers.  We have a name for him or her.  We call him or her an "exhibitionist."


Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut, Ch. 9

Doomed to Repeat the Past (Kurt Vonnegut)

"As the philosopher George Santayana said, 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'"

"Is that a fact?" she said.  "Well - I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what.  That's what it is to be alive.  It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten."

Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut, Ch. 10

War Fatigue and the Patriotic Imagination (Kurt Vonnegut)

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then.  It’s hard to believe how sick of war we used to be.  We used to boast of how small our Army and Navy were, and how little influence generals and admirals had in Washington.  We used to call armaments manufacturers “Merchants of Death.”

Can you imagine that?

Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut, Ch. 8

Hope, faith, "progress", transformation (Gerald May)

Then I reflect back over my own life, in which it seems I can identify many experiences of both night and morning, and I ask, “Am I really more loving now than I used to be?” Sometimes I think I am; other times I’m not at all so sure. And then, finally, I remember how vast and incomprehensible real love is, and how terribly limited is my capacity to judge it for myself, let alone for anyone else. My ideas of love have to do with emotional feelings and acts of kindness, and I know these bear as much similarity to divine love as Teresa’s silkworm does to the butterfly. And I am reminded of how attached I am to the idea of progress; I am looking for objective evidence that I am making headway in this spiritual journey. Yet the truth of the journey admits of no such evidence, and it completely transcends my petty notions of progress. 

So in the end I am left only with hope. I hope the nights really are transformative. I hope every dawn brings deeper love, for each of us individually and for the world as a whole. I hope that John of the Cross was right when he said the intellect is transformed into faith, and the will into love, and the memory into…hope.

From The Dark Night of the Soul by Gerald May - Ch. 7

Divine Love As Giving (Miroslav Wolf)

So, what do we Christians mean by love? First, let’s consider what we don’t mean. Plato’s Symposium is likely the most influential text about love in the whole of Western literature. In it, Socrates argues that to love is to desire something one does not have and considers to be good. Apply this definition of love to God, as some Muslim theologians do, and you immediately see the difficulty. God lacks nothing that is good, and God has no needs. So God cannot desire anything God doesn’t have. Therefore God cannot love— in Socrates’s sense of the word. Now, Christians agree with Muslims who think this way. All responsible Christian theologians insist that God doesn’t love in this “needy” kind of way; such love wouldn’t be worthy of God. 

Does it follow, however, that God doesn’t love at all? We use the word “love” in another sense— not just to designate desire for what we lack, but commitment to give of what we have and of who we are. This is the main sense in which the Christian tradition speaks of God’s love. “For God so loved . . . that he gave,” reads the famous verse about God’s love quoted earlier. When God loves, God doesn’t long to get something, but undertakes to impart something. God gives when God creates; God gives when God delivers; God gives when God forgives; God gives when God grants eternal life. God gives, and in giving God loves. All of God’s works are done out of generosity, none out of acquisitiveness.

--Mirsoslav Wolf (Allah: A Christian Response, p. 154)

Climbing the ladder of success (Thomas Merton)

A few quotes from Albert Einstein

As a follow up to my brief post on black holes on Saturday, I thought I'd post some quotes from Einstein.

Scientist, philosopher, mystic, sage, curious and wondering child....Einstein is a difficult man to pin down.


The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express in words afterwards.

The Moral Theology of the Devil (Thomas Merton)

Thomas Merton: “The moral theology of the Devil.” From New Seeds of Contemplation.

The devil has a whole system of theology and philosophy, which will explain, to anyone who will listen, that created things are evil, that men are evil, that God created evil and that He directly wills that men should suffer evil. According to the devil, God rejoices in the suffering of men and, in fact, the whole universe is full of misery because God willed and planned it this way.

Indeed says this system of theology, God the Father took real pleasure in delivering His Son to His murderers, and God the Son came to earth because he wanted to be punished by the Father. Both of them seek nothing more than to punish and persecute their faithful ones. As a matter of fact, in creating the world God had clearly in mind that man would inevitably sin so that God would have an opportunity to manifest His justice.

So according to the devil, the first thing created was really hell – as if everything else were, in some sense, for the sake of hell. Therefore the devotional life of those who are “faithful” to this kind of theology consists above all in an obsession with evil. As if there were not already enough evils in the world, they multiply prohibitions and make new rules, binding everything with thorns, so that man may not escape evil and punishment. For they would have him bleed from morning to night, though even with so much blood there is no remission of sin! The Cross, then, is no longer a sign of mercy (for mercy has no place in such a theology), it is a sign that Law and Justice have utterly triumphed, as if Christ had said: “I came not to destroy the Law but to be destroyed by it.” For this, according to the devil, is the only way in which the Law could really and truly be “fulfilled”. Not love but punishment is the fulfillment of the Law. The Law must devour everything, even God. Such is theology of punishment, hatred and revenge. He who would live by such a dogma must rejoice in punishment. He may, indeed, successfully evade punishment himself by “playing ball” with the Law and the Lawgiver. But he must take good care that others do not avoid suffering. He must occupy his mind with their present and future punishment.  The Law must triumph. There must be no mercy.

This is the chief mark of the theology of hell, for in hell there is everything but mercy. That is why God Himself is absent from hell. Mercy is the manifestation of His presence.

The theology of the devil is for those who, for one reason or another, whether because they are perfect or because they have come to an agreement with the Law, no longer need any mercy. With them (O grim joy!) God is “satisfied”. So too is the devil. It is quite an achievement, to please everybody!

The people who listen to this sort of thing, and absorb it, and enjoy it, develop a notion of the spiritual which is a kind of hypnosis of evil. The concepts of sin, suffering, damnation, punishment, the justice of God, retribution, the end of the world and so on, are things over which they smack their lips with unspeakable pleasure. Perhaps this is why they develop a deep, subconscious comfort from the thought that many other people will fall into hell which they themselves are going to escape. And how do they know that they are going to escape it? They cannot give any definite reason except that they feel a certain sort of relief at the thought of all this punishment is prepared for practically everyone else but themselves.

This feeling of complacency is what they refer to as “faith”, and it constitutes a kind of conviction that they are “saved”.

The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied:. And after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.

The moral theology of the devil starts out with the principle: “Pleasure is sin.” Then he goes on to work it the other way: “All sin is pleasure.”

After that he points out that pleasure is practically unavoidable and that we have a natural tendency to do things that please us from which he reasons that all our natural tendencies are evil and that our nature in itself is evil in itself. And he leads us to the conclusion that no one could possibly avoid sin, since pleasure is inescapable.

After that, to make sure that no one will try to escape or to avoid sin, he adds that what is unavoidable cannot be a sin. Then the whole concept of sin is thrown out the window as irrelevant, and people decide that there is nothing left except to live for pleasure, and in that pleasures that are naturally good become evil by the de-ordination and lives are thrown away in unhappiness and sin.

It sometimes happens that men who preach most vehemently about evil and the punishment of evil, so that they seem to have practically nothing else on their minds except sin, are really unconscious haters of other men. They think the world does not appreciate them, and this is their way of getting even.

The devil is not afraid to preach the will of God provided he can preach it in his own way.

The argument goes something like this: “God wills you to do what is right. But you have an interior attraction which tells you, by a nice warm glow of satisfaction, what is right. Therefore, if others try to interfere and make you do something that does not produce this comfortable sense of interior satisfaction, quote Scripture, tell them that you ought to obey God rather than men, and go ahead and do your own will, do the thing that gives you that nice, warm glow.”

The theology of the devil is really not theology but magic. “Faith” in this theology is really not the acceptance of a God Who reveals Himself as mercy. It is a psychological, subjective “force” which applies a kind of violence to reality in order to change it according to one's own whims. Faith is a kind of super effective wishing a mastery that comes from a special, mysteriously dynamic will power that is generated by “profound convictions.” By virtue of this wonderful energy one can exercise a persuasive force even on God Himself and bend Him to one's own will. By this astounding new dynamic soul force of faith (which any quack can develop in you for an appropriate remuneration) you can turn God into a means to your own ends. We become civilized medicine men, and God becomes our servant. Though He is terrible in His own right, He respects our sorcery. He allows Himself to be tamed by it. He will appreciate our dynamism, and He will reward it with success in everything we attempt. We will become popular because we have “faith”. We will be rich because we have “faith.” All our national enemies will come and lay their arms at our feet because we have “faith”. Business will boom all over the world, and we will be able to make money out of everything and everyone under the sun because of the charmed life we lead. We have faith.

But there is a subtle dialectic in all this, too.

We hear that faith does everything. So we close our eyes and strain a bit, to generate some “soul force”. We believe. We believe.

But nothing happens.

So we go on with this until we become disgusted with the whole business. We get tired of generating “soul force”. We get tired of this “faith” that does nothing to change reality. It does not take away our anxieties, our conflicts, it leaves us prey to uncertainty. It does not lift all responsibilities off our shoulders. Its magic is not so effective after all. It does not thoroughly convince us that God is satisfied with us, or even that we are satisfied with ourselves (though in this, it is true, some people's faith is often quite effective).

Having become disgusted with faith, and therefore with God, we are now ready for the Totalitarian Mass Movement that will pick us up on the rebound and make us happy with war, with the persecution of “inferior races” or of enemy classes, or generally speaking, with actively punishing someone who is different from ourselves.

Another characteristic of the devil's moral theology is the exaggeration of all distinctions between this and that, good and evil, right and wrong. These distinctions become irreducible divisions. No longer is there any sense that we might perhaps all be more or less at fault, and that we might be expected to take upon our own shoulders the wrongs of others by forgiveness, acceptance, and patient understanding and love, and thus help one another to find the truth. On the contrary, in the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong. This does not exactly make for peace and unity among men, because it means that everybody wants to be absolutely right himself, or to attach himself to another who is absolutely right. And in order to prove their rightness they have to punish and eliminate those who are wrong. Those who are wrong, in turn, convinced that they are right... etc.

Finally, as might be expected, the moral theology of the devil grants an altogether unusual amount of importance to.. the devil. Indeed one soon comes to find out that he is the very center of the whole system. That he is behind everything. That he is moving everybody in the world except ourselves. That he is out to get even with us. And that there is every chance of his doing so because, it now appears, his power is equal to that of God, or even perhaps superior to it...

In one word, the theology of the devil is purely and simply that the devil is god.

The Grace In Not Knowing The Way (Gerald May)

If we are honest, I think we have to admit that we will likely try to sabotage any movement toward true freedom. If we really knew what we were called to relinquish on this journey, our defenses would never allow us to take the first step. Sometimes the only way we can enter the deeper dimensions of the journey is by being unable to see where we’re going.

From The Dark Night of the Soul by Gerald May - Ch. 3

Freedom for the fulfillment of love (Gerald May)

If we were left in the realm of self-determination, our freedom would remain directionless. It might be freedom from attachment, but it would not be freedom for anything. It would be doomed to wander from one self-generated intention to the next. It is only by moving from self-determination to divinely inspired participation that freedom finds its direction toward the fulfillment of love. 

And it is the realization of our essential union with God and creation that enables and empowers the practical living of love in the real situations of life. There is no missionary zeal here, no knee-jerk attempts to be helpful, no programmed acts of religious nicety, no knowledge of what to do for one’s neighbor. Here actions and feelings flow from a bottomless source within us, and our intellect can do nothing but stand by and marvel.  


From The Dark Night of the Soul by Gerald May - Ch. 7

My Bright Abyss: Christian Wiman (Part 7)

Chapter title in bold below.

Mortify Our Wolves

What is this world that we are so at odds with, this beauty by which we are so wounded, and into which God has so utterly gone?

Part of the mystery of grace is the way it operates not only as present joy and future hope, but also retroactively, in a way: the past is suffused with a presence that, at the time, you could only feel as the most implacable absence. This is why being saved (I dislike the language too, not because it’s inaccurate but because it’s corrupted by contemporary usage, a hands-in-the-air-holy-seizure sort of rapture, a definitive sense of rift) involves embracing rather than renouncing one’s past. It is true that Christ makes a man anew, that there is some ultimate change in him. But part of that change is the ability to see your life as a whole, to feel the form and unity of it, to become a creature made for and assimilated into existence, rather than a desperate, fragmented man striving against existence or caught forever just outside of it.

The single most damaging and distorting thing that religion has done to faith involves overlooking, undervaluing, and even outright suppressing this interior, ulterior kind of consciousness. So much Western theology has been constructed on a fundamental disfigurement of the mind and reality. In neglecting the voices of women, who are more attuned to the immanent nature of divinity, who feel that eruption in their very bodies, theology has silenced a powerful— perhaps the most powerful— side of God.

Nothing is served by following someone into a grave. Somehow, even deep within extreme grief, the worst pain is knowing that your pain will pass, all the sharp particulars of life that one person’s presence made possible will fade into mere memory, and then not even that. Consequently, many people fight hard to keep their wound fresh, for in the wound, at least, is the loss, and in the loss the life you shared.

It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, “maturity,” suffering.

My loves, I love you with all the volatility and expansiveness of spirit that you have taught me to feel, and I feel your futures opening out from you, and in those futures I know my own. I will be with you. I will comfort you in your despair and I will share in your joy. They need not be only grief, only pain, these black holes in our lives. If we can learn to live not merely with them but by means of them, if we can let them be part of the works of sacred art that we in fact are, then these apparent weaknesses can be the very things that strengthen us. Life tears us apart, but through those wounds, if we have tended them, love may enter us. It may be the love of someone you have lost. It may be the love of your own spirit for the self that at times you think you hate. However it comes though, in all these— of all these and yet more than they, so much more— there burns the abiding love of God. But if you find that you cannot believe in God, then do not worry yourself with it. No one can say what names or forms God might take, nor gauge the intensity of unbelief we may need to wake up our souls. My love is still true, my children, still with you, still straining through your ambitions and your disappointments, your frenzies and forgetfulness, through all the glints and gulfs of implacable matter— to reach you, to help you, to heal you.

A Million Little Oblivions

No, to be a Christian has to mean believing in the resurrected Christ, though I grow less and less interested in the historical argument around this: Did a man named Jesus really rise from the dead three days after being crucified in Jerusalem two thousand years ago? The arguments are compelling on both sides, but the whole process of putting faith on trial, the incessant need for an intellectual result, feels false to me. It seems like a failure of vision even to ask the question, much less to get all tangled up in it.

There is another way. It is the way of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading for release from his fate, abandoned by God. It is something you cannot learn as a kind of lesson simply from reading the text. Christ teaches by example, true, but he lives with us, lives in us, through imagination and experience. It is through all these trials in our own lives, these fears however small, that we come close to Christ, if we can learn to say, with him, “not my will, Lord, but yours.” This is in no way resignation, for Christ still had to act. We all have to act, whether it’s against the fears of our daily life or against the fear that life itself is in danger of being destroyed. And when we act in the will of God, we express hope in its purest and most powerful form, for hope, as Václav Havel has said, is a condition of your soul, not a response to the circumstances in which you find yourself. Hope is what Christ had in the garden, though he had no reason for it in terms of events, and hope is what he has right now, in the garden of our own griefs.



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My Bright Abyss: Christian Wiman (Part 6)

Chapter title in bold below.

Varieties of Quiet

What is the difference between a mystery in which, and by means of which, one’s whole spiritual and intellectual being is elated and completed, and a mystery that merely deflates one’s spirit and circumvents one’s intellect?

We do not need definite beliefs because their objects are necessarily true. We need them because they enable us to stand on steady spots from which the truth may be glimpsed. And not simply glimpsed— because certainly revelation is available outside of dogma; indeed all dogma, if it’s alive at all, is the result of revelation at one time or another— but gathered in. Definite beliefs are what make the radical mystery— those moments when we suddenly know there is a God, about whom we “know” absolutely nothing— accessible to us and our ordinary, unmysterious lives. And more crucially: definite beliefs enable us to withstand the storms of suffering that come into every life, and that tend to destroy any spiritual disposition that does not have deep roots.

If piety forbids one to imagine any afterlife that makes this life seem altogether inferior, then piety essentially forbids one from imagining any afterlife at all. (Unless you simply imagine this life somehow continuing in perpetuity, which would, even for the happiest person out there, eventually be a kind of hell.) One can still have faith in an afterlife, but it is a faith both kindled and confined by the earth.

The purpose of theology— the purpose of any thinking about God— is to make the silences clearer and starker to us, to make the unmeaning— by which I mean those aspects of the divine that will not be reduced to human meanings— more irreducible and more terrible, and thus ultimately more wonderful. This is why art is so often better at theology than theology is.

Renouncing sex may not be easier than renouncing disbelief, but at least you can understand it; it is a problem you can, so to speak, grapple with.  Trying to take hold of disbelief is like fighting your own shadow.

Every man has a man within him who must die.

Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine. —H. J. IWAND

It goes both ways, though: mystical experience needs some form of dogma in order not to dissipate into moments of spiritual intensity that are merely personal, and dogma needs regular infusions of unknowingness to keep from calcifying into the predictable, pontificating, and anti-intellectual services so common in mainstream American churches. So what does all this mean practically? It means that congregations must be conscious of the persistent and ineradicable loneliness that makes a person seek communion, with other people and with God, in the first place. It means that conservative churches that are infused with the bouncy brand of American optimism one finds in sales pitches are selling shit. It means that liberal churches that go months without mentioning the name of Jesus, much less the dying Christ, have no more spiritual purpose or significance than a local union hall. It means that we— those of us who call ourselves Christians— need a revolution in the way we worship. This could mean many different things— poetry as liturgy, focused and extended silences, learning from other religious traditions and rituals (this seems crucial), incorporating apophatic language. But one thing it means for sure: we must be conscious of language as language, must call into question every word we use until we refine or remake a language that is fit for our particular religious doubts and despairs— and of course (and most of all!) our joys.

You can’t really know a religion from the outside, and you can’t simply “re-create” it to your liking.


Continue to part 7