The Sacrament of the Present

 My Lenten devotional group today reflected on the need to embrace (in Richard Rohr's words) "the sacrament of the present." Rohr's meditations in God For Us encourage us in the ancient practice of "being here now." We let go of living in the future or the past so that we can be fully present and give our attention to matters immediately before us.

As a practice of visio divina, we spent time contemplating Paul Gauguin's Christ on the Mountain of Olives (1889):

 

Visio divina (the visual art equivalent of lectio divina) involves focusing on a painting and opening oneself to inspiration. You contemplate the portrait. You ask four questions:

What do you see?

What do you feel?

Are you in the painting? If so, where/who?

What is God telling you?

 Since the meeting was on Zoom, I saw only the painting, not its title. I did not immediately catch on that the central figure was Christ on the night he was betrayed. I saw only a man consumed with worry and isolated from companions. He was suffering. It recalled to me times when I have felt isolated, fretting about some matter (including my isolation). 

Learning the painting's title and subject matter solidified my reading. Christ was suffering in heart and mind, knowing at least the broad contours of the more bodily, protracted suffering of the passion and the Cross.

But where Rohr invites us into a present focus that allows worry about what is to come to fall away, Christ here seems both focused on the present and also suffering. The feast of foot washing and communion is over. There's only the sweat drops of blood as he begs God to let this cup pass from him.

What is God telling me? 

I can't help but hear, "Suffering. Suffering is coming." 

Sometimes I think the sacrament of the present isn't sweet like unfermented wine or wholesome like bread. It is bitter and draining, a promise of pain and loss and sacrifice. It is a call to that sacrifice, not for the glory of martyrdom but out of love for the world, even the parts that inflict pain and hate.

I read words by Timothy Burke, a voice I usually listen to for perspective and calm. He argues that "the Trump Administration is not just walking away from the world system established in the aftermath of World War II. It is quite seriously running towards a world where territorial aggression and imperial conquest are entirely thinkable—and where the United States will not just ignore aggression in the spirit of isolationism but will actively pursue it for itself."

This is no bluff, Burke stresses. It has become increasingly evident that Trump and his closest allies believe this sincerely and deeply. (Burke speculates some of them may even accept the inevitability of global warming, encouraging climate-skeptical Trump northward so as to secure lands that will eventually be a destination from those fleeing hostile climes.)

Whatever his reasoning, whatever the reasoning or rationalizations by his supporters and enablers, the rest of the world needs to act now:

Canada needs to regard the threat as completely serious and not just bluster, in a way that goes beyond stalwart rhetoric from political leaders and clearing the shelves of bourbon. The Canadians need to be planning in response to scenarios that no one has modeled before—what if Trump directs the American military to deploy special forces and air power to seize Canadian airports and key government buildings with the goal of forcing a quick surrender while moving some ground forces to the northern border in anticipation of a longer conflict? It doesn’t matter if this is madness, because this administration has already made it clear that they’re not playing at being madmen for negotiating advantage but are in fact doing all of that self-destructive nonsense. The Canadian government and its real allies in NATO need to act now to remove the United States from all shared military and intelligence cooperation, no matter how hard that is to do in practical terms. The U.S. needs to be booted out of Five Eyes, needs to be expelled from NATO. Because now those countries have to plan as if the United States government is an enemy regime, to take all of what is being said as if it is serious. 

And us?

Americans need to plan in order to think what a war with Canada—and possibly Europe—means for the rest of their lives. Misery, deprivation, suffering, and the certain end of anything like a constitutional democracy in this country are only the immediate consequences. None of it necessary, none of it right, none of it for the better in the long or short run. . 

Burke ends by insisting that it is not yet too late for Americans--especially "people with real power in our unequal society"--to draw a line in the sand. Not on our watch. Not this time.

It may be that the sacrament of the present involves a full-scale, costly drawing of such lines.

I don't know. But the Gauguin painting and the Gospel narrative it portrays remind me that sometimes, it is OK to admit to fear, to look at what the present offers and pray that God take it away. And it is comforting, at least a little, to know that Christ suffers with us (com-passion), contemplating what it is to partake of a sacrament of sacrifice.

Anticipatory Confidence

Here at the end of a particularly cruel April, just today, I am experiencing one of those rare moments where a number of different deep movements of spirit and thought suddenly break the surface of consciousness and align.

Here's one movement that surfaced: I had a chat today with a friend whose struggles with faith in part inspired me to start this blog. We picked up on some themes she had raised in earlier conversations, e.g., how to keep a faith when so much of the faith of one's childhood seems nonsensical or repellent. I found myself putting into words thoughts and feelings that had largely been inarticulate for a while but roiling in my subconscious for some time. It felt good to talk about what I believe and why I believe it.

The conversation also reminded me how my absence from writing on this blog, my break from forcing myself to communicate my beliefs, has muted my spirit. The engagement of conversation--with another or even with myself in writing--is a discipline I need to practice more often. I write, after all, about evangelicals training themselves to be articulate ambassadors of Christianity. While I distance myself from many of their methods and theologies, I too am a representative of Christianity.

I especially like representing a Christianity different from the one my friend (and I) absorbed as a child, the black-or-white system of certain belief. "When I was young," my friend explained (I paraphrase), "I just knew that certain things were true: that Jesus was God, that he rose from the dead. Now I don't believe that. Or at least I don't know that.

"Do you," she asked, "believe in heaven? Or that Jesus is God?"

I did, I said. And I do. But, as I explained, this is something I've chosen to believe. I do not believe because I have been presented with an accumulation of convincing empirical evidence. In fact, the whole push toward evidentiary apologetics, "proving," say, Christ's resurrection as one might prove a legal case or scientific theory (Josh McDowell is the go-to example here)--this turns me off.

I believe in Jesus as God not because I've been rationally convinced but because I'm caught by the image of God-with-us, of God's miraculous, shocking solidarity with humanity even at its most painful and alienated from God ("My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?"). I see heaven as congruent with this image of the God who breaks through all barriers to be with humanity. This image of the reconciling God resonates with me, provokes an affirmation of spirit that I cannot justify in purely material terms. It's also, I said, a belief that I feel pushes me towards an ethic beyond myself. I feel I am a better person than I might otherwise be thanks to my belief in a fullness beyond my own temporal life.

And so, without being fully, rationally, finally convinced in some forensic way, I have committed to this belief. It is, to be sure, a leap of faith, an act that Charles Taylor christens "anticipatory confidence." And I have felt as I leap that I have been caught, upheld. Not all the time, to be sure. There are plenty of days where I feel only alienation and uncertainty, the temptation to stop trying, to stop leaping into the dark (or the light?).

But--and this is another difference between my childhood faith and my current faith--my belief isn't a matter of clear certainty. It doesn't depend on my moment-to-moment feeling of confidence. Rather, I keep up a fragile commitment--fragile because I am constantly aware that it could be otherwise, fragile in the sense that I don't take it for granted. Fragile, but not brittle. I look back on my childhood faith, where I like my friend just knew that Christ was God, that heaven was real, that angels surrounded us. I just knew this because the only other option to such certainty was nihilist unbelief. My firm knowledge rested on some absolute truths which, if questioned in the slightest, would shatter the entire framework of my beliefs. The appearance of utter doubtlessness was made of glass.

I sense the same brittleness in the "Bible-believing" (i.e., pro-inerrancy) and material-evidentiary branches of Christianity. The Bible is true in its every literal detail because it must be. Were even the slightest discrepancy, the slightest contradiction discovered, the entire Christian belief system would crumble. Here confidence isn't anticipated but desperately maintained no matter what.

I recognize--largely thanks to Taylor's A Secular Age--how such brittle certainty is both a product of and a reaction to the present age of pluralized beliefs and non-beliefs. Reading him this evening brought other mental wrestling matches I've been waging to the surface. I've gotten (finally) to the part where Taylor addresses and answers some of the current arguments against Christian belief. His writing on suffering and faith captures much of my own thinking, much of my own feeling.

More on him next time.

JF

About that Fear and Trembling...

Yesterday, I alleged that underneath the conservative-evangelical surface of absolute certainty lies a mass of anxiety--mainly a never-to-be-completely-extinguished worry about whether or not one will be cast into hell for eternity. It's this fear/faith combo, I suggested, that keeps evangelicals going to church, walking tearfully down the aisles, evangelizing on the street and in their lives, and basically involved in their faith life.

Cathartic as it was for me to get all that out, it's all a bit too simplistic. I admit that I have a great deal of bitterness toward elements of my Southern Baptist upbringing. But I give the wrong impression if I suggest that evangelicalism is nothing but a dance of dogmatic certainty and agonizing fear.

Two quick side notes to yesterday's rant, then:

First, most evangelicals I knew and know don't think of their faith life as a miserable experience. Nor do they fit the progressive-secular stereotype of benighted dupe, naively following the awful dictates of a cultish ruler. I've highlighted some of the more painful or embarrassing moments from my childhood faith, but in truth there were many more times where my faith was a source of strength and comfort to me.

For all its faults, my church taught me the value of Ultimate Concerns. That is, I learned from an early age that there were dimensions of existence (ethical, spiritual, etc.) that transcended the immediate/material. I learned that part of seeing and evaluating the here and now--Where am I? Who am I? What should I be doing? How shall I live?--was putting the present into the perspective of eternity.

While my vision of that "eternity" has changed significantly, I still try to put the immediate into conversation with the transcendent. Sometimes that conversation moves me, makes me act in ways I otherwise wouldn't. Sometimes it keeps me from acting. Sometimes it simply gives me a sense of not being alone, a hunch that--as bad as things may be right now--they are small in the context of the Ultimate. My faith moves me beyond myself.

For the record: I don't necessarily think that Christianity or even religion in general is the only way to come to appreciate Ultimate Concerns. An atheist working for prisoners' rights, for example, may do so in the name of an abstraction--an Ultimate Concern--like Justice or Human Rights. Nor do I think that every expression of religion or faith necessarily leads to what I would consider a healthy conception of (or relationship to) Ultimate Concerns. The task of discriminating between healthy and unhealthy Ultimate Concerns is, well, a whole other ethical/theological/metaphysical conversation...

Second, I actually do believe in working out one's faith with fear and trembling.

Quick fact about me--one of my pastimes is listening to fundamentalist and conservative sermons on particular topics (evolution, gays, etc.). I just heard one last night about "Why Men Choose Evolution." (I'll try to get the link soon). The pastor's argument was that people choose evolution over young-earth creationism because they are so uncomfortable with a God who judges--a God who would kick humanity out of Eden, a God who would flood the earth for humanity's sins, a God who will come again in Final Judgment of all humanity.

He's right. I am uncomfortable with that kind of God. It does not follow, contrary to what this pastor argued, that I therefore prefer a God who makes no judgment, who has no standards, or who never expects anything of me beyond who I presently am.

A classic (read: nearly cliched) definition of a pastor's role is "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted." I like the notion of faith and ministry as prods, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comforted. I would agree with my conservative evangelical sisters and brothers that there's something wrong with a faith that does nothing more than confirm, conform, and comfort.

There's a time for "the peace that passes understanding," and there's a time for being brought up short--convicted, unsettled, de-stabilized--by a holy nudge. I try to keep in mind C. S. Lewis's characters' warnings about Aslan the lion-that-is-allegorically-Jesus: He's not a tame lion.

Thus, I try to recognize and incorporate into my faith practice a degree of uncertainty about who God is and what I should do in light of that knowledge. I'm convinced by the example of Jesus in the gospels (and elsewhere) that one of God's favorite tropes is the surprise--Jesus doing something or acting in a way that disrupts or overturns conventions and certainties, especially certainties that derive from an orthodox faith or a literal reading of scripture. I no longer try to imagine exactly what the afterlife will be like, but I suspect much of it will be a kind of surprise.

So. Fear and trembling, uncertainty and belief--all of these remain vital parts of my faith. What, then, is my problem with the certainxiety of my childhood faith?

More on that tomorrow.

JF