Month: August 2023

Laypeople of the World, Unite (I Mean, Unite Two Opposing Concepts and Hold Them in Tension)

This entry is part 4 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Continuing with my (extremely slow) reading of Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World. There’s still a lot of Chapter 1 left, so if I don’t step up the pace, this book may take the better part of my remaining life to finish. And it’s not even a very long book!

In the last post, I talked about Ellul’s contention that “it is by living and receiving the gospel that political, economic, and other problems can be resolved.”

This is done through accepting the tension (and “liv[ing] it out to the full“) between knowing that it is impossible to make the world less sinful, while still refusing to accept it the way that it is.

It’s up to laypeople to live out this tension and present “theological truth” to the world, because, as he wrote earlier in the chapter, “for them in particular there is no separation from the world” — and the clergy “does not understand the world’s situation.”

Unfortunately, modern laypeople tend to compartmentalize their faith aside from the rest of their life, or else they have reduced it to a “moral system” (which is not theological truth, or even faith). Since God uses “a material medium, human means, to act by his Spirit,” and this material medium — the laity living out their faith, in tension, in full — does not exist to any great extent, “the gospel no longer affects the world.”

We (laypeople) live and act in the midst of economic, political, and ideological realities, and our role is not to pick and choose amongst these forces to find the “best” ones, but to recognize that they are all sinful and “cannot be improved in some other way.” Our role instead is to demonstrate “Jesus Christ’s forgiveness” for all of these sinful realities.

Ellul says that laypeople are not “guinea pigs” — and I think perhaps here he means that they are not merely being dispatched by the church to attempt a seemingly impossible task, but instead their very existence (if they are “liv[ing] out the tension each day of their lives”) is what actually enables the church to understand the world’s dire situation, and the world to recognize the spiritual problems it is trying (and failing) to solve with other means. The layperson is where the world and the church connect.

I think that failure of the laity to recognize the importance of our role may be the biggest problem the church faces, not only in mainline denominations such as my Episcopal Church, but across the spectrum. We compartmentalize, and we moralize (on left and right), and everything else is up to the clergy and the church staff; that’s what we pay them for, right?

Ephemera, 8/13/23

The title I used for the last post came from a Philip K. Dick story I originally read in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #9. I bought a copy of that book when I was 10 or 11 from the paperback racks at a local discount store, and it remained in my possession for many years after that. Several of the included stories live on in my memory, but most vividly George R. R. Martin’s “Sandkings,” which scared the living hell out of me. I also read it over and over. (I always read very inappropriately for my age; around the same time I read The Shining and The World According to Garp.)

* * * *

“The main problem with turning the world into language is that it’s, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing it is meant to represent.” (Stephen Dobyns)

* * * *

I just don’t get Linktree, especially the folks who fill theirs with links to specific articles, stories, poems that they have published, so that it’s just a long, vertical string of links running down the page. It’s the very definition of user-hostile. Just get a website, maybe? Am I missing something about this?

Anyway, what do I know, I’m posting this on a blog. 2005 Internet was the best Internet.

Passages: The Exit Door Leads In*

Last night my husband and I saw Passages. It’s our fifth film at a theater in six weeks, which is a record for us, not only post-pandemic but for our entire relationship. We’ve always liked “going to the movies,” but never did it quite as often as we have been doing recently, and frankly I like the new pattern.

The film is so skillfully written, filmed, and acted that we talked about it, considering the characters and scenes from different angles, on the way to the car, on the drive home, and again this morning over breakfast.

In short, Tomas and Martin, both expatriates living in Paris, have been married for a number of years; the film begins at the point of a relationship already distant and strained. Following a mild argument with his husband, Tomas has sex with a woman, Agathe. Over the next ninety minutes, we follow Tomas and Martin’s relationship as it ends, renews, ends, renews, and finally ends.

The film pretends to be about the disintegration of a marriage, but is really about two people who happen to be married to each other. (And a third person, who gets somewhat short shrift, not to mention ill treatment.)

The title is, I think purposefully, reminiscent of the mid-70s book by Gail Sheehy about adult stages of life, which popularized the concept of “mid-life crisis.” To me, this seems like a joke on the part of the filmmaker. Tomas is excited over his affair with Agathe because it offers a chance to feel something “different,” and he describes it as “growth.” He says he wants to see Martin “grow” as well.

Which is a lie, of course; when Martin, angry and hurt, begins his own relationship with another man, Tomas reacts with near-panic, which leads to a number of complications.

There is no “growth,” here, for either of the two men — perhaps for Agathe, who learns a hard lesson indeed, but there is no evidence of Tomas and Martin being any different at the end than they were at the beginning.

It’s telling that the film starts, essentially, in medias res; the relationship is already strained, and I don’t think we ever learn anything about either of their lives, separate or together, before the moment of the opening. (Aside from some facts about Tomas’ family, which we learn about in a very funny scene with Agathe’s parents.)

And when Tomas first excitedly tells Martin of his sex with Agathe, Martin responds, “This always happens when you finish a film.”

On the surface, we are presented with Tomas (in a fantastic performance from Franz Rogowski) as the villain of the piece, struggling with his “feelings” and the havoc they wreak on his own life and everyone else’s. Martin is presented — again, on the surface — as the sympathetic one.

Except, actually, Martin is just as culpable for bad choices and selfish desires as Tomas. Tomas wants new experiences; Martin wants a child, but to what end? Martin proves himself willing to hurt other people in order to get what he wants, just like Tomas.

These characters are not going through a “mid-life crisis,” and the passage through which they are going is ultimately not leading to anywhere different than where they started. Completely ungrounded in their being, even as they both seem relatively stable and successful, they are seeking something that they feel is missing, because they have no idea what it is that they’re actually missing.

The film ends with Tomas cycling wildly and aimlessly through the city at night. It freezes on his face and fades to black.

* Yes, I know I stole the title from Philip K. Dick.

Ephemera, 8/10/23

Maybe the real AI was the stupid things we made along the way.

* * * *

Richard Beck on the subversive nature of the Bible: It “denies the ultimacy” of any political system (we are not citizens of this world), the prophetic tradition opposes oppression and injustice, and the themes throughout the scripture are about emancipation, liberation.

Beck says that the entirety of “political theology” may rest on the simple statement that the Bible exists “to unsettle the nations.” This seems right; those who claim Biblical support (and thus God’s blessing) on their state, or their ideology or particular political beliefs, whether currently in power or only seeking to be, are missing the point entirely. God has no interest in your political debates, he is only interested in justice.

I think it’s important for everyone, no matter left or right or in-between, whether they are in positions of authority, or seeking an electoral victory, or fomenting a revolution, to ask themselves: Why has every human political system in history led to oppression and injustice of some sort? And what makes me think my preferred political outcome would wind up any different?

I can’t help but go back to Ellul: Our world’s will always leads toward suicide. “If Christians work with all their might for a human project, they are only human beings like others and their effort has no added value. But if they accept their specific function as Christians, which does not necessarily involve participating in the world in material or measurable ways, then this is decisive for human history.”

* * * *

Speaking of Ellul, through the end of this month Wipf and Stock is offering a 40% discount on his books; use code IJES40 to purchase from them directly.

Ephemera, 08/07/23

“Got a special celebration on your parish calendar? A.I. can compose a unique hymn for the occasion!” Is this satire?

* * * *

I’ve very recently started reading David Bentley Hart’s translation of the New Testament as part of my morning routine, usually a chapter at a time. Reading the gospel as something both familiar and strange has really fired me up and improved my focus. I’ve been writing lengthy notes on each chapter in my own journal; don’t worry, I’m not subjecting the interwebs to my stream-of-consciousness Biblical babbling. But these readings may lead to some other posts here.

I mention all this just because Richard Beck had a great quote from DBH’s introduction to this translation (which makes a fascinating essay in its own right) which feels perfect for a Monday. Of the shocking and strange message of Christianity (which most of us forget is either shocking or strange, we are so immersed in, or bored by, it), DBH says, “I doubt any of us has ever understood it nearly as well as we imagine.”

* * * *

I still remember the first time I heard Sinead O’Connor. I was a college freshman, and my friend Chris played “The Lion and the Cobra” for me in his dorm room. “Mandinka” is what always gets mentioned, and it’s a great song on a great album, but it’s the very first track, “Jackie,” with its cold and plaintive opening, that haunts me to this day.

I’ve been washing the sand
With my salty tears
Searching the shore
For these long years
And I’ll walk the seas forever more

We Cannot Solve Sin’s Consequences by Human Means

This entry is part 3 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Resuming my read-through of Jacques Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World. I got sidetracked for a while with life, vacation, other writings and readings. There is still quite a bit of Chapter 1 to muddle through.

In my last post, I mentioned Ellul’s contention that the world is now so interconnected that all of us share some responsibility for sins, even if they are corporate, institutional or cultural sins; it is “scandal” for Christians to be associated with the world’s sins, but there is no solution to this scandal.

In fact, as Ellul continues in Section 2 of Chapter 1, simply living in the world — which is something he says Christians must not try to avoid — is, always has been, and will remain, a scandal. “We have no right to accustom ourselves to this world or spread a veil of Christian illusion over it,” Ellul says.

The world is “the domain of Satan” and all of us who live here, including Christians, are affected by the consequences of sin because we’re all sinners, and through our connections to others, participants in the world’s sinful condition. (A footnote explicates Ellul’s belief that Satan is “only the composite, the synthesis, the sum total of all the accusations brought by people against other people in the world.” Which is not a terribly clarifying footnote, really.)

Christian virtues will not “offset” these sins. Trying to change the world so that humankind might be “less wicked, if not less unhappy, living in it” is futile. At the same time — and here things get a bit complicated — we cannot reconcile ourselves to the wickedness, either. “We must not tell ourselves that we can do nothing about it,” even though Ellul has just said that we can do nothing about it.

In other words: the tension, oh the tension, of two truthful statements completely opposite in meaning. “On the one hand, we cannot make this world less sinful; on the other, we cannot accept it as it is.”

He compares this tension to that we feel being caught between sin and grace — we are sinners; we have received, and will receive, grace — and admits that this is an “uncomfortable” position. But it can’t be avoided: accept the tension, and live accordingly, he says.

Which means what, exactly?

It means not falling for the same false choices presented by most people and groups in society. They try to solve the economic, social, and political problems around us by using “technical means or moral criteria,” because they cannot see the underlying spiritual causes behind all of these problems. They don’t see sin.

Since they don’t and can’t solve the spiritual crises that they don’t or won’t see, they create “solutions” that just make the existing problems get worse “until what they have called their civilization reaches the point of collapse.”

As Christians, Ellul says that our role is not to see these problems in the same way as others, or to offer technical or moral “solutions” to these problems. Instead, we must look to the spiritual reality beneath the corporeal difficulties, and respond to these problems with the only actual solution: “it is by living and receiving the gospel that political, economic, and other problems can be resolved.”

At this point in the reading, I’m not sure specifically how this sort of thing would look in everyday life. Going back to Ellul’s point that we are Salt, Light, Sheep, even those metaphors-not-metaphors are pretty abstract: we are to live our lives as signs that point others to God. I find myself longing for a listicle of “24 ways to live and receive the gospel today.”

Actually, writing that last sentence made me shudder, and it certainly feels opposite to Ellul’s point. Almost, but not quite, as opposite, as trying to, on the one hand, “return” the government to an illusory “Christian” past; or, on the other, solve every human problem with a bureaucratic government program. (Oversimplifying both sides here.) Both of those proposed “solutions” rely exactly on the technical and moral means that Ellul claims move civilization closer to ruin.

To respond to the crises of our time “in a human way that is not a lie or pretense,” Christians have to embrace the uncomfortable tension: we cannot remove sin from the world, or solve the problems caused by sin using human means; but neither can we accept the sinful world as it is.

Ephemera, 08/04/23

Iain McGilchrist, in describing the left hemisphere of the brain, could just as easily be describing ChatGPT based on multiple reported experiences with the LLM, which is somehow worrying: “It is demonstrably self-deceiving and confabulates — makes up a story, when it cannot understand something, and tells it with conviction … It is not reasonable. It is angry when challenged, dismisses evidence it doesn’t like or can’t understand, and is unreasonably sure of its own rightness. It is not good at understanding the world. Its attention is narrow, its vision myopic, and it can’t see how the parts fit together. It is good for only one thing – manipulating the world.” (The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning)

* * * *

David Brooks asks, “What if we’re the bad guys here?” I think a better question might be, What if none of us are the good guys here?

* * * *

“Was this how everybody wrote fiction? It needed work, a good bit of work, but once you gave up trying to be deep, writing was a lot easier and a lot more fun. And what a relief to blame your fantasies and your nightmares on fictional characters.” (John L’Heureux, The Handmaid of Desire) (He wrote better novels when he was trying to be deep, tbh.)

Kierkegaard as Poetry (Part 1)

Yes, It Is Nothing

But what does this
mean, what am I to do,
or what is the effort
that can be said to seek,
to aspire to God’s kingdom?

Shall I see about getting
a position commensurate
with my talents and abilities
in order to be effective in it?

No, you shall first seek God’s kingdom.

Shall I give all my possessions to the poor?

No, you shall first seek God’s kingdom.

Shall I then go out and proclaim this doctrine to the world?

No, you shall first seek God’s kingdom.

But then in a certain sense it is nothing I shall do?

Yes, quite true,
in a certain sense
it is nothing.

In the deepest sense
you shall make yourself
nothing,
become nothing
before God,
learn to be silent.

In this silence
is the beginning,
which is to seek first
God’s kingdom.

(From “Look at the Birds, Look at the Lily,” by Kierkegaard, included in Without Authority, translated by Howard & Edna Hong; italics in original.)

+ More