Authority Is Unavoidable

Obviously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people...It is because the humane father thinks soldiers wrong that they are forbidden; there is no pretense, there can be no pretense, that the boy would think so. The average boy's impression certainly would be simply this: 'If your father is a Methodist you must not play with soliders on Sunday. If your father is a Socialist you must not play with them even on week days.' All educationists are utterly dogmatic and authoritarian...There are no uneducated people. Everybody in England is educated; only most people are educated wrong.

G.K. Chesterton in What's Wrong with the World, 1910.

Maybe I just attract the interesting wedding conversational fodder (see this post or this post for more evidence)?

This time, I was talking with a lively ex-Catholic at a rehearsal dinner. This person, who despite going to a Catholic high school and college, was surprisingly ignorant of basic Christian doctrine. Yet without traversing down an oft-traveled- and fun- path about Catholic theology, our conversation was more about the nature of how we raise our children in faith.

As is typical of ex-Catholics, this person held disdain for her parents for raising her Catholic, without giving her a choice. As if she was reading too much Christopher Hitchens, she insinuated that raising children in church, or any religious persuasion, was akin to child abuse. Aside from being a ridiculous claim, if you have ever been to children's Sunday school, the charge obviously came from a very personal place.

My response was simply that her charge against religious upbringing was unavoidable, and that she would perpetrate the same abuse on her children.

"Not so. I won't raise my child with any religious options, and then they'll get to choose when their older what they want," she retorted. [Aside: don't independent, self-functioning, and free adults always get to decide what they want when they are older? This argument works both ways, as we will see.]

I responded: "But that is, in fact, an authoritative way to raise your child. You are teaching your child that religion is an option among many others, and that it's fairly inconsequential. You are teaching something to your future child, even tacitly. You are teaching the religion of pluralism and secularism."

Besides the fact that I'm not very persuasive, and most people keep their strongly held religious views more strongly in opposition, I think my argument at least made sense to her.

G.K. Chesterton makes the same point in the quotation above. Essentially, his argument is that we always interrupt the human nature of children by educating them. If left alone, they wouldn't learn how to read and write, they'd be completely selfish, and they'd have a whole host of societal deficiencies. This fact alone is corroborated by isolated and abused children.

So, what's left? A competition as to who gets to be the one who educates. Even a life on the street is an education, as poor Oliver Twist can attest to. Let's not denigrate religious education, then, as oppressive. Let's simply try to make our claims about why one form of education is better than another.

G.K. Chesterton sums it up nicely:

A modern London school ought not merely to be clearer, kindlier, more clever and more rapid than ignorance and darkness. It must also be clearer than a picture postcard, cleverer than a Limerick competition, quicker than the tram, and kindlier than the tavern.

I'd like to think that a religious education built by and for the only person in the world to fully atone for his followers' imperfections and estrangments is probably the most supreme form of learning, then.

What I Do

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.

From Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I could have never put my finger on the nature of my work were it not for this book. There's a whole host of meaning associated with pastoring people. You want people to see behind the veil of life, to see the work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit weaving throughout this life and the life of the gathered church for worship. And yet, Robinson, from a totally different angle, captures so much of my experience. I know what a pastor does, but this statement above answers a totally different question: what does a pastor experience from others?

There's a real gravitas, a real earthiness, about life that makes the intersection between the divine Trinitarian mystery and us marred people that is often best captured in a pub. It is, after all, a place where people's problems and spirits are joined. And I like to go and be amidst the people, because people don't mind getting into real conversations at these places of dark wood and rich ale. It is here where the pastoral experience makes sense.

"So what do you do?" I'm often questioned.

"I'm a pastor at one of the churches down the street."

And here we have reached the crossroads. Folks either clam up and apologize for their rough language, or folks ask for prayer. Robinson is perhaps more right than she knew.

And yet, truly, the pub is no different than the people of God gathered for worship, still marred, still looking for hope in something tangible, a transcendent God who can be felt: perhaps in communion instead of the other spirits. People will put on all manner of decorum on Sunday, which in Colorado could be just about anything, but must assuredly include the invisible mask.

There's lots of ways people will execute their mask. They might show their ambivalence towards me and others. Many simply ignore the pastor. Some will gripe. Even a few will blame me for many wrongdoings. Or just as often for not doing enough.

And then they'll come by my office, because if other people knew who they really were they'd be ashamed. But that person knows, just truly knows, that I won't judge them, and that it's a safe place.

And, hopefully, in a way perhaps not as powerful as God meeting his corporately gathered people, but potentially just as poignant, they will know that heaven can meet earth in the sterile place that is my office, with another marred human being sitting across the desk from them.

The King is Coming

I have a unique relationship with this President's motorcade.

The first instance was my desire to experience the hullaballoo that was the Democratic National Convention in Denver back in 2008. Now, mind you, my political opinions certainly differ from the President's, but I welcomed the idea of such a unique experience.

Because Denver was in a sort of crazed traffic all that week, I took the light rail down to experience the festivities of that final day of the convention. I recall being compactly seated across from a reporter from the famous French paper, Le Monde. We had an interesting chat about the significance of American politics on the world; and the reporter definitely wanted my opinion on Obama fandom. I think the reporter was surprised to actually meet an evangelical Christian, but I don't think I confounded any expectations.

Later that day, I was walking down some downtown sidestreets, where I was the only visible person walking on either side of the street. As I was halfway down the block, a torrent of police cars, black SUVs, ambulances, and black limosines raced by. Yes. This was the candidate's motorcade.

Flash forward to this past spring, my wife and I were in Boulder, CO to meet up with some of my relatives from out of town. They treated us to a nice dinner down on Pearl St., which is usually crowded but wasn't that night because the President was in town. He was speaking to college students about the interest rate on federal student loans. Riveting stuff, I know.

As my wife and I hopped back into the car, almost every street in Boulder was now closed because of the President's visit. To avoid those roads, and then the resulting roads where all the traffic would be, we took some side streets through off-the-beaten track Boulder neighborhoods (alas, the directions on the old iPhone do have redeeming value). As we neared a stop sign, with all but 2-3 other cars on the road in sight, a huge stream of police cars, black SUVs, ambulances, and black limosines raced by.

Perhaps he's really really after my vote this time?

And now, on this upcoming Wednesday, I'm going to have to be on the road, as my schedule would have it, while much of the Interstate is closed, because the Presidential debate is 10 minutes from my house and right in the heart of my commute. Could I strike gold a third time? Perhaps or perhaps not.

But the motorcade got me thinking, once I realized I'd be inconvenienced this Wednesday. The President is undoubtedly one of the most influential people on this planet, and we must prepare and ready his advance. His safety does matter to me, as does the fact that we make sure he doesn't get caught up in traffic.

And yet I'm bothered by this idea that a greater King is coming. I have been reading too much in the book of Isaiah recently, and there's a lot of language about preparing for a coming King in those books after all. Lower the mountains, raise the valleys, prepare a highway in the desert! Oh, and be sure to make it straight. A King is coming. We must prepare.

And, by the way, we're not sure when, or how, but it must be prepared nonetheless. But how should one prepare? Closing the interstate just won't do on this one.

Christians believe the most potent way to level those highways is to practice it every week, with other Christians, as they sing and pray and listen to the Bible preached faithfully. We call it corporate worship, and its significance lies in the fact that we will be doing the same acts of worship forever. Currently, we consider it a type of firstfruit, a pronouncement now that will be only greater and fully realized in the world to come.

And if you think about it, it's quite subversive to the current powers, whatever party they reside in. We sing and prepare for a Cosmic King together, every week, until we die or until he comes again.

There's no more subversive rebuke to power than ignoring them and declaring a higher allegiance together. That, and avoiding traffic to go to the mountains, all the while ignoring the debate.

The Inside is Bigger than the Outside

This pastor never seems to tire of wedding chatter directed at me in a psuedo-philosophical manner (see a few posts ago for an example).

So, at a recent wedding, I had a lovely chat with an agnostic person- proud and presumptive of the fact that he was smarter than anyone who believed in God- that was cordial, if not a study in missing the point. He was certainly intelligent, but had obviously never engaged any serious Christian theology or philosophy, which is a pretty important point of contention if you are going to reject Christian theology and philosophy out of hand.

Needless to say, though the conversation was admittedly lively and enjoyable, one of his major objections to Christianity was the bore that would be heaven. He said he'd rather die and enjoy the pleasures and bounty of this life without getting tired of them for eternity. I found this a quaintly American objection. After all, when one consumes at such a voracious rate as the typical American, its easy to see how one grows weary of new pleasures.

And even still, if I'm honest, it's a concern that I and many other Christians have had. How could heaven possibly go on forever? Our thoughts can hardly sustain it.

My particular answer to him was at a more existential level: "ever had a song that you loved so much upon first hearing it that you had to share it with others? And then, you just had to listen to it over and over again? And upon each hearing with a new person, the song actually got better instead of worse?" Though the opposite of the ingrained cultural pattern of the law of diminishing return, he had to admit that indeed this had happened to him. I told him it was the eternity within him craving ever increasing resolution.

But as so often happens in my life of limited knowledge, I've since found two people that explain it better. The first is from theologian David Bentley Hart (an oft-quoted man on this blog recently). Hart discusses the nature of the infinite God, and how the finite- read, humans- cannot traverse an infinite. In other words, God is not a being as we are beings, capable of being defined. An "infinite" is not a substance like a "finite" person is. His very nature is that He's infinite, without limit or without a starting place. The great divine mystery is that as we partake in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), though we could never become infinite as contigent beings upon God, we can always become more infinite throughout eternity.

This is the only possible Christian narrative of the "self": that the inmost interiority proves, at the last, to be simply the most capacious openness before time and eternity.

We aren't infinite, and we could never become infinite, but we could always be becoming more infinite. In other words, we have the possibility of always growing and expanding into God forever. Less theologically but no less seriously, another-C.S. Lewis- says this same truth more simply.

In his final book of the Narnia series, The Last Battle, the children embark upon a renewed and remade Narnian land, which was more real and more alive than the previous Narnia. Having started on the outskirts of the new Narnian land, they are exhorted to continue going further in and further up. Upon entry into each new successive piece of land, it actually exists as larger than what it appeared on the outside. It's inside was, in fact, bigger than it's outside (Harry Potter utilizes this idea as well); this is a common refrain toward the end of the book. Somehow, the more real it got, the better it keeps on getting. And then the book ends this way:

And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forvever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

I wish I had told my wedding friend about this instead. Who, upon hearing this, does not desire it? And if one does so desire it, is that not proof of it's existence? Something more is to be had: God himself and the eternal land set before us.

Secularism is a Religion

Peter Leithart, in a brilliant piece of simultaneous satire and book review, offers an interesting take on secularism as religion, and the myth that "religion" is inherently violent. Truly, it is secularism that is the inherently violent ideology. But let Leithart tell you instead of me:

In the beginning was religion, and only religion.

Now religion was irrational, absolutist, and divisive, and so chaos was on the face of the earth.  Religion drove kings mad.  Because of religion, because religion was all, Catholics killed Protestants, Protestants killed Catholics, and both Protestants and Catholics killed pagans across the seas.  And darkness covered the face of the earth.

And from the darkness, far in the West, came the Liberal State, and the Liberal State said, Let there be light.  And there was light.  And the darkness was afraid.

And in the Liberal State there was no religion.  And the Liberal State called itself Secular.  And it was so.

And the Liberal State said, Let us divide religion from life, and, lest the darkness return, let us place between religion and life a firmament that cannot be crossed.  Let us bury religion deep in the heart of man, where it can do some small good but no harm.  And let us make religion innocuous and rational.

And the magicians and sorcerers and court prophets shouted and said, All you have commanded, so shall we do.

And it was so.  And the Liberal State saw that it was good.

And peace dripped like honey from the rock and flowed like wine from the mountains.  Lions supped with lambs.  All nations rejoiced in the Liberal State, for its mercy endures forever.

And still the darkness grew strong.  It wept and called itself Beck.  It raged and grew a beard and called itself bin Laden.

And the Liberal State said, The darkness has grown strong and will soon be as one of Us.  We must grow stronger, for we are light and light must triumph over darkness.

And the Liberal State said, Eternal vigilance is the price of secularity.

And all the peoples said, Amen, and Amen.  Most of them, anyway.

Tis only the beginning: read the whole thing.