The Way of the Cross

Here's a story told by Wendell Berry in an essay called, "The Burden of the Gospels":

"In 1569 in Holland, a Mennonite named Dirk Willems, under capital sentence as a heretic, was fleeing from arrest, pursued by a ‘thief-catcher.’ As they ran across a frozen body of water, the thief-catcher broke through the ice. Without help, he would have drowned.

What did Dirk Willems do then? Was the thief-catcher an enemy merely to be hated, or was he a neighbor to be loved as one loves oneself. Was he an enemy whom one must love in order to be a child of God? Was he ‘one of the least of these my brethren’? What Dirk Willems did was turn back, put out his hands to his pursuer and save his life. The thief-catcher, who then of course wanted to let his rescuer go, was forced to arrest him. Dirk Willems was brought to trial, sentenced, and burned to death by a ‘lingering fire.’

I, and I suppose you, would like to be a child of God even at the cost of so much pain. But would we, in similar circumstances, turn back to offer the charity of Christ to an enemy?"

What's stunning about Holy Week isn't just that it happened, but that it happens again and again in this world. And the question is, just as it is for the pacifist witness of Dirk Willems, "does it work?"

From our perspective, Willem's charity didn't work out for him. But our definition of a life's working out well is probably closer to Spock's than Jesus's. "Live long and prosper" we get. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you," ...not so much.

Like Wendell Berry, I can't say that I would respond like Dirk Willems. I can't even manage to forgive the enemy who simply slanders or mistreats my ego in the mildest of ways. And I can easily construct a situation in my mind in which the pacifist witness would look less noble, or at least more complicated. But the truth is that Jesus' silence this week before his accusers is not some literary flourish to this story.

Jesus refused to return evil for evil, violence for violence, even when it meant his crucifixion. He taught us to do the same. Yet radical peaceableness toward enemies was explained away so long ago by most Christians that we rarely let the notion cramp even our emotional state. The righteous hatred and embrace of retributive justice by Christians are taken as matters of fact, by the world and by us Christians ourselves.

All I ask is that we listen honestly to the story that will unfold this Triduum, these three sobering days. And ask the question, "This way of Jesus, this way of the cross, did it work? Does it work?"

The answer probably comes down to whether I will let Jesus' way go to work on me.

Ignorance and Bliss

"Since we're billions of times more ignorant than knowledgeable, why not go with our long suit and have an ignorance-based worldview?"

- Wes Jackson in The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge

Did you know about the Google calculator? If you type in a math problem into Google, you'll get the answer above the several million search results. This doesn't sound very impressive, since your old Texas Instruments calculator did the same thing back in 1980. But if you Google "answer to life, the universe, and everything" the Google calculator will answer "42". Try it.

Douglas Adams fans will appreciate this playful little quirk in the great search engine, as the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything does, in fact, turn out to be 42 in Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

Google's California headquarters is named the "Googleplex", a nod to the "Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?" (again, see The Hithhiker's Guide to the Universe).

It's heartening to me that the folks at Google have a sense of humor. Because in the age of Google, it may be more important than ever to remember that the calculable answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything might just be something like 42. Put another way, we're increasingly amazed at how much we know and how accurate our knowledge is becoming. But we don't always stop to ask whether we can still find meaning in all that data.

Wes Jackson is a farmer and agricultural scientist. And the quote at the top of this page contrasts pretty sharply with googlization. It suggests that we might not be any closer to the truth about our selves and our world if we had a real Googleplex Star Thinker. And Jackson suggests that a respect for all we don't know is as crucial as the accumulation of information.

The book of Proverbs puts it this way:

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own insight.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.
Do not be wise in your own eyes;
fear the Lord, and turn away from evil."

That sounds like quaint, out of date wisdom from an age of inadequate information. Human insight has gotten us mighty close to the Googleplex that was science fiction humor a few decades ago.

But the stuff of tragedy is the same as it was in Homer's time and before. Hubris is ever the enemy. The prideful certainty that we can know enough is still our downfall. We are oh so wise in our own eyes, but are we happy? Are we whole? Can we still make a mess of things?

Trusting in God and acknowledging God are ways that we humans have embraced our ignorance. While we Christians believe that God has disclosed God's very self to us, God is not a problem to be solved by the Googleplex. God is a mystery that grows thicker, richer, deeper with every encounter. And, ironically, it's only in our acknowledgment of the realm and the One we know almost nothing of, that what we do know takes on meaning.

Without the reclamation of an ignorance-based world view we may never learn to use the information we've Googled well.

A Bottle o' Mystery

"God did not become a movement, a concept, an ideal, or even a committee, but a man of flesh and bone with a parentage, friends, a language, a coutry, a home. He inhabited not just a time but places, streets, rooms, countrysides, and by his presence in the flesh he changed them all."

- Aidan Kavanagh, Elements of Rite

I heard on the radio this morning that a woman recently auctioned a glass bottle containing two ghosts for $2000. This is a great mystery.

The mystery, however, isn't about the contents of the bottle. The woman's the mystery. And I don't mean she's a mystery because she's crazy enough to believe in bottling ghosts. It's just that a thing (a person being some-thing rather than no-thing) is a far greater mystery than a concept. That's why wondering about whether ghosts exist is nothing like wondering at the mystery of a real person who gets out of bed on a particular morning in March and decides to sell her bottled ghosts on Ebay.

Today is Gregory of Nyssa's feast day. And in the fourth century, he wrote, "Concepts create idols; only wonder grasps anything."

Gregory of Nyssa and Aidan Kavanagh (the fellow quoted above) share a suspicion of our preoccupation with concepts, with disembodied ideas. And they both believed that God changed and changes us less through notions than with bodies. The incarnation isn't a concept. It's "a man of flesh and bone with a parentage, friends, a language, a coutry, a home."

Christian theology often seems to be about carrying around proper concepts about God in our heads. I love the struggles and arguments that these concepts have stirred up over the centuries. But the concepts are the ghosts in our bottles. They have a lot to do with who we are, but we're what's real, and it's us that God's at work in and on and through.

This is why Aidan Kavanagh cared so passionately about liturgy. Liturgy is a way of doing theology. Liturgy isn't a concept. Liturgy is always embodied. Liturgy is always about bodies and buildings and furniture, things seen and smelled and heard. Liturgy is never less than real voices singing and speaking among living people and sturdy things in a real moment in earthly time. Liturgy can be done well or poorly, but liturgy can't be done at all in our heads.

So I wish you a wonder-ful Lent. But a Lent less concerned with wondering about concepts than wondering at things. Ultimately wondering at the God who inhabited "places, streets, rooms, countrysides, and by his presence in the flesh he changed them all."

Sarcophagi, Shiny Things, and the Great Right Here

To my mind, pharaohs and Egyptians were the Old Testament equivalent of Darth Vader and stormtroopers, the sorts of folks whose drowning gets celebrated in poems and happy songs.

Then, on Saturday, I saw a little model granary sent along with the Egyptian dead to ensure the provision of food in the next life. And those ancient villains and I became friends of a sort.

Our friendship is an unlikely one. Besides their bad guy reputation in my religious tradition, Egyptians were just wrong. Right? There's nothing in the Christian faith about the need for building models to make sure we get fed in the sweet by and by. Why, I'm pretty sure there's a kitchen somewhere in that mansion on a hillside I'll inhabit one day. Unless it turns out that resources got scarce after the gold street paving project, leaving the mansions more meagerly furnished.

Then the tetradrachm (that's the ancient Egyptian coin I just googled) dropped.

We're not so different, those ancient Egyptians and us. We all imagine ourselves into the mystery that lies on the other side of death with the best images from this life we can muster. And when we're at our best, the stories we pass around about heaven are less a means of escape than a celebration of the best of this life.

Loaves of bread and shiny golden things. Rivers and houses and walls set with precious gems. All these lovely images may serve us best when they point us not only to a wonderful reality beyond this life, but to something (or even some One) that lies beneath this life, to the source of beauty and goodness itself.

For in the end, a better question than "Will things really shimmer like gold in heaven?" may be "Why do we love things that shimmer at all?" Because "Will things really shimmer?" is a fair enough question. "Why do we love them?" might be the beginning of prayer.