On the wisdom and foolishness of attending seminary-excerpt from a letter to a friend

Congrats on your accomplishments with all the work you have been doing. That must be gratifying. I suppose I believe now more than ever that odd things (or maybe better said would be "peculiar, unexpected things") come to us in life that in some ways change us but in deeper ways tell us about who we have been moving toward long before. Perhaps the great realization is when words or life or friends come to us in a way that echoes to something that has more whispered than rumbled within us. That is how I think many of the turning points in my life have come to be. Maybe they are nothing more than sign posts, but ever greater because of that. I write all of this not because anything in our conversation has necessarily stirred you. Much has been stirring within you for a while, that is for sure. I am just grateful that you listen to it, or question it (not in the skeptic's way, but in the way that Job indicts God to be God), or that you simply inhabit it.

If seminary is something that you are to pursue, it will more than likely pursue you. We can choose our hobbies, but it is hard to do that with passions. To be worthwhile, I think they need to be bigger than we are. I never have nor will I gain absolute certainty that I should be in seminary for certainties rarely comprehend and most often betray Certainty. That said, it is not foolish, or maybe it is the right kind of foolish, to throw ourselves into something new on a hunch, a nudging. Certainties we like to claim with science, safety we think we are afforded by the government or 401k's, but the only reason to even consider seminary would be if there just might be a God about whom we can't be certain and with whom we can't feel altogether safe. Good news often is bad news to us before it is good. And certainties are only worth their weight when there is nothing we can't comprehend. This move seems to make the world static to me, bite-size. Maybe I just like mystery, or maybe it is because miracles seem more true than the mundane, but I am only in seminary because I believe in a Living God. That sort of foolishness might be the primary requisite for seminary, and if not a belief, an imagination puts you close.

...

Also, I love the quote that you sent. It strikes me that out of all the fantastical-ness of fairy tales, what they are most trying to communicate is that each stumble, each detail, each insignificant component of our lives is the locus of such immeasurable worth. Fairy tales are not meant to remove us from the world, but to move us into the world with the eyes of a child and with wisdom that can only be gained by living as one, fully thrusting ourselves into the world.

Competing Anthropologies

A couple of days ago I was listening to NPR.  I like NPR because they often times manage to escape the trap that we humans often fall into of turning a thick, robust, so full of life that it is bubbling over sort of world into a thin, single-layered, reductionistic world in which we can explain how something happens and then manipulate this world that wouldn't be worth living in if it were true.  

That said, there was a show on marital infidelity and its causes.  They had psychologists, sociologists, even a guy who runs a website for married people who are looking for an affair with another married person.  However, don't fear, as he explained, he is only a business man.  He is not doing anything immoral.  I think his presupposition is that the free market is a sphere void of any worries of morality, only governed by unbridled cravings thanks to our split spheres of private and public.  He claims he is only allowing people who had this desire to connect in a safer way that doesn't tangle unwed folks into this mess as well.  However, just a couple of minutes before, it was stated that the incidence of marital infidelity increases greatly with opportunity.  Sure, there might have been an inkling before, but they can jump over all those steps of second guessing when the website will deliver extra-marital sex to them and then put the billing on their credit card under an alias, like GFI Media, or something like that.  That way, when our spouse looks at your credit card bill, she won't know.  Sadly, when the psychologists and sociologists were asked about what they thought about this guy, they had no recourse.  "He is smart, way ahead of me.  I never would have thought of that."  Of course, this "business man" also wanted to ask us to re-consider whether monogamy is an archaic outdated arrangement for us modern people.  I love that as consumers whose desires are endless, we never question our working anthropologies, only any external system that might limit our omniverous selves.  After all, the modern world tells us that nothing external or greater than us can tell us truth.  Truth is in us.  We are our own arbitors of truth.  

Studies show that the main causes for extramarital affairs are stess and boredom.  Never once was our assumption about what marriage is questioned.  The self needs variety and the self cannot receive too much stress.  If that happens, the self will look for a more interesting, or less known self, than the self that (s)he has already committed to.  What really got me was when the "business man" empathized with the millions of adulterers who are unhappy because they are not getting enough sex in their marriage.  "After all", he said, "these people did not agree to a sex-less marriage."  And that is precisely the point!  They did not agree to a sex-less marriage.  They did not agree to a marriage with an abundance of sex either.  They agreed (and committed to) in sickness and in health, till death do we part.   This is a peculiarly un-modern claim that is made on the life of an individual which presupposes an alternative anthropology than the one employed by the psychologist, sociologist, and business man.  All three of these people mentioned that the problem was that these people weren't happy , of which boredom and stress were merely manifestations.  Yet no one, despite the wealth of data and experience about the myth and bankrupt notion of perpetual, chronic happiness, no, not a single one of them said, "well maybe happiness isn't what it's all about."  Why?  Because the modern world says that is what it is all about.  Before any claim can be made on my life in the form of a duty or a respinsiblity, I, yes, I, must be happy.  Then maybe we can talk.  

I turn to Hauerwas and Willimon in Resident Aliens who tell us Christians that we live in a peculiar narrative, in which we are not called to be happy, but holy.  And to be sure, holiness makes a claim on the self not just at the expense of the self (though for modern people it will feel that way), but for the very sake of the self.  So if you're a Christian and you're bored or stressed...too bad.  Who told you that you were condemned to perpetual happiness anyway?  Is it good to be joyful sometimes?  Absolutely.  But when happiness is our ultimate ideal, and not the holiness of God, remember where you came from, and remember to where you are to go.

My Last Letter to My Mother

There is a story from when I was larger than life but as fragile as always. I was 4 years old and enrolled at First Christian Pre-School. That day it rained. Not too much to lock us inside and not too little to make it safe to be chased by girls. And so it happened. Branch, Chad, Bennett, and I, those four rapscallions alternately dressed as cowboys or wearing our shirts with our arms through the holes but with the rest of the shirt pulled behind our head (in order to or incidentally showing the chests that one day would have enough or little enough hair to count), we scampered across the enormous schoolyard that has become much more diminutive as I have revisited that place and that day and as hairs have slowly populated my now covered chest.

I don’t know who started telling the story or who first imprinted it upon us before it became etched. It might not matter so much who first gave it life because it is made of the stuff of life and now has a life all its own. Stories are that way. No single one of us tells it. All of us do. And it tells all of us, too.

I am still that boy, alternately thought of as a man in my late forties and a boy who is 4 and 1/4 years old. But I was actually born 24 years and a week ago by a mother whom I cry about often these days. That same mother, my only mother, did not receive a phone call that afternoon when hormones (or a lack thereof) still propelled me in the opposite direction of girls. Branch and I split off and took different paths in hopes of discouraging our pony-tailed potential captors from pursuing any longer. As all three of them, who to the best of my recollection likely had names that ended in double consonants and a “y” followed in my wake, I darted left in hopes of leaving behind the sure footing of the asphalt for the rough and tumble muddy, rocky terrain where we always rounded up the hooligans to keep the schoolyard free of outlaws. But not this time. Their girlish instincts quickly turned motherly when they caught up with the 4 year old boy with one less elbow in tact.

My mom, who had been at home with the intuition that settles and unnerves one’s stomach before rising and welling up in one’s throat, felt it was time to make her first unscheduled visit to First Christian. She was sent by the senses of truth far more guttural and from the gut and perhaps more precise than ways of knowing transmitted through words. What I felt in my elbow, she felt deep down in her motherly being.

I don’t remember much beyond this scene. I remember the fall, the miracle, truth embodied, and the tears. It was not a tissue or even my mom’s hands that wiped away my tears but her. At my height, her hug engulfed me and I imagine it was the vicinity where her stomach would almost touch her heart where my tears were absorbed.

The tears were done for then but they sputtered for days. I laid at home unable to eat a lot, and unable to eat at all without her hand acting as one of mine. Those next two days we went to at least two doctors who told me that I had bruised my elbow and that the pain would subside even when I protested with my boyish intuition and the intimacy of having this truth in my own body that my elbow was not ok. It was broken. It needed to be put right. And I couldn’t do it myself. I was 4!

I don’t blame them for not believing me. People often don’t, and not just about elbows. I got lecture after lecture about being the boy who cried wolf because there would be a time that no one would come running if I kept with my stories. My stories got bigger with time, I’ll admit it, but it was not without reason. I was terrified when people would come after me with the intent of making me uncomfortable in my body, whether it was my brothers in search of entertainment, getting a spanking me for what I had done or hadn’t done, or a 4 year old girl named Molly on a rainy afternoon. It didn’t really matter.

I have always felt things more strongly than many people seem to feel the things of life. For most of my life, only my mom has still believed my stories. Maybe because she felt the same things or at least the same way. Or maybe we were part of the same story.

There was another story I would tell most nights until the age of 10. The same intruder, or different ones, (it doesn’t so much matter, they weren’t the point of it) would lurk outside my bedroom and would leave me just enough time to scamper back to my parents bedroom where I could be safe between their bodies as they exchanged the rest that came their way through sleep for my rest that came from being sandwiched between them.

Prompted by some fantastical storytelling of my current agony, my mom and I trekked from doctor to doctor in search of the good news that indeed something was wrong. I prayed that someone would tell me that something was wrong, that I wasn’t a liar, or at least that I wasn’t just a liar. I wanted someone to tell me that the truth of my elbow, of my mom’s stomach and throat, of each of our bodies, of all of our bodies was that indeed something is just not right. There was hope in that. Something was right, though, when they all told me no and sent me to my mom’s embrace where my tears would disappear into her motherly enfolding embrace.

Twenty years later I still cry. My elbow was fixed a long time ago, and I have not been to the doctor for even a check-up in two years. But my mom has. Her tears have to do with a kidney and a shoulder, but even more to do with being a mom. And mine have to do with being a son. Just like twenty years ago.

These days for some reason people sometimes come to me as if I were that doctor. I think they ask out of the same fear that drove my stories to be unbelievable. They all say with different words, “Matt, something must be wrong. Why does it have to be your mom? Please tell me this isn’t right. Tell me this isn’t it, that this isn’t true, that this isn’t truth. I want to know that the truth of our lives, of our stories, of our tears do not end here. Where does it all go?”
I have a lot of words and none at all. The best words I have are “It is not right. But it, as all things, will be. It will all be put right.” But as all words fall short, I tell this truth in tears. Something about flesh tells truth deeper than words.

Around 100 times as long ago as when I was 4, another mother held a child somewhere near the place where my mom’s intuition is located. That child was born unto her, brought into the world by a mother as all of us were who are a child to someone. And that child, who had truth in his body like you and me and my mom, and who was truth embodied, bore much. In the fragility of broken bones and bodies and worlds, he passed into the vast abyss of death, of nothingness, and out of the barrenness of it all has born all of us into life through and beyond death. I suppose that story has been telling our story all along and will someday reveal itself as the story toward which our stories have been moving since before they began.

Frederick Buechner to Me

"God speaks to us through our lives, we often too easily say.  Something speaks anyway, spells out some sort of godly or godforsaken meaning to us through the alphabet of our years, but often it takes many further spellings out before we start to glimpse, or think we do, a little of what that meaning is.  Even then we glimpse it only dimly, like the first trace of dawn on the rim of night, and even then it is a meaning that we cannot fix and be sure of once and for all because it is always incarnate meaning and thus as alive and changing as we are ourselves alive and changing.

A child takes life as it comes because he has no other way of taking it.  The world had come to and end that Saturday [Sunday] morning, but each time we had moved to another place, I had seen a world come to an end, and there had always been another world to replace it.  When somebody you love dies, Mark Twain said, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.  For me it was longer than for most, if indeed I have realized it fully even yet, and in the meantime the loss came to get buried so deep in me that after a time I scarcely took it out to look at it at all, let alone to speak of it.  If anybody ever asked me how my father died, I would say heart trouble.  That seemed at least a version of the truth.  He had a heart.  It had been troubled."  

Her heart was full though.  She knew trouble but lived in peace.

Dom Christian de Cherge

I read this "Testament" of Dom Christian de Cherge in college in a course on Monastic Life.  He wrote it in anticipation of his murder.  He and his monastic brothers lived in a volatile Algeria, living peacefully with local Muslims, but persecuted by militant groups.  They considered leaving upon repeated threats to their lives, but they decided to remain true to their vows and stay.  If they were to leave, then their Muslim neighbors might not be fed as they were when these monks shared their food with their malnourished neighbors.  They also allowed the local people to use their sanctuary since they lacked a mosque.  So here is his address, a pre-emptive offering of peace to his murderer.


When an “A-DIEU” takes on a face.
If it should happen one day—and it could be today—
that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf
all the foreigners living in Algeria,
I would like my community, my Church, my family,
to remember that my life was GIVEN to God and to this country.
I ask them to accept that the Sole Master of all life
was not a stranger to this brutal departure.
I ask them to pray for me—
for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?
I ask them to be able to link this death with the many other deaths which
were just as violent, but forgotten through indifference and anonymity.
My life has no more value than any other.
Nor any less value.
In any case it has not the innocence of childhood.
I have lived long enough to know that I am an accomplice in the evil
which seems, alas, to prevail in the world,
even in that which would strike me blindly.
I should like, when the time comes, to have the moment of lucidity
which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God
and of my fellow human beings,
and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me
down.
I could not desire such a death.
It seems important to state this.
I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice
if the people I love were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder.
To owe it to an Algerian, whoever he may be,
would be too high a price to pay for what will, perhaps, be called, the “grace of
martyrdom,”
especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.
I am aware of the scorn which can be heaped on Algerians indiscriminately.
I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam which a certain Islamism encourages.
It is too easy to salve one’s conscience
By identifying this religious way with the fundamentalist ideologies of the
extremists.
For me, Algeria and Islam are something different: they are a body and a soul.
I have proclaimed this often enough, I believe, in the sure knowledge of what I
have received from it,
finding there so often that true strand of the Gospel,
learnt at my mother’s knee, my very first Church,
already in Algeria itself, in the respect of believing Muslims.
My death, clearly, will appear to justify
those who hastily judged me naïve, or idealistic:
“Let him tell us now what he thinks of it!”
But these people must realize that my avid curiosity will then be satisfied.
This is what I shall be able to do, if God wills—
immerse my gaze in that of the Father,
and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them,
all shining with the glory of Christ,
the fruit of His Passion, and filled with the Gift of the Spirit,
whose secret joy will always be to establish communion
and to refashion the likeness, playfully delighting in the differences.
For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs,
I thank God who seems to have willed it entirely
for the sake of that joy in everything and in spite of everything.
In this THANK YOU, which sums up my whole life to this moment,
I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today,
and you, my friends of this place,
along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families,
the hundredfold granted as was promised!
And also you, the friend of my final moment, who would not be aware of what you
were doing.
Yes, I also say this THANK YOU and this A-DIEU to you, in whom I see the face
of God.
And may we find each other, happy good thieves, in Paradise, if it pleases God,
the Father of us both. Amen. In sha ‘Allah.

Algiers, December 1, 1993 – Tibhirine, January 1, 1994.


Also, if you care to learn more about this, then you can read a short article by my favorite college professor.  Search "dom christian de cherge testament plank".  It is the third link.  Great article.

Hauerwas might like Stringfellow

“A most obstinate misconception associated with the gospel of Jesus Christ is that the gospel is welcome in this world. The conviction endemic among church folk persists that, if problems of misapprehension and misrepresentation are overcome and the gospel can be heard in its own integrity, the gospel will be found attractive by people, become popular and even be a success of some sort.
This idea is curious and ironical because it is bluntly contradicted in Scripture and in the experience of the continuing biblical witness in history from the event of Pentecost unto the present moment. During Jesus’ earthly ministry, no one in His family and not a single one of his disciples accepted Him, believed His vocation or loved the gospel He bespoke and embodies.
Since the rubrics of success, power, or gain are impertinent to the gospel, the witness of the saints looks foolish where it is most exemplary.”

-William Stringfellow

Amusing Ourselves to Death

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us."

-Neil Postman