To Think God as Love

Prayer as Agon(y)

Posted on 6 August 2010 | Comments Off

If I’m reading St Paul rightly, he believes that Epaphras’ prayers – and presumably ours too – make a real difference for others; his agonizing in prayer is somehow related to their development in Christ. Not only that, these prayers seemingly require violent effort, so much so that the prayer can be described as warfare.

'The Agony in the Garden', Giovanni Bellini c. 1465

St Theophan the Recluse understands prayer as labor, too.

I won’t conceal the fact that, though once you prayed from the heart, it is hardly possible to pray that way constantly. Such prayer is given by God or is inspired by your Guardian Angel. It comes and goes. It does not follow, though, that we should give up the labor of prayer. Prayer of the heart comes when one makes an effort; to those who do not strive, it will not come. We see that the Holy Fathers made extraordinary efforts in prayer, and by their struggles they kindled the warm spirit of prayer. How they came to this prayerful state is illustrated in the writings they have left us. Everything they say about striving in prayer makes up the science of prayer, which is the science of sciences… Let me add: There is nothing more important than prayer; therefore, our greatest attention and most diligent attention must attend it. Grant us, O Lord, zeal for such an effort! ¹

What are we to make of this? In what way(s) is prayer warfare? Here are a few thoughts, for what they’re worth.

1. Prayer is a struggle to maintain focus of attention on the presence of God, on the Gospel’s promises, on the needs of our brothers and sisters. It is incredibly difficult to keep our minds from drifting from the matters at hand; it takes years of discipline, and the aid of the Spirit, to keep our minds and hearts on target.  If we can learn to hold our attention in times of prayer, then we can apply this discipline in the other moments of our lives.

2. Prayer is a struggle against the lack of faith. Simply to pray, from the heart, is already an act of faith, however weak. For to pray with conviction is to pray from the knowledge, the confidence, that God is and that God responds to our need, our petition. (Nothing reveals our faithlessness quite so clearly as our lack of prayer.)  But even when we lack real conviction, even when we fail to remain confident in God, praying strengthens our faith, rekindles it, re-aims it toward the truth.

3. Prayer is a struggle against the tyranny of ‘realism’. Those of us who think of ourselves as realistic are tempted to think of prayer as a last resort, as something to be done when nothing else can be done. As if prayer weren’t practical! As a matter of fact, however, it is in prayer — insofar as it is Christian prayer — that we are allowing ourselves to be situated in God’s presence, in the hiddenness of the kingdom that is already breaking in to our world. We pray because and so that we can know God acts on us and our world in ways that cannot be calculated or curtailed.

4. Prayer is also a struggle against all kinds of optimism. Ours is a broken world, bent toward destruction and non-being, and without the intervention of a living God we are doomed. So we pray and find ourselves in the grip of a realization: things don’t work themselves out, not everything happens for a reason, but God does work good for us in spite of it all. We pray so God won’t leave us to ourselves, inertly carried along by the momentum of our own virtues and vices, or those of our neighbor. We pray so we won’t forget that the world is not closed off from the Creator Spirit.

von Balthasar on God’s Almightiness

Posted on 4 August 2010 | 2 responses

‘When the New Testament refers to [God] in many passages as “almighty,” it becomes evident from these that this almightiness canbe none other that of a surrender which is limited by nothing… It is therefore essential, in the first instance, to see the unimaginable power of the Father in the force of his self-surrender, that is, of his love, and not, for example, in his being able to do this or that as he chooses’.

Our Prayers and Others’ Autonomy

Posted on 25 July 2010 | 2 responses

If prayer really does count, really does affect what happens (and/or how it happens) in the lived world, then we have to ask ourselves how if at all God’s responses to our prayers leave room for others’ ‘free-will’ or self-determination. In his memoir, Hauerwas provides a striking example. His mother, he says, prayed ‘Hannah’s prayer’: he was ‘the result’. When Stanley was 6, she told him the story of her prayer, his birth, and her dedicating him to God.

At the time, God knows what I made of knowing that I was the result of my mother’s praying. However, I am quite sure, strange servant of God though I may be, that whatever it means to be Stanley Hauerwas is the result of that prayer. Morever, given the way that I have learned to think, that is the way it should be.

Hauerwas then allows the question, ‘Was I not robbed of my autonomy by my mother’s prayer?’ And provides his answer: ‘Probably’. In any case, he’s happy with what came of it all.

The problem, I believe, is simply resolved once we give up on our (mistaken) notions of self-determination. No one is the ‘I’ of his or her own making, independent of others. To put it another way, we shape others’ lives constantly and in countless ways, almost all of which remain (thankfully) hidden from us and from them. Further, much of what we do to others does them a disservice, making it that much more difficult for them to open themselves to the Life that intends their good. Through prayer, however, we’re allowed to trust our impact on others more completely to God, who can ‘weed out’ the chaff of our evil intents from the wheat of our holy ambitions for others. As a parent and a pastor, I find this especially reassuring.

Our Prayers and God’s Almightiness

Posted on 22 July 2010 | Comments Off

Why pray? If God is the Almighty confessed in the creed, the all-knowing and all-powerful, and if we are the creatures beset by our own sins and the fracturedness of the world as Scripture insists we are, then how could our prayers possibly matter? Obviously, Scripture and the Christian tradition insist that we should pray, that praying matters — and not only to us as prayers. Further, Christians pray as if they believe that prayer makes a difference in what does or does not happen in the lived world. But is there a way to make theological sense of this conviction? Robert Jenson insists that we can if we begin our thinking of God’s almightiness from God’s self-revelation in Jesus and his availability to us, rather than operating with a sheerly philosophical definition of God.

The criterion of the triune God’s self-identity is Jesus, just in his openness to his fellow human beings. Therefore, that God listens to us and responds to us, far from being a condescension, is the very way he is faithful to himself. God is not God in spite of changing his mind, in spite of answering prayer or failing to do so; he is God because he does and can do such things wholeheartedly. Operatively: unabashed petitionary prayer is the one decisively appropriate creaturely act as over against God. ¹

Although I would nuance what Jenson says about Jesus as ‘criterion’ of God’s self-identity, I do agree with everything he says here. Petitionary prayer is fitting for us just because responding to it is fitting for God. When God says ‘Ask… you shall receive’, God tells us the kind of relationship in which we are in fact engaged. God’s almightiness is the kind that makes room for our participation. We are called to allow our weakness and frailty, our non-almightiness, to be room for God to act, as well.

‘How it Was’

Posted on 21 July 2010 | 2 responses

The earth trembled; its foundations
shook like silt; the sun, chagrined,
fled the scene, and every mundane
element scattered in retreat. The day
became the night: for light could not endure
the image of the Master hanging on a tree.
All creation was astonished, perplexed
and stammering, What new mystery is this?
The Judge is judged, and yet He holds his peace;
the Invisible One is utterly exposed, and yet
is not ashamed; the Incomprehensible is grasped,
and will not turn indignant; the Immensity
is circumscribed, and acquiesces; the absolutely
Unattainable suffers, and yet does not avenge;
the Immortal dies, and utters not a word;
the Celestial is pressed into the earthen grave,
and He endures! What new mystery is this?
The whole creation, I say, was astonished;
but, when our Lord stood up in Hades—
trampling death underfoot, subduing
the strong one, setting every captive free—
then all creation saw clearly that for its sake
the Judge was condemned, et cetera.
For our Lord, even when He deigned
to be born, was condemned in order
that He might show mercy, was bound
that He might loose, was seized
that He might release, suffered
that He might show compassion, died
that He might give life, was laid in the grave
that He might rise, might raise.

—Scott Cairns

The All-Bearing Lightness of Glory

Posted on 20 July 2010 | Comments Off

It is written that we shall “stand before” Him, shall appear, shall be inspected. The promise of glory is the promise, almost incredible and only possible by the work of Christ, that some of us, that any of us who really chooses, shall actually survive that examination, shall find approval, shall please God. To please God…to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness…to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. ¹

Lewis is right. The promise of ‘glory’ is the promise of being found pleasing — even pleasurable —  to God; to be saved means, as he says, to be ‘an ingredient in the divine happiness’. If, as Lewis writes elsewhere, joy is the serious business of heaven, then that joy is reciprocal: we shall enjoy God enjoying us, and vice versa. If we’re to be eternally enraptured in worshipping the ‘Love that moves the sun and the other stars’, it is only because that Love is eternally enraptured in us–as we are in Christ. For, now and then, when the Father sees the Son, the Father knows us too, as his. This is our glory: Christ’s glory–which he has shared with us.

Lewis (rightly) speaks of it as weighty. But it is a lightness, too. For this is the only real source of joy: to find ourselves at rest in the Communion from which, through which, and for which we were made. Of course, there’s no way into this glory except judgment. Unless we come to the light, as John’s Gospel has it, we cannot be made light with the lightness of God. That is the weightiness of the matter.

Four Kinds of Love: Andrew Peterson and Bernard of Clairvaux

Posted on 17 July 2010 | Comments Off

Listening to this song, I couldn’t help but recall the final chapter of Bernard’s On Loving God.

“Nevertheless, since we are carnal and are born of the lust of the flesh, it must be that our desire and our love shall have its beginning in the flesh. But rightly guided by the grace of God through these degrees, it will have its consummation in the spirit: for that was not first which is spiritual but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual (I Cor. 15:46). And we must bear the image of the earthy first, before we can bear the image of the heavenly. At first, man loves himself for his own sake. That is the flesh, which can appreciate nothing beyond itself. Next, he perceives that he cannot exist by himself, and so begins by faith to seek after God, and to love Him as something necessary to his own welfare. That is the second degree, to love God, not for God’s sake, but selfishly. But when he has learned to worship God and to seek Him aright, meditating on God, reading God’s Word, praying and obeying His commandments, he comes gradually to know what God is, and finds Him altogether lovely. So, having tasted and seen how gracious the Lord is (Ps. 34:8), he advances to the third degree, when he loves God, not merely as his benefactor but as God. Surely he must remain long in this state; and I know not whether it would be possible to make further progress in this life to that fourth degree and perfect condition wherein man loves himself solely for God’s sake.

Let any who have attained so far bear record; I confess it seems beyond my powers. Doubtless it will be reached when the good and faithful servant shall have entered into the joy of his Lord (Matt. 25:21), and been satisfied with the plenteousness of God’s house (Ps. 36:8). For then in wondrous wise he will forget himself and as if delivered from self, he will grow wholly God’s. Joined unto the Lord, he will then be one spirit with Him (I Cor. 6:17). This was what the prophet meant, I think, when he said: ‘ I will go forth in the strength of the Lord God: and will make mention of Thy righteousness only’ (Ps. 71:16). Surely he knew that when he should go forth in the spiritual strength of the Lord, he would have been freed from the infirmities of the flesh, and would have nothing carnal to think of, but would be wholly filled in his spirit with the righteousness of the Lord.” (On Loving God, chapter 15)

The Virtuous Circle and the Narrowing Walls: Reflections on Boundary Conditions for Living as Church

Posted on 13 July 2010 | 2 responses

Living as the church requires the formation of hard disciplines, the development of character traits (especially humility and patience, which is only humility stretched temporally), the learning of dispositions and what might be called holy ‘people skills’, as well as the being persuaded to certain convictions, and the assumption of certain habits of thought and practice. Of course, the only way to develop these disciplines is — by living as the church. No other community can provide the necessary conditions, period.

The tension doesn’t relax: only those churches peopled by at least a few already possessing these disciplines can possibly function as a disciple-forming community. So we come up against a circularity. But this should not frighten us, or even leave us confused. For that very circularity reveals our final dependence on a Third, on a force beyond and outside of us, to make our life together possible — and we do not lack for a name for this Third. This is the sum of the matter: because of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, we find ourselves caught in a virtuous circle. ¹

What does this ‘virtuous circularity’ mean for us? It means we can trust God to make Christian community possible by bringing some people into the kind of maturity that allows them to live with us patiently and humbly, and so make it possible for us to learn Christ together. These people, rarely if ever the ones we would recognize as crucial to the community, are the foundation of the local church; without them, we simply cannot be constructed into a ‘habitation of God through the Spirit’. Not to put too fine a point on it, but their presence is the evidence of the Spirit’s work on our behalf. They are the ‘signs’ that contradict all our unbelief. They are the walls that narrow our lives so that we cannot escape confrontation with grace (cf. Num 22.24-26). We cannot see God without them framing our vision.

Re-Visioning Worship: Music to Pray By

Posted on 12 July 2010 | 5 responses

Sufjan Stevens’ perfect weirdness may help us to recapture some of the mystery, the delightful, enchanted strangeness, of living life God-wardly. In these songs (along with many others), Stevens helps us to feel our sin — but without shaming us; he moves us toward God’s presence — without in any way derailing into sentimentalism or the hyper-spirituality that encloses us on ourselves. In these ways, and others, Stevens provides us with a model for selecting, performing, participating in worship musically.

Confession of Sin: ‘I Can’t Even Lift My Head’

I love how Stevens brings us — me — face to face with the realities of my sin, my inevitable, imminent death, and my inescapable neediness, and he does it all with such a light touch. So much of our contemporary worship music simply can’t get at these realities without being heavy-handed and clumsy.

This song, in my opinion, helps us to pray, and so serves our worshipping, because it helps us put good words to the facts of our existence in the presence of God. It lets us feel creaturely, I suppose. I like, too, that it doesn’t try to say any more than it says, doesn’t try to bring ‘resolution’ to the feelings of guilt and unspeakable smallness before God. Sometimes, oftentimes, it’s good for us to be left with that weight on our shoulders.

Promise of Pardon: ‘How Can the Stone Remain’

Is God addressing us in this song? Are we addressing God? What is the stone that does not remain? Christ’s tombstone? The stony heart that makes me insensitive to God’s touch? It’s good for us to experience this uncertainty of meaning. Our spirits need the up-in-the-air feeling from time to time!

Holy Communion: ‘To Be Alone with You’

Like the Psalms, this song moves back and forth, sometimes Christ is spoken for, and sometimes, spoken to. That dialogical movement is essential to Christian worship, for obvious reasons. And that one line - ’I'd give my body to be back again/in the rest of the room’ -- shows that even though this is a song about personal intimacy with Christ, it isn’t individualistic or pietistic. It is an intimacy that takes place with and in the church, and in the world, fractured as it is.

Benediction: ‘God’ll Never Let You Down’

My favorite of this selection; musically, lyrically, vocally, ‘God’ll Never Let You Down’ manages, somehow, to be hopeful without being in the least escapist, to be happy without being frivolous. It stirs in me a kind of cheerful, quietly confident excitement to be claimed by a God like this God; leaves me  glad to be able to sing about it -- the being claimed -- and him, the God who does the claiming. This song makes me feel like I think I should feel at the end of a worship service, at least much of the time: assured of God’s promises, but not without being reminded of my need for forgiveness and constant, prevenient grace.

‘Psalm of Then’ by Nicholas Samaras

Posted on 11 July 2010 | Comments Off

Then, the Lord heard me in the wilderness of my soul.
Then, the lost place of me became clear.
Then, I recognized distraction for what it is.
Then, I was freed from the desert of diversion.
Then, I was moved to the green oasis within me.
Then, the still voice of the Lord was as the depth of water.
Then, I could cease the constant music in my head.
Then, I could move beyond myself and the noise of myself.
Then, I could hear the smallness of my own voice.
Then, the still voice of the Lord was as the depth of water.
Then, the lost place of me became clear as a cascade.
Then, I could hear the bass of my name.
Then, I heard the Lord in the wilderness of my soul.
Then, stillness and stillness and stillness sang.

Aaron Niequist on Reading Chesterton, Finding Child-like Faith and the Awakening from Cynicism

Posted on 8 July 2010 | 2 responses

Here is the song he wrote.

A Response to “The Book of Eli”, pt 3

Posted on 8 July 2010 | 1 response

Not everyone agrees with my reading of the film, to say the least. For instance, consider Robert Cheeks’ review. He found the film deeply moving, even revelatory, and proclaims it the ‘finest film ever made’.

If I were to reduce the film to a simple sentence I would quote St. Francis when he said, “Preach the Gospel at all times, if necessary use words.”  This film is a brilliantly executed symbol that expresses the tension of the experience of Infinite Being in metalepsis with being at the eschaton. Brilliantly written and beautifully executed the film reflects the effects of Original Sin on the nature of man, where man is moving to that point where he no longer remembers the Logos or seeks the redemption and salvation of Jesus Christ.

A blogger at The Whirlpool’s Rim offers what strikes me as a saner reading of the film, concluding that the ‘real interest of the movie’ is ‘memory as participation in the Logos’. But in the final analysis, I’m not buying that reading, either, even if it does get at an aspect of the film.

Ben Witherington, whose reading of “The Road” I found to be wrong-headed, gives an exasperating readingof this film. He classifies it (rightly) as a ‘post-apocalypse western’ and acknowledges how violent the film is, but quickly remarks that the same held true on the ‘old frontier– it was in part how the West was won’. To his credit, Witherington recognizes the ’good deal of irony in the “let’s fight over the Bible” thrust of this film, when the Bible includes the message to put down your weapons and beat them into plowshares’. But he doesn’t find this too troubling, because ‘this movie is more like the book of Joshua or Judges or Exodus than like the Gospels’. To say the least.

Witherington heartily recommends ‘this parabolic movie’, and effuses praise for Denzel Washington’s and Gary Oldman’s performances. He finds the film ‘entirely an appropriate one for a country at war, as ours is, or a country trying to help a nation like Haiti recover from what must have seemed like a nuclear disaster’, and concludes:

For those hoping to escape the final tribulation on earth, this movie has a simple message— buckle your seat belts, because no one, including Christians, are leaving this world without dying.  No one.  Eli’s coming, coming first, but Jesus will be a while later.

Why is this film ‘entirely appropriate’ for a country at war? In what ways is it helpful for a country at any time? Witherington doesn’t explain. I can’t for the life of me understand what he means by that last line, but it leaves me cold and stomach-sick. I don’t know what in the world any of his comments have to do with the Kingdom of God. But, to be fair, this film had nothing to do with the Kingdom either; only with lesser kingdoms, and the use they seek to make of Word.

Mako Fujimura on Art & Faith

Posted on 7 July 2010 | Comments Off

A Response to “The Book of Eli”, pt. 2

Posted on 6 July 2010 | 1 response

This film, as I said before, seems to me just another instance of the American belief in the saving power of violence, particularly the violence we levy against ‘evil’ everywhere. ¹ But leaving that aside, the message driving this film –  a message I think authorially intended –  is that humanity depends upon civilization, which in turn depends upon religion to hold itself together. Tellingly, a Emil Cioran quote serves as the epigraph to the script: and tells the tale: ‘A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed’.

Eli, the sole devout, has this god-given duty: to protect his treasure from the evil ones and the quasi-culture they would establish, and to surrender it trustfully to the right culture makers (with Malcolm Macdowell’s character, Lombardi, playing the role of librarian/leader of the new world-makers), who promise safety (remember Lombardi’s parting words to Solara) and freedom of religion (notice how the newly-printed KJV fits nicely in its spot on the shelf between the Tanakh and Koran) and thereby a ‘new birth of freedom’ for those who have survived the apocalyptic events.

As far as I can see, this film means to convince us that civilization can and will save the world, if only it makes the right use of religion. In other words, it is but another instantiation of the Enlightenment vision for European culture. It is deeply ironic that Denzel Washington, both as an African-American and a Christian, plays a role in which he finds himself entrusted with what Kipling hymned as the ‘white man’s burden’, a burden that has nothing to do with the cross.

The filmmakers apparently believe that (the)  faith serves the world in just the way it serves Eli himself, providing both it and him with (nothing more than) the energy to carry through life with a sense of meaning, so that same energy can be transferred to the next generation and the human race can survive with more than the thinly civilized world that Carnegie intends. The film poses a (mindless and faithless) question: Which culture will win, in the end: the dictatorial culture sustained by violent oppression or the democratic one, held together and carried along by tolerance and the exchange of ideas?

While I do believe that religion, including the Christian faith, does serve a divinely-ordained culture-sustaining function, I do not agree that that is its reason for being. ‘Eli’ reduces (the) faith to an utterly this-worldly reality, completely de-eschatologizing it, so that we see a Christianity without real hope of a telos, without redemptive intervention from beyond the cause-effect realities of history, a Christianity-in-service-of-culture — and so no real participation in or imitation of Christ at all.

A Response to “The Book of Eli”, pt. 1

Posted on 5 July 2010 | 3 responses

I watched “The Book of Eli” today, and even though it was farily watchable and the visuals were almost-spectacular, I found it narratively unsatisfying and thematically disturbing. Admittedly, because Independence Day fell on a Sunday, I was already on red-alert for nationalism parading in Christian garb, but “Eli” seemed to me just another example of the  overly-Americanized Christianity ¹ that threatens us on all sides.

To be sure, this film was not so much about Christianity as it was about religion more abstractly, about the meaning-giving power of belief and ritual. (It doesn’t so much matter what ones believes or to whom one prays, so long as one does believe and does pray.) Eli happens to be Christian (of a sort), but that is not as important as that he is a sincere believer, a reader (and in his better moments, an aspiring doer) of the Book, one who walks by ‘faith and not by sight’, as he himself explains.

In keeping with the Old-Western ideals that control the story’s moral framework, Eli’s faith is radically individualized. He walks the road entirely alone, sullen behind his dark goggles, iPod ear-buds crammed in his ears, and armed with an array of weapons, ancient and modern; he is also possessed of  super-human combat and hunting skills — and of course the leather-bound KJV, embossed with a gilded cross.

Eli is a gunslinging monastic; part Jesse James, part St Francis: after slaying his victims, he prays; before killing them, he quotes Scripture. Think Jules Winnfield, but as a true believer. As one critic explains:

Eli practices a muscular sort of Christianity, not the wimpy old-fashioned turn-the-other-cheek variety. He’s not looking for a fight – indeed, he will watch from hiding, muttering to himself “Stay on the path it’s not your concern” as a man is robbed and killed and his wife is brutally raped by a gang of marauders. But he can be pushed just so far, and no further. “You lay that hand on me again and you will not get it back,” he warns a threatening tough. And he means it.

Don’t miss the fact that even though no weapon formed against Eli can prosper, he chooses not to interfere to save the man and his wife from Carnegie’s highwaymen. It is not because he fears for his life, but because his mission requires him to turn a blind eye to those injustices that fall alongside, rather than across, his divinely-ordered path. He can’t be expected to right every wrong.

But make no mistake: Eli’s violence is holy, a necessary evil — and so not really evil at all — required of him in his solitary, world-saving odyssey. He fights on the Lord’s side; he is the Spirit-gifted warrior, the embodiment of humanity’s ‘last, best hope’. Like America, Eli has to wield the weapons of his carnal warfare, for he does in fact wrestle against flesh-and-blood. If Julia Ward Howe discerned in Union cannon-fire and bayoneted rifles ‘a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel’ then she certainly would thrill at the arm- and head-severing swipes of Eli’s sword and the unerring accuracy of his death-dealing arrows. If she believed that Northern soldiers would receive God’s grace just to the extent that they avenged God against God’s Southern ‘contemners’, then she surely would crown Eli with Christ’s own glory. Eli is American military exceptionalism on steroids.

To be fair, the U.S. doesn’t corner the market on violence-as-salvation; the story is as old as empire. But it is nonetheless disturbing that many, many of our fellow Christians fail to see any difficulty with the idea. At some point, we have to come to terms with the fact that the way of Jesus is not heroic, and that the violence of the Cross is foolishness to the kingdoms of this world.

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