A Tale of a Tub

I was talking to a friend recently about what I thought I would post next on my blog, and I said that I would try to grapple with a partial definition of what Christian poetry might look like, but that I did not, of course, want to say anything too definitive, lest I should fail to be nuanced. In jest, he pointed out that this contracted my previous post, in which I had promised to be more straightforward, and to stop hiding behind sophistic complexity. Even though he was just joking, he had a very good point; my natural proclivity is to hide behind nuance, and I need people and God to keep reminding me to develop integrity. So, with many thanks to my friend (who usually posts under the name of Cramsey), I will, in this post, undertake an analysis of this proclivity in the hope that it will serve as a reminder of integrity for myself, and an encouragement to those who find themselves faced with similar temptations.

Let us begin with the concept of integrity, which is the virtue that stands opposite to this vice, and which must therefore be the rod by which we measure its aberrations. I think the best definition of integrity is that it involves ensuring that there is a correlation between one external, public life, and one's internal, private life. It means that both parts of one's life are integrated with each other. Time and again, Scripture urges us to such integration. Internal faith complements, and is complemented by, external works. Those led (internally) by the Spirit of God bear His (external) fruit. When someone says something to you privately, you are to shout it from the rooftops. We are to avoid spiritual pride, which is characterised by all the religious fervour of whitewashed tombs. We are to emulate Christ, who told his persecutors that he was doing the same thing privately, in Gethsemane, as he did publically, in the temple courts.

In opposition to integrity stands hypocrisy; along with Shakespeare's Iago, and contra the God who appeared to Moses, the hypocrite says, "I am not what I am." In hypocrisy, one seeks to depict oneself to others as increasingly attractive, even while one is internally corroding. Permanent hypocrisy is the state of hell - the devil considers himself to be an angel of light - he thinks he is something when he is nothing - and those who follow him claim to be wise, even as they become fools. It is no wonder that Paul wished earnestly to be released from this state when he lamented that he did those things that he would not do, and did not do those things that he would do.

Having established this definition, I will now talk about my own particular form of hypocrisy, which involves diverting others from my corrupt, frail, and broken inward state by deploying complex and sophisticated ideas and arguments that serve to distract them. I do not, of course, believe that all such nuance emerges from this source - indeed some complexity is necessary because God, and his universe, are gloriously complex - but, for now, I will confine myself to the sort of complexity that is sophistic rather than necessary, since I am more tempted towards that than toward simplisticism (which is also sinful, in its way).

We encounter this form of hypocrisy often in the Bible. The teacher of the law asks Jesus who his neighbor is, not because he is inwardly concerned about his neighbor, but rather because he want to make himself look good in the eyes of others - thus, his awareness of the "complexities" of Jewish law turns into a foil designed to distract others from his lack of compassion. When Jesus strikes at the very heart of the Samaritan woman's impoverished spiritual condition, she attempts to divert his gaze from it by introducing doctrinal complexities: "Should we worship on the mountain or in the temple?" Pilate, the patron saint of postmoderns, is, perhaps, the best example of such hypocrisy; seeking to evade his legitimate unease concerning Christ's mistreatment, he ask Jesus, "What is truth?" Obviously, he is not actually curious, but is trying to cover up his inwardly guilty conscience by explaining his inactivity as the result of his "sensitive humility in the face of an infinitely complex, plural reality" (does this sound like any postmoderns you know?). Once again, complex philosophical arguments work as a mask for a corrupted heart.

So, as unwilling disciples of Pilate, what can we do to correct our addiction, especially when it is a parasite that deploys our most seemingly noble forays into theology, docrine, and philosophy, just as it converted (as Paul writes) the law into a vehicle of sin? The conclusion that I have come to is that we can find salvation from this state through repentance. "Of course!" you are no doubt thinking, "Can one think of a more cliched truism?" But give me a moment to explain. It is in repentance that we begin to assert publically, before God and men, the extent of our internal corruption - we break down the barrier between what we are, and what we want people to think we are. Like the tax collecter, we stand a long distance away from the temple, and beat our breasts, and, in doing so, we conform our outward state to our inward state. Whether in the presence of a priest or an accountability partner, whether generally or particularly, we tell God and others, "We can't pretend any more. We are fakes, shams. Our arguments are superfluous and hollow, and we only made them to avoid getting caught, to avoid being shamed publically. But now we wish to tell the truth - now, publically, we declare that there is no health in us. We admit that we are shamed, cursed, and unworthy to be called your son." And then something amazing happens; we stop saying that we have no sin, and thereby stop being hypocritical liars. We are freed from an iron maiden of our own making, the twisted, contorted body consisting in our puffed up, sophistic arguments, and we step into light, a light that illuminates both the inward and outward person. God's will is done, and His kingdom comes, publically and privately, externally and internally, on earth as it is in heaven. Until we once again forget, and once again re-turn to Him - 490 times, if necessary - and once again step into the unity and coherence of His presence, knowing fully that we probably will stray from our repentance, but resting in the knowledge that God will call his sheep back to Him, and that we need not worry about the sins of tomorrow; this is the time of repentance - this is the day, the hour, the moment that God has made - let us rejoice, and be glad in it!

Deep Calls to Deep: An Apology for Liturgy

For many of my friends, my decision to leave the Evangelical Church (in the denominational rather than literal sense of the term) in favour of the Anglican Communion has been somewhat puzzling. Usually, they are willing enough to allow that God can, probably begrudgingly, work through the High Church in spite of the "impersonal," "deadening" effect of liturgical prayer and praise, and that a liturgical church is better than no church; however, many of my Christian friends, whom I highly respect, have trouble understanding why I would leave a democratised and populist church for the sake of "wooden forms," allegedly sleepy congregations and the empty pews that accompany them. I cannot, of course, answer all such concerns, but, today, in this post, I will talk about one of the major reasons for my liturgical turn.

The best way to explain this is to explain the need that drove me to it. As a good evangelical, I was taught to believe that the centre of Christian faith is a privatised, individualised encounter with God; at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what your pastor, or your church, or your friends think about God - what counts is a personal engagement with, and application of, scripture. Most Evangelical Church services are theoretically designed to facilitate such an engagement - the community is only necessary inasmuch as it supports our personal relationship with Christ, and the only guideline for interpreting the Bible is that one should strip it of any cultural, historical, or liturgical baggage that keeps one from encountering the text in its barest possible terms.

As I was shaped in the context of these beliefs, I usually tried to avoid any sort of biblical commentaries or external reading patterns during my devotional time - after all, if the Bible itself is God's word, why clutter it with the opinions of mere humans? But as I followed this pattern, I began to feel more and more alienated from God and his word. When I knelt to pray, my thoughts would wander, with no boundaries to curb them. More significantly, as I read selections of scripture, I began to wonder precisely what an authentic personal engagement with scripture meant. As an English Major shaped and trained in the fragmented battlefield of postmodernity, I could, almost unconsciously, identify numerous potential interpretations of a single text. As I read, the spectre of Derrida hovered over my shoulder, always seeking to disrupt the interpretations suggested by that unholy trinity, Marxism, Feminism, and Post-Colonialism. Foucault and Freud loomed large, along with Nietzsche and whoever is responsible for performance theory (Judith Butler?). I did not, of course, think that any of these interpretive paradigms would allow me to read the Bible in a way that would bring me closer to God, but, in order to counter these voices impressed on me by my English training, I required a strong interpretive counter-paradigm.

This created a problem because my Evangelical training had not taught me a method of encountering the Babel of voices that seemed to haunt me when I read the Bible. It could assert that I should go with the "plain," or "common sense" reading, but this simply left me wondering about the nature of common sense. A feminist's common sense (common sense being the ideas that are considered obvious, or self evident) would be very different from the common sense of a Marxist; for the former, a common sense reading would highlight the "obvious" assumptions about gender and sex encoded in the Bible, while a Marxist would highlight its "obvious" message for an oppressed working class. As it turned out, there were as many "common sense," "plain" readings of any given Biblical text as there were theories that approached it. So I could not simply still the wind and the waves by appealing to the "plain" sense of Scripture.

With little more success, I looked to historicism. Basically, a historicist reading of the Bible seeks to discover the ways that a Biblical text interacts with the historical setting in which it was written. I thought that, if I could simply bypass the interpretive frames, and read God's word from the perspective of its first audience, I could get at what he was saying to humans, and thereby get at what he is saying to humans. However, I soon became disenfranchised from this approach for two reasons. The first is that history does not really manage to evade the postmodern culture wars that I sought so earnestly to escape. It became clear to me that one could historically contextualize the Bible in a variety of ways, and that these ways suspiciously reflected the biases of interpreters. For example, one cannot simply talk about the single historical context of, say, the Gospel of Luke - one could construct, out of primary source materials, a variety of histories (historical contexts) that are written from different perspectives. To follow our earlier theme, we could, using the same primary texts, construct both a historical context that is organized around the concept of class, and another that is organized around the concept of performative gender; these are only two examples, but I could come up with many more. In which of these contexts should we view Luke? Once again, we are overwhelmed by a multiplicity of potential histories unveiled by a variety of theories, and are faced with the daunting question: Of this wearisome infinity of contexts, which will unlock the meaning of the text so that we can get to God? Again, I was confused.

The other problem I had with the historicist method was that it placed a great deal of distance between myself and the Biblical text. I could pretend to escape both secular postmodern theorizing and facile Evangelical moralizing by limiting my engagement with the Bible to an understanding of its historical context, in the dryest and most uninteresting sense of the term (interest, after all, implies dangerous bias). But I had no strategy for applying historicist fragments of the Bible to my own life. My safety consisted in the barest assertion of what was said in the text, and I feared personal application, lest I should once again enter the realm of subjectivity, and, once again, be mercilessly assaulted by the plurality of postmodernity. But this shelter from postmodernity came at a high cost; I traded a bible vexed with subjectivity for a bible whose certainty lay safely entombed in graveclothes woven from endless layers of history. It seemed as if I would have to choose between a personal interpretation of the Bible that had no access to truth, and a truthful preservation of the Bible that kept it from effecting any change, whether personal or cultural.

In these plights, I found (and still find) the Anglican Book of Common Prayer to be an efficacious means of reading the Bible. To begin, the prayer book prefaces and follows the scriptural readings with prayers that are themselves extracted out of, and synthesised from, the bible. Rather than confining me, these prayers guide my wandering thoughts so that they can be directed toward God. It is freeing to know that I can rest in the prayer-forms of scripture instead of undertaking the Herculean task of personally overcoming my own strong-willed, individualistic tendency to mentally stray during prayer.

These prayers, which have been used time and again by Christians for 2000 years (they are therefore not arbitrary, as are many devotional manuals/programmes), basically work to re-create in me an interpretive paradigm extracted from Scripture itself, and they also draw me much nearer to the Biblical text (and thereby to God); there is a world of difference between talking about moral, historical, political etc. points that we can take from the Bible, and actually using the very words of Scripture as the instruments of our prayers. As I use these words and forms, inspired by God himself, my heart and mind becomes tuned to the heart and mind of God; scripture no longer points toward me, and my own personal affairs, but, rather, it re-forms me so that the direction of my life points toward God. And as the Word begins to teach me to have the mind of Christ, through Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, I am exposed to other portions of scripture, so that I can use my biblically tuned ears to hear what they have to say. In many ways, liturgy is circular, for we are invited to use the Bible as both the instrument of our interpretive reform, and the object of the reformed interpretive capacity, and this cycle is itself set in motion by that model of holy cyclicality, the Trinity, who has predestined us to interpret his Word according to his Word. Thus, the Babel of voices postmodern, historical, and otherwise, is stilled as God's word communes with itself, and as we are caught up in this glorious communion. All the rivers of God's Word flow into the sea of his Word, and the sea is never filled, and we cry with the Psalmist, "Deep calls unto deep at the noise of your waterfalls; all your waves and billows have gone over me."

A Theodicy in Jello

In some of my prior posts, I have attempted, with little success, to treat the topic of depression. I say that I have done so with little success because it seems that every time I talk about something like that - something that involves very personal and human suffering - I bury it underneath a pile of philosophical dithering that often resembles that of Job's comforters. Of course, I think that, given the difficulty of depression, it is understandable that I should seek to avoid speaking about the thing itself - it is painful, and in the face of a painful subject, it is natural that we should almost unconsciously seek to avoid it. But I have become tired of trying to answer emotional pain with philosophical discourse, and therefore this post will not, in any sense, provide an "answer" to the problem of evil or the problem of depression. I merely want to paint a picture of my own experience with depression; too many people are ready to "fix" depression without giving any thought to what the state of depression actually looks like, so I hope that this post can add a descriptive corrective to the often prescriptive answers that people are ready to offer to a depressed person.

To begin, I wish to relate the medical specifics behind my depression, so that readers, if indeed there are any out there, do not have false ideas of my position. I have been on antidepressants (Effexor, and now Bupropion) for the past three years or so, and have remained on them due to my tendency to get high scores on the Beck's inventory (perhaps the only time I have been disappointed to get high scores on a test). However, I have not seen a professional psychiatrist (only a general practitioner) about the matter, and therefore have not been officially diagnosed with clinical depression proper. Official stats, however, do not keep me from becoming depressed.

As I have experienced it, depression is a state in which normal negative emotional reactions to things are amplified. So, today, for example, I became worried and stressed because of four causes

1) I was worried that I was not making enough progress in Latin (I need strong Latin skills for the next degree that I am taking)

2) I was worried that I was disappointing the professor who hired me by not doing enough/the right kind of research for her

3) I was worried that we will not find affordable housing near UBC for September

4) I was worried about making a decision concerning storage for our stuff when we move out

5) I was worried about our house, which is less than clean.

Okay, maybe there are more than four things in this list, but, in reality, a lot of them should not be a big deal. Housing and storage are not terribly difficult to find; I made more Latin progress this past week than I was making earlier this summer, and I am in contact with a fabulous Latin prof, who is willing to help me; by her own admission, my supervisor/boss was having difficulty communicating her expectations to me, and I can't expect myself to read her mind - moreover, she cares about human matters, and would not want me to do endless research at the cost of everything else; and, if I work at cleaning the house/packing in bits, I will eventually be able to manage the messiness. So, technically, I had nothing to worry about.

However, due to my depressive tendencies, each of these matters became a big deal. I know it will sound quite silly to someone who has not experienced depression, but I saw each as concrete proof of my failure at life in general, and as a token of the many disappointments that I can expect in the future. I am barely able to comprehend hope and joy, and when I am just barely able to do so, it feels like I am just waiting for the next mishap, however minor, to plunge me into a chaos of self doubt and loathing. Right now, the clearly rational part of me is protesting fiercely against my vocalisation of such an attitude - indeed, it causes me to be ashamed of such irrational, hyper-dramatic thoughts, and makes me wonder if I do not simply cherish them out of a theatrical love affair with heightened and worthless melodrama. Even as I write, I have to reassure myself that these are real emotions that I have to deal with, and not just performative attempts to "out-Herod Herod."

So, what do I do about them? Once again, I am ashamed, and want to answer that I stoically entomb them in an intellect of steel - that, by trying hard enough and coming up with the right philosophical/theological formula, I successfully suppress the rebellion that my soul undertakes against me. However, trying to argue oneself out of depression is kind of like trying to argue oneself out of having a broken leg. In reality, I cling to what I can. On a less noble note, this means that when I am shopping, I sometimes buy stupid little things, like Jello, to make myself happy. It may seem trite, absurd, and juvenile that such things as Jello can somehow help depression and answer the problem of evil, but, even as I was worrying about this, I remembered how my mentor, the Ecclesiast, embeds in his philosophically depressive texts instructions to eat, drink, and make merry. Perhaps he, too, was so weary of his dungeon of philosophical inquisition that he was glad to participate in something simple, normal, and somewhat delightfully trite. Perhaps he was talking about the Near Eastern equivalent of Jello. But, if this argument does not convince you, you really need to see "Stranger Than Fiction," because it perfectly embodies what I mean: In the face of death and darkness, it is not grand, overarching philosophising that teaches us the meaning of life, but rather things simple and mundane that we nonetheless love because they are embarassingly, painfully, and beautifully human.

But all Jello aside, my relationships with my wife, my friends, and my family have done much to help me survive. I do not, of course, pretend that these people have fixed me, or even that they are always perfect or faithful comforters -indeed, who is? - but they are there, and that is often enough. Even when I am most evasive around them, and they fail to press me to share the things in my heart that I simultaneously need most to share and want most to hide, they are there, much like the God whose name, I AM, indicates simple presence. Throughout all my exaggerated trials, throughout the silliness of my trite sorrows and sufferings, they are there; they are there as God is there, and I am blessed.