Lest it should be possible that any unchildlike soul might, in arrogance and ignorance, think to stand upon his rights against God, and demand of Him this or that after the will of the flesh, I will lay before such a possible one some of the things to which he has a right… He has a claim to be compelled to repent; to be hedged in on every side: to have one after another of the strong, sharp-toothed sheep dogs of the Great Shepard sent after him, to thwart him in any desire, foil him in any plan, frustrate him of any hope, until he come to see at length that nothing will ease his pain, nothing make life a thing worth having, but the presence of the living God within him.
Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God does not fill it, but on the contrary, God keeps it empty and so helps us keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain… The dearer and richer our memories, the more difficult the separation. But gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy. The beauties of the past are borne, not as a thorn in the flesh, but as a precious gift in themselves. We must take care not to wallow in our memories or to hand ourselves over to them, just as we do not gaze all the time at a valuable present, but only at special times, and apart from these keep it simply as a hidden treasure that is ours for certain. In this way the past gives us lasting joy and strength.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
A Year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Daily Meditations from His Letters, Writings, and Sermons
Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Lewis had at the cornerstone of his faith experience something that he referred to as “joy”. But what he called joy, was much different than what is typically conjured in my mind when I hear the word. I quickly relate joy to happiness and then I contrast and differentiate it from happiness by making an experiential distinction. Happiness is something I can categorize as moments of circumstantial favor for my particular disposition. Joy is a more willful choice I make to see the happiness I ought to have regardless of my circumstances.
I believe that Lewis’s conception of joy differs from my trained perception in that it has an inherently transcendent nature, in his own words “a longing”, and is usually described as a very spiritual experience in which the object of the longing is perhaps just out of reach in this life.
Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? “Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.” But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.
In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world.
Here, then is the desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies.
If Christianity could tell me no more of the far-off land than my own temperament led me to surmise already, then Christianity would be no higher than myself.
~C.S. Lewis
On some level I have come to accept and look for this phenomenon in most every aspect of life. At first it seems like a cruel joke, a cosmic teasing of sorts. But vain attempts to try to satisfy or saturate the desire always leaves such a profound lack of satisfaction that the “joy” of longing for something better does start to emerge.
Our current technologies are often focused on solving perceived problems of want or desire. If you want to make a mint in the tech world, then find a stock consumer driven complaint; solve it efficiently with a web page, device, or pill and then sit back and collect as the consumers attempt to satisfy whatever is missing by clicking and swallowing after the ever regressing dopamine feedback loop.
But, perhaps “the problem” technologists are trying to fix is the very intimation of joy (longing) that is the best hint this world has to offer towards better fulfillments yet to come. Well at least, this is I believe where Lewis would reside in his analysis of modern tech trends… of which he may lump them all together with his fictional mud pies anecdote.
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
~C.S. Lewis; The Weight of Glory
The Weight of Glory
Author: C. S. Lewis
And this is where I see a universal connection to people who would scoff religion, Christianity, the Bible, and perhaps even the vague land of “spirituality” on one page… and then on the very next page assert this very same profound observation of the good nature of longing that is deeply rooted in what it means to be a human. To remove the longing by employing a gadget is a spiritual trespass.
If some infantile trauma or anxiety can be made obsolete by technology, then what will happen as soon as possible (perhaps even sooner!).
Children want attention. Therefore, young adults, in their newly extended childhood, can now perceive themselves to be finally getting enough attention, through social networks and blogs. Lately, the design of on-line technology has moved from answering this desire for attention to addressing an even earlier developmental stage.
Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the close door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
~Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
Author: Jaron Lanier
It’s worth repeating obvious truths when huge swarms of people are somehow able to remain oblivious. That is why I feel the need to point out the most obvious overall aspect of digital culture: it is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia.
Some of the greatest speculative investments in human history continue to converge on silly Silicon Valley schemes that seem to have been named by Dr. Seuss. On any given day, one might hear of tens of hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to a start-up company named Ublibudly or MeTickly. These are names I just made up, but they would make great venture capital bait if they existed. At these companies one finds rooms full of MIT PhD engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks. At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school.
It might seem that I am skewering the infantile nature of Internet culture, but ridicule is the least of my concerns. True, there’s some fun to be had here, but the more important business is relating technological infantilism neoteny to a grand and adventurous trend that characterizes the human species.
And there is truly nothing wrong with that! I am not saying, “The Internet is turning us all into children, isn’t that awful”; quite the contrary. Cultural neoteny can be wonderful. But it’s important to understand the dark side.
~Jaron Lanier, You are not a Gadget
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
Author: Jaron Lanier
I believe that Jaron is hinting at a timeless struggle with creativity in these observations. In fact, many of my favorite authors and theologians, are often times describing a paradoxical approach to life that involves a simultaneous enjoyment of childlike wonder and the challenge towards maturity. When either pursuit is abandoned we end up with something that is either stoic and cruel or shallow and vapid. It just may be that some of our best solutions to complex “serious” problems come out of naive play and whimsical enjoyment in seemingly unrelated realms. Whenever one decides that “Now I am only going to do important and worthwhile grownup things.” they are almost immediately doomed to not only fail in their endeavor but also succeed in bringing sanctimonious misery to themselves and whomever is unfortunate enough to have to work with them.
…but nevertheless, when you walk into the room of PhD educated professionals outfitted with the most powerful tools known to mankind, throwing themselves at digital tasks of inane and childish invention, you have to ask,
“Don’t you folks have anything better to do?”
And I suppose that is where I start to take umbrage at the shape of communication technologies that I now feel are being forced upon me. If I have to spend the next decade of my life clicking, yelling, and VR swatting the ignore button on digital teddy bears in order to communicate with the people in my life… I would rather just Opt-Out, walk next door, and have a cup of tea with someone who missed the digital boat and is not really sure why they would want to “logon” in the first place.
The ‘historical Jesus’ then, however dangerous He may seem to be to us at some particular point, is always to be encouraged. About the general connection between Christianity and politics, our position is more delicate. certainly we do not want men to allow their Christianity to flow over into their political life, for the establishment of anything like a really just society would be a major disaster. On the other hand we do want, and want very much, to make men treat Christianity as a means; preferable, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything–even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice. For the Enemy will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that ‘only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilizations’ You see the little rift? ‘Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.’ That’s the game.
~Screwtape, as Written by C.S. Lewis; The Screwtape Letters
The Way of the Disillusioned ‘Sensible Man’–He soon decides that the whole thing was moonshine. ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘one feels like that when one’s young. But by the time you get to my age you’ve given up chasing the rainbow’s end.’ And so he settles down and learns not to expect too much and represses the part of himself which used, as he would say, ‘to cry for the moon’.
This is, of course, a much better way than the first, and makes a man much happier, and less of a nuisance to society. It tends to make him a prig (he is apt to be rather superior towards what he calls ‘adolescents’), but, on the whole, he rubs along fairly comfortably.
It would be the best line we could take if man did not live for ever. But supposing infinite happiness really is there, waiting for us? Supposing one really can reach the rainbow’s end? In that case it would be a pity to find out too late (a moment after death) that by our supposed ‘common sense’ we had stifled in ourselves the faculty of enjoying it.
~C.S. Lewis; Mere Christianity, Hope
Mere Christianity
Author: C. S. Lewis
It is to this fatal error of the ‘Sensible Man’ that Lewis would have found fundamental respect, yet supreme difference with the likes of Freud and Nietzsche… is it hope, or is it self deception?
I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it… The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to other is relatively the exception.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
A Nietzsche Reader (Penguin Classics)
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
The Question of God: Sigmund Freud & C.S. Lewis
Director: Catherine Tatge
For the telegraphy did something that Morse did not foresee when he prophesied that telegraphy would make “one neighborhood of the whole country.” It destroyed the prevailing definition of information, and in doing so gave a new meaning to public discourse. Among the few who understood this consequence was Henry David Thoreau, who remarked in Walden that “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Main to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate… we are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”
Thoreau, as it turned out, was precisely correct. He grasped that the telegraph would create its own definition of discourse; that it would not only permit but insist up on a conversation between Maine and Texas; and that it would require the content of that conversation to be different from what Typographic Man was accustomed to.
The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography’s definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence. These demons of discourse were aroused by the fact that telegraphy gave a form of legitimacy to the idea of context-free information; that is, to the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action, but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.
~Neil Postman; Amusing Ourselves to Death
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Author: Neil Postman
I believe that Andy Crouch in his recent book, Culture Making, describes an important acknowledgment that the modern world has refused to make in its progress and invention;
Every new cultural good performs these two functions–making things possible that were impossible, and perhaps more importantly making things impossible that were once possible.
~Andy Crouch, Culture Making
Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling
Author: Andy Crouch
Every new bit of created culture makes some new activity possible and some old activity nearly impossible. We now live in a world where the the limits of communication have been stretched beyond our imagination and the unforeseen consequence is that the possibility for meaningful context is becoming strangely elusive.
We are constantly being fooled by the current crop of visual information tools into believing that a dashboard of blinking messages can makeup for this spiritual loss of context. I believe this is plain to see in a slice of information from the equivalent of the modern day news telegraphy devices; television and now the internet news portal… both of which feel very much alike, except the passive experience of TV surfing is now replaced by the active hypertext anxiety of drilling into the information portal of a hundred different simultaneous threads.
The 21st century news portal has arrived and it is the fully wired, ever shifting interface of randomly shredded and regurgitated information from everywhere. When you are done skimming, clicking, and browsing what have you gained other than a superficial confidence in “knowing” what is going on, and an anxious guilt of being numbly incapable of experiencing true apathy for any of the people represented in the story content… because you still don’t know them or hardly anything about them… and so what if you did?
This is the information environment that we live in, are we truly to believe that it will have no effect on us?
I know there are “success” stories of the person who reads a random headline, becomes intrigued by some issue or happening on the other side of the world and then sells everything they own to pursue a calling, event, person, or vocation full of purpose and meaning. But even then, I do believe that the personal context of one’s own soul is much more valuable than the bit of information that has traveled through space and time to your consciousness. I suppose this is just what I have found true for myself, until I am completely enamored with the immense and immediately incarnate value of my own neighbor and neighborhood it is impossible for me to care about anything else. I don’t believe that apathy emerges from a lack of information, but rather can be arrived at by attempting to respond to every fragment of tragic news floating in a sea of flippant banter.
Back in August of 2009 before the earthquakes this year I spent about two weeks following out the lives and interviewing a collection of people who had dedicated themselves to the prosper of foreign people in a foreign land. I asked pretty much everyone I interviewed how it was that they found themselves in Haiti as a servant, worker, resident, missionary, or returning native. The answers ranged from nothing short of a prophetic dream to visiting on a short term missions or service project and feeling a deep connection to the land and the people. Short term visits of service and embedded knowingness sealed the deal for everyone who decided to commit. First person stories conveyed orally and in person to small collections of friends and congregations seemed to be the very best way to invite new recruits.
Almost as soon as the news hit the airwaves about the disastrous earthquakes in Haiti there was a fearful plea by heartfelt advocates to not let the Haitian people disappear from the focus of the worldwide community. People were already lamenting the status of being the tragedy of the week, soon to be eclipsed by the most trite of celebrity gossip stories… after all, Haiti was the only news capable of defeating the incessant cataloging of Tiger Woods’ adulterous lifestyle.
Next week Haiti moved from the headline, to the corner update box, the week after that to the bottom ticker tape, and then relegated to the consistent ping-blip popping up with regular annoyance in front of the most recent news. And every time we are reminded, but not in the context of prayer or personal story, something in us is twisted against what it means to be human and to know with the potential of response. Jesus may have been near overwhelmed by the crowds, but at least he was able to face them in person and with human presence. And why did He instruct so many to not tell anyone what had happened?
Luke 8:40-56
As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. 43And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years,[d] but no one could heal her. 44She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.
45″Who touched me?” Jesus asked.
When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”
46But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”
47Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. 48Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”
49While Jesus was still speaking, someone came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. “Your daughter is dead,” he said. “Don’t bother the teacher any more.”
50Hearing this, Jesus said to Jairus, “Don’t be afraid; just believe, and she will be healed.”
51When he arrived at the house of Jairus, he did not let anyone go in with him except Peter, John and James, and the child’s father and mother. 52Meanwhile, all the people were wailing and mourning for her. “Stop wailing,” Jesus said. “She is not dead but asleep.”
53They laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. 54But he took her by the hand and said, “My child, get up!” 55Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up. Then Jesus told them to give her something to eat. 56Her parents were astonished, but he ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened.
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!
Last year I ventured into a theology class at a local seminary. My father was taking a few classes in his retirement and I decided to join him for one on a promotional scholarship, Trinitarianism 402.
I must admit, I entered the class with a casual sophomoric confidence… the abstract paradox of the trinity is something I had been swallowing as a basic “truth” about God since I was probably 7 years old. The class structure was fast paced academia from the get go, there was lots of material, terminology, and history to get through in our once a week 4 hour lecture sessions… and our professor was not going to waste any time with a drawn out setup.
To be fair, this is a 400 level class, and most folks attending a seminary long enough to get to this class have had plenty of time to ponder a more holistic reality of God… so diving into the specifics of the content is pretty reasonable.
However, my father (a self proclaimed evangelist and exhorter) begged to differ. After reading what seemed like a random collection of esoteric theology discussion books and enduring several weeks of long lectures laden with ancient insider terminology… he was out. I didn’t blame him, but I was down for finishing off the class and I think I was even learning something. Strange new words like “Perichoresis” offered entrance into a very old conversation about God and His triune nature.
The ancient theologian John of Damascus (c.675-c.749), may have been the first to coin the term “Perichoresis” as an reference to the mutual indwelling of persons described in this passage.
John 17:20-26
20″My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: 23I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. 24″Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. 25″Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. 26I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”
Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The expert is the man who stays put.
I no longer hesitated what to do. I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. I attracted my brother’s attention by signs, pointed to the floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him understand what I was about to do. I thought at length that he comprehended my design - but, whether this was the case or not, he shook his head despairingly, and refused to move from his station by the ring-bolt. It was impossible to reach him; the emergency admitted of no delay ; and so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself to the cask by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter, and precipitated myself with it into the sea, without another moment’s hesitation.
~Edgar Allan Poe, A Descent into the Maelstrom
Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
It breaks my heart when I talk to energized young people who idolize the icons of the new digital ideology, like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and free/open/Creative Commons mashups. I am always struck by the endless stress they put themselves through. They must manage their online reputations constantly, avoiding the ever-roaming evil eye of the hive mind, which can turn on an individual at any moment. A “Facebook generation” young person who suddenly becomes humiliated online has no way out, for there is only one hive.
I would prefer not to judge the experiences or motivations of other people, but surely this new strain of gadget fetishism is driven more by fear than by love.
At their best, the new Facebook/Twitter enthusiasts remind me of the anarchists and other nutty idealists who populated youth culture when I grew up. The ideas might be silly, but at least the believers have fun as they rebel against the parental-authority quality of entities like record companies that attempt to fight music piracy.
The most effective young Facebook users, however–the ones who will probably be winners if Facebook turns out to be a model of the future they will inhabit as adults–are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.
They tend their doppelgängers fastidiously. They must manage offhand remarks and track candid snapshots at parties as carefully as a politician. Insincerity is rewarded, while sincerity creates a lifelong tainting. Certainly, some version of this principle existed in the lives of teenagers before the web came along, but not with such unyielding, clinical precision.
The frenetic energy of the original flowering of the web has reappeared in a new generation, but there is a new brittleness to the types of connections people make online. This is a side effect of the illusion that digital representations can capture much about actual human relationships.
The binary characters at the core of software engineering tends to reappear at higher levels. It is far easier to tell a program to run or not to run, for instance, than it is to tell it to sort-of run. In the same way, it is easier to set up a rigid representation of human relationships on digital networks: on a typical social networking site, either you are designated to be in a couple or you are single (or you are in one of a few other predetermined states of being)–and that reduction of life is what gets broadcast between freinds all the time. What is communicated between people eventually becomes their truth. Relationships take on the troubles of software engineering.
~Jaron Lanier, The Abstract Person Obscures the Real Person
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
Author: Jaron Lanier
And notice that those cautions which the tempter whispers in our ears are all plausible. Indeed, I don’t think he often tries to deceive us (after early youth) with a direct lie. The plausibility is this. It is really possible to be carried away by religious emotion–enthusiasm as our ancestors called it–into resolutions and attitudes which we shall, not sinfully but rationally, not when we are more worldly but when we are wiser, have cause to regret. We can become scrupulous or fanatical; we can, in what seems zeal but is really presumption, embrace tasks never intended for us. That is the truth in the temptation. The lie consists in the suggestion that our best protection is a prudent regard for the safety of our pocket, our habitual indulgences, and our ambitions. But that is quite false. Our real protection is to be sought elsewhere: in common Christian usage, in moral theology, in steady rational thinking, in the advice of good friends and good books, and (if need be) in a skilled spiritual director. Swimming lessons are better than a lifeline to the shore.
~C.S. Lewis, from “A Slip of the Tongue” (The Weight of Glory)
A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works
Author: C. S. Lewis
Recent Comments