"And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" — Micah 6:8
By now it's no secret that my spirituality seems to have evolved into a concern for justice and, what I believe amounts to the same thing, the extolling of humility, kindness, and compassion. With the help of Google I have stumbled upon an odd website, www.compassion.org, that seems to consist of a single page containing four quotations about compassion. I find all four resonant.
The first of these quotes is from the Catholic monk and author Thomas Merton: "Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things." Another site with quotes about compassion cites Merton as saying, "The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another."
The second quotation is from someone I don't know, Arthur Jersild, who (Googling reveals) is a psychologist and professor of education at Columbia: "Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity. It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment."
Quotation number three comes from another source not known to me, Matthew Fox. This article about him appears in Wikipedia. There he is called "a controversial American priest and theologian, and the leading exponent of Creation Spirituality," which is apparently a mystical tradition from the 12th to 15th centuries. The quotation reads, "Compassion is not sentiment but is making justice and doing works of mercy. Compassion is not a moral commandment but a flow and overflow of the fullest human and divine energies."
And the fourth quotation, "The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, forgiveness," comes from the present Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. The Dalai Lama is the supreme head of Tibetan Buddhism, said to be one in a series of incarnations of the bodhisattva, or enlightenment-being, of compassion.
These quotations, taken together, emphasize: gaining a sense of all beings' mutual interdependence; finding spiritual and emotional maturity; enacting justice and mercy; and facilitating love, patience, tolerance, humility, and forgiveness. Christians have an expression that summarizes it all: living in the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God, also called the kingdom of heaven, is spoken of often in the Gospels and throughout the New Testament, but the meaning of the phrase is a bit elusive. Thus, this question put to Father John Dietzen, whose column answering knotty concerns of Roman Catholic belief appears widely in the Catholic press.
Fr. Dietzen addresses the perplexing problem that the kingdom of God is said to be both present now and coming in the future. Rather than thinking of it as "a static, unchanging condition, something finally finished here or perhaps even in the future," we need to imagine it as "active and full of life, constantly at work in everything [God] continually is creating."
The kingdom is, in fact, "God’s reign, his loving rule over all creation" which we can experience as the "compassionate and magnanimous presence of God." As "an ongoing presence," the kingdom "declares that the rule of God is now." This rule of God is to be experienced as "the Father’s benevolent presence and power active in the world."
Yet the kingdom involves the future just as much as it concerns the present. It is a force working ceaselessly "to re-establish the harmony of creation destroyed by sin." This redemptive process, Fr. Dietzen says, is "part of the mystery of God's creating love." It seeks to establish the perfect justice which our everyday experience finds woefully lacking in this material world.
In view of the reality of the kingdom here and now, yet extending forever into the future, we are urged by Jesus "to trust, not to be afraid. Whatever happens, we are sure of the Father’s benevolent presence and power active in the world. ... The more we are aware of the power of this divine rule among us now and its continuance in eternity, the greater is our confidence that, in St. Paul’s words, nothing can separate us from the love of God that comes to us in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Showing posts with label Spirituality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spirituality. Show all posts
Monday, January 29, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Impulse Control
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| Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word |
Christian ethics and morality seek to train the will to want only right and proper things, but as King points out, none of us can suppress our urges and impulses entirely. We may dedicate ourselves to serving an ethical ideal. Then we may encounter a Dark Night of the Soul, when we realize that our chaotic inner impulses have refused to die. Oddly, the next stage of religious development is quite marvelous: a "second baptism" into a true spirituality.
Impulses are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically bad. However, they need to be placed under some sort of control, some "decider" which tells us in which direction to move after an impulse has propelled us to make a change in our life, or even just to alter something in our momentary situation.
King suggests this is the province of the Spirit of God, which, the Bible says, "blows where it will." The Spirit, that is, does not adhere to rules that can be stated in words, in the way that a rational ethic does. (This is why King says that the Bible cannot always be read literally, as if all divine truth could be conveyed in flat, everyday prose.)
I am put in mind of a scene in the movie The Apostle where the protagonist, Robert Duvall, is kicked out by wife Farrah Fawcett for his philandering ways. He is nonetheless a holy man. As he motors along toward some sort of new life, he asks the Good Lord for direction by driving his car round and round in circles in a deserted intersection until an impulse tells him which highway to take.
I think this is something my evangelical/charismatic friends Chris and Dee (see Aspiration and Inspiration) are intimately familiar with. They are always talking about how God is "leading" them to do this or that, a locution which I interpret as meaning that the Spirit is moving them in a particular direction. Or, in terms of the urges and impulses that they feel as complex human beings, I think they are saying that they experience one particular impulse, among the riot of possibilities that well naturally up within them, which they feel has God's sanction and bears his blessing. It is that particular one which deserves to be followed. It is that one which marks the highway they need to take, at the proverbial crossroads.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Aspiration and Inspiration
I recently received in the mail a flier from Heather K. telling of her youth group's plans to evangelize in Europe this summer of 2007. Heather is the teenage daughter of good friends of mine who I think it is fair to say are among America's huge number of evangelical Christians, though they could also be described as charismatic as well. Heather's youth group, the flier said, is looking forward to preaching God's word in countries that they feel have pretty much lost touch with it.
I know there is widespread sentiment on this side of the Atlantic that the Europeans are a bunch of rank atheists, but I can testify from my multiple visits there that there are plenty of Christians in Europe and plenty of churches, some of which I have attended beautiful services in.
One of the things that distorts our understanding of this is that American Christianity has a strong evangelical orientation that seems to be lacking in much of Europe. My guess is that it's because evangelicalism fits in so well with upward socioeconomic mobility in America, but in Europe the movers and the shakers tend to be the ones who have abandoned religious values for secular ones.
Meanwhile the "ordinary" folks in Europe are still religious, but in a quieter way since they don't necessarily aspire to the next rung up the ladder. In this country, folks who are climbing the socioeconomic ladder see God as an awesome, mighty force in aiding that process. In other words, how we experience God depends on how we experience life. Nothing wrong with that, but it does tend to make Christians of different styles talk past one another, rather than to one another.
Those are the kinds of things I told Heather's parents, Chris and Dee, in an e-mail I have just sent them today — in which I also told them I have mailed Heather a small donation in support of her trip. It just so happened that Chris and Dee e-mailed me to find out how I've been doing, and I received their missive on a morning after I had awakened during the night with a host of thoughts concerning evangelicalism in American religion.
My primary thought was this: I have to admit, personally, to having an anti-evangelical bias in my own religious sensibility.
In trying to explain that to myself, I began to focus on the notion that I have never been in the position of aspiring to a great deal more socioeconomically than the life without want I was born into as the son of parents from the American heartland or Bible Belt whose own upward trajectory — a very successful one, in material terms — I would call sort of "European," in a broad sense. Or, at least, cosmopolitan.
Harold Francis Stewart and Leota Isabel Berry Stewart, my beloved parents, now dead, were among the generation of Americans who became teenagers in the Roaring Twenties. It was a time when religious backgrounds (she was Southern Baptist, he Methodist) were experienced by many Americans as hindrances to the high life that could be theirs if they threw off old-fashioned strictures and shackles of religious observance.
My family did very little churchgoing in my youth, though some of my mother's large family stayed faithful to the old-time religion. They stayed away from big cities and remained back in the Midwestern states which Mom and Dad had left behind to make a better life, during the Great Depression, in the "godless" East. Of course, the metropolitan East wasn't really godless, but neither was it evangelical. Religion was mostly a private affair.
My parents kept it so private that, today, I am not quite sure exactly what they believed about God, or how much they believed it. I do remember one dinner-table conversation in which they told me how the home of my maternal grandfather, William Palmer Berry, a man who was trained as a lay preacher in the Southern Baptist Convention, was run so strictly that there was no listening to records or the radio, no dancing, no card playing ... and, of course, no cigarette smoking or alcohol drinking.
My father's father, Willis Warder Stewart, was also a stern sort, in a Methodist way rather than a Southern Baptist one — I never quite caught on to the difference, if there was one. All I knew is that my parents had abandoned religion, while still clinging to some belief in God. They were not, strictly speaking, freethinkers, but their lives had been strongly influenced by the free thought of the likes of, say, H.L. Mencken.
Mencken was the newspaper reporter and columnist who had emerged from strictly local renown in Baltimore, Maryland, to a national audience through his coverage of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee. This was the famous trial of a local schoolteacher accused of violating state law by teaching evolution. Mencken assailed the Dayton townsfolk who resented Darwinism and set up the prosecution of John Scopes as benighted ones "unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible" (see this account of his coverage).
My parents felt that success in this world — what I think of as the high life — would follow upon the relinquishing of such benighted, fundamentalist attitudes.
In other words, their aspirations were such as to lead them away from religion. I think for Chris and Dee, as for countless other evangelicals today, it is just the opposite. Aspiration and inspiration are inseparably linked in their religion and in their life experience.
In mid-adulthood I became a Christian. But, rather than having a born-again experience, I gravitated toward and eventually became a member of the Roman Catholic faith. In other words, instead of emphasizing the evangelical, as so many Americans, my life experience has been more of the Old World variety, even down to the style of Christianity I felt drawn to.
I remember during my childhood watching, on that first new TV that entered our home in the primitive 1950s, one of the early televangelists thumping his Bible and asking members of his live audience to come forward and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. I also remember my mother saying something disparaging about it — her exact words are ones I can't recall. All I know is that it left me with a distaste for that kind of religion, which persists to this day.
In my middle-of-the-night musing about such things, I realized my distaste may be in large part a matter of not wanting to re-associate myself with the socioeconomic class my parents left behind on their rise to the upper middle class.
Or perhaps the class to which I refer was the one their parents had left behind in moving from the recurrent edge of poverty to what I think of as a staid "middle middle class" existence in the American heartland. I may have this wrong, and if so I apologize to any whose feelings I offend, but my impression is that evangelicalism appeals mainly to the peculiarly American socioeconomic stratum that I think of as poor Scotch-Irish and their ilk.
The Scotch-Irish in America, my ancestors, are the descendants of Protestant people who moved away from oppression and penury in Scotland centuries back, to take up residence in Northern Ireland. After their prospects there dimmed, many sought a brave new world in America — including my direct Stewart antecedent, one of three brothers who came here from Ulster at about the time of the War of 1812. One brother struck it rich as the founder of the world's first department store, A. T. Stewart's, later Wanamaker's, but the other two, including my lineal forebear Robert Stewart, weren't so lucky. My heritage on both sides of my family — not all of it identifiably Scotch-Irish, by the way — came through ancestors who often had to struggle to make ends meet.
All my grandparents were devoted to their religion, as far as I can tell, but I received no inkling that they were particularly evangelical in their religious style. By the time I was old enough to sit up and take notice, my paternal grandfather had remarried after mourning the death, some time back, of his first wife, my true grandmother. Then he died before I could get to know him. As for the grandparents on my mother's side, I did get to spend some time with them before their own rather early deaths, but I never knew them as particularly fervent religious types. True, when we went to visit them in Springfield, Missouri, my mother had to slip into the bedroom to sneak a smoke, or, along with my Dad, a wee nip. But I don't recall being taken to church on a Sunday or hearing much in the way of religious talk. And there were the games I'd play with Grandpa Berry, checkers and Chinese checkers, to make him seem like a regular guy. There was a bit of a dust-up, as I recall, over whether I was allowed to chew gum in their house... but a lot of that generation, born in the second half of the 19th century, thought gum-chewing was "common"; it wasn't just religious evangelicals.
The point is, I don't really know why my grandparents weren't terribly evangelical, but I suspect it was because they had attained their early aspirations of middle-class security and respectability long before I came along. That, and they were no longer young and full of zeal.
By the time my parents were thinking about leaving their respective nests, the smart set back East were well known across the land as having traded in the old-style religion for a high life of sophistication and glamor. My father wanted to follow in the footsteps of Mencken ... but W.W. Stewart couldn't afford at the crucial moment to put him through journalism school at the University of Missouri. H.F. Stewart instead joined the Army; served in peacetime Hawaii; turned down Officer Candidate School to spare his intended wife, my mother, a vagabond life of military bases; married and brought his new wife to Washington, D.C., to latch on as a policeman; rose through the ranks; took time out to serve as Executive Officer on a ship in the Pacific in World War II; came home to take Mom on a belated honeymoon and engender his only child, me; and wound up Chief of Police just as I was turning seven years old.
Their world was indeed, I found, one of cosmopolitan sophistication — though later events would show what a thin veneer that sophistication really was. My father even admitted it: at heart he and his Missouri-days associates were still the hillbillies they always were, men who would visit moonshine stills in the Ozarks backwoods during Prohibition to get their dram of liquor. In his salad days, Dad would come to drink 12-year-old Scotch whisky, but in later life he reverted to Maker's Mark bourbon, bless his soul.
One of the things I don't quite get about the poorer whites of the not-too-distant American past — my own ethnic heritage — is this distinction between the born-again set and the moonshine crowd, some of whom were the same people. I have extended family in both camps. Part of me is in both camps!
That's because I'm basically a straddler, from straddler stock. I look at the situation this way: the evangelical spirit is kept alive in folks who in the Old West would have been gunslingers and card sharps and saloon girls, if not for having been saved by Jesus Christ. In more recent times they might have been moonshine runners, not just partakers like my sainted daddy. Being born again is what has put these folks, in their modern incarnations, firmly on the other side of the fault line of sin from their wilder doppelgangers. It is what keeps their energies and zest and zeal from turning rancid. It is what makes them sheriffs, not gunslingers.
As a straddler, I have one foot on each side of that fault line. I identify not with gunslingers and sheriffs, but with "peaceable townsfolk" who can secret a bottle of illicit liquor in their pantry and who believe in minding their own business about the equally minor transgressions of others.
I identify with the old sawbones doctor who may have a drinking problem. (I'm speaking metaphorically here, with all these booze references, since I myself consume no more than a beer with dinner.) Rather than toting a gun, though, he digs bullets out of those who do.
A literary hero of mine is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, who trumpets no religion but bears malice toward none and charity for all, the way Jesus did.
It is possible to be upstanding as a straddler — like Atticus was and I would like to be — but it is apparently not possible to be an evangelical. I am not able to be a trumpeter of religion. Such a trumpeting of righteous fervor makes no sense to a straddler, who knows the other side of the fault line to be but one tiny hop away.
Which has the curious side effect of making the straddler suspicious of those who find socioeconomic aspiration and religious inspiration to go so easily together. Sorry, Chris and Dee. Sorry, all ye evangelicals of this land.
I know there is widespread sentiment on this side of the Atlantic that the Europeans are a bunch of rank atheists, but I can testify from my multiple visits there that there are plenty of Christians in Europe and plenty of churches, some of which I have attended beautiful services in.
One of the things that distorts our understanding of this is that American Christianity has a strong evangelical orientation that seems to be lacking in much of Europe. My guess is that it's because evangelicalism fits in so well with upward socioeconomic mobility in America, but in Europe the movers and the shakers tend to be the ones who have abandoned religious values for secular ones.
Meanwhile the "ordinary" folks in Europe are still religious, but in a quieter way since they don't necessarily aspire to the next rung up the ladder. In this country, folks who are climbing the socioeconomic ladder see God as an awesome, mighty force in aiding that process. In other words, how we experience God depends on how we experience life. Nothing wrong with that, but it does tend to make Christians of different styles talk past one another, rather than to one another.
Those are the kinds of things I told Heather's parents, Chris and Dee, in an e-mail I have just sent them today — in which I also told them I have mailed Heather a small donation in support of her trip. It just so happened that Chris and Dee e-mailed me to find out how I've been doing, and I received their missive on a morning after I had awakened during the night with a host of thoughts concerning evangelicalism in American religion.
My primary thought was this: I have to admit, personally, to having an anti-evangelical bias in my own religious sensibility.
In trying to explain that to myself, I began to focus on the notion that I have never been in the position of aspiring to a great deal more socioeconomically than the life without want I was born into as the son of parents from the American heartland or Bible Belt whose own upward trajectory — a very successful one, in material terms — I would call sort of "European," in a broad sense. Or, at least, cosmopolitan.
Harold Francis Stewart and Leota Isabel Berry Stewart, my beloved parents, now dead, were among the generation of Americans who became teenagers in the Roaring Twenties. It was a time when religious backgrounds (she was Southern Baptist, he Methodist) were experienced by many Americans as hindrances to the high life that could be theirs if they threw off old-fashioned strictures and shackles of religious observance.
My family did very little churchgoing in my youth, though some of my mother's large family stayed faithful to the old-time religion. They stayed away from big cities and remained back in the Midwestern states which Mom and Dad had left behind to make a better life, during the Great Depression, in the "godless" East. Of course, the metropolitan East wasn't really godless, but neither was it evangelical. Religion was mostly a private affair.
My parents kept it so private that, today, I am not quite sure exactly what they believed about God, or how much they believed it. I do remember one dinner-table conversation in which they told me how the home of my maternal grandfather, William Palmer Berry, a man who was trained as a lay preacher in the Southern Baptist Convention, was run so strictly that there was no listening to records or the radio, no dancing, no card playing ... and, of course, no cigarette smoking or alcohol drinking.
My father's father, Willis Warder Stewart, was also a stern sort, in a Methodist way rather than a Southern Baptist one — I never quite caught on to the difference, if there was one. All I knew is that my parents had abandoned religion, while still clinging to some belief in God. They were not, strictly speaking, freethinkers, but their lives had been strongly influenced by the free thought of the likes of, say, H.L. Mencken.
Mencken was the newspaper reporter and columnist who had emerged from strictly local renown in Baltimore, Maryland, to a national audience through his coverage of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial in 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee. This was the famous trial of a local schoolteacher accused of violating state law by teaching evolution. Mencken assailed the Dayton townsfolk who resented Darwinism and set up the prosecution of John Scopes as benighted ones "unable to imagine a man who rejects the literal authority of the Bible" (see this account of his coverage).
My parents felt that success in this world — what I think of as the high life — would follow upon the relinquishing of such benighted, fundamentalist attitudes.
In other words, their aspirations were such as to lead them away from religion. I think for Chris and Dee, as for countless other evangelicals today, it is just the opposite. Aspiration and inspiration are inseparably linked in their religion and in their life experience.
In mid-adulthood I became a Christian. But, rather than having a born-again experience, I gravitated toward and eventually became a member of the Roman Catholic faith. In other words, instead of emphasizing the evangelical, as so many Americans, my life experience has been more of the Old World variety, even down to the style of Christianity I felt drawn to.
I remember during my childhood watching, on that first new TV that entered our home in the primitive 1950s, one of the early televangelists thumping his Bible and asking members of his live audience to come forward and accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. I also remember my mother saying something disparaging about it — her exact words are ones I can't recall. All I know is that it left me with a distaste for that kind of religion, which persists to this day.
In my middle-of-the-night musing about such things, I realized my distaste may be in large part a matter of not wanting to re-associate myself with the socioeconomic class my parents left behind on their rise to the upper middle class.
Or perhaps the class to which I refer was the one their parents had left behind in moving from the recurrent edge of poverty to what I think of as a staid "middle middle class" existence in the American heartland. I may have this wrong, and if so I apologize to any whose feelings I offend, but my impression is that evangelicalism appeals mainly to the peculiarly American socioeconomic stratum that I think of as poor Scotch-Irish and their ilk.
The Scotch-Irish in America, my ancestors, are the descendants of Protestant people who moved away from oppression and penury in Scotland centuries back, to take up residence in Northern Ireland. After their prospects there dimmed, many sought a brave new world in America — including my direct Stewart antecedent, one of three brothers who came here from Ulster at about the time of the War of 1812. One brother struck it rich as the founder of the world's first department store, A. T. Stewart's, later Wanamaker's, but the other two, including my lineal forebear Robert Stewart, weren't so lucky. My heritage on both sides of my family — not all of it identifiably Scotch-Irish, by the way — came through ancestors who often had to struggle to make ends meet.
All my grandparents were devoted to their religion, as far as I can tell, but I received no inkling that they were particularly evangelical in their religious style. By the time I was old enough to sit up and take notice, my paternal grandfather had remarried after mourning the death, some time back, of his first wife, my true grandmother. Then he died before I could get to know him. As for the grandparents on my mother's side, I did get to spend some time with them before their own rather early deaths, but I never knew them as particularly fervent religious types. True, when we went to visit them in Springfield, Missouri, my mother had to slip into the bedroom to sneak a smoke, or, along with my Dad, a wee nip. But I don't recall being taken to church on a Sunday or hearing much in the way of religious talk. And there were the games I'd play with Grandpa Berry, checkers and Chinese checkers, to make him seem like a regular guy. There was a bit of a dust-up, as I recall, over whether I was allowed to chew gum in their house... but a lot of that generation, born in the second half of the 19th century, thought gum-chewing was "common"; it wasn't just religious evangelicals.
The point is, I don't really know why my grandparents weren't terribly evangelical, but I suspect it was because they had attained their early aspirations of middle-class security and respectability long before I came along. That, and they were no longer young and full of zeal.
By the time my parents were thinking about leaving their respective nests, the smart set back East were well known across the land as having traded in the old-style religion for a high life of sophistication and glamor. My father wanted to follow in the footsteps of Mencken ... but W.W. Stewart couldn't afford at the crucial moment to put him through journalism school at the University of Missouri. H.F. Stewart instead joined the Army; served in peacetime Hawaii; turned down Officer Candidate School to spare his intended wife, my mother, a vagabond life of military bases; married and brought his new wife to Washington, D.C., to latch on as a policeman; rose through the ranks; took time out to serve as Executive Officer on a ship in the Pacific in World War II; came home to take Mom on a belated honeymoon and engender his only child, me; and wound up Chief of Police just as I was turning seven years old.
Their world was indeed, I found, one of cosmopolitan sophistication — though later events would show what a thin veneer that sophistication really was. My father even admitted it: at heart he and his Missouri-days associates were still the hillbillies they always were, men who would visit moonshine stills in the Ozarks backwoods during Prohibition to get their dram of liquor. In his salad days, Dad would come to drink 12-year-old Scotch whisky, but in later life he reverted to Maker's Mark bourbon, bless his soul.
One of the things I don't quite get about the poorer whites of the not-too-distant American past — my own ethnic heritage — is this distinction between the born-again set and the moonshine crowd, some of whom were the same people. I have extended family in both camps. Part of me is in both camps!
That's because I'm basically a straddler, from straddler stock. I look at the situation this way: the evangelical spirit is kept alive in folks who in the Old West would have been gunslingers and card sharps and saloon girls, if not for having been saved by Jesus Christ. In more recent times they might have been moonshine runners, not just partakers like my sainted daddy. Being born again is what has put these folks, in their modern incarnations, firmly on the other side of the fault line of sin from their wilder doppelgangers. It is what keeps their energies and zest and zeal from turning rancid. It is what makes them sheriffs, not gunslingers.
As a straddler, I have one foot on each side of that fault line. I identify not with gunslingers and sheriffs, but with "peaceable townsfolk" who can secret a bottle of illicit liquor in their pantry and who believe in minding their own business about the equally minor transgressions of others.
I identify with the old sawbones doctor who may have a drinking problem. (I'm speaking metaphorically here, with all these booze references, since I myself consume no more than a beer with dinner.) Rather than toting a gun, though, he digs bullets out of those who do.
A literary hero of mine is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, who trumpets no religion but bears malice toward none and charity for all, the way Jesus did.
It is possible to be upstanding as a straddler — like Atticus was and I would like to be — but it is apparently not possible to be an evangelical. I am not able to be a trumpeter of religion. Such a trumpeting of righteous fervor makes no sense to a straddler, who knows the other side of the fault line to be but one tiny hop away.
Which has the curious side effect of making the straddler suspicious of those who find socioeconomic aspiration and religious inspiration to go so easily together. Sorry, Chris and Dee. Sorry, all ye evangelicals of this land.
Monday, December 04, 2006
Paths to Spirit
It seems to me that the fundamental basis of Western religion might be boiled down to this: what is meant to be is destiny. It will happen, somehow, thanks be to God.
Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word (available used from Alibris) talks of how we can be "enchanted" by stories. In stories there is a sense of intrinsic inevitability, of destiny. The outcomes of the stories we love best are simply meant to be.
King contrasts story outcomes with events in the real world, many of which are clearly not meant to be. The world is accordingly less intelligible than a book. A lot of the time, what happens is not what is really meant to occur.
Deep down, we would all like to live in a world in which what is is always what is meant to be, and what happens is always what is meant to transpire. Religion tells us of just such a higher world, up above ours. King puts it this way (p. vi):
We have a sense of the discrepancy between what actually happens in our world and what is truly meant to be. It is by means of this inbuilt sense that we simply know when a storybook narrative hits the nail squarely on the head ... and when it doesn't.
One of my favorite stories is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Hifalutin' critics sniff at it, yet it has entranced millions over the decades since it was published, spawning a triptych of marvelous movies in recent years. Why? Because it tells of the victory of what is meant to be over that which currently is.
What is meant to be is the peace of the Shire, the dwelling-place of hobbits Bilbo Baggins, Frodo, Samwise Gamgee, Merry and Pippin, et al. Indeed, what is meant to be is the harmony of all Middle Earth. What is actually happening in Middle-earth, however, is that a force of evil, represented by the power-mad Sauron, is seeking to control everything, by regaining The One Ring. Sauron's lust for power ruins the peace. All struggles for power are inimical to peace. So the plot of the tale concerns the need to destroy the Ring once and for all, lest it turn its bearer as contentious and power-mad as Sauron.
Evil, by this broad definition, is that which stands in the way of what is meant to be. If what is meant to be is universal harmony and peace, then struggles for absolute power destroy peace and constitute evil. That is the moral logic of The Lord of the Rings.
Is there a heavenly book, a story written by a divine author that inevitably shapes events on earth? Are there things that are simply meant to be? Is there an eternal being whose very words make things so?
Yes and no. What is meant to be — the peace and harmony of the Shire and all Middle-earth, metaphorically — is possible only if there is a King, with us his willing subjects. Then and only then do actual destiny and what is meant to be coincide.
King Aragorn, whose return the destruction of The One Ring enables, is like King Arthur or any other good king. The primary function of a monarch is not so much to rule as to unite. To turn a multiplicity into a unity is what distinguished England's Queen Elizabeth I, whatever her double dealings with rival France or duplicities with Mary Queen of Scots. Our first president, though he eschewed a crown, knew this. How many of us can name a single ideological position or policy initiative of George Washington's? How many think he wasn't, with Lincoln, one of our two greatest presidents?
Making a unity of an internal multiplicity is, for Thomas King, the distinguishing mark of a spirituality, any spirituality. "In this study," he writes (p. 59), "spirituality has been identified as any method that deals with the impulses and moods that act apart from the will." Our impulses, moods, humors, and appetites are the "spirits" that dwell within us. If such psychic forces control us, independent of the will, then the kingly, uniting self can effectively disappear — just as Frodo vanished whenever he put on the Ring. Sauron (or the Devil) can then run rampant.
Religion is a gateway to spirituality. The Christian religion speaks of Christ the King. Christians are told to submit their inner multiplicities of impulse and appetite to taking up and bearing their cross on a daily basis. King describes the earnest attempts of great Christians such as St. Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Merton to do just this — to become knights-errant of the cross, as it were.
Their noble attempts to escape the World of Sense Experience and live by Word Alone ultimately broke down in failure, though. A bad thing? Not really. In each case, a Dark Night of the Soul betokened the birth of a true spirituality:
Before Aragorn took up his mantle as king, he was a wandering knight: a Ranger named Strider. He operated under the blessing of otherworldly Elven Folk. He lived by Word Alone. Knights seek justice, but only kings can unify.
In a way, The Lord of the Rings can be read as Aragorn's Night of the Soul, in the course of which he regained the ability to make decisions on his own. The reforging of the shattered ancient sword of kings, Narsil, as Aragorn's sword Andúril symbolized his newfound — rediscovered — sense of personhood, integrity, and authenticity. Then he was ready to tread the Paths of the Dead without fear, and eventually to become King of Gondor.
In so doing, Aragorn found his destiny and made real what was meant to be. Like Ignatius after his own personal or spiritual rebirth, Aragorn "gave primacy to a sort of sure intuition whereby 'the devout soul, without questioning and without desire to question, follows what has been manifested to it' ... a personal and wordless manifestation of God that cannot be generalized" (p. 63).
Aragorn, like other knights-errant, came to "a moment wherein they find a depth in themselves that is so unique that all the guiding principles they have received no longer apply" (p. 64). Aragorn could no longer accept what the Elf-Lord's prophesies held in store for him. They were but words, and now words alone could not decide. Spirit ruled Middle-earth.
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| Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word |
King contrasts story outcomes with events in the real world, many of which are clearly not meant to be. The world is accordingly less intelligible than a book. A lot of the time, what happens is not what is really meant to occur.
Deep down, we would all like to live in a world in which what is is always what is meant to be, and what happens is always what is meant to transpire. Religion tells us of just such a higher world, up above ours. King puts it this way (p. vi):
Santayana has said, "Another world to live in — whether we expect to ever pass wholly over into it or not — is what we mean by having a religion."
We have a sense of the discrepancy between what actually happens in our world and what is truly meant to be. It is by means of this inbuilt sense that we simply know when a storybook narrative hits the nail squarely on the head ... and when it doesn't.
One of my favorite stories is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Hifalutin' critics sniff at it, yet it has entranced millions over the decades since it was published, spawning a triptych of marvelous movies in recent years. Why? Because it tells of the victory of what is meant to be over that which currently is.
What is meant to be is the peace of the Shire, the dwelling-place of hobbits Bilbo Baggins, Frodo, Samwise Gamgee, Merry and Pippin, et al. Indeed, what is meant to be is the harmony of all Middle Earth. What is actually happening in Middle-earth, however, is that a force of evil, represented by the power-mad Sauron, is seeking to control everything, by regaining The One Ring. Sauron's lust for power ruins the peace. All struggles for power are inimical to peace. So the plot of the tale concerns the need to destroy the Ring once and for all, lest it turn its bearer as contentious and power-mad as Sauron.
Evil, by this broad definition, is that which stands in the way of what is meant to be. If what is meant to be is universal harmony and peace, then struggles for absolute power destroy peace and constitute evil. That is the moral logic of The Lord of the Rings.
Is there a heavenly book, a story written by a divine author that inevitably shapes events on earth? Are there things that are simply meant to be? Is there an eternal being whose very words make things so?
Yes and no. What is meant to be — the peace and harmony of the Shire and all Middle-earth, metaphorically — is possible only if there is a King, with us his willing subjects. Then and only then do actual destiny and what is meant to be coincide.
King Aragorn, whose return the destruction of The One Ring enables, is like King Arthur or any other good king. The primary function of a monarch is not so much to rule as to unite. To turn a multiplicity into a unity is what distinguished England's Queen Elizabeth I, whatever her double dealings with rival France or duplicities with Mary Queen of Scots. Our first president, though he eschewed a crown, knew this. How many of us can name a single ideological position or policy initiative of George Washington's? How many think he wasn't, with Lincoln, one of our two greatest presidents?
Making a unity of an internal multiplicity is, for Thomas King, the distinguishing mark of a spirituality, any spirituality. "In this study," he writes (p. 59), "spirituality has been identified as any method that deals with the impulses and moods that act apart from the will." Our impulses, moods, humors, and appetites are the "spirits" that dwell within us. If such psychic forces control us, independent of the will, then the kingly, uniting self can effectively disappear — just as Frodo vanished whenever he put on the Ring. Sauron (or the Devil) can then run rampant.
Religion is a gateway to spirituality. The Christian religion speaks of Christ the King. Christians are told to submit their inner multiplicities of impulse and appetite to taking up and bearing their cross on a daily basis. King describes the earnest attempts of great Christians such as St. Ignatius of Loyola and Thomas Merton to do just this — to become knights-errant of the cross, as it were.
Their noble attempts to escape the World of Sense Experience and live by Word Alone ultimately broke down in failure, though. A bad thing? Not really. In each case, a Dark Night of the Soul betokened the birth of a true spirituality:
Now the knight must create his or her own judgments and a new way of life. Inner spirits (moods and impulses) can no longer simply surrender to words; now the process is reversed: words — if words are involved at all — must arise from the spirits. That is, the impulses and moods must now create a truth, a personal truth. As one proceeds with this awesome task of creating a truth, one gives birth to a new and indescribable self, a self that is not patterned after examples found in a book. It is a self so awesome and personal that it arises on the border between freedom and madness. In the world of time one is confronting an eternal presence, and, though one speaks only to a human friend, one knows one is speaking to the eternal God. One speaks to God as to a friend and to a frriend as God — and one is amazed aat both the Presence one addresses and the self that speaks. (p. 63)
Before Aragorn took up his mantle as king, he was a wandering knight: a Ranger named Strider. He operated under the blessing of otherworldly Elven Folk. He lived by Word Alone. Knights seek justice, but only kings can unify.
In a way, The Lord of the Rings can be read as Aragorn's Night of the Soul, in the course of which he regained the ability to make decisions on his own. The reforging of the shattered ancient sword of kings, Narsil, as Aragorn's sword Andúril symbolized his newfound — rediscovered — sense of personhood, integrity, and authenticity. Then he was ready to tread the Paths of the Dead without fear, and eventually to become King of Gondor.
In so doing, Aragorn found his destiny and made real what was meant to be. Like Ignatius after his own personal or spiritual rebirth, Aragorn "gave primacy to a sort of sure intuition whereby 'the devout soul, without questioning and without desire to question, follows what has been manifested to it' ... a personal and wordless manifestation of God that cannot be generalized" (p. 63).
Aragorn, like other knights-errant, came to "a moment wherein they find a depth in themselves that is so unique that all the guiding principles they have received no longer apply" (p. 64). Aragorn could no longer accept what the Elf-Lord's prophesies held in store for him. They were but words, and now words alone could not decide. Spirit ruled Middle-earth.
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