Virtual Experts

The internet is where you can do a lot of things virtually, including pose as an expert. It is possible to leap to conclusions, to fail to research or to obtain valid premises, and still to grow a virtual reputation while posing as an expert. All you have to do is get the recognition of enough people. With enough people who do not know how to judge the matter you are opining about but who think you do you can take on, for a while, a prophetic aura.

There is something dismaying in the phenomenon if you take it seriously: the annunciations of calamity, the call to something radical, the people who follow along and end up larping in ways that negatively affects their life. At some point you have to hit the world that is not digital. The digital must depend on the non-digital.

All the virtual ends up hitting the real world, and it seems to me that what still matters is the non-digital interactions and institutions. The world is only shadowed in the digital. The internet can project a reputation and accomplishments further along, but it is misused when you only conjure in the digital realm.

Led by the Spirit

If you have a religion that denies the real influence in the believer’s life of the Holy Spirit of God, then you have a false religion. You may have a kind of deism, the common American sort being classified as therapeutic, moralistic deism. It is all about unaided human effort, God being too remote or rendered too effete by inadequate theology to be meaningfully involved. That is sad and worthless.

The question is not about whether the Spirit of the living God has an influence in a believer’s life or not, it is a question about how he influences us. That is a question that involves your whole view of the spiritual life.

Many Christians believe that the Holy Spirit prompts them. They believe he suggests courses of action, that by way of impulses, providing intuitions he checks them or nudges them inwardly. So they conclude that they need to be sensitive to these promptings or they will miss out on the full direction that the Holy Spirit provides.
I don’t believe this myself. But the problem is, if I deny what these Christians believe, I will seem to them to deny that the Holy Spirit has any influence at all, or at least I will seem to them to reduce the influence of the Holy Spirit on my life significantly. I will seem to be cutting myself off from all I could be for the Lord.

And yet, it has for most of my life seemed to me that one can only adopt the attitude that one’s inward impulses are caused by the Holy Spirit if one is either very simple or at least somewhat proud. Probably a mix. Perhaps mostly simplicity and only a little pride–it doesn’t take much, after all! But I’ll just address simple rather than proud.

I think there is too much theological simplicity in the idea that one is guided by inner impulses by the Holy Spirit. I’ll give you two arguments.

Let us suppose that the Holy Spirit really does prompt me. He reminds me when I have forgotten something, he urges me to do what I might not have considered, he gives me inner guidance through something I feel. I do not see why I would do anything other than wait for that to happen. I would be quiet until the impulse came to guide me, and spiritual growth would just be for me to grow in sensitivity to the promptings. Would I think about problems that I faced? I am not sure what good that would do me. Would I ask counsel from others? I have asked counsel of persons who are prompted, and was told that it was not their business to tell me what the Holy Spirit would show. I find that the logic of following impulses runs counter to a lot of the teaching of Scripture about deliberation, about understanding, about wisdom, insight, and all that which gives us necessary information for making good choices. I don’t think anybody who follows promptings wishes to deny these things, but I don’t think they have a good way of integrating all these things into their lives. I think promptings wave away rather than seize, value, and implement wisdom, understanding, counsel, and power. These are gifts of the Holy Spirit, by the way.

The spiritual life does not exist to promote a merely reactive agency in the Christian, one of only yielding. There are indifferent matters, for instance, in which the choice is wide open to you. Besides this, it is childlike to think that every choice can be reduced to a matter of obvious right or wrong, submitting or ignoring a command. There is much good in learning to be sweetly submissive to the command of God. But all choices are not starkly moral choices, and the world that God made demands of us approaches that are not reductive. If in our understanding we do not progress, we will not be childlike but childish merely. God empowers our agency, he enlightens our minds so that they perceive the complexity and wonder of things. God renews the will, strengthening it. God also works in us so that our passions are ordered to our reason, to our own growing understanding, and are guided by our own sound judgment. Our choices cover a wide range of human experience. Being prompted seems to me to narrow it. I think instead we need to grow as choice makers. We need to grow in wisdom so that we can see what the right choice is thanks to the light supplied by the Holy Spirit. We need to use that clarity of understanding to ponder the situation facing us. Our choices are improved by being experienced through trial and error while walking in communion with God. They are improved through learning from Scripture, through all that which involves the mind in careful deliberation. We need strength from God, certainly, but is that experienced in a physical surge of power or in guiding impulses?

The second argument is that the Christian life requires an increasingly robust theological account of its processes and procedures. Promptings short circuit that approach. They simplify the Christian life. I don’t mean that people who follow promptings stop studying Scripture and praying and being disciplined. They may even be prompted to do so! But I mean that the rationale is less obvious. We study Scripture in order to know the mind of God. If you can know the mind of God by promptings, you are a little bit less clear on why you study Scripture. You have started limiting the scope of Scripture. You may still study it as a duty. You may still do it because you are prompted. But you are not doing it because without it you will never know what God expects.

This is why I wonder if the idea of being prompted doesn’t arise in the decay of spiritual discipline. That which brings Scripture deep into our lives is meditation. Meditation is not just puzzling over what Scripture means, it is enjoying and, as John Owen liked to put it, relishing what it means. He also calls it being spiritually minded, which is considerably more than just waiting to be prompted. Being spiritually minded is an avid thing: it is being deliberate in digesting the teaching of Scripture, wondering at it before God, diligently pondering all that God intends to say with a view to knowing more for the purpose of offering God praise, obedience, repentance, and thanks. It involves much prayer and it is the regular discipline of a healthy, growing Christian. What is more, if you are doing this diligently, you will be led by the Spirit of God. And I wonder if you will still have a need to baptize your inner impulses, attributing them to an agent you will never be able to prove is someone other than yourself.

Because I think the outcome of following your impulses as if they were coming from the Spirit of God is that you could develop spiritual anemia. Reading the Bible because you have to, or you ought to is good. Reading the Bible with careful attention because otherwise you will not know what God expects from you is another thing altogether. Praying because you know you should and there is some benefit in it may lead to superstition. If you don’t pray you could have bad luck! Praying because without prayer you cannot obtain understanding of Scripture, you can never have power to overcome sin, you can’t have the back and forth with God which is the basis of a relationship . . . that is another thing.

I don’t think promptings are a relationship. Communion is not promptings, it is not the limited morse code of impulses which I am afraid are sourced in your own misgivings and intuitions. They come from the unexamined, and you know what Socrates said about that. Communion with the living God is repentance and faith which engages all your being, all your agency. It has to involve your mind, deliberating, weighing, thinking carefully. God wants this activated and active, not passive. It has to involve the discipline of your passions with all the wrestling and trial and error that involves. And it has to involve the renewal of your will, so that your agency becomes more free as you realize better what the good actually is and you have growing power to pursue it.

Contra Mundum

I do not shy away from Thomas Aquinas. I read him, I appreciate him, I look to him. And so it was with a certain feeling of shame I read about people parading his old skull around in an act of veneration. They even have a glass box they keep it in. It is unbelievable! They have a thing that is like a lamp, with his skull wedged into it, empty sockets staring out blindly. I blame Aristotle! Makes you glad the protestant reformation came along so that many of the bones of God’s people could rest in peace and be treated with more dignity. The superstition! Still, Aquinas is by all objective measures a strong candidate for one of Christianity’s greatest theologians ever, and so should be consulted for that.

And then there’s our side’s faults. I read Calvin’s commentaries all the time, other things too. He helps me, he instructs me, I look to him as much as to Aquinas or Augustine or Origen my father. Calvin understood in sensible terms what the basic point of a passage is, without flights (I do find it funny that when he can’t figure something out he will often sarcastically [and ironically] urge his readers to consult someone more given to allegory). What gets me is the sentimental veneration: when people act like we should read him because it is intimated that he is more pious than any other options. Calvin! with his dyspeptic, twitter-feed rhetoric against the papists. I think he leans stoic and I dislike him for it, and yet I dare not stop consulting him.

Now we are balanced aren’t we? Superstition and sentimentality. Yet I persist.

I read Puritans too, but still reject the idea that they were measurably more pious. I know why we do that: Protestant anglophone evangelical Christianity is formed on them as its ideal, the myth, the Puritan legend that arose in their defeat. And they were truly pious, as pious as many others throughout the history of the church . . . if you read the rest. You can often find clearer writers than the Puritans, less requiring of supplemental maps and outlines. Less labyrinthine writers, less rejecting of the canons of rhetoric and without the penchant for “plain” preaching which often threw out the clarity with the bathwater of eloquence in an overzealous effort to be bare and unadorned. Richard Weaver speaks of their cult of ugliness . . . probably because he was offended at the insult they offered to real eloquence.

And what of the despised mystical tradition? Now I come full circle. Thanks to A.W. Tozer who was truly catholic in his reading I consult them too, and love and pore over them. Yes, they are congenial to me beyond many others. Because they are sensible, and profound, and convicting, and beyond the pale of posture. Oh they provoke suspicion in more trepidations temperaments. The mystics are not for the theologically preppy, intent on avoiding anything that is obviously unfashionable or might inspire any qualms whatsoever. The platonic inheritance flourishes in the mystical and her handmaid the ascetical tradition! In the fullness of time God sent the Pseudo-Dionysius to impersonate and to instruct. Give me piety, let me never despise it wherever it flourishes in Spirit and in truth, and let me always embrace and value it.

And so I wish to say: give to each what is due: tribute to whom tribute, custom to whom custom, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.

And treat the past with justice.

Going Around

No music plays at Mar-Bar Tire. The waiting room is arranged with chairs and tires. On the side farthest from the service desks a worn leather sofa and armchair are arranged before a rug and a coffee table. On the table are much-handled books and puzzles for kids. All of it this is set before a long trophy case full of Goodyear memorabilia: cars, semis, tractors, trains, bears, glasses, pennants, even a full-size bicycle.

The customers all speak as do the employees, with the local drawl, a southern accent of the north, here so close to the Mason-Dixon line. In the waiting room is heard the tell-tale word repeated over and over, pronounced like tar, with the A drawled out: tahr. Without fail, always, every time, tahr, tahrs. That’s how they say fire and enquire and hire and desire. And if they ever used the word “respire” they would probably pronounce it the same.

The service is sleepy and soft-spoken. Sometimes a joke bubbles through. No stress, no arguments, no anxiety. Conversations can be repetitive from time to time. Sometimes a joke bubbles through.

The business is run by a clan of Brethren. In a cubicle before a computer, wearing a phone headset is a woman in Mennonite garb. I talked to her on the phone. She is abrupt but not impatient. I found Bibles available on the end-table by the couch, King James. There are CDs for sale on a small, spinning rack, songs and Bible studies. On a table there is a display of baked goods such as homemade cookies and also honey. Cash only.

A conversation arises between an employee picking up some cookies and a luckless customer who has no cash. “Oh ah always payn cash. Always have cash.”

“Yeah ah know.”

The customer used to work for the government, would take fahv grand every tahm he went on vacation and pretty much spend it all. Paid for everything in cash, all in cash. The trouble is that the customer finds himself in a legal battle with his ex. His paycheck has been delayed six months, so he’s scrounging around to pay for tahrs and laments being forced to resist the temptation of the baked goods since he has no cash.

A man enters wearing a coonskin hat. Like a wedding cake of fur on his head, the tail dangling behind, the face of the deceased animal perched on the front. His tahrs, which still have fahv thousand mahls on them, do not pass the inspection requahrd by the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Sitting opposite the table with baked goods, he explains on the phone that his plan is to take the old tahrs with him. He’ll get his inspection with the new ones, change them subsequently, and then get his money’s worth out of the old. He talks about cars on the phone. They don’t make good cars anymore like [why is this word pronounced like and not lahk?] they used to. Stay away from Volvos, never seen more problems in a car.

He examines the trophy case attentively, then all the tires displayed throughout the store, every one, examines the coffee and the vending machines, the plants, prowling every inch of the business open to the customer, as if showing the late coon the sights. It emerges that he also visited the rivals, Costco (where one of the guys at Mar-Bar used to work). He went to get tahrs and they told him they couldn’t get the kahnd he needed. “You mean to tell me that ah just have to sell my car after the tahrs wear out?” He shakes the coonskin hat, the little face panning the establishment slowly, the tail wagging. He’s put three hundred thousand on a recent car.

In conversation with an employee he is offered some chicken pot pie. They are all having chicken pot pie, a communal lunch arrangement.

“The kahnd that is in the crust or in a bowl like soup?”

“In a bowl, you wanna bowl?”

And do you know, dear reader, what the gentleman actually replied? I swear. I am not making this up.

He sez, “Nah, ah’ll just have some roadkill afterward.”

Circe, by Madeline Miller

What Madeline Miller does in The Song of Achilles and again in Circe compares with what C.S. Lewis did in Till We Have Faces. She retells the stories of classical antiquity, giving us a strong sense of time and place along with characters that feel that they really belong to it. Circe is interesting because Miller imagines her way into one of the families of Greek mythology. Helios, the Titan who daily drives the chariot of the sun across the skies, fathers several children from the nymph Perse, among them Circe. We also encounter Prometheus, witness the Minotaur’s birth, see the tension and snobbery between Titans and Olympian gods, and many other intriguing situations such as what kind of people it takes to give birth to the monsters and situations of classical mythology. The story is told by Circe and is about her life in the context of these ancient stories. What is peripheral and beckons in The Song, the superhuman beings, become central and focal in Circe.

What caught my attention about Miller’s writing was when Thetis first appeared in The Song of Achilles. I wished then that she would work that angle more. Her power to describe superhuman beings, to bring them into a situation and react to them properly is her great superpower. Anybody who reads fantasy yearns for this kind of thing. It is one of the great successes of Tolkien to bring elves and wizards into his stories in ways that succeed.

Miller can also tell a story. Both books were hard to put down. There are no slack moments, nothing is clumsy, nothing is tedious. Not only has she mastered the sources she is drawing on, she has researched numerous details in ways that make the whole thing more real. There is even a recipe for cleaning sheep’s wool that I would be surprised if it turned out to be bogus.

Circe is unusual because the story is the story of supernatural families and relations, of the Greek view of divine beings with all their human inner pettiness and superhuman powers brought to life. We meet Hermes and Athena, we meet everybody who might have conceivably have met Circe, and in that way we are treated to the full tragedy of that fully tragic view of things. Plato famously complained about how the poets depicted the gods of Greece, Miller rolls up her sleeves and makes a long, intriguing novel out of it.

And I think that it is an interesting time and place for such a work to be written. It holds up a mirror to American elites. The good thing about using the Greek pantheon is that no matter how deplorable our elites may be, they can still occupy some moral high ground in comparison. It does make you think, though. In how many ages can elites be depicted with absolutely no ideals? The cruelty, for example, the petty selfishness, jealousy, amoral sexuality, and corresponding weariness, all done with very few redeeming contrasts. Miller’s examples are more tilted toward the negative polarity than, for example, Tolkien’s more balanced elves. Perhaps her view is altogether more accurate. I don’t know, it seems this American moment has lined up to help her.

I only wish Miller had a stronger point to make out of it all. She has a point to make, and it is not a particularly bad point. It’s just the story has to end eventually and it fades away somewhat abruptly. The ending is not illogical and it is masterfully narrated, like everything else. But it packs no punch. I think it is because Circe has to accept the logic of the premise that the superhuman beings are still fallen beings.

When in the Bible God banishes his fallen creatures from the garden of Eden, he uses superhuman beings to guard the way back. He does it because it is not good for fallen creatures to eat of the tree of life and become immortal while still being fallen. Without a story that explains how the creatures fell, however true it is that fallen creatures should not eat of tree of life, the story cannot pack a punch. And in this Madeline Miller is not like C.S. Lewis, who demonstrated that the gods have to be more in line with Plato’s expectations.

A Comfort to Creatures

I woke up early, thinking about the resurrection of the body. I thank God that I am a Platonist, since a Platonist has a thing of two to think about in regard to that hope.

The hope of the resurrection of the body is a confirmation of the goodness of what God made us to be. We are not simply souls trapped in bodies (though there is a great deal of truth in the Platonical idea that the body is a prison). We are our bodies too. Our deliverance does not consist in being disembodied, but in having a body which is in no way a prison. It is a comfort to a creature like me that I can go on being a creature like me. I like being such a creature. With hands, for example. Clever hands, useful hands, indispensable hands, really. Think of being a creature without them. So there is something conservative and reassuring about the resurrection of the body. When like a small animal I lie under my blankets or I enjoy sandwiches all Wind-in-the-Willows-like, there is something I never want to leave behind. It is good to be one of God’s creatures!

Of course, there has to be more. The present body is needy. We need food, we need sleep, we need things to do. In the resurrection, I think we can say, God will give us to ourselves more than now and all without giving us away. The body of the resurrection is a permanent possession, more ours, more under our own voluntary and conscious control. I will be impassible according to Thomas Aquinas. That is, I will not have a needy body, but I will have one that was sown in weakness and raised in power. I will not have a shameful body, but I will have one that is glorious, clothed in its own intrinsic dignity and the splendor of the cause of which it is an undiminished effect. It will not belong to nature, to physis, but to pneuma, to spirit, which I take to mean a realm of effects whose efficient cause is the Spirit of God. The Platonism which affirms this paragraph, however, does not deny the first. Because I will never stop being a creature, I can only become a higher one, a greater one, or if you more paradoxically will, more of a creature than ever.

The 138th Psalm ends with the prayer to God not to despise the work of his own hands. The hope of the resurrection of the body means that indeed he does not.

Thoughts after the Border Trilogy

It is not possible for me to have coherent, comprehensive thoughts about something so vast and biblical as Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. I have only read them through three times. But I can say a few more things this time than the last.

One is that I’m grateful for the joys of literature. When the book is good literature you can return and return. McCarthy holds and keeps me. I think what he does is in some way endless because it manages to gesture at reality. Reality is to the human mind inexhaustible. A great work of art, it seems to me, has to capture something of the to us inexhaustible nature of what is real, of how mysterious it all is. I return with joy and gratitude to the Lord of the Rings, to just about anything C.S. Lewis wrote, to Anthony Powell and Eugene Volodazkin and Jane Austen. None of these rates second to C McC. He knows that nothing interesting is without the strange.

The adjective that my mind settles on for his observations, his themes, his descriptions, his variety, and even his scope is biblical. It does make him difficult. You have to pay attention. But it is not hard to settle in to paying attention. That’s why All the Pretty Horses is a good place to start. He marks out in exalted prose the moments that you need to pause over, the climaxes. Re-read those poetic passages, reflect on what has happened, it is designed to guide you in. You will start to see that even routine descriptions have stories. Everything is a story. That is one of his great gifts: he is interested in being interesting, and he knows that stories are the forms, that which makes things interesting. You can read him wondering why this story that you don’t understand is so interesting—and I find that is also biblical.

Mexico is developed into such a rich symbol in this trilogy. He should get an award from Mexico for it, along with all its former territories which president Polk was instrumental in eminent domaining. Mexico is depicted as an anarchic realm of random violence and unexpected kindness. Nobody in Mexico is obeying anything but the stark rules of reality ever. It is a place in which the only operating principle is unidealized reality. Nobody will deny that the symbolism in McCarthy is complex. I have understood from reading him that in his thinking the feminine is the civilizing, the nurturing, the resigned, the desire of curiosity not of conquest or domination, that to which sacrifice is made, while the masculine is the persevering, the sacrificing, the dominant, the brutal and of course the savage. I gather from the dream described in the epilogue of Cities of the Plain that McCarthy thinks of the unconscious as something like the Neoplatonic world soul, but one arising from below rather than from above. It is a feminine thing, out of which we are born when a dream achieves a narrative for itself which individuates. The unconscious is like a dream state to our consciousness, and it seems to encourage us in our story about ourselves, helping and directing because it is curious about the outcome. Our consciousness, by which I mean that of the individual rather than the panpsychic and collective unconscious, is a more masculine element: aggressive, bringing itself into suffering, capable of brutality toward others. It is as if the unconscious for him is a process theology god, feminine, curious and developing by means of the individual, but existing in a wholly separate realm of consciousness which is like a dream to our waking one. I really think that like Robert Frost McCarthy’s metaphysic is dualist. I think that explains the preference for soul-sucking tragedies, as well as the fact that his scheme of reality is evolutionary rather than emanational (arising rather than descending).

Cormac McCarthy writes about what is grand, what is tragic, even what is noble and admirable. In the end, that is what draws a clear line between authors I keep and authors I don’t. You can’t be sentimental, you can’t be contrived, but gratuitous degradation and despair are often the alternative. He does not succumb.

Fascination

Nothing interesting isn’t weird.

A Good Winter

The wind howled and shook the building on Monday with gusts and blasts of cool, moist air after a springlike Sunday. During the late afternoon the snow started to fall, gentle and not too cold. Tuesday came with lower temperatures and snow. Not a lot of snow, but all day snowing. We live far enough south that it shut down some public places, as it had two Saturdays before as the failed predictions called for the raging storm of the century and when everybody was out in it preparing for the storm from nine to noon, driving and shopping while the snow came down, crowding through the drive-thrus. Today we reached the deepest depths so far of winter with everything and low temperatures. Still, the sun shining clear and the constant running of the heat accumulating interstitial at the top of things is melting the bright rooftop snow. You hear gurgling in the gutters and imagine freezing halfway down. Formations of solid ice gleam with flowing water at the level of the sidewalk. No inattentive pedestrians should go there, carefree, watching the puffed birds up on the wires and admiring the remote skies. Maybe more snow on Friday.

Preparing for the semi-centennial

Aspiraciones – Teresa de Ávila

Sea mi gozo en el llanto.
Sobresalto mi reposo,
Mi sosiego doloroso
Y mi bonanza el quebranto;

Entre borrascas mi amor,
Y mi regalo en la herida,
Esté en la muerte mi vida,
Y en desprecios mí favor;

Mis tesoros en pobreza
Y mi triunfo en pelear,
Mi descanso en trabajar
Y mi contento en tristeza.

En la oscuridad mi luz,
Mi grandeza en puesto bajo,
De mi camino el atajo
Y mi gloria sea la cruz;

Mi honra el abatimiento
Y mi palma padecer,
En las menguas mi crecer
Y en menoscabos mi aumento;

En el hambre mi hartura,
Mi esperanza en el temor,
Mis regalos en pavor,
Mis gustos en amargura;

En olvido mi memoria,
Mi alteza en humillación,
En bajeza mi opinión,
En afrenta mi victoria,

Mi lauro esté en el desprecio,
En las penas mi afición,
Mi dignidad el rincón,
Y la soledad mi aprecio;

En Cristo mi confianza,
Y de Él solo mi asimiento,
En sus cansancios mi aliento
Y en su imitación mi holganza.

Aquí estriba mi firmeza,
Aquí mi seguridad,
La prueba de mi verdad,
La muestra de mi fineza.

Last Sermon of the Year

Leviticus 10

While rain is washing out the fallen leaves
and the reflected sky shines from the streets
December slowly finishes the year.
A month not unlike the old covenant
whose fading glory became obvious
when Aaron’s sons were burned alive.

The family couldn’t mourn and wouldn’t eat
and they were caught as priests who stand
between the people and their God and know
they cannot do as they were told. It was
the same thing God had said to Cain.
They only had to do what God had said.

But here’s the thing, what person does? That’s when
the tent flapped and a rope groaned under strain
and Aaron knew this covenant was not
or ever could be all, depending as
it did on miserable priests like him.

Watercoloring the Unexamined Life

I always seek out the watercolors in an art museum. Trying to remember when I became interested, I think back to the free Thursdays afforded by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It may have been seeing watercolors there that first got my attention. I began to paint when I found a watercolor artist in our congregation in Colombia who was willing to give me lessons. And I have kept up the practice on and off for over a decade. Because I always need something to do when listening to a podcast, and there are many interesting podcasts these days, I keep on painting.

Eventually what happens is that the idea of doing watercolors and just fooling around gets stale. That original goal of being able to do a few interesting things and learn about the medium without pretending to anything was met. When I realized that I was just doing in cycles what I had done before and that if I didn’t get a sense of forward momentum I was going to get bored with it all, it became obvious that I needed to level up or give it up. So now the podcasts are interspersed with videos by better watercolor painters, and the good news is that this is working.

But I have developed something else as a result, something crucial to keep going. Once you have an idea of what it all entails you need a goal that is sufficiently remote and yet in some way realistic and which will draw you on. The goal with watercolors is not just to level up but to do so in such a way that I can produce something I could charge for, something good enough to be put before the public with my name on it. That goal has admirable, excellent distance, and I am learning about all the stages it is going to require and starting to take them on one by one. Having made a little progress, I have a little more confidence.

Is it not this way with many things?

I was staring at a watercolor from a master on my desktop the other night. This painting was there because it was amazing, and yet as I looked at it I noticed his skies were shockingly casual. Then I saw a tree that was almost a random collection of careless slashes. Other things began to emerge. Was he being careless? Was he being contemptuous of the heavens? Did he not care about these observable details? No, this master knew that you have to have a focused aim, that the painter has to draw the viewer’s eye with light and detail. Where the light is, there is the detail. The light was falling on the houses, not on the clouds or on the tree (actually through the tree and past it, and that was part of the genius of the artist’s eye). Had the watercolor had more detail it would just have been a photograph and not a work of art. The artist was making a comment and he was precise and efficient, his painting was therefore coherent.

It is the same, for example, with reading the prose of Cormac McCarthy, everything points where it should, the adjectives are targeted, the foreground is not eclipsed by the background. There is coherence and laser focus in his prose. That is how great craftsmen work, not wasting effort on that which will detract.

I think this also has to do with all of life. I was driving along, exiting an interstate and merging into traffic not too long ago. As I was doing so, I was being given elaborate directions by the passenger. I could only retain a vague impression of these directions. They required more attention than in that moment I could give. Sermons are another place. Think of John Owen and the sheer amount of detail he gives to everything in his books, those of which especially which were compiled out of sermon series. It makes them hard to navigate, hard to understand.

And so I think these insights spread to all of life because doing something worthwhile is what life apparently is for. When it comes to painting, in order to paint well and to form your own style you have to see things. You have to watch the bay, look at the trees, observe the houses and streets and blowing leaves. And you have to focus: where is the light, where is the detail, what is this about, how is it coherent. It is like the prose of Cormac McCarthy, an extraordinary writer who looked at things intently, listened to them, never pretended and therefore wrote efficiently.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

In this novel John Irving is making a point about the presence of higher powers in human affairs. There is religion, there is Scripture, and a lot of conversation around the subject of belief. This novel has many strengths, among them are the lively, clearly defined characters, an intricate plotting that brings things climatically and busily but not confusingly together, and it also shows the author’s knowledge and mastery of the many things that go into the characters and situations. In many ways it is rich with life, humor that is sometimes manic, and pathos.

At the same time, the novel has great weaknesses. The problem with the characters is that they can become cartoonish at moments, though usually Irving keeps to the right side of that line. The real problem is that there is too often too much detail. This in turn indicates an underlying problem in Irving’s sense of proportion. The result is that there are things that are too preposterous. Such as? Owen Meany is so light he can be lifted and passed around in the air by other children of his age in Sunday school. And then, though he is so light, he manages one day to hit a little league baseball so hard it kills a bystander. It doesn’t add up, you can’t have both things and the first is a strain the author ultimately acknowledges. I think underlying this lack of proportion which annoyingly crops up as well as the exacting detail of everything and everybody is a lack of focus. If Irving’s story were more focused it would exclude more details. His is a higher quality of writing than this example, but it is not unlike when you have a writer gratuitously larding his prose with adjectives that add color to everything and exasperate the attentive reader by pointing everywhere and nowhere.

The book does have a poignant climax, one that draws much of the reader’s previous experience together. The problem is not the plotting, the problem is not that the many details blur into a murk of confusion, the problem is not even that it is paced too slowly, though it is something almost the same: the problem is that it is inefficient. And you can tell it is clumsy when Irving has to return to the lightness of Owen Meany at the end and make a special plea to explain it to the reader, obnoxiously thrusting his point out of the finished story. It should have been shown in the story and left to the reader.

It could be that I need to read the whole book again with better attention, I theoretically admit. Here is the problem I have: I have endured it with attention all the way through page 627, the last. And a desire to do it all again is not something I was left with.

With Less of the Internet

Life becomes more interesting, almost too interesting in that you have to practice that exclusion we call focus. That also is an interesting thing, the husbanding and steering of your own attention and marshalling its surging tides. You have to be like a moon brooding over your own restless soul, shining on it with lunar indifference, like a wizard or something. How to be focused without excluding any of your worthwhile options is what you end up juggling.

Mad Algorithms

What adjectives focus the semantic laser endeavoring to describe the quest for greater digital speed? ‘Indefatigable’ is too positive. ‘Perverse’ is not correct. ‘Persistent’ and something else. The quest for processing speed has been a persistent search for smaller spaces. The chip becomes the microchip and perhaps the nanochip (for all I know), and the reduced distances accelerate the exchanges. In those confined spaces the algorithms (wish I knew what exactly an algorithm is), the algorithms, I say, process at frantic speeds, and the effect is frantic. And yet the adjective I seek is not ‘frantic’.

I also want to point out that the loss of space is the loss of peace. Peace is spacious, like a meadow, like the view from high on a hill, like the slow movement in a Mozart concerto. Peace is like, as Emily Dickinson put it, those distances that oceans are. What, for example, do these alleged algorithms know of those distances which the opening chords of Bruckner’s fourth symphony describe? It is unimaginable. And if you keep thinking that way, the quest for greater digital speed starts looking like a quest for ultimate (or is the adjective ‘impossible’ here?) immanence, for the coordination of the smallest possible particles on the smallest possible surface teeming with electric pulses. A quest for manic immanence based on more and more of less and less.

I have been trying to withdraw from it somewhat, replace it with the accordion and whatnot. It turns out it matters what you withdraw from, as anybody who has ever died of thirst in the desert will confirm. Which is why I have been toying with the idea of actually withdrawing from X. I recently let my usage lapse, not even for a day. But I did find that with just a small but deliberate withdrawal, when I returned I noticed the mad algorithms. I felt like I was watching the computer screens in The Matrix, the streaming lines of half-discernible code, the doings of obsessed robots, the indefatigable programs which continue what has been programmed mindlessly as long as things hold together and power is supplied.

The speed of our digital wonders has upsides, of course. We can get video, which no doubt requires an awful lot of constrained spaces full of frenetic activity. There are other sources of information than X–though a good, intelligent use of it has seemed to me indispensable until very recently. Part of suspending or at least reducing one’s use of X (try writing something with the capital letter X repeated and you will understand the effect Elon Musk is after, that player of games: it is this enigmatic thing you keep mysteriously talking about, it is a name not a name), part of reducing my use of X means a loss of valuable information. It does inform me. The problem is that it is never a source of information that is properly ordered. It is always a source of disorder, whatever else it provides.

X is a source of conflict, primarily. Instagram is apparently a source or cause of envy. Facebook of selfish preening and vainglory, and so on. X has been renamed to be what it is: a crossing of paths. a clash, and it disorders the human passion of anger. I paused because I found myself angry at the FBI, at Joe Biden of all people, at random things–considering my station in life–and that made me wonder. Anger can waste the use of your intellect by focusing it on objects which can yield no beneficial outcome. And so that which supplies the intellect with information, the social media platform that I understand is the most elite, is what can most derail your intellect from its appointed task (such as it is).

Well, it is going to be a digital and a mad, frenetic world no matter what. But for that very reason sources of serenity, composure, the insights of quiet contemplation, joy, and peace may be at a premium. Happy is the man who can secure such luxury goods.

Romans 13:1–7

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, 4 for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. 6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. 7 Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

What Paul is saying is that if you live in submission to God, you will not have to fear the government. The agents of government work for God. Since God instituted human government back in the covenant he made with Noah and humanity, all human government derives its authority from God. God alone holds authority absolutely. God also appoints the agents of government. They are therefore not to be resisted in the pursuance of their lawful duties but instead encouraged by our submission. The agents of the government, moreover, are God’s servants (diakonos twice and leitourgos when it comes to collecting taxes), and God appoints the ones you have for your good. Because God has instituted, appointed, and controls them, you have nothing to fear as long as you submit to God. There are two things to fear: God’s wrath for insubordination to him and a bad conscience that comes for the same reason. Both consequences result when you violate God’s authority. Avoid those by doing justice: giving to God all worship and surrender and giving to each his due. Specifically, submit to your superiors in government. If you have to stand up to your government because it is not submitting to God’s purposes, God who instituted, appointed, patrols, and controls your government will be on your side (or rather, you will still be on God’s). Again, you have nothing to fear. Remember God’s absolute authority and keep your conscience clear. There is no chaos, there is only an illusion of chaos to those who cannot clearly discern God’s purposes coming to pass.

Two Literary Observations

Cormac McCarthy is one of the best things the USA has given to English letters and the world. He wants nothing so much as to stare straight at reality. Can anybody say that his skill has many equals? It may be I am intoxicated by his skill, but I say he is a Jane Austen-level novelist: one of the few in the first rank who is doing what more than a few readings reveal.

The Wind in the Willows is a great work of literature, as much as The Lord of the Rings or Blood Meridian or Pride and Prejudice. It is hard to find more evocative descriptions, a more ingenious combined quartet of characters, and a more skillful alignement of the ordinary to the transcendent. It is a novel about life in a grand and wise and true way.

From Mind to Heart: Christian Meditation Today by Peter Toon

I can’t ever remember being instructed in meditation whether in church or in seminary, but that could turn out to be no more than a comment on my memory. What is certain is that Peter Toon’s book aims to inspire us to meditation and to explain in practical ways what it is we need to do.

He gives six reasons for meditation: to balance the business of contemporary life, to assimilate divine revelation, to open a way for the influence of God’s Spirit, to prepare for personal and corporate worship, to align our desires with God’s purposes, and in order to have a healthy Christianity. That meditation is indispensable for spiritual health is clearly argued in this book.

Toon spends the first part of his little book surveying some of the teaching of Scripture on meditation, parking on a few obvious Psalms, explaining meditation in the life and teaching of Christ, and pointing out a few other things from the New Testament. Depending on your ideas about his intentions, it is either perfunctory or succinct.

The second section of his book begins to explain different approaches. He calls the first approach evangelical, drawing from the example of Martin Luther and George Muller. He could have cast his net wider, but these examples get the point across. Then he considers the counter-Reformation, because it is hard to deny that there are rich treasures of ascetical theology there. He takes a certain distance from some of the Catholic aims and practices, but on the whole is appreciative, selecting Peter of Alcantara as his source. Then he turns to the Puritans, whom he has consulted extensively, and explains that approach to meditation last. All three examples align in this: we must be deliberate in meditation, we must begin with prayer, we must be consistent and disciplined in our dedication, and the ultimate purpose of meditation is to lead into prayer. In other words, there is always a dimension of communion with God which we seek in meditation. It is not study, it is not just thinking, but it is digestion of the truth of Scripture for the purpose of drawing near to God.

He concludes by listing some benefits and providing his own specific list of the steps that a person ought to follow in order to build up the habit of meditation.

Toon makes his point without any excess at all. There is research, there are bibliographical rabbit trails for the reader to follow, there are illustrations, explanations, and sufficient examples. This book is a good introduction to the subject.

Another benefit is that the book is a little less closed than one often finds Protestants to be about being informed by those who are not. While expressing disagreements, Toon does not believe that disagreements need to be expressed always with disapproval. I find his rejection of contemplation (which amounts to a rejection of mysticism) implausible, but I do not think most Protestants would side with me on that, Platonism being in a great state of neglect among us. At least he has read, understood, and considered what he evaluates.

Thunderstorm in Hanover

The western sky loomed dark at three, and soon the wind tossed the tops of the trees. It swept the dust of the long drought along, making us squint. Withered leaves plunged across Baltimore street, heedless of traffic, heading where fallen leaves go to avoid getting wet. Lightning came, then those first heavy drops, and so passed the last of the high heat of summer.

George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind

If you don’t know anything about George MacDonald, one of the things you can do is get a little anthology C.S. Lewis made of all his favorite things MacDonald ever printed. MacDonald had an intuitive power of seeing deep into things. “To try to make others comfortable is the only way to get right comfortable ourselves,” he writes in an aside to the reader early in the story. “And that comes partly of not being able to think so much about ourselves when we are helping other people. For our Selves will always do pretty well if we don’t pay them too much attention.” That advice for spiritual health is one which Lewis’s will turn into a definition of humility. MacDonald completes his explanation with an analogy, “Our Selves are like some little children who will be happy enough so long as they are left to their own games, but when we begin to interfere with them, and make them presents of too nice playthings, or too many sweet things, they begin at once to fret and spoil.”

This book is the story of Diamond, the young son of a poor London cab-driver who is befriended by the North Wind. The adventures on which Diamond is taken at night contrast with his waking life, in which poverty, dreariness, and adversity grind away at his family. In his flights with the North Wind, Diamond is initiated, and both in his nighttime adventures and in the common problems of his daylight life he undergoes a series of spiritual purifications and illuminations until he is able to go through the North Wind and find the country at her back. We later learn that all he actually had was a dream of that region, a mystical anticipation which changed all his life so that ever after he lived for the moment in which he would actually arrive.

By combining light and dark, flying through the starlit world and walking on the grim London streets, MacDonald is able to show us the spiritual nature of common human interactions. There is a sense in which what is dreaming and what is waking is shown to be interchangeable with a calm and yet vertiginous demonstration. This is a MacDonald trademark. For this alone, the book is worthwhile and thought provoking. It gives to everything he wrote a sense of freshness and joy, of the cheerfulness of holiness, a point he wanted very decidedly to make. How Diamond is transformed, grows, responds to adversity, helps others, all this is intriguing and instructive because MacDonald is not just spinning a yarn. But he does not want to be didactic merely, though he has his didactic moments (which are somewhat but not entirely unfortunate). Through all these episodes he is working to bring something into focus which he wants his reader to see as clearly as possible: it is about the reality at the core of the spiritual life in this mythopoesis of discipline and perfection.

What is the North Wind? What exactly does this personification represent?

She is in some way associated with the providence of God, doing things behind the scenes for greater purposes. It is as if MacDonald saw the wind blow someone’s hat off and by leaping to retrieve it the person inadvertently avoided being run over by a bus. The North Wind goes about her business causing incidents from minor obstacles to disasters and calamities all ordained for outcomes, it emerges, of ultimate good. Intriguingly connected to that, the North Wind also is revealed as a source of dreams. Is MacDonald gesturing toward what psychology now denominates the unconscious? Providing dreams is another form of providence, a somewhat more overt but sufficiently subtle tampering with the course of events.

The most curious thing about the North Wind is that there is a country behind her. This sets her apart from the South Wind, for example. As a person approaches, she becomes inert, cold while still apparently conscious, lethargic and at last entirely unresponsive when Diamond approaches that region. She is, in fact, the frozen door, the way through to this region which is nearly impossible to describe but which has the power of imparting a deep and lasting joy. And at the very end of the story we learn that the back of the North Wind is the region of death.

Because, the North Wind is ultimately death, which in MacDonald’s thought is the moment of our awakening to a higher reality. “Sometimes they call me Bad Fortune,” North Wind explains to Diamond, “sometimes Evil Chance, and sometimes Ruin; and they have another name for me which they think the most dreadful of all.” Which name she refuses to give to Diamond, but which she suggests reminds him of his mystical experience. For George MacDonald, we are living in a lower reality, and compared to what is coming, we are living in a dream, one that is full of incoherence and lacking clarity. It is no accident that when C.S. Lewis wrote a story in which hell is the least real place, purgatory more real, and heaven most real of all that this story should prominently feature George MacDonald.

Psychology and also literature both puzzle over the phenomenon of the unconscious, this astonishing place where mathematics is done, this seemingly living, responsive thing that cares about nothing but the person whose consciousness it is determined to influence for the better with all of the resources at its disposal. I wonder if George MacDonald would have said that it is the country at the back of the North Wind summoning us from the dreams of consciousness to a greater waking reality. Perversely, we interpret it as the obscure and mysterious and undeveloped and we try to bring it into our conscious clarity in a kind of anti-platonism. But it is we who are groping and trying to make unconscious dreams out of a waking consciousness, denying that we were made and destined for regions of greater metaphysical clarity.

Late in the story the North Wind takes Diamond back to his first home, where he lived when he first met her. He finds that the same place is no longer the same, that because it is uninhabited it isn’t a home any more. “‘I thought that would be it,’ said North Wind. ‘Everything, dreaming and all, has got a soul in it, or else it’s worth nothing, and we don’t care about it about it. Some of our thoughts are worth nothing, because they’ve got no soul in them. The brain puts them into the mind, but not the mind into the brain.'”