Harold Kushner relates to God in terms of action. This is usually called a "Predicate Theology," which says that God is experienced in a caring hospice nurse, serving others in a soup kitchen, or joining together in a wedding celebration. I have two problems with this way of thinking.
First, it lets God off the hook for the bad times. If God is part of special moments only, what is God's relationship to misfortune? We can't just leave it that God is made up of these moments of beauty, and not much more. This is like gerrymandering God, in the same way that politicians gerrymander Congressional districts to include a certain percentage of Republicans, or African-Americans, or union members. Gerrymandering ruins politics, and it ruins God. God isn't much of a god, if God includes fluffy bunnies and not hungry foxes. God has to be in all of these things and more.
Second, although it helps us to think about the Divine, what does Predicate Theology say about holiness? When a friend died, I had trouble praying and certain words stuck in my mouth. I couldn't get my lips around the word "holy." God's world seemed broken and empty of holiness. What does it mean to be holy?
What is holiness in a world with brokenness? I'd offer a hesitating definition, that comes by way of that lost friend. Joel was a marvelous musician and was very fond of the saying in the Talmud, "Sing each day, sing every day." He was an optimist, and a person of great faith. Even in his hospital bed, withered by Leukemia, he recognized his place in God's plan. He was God's finest creation, made by God with materials that don't last forever. Before his strength failed, Joel still made time to play guitar, sing and jam.
Being bold in the face of fear is holiness. Having the courage to smile and teach and sing when others would quit is godly. Living lives of faith that testify to God's real presence, even in a hospital, is what brings God's divine holiness into our world. Recognizing the limits of our bodies and our lives, knowing that we will never understand God's wide world, and going ahead in spite of our existential nausea - that's holy.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Friday, December 14, 2007
fear
Wednesday morning, I was driving off-road in an '01 Toyota HiLux through Wadi Rum, the Jordanian desert where "Lawrence of Arabia" was filmed. Our guide had the slick look of a hustler. I didn't trust him, and had a lingering doubt that he might take our money and leave us in the desert to dry. Turns out I was wrong, and in the end he was a decent guy. I want to talk about that fear.
We were driving up, across and down massive steep dunes, and wheeling about empty stretches of desert where the only thing to see was sand, rock and scrub. My anxiety - about being ripped off, left for dead - blended into fear that the truck would tip over into the sand, and we would struggle to survive on the water left in the engine coolant. Of course, the fear was unrealistic, but there it was.
I realized that I should thank God for the fear. At a basic level, fear can keep us alive. It lets us know what to avoid, and when to run. Too much fear can slow us down, too. But by entering into the scary spaces, we have a chance to confront the ultimate fear. When you go into those unknown places, empty places, dangerous places, you can test out what it's like to face the final unknown place: death.
We live our lives in dread of the end. We are constantly slowed down by fears of loss, terror of our own mortality, and by the dark realization that it all ends, sometimes by chance. The rabbis called sleep one-sixtieth of death, and I might say that a thrill is one-sixtieth of that final fear. I think that everyday fears, about money, about family, about health and safety help us touch the awe of death from a safe distance.
Step into fear from time to time, even if it's just the terrible character of Anton Chigurh in "No Country for Old Men." Without testing those waters, you may never be able to live with the knowledge that you will die.
We were driving up, across and down massive steep dunes, and wheeling about empty stretches of desert where the only thing to see was sand, rock and scrub. My anxiety - about being ripped off, left for dead - blended into fear that the truck would tip over into the sand, and we would struggle to survive on the water left in the engine coolant. Of course, the fear was unrealistic, but there it was.
I realized that I should thank God for the fear. At a basic level, fear can keep us alive. It lets us know what to avoid, and when to run. Too much fear can slow us down, too. But by entering into the scary spaces, we have a chance to confront the ultimate fear. When you go into those unknown places, empty places, dangerous places, you can test out what it's like to face the final unknown place: death.
We live our lives in dread of the end. We are constantly slowed down by fears of loss, terror of our own mortality, and by the dark realization that it all ends, sometimes by chance. The rabbis called sleep one-sixtieth of death, and I might say that a thrill is one-sixtieth of that final fear. I think that everyday fears, about money, about family, about health and safety help us touch the awe of death from a safe distance.
Step into fear from time to time, even if it's just the terrible character of Anton Chigurh in "No Country for Old Men." Without testing those waters, you may never be able to live with the knowledge that you will die.
tradition
I was visiting cousins last weekend. My wife taught them to play Cat's Cradle with a spool of yarn. Then, they taught her to play Chinese jump-rope (known in Britain as elastics), which is like hopscotch with string. Aside from the basics of four-square, I have no capacity for these games. I'm horribly uncoordinated, and I can't remember the order of the moves for the life of me.
As I watched, I wondered: How can a game be the same in different countries? How do people remember all these moves? It's as if there was a hard-drive out there, with all these wild bits of information. But it's not out there, it's in us. It seems like people have an amazing capacity to remember complicated moves, and to pass the order along to friends and family members. We carry it forward and move the information along.
That seems to be how the Bible (and the Talmud, the Vedas and the Gospels) got to us. It was a group memory, like the sequences of Cat's Cradle or a family recipe. First re-told as campfire songs in the desert, it became elaborated, recited and turned into a massive ritual, hundreds of thousands of verses long. How did people remember so much, you must think. How could they not? People can still hold on to the bizarre moves of Cat's Cradle, even with all the modern distractions: the Internet, cellphones, fast cars and music videos. In a time before electronics, people had a lot more "bandwidth" to store great stories.
Remember, humans are built for stories. We thrive on narrative. Thousands of years ago, the narratives that formed the core of the Bible helped us to make order of the world, and listening to them around a fire helped us to cope with the fears that inevitably come in the coldness and the silence of the desert. Then, something changed. We moved to towns and cities, and lost our memory. We had to write down what we knew because our lives were shifting. It's no wonder that the Talmud, millions of lines of Jewish oral law and legend, was written down as Jews migrated and urbanized. It's harder to hold on to memories in cities. There are more distractions.
A funny things happens when humans write down these oral memories. We start to forget them. That was the experience of anthropologists trying to catalog Yugoslavian epics in the twentieth century. Even as the scientists tried to copy out the epics, the story-tellers began to forget them. And these were tellers who remembered hundreds of thousands of verses by heart. On another side, writing things down seems to take away the personality of the story-telling. There's less vitality and originality, because the subtle variations of the individual teller are ironed out of the story. Think about a joke that gets written down into an email. It may be good on screen, but it lacks the punch of a gifted comedian.
Singers and other musicians know this already. Fela Kuti, the great African pop musician, refused to play songs again once he had recorded them onto albums. Spontaneity in concert wouldn't make sense at that point. An audience wouldn't be able to hear his songs freshly, but would expect the album version. I wonder if that's happened with Scripture. Have we lost something vital about the religious experience now that the words are frozen on a page? What's happening to other human knowledge, now that it's being stored on Wikipedia? Will we forget our traditions and our ways? Now you can find instructions for Cat's Cradle on the Internet.
As I watched, I wondered: How can a game be the same in different countries? How do people remember all these moves? It's as if there was a hard-drive out there, with all these wild bits of information. But it's not out there, it's in us. It seems like people have an amazing capacity to remember complicated moves, and to pass the order along to friends and family members. We carry it forward and move the information along.
That seems to be how the Bible (and the Talmud, the Vedas and the Gospels) got to us. It was a group memory, like the sequences of Cat's Cradle or a family recipe. First re-told as campfire songs in the desert, it became elaborated, recited and turned into a massive ritual, hundreds of thousands of verses long. How did people remember so much, you must think. How could they not? People can still hold on to the bizarre moves of Cat's Cradle, even with all the modern distractions: the Internet, cellphones, fast cars and music videos. In a time before electronics, people had a lot more "bandwidth" to store great stories.
Remember, humans are built for stories. We thrive on narrative. Thousands of years ago, the narratives that formed the core of the Bible helped us to make order of the world, and listening to them around a fire helped us to cope with the fears that inevitably come in the coldness and the silence of the desert. Then, something changed. We moved to towns and cities, and lost our memory. We had to write down what we knew because our lives were shifting. It's no wonder that the Talmud, millions of lines of Jewish oral law and legend, was written down as Jews migrated and urbanized. It's harder to hold on to memories in cities. There are more distractions.
A funny things happens when humans write down these oral memories. We start to forget them. That was the experience of anthropologists trying to catalog Yugoslavian epics in the twentieth century. Even as the scientists tried to copy out the epics, the story-tellers began to forget them. And these were tellers who remembered hundreds of thousands of verses by heart. On another side, writing things down seems to take away the personality of the story-telling. There's less vitality and originality, because the subtle variations of the individual teller are ironed out of the story. Think about a joke that gets written down into an email. It may be good on screen, but it lacks the punch of a gifted comedian.
Singers and other musicians know this already. Fela Kuti, the great African pop musician, refused to play songs again once he had recorded them onto albums. Spontaneity in concert wouldn't make sense at that point. An audience wouldn't be able to hear his songs freshly, but would expect the album version. I wonder if that's happened with Scripture. Have we lost something vital about the religious experience now that the words are frozen on a page? What's happening to other human knowledge, now that it's being stored on Wikipedia? Will we forget our traditions and our ways? Now you can find instructions for Cat's Cradle on the Internet.
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