Mother Teresa

I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.   --Mother Teresa

Time Magazine has an article about Mother Teresa and the new book of her letters to her spiritual confessors over the years, Come Be My Light. Many of her communications reveal a deeply felt absence of God, and her persistence in her faith and work in light of it is all the more astounding.

Most (all, I suspect) of us experience what Richard Foster calls a "Sahara of the Soul" at one point or another, although gratefully most of them seem to last for less than the 50+ years of Mother Teresa's.  I find these letters so encouraging, as I continue to grapple with my own doubts and the inevitable times when I feel like I'm talking to the air.  A similar sentiment was expressed by many in the article. Rev. James Martin says of the book, "It would be a ministry to people who had experienced some doubt, some absence of God in their lives. And you know who that is? Everybody. Atheists, doubters, seekers, believers, everyone." (See Also: Brian McLaren)

On the other side is Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken atheist, who reads the letters as additional evidence of the profound idiocy of faith:  "She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she had dug for herself." (See Also: Sam Harris) There is also the psychological analysis, that "she punished herself with a crippling failure to counterbalance her great successes."

The overwhelming lack of feeling of closeness with Christ in Mother Teresa's life suggests that perhaps we should re-examine what faith is. Most know that it's not just a feeling, but how do we live our lives when the feeling isn't there? And what constitutes sufficient feeling? Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, who put the book together, "thinks the book may act as an antidote to a cultural problem. 'The tendency in our spiritual life but also in our more general attitude toward love is that our feelings are all that is going on,' he says. 'And so to us the totality of love is what we feel. But to really love someone requires commitment, fidelity and vulnerability. Mother Teresa wasn't 'feeling' Christ's love, and she could have shut down. But she was up at 4:30 every morning for Jesus, and still writing to him, 'Your happiness is all I want.' That's a powerful example even if you are not talking in exclusively religious terms.'"

Personally, I'm grateful for the example and look forward to reading the book. As often as we talk about doubt, it is rare to have someone with such great spiritual maturity or in leadership be so open about their own struggles, except in a very general way. (See Also: Kamp Krusty) I should also mention, though, that Mother Teresa herself wanted these correspondences destroyed, but her wishes were overruled by the church. That decision is a whole other question, and while I'm grateful that they are being made available, I don't know what I think of it.

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OMG! So Interesting!!

Encouraged by a new style guide to use exclamation points liberally in e-mail correspondence, an article in Slate today points out their original use:

A relatively recent addition to the punctuation clan, it first appeared in print around 1400 and was known until 1700 as a "mark of admiration," though admiration in this case meant something like "wonderment" (of a religious variety). Some scholars believe it derives from the Latin Io (meaning joy). Io, the theory goes, might have been rendered with its second letter under the first, thus producing an exclamation mark.

and some of the sad effects of the medium itself:

For centuries, the act of writing mandated a tremendous exertion of labor, so that scribes committed to the page only texts of supreme import. (Imagine a team of tonsured monks toiling for decades on an illuminated manuscript that read, "WTF … c u l8r?") For centuries, that which was written had to deserve to be written. Today's technology, however, allows us to transmit doodles of thought (e.g. "Running 10 mins late") we never would have deemed worthy of print. It's not that we know we aren't writing well—and so tack on some exclamations!!!—it's that we know what we're saying doesn't deserve to be written at all.

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Just For A Laugh...

Check out The 10 Most Regrettable Celebrity Commercials

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The Disciplined Heart - Chapter 4

This chapter on friendship begins with the task of trying to get to some definition of 'friend' from which to start. After all, it is a term we tend to use loosely, referring to everyone from people we see at work to the folks who were part of our past to our current intimate friends. How do we narrow it down? Simon suggests a starting point, outlining some features that are (ideally) part of a significant friendship: "A sense of equality and mutuality, concern for each other's welfare, willingness to help when needed, shared interests and activities, shared values and principles, shared history and memories, open communication, and intimate connection." (89) "Intimate connection" is an interesting one for me, as I don't have the luxury of physical proximity to most of my dearest friends. There is a short article in Philosophy Now  that offers a positive spin on how email/the internet allows friendship to grow and thrive in new ways. What do y'all think - how significant can a friendship be when you're only face to face once in a blue moon?

So then, how does friendship differ than neighbor love? Well, the use of imagination is markedly different, for starters. While in neighbor love we need not have " any clear idea of what his destiny is beyond the general Christian belief that it will somehow involve Christlikeness," (89) friendship requires knowledge of the other and an affirmation that their own vision of their destiny is substantially correct. In addition, it requires a commitment to help them achieve their vision, supporting them and encouraging them and in general becoming a source of strength for them. All of this implies that friends must not be "so completely fictions of their own making that they have not a clue of their own destinies." (96) They (and we) must be sufficiently self-aware.  We all engage in some degree of fiction-making about ourselves, but "[t]o the extent we [do so], we are strangers to ourselves and others." (107) This is true in our relationship with God as well as with other people.

If we take an affirmation of destiny (used here as God's intention for our lives, our "true story") as one of the central ways of loving a friend, does this mean that Christians can only be friends with other Christians? Or that non-Christians in general can't have true friendships? To this charge, Simon says no: "Spiritual or moral growth need not be the focus of a genuine friendship, but growth in the good will be its result." (103) This good could be a love of art, a passion for science, or whatever. Even in Christian friendships, it "need not look like two-person religious support groups. The friends may spend more time talking about literature or sharing the silence of a trout stream's banks than engaging in 'God talk.'" (103) Spiritual improvement is not the aim of friendship, but rather it is to help them fulfill their conception of their destiny. I think the "their" there is important. Friends have the difficult task of speaking sometimes hard truths into the relationship and sharing insight, but ultimately "one wants the story that one's friend lives out to be his own." (105)

So how do you respond when a friend's story begins to diverge from your own? Or when when you simply don't agree with a person's conception of their destiny? I'd be curious to hear thoughts about how to deal with these things... how to discern when to speak and when to maintain silence.

It seems evident, even from this very superficial overview (me, not the book), that, as Aristotle claimed, "a wish for friendship may arise quickly, but friendship does not." (93) To have understanding and acceptance of the other person requires that you know them fairly well, and establishing trust and intimacy requires time - for some of us, a lot of time!

To end, a quote from The Great Gatsby, which is the novel she uses to illustrate friendship, in which Nick describes Gatsby:

He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. (91)

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The Perils of Writing

I won't claim to know much about the Jose Padilla trial that prompted this essay, but Garrison Keillor has written a wonderful and humorous piece on the dangers of writing for unknown readers and the hazards of being (mis)interpreted....

We are invisibly linked through words I have written, and yet the meaning of those words, as determined by a jury of twelve men and women good and true, could be far, far from what I intended, and as I sit there at the defense table in the Miami courtroom, smelling the musky cologne of your idiot attorney, looking past him at you, you wretched cretin, as the linguistics expert for the state, a tall bunheaded woman with a Ph.D. in literary deconstruction, testifies that the subtext of my column in question was a command that you plant an explosive device in the heel of your cowboy boot and try to run through airport security hollering "I'm a-comin', Mama!" I am going to think back on my life and wish I had become a gardener. Nobody was ever indicted for watering plants.

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Free Theological Classes

Reclaiming the Mind is starting new theology courses on September 9th (HT: Evangelical Outpost) that are free for the self-led online version, if anyone is interested...

The Theology Program is a program of Christian theology (study of God) and apologetics (defending the faith) created with all believers in mind. TTP seeks to give people who may never have the time, ability, or circumstances that allow them to attend full-time seminary the same opportunity to study the great and rich Christian heritage of truth. Here, you will learn theology historically, biblically, and irenically (in a peaceful manner). The contents of TTP are created from a broadly evangelical perspective, engaging other traditions in a persuasive yet gracious manner. In short, we seek to help people think theologically by understanding what they believe and why they believe it.

Having never taken a course from them, I don't know what they're like, but I thought I'd pass along the link.

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The Joy of Reading

I just finished reading Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which talks about some of the problems inherent in an image based culture (as opposed to a print based one). It was alarming to have laid out so clearly the ways in which our TV saturated society has reframed our entire epistemology over the last hundred years or so! Hopefully I'll post more on the book, but for now I just wanted to direct you to Tim Challies' recent post on the pleasures of reading, which was a great affirmation of the value of books after spending some time with a more negative critique of things.

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The Disciplined Heart - Chapter 3

In this chapter, Simon discusses neighbor love. This, of course, begs the question of "who is our neighbor?", which Jesus answered in the parable of the good Samaritan and which I will summarize here as "Everyone."

Neighbor love, like self-love, involves imagination, a creative vision into the destiny of the other. (Remembering that destiny, as defined by Simon, is that which God intends for our lives; our "true story.") We are called to do this even when there is little overt evidence that the destiny is even in progress, and we can find no easily identifiable value in the other person. But "because Christians refuse to see people from a merely human point of view (2 Cor 5:1-17), we take this exercise in imagination to be more than fiction-making." (74) Such fiction-making would result in a superficial sentimentality, which "assumes that thinking nice thoughts will solve all problems, that pretending that things are less grim than they are will somehow magically make them better." (74) It requires a much deeper transformation in our thinking, a willingness to see that appears to be pure foolishness much of the time.

There is a crucial distinction she is making here that I think is important to point out, especially because it is a trap I find myself falling into: We are not loving others in spite of what we see, thereby affirming the unworthiness of the object on at least some level, but instead we are perceiving the actual value of the other person. (There is a whole discussion she goes into on the popular Christian dichotomy between agape and eros, and proposes something of a synthesis between them (caritas), akin to that which Augustine and Calvin talked about. An interesting read, but I won't get into it here.)

The relationship between love and humility comes to the fore again as we look at the flip side: our willingness to receive love. Most of us have experienced how hard it is to accept love that we don't feel we deserve. As C.S. Lewis says in The Four Loves, "how difficult it is to receive, and to go on receiving, from others a love that does not depend on our own attraction!" Plus, many of us are sometimes overwhelmed a by a sense of guilt and shame. There is a certain pride in hanging onto that. For me, accepting the grace and forgiveness of God was one of the hardest things I've ever done (and continue to do). To accept the loss of myself as my own savior was tough, but ultimately freeing. And if it's that difficult to accept from God, how much more so from other fallen people! But it seems here that a similar 'giving up' is required for us to participate in a Christian vision of neighbor love. It would be a very condescending version of 'love' to give to all and accept from only a few. It requires much more imagination to, for example, participate in the good act of volunteering at a soup kitchen and see the street people there as having something important to offer you by their love, and not just you coming in to offer something to them.

To love people is to respect them... I'll finish with this definition of respect from a footnote that quotes Paul Wadell summarizing Enda McDonagh on page 74 (how's that for a convoluted reference?)

To respect another person is to take whatever time is necessary to see their goodness. Respect literally means to ‘look again,’ to ‘take a second look.' It means we cannot settle for first impressions, or casually dismiss people from our lives. To have respect for someone is to look far enough into the person to see their goodness, even if that goodness is more a promise than a fact. We respect them when we call them to this goodness and commit ourselves to eliciting it.

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I Know I Shouldn't Laugh...

...but there is a story in the IHT today about an Australian woman killed by her pet camel when it attempted to mate with her.

In other, less cringe-inducing  news, it appears that J.K. Rowling is at work on a new crime novel. I can't wait to see what she does!

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The Key Demographic in 2008

In The Know: Candidates Compete For Vital Idgit Vote

 

I ♥ The Onion

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The Disciplined Heart - Chapter 2

This chapter, " Love and Self-Knowledge", deals in large part with the danger of self-deception. She uses two stories - "The Lame Shall Enter First" by Flannery O'Connor and "Father Sergius" by Leo Tolstoy - to illustrate the depth and power of a person to deceive themself about who they are, and how this filters outward and colors the way in which other people and the world are interpreted. It is a destructive fiction-making that prohibits love. For example, in the O'Connor story the main character, Sheppard, believes himself to be a good father who provides everything his son, Norton, could need or want after his mother passed away. So when he witnesses Norton counting his coins, he interprets this hoarding behavior as selfishness, rather than "pathetic attempts of a grieving child to build some fragile security." (44) His desire to perceive himself in one way causes him to think and act in ways that generate the exact opposite perception of him by other people.

How often do we all do this? I know I certainly have some deeply held beliefs about myself that lead me to some less than generous conclusions about other people's behavior!

So how do we get to this point? Self-deception seems terribly incoherent, as we would be "both believing and not believing the same proposition at the same time." (45) Simon points to the philosopher Alfred Mele, who says that self-deception occurs when the desire for a false belief to be true causes one to look only at/for evidence that confirms the truth of the belief, or to interpret evidence only in such a way as to support the belief. It's all very subtle, really. And so convoluted and deeply entrenched in our minds that it is quite difficult to know when we're doing it!

Given the immensity of the task of knowing ourselves and the sometimes overwhelming reality of self-deception, what can we do? Well, for one thing, we must engage in the task of reflection. Self-knowledge, she claims, is intimately connected with progress in virtue. (Virtue being defined here "character traits that enhance one's ability to live out one's destiny." (41) ) To become more virtuous is to face our vices - the evil in us - and "[t]he more we reflect, the more we shall transform ourselves from being the instruments of [evil] to being [its] controllers." (58)

But reflection on its own can be a dangerous thing; our vices can influence our introspection. For example, "[m]alicious people who engage in reflection are likely to become adept at insight into other people's weaknesses, especially those whom they dislike, but may be unable to see this as itself an instance of their own maliciousness." (58) Reflection alone could in this way increase our self-deception rather than draw us closer to truth.

At this point in the chapter, I felt a wee bit despairing... how in the world can we ever cut to the truth of it all if all of our tools are dull and dangerous? Happily, there is more. Here we begin to clearly see some of the connections between love and humility: as we allow ourselves to become vulnerable enough to hear critique from our community, and also start taking steps of both personal and communal confession, that dynamic relational interplay hones us. It starts becoming easier to see where our thinking diverges from reality, and community support can be a major factor as we begin the hard work of change.

We also can't underestimate the value of the traumatic moments when we fail in a spectacular fashion. Those times disallow us the luxury of pretense, as we are faced with an obvious display of our weakness and sin. Augustine actually believed that overt sin is less spiritually dangerous than pride hidden beneath a veneer of good behavior. That makes sense to me.

I feel as though I've skipped through this chapter so quickly, I hope I pulled out at least some of the main points. I'd be really curious to hear anyone's thoughts about self-knowledge and how well we can actually know ourselves, particularly any thoughts on the good/bad points of introspection.

I'll finish it up with one last quote from the chapter:

In order to know who we are, we do not need to strive for unemotional objectivity, but rather to cultivate the correctives to pride: the faith that allows us to face the truth about ourselves because the depth of our brokenness finds its answer in grace; the hope that, though we often wander from the path, grace will make straight what we have bent; and the love, compassion, and gratitude that follow from seeing our own and others' stories as part of God's story. (65)

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Proving What We All Knew In High School

Conventional wisdom says that men not only think about sex more than women, but are also having a great deal more sex. Surveys have proven this: in the US a recent study proved that men had a median of 7 female partners while women had slept with a mere 4 guys. The only problem with the data? Apparently, it's not mathematically possible. So where does the discrepancy come in? One explanation:

"Some might be imaginary," Graham said. "Maybe two are in the man's mind and one really exists."

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New PostSecret Video

I love checking out the PostSecret site on Mondays to see the new postcards they put up. (PostSecret is an ongoing art project in which people mail in artistic cards revealing a secret). This morning they have put up a video in lieu of the typical 20 secrets. If you have a moment, check it out...

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Is This Love?

Texas Megachurch Cancels Memorial for Gay Navy Vet 

(HT: Brant)

 ******

ETA: My mom just checked the blog and followed the link back to Brant, who has posted the link to the response of High Point Church.  So much for 'fair and balanced' reporting. Tough call, that one.

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The Great Escape

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The Disciplined Heart - Chapter 1

After a couple of delays, I think I'm finally ready to get going on The Disciplined Heart: Love Destiny, & Imagination by Caroline Simon. The chapters are fairly lengthy, so I'm going to leave lots out in the interest of space, but if anyone is reading along and thinks I've skipped something crucial, let me know.

This first chapter is called "Love and Love's Counterfeits", and serves primarily as an introduction to the framework she will be using for dealing with the various forms of love throughout the rest of the book.

Of primary importance is the concept of destiny, which in her usage will refer not to fate, but to one's "true story". Destiny is "what God intends, but does not compel, me to be." (19) A couple of conditions apply to a Christian account of destiny. Our destinies only include things that are valuable and significant. Part of the value lies in the morality, so my destiny would preclude anything counter to God's moral will. Significance is fairly easy to understand... many choices I make are largely irrelevant to my destiny, such as a haircut, etc.

Open-endedness is a key factor of destiny as well. By this she means that there are not specific individual blueprints for our lives, but that there are any number of possibilities that would be in keeping with God's intentions for us. "Destinies can be failed or refused, but God confers on humans the dignity of being creators of their own destinies within the limits set by God's intentions." (20) So there isn't a single path that constitutes our destiny. This is hugely freeing - how often do we face choices (job, marriage, move, etc.) and get terrified that we'll make the wrong decision and permanently remove ourselves from God's plan for our lives? Talk about pressure! A pastor I once heard, I can't remember who, made the point emphatically that "with God, there is no plan B." Our choices matter, but I don't know that we have the power to do anything that will completely thwart God. Honestly, given my own checkered past, I take great comfort that God can use pretty much anything for good. Doesn't mean I couldn't have made better choices - I really wish I had - but it doesn't doom me to a second rate life. But you get the point.

So what does destiny have to do with love? Simon says (heh) that love is a form of grace that allows us to have insight into another person's destiny. And then it goes further. Not only does it allow us to perceive people in light of their destiny, but also to "act toward them in certain ways and experience certain feelings" (30) about them. This is important. To counter the prevalent romantic notions of love, Christians (and others) have become quite adamant that love is not an emotion, but an action or a commitment. Here she counters that, saying that while love cannot be reduced to an emotion, it certainly includes emotion. It is much deeper than a romantic feeling, however. It is the care and compassion that motivates our actions towards another. I definitely have a romantic streak, but am also quite practical in matters of the heart, and find it appealing to think in terms of 'deciding' and 'choosing' to love. So it was very helpful to think of  the emotional side in a more nuanced way than the twitterpated feelings of love (infatuation?) that so often characterize our understanding.

Finally, a key element in her understanding of love is imagination. Imagination is the thing that allows us to have insight into the destiny of someone. This is contrasted with what she calls fiction-making, which is an illusion produced, often selfishly, by wishful thinking. Imagination is based firmly in the reality (the good, the bad, and the ugly) of the other but seeks to see beyond it and place them in the true narrative of God's purposes. It is defined by hope anchored in God, allowing us to see folks as God wants them to be, and then committing ourselves to being a part of their redemptive journey.

So that's a brief intro into her concepts of love, destiny and imagination. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book, especially as she will be taking a narrative approach and drawing a lot on novels and literature. As a bookworm, this pleases me.

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My Meandering Mind

I returned home today from Lausanne with the best intentions in the world to finish writing up the first chapter of The Disciplined Heart to post here. But then I read Bill Kinnon's post titled On Women As Introverts, which links to Calicirian's blog where she writes about some of the difficulties of being an introverted Christian woman. She in turn linked to a fantastic and funny article called Caring For Your Introvert. I continued to follow the rabbit trail back to Bill's blog and his link to a hysterical take on the Myers-Briggs personality types.

Of course, this got me wondering what my very own box might look like, so I did a quick search and took a quiz, discovering that I am an INFJ, aka a conspiracy theorist. My mom, to the surprise of absolutely no one who knows her, appears to be an ISFJ, aka The Martyr.

So after that fun little foray, needless to say I shall not be posting chapter 1 tonight, but will do it tomorrow. If anyone else decides to jump in the rabbit hole, let me know what you find out...

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The Downside of Diversity?

From the International Herald Tribune:

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

Huh. There's a ton of info in the article and my brain is a little too mashed at the moment to think clearly about it, but my initial response is to really respect Putnam, who has courageously published results that he knows, as a civic leader, will probably be used against the ideals he strives for by certain conservative groups. I'm also impressed that in addition to just publishing the data, he included some prescriptions to help smooth over some of these difficulties, and offers some hope that while these things may be true in the short term, over the long term "increasing diversity in America is not only inevitable, but ultimately valuable and enriching."

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Asexual Embryos?

I don't know if I find this more or less frightening, but it seems as though the Korean scientist who published fraudulent data from his stem cell experiments may have accidentally stumbled upon a major breakthrough in the field. He "inadvertently created cells that were derived by "parthenogenesis", a method by which unfertilised eggs start to divide to form embryos asexually."

The question is, does this make it ethically neutral? If the embryo is chemically "tricked" into development, what does that mean exactly? I don't know. I haven't got the scientific background to understand it all, and even if I did I don't know how one would go about navigating this ethical quagmire.

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Swiss National Day

A few photos from the August 1st parade in Villars...

   

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White Like Me

Have you ever thought much about white privilege? For most of my life, I haven't. I've never been forced to really think about race in America, which is actually just as good an example that white privilege exists as any other. I'm fairly certain that most ethnic minorities are unable to postpone or avoid confrontations with the realities of racialization that surround them.

 I just finished reading White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son by Tim Wise, in which he does a terrific job of narrating the story of white privilege in the U.S., using personal anecdotes as well as expounding on public policy and events to illustrate truths that are difficult for us, as white folk, to accept. His voice is not one of condemnation, however, but one of hope. For justice for all (and even if we don't see or never achieve such justice, "there is redemption in struggle"), which includes white people... racism, he claims, not only harms the oppressed, but damages the oppressor.

Racism, even if it is not your own, changes you, allows you to think things and feel things that make you less than you were meant to be. It steals that part of your humanity that is the most precious because it is that part that allows us to see the image of God, the goodness of creation, in all humankind. And our unwillingness to see that, and more than to see it, to really feel it, deep in the marrow of our bones, is what allows us, and even sometimes compels us, to slaughter one another, often in the name of the same God whose image we wouldn't recognize if our lives depended on it. Which, come to think of it, they probably do. (p. 126)

This echoes Wendell Berry, who says:  "If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself... The wound is in me, as complex and deep in my flesh as blood and nerves." (The Hidden Wound, p. 4)

This is not to in any way, shape or form imply that white people somehow suffer more from racism, or that we should be selfishly motivated in our pursuit of justice. It is simply to say that as we continue to reap the benefits of a racialized society, it would behoove us to get outside of the paternalistic, "we'll help you", mindset that seems to be deeply ingrained in us and move toward a more holistic approach centered on the truth that sin hurts everyone it touches.

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With Bells On...

To be somewhere with "bells on" refers to a practice peddlers had when they roamed the area west of the Appalachians selling wares. To avoid Indians, they traveled as silently as possible until they reached a settled area. Then they unmuffled bells hung around their horses necks to announce their arrival to outlying cabins. Hence, "I'll be there with bells on." The peddlers' arrival was a much anticipated major event in the mostly tedious and hard lives of settlers, not only for the goods they sold, but also for the news, letters, and messages they carried from the outside world. (--From What's the Meaning of This?)

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