the harvard ichthus » Volume 2, Issue 1

My grandmother died today. For you, the reader, it will have been days, weeks, months, perhaps even years since she died, but for me, it was today. I am still sorting it out-I had no intention of writing this piece about her, but somehow, there is nothing else right now that seems worth writing about. She was alive when I woke up this morning, and now she is not. Life goes on, oddly enough, even though it seems like it shouldn’t. I got the call from my dad just hours ago, and right after I had to bike to class. Strange, really-to think about something as obscure as constitutional law right after one’s grandmother dies. The world seemed different somehow as I biked to class-more distant, fragile, and somehow unreal-as if one blew too hard, it might all come crashing down like a house of cards or a sandcastle. I am sitting, now, at my computer at my desk, in my room, alone. I am quite sure that I am fine-she was, after all, an old woman, and towards the end we all hoped that she would go something like this. Quietly, without too much suffering, in her sleep. But even so. but even so. I am still sorting it out.

I was going to write this article about the purpose of education; indeed, more broadly, about the meaning of life. As if I know the answer to such questions. It is something that has been on my mind lately—my roommate, for example, has been going through the recruiting process for the past few weeks. He just got a wonderful job, and I’m very happy for him. But it was nerve-wracking for him; I could tell. He was so nervous, he made me nervous, too. And I got to thinking about what I was going to do after I graduate—law school? Seminary? Consulting? Graduate school? The possibilities swirled around in my mind, and before long, became something of an obsession. If seminary, which seminary? Lutheran? Episcopalian? None of the above? Or if law school, which law school? Am I smart enough to get into Harvard or Yale? If not, where will I go? Where will I go afterwards? Do I really want to work 15-hour days in a big corporate firm? What, where, when, WHY? That, finally, was the question that stuck most in my mind. If I’m running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to get into the best law school or the best seminary, why am I doing it? What really do I want? Why, why, why, why, why???

Death has a way of concentrating the mind. Most college students, I imagine, don’t often think about death—I certainly don’t. Living in the Quad as I do, the shuttle takes me each day to the Yard, and drops me off right smack in front of an old cemetery—God’s Acre, I believe it is called. But I rarely look at it. Really look at it, I mean. Rows upon rows of gravestones, most of them inscribed with gruesome little winged death’s heads—I don’t really see that when I get off the shuttle bus. “Even in the midst of life, we are in death,” the old Puritan preachers used to say. That’s not really true, I think. In the midst of life, we do everything we can to forget about death. We think about the problem set due tomorrow, and the cute girl in section, and so on, and so forth. In the midst of life, we tell ourselves, we are in life, and death is something far, far away…

Until it actually hits home. Death, I think, is something so strange, so different, so other, that we can’t handle it on a day-to-day basis. But when it comes, it changes us for a bit, and makes us see things differently, if only for a little while. It’s a lot like the mini-existential crisis brought on by my roommate’s job search—it makes us ask the why questions, only more so. Why do I want to be a lawyer, or a writer, or a pastor? More than that, why do I want to be anything at all? What should I spend my life at? I won’t have it forever—someday, even if I don’t like to think about it, I too will die. And so will my parents, my family, and my friends. Does that sound morbid? I suppose it is—but unfortunately no less true. Most of us don’t ask these questions out loud; they seem silly, in a way; too personal, and too subjective. But I think, in the end, they are the only questions that matter at all. What am I to do with my life? Who am I to spend it with? It’s so fragile… like a house of cards, or a sandcastle. How will I live? Why?

G. K. Chesterton said somewhere that God gave us death so that we might appreciate life. I am not sure if that is true, but there may be something to it. Adam and Eve, so the story goes, were given everything they ever could have wanted—a blissful Eden in which to live out their days, in perfect happiness and perfect peace. But still, they were not satisfied. “Ye shall be as gods,” the serpent told them, if only they would eat from the forbidden tree. And so, they took, and they ate. And God came and found them in the garden, and told them then that they would one day die—that, somehow, there would come an end to things. Adam would not forever live with Eve, nor Eve with Adam—someday, they would die. I wonder what Adam and Eve thought of that—I wonder if they even had any idea what to think. How can someone who has not known death understand it? But even as I write, I know that this is a silly question. I do not understand death; I don’t suppose that I ever will. All I know is that there will come an end to things—that, so to speak, I will not forever dwell in the Garden. I suppose Adam and Eve grasped that somehow too, when God told them that they were going to die. And I imagine that the fruit on the trees, and the grass on the hills, and the flowers on the meadows, looked all the more beautiful because they knew that they would not always have them. Adam and Eve had it all, and still were not satisfied—maybe God really did give them death so that they could appreciate life.

Life really is a funny thing, when you think about it. It doesn’t really answer the why questions for you—you’re born one day, even though no one asked you about it; you start spitting up and crying and eating mashed peas; you go to kindergarten and try to avoid the school bully; you go to middle school, and as if that wasn’t confusing enough, you get shipped off to high school; then you go to college, and wham!—there you are, 21 years old, and not too much more sure about things than you were during your mashed-pea days. At least then, you knew for a fact that you didn’t like mashed peas. The why questions are still out there, waiting, and they don’t get a bit easier as you go along.

I don’t think I can answer the why questions for you; not in a tidy little magazine like this one, published thrice yearly and door-dropped for your convenience. I don’t think truth works like that; I don’t think you can wrap it up tight with paper and string and leave it on someone’s doorstep. But I can tell you to please, please—start asking the why questions for yourself. Sometimes I worry that we forget to ask the why questions—we’re too busy running around, making sure that we get good grades, have the right friends, get the right job, and things like that. It’s like we spend our whole lives running, and don’t stop to think about where we’re running to, or why we’re even running in the first place. Maybe I’m wrong—maybe more of us lie awake at night than I think, wondering what we’re doing down here, and asking if there’s a God up in heaven who cares about all of us. I hope so. But I just worry that lots of us forget to do that.

Anyhow, I’ll be home this weekend for the funeral. It’ll be in a little side chapel at the First Lutheran Church ; they use it mostly for funerals, I guess. I remember once when I was much younger, I was in that chapel with my grandmother, and she told me that she thought she’d like to have her funeral there someday. It sort of creeped me out—to think that, one day, I would be back in that room, attending her funeral. And now, very soon, I will be. I still don’t know what to think about it all—my grandmother was a wonderful lady, and I know that she loved my brothers and me very much. The last time I saw her, it was in the nursing home, over Christmas break. She couldn’t talk very well, but I told her that I loved her, and that I’d miss her when I was gone. She understood what I’d said, and told me the same. And then I left, and now she’s gone. Death is too big for us to understand—any of us, no matter how much we’ve seen it—which is why, I think, we have funerals in churches. Things like that are too big for us, and so we bring them to God. I’m not going to understand death any more than I do now after the funeral, but I imagine that somehow, it will help to know that even if I don’t have all of the answers, God does.

There are some things in life, I think, that really count. Like love, for instance, and God, and what we’re here for, and what we’re going to do with our lives, and who we’re going to spend them with. Death has a way of concentrating the mind—of making you realize how important things like that are, and how so many other things that we spend our lives chasing after don’t really matter all that much. I’ve never been able to buy the notion that life is meaningless—that we’re just cosmic accidents, tricked by chemicals in our brain into thinking that things like Love, Truth, and Beauty really exist. I don’t buy that—I think they do exist. I think that, in this life, there are some things that count, and that those things are what make life worth the living. I even think that some of those things are stronger than death itself. I suppose, finally, that that’s why I am a Christian. I’m not going to get into what I think about all of the why questions right now—as much as I hold what I’ve found close to my heart, and care deeply about finding answers to the questions I haven’t figured out yet, those are the sorts of answers that we all have to find for ourselves. I just hope that, wherever you’re at, you start looking for them. I, for one, am still sorting them out.

Jordan Hylden ’06, Editor-in-Chief, is a Government concentrator in Currier House.

God and the Tsunami

Megan Buresh — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 04:15:43 +0000

Responding With Hope in the Midst of Destruction.

In the wake of the tsunami that struck Asia on December 26, 2004, images of the resulting destruction have pervaded the media. Tableaus of bodies piled high and of empty beaches where villages once stood have been seared into our minds. The effects of the tsunami continue to ripple throughout the world. According to the New York Times, it is estimated that between 143,877 and 178,981 people have been killed; over 96,000 of those deaths have occurred in the Aceh province of Indonesia alone. The body count is only rising as dengue fever, malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases breed in now ubiquitous standing water. It is impossible not to grieve at such loss, and the outpouring of donations from governments and private citizens alike have demonstrated the depth of our commiseration and grief. The overwhelming magnitude of the catastrophe raises the question: why are such things are allowed to happen? If a loving and merciful God truly governs the world as Christians believe, why does he permit such suffering?

I’m not sure that this, ultimately, is an issue that we can ever fully understand with our minds—the true weight of suffering tugs at our hearts, making all intellectual attempts at understanding ring slightly hollow. The only way I can come close to understanding this issue, however, is with reference to human free will. I believe that God, in creating us, loved us enough to desire a true relationship with us, and so respected us enough to allow us to choose whether or not we want to enter into a relationship with him. He did this despite knowing that we would sin, which has separated us from him and allowed pain to come into the world. Somehow, in a way that we cannot fully understand, this pain includes the disruption of the natural order, in the form of pestilence, disease, and natural disasters like the tsunami. Though Christ has allowed us a means of redemption for entering into a relationship with God, we still sin, meaning that life in this world will never be perfect. Some people, including American Christians and Muslim clerics in the region, have made the argument that the tsunami is a judgment on the people of the affected region. I cannot accept this, at all—the notion that God “judged” the people of Asia in any way with this terrible disaster is, I believe, utterly incompatible with any idea of a loving God. So, in the end, even though such suffering in many ways remains beyond my understanding, I continue to look to Christ, who knows intimately the sufferings of mankind, because he has suffered them with us. Intellectual answers, in the end, pale before the cross of Christ, on which our Lord bore our sorrows. Even though I cannot fully understand suffering, I can take comfort in knowing that God—even God—suffers with us.

As difficult as this issue is, of course, we cannot simply struggle with it forever—tragedies on this scale demand not only reflection, but action. While continuing to mourn with the peoples of Sri Lanka, India, and Indonesia at such a loss, I believe that we can also have hope —hope in Christ’s redemptive power. By keeping our faith and never ceasing to hope, we can boldly ask him to transform these regions and to use us as his instruments for good in the process. As Christians we are called not to give in to despair, because the foundation of our hope is Christ, who is not shaken by the troubles of this world, however large they might be. Instead, we are called to pray and to ask God how he would have us respond.

I believe that there will be some key challenges unique to Christians in the relief effort. Although surely we will fact logistical difficulties like providing quality health care, shelter, and services in regions where all such amenities have been wiped out and the general infrastructure is poor, a more subtle challenge will be to avoid focusing solely on working in the most efficient way possible (as we see it), instead being careful to give God room to work as he wills. While holding ourselves to high standards of relief work practices, it will also be essential that we pray intently about how God would have us work in this region. While keeping in mind the urgency that is necessary in this crisis, we must not allow it to make us act in a spirit of frenzy. Instead, we must temper our efforts with peace and confidence in the sovereignty of God.

Additionally, as Christians, we must always remember that those affected by the tsunami have more than merely physical needs; beyond that, those touched by such tragedy will undoubtedly be in need of emotional and spiritual guidance. As Christians, we can offer a comfort that is based in the Gospel; a solid foundation upon which people can truly rebuild their lives. The hope present in Christ, which is not based on the abundance or lack of material possessions, is something that possesses eternal value. However, we Christians must also be continually wary of taking advantage of the spiritual vulnerability of tsunami victims by forcing our faith upon them. If we mix the giving of material aid with proselytizing, people may profess Christianity merely to receive better aid. Thus, in these initial months especially, it is important for Christian relief workers to remain primarily relief workers who give on the basis of physical need and not of faith, thereby witnessing primarily through their love and actions, rather than directly attempting to convert those of other faith traditions. Discerning how to achieve this delicate balance is difficult, and will require much prayer, but in general I think the work of Christian relief agencies should be to provide aid and pray, and leave room for how God would desire to move in order to bring people to him.

Finally, it will be difficult to keep up the intensity of the relief efforts as time passes, donations taper off, and the attention of the public passes on to some other attraction or focus. In anticipating this inevitable waning of interest, we must first make the most of people’s current willingness to help, and to entreat the media to continue their coverage over the coming months and years, which will help remind people of the continuing damage. As Christians, we should distinguish ourselves by not ceasing to pray and by continuing physical donations and provision of medical care and other services. The tsunami has ravaged areas to a point where there is nothing remaining; the rebuilding process will take years. As we commit now to the ways that God would have us respond, we must make a continuing commitment to persevere and not abandon the people of Aceh or Sri Lanka to their own meager resources. This said, the relief efforts should truly be a partnership, in which people native to the region are allowed to take the lead, and we as foreigners, especially as Americans, humbly follow.

As we continue to pray and reach out to the people and regions affected by the tsunami, I believe that we can confidently wait in expectation to see God transform these areas, and also witness that in reaching out in faith to the people of South Asia and Eastern Africa, our own lives will be transformed. In partnering with God after such a terrible disaster, we will naturally grow in our faith as we see how God redeems even losses of such great magnitude, and gain perspective on how blessed our lives have been.

Meghan Buresh ‘08 is a Biochemistry concentrator in Lionel.

Why I Go to Church

Nathan Rosenberg, Jr. — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 04:14:46 +0000

My 94-year old grandmother, who is still as sharp as ever, skipped church this past Easter Sunday. When I jokingly scolded her about it, she quickly retorted, “Nathan, I have been going to church every Easter for 94 years. I don’t think God is going to mind if I skip this once.” I think she was right. Skipping church is not a sin. God can be found everywhere and a relationship with God does not require attending services. But, if that’s true, then why should we go to church at all?

When I first started college, I did not attend church services regularly. During my time in college, I have found that few Christians on campus regularly attend services. I assume that, like me, college is the first time many of them have thought about whether or not they want to regularly attend church. Like many, freshman year was the first time I had been away from my family for extended periods. At home I regularly attended services with my family, but at school, whether I went to church and how often was completely up to me.

Like many, I at first found church to be long and boring. Plus, I never felt like I had enough time to get all my work done, so I started going only when I felt I had the time. I could have stopped going altogether, but going to church helped me feel more at home at school. I enjoyed listening to the readings, singing the hymns, and hearing the insights from a good, succinct sermon. At the beginning of freshman year, I went to church when I felt homesick. Like many, I did not think that church made much of a difference in my life or my relationship with God. Going every so often felt good, but I did not think going every week made much of a difference.

Then I started noticing that my life went better the weeks that I went to church. I had peace. I was more focused. I was better able to see the good in what I was doing and express the love I had for others. I was living life and not just going through the motions. When I did not go to church, things were not bad; they just were not as good. I remember one week when I did not go to church, I fell behind on my readings and spent most of my time in my room because nothing seemed worth much effort. The conversations in the dining hall were interesting but seemed superficial. I felt very distant from people.

One gray week in winter, after going to church for the first time after a long absence, I was reminded that I loved learning and consequently enjoyed my classes that week. I felt connected to all human beings and happily said hello to people I passed during the day. Most importantly, I had faith that what I was doing was the will of God, and so I was not stressed despite my hectic schedule. What is it about church, I wondered, that could touch me in so many ways?

The value in going to church, I have found, is in the community and in the guidance of the liturgy, the prescribed rites and rituals of a church service. I love being around religious people. Faith and integrity are part of who I consider myself to be. When I am around people of faith and integrity, I am not only encouraged to be the same but I also feel at home. The power of the Spirit always seems to be present when I am worshipping God with others. It is that presence, not the familiarity of church rituals, which now draws me to worship with others in church. I have found truth in Jesus’ words: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20).

Being among friends, however, is not my primary purpose for going to church. Loving one’s neighbor is only the second greatest commandment. The first is “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” (Matthew 22:37-22:39) The community exists only to serve God. In a church, God is in the midst of the people, that they might know and worship him. Therefore, I am not surprised that merely praying with my roommates in their Lifegroup (a campus Bible study) was not the equivalent of going to church.

The guidance of a liturgy brings me into relationship with God. I do not subscribe to only one liturgy, because in my experience, Catholic, Protestant, and even some non-denominational liturgies all serve the same purpose and often follow the same form. Most of the services I have been to begin with the congregation singing and speaking praises to God and praying that the service will serve us well. We then listen to readings and contemplate their meaning until a minister shares his/her inspired perspective on the Word of God. I listen to the readings to discover Truth, the nature of the universe, and to discern God’s will for me.

I remember, once during Lent, the reading from the New Testament was about the temptations of Christ while he was in the desert. In the story, Satan tells the hungry Jesus to turn stones into bread, and Jesus refuses. I must have heard the story a dozen times, but the sermon revealed something in the reading that I had not seen before. Jesus, the priest told us, with his infinite power, could have turned the stones into bread and fed the whole world, but he refused, saying, “Man does not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). The priest pointed out that the story was not simply about Jesus feeding himself, but instead about God feeding the world — ministering not to the physical but to the spiritual needs of people.

Following the readings and sermons, we affirm our faith, give thanks and prayers, confess our sins to be at peace, and then share in God’s peace to prepare for Holy Communion. Before receiving Communion, I take a moment to prepare myself, and then following it, I open my heart and listen for anything that God may have to say to me. I usually emerge from that prayer deeply in touch with my love for my friends and family. The service ends by giving thanks to God and a prayer that God be with us as we leave the church. Finally, as we depart, we sing a song of praise or thanksgiving. I follow the rituals of the service, crossing myself and saying “Amen” after the reception of the bread and wine, not simply because the rituals are familiar, but because the rituals bring me closer to God.

Finally, I have found that being with the people whom I love affects my experience of church. It is not simply about God and me; it is also about the people in my life. At home, I still go to church with my family every Sunday, and I believe doing so enriches our love for one another. After my sophomore year, my sister and my girlfriend both came to school in Boston. I am thankful for that, because now that they are near, we can worship together. As I mentioned earlier, one thing I get out of church is being in touch with the love I have for others. The weeks that my girlfriend and I go to church together, we tend to fight less. My roommate and I have also once gone to church together, and I have never felt so close to him as I did then. Worshipping in a church with others brings me closer to God’s love, but it also works the other way around. Since God is love, being closer to God also causes me to be present to the love I have for others.

The last time I went to church, I confessed my sins to God and walked out in peace. I walked out conscious of and thankful for many of the blessings in my life and thankful that God loves me so much that he grants me those blessings. I loved my brother, mother, and girlfriend, and knew that they loved me. I started my week happily knowing that if I could just hold that love close, whatever I did would be what God wanted me to do.

The choice to go to church is a personal one, and my guess is that different people get different things out of going to church. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with skipping church like my Grandmother did, or only attending church occasionally as many college students do. However, I choose to attend regularly because I have found that going makes a difference in my life and in my relationships. And for that, I am thankful.

Nathan Rosenberg, Jr., ’05, president of Episcopal Students at Harvard, is a Physics concentrator in Pforzheimer House.

Jesus in the Real World

Mark Hill — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 04:13:57 +0000

Reclaiming What Christian Culture Forgot.

I hate Christian culture. And I bet deep down you do too. I hate the isolation and hypocrisy. I hate the way that Christians take good secular bands and construct cheap, generic Christian imitations. I hate the frou-frou Christian self-help books at the top of the best-seller lists that claim to have found the “magic pill” to life through purpose-driven prayers of Jabez. I do not take these pills. My mom told me to never take drugs from strangers—especially strangers who believe that their magic pills will one day allow them to float up through the clouds into Never-Never Land, while those who reject the pills descend into fiery pits of devils and despair.

I am a Christian, but I will not take those pills.

The distinction must be made between Christian culture and the person of Jesus Christ. There is little of the true Christ in the pills and the easy, fix-it-remedies of popular Christian culture. Part of the problem is that we’re imperfect people, and our imperfections show up in our media culture—everywhere from the latest Tim LaHaye Left Behind novel to Plus One (the Christian boy-band answer to N Sync). Christians, we must repent individually to people around us who have been subjected to Christian culture—I’m not kidding.

Forgive us… we’re sorry.

Christians, we don’t need to run to the “Christian music” section in Sam Goody in order to find music about Jesus. There’s so much more out there than what’s to be had in the treacly-sweet isolation of bubblegum Christian culture. Christ can be found in many of the other sections, where the good CD’s are, and the stories that those songs tell have an amazing amount of substance to them.

Let’s start where I think the story begins. Switchfoot tells it well—I’m sure you’ve heard them on the radio with “Meant to Live” or “Dare You to Move,” from their latest album The Beautiful Letdown. They paint a beautiful picture in the title track about what it means to be human. “It was a beautiful letdown/When I crashed and burned/When I found myself alone, unknown, and hurt.” Humans, Switchfoot tells us, are not what they’re supposed to be. We were created perfect, but sin happened. Now, we’re left with a big wall up between us and the Creator, and a lot of junk happens down here on earth that shouldn’t.

Norah Jones picks up the story as well, in “Humble Me” from her sophomore album Feels Like Home: “What do you say when it’s all gone away. . . truth spoke in whispers will tear you apart. . . it never rains when you want it to. . . you humble me Lord. I’m on my knees empty. . . so, please, please, please forgive me.” I don’t know about you, but I think I know exactly how Norah Jones feels. Lots of days, I feel like a jelly-less jelly donut, and am constantly needing, wanting, and yearning for something to fill up my empty insides. My problem is that I usually try to fill up my insides not with real, genuine Smuckers, but instead with sugar-free jelly substitutes that really taste more like the tapioca balls in bubble tea. And when I don’t get what I really yearn for—when I try to fill up the emptiness inside of me with artificial substitutes—I end up feeling broken and defeated, just like Norah Jones. My only response is to sit alone in my room and ask forgiveness for all of the fake tapioca balls that I’ve used as jelly substitutes in my life. My jelly-less jelly donut can only be filled if I’m humbled enough to realize that I can’t fill it. But what then?

Have you ever listened to Ben Harper? I forget about him. But every time I remember, I get stuck on him for a few weeks, and he lives in my CD player, constantly spinning around and around as he sings to me. His lyrics follow me through my days, gently echoing somewhere in the back of my mind. They feel good. I love his song “Blessed to be a Witness,” about the Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro, because it tells us how to repair the beautiful letdownness of the world. He sings, “So much sorrow and pain. Still I will not live in vain. . . Only by the grace of God go I . . . I am blessed to be a witness.” Harper believes that God is the only repairman able to fix our broken souls. He sees the world as a place of sorrow and pain created by needs, wants, and yearnings, but somehow still believes that our lives have purpose—he doesn’t think we have to “live in vain.” But where does he find purpose? In the grace of God, who has given him the opportunity to witness the story of humanity and of Christ. Ben Harper did not create this opportunity for himself, as it wouldn’t have occurred to him: it wasn’t one of his everyday needs, wants, or yearnings. But God gave it to him, and only by it does he live.

Finally, I think the threads of the story I’ve found in Switchfoot, Norah Jones, and Ben Harper are drawn together best in one of my favorite movies from this past year—Saved!, directed by R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe. The movie begins by introducing us to Mary, a Christian teen who finds out that her boyfriend is having doubts about his heterosexuality—a big no-no in their evangelical Christian high school. She concludes that the Christian thing to do is sleep with him in order to save him from the evils of homosexuality (is this sacrilegious yet?). Inevitably, she gets pregnant, and her boyfriend is sent off to a Christian home to be “de-gayed.” A series of events ensues, during which Mary begins to realize that the “Christian” culture of her high school, epitomized by a wickedly righteous Mandy Moore, doesn’t know the first thing about Jesus. One of my favorite scenes is the one where Moore hurls her big, leather study Bible at Mary and screams, “I am FULL of the Holy Spirit!” At the end of the movie, Moore literally knocks the head off a giant, 90-ft. tall statue of Christ: it’s a powerfully symbolic gesture, representing her bastardization of the ideas He represented. Mary, on the other hand—even though she makes bad decisions and questions her religion—emerges with a genuine faith and a desire to seek Christ without making Him conform to the smug, self-righteous ideals of middle-class suburbia. The movie closes with an invocation of one of the biggest fads in the history of Christian culture: “In the end, what would Jesus do?” Mary asks. “I don’t know, but in the meantime we’ll be trying to figure it out—together.”

These depictions of Christ in mainstream media are authentic because they don’t give easy, Sunday school answers—they have substance. They don’t boil Christ down to a fuzzy, feel-good bearded guy. They don’t try to substitute man-made spiritual panaceas in the form of motivational self-help books. The Christ of Switchfoot saves us from remaining a beautiful letdown. The Christ of Norah Jones humbles us with our knowledge that we can’t fill our empty insides with what we need, want, and yearn for on our own. The Christ of Ben Harper does what we cannot do by bringing us to a knowledge and experience of him, when we ourselves are incapable of approaching him. And the Christ of Saved! is too majestic and too holy to be boiled down to the books, music, and bracelets of Christian culture. The Christ of these snippets of popular culture is real.

The paradox of human life is that, like Switchfoot said, we’re all beautiful letdowns—we’re trapped in crises of faith and can’t find the fulfillment that we crave. But that’s exactly where Christ meets us—he approaches us in the dark, when we’re humbled and asking forgiveness on our knees. And in the dark we realize that Christians suck, but Christ doesn’t. And we forgive the bracelets, the books, and the terrible music, because the Creator of the universe has forgiven us of so much more.

Mark Hill ’05 is a Religion and History of Science concentrator in Kirkland House.

Looking for Fathers in All the Wrong Places

Simeon Zahl — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 04:12:25 +0000

The second-best thing about the Christian doctrine of imputed righteousness is that it offers hope for us guys with dating. And let’s face it: we need all the hope we can get. If I am honest, I must admit I devoted the vast majority of my emotional and intellectual energy at Harvard to women: thinking about them, avoiding them, playing psychological games with them, and—very occasionally—actually interacting with them. And to say that I was not alone in this commitment of resources would be a bit of an understatement. But for all the thought and mind games that went into this all-important area of my life and the lives of so many guys around me, I seem to recall seeing very little results among my male friends (or in my own life) in terms of genuine, honest, and confident romantic interaction with actual, flesh-and-blood women. I think this is because we boys—I wouldn’t call us men, yet—are deeply afraid of women; deeply afraid of not measuring up to the expectations we perceive them to have on us. We are afraid, more than anything in the world, of rejection.

I would like to propose (modestly) something like an answer to the nearly universal problem of the fear and paralysis young men feel when it comes to women. I cannot speak for women. But I do have something to say to the legions of paralyzed, insecure, female-fearing dudes out there. I hope it is helpful. I repeat: we need help!

I loved Spiderman 2. I related profoundly to the insecurity, confusion, and desire to please that characterized Tobey Maguire’s superb take on Peter Parker. His excruciating inability to tell Mary Jane what he was really feeling was spot on. The depiction of the boy trying, and generally failing, to become a man was moving to me, because its diagnosis was so accurate to my own life. But I have a bone to pick with the movie. Remember the solution it offers to Peter Parker’s problems and insecurities? Basically, he is not able to step up to the plate and “be a man,” much less a hero, until he is roused to it when Mary Jane is put in mortal danger. His fading powers return at last, and his conflicting needs and desires merge into one stable identity when he feels genuinely needed by a girl. His question is, “How is a boy like me to become a man in this day and age?” The answer he comes up with is, “Find a girl.”

We boys are all trying to figure out how to become men, how to stop being insecure, and how to get the girl—in short, how to grow up. And, like in the movie, we think that the love of a woman can give us what we need. So we obsess over the women in our lives, paralyzed in our headspace, too needy and unconfident ultimately to be all that attractive. “We were just as good/ as married in my mind/ but married in my mind is no good” (Weezer). I believe that the answer to our problem, the key to the door to confidence and adulthood, cannot come from The Girl. And so, in this sense, Spiderman 2 is giving us the wrong message.

The bottom line is this: what we boys really need first is the affirmation of a father, not of a woman. The confidence that leads to healthy romantic relationships does not come from romantic relationships. It comes from outside—from fathers and father-figures. Enough resenting women for not giving us what we need! Guys: the love of a woman, though wonderful and important, can never stand in place of the love of a father. We need both, but we need the father first. And we will inevitably be disappointed, even angry, when we look to Her in vain for what only the father can give. This resentment we feel toward the opposite sex—and show me the man who does not harbor some resentment towards women!— is an evil thing, especially because it all too often turns violent. Let’s stop demanding from them what they cannot give, and then despising them for it. We must take our neediness to fathers, not to women.

Has anyone noticed that Spiderman is first and foremost a boy in search of a father? I don’t think many have, but it’s true. Peter Parker is an orphan, raised by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. In the first sequence of the first movie, Parker loses even this father-figure: Ben is killed by a criminal, and his death serves as the catalyst for the rest of Spiderman’s story. The movies go on from there to paint an even darker picture when it comes to fathers: it is no coincidence that both of the main villains in the films begin their relationship with Parker in an obviously fatherly capacity. Mr. Osborne loves Peter more than he loves his own son, Harry, and his hatred for Spiderman only really begins when Spiderman rejects his offer of partnership; his offer to be a proxy father. The eight-limbed villain of the second film, Doc Ock, enters the movie initially because he is impressed by Peter’s scientific acumen, and sees the potential for Peter to become a great student of his. The kindly professor even invites Parker over for dinner to give him some advice on how to use his gifts. He is Peter’s hero—as a student at Columbia, Parker is even writing a paper on Dr. Octavius’ work. But quickly Octavius, too, turns evil and becomes Spiderman’s greatest nemesis. Poor Peter Parker! Every new father-figure he comes across soon turns on him and tries to kill him. I submit that Peter Parker’s number-one problem, the problem to which so many male viewers have been able to relate—though often without realizing it—is his need for the love, affirmation, and non-judgmental guidance of a father. And yet fathers in the Spiderman movies are either absent (Pete’s natural father; Uncle Ben), or evil (Osborne, Octavius). With this dark portrait of fatherhood, it is no wonder that the films find the answer to Parker/ Spiderman’s problem in the love of a woman—if there are no fathers to be found, surely romantic love is the next best thing, right?

But the reason that we boy-men must reject Spiderman’s answer to our neediness, our lack of confidence, and our fear of women, is simple: it does not work. My friends and I spent our four years at college (I am only slightly exaggerating) looking to romantic relationships, or at least the idea of romantic relationships, to solve our problems, and it did not work. We played mind-games with women, and when that didn’t work we watched pornography, and when that just depressed us we opted out of the whole mess and played Smash Brothers for 15 hours a day (although, let it be noted, Smash Brothers is completely awesome) or just sat in our rooms and drank beer. The affirmation that turns, ahem, “boys II men” cannot come first from the opposite sex; rather, we need the affirmation and love of a father. Only when we have received this love and it has freed us to grow up are we ready to love a woman without smothering her with our neediness.

Let me tell you about someone who has had a profound ministry with my family over the last few years. Dr. Rod Rosenbladt is a Lutheran theologian, and appears on a weekly radio talk-show based in California called The White Horse Inn. About two years ago, my Dad, an episcopal minister, invited Rod to speak at his then church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was there that Rod started saying the most remarkable things to me, my Dad, my brothers, and the rest of the men in the congregation—things that really did change our lives. His main message was that a boy needs his father’s (or father-figure’s) affirmation—his grace—in order to understand the affirmation and grace of his Heavenly Father. This is why a good Christian minister is, for men, nearly always a father-figure. And where the love of the earthly father is not present, Dr. Rod said it is nearly impossible for the son to believe that his Heavenly Father really does love him. Rod spoke to the deepest places in us of the love of our True Father for us—words of profound comfort and release. We immediately started sending tapes of Rod’s talks to friends and loved ones far and wide. This was good news that needed to be heard.

For my brothers and me, one of the most profound things Dr. Rod did was to show that it is OK for us to love our father—that such love is not a sign of weakness, but rather a source of strength. This is important. It means that freedom and maturity come not from the rejection of the father, as worldly wisdom would have it, but from his acknowledgement and reciprocation of our love for him.

The myth is that we are free only when we do not need love—when we are “strong.” The truth is harder, and more profound: only when we are loved are we free. This is hard because we do not finally have control over whether or not we receive love. Thus, we do not have control over our freedom. This truth leaves us fundamentally in a place of weakness. We who would have control over our lives find this conclusion very unsettling. Can anyone really deny that the mind-games we all play in the so-called “battle of the sexes” are nothing more than the attempt to force love? That the underlying assumption in the movie “Swingers” (wonderful as that movie is!) is that love will never be given unless it is forced? Manipulation, my friends, is not love. It is the enemy of love.

Unfortunately, what I am saying here about fathers and sons raises a pretty big problem: what about when we have bad fathers? Unloving, self-involved, impatient, judgmental, cruel fathers? Or—more insidiously—apathetic fathers? Or even dead fathers? How are we to become men if our fathers do not love us they way we need them to? Are we doomed to be the hollow men, the grey men, Fitzgerald’s ashen figures of West Egg, playing video games and watching sports in our “fortress of solitude” until we crumble to dust? No, thank God, we are not. There are two solutions to our dilemma. The first, though real, is provisional and limited. It is but a shadow of the second.

Truth to tell, I believe that we are all like Peter Parker: we are all sons in need of a new and more loving father to replace the one who has inevitably failed us. This is because even the best earthly father cannot be perfect. I myself happen to have a wonderful father—one who is neither cruel nor apathetic nor absent, and who tells me he loves me. But even fathers as wonderful as my own Dad cannot but fail us eventually, and leave wounds that need healing—“For all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

So for us Peter Parkers, wounded and bleeding to one degree or another, the first option is to search for a proxy father; a father-figure. This new father can be a teacher, a coach, a grandfather, or even just an older friend—any older man whom we love and respect. I am a grad student right now, and nowhere is the not-so-subtle male search for a father-figure more obvious than among men in graduate school. We cannot help ourselves: we live and die for the affirmation of our supervisors. The Germans call Ph.D. supervisors “Doctor Fathers”; I believe they are onto something.

Through proxy fathers it is possible in some cases to receive the love and affirmation needed to become an adult; to become a man. But this is an imperfect solution, because, like our natural fathers, father-figures can never be perfect. We can never be sure that he, too, won’t let us down: what if our father-figure dies, like Uncle Ben, just when we need him most? Worse, what if he turns on us for reasons of his own, like Osborne turned on Peter Parker when he became the Green Goblin, or Octavius betrayed him as Doc Ock? We need only look to the recent crisis in the Catholic Church to find non-fiction examples both darker and much closer to home. Important as flesh-and-blood father-figures can be to us in our lives, they can never be the final answer we need, at least not on their own.

Enter Christianity.

It is no coincidence that Jesus’ ministry began with the greatest fatherly affirmation of a son in the history of the world. As Jesus was baptized, a voice came from heaven, speaking simple and mighty words: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well-pleased” (Luke 3:22b; also Matthew 3:17, Mark 1:11). These are the words every boy longs to hear from his father. These are the words without which, in some form or other, no boy can become a man. These are the words that have the power to make us shed our insecurities and our paralyzing fear of women (which is really fear of vulnerability, and therefore rejection) like a snake sloughs off an old and burdensome layer of skin.

Some of you may disagree. You may be thinking that the affirmation of your father is not actually something in which you are particularly interested. You would be wrong. I submit as evidence the profound burden of neediness that we lay at the feet of the women in our lives, and the crucial, troubling, but empirically obvious fact that they are simply not able to give what we demand. It may not immediately be apparent, but it is true time and time and time again. What we boys need are loving fathers. We need to hear the words that Jesus heard.

On first read, however, God’s words to his Son are tantalizing in their power, but crushing in their remoteness from the rest of us. They are tantalizing but remote because God is calling Jesus his beloved Son, with whom he is well-pleased. Not Simeon. I know deep down that there is far too much wrong with me for God ever to speak those amazing, life-giving words to me. Why would he be pleased with my intractable selfishness and small-mindedness? God was pleased with Jesus because Jesus was perfect. Jesus never did wrong. He loved without expectation of love in return. He did not wait for us to give away our hand before he came as an infant into this world of darkness on our behalf. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8b). He made himself utterly and totally vulnerable to us, and we responded with a cold shoulder like none other in history. We did not just look the gift horse in the mouth—we blew it up with a rocket launcher. We have had the arrogance to believe that we can force love; that we can create it from nothing with our pathetic strategies and head-games. Or we have opted out, avoiding love at all costs, even though the world needs it so desperately. We are hollow men, playing hollow games, and we know it. Jesus deserved his Father’s affirmation. We deserve nothing but the ashes in our hands.

I opened this article with a reference to the theological concept of “imputed righteousness.” As I said up there, I think this doctrine is the key to male dating problems in this day and age. I suppose it is worth adding that I think it is the key to all the problems of humanity at all times as well—but that is a secondary issue. Imputed righteousness is a doctrine in Christian theology that says that those who have faith in Christ became perfect in God’s sight at the precise moment that Jesus became sin on the cross. Those who believe are saved from God’s judgment because, when he looks at us, he sees only Jesus’ righteousness (with which he was “well-pleased,” remember?). And, conversely, when he looks at Jesus on the cross, he sees only our unrighteousness. Our goodness before God is based exclusively on a goodness that belonged to Jesus, but which was imputed to us. That is why we say that Jesus “saves” us: he makes us good in God’s sight, and thus rescues us from the damnation we otherwise deserve. The flipside is that, in order to give us his righteousness, Jesus had to take our sinfulness from us and keep it for himself. That is why the Bible says that on the cross Jesus “became sin” and “[became] a curse for us” (2 Cor. 5:21, Gal. 3:13). That is also why he died and descended into Hell—the just punishment for a sinner. The doctrine of imputed righteousness says that it is as if, through the cross of Christ, God took a picture of us and of Jesus, and then turned it into its negative. The light became dark, and the dark light; the bad good and the good bad. Nowhere is this doctrine expressed more clearly than in 2 Cor. 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

The really good news about imputed righteousness is that it means that God’s wonderful, fatherly words to Jesus apply to us as well. He sent Jesus in our place because He loved us so much He desparately wanted to give us the affirmation we need—“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only son…” (John 3:16). Because of our imputed righteousness, given out of love through His Son, the Father can look at us, too, and say, “You are my sons, whom I love; with you I am well-pleased.” Because of what took place on the cross, when our photograph was replaced with its negative, Christianity offers us the loving and perfect Father we boys so desperately need. Where our fathers have been absent, He will be present. Where our fathers have been harsh, He will be forgiving. Where they have been silent, He will speak. And where they have let us down time and time again, he will be our advocate, with his strong right arm, mighty to save. This Father will never leave us, never turn on us, and never cease to let us know how much he loves us. Thanks be to God.

The Christian gospel has the power to turn boys into men. God the Father himself enters into the lives of those who believe in his Son, so that wherever we go, whatever we do, we cannot escape the loving whisper in our ear: “You are my son, whom I love; with you I am well-pleased.” The Father’s voice gives birth to confidence and to security in a man. And it takes away our fear of women, and our need to manipulate them, so that we might be free, at the last, to love them, and to be loved by them. Loved by our Father, we may become heroes—men who actually have something to offer the women around us other than neediness, manipulation, and resentment. Like Spiderman, in the end, even if he got there for all the wrong reasons.

Simeon Zahl ’04, a graduate in History and Literature from Currier House, is currently studying theology at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Eyes Wide Open: A Christian Response to Poverty and Oppression

Yi-An Huang — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 04:11:46 +0000

Lata was fifteen when she was given away for the ostensible purpose of working as a maid in Bombay. Her family was desperately poor and she recalls that “not for one moment did anyone suspect or question what [the buyer] told us.”(1) Her family received about US$360 and was told she would be able to mail money home every month and visit after the first six months. The day she left was the last time she ever saw her parents.

She arrived in the Kamathipura district of Bombay, and was soon to become one of its thirty thousand sex workers. Only fifteen years old, she didn’t understand what was happening.

I saw all of these girls wearing nothing but colored blouses, makeup and skirts, and asked the madam, “What is this?” She told me it was a place for working girls. I still didn’t understand, frightened by the very clothes these women wore. . . . Sapna, the madam, told me that I would be staying with her and ordered me to put on clothes that lay on the floor for me and then stand outside. I began crying and told her I couldn’t stay. She slapped me hard, and I remember I couldn’t stop crying. I told her to let me go, and she looked me straight in the eye and said, “You want to leave, fine. Give me 15,000 rupees and you’re free. Until then, get dressed and start paying back your kurja.(2)

For the next three days, Lata pretended to be sick, listening to the other girls call out to customers on the street. She watched as men and girls traveled in and out of rooms occupied only by a bed. On the third day, the madam lost her patience and asked one of her managers to “break Lata in.” Lata painfully recalls:

I had been sitting in the same corner for days, pretending I was not feeling well, frightened, and wishing Sapna would let me go. Finally Arun came to me and pulled me by my ear, telling me to put on the clothes and stand outside. I was a fifteen-year-old village girl and didn’t know what sex was, let alone prostitution. How could I understand what was going on? He took me to the room with the bed and closed the door and forced me to have sex with him. Afterwards, he said, “Now do you understand?” and laughed and told me to get to work. I remember being silent while the other girls stared at me when I came out. I’m sure they knew what he did. And for the first time I began to accept that there was no way out – I was here to stay.(3)

I read Lata’s story on February 1, 2004 while lounging on a futon in front of the TV. The Superbowl was about to start and someone was singing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” An American flag lit up by bright lights rippled in the wind and filled the 27-inch screen. The abrupt and ironic juxtaposition of this celebration of freedom and prosperity and Lata’s story of oppression and poverty made me want to cry. In the margin of the book, I scribbled “a thirty second commercial in the Superbowl costs $2.3 million.”(4)

Lata’s story is her own, yet there are so many stories just like hers – there is a repetition of the same desperate circumstances and choices, of deception, violence, despair and surrender. There are no accurate statistics, but it is estimated that in the last thirty years, 30 million women and children have been “employed” in forced prostitution.(5) This is not confined to the developing world. Kevin Bales, author of Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, writes that there are 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in bondage in the United States at any given time, often lured to America by promises of freedom and prosperity.(6)

Beyond active oppression, billions more people are victims of structural violence, mired in indescribable, overwhelming poverty. Girls practice survival sex, selling their bodies to stave off starvation or to secure schooling. Families are torn apart by diseases that are easily treatable, but only by medicines that are impossible for them to acquire. 40 million people around the world have HIV/AIDS. Few have access to treatment, and every day 8,000 people waste away, breathing their last while life-saving medicines remain far, far out of reach.(7) Two billion people live on less than $2 per day. Tens of thousands of children die every day from malnourishment. There are millions of individual stories, each person as alive as I am, and just as capable of experiencing joy, love, hope, compassion, pain, agony, and despair. When looked at with eyes wide open, the world can be a dark place.

Sometimes, all this makes me want to shut myself away in an ivory tower. My dorm room becomes my sanctuary; the pale, plaster walls push away the darkness and block out billions of people from my mind. Suffering of such magnitude beggars description, much less comprehension. It is difficult to even begin thinking about it without becoming overwhelmed by despair and depression. What can I do in the face of so much pain and suffering? It’s so much easier to simply stop caring, to stop reading books that make me want to cry and forget that somewhere, in a world beyond my understanding, all of this suffering is taking place. I want to divorce myself from Lata’s story; she is not like me. She might exist, but she is not real. And so I forget, and I go on with my life. I read newspaper accounts of genocide in Sudan, but my eyes skip down to the entertainment section, and I rush out the door excited about the latest Pixar movie, forgetting completely the horrors of Darfur.(8) Gary Haugen, founder of the International Justice Mission, captures this problem when he writes about his experiences during the Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 people were slaughtered over a period of 100 days.(9) He recalls:

Like most Americans in the spring of 1994, I was also starting to see horrible stories in the newspapers about some kind of “tribal warfare” in an African country I had never heard much about. Then I saw pictures on the evening news of bloated bodies floating down a river and heard commentators talking about genocide. Apparently thousands, maybe even millions, of Tutsis were being slaughtered by their Hutu compatriots in a genocidal hysteria sweeping across Rwanda. But like most of the great ugliness transmitted by TV across the world and into my living room, the terror in Rwanda just did not seem real. It seemed true, but not real – not to me. I did not dispute the accuracy of the reports, but they might as well have been pictures from Sojourner on Mars or reports about people who lived in ancient Rome or statistics about how many bazillion other solar systems are in the Milky Way – all true enough, but not real. Not real like my kids when they are sick, not real like my job when I am behind in my work, not real like my neighbors when one of them has been in a car accident, not even real like my Midwestern compatriots when they have been flooded out of their homes.(10)

Haugen later traveled to Rwanda, as part of the UN’s genocide investigation team, and came face to face with survivors that had lost their families. He interviewed two little girls, one with a thick pink scar across her neck, and the other with one across her head. They talked about where they had lived, their favorite animals, the families they used to have, and the neighbors that were now caring for them. The two left the room tugging each other close and whispering. He thought of his two daughters in the United States, and at that moment, it became real to him. Haugen realized that poverty, slavery, disease, and genocide were not merely the troubles of a far-away and misty country. The world of slaughtered parents and scarred orphans was the same world as the more familiar one of iPods and high definition TV. Haugen could no longer turn away from such stories, and the more that I learn, the more I am convicted that, as a Christian, I cannot look away either. Lata’s story is real, and no matter how much I wish it were not, when I close my eyes, she is still there.

I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I believe in his crucifixion and resurrection as the necessary and complete atonement for my sins and the sins of humanity. I believe in salvation by grace alone, the authority and authenticity of the Bible, and the Church as the body of Christ. What then, does it mean for me, as a Christian, to engage the reality of extensive and excruciating poverty and oppression in our world? What does God’s Word say about the darkness that envelops the earth, and what does he enjoin us to do about it?

~~~

Throughout the Bible, it is made clear that the poor and the oppressed have a special place in the heart of God. Catholic social teaching calls this a “preferential option for the poor,” and the idea that God loves the poor extra finds strong Scriptural support, especially in Jesus’ ministry. God could have manifested himself as a powerful Roman governor or an influential priest in the Jewish court, but instead was born in a manger, lived as a humble carpenter, and acted as a servant to all he encountered. As St. Paul writes, “Though he was rich, yet for [our] sakes he became poor” (II Cor. 8:9). When Jesus announced his ministry, he read from Isaiah that “the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). When John the Baptist’s disciplines came to ask Jesus if he was the Messiah, Jesus repeated the same, and replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor” (Matthew 11:4-6). The sign of Jesus the Messiah is ministry that emphasizes service to the poor. If Jesus came today, would we find him preaching in a clean, comfortable suburban church, or shuffling down a dusty, dirt road in the red-light district of Kamathipura, ministering to prostitutes and healing lepers?

Jesus also actively calls us to prioritize the poor as he did. He says, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors… But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed” (Luke 14:12-14). God’s preferential option for the poor is seen even clearer in the Epistle of James, where St. James writes that not only should we not favor the rich as the world does, but asks rhetorically, “Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?” (James 2:5-7) God’s preferential option for the poor says that God gives an extra measure of grace to the poor, and challenges us to care extra for those who are marginalized, because they are the ones who are blessed. The sick, the poor and the oppressed are where Jesus’ ministry started, and we are exhorted not to forget them. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops recognizes this, stating boldly and unambiguously: “Our parish communities are measured by how they serve ‘the least of these’ in our parish and beyond its boundaries: the hungry, the homeless, the sick, those in prison, the stranger… A parish cannot really proclaim the gospel if its message is not reflected in its own community life.”(11)

But, we might ask, does Jesus really care so much for the materially poor, or is he merely talking about the spiritually poor? Many people point to the Beatitudes, where Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,” with no indication given of material poverty (Matt. 5:3-6). In any event, for many of us, the “blessing” of material poverty is perhaps one we would be happy never to receive, and in fact, is one that we fear and work hard to avoid. Is our responsibility to serve the materially poor quite so clear, then, as we had thought? The portrait of Jesus as a social activist seems lacking. While he reacts strongly against money changers in the temple court, he has little to say about the injustices of Roman society, from slavery to the sexual exploitation of young boys. By this reading, it seems that Jesus’ primary purpose was redemption and reconciliation of humanity to God, and while helping the poor is a powerful expression of love, it is not a necessary component of authentic faith like prayer, fellowship, or confession. Most of us are not perpetrators of injustice, nor do we cheat others in order to make money—so poverty and injustice aren’t really our responsibilities, right? Christians are called to believe in Jesus and to pursue God: if we also feel called by God to seek justice or help the poor, that’s a personal spiritual calling, but we’re not all called in that way, are we?

A deeper look into Scripture shows that, in fact, God cares profoundly about how we respond, or do not respond, to the poor and the oppressed. The language used is actually so strong that I wonder if complacency and inaction in the face of injustice and poverty is not just a minor fault, but a sin that will be judged as severely as any of the others we worry about so much. Proverbs 24:11-12 says, “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it? Will he not repay each person according to what he has done?” Jesus exhorts us in the same way and makes it eminently clear that we are judged with regard to how we treat the most vulnerable in society:

Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’ They will also answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ (Matthew 26:41-46)

A preferential option for the poor is not optional. It is in the poor that Jesus dwells, and blindness to oppression, poverty, and suffering is itself a rejection of Jesus. The picture Jesus paints is chilling, for if we persistently ignore and reject him, he says he will ignore and reject us.

Scripture further supports the critical role of the pursuit of justice and care for the poor in our spiritual lives. While sometimes it seems like Christians are defined by religious activity such as prayer, fasting, and going to church, the prophets in the Bible are adamant in their assertion that justice is a necessary component of worshipping God. In the time of Amos, Israel and Judah were experiencing a period of great prosperity and military success, and while they continued to worship God and offer sacrifices, they quickly forgot the poor and suffering in their societies. The prophet Amos harshly condemned their shallow religious piety, declaring on behalf of the Lord:

I hate, I despise your religious feasts; I cannot stand your assemblies. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never failing stream. (Amos 5:21-24)

The prophet Isaiah carried the same message. God speaks clearly to Israel that justice for the oppressed and help for the poor are critical components of authentic worship:

Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter – when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not turn away from your own flesh and blood? (Isaiah 58:6-7)

Scripture speaks with a clarity, potency, and authority that I cannot hope to attain. Our worship to God becomes empty without concern for the “least” in our world. As Mother Theresa said, “Do we share with the poor, just like Jesus shared with us?”(12) We are called to love our neighbors. We are called to care, and we are called to action.

~~~

So, what’s next? God calls us to care for the poor and the oppressed, but how are we to care? Each of our responses will be unique and personal, and God calls each of us to love our neighbors in different ways. As such, the following suggestions are by no means meant to be exhaustive or required; they are merely my limited personal reflections on how we can serve the poor as part of our worship. My hope is not that this would be a to-do list, but instead that it would be a starting point for struggling and striving toward a fuller manifestation of God’s love for the poor.(13)

First, because it is so hard to love people whom we cannot see and do not know, it is important to have a direct connection with the poor. Interacting with people who are poor can put us outside of our comfort zone, and can stretch and grow our hearts to be more compassionate and to love the way God loves, not the way the world loves. Furthermore, often, it is not our presence that blesses the poor, but theirs that blesses us with a perspective that is, in many ways, closer to that of Christ. Connecting with the poor could mean taking a homeless person out for a meal, volunteering at a homeless shelter, participating in an urban plunge, or going overseas on a short-term missions trip. Sometimes we do not truly know something until we see it with our eyes and touch it with our hands—we should step firmly into the world and live among all God’s children.

It is also important that we educate ourselves about global poverty and injustice. There is no shortage of topics, and resources abound: newspapers, magazines, periodicals, books, movies, and the Internet. Awareness is important because structural oppression, violence, and poverty are often very complicated issues, and we need to critically evaluate each situation to ensure that our efforts are not counterproductive. For instance, in the early 1990’s, the US Congress considered passing the Child Labor Deterrence Act that would have authorized punitive actions against companies benefiting from child labor. On its surface, this bill seemed to be a victory for overworked, underpaid children, but the reality was much different. At the threat of legislation, a German garment maker laid off 50,000 child workers, thousands of whom were later found to have become prostitutes, turned to crime, or starved to death. We ought not to react only with moral indignation, but instead should dig deeper to understand the true effects of our actions.

Third, we can engage the world by being more generous with our money. Christians have historically given more to charity than non-religious people, and Christian organizations are at the forefront of helping the poor around the world through organizations like the International Justice Mission, World Relief, Catholic Charities, and many, many more. However, when Christian contributions are considered as a percentage of our immense wealth, our actions have been nothing less than shameful. In 2002, church members gave only 2.62 percent of their income to charity, with only 0.38 percent going to activities beyond their congregation.(14) This compares woefully with the Biblical command to give ten percent of our earnings to the work of God. My pastor remarked that 92 percent of the world’s wealth is in the hands of Christians, and it fills my heart with sorrow that we, the body of Christ, have not given generously of our riches, but have instead selfishly spent the vast majority of our wealth on personal comforts and pleasure. St. John’s exhortation to us seems to be largely forgotten: “If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth (1 John 3:17-18).” We should not trust in our own riches, but should instead allow God to use our money to help the poor. We should give generously. The question is not how much of our money are we willing to give; it is how much of God’s money are we going to keep.

Fourth, God’s heart for the poor and oppressed ought to influence our advocacy. The word “evangelical” elicits a remarkably negative reaction from most non-Christians, for we sadly are known most for our opposition to gay marriage and abortion. While I do not denigrate the importance of those issues, I believe that they have too often been emphasized to the detriment of issues of social justice. Why should we care so much about abortion, and so little about global poverty and oppression, which also involve life and death? The example of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 is often cited as an example of how God responds to sin, specifically with reference to homosexual sex. Yet in the Book of Ezekiel, we read that Sodom’s principal sin was her material wealth and neglect of the poor. Ezekiel declares, “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen (Ezekiel 16:49-52).” The prophet Isaiah calls the Israelites “rulers of Sodom” and “people of Gomorrah,” not due to homosexual sex, but because of their meaningless worship and neglect of justice (Isaiah 1:10-17). Isaiah then exhorts them to “Seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.” A survey of Scripture reveals God calling again and again to care for the poor and to pursue justice, while homosexuality is mentioned only infrequently. Our advocacy ought to reflect God’s priorities—we should not forget God’s teachings on life and sexuality, but we ought to cry out on behalf of the poor and the oppressed just as loudly, and probably even more loudly.

Finally, we can care for the poor by considering how God might use our career choices to help the poor and oppressed. We are, of course, not all called to be medical missionaries in impoverished rural villages, but I fear that most of us do not even have ears to hear God’s call to serve the poor. Our primary motivation should not be comfort, security, or prestige, nor should it be our own personal interests and happiness, but rather an honest desire to do the work God has called us to, with a willingness to sacrifice our ambitions and desires. It is a dangerous and false belief that God wants us to do the things that we think will make us happy. God desires our joy, but he desires our joy in him. The psalmist writes, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart (Ps. 37:4).” Jesus does not promise comfort or an easy life; instead, he calls us to faithfulness and says, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it (Matt. 17:24-25).” Will we follow after Jesus? Will we care about what he cares about? Today, we as a generation have historically unrivaled influence over the condition of the poorest in the world. If we unite in a commitment to serve the poor, even at expense to ourselves, I believe strongly that it will transform us, and will transform our world.

~~~

There is great darkness in our world, and we must open wide our eyes and confront it. Lata’s story is only one among millions: innocent people are tortured and murdered all around the world. Children die of starvation, for simple lack of nourishment and clean water. The immensity of suffering is impossible to capture or comprehend, and it is easy to despair when confronting the magnitude of poverty and oppression in our world. It is easy to sink into depression when the truth hits home, and the nameless, faceless statistics turn into people – beloved children of God no different, and no less loved than you or me. It is hard to love Lata while feeling so helpless to change her life or impact the lives of thousands of girls like her. Despite all of the possibilities for action, when faced with suffering of such enormous magnitude, we are still tempted to ask: “What can I do? What impact could I possibly have on a world so full of pain?”

The good news is that God has not called us to save the world—in the end, that will be His doing. In our lifetimes, he has only called us to be faithful. God wants us to respond to his voice and say, “Here I am. Send me!” (Isaiah 6:8). He is calling us to come forward with what we have, even if it is no more than the widow’s mite (Luke 21:2) or a few fish and loaves of bread (Matt. 14:18). We are to do what we can, and trust God to do the rest. We may never bring an end to suffering in this world, but while we are here, we are to be salt and light in this broken world: to sincerely love and earnestly pray for all who are suffering, both in our backyards and in the farthest corners of the globe. Let us step out, then, into the world that God has called us to serve, to do justice, and to love mercy, until the words of the prophet Amos are fulfilled: “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

Farmer, Paul. Infections and Inequalities: The modern plagues. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1999. p. 73.
Ibid, p. 74.
Ibid, p. 75.
International Justice Mission (www.ijm.org), a Christian relief organization that works to fight bonded labor, illegal detention, and forced prostitution through casework and education estimates that it costs them around $400 to free someone like Lata who is being forced illegally to be a prostitute.
Gupta, Ruchira. “Trafficking of children for prostitution and UNICEF response.” Asia Society, Social Issues Program. 2003. Available online: http://www.asiasource.org/asip/gupta_nature.cfm.
Vitagliano, Ed. “Slavery continues in the form of forced prostitution.” Agape Press. April 15, 2004. Available online: http://www.crosswalk.com/news/1257639.html.
For a compelling look into the AIDS pandemic, listen to an interview with Stephen Lewis, the UN Ambassador for HIV/AIDS in Africa at: http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2003/200302/20030212.html.
For documentation of the genocide and horrors in Darfur, read the Human Rights Watch reports at: http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/darfur/
For a comprehensive account of the Rwandan genocide, from the history, to the 100 days of killing, to the aftermath, I highly recommend We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch.
Haugen, Gary. Good News About Injustice. Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1999. p.24.
United States Catholic Conference 1993. “Communities of Salt and Light: Reflections on the Social Mission of the Parish.” Approved by the Administrative Board in September 1993 and by the Catholic bishops of the United States at their General Meeting in November 1993. Available online: http://www.nccbuscc.org/sdwp/saltandlight.htm.
González-Balado, José Luis, ed. Mother Theresa: In my own words. New York, NY: Gramercy Books, 1996. p. 23.
For another look at how to engage with the world as an affluent Christian, see Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ronald J. Sider.
Empty Tomb, Inc. “The State of Church Giving through 2002.” 14 th edition. 2004. Available Online: http://www.emptytomb.org/research.php.

Yi-An Huang ’05 is an Economics concentrator in Kirkland House.

G.K. Chesterton and the Joy of Living

Jordan D. Teti — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 04:10:56 +0000

Christians live by creeds. A Catholic, for example, follows the Apostle’s Creed as a summation of his faith. And, of course, the most basic set of principles that bind us all is the Ten Commandments, which forms the foundation for all Christian moral teaching. In so many ways, we find ourselves in a world of rules—we must go to church on Sundays; we must avoid sin; we must fear the Lord. But one of the unwritten rules of Christianity often escapes us—that human life is a sacred gift from God that must be enjoyed. Although we remember this every once in a while—for example, when a beautiful sunrise takes our breath away—most of the time, we don’t know what it is to truly enjoy our day-to-day lives. The true joy of living, unfortunately, is often swallowed up by the banality of following endless creeds, lists of rules, and by the pursuit of empty pleasures that never, in the end, give us any real joy.

G.K. Chesterton, however, believed that the “creeds” and “lists of rules” that so many of us associate with spiritual deadness can, when properly understood, lead us to a radically new appreciation of the joy of life. The problem, Chesterton thought, is that too few of us truly appreciate what we have been given—the deep-down wildness and beauty of life. Life, Chesterton believed, is at bottom a magical thing, which is nowhere better described than in fairy-stories. As he put it, “ The supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born… by the act of being born, we step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words… we step into a fairy-tale.”

This world, Chesterton tells us, is a strange and wondrous place, containing beauties far too deep for words, of which our jaded souls have sadly forgotten. We have taken beautiful things—like friendship, and true love—and have devalued them with the carelessness and monotony of modern life. But the “creeds” and “rules” of Christianity, says Chesterton, are really at heart a way of reminding us of the lost beauty of life: just as no one will guzzle well-aged wine by the bottle, but instead will savor it one glass at a time; so the Christian will not commit adultery, but will remain faithful to the one whom he loves. And so, in the paradoxical manner for which Chesterton is famous, he reminds us that the seemingly onerous rules of Christianity were not meant to devalue life and its pleasures, but instead to fill us anew with the true joy of living.

“The Apostle of Common Sense”

G.K. Chesterton was a turn-of-the-century Catholic apologist, moderately famous in his own day and ours for his celebrated Father Brown mysteries, as well as for several minor Christian classics, including Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. In his native England, he had built a reputation for himself as an incorrigibly gregarious and contrarian gadfly, engaging in numerous popular debates and scuffles with such literary eminences as George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, and H.G. Wells. He was well-known in Britain as the Catholic Church’s most articulate defender, and even today, it’s difficult to find a priest who doesn’t know his Chesterton backwards and frontwards. C.S. Lewis, the revered author of the Chronicles of Narnia, largely credits Chesterton with his conversion to Christianity. As Lewis later wrote, “He had more sense than all the other moderns put together… [when] I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, for the first time I saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense.” In what is perhaps his most famous work, Orthodoxy, he described the path that brought him from agnosticism to Christianity:

I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers… How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?

Chesterton concluded that Christian theology was the answer to the question. The Church, he claimed, gave the world a set of principles and an institution to feel at home in, while the principles themselves keep us constantly amazed by the world in which we live. Moreover, without Christianity, our world would eventually become so boringly normal that no one would be able to appreciate it. He asserted, at the time, that he would never get the chance to write the sort of romance novel he had described. But in 1912, he did, with the short novel Manalive. The book is really an extension of Orthodoxy, in that it explains how our earthly lives can be filled with astonishment and excitement. Finding true Christianity, he argues, is really quite a lot like discovering that New South Wales is really Old South Wales—it is like coming home again, and knowing the place for the first time. Christians, he says, can paradoxically come to a real appreciation of the wonderful beauty and mystery of life in this world, “by breaking the conventions, and keeping the Commandments.”

The Great Wind of God

Manalive’s humorous plot revolves around Innocent Smith, a middle-aged man who literally is thrown by a great gust of wind into a boarding house with eight disillusioned tenants. There, his antics—climbing trees, jumping over walls, picnicking on the roof, and so on— transform the lives of its inhabitants, making them each feel like every day was their birthday. What previously had been mundane became purposeful, even unique. Six of the characters decide to get married, in the span of a day. The wonder of it all is not that Smith is telling them to do all this, but that in the process of trying to rationalize his actions, they discover and interpret his message. In such a scene, Innocent’s main supporter, Michael Moon, tells the others: “I don’t think [sending Smith to an asylum] is necessary. Because [we’re all] in one now. Why, didn’t you know? I thought we all really knew.” In classic Chestertonian style, Moon realizes that “all habits are bad habits. Madness doesn’t come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.” This method of learning—self-discovery— is intended to signal that these truths are all hidden within each of us. We need only, he says, to adjust our outlooks to find them.

But all the fun stops when Smith unexpectedly fires a gun at a scientist, claiming that he did so only “to give life,” not to take it. Why would Smith, who had become the most beloved man in the house, do such a thing? The book turns into a sort of mock trial that sets out to prove why Smith is, in a sense, “innocent” of attempted murder, polygamy, desertion, and burglary. Michael Moon defends Smith, while an American doctor serves as the prosecution. They read collected affidavits in support of their sides, and we, along with the book’s characters, embark on a quest to solve the riddle of Innocent Smith’s life, without any guidance from Smith himself. In the finest Chestertonian (and, indeed, Christian) tradition, the book becomes a quest to find out what we already know.

Step One: Definitive Death, the Will to Live, or Enjoyment of Existence?

If Chesterton’s paradoxes are confusing the first time you read them, then you are probably reading them correctly—they need quite a bit of explanation in order to gain an understanding of what Chesterton is getting at. This happens in the course of the mock trial, in which we learn how to radically live and appreciate life.

In the early 1900s, as is the case today, many among the intellectual elite regarded death as the end of man’s existence. They fatalistically believed that the purpose of one’s life is to, in the end, die. In effect, there would be no enduring meaning to human life. Good deeds, pleasure, friendship, and other such banalities were “trivial and soon tasteless bribes to bring us into a torture chamber”— death. They consequently believed God was also dead; nonexistent, since any type of immortality was impossible. They dreaded looking up at the stars at night, seeing only the vast immensity of the cosmic machine— “the universe black with white spots.”

It is no wonder, then, that Chesterton begins Smith’s life story with his college days in Cambridge, specifically taking us back to a discussion with a famed professor of his, Dr. Emerson Eames. As a young student, Smith doubted that there was a purpose to life, and so became paralyzed with fear. He desperately reached for some explanation for the “vulgar people who want to enjoy life as they enjoy gin,” yet can never find happiness. Hoping to find an answer to his burning questions, Smith brought his troubles to his professor, Dr. Eames. The professor, unfortunately, was not much help: he patiently explained to Smith that if there really was a merciful God, he would strike us dead immediately, because human life is both purposeless and painful, somewhat akin to a puppy slowly drowning in water. “All thinkers are pessimist thinkers,” Dr. Eames told him.

Unfortunately for Dr. Eames, Smith understood him perfectly—all too well, as a matter of fact. After reflecting for a bit on the professor’s words, Smith removed a gun from his coat pocket and pointed it directly at his teacher’s head. Wildly brandishing his gun and blathering on about the futility of life, Smith forced Eames out onto the balcony, on which the professor clung to a gargoyle, holding on for dear life. Making sense in a mad sort of way, Smith told his professor that he was doing him a favor by putting him out of his misery: “It’s not a thing I’d do for everyone!” he shouted. “The only cure for life,” he told Eames, “is death”: his macabre yet brutally logical interpretation of his professor’s philosophy. But then, before he finished his mad justification for murder, something astonishing happened: the sun began to rise. The soft, yellow light fell onto the streets, rooftops, and spires of Cambridge, transforming the previously grim landscape into a sort of fairyland. “The copper ornaments, green enamel, sea-blue slates of a church roof, and the scarlet tiles of a villa had something oddly individual and significant about them… and arrested the rolling eyes of Emerson Eames as he looked round on the morning and accepted it as his last.”

For the first time in Eames’s life, he began to care about more than just the outward appearance of the halls and houses of Cambridge: now, he cared about the people who lived in them as well. He saw them all, as it were, in a new light. Quite unexpectedly, he sang aloud: “I thank the goodness and the grace/ That on my birth have smiled/ And perched me on this curious place/ A happy English child.” Something happened to Smith, too, who decided not to kill his professor after all—instead, he ordered Eames to “thank God for the villas and vulgar people and puddles and pots and pans and sticks and rags.” Eames wholeheartedly did so, after which Smith (an excellent marksman) fired two shots that whizzed by Eames’s head, put down his gun, and let his professor go.

In that moment of sunrise, both Smith and Eames discovered something new about life: the sheer joy of existence itself. Before that moment, Eames had not loved his life; rather, he had stubbornly clung to it because he feared death. But Eames realized that true living meant more than merely avoiding death: instead, it meant choosing life. As he awaited his imminent death there on the balcony, his eyes shone to see, really see, for the first time, everyday beauties that he had never before noticed: “gray clouds that turned pink, and the little gilt clock in the crack between the houses.” Smith confessed that if he had never seen that gleam in his professor’s eyes, he would have certainly gone ahead with his plan, killing both himself and his teacher, as he saw nothing in life that he would have missed. And so, Smith and Eames went to the brink of death together, and discovered that there was something about life that made it worth the living.

After his brush with death, Eames raced around the streets of Cambridge, noticing all of the wonderful little things that he had never noticed before—he spent hours, for example, scrutinizing a few villas that, inexplicably, had spotted blinds on the windows. Neither Smith nor Eames any longer gave a thought to defining death: rather, they merely concluded that death (whatever it is) keeps humanity young, as knowing that we will have to one day face it forces us to love and truly appreciate life. In this way, they reasoned, God created death to keep our hearts youthful at this, the beginning of our eternal human journey. And so, in this rather odd fashion, both Eames and Smith came eventually to Christianity, through the barrel of a gun and a sunrise. Joy, they discovered, was at the core of existence, and so they concluded that the Christian message of hope, love, and eternal life just had to be true.

This, of course, is meant to be a fantastical example. Chesterton does not mean for us to take to shooting at people in order to make them happy. Instead, Innocent Smith serves as an example of how to break free of the monotony and meaninglessness of modern life, radically reinventing the humdrum reality of this world and seeing, back behind it all, the God who created it in the first place. We too, Chesterton says, can live life as if we were clinging to a gargoyle four stories up with a pistol pointed at our heads. In short, we can come to love the beauty of life so much that we would hate to leave it. In this way, death, paradoxically, can keep us young, and instead of clinging fearfully to life, we can choose it, merely for the joy of living. Chesterton never says it better:

I don’t deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough to fear death… Until a pistol-barrel was poked under their very noses they never knew they had been born. For ages looking up in eternal perspective it might be true that life is learning to die. But for these [people] it was just as true that death was their only chance of learning to live.”

Step Two: Going Around the World to Get Home

As that dawn in Cambridge began, so did a new life for Innocent Smith. He decided that he would become a gift-giver, surprising the world into joy, and “hold[ing] a pistol to the head of the Modern Man.” This is what he did to the doctor at the boarding house, which spurred the trial. But another charge brought against him was desertion; that he abandoned his wife and kids to pursue his own interests abroad. On a sudden whim, it seemed, Innocent Smith had run out the door of his house shouting that he would find a better wife with “redder hair” and a better house with a “finer” garden. For any normal human being, this would have been quite good evidence of desertion; for Smith, however, it was all part of a larger plan.

Innocent Smith began taking “the round road” home that day. He decided that in order to truly value his wife, children, house, and garden, he would have to find out what it felt like to really have a home. In other words, he needed to break through the mere labels and figures that are “home and family,” and learn what it feels like to want to come back to something. In typical humorous Chesterton fashion, Smith does this by interacting with people he meets along the way, from France, Russia, China, and California, and discussing with them the meaning of home and heaven.

The purpose of his journey, he tells the Frenchman, is to undergo a revolution, but in the sense of revolving: “like every repentance,” a return. He asserts, “I’m going to turn the world upside down, too. I’m going to walk upside down in the cursed upside down land…But my revolution, unlike the earth’s, will end up in the holy, happy place, the celestial, incredible place—the place where we were before.” Just like Dr. Eames’s life was transformed by seeing Cambridge in a new light, Smith wanted to see his home and his family, too, for what they really were.

Finding himself a bit later on in Russia—another country that knew something of revolutions—he is questioned about his intentions. If he has already broken with convention, the Russian asks him, and freed himself from his attachment to his home, then why shouldn’t he take greater advantage of his newfound freedom? As the Russian tells him, “you have a right to leave it all behind, like the clippings of your hair, or the parings of your nails. Having once escaped, you have the world before you.” Smith, however, would have nothing of it. In fact, the Russian’s question makes him finally realize how terribly wrong it is for a man to run away from his wife: it is very dangerous, he concludes, because then “nobody can find him, and we all want to be found.” The Russian disagrees quite strongly with his, arguing that all the “most original modern thinkers”—Ibsen, Gorki, Nietzsche, and Shaw—“would all say rather that what we want most is to be lost…to break with the past and belong to the future.” This, clearly, is a fundamental philosophical claim that challenges the tenets of Christianity. In light of this, Smith’s journey takes on new layers of meaning, because he is testing the real value of Eden in our lives—a sacred, meaningful homeland. Is it really so, Chesterton asks, that it is in human nature to want to leave our homes, and become, as the Russian says, lost? Clearly, Chesterton believes it is not, and argues that the best way to prove it isn’t so is to leave home and find out.

Before leaving home, Innocent Smith was unable to feel a real connection with his family. Although he did honestly love his wife and children, “they seemed not only distant but unattainable… [and] I seemed like a cold ghost.” That is why he wanted to become a revolutionary: “to become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile.” And this revolution, unlike those of the French and the Russians, prevailed in the end. As he grew closer to England, he desired his family and his homeland more and more. As a result, he realized that “God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.” God gave us houses and gardens and families to love so that we would not be tempted to worship “eternity…the largest of the idols—the mightiest of the rivals of God.” Standing on a precipice in the Sierras, Innocent Smith finally realizes that the abyss of nothingness below him is the precise opposite of familiarity. We have homes, he concluded, so that we can “love one spot and serve it…so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries; that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere; is something and not anything.” Having a home to come back to, Smith discovered, is a basic human desire, making up an essential part of who we are.

Of course, loving one’s family and home is not necessarily a Christian virtue. But oftentimes, Chesterton surmised, we all fail—believers and non-believers alike—to recognize the true value of what we have been given. Like Innocent Smith, we can love our families and our homes, yet not truly appreciate them. And the best way to cure this, Chesterton said, is to “leave” them—perhaps not by really traipsing around the globe, but at least by making a concerted effort to see them in a new light. All too often, we fail to appreciate what we have until we are in danger of losing it—the challenge, Chesterton says, is learning how to appreciate what we have before we lose it, whether to death or mere boredom: our homes, our families, our wives, our husbands, our friends, our children, and, indeed, our lives.

Manalive!

These weren’t Innocent Smith’s only bizarre actions. He broke into his own house, and was charged with burglary. He remarried his own wife on several occasions, and was accused of polygamy. Odd as these actions may be, you will by now have guessed why he did them—in order to truly appreciate what he already had, instead of futilely longing for what he did not need. And he did them, in a sense, to feel the joy of the Commandments of God: not to covet your neighbor’s goods, but your own goods; and not to covet your neighbor’s wife, but to instead love your own wife. By breaking into his own house and drinking his own cheap wine, he felt the thrill of having what he already had. And by pretending not to be married, he reminded himself that he was. And what a joy it is to be married, to have your own home, and your own goods, and to be alive! Smith followed the Commandments in the most “innocent” way possible for anyone on earth.

Yet, even now, he may seem like something of a madman to you. He did, after all, destroy nearly all our preconceived notions of normalcy, imparting the surprise and excitement of vigorous life to what we are used to thinking of as boring old “creeds” and “rules.” But this, in fact, is the way that God should be followed—with exhilaration and a sense of joyful mystery. Modern life, all too often, has forgotten about exhilaration and mystery. Even those things (indeed, especially those things) that were once pursued as precious and sacred have been devalued, and now appear commonplace and pedestrian to our jaded and wearied eyes. We are left, finally, no longer appreciating what we have, but instead eternally longing for what we do not have, seeking to satisfy an unquenchable thirst in our souls. Paradoxically, Chesterton suggests, this is because we have lost our appreciation for what we have been given, thinking as we do that such “simple things” are too backwards and unsophisticated for we modern men and women. In this context, Chesterton would argue, “keeping the rules” can actually be wilder and altogether more adventurous than breaking them. It is precisely this that Chesterton, wearied of modern “sophistication,” tried in his own life, and it is because of this that he discovered the true joy of living, and, unexpectedly, the reality of God and the love of Christ. Chesterton discovered a Joy that permeated and filled the entire world; indeed, that was so deep and strong as to have come from another world altogether. As Innocent Smith declared, “You live by customs, but we by creeds. You are steadfast as the trees, because you do not believe. I am as fickle as the tempest because I do believe.” And this last paradox, Chesterton would have us believe—this fickle tempest-life brought about by the sheer joy of living—is, indeed, Christianity.

Jordan Teti ’08, Fiction and Poetry Editor, is a Government concentrator in Wigglesworth.

Dismantling the Bomb

Benjamin Woodruff — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 04:09:54 +0000

After more than 20 years and 75 million records sold, U2 still has some surprises up their sleeves. Their newest album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, is their sixth to open at the top of the charts, has been lauded by a majority of music critics, and will most likely go down in history as one of their top five best records. Some critics, however, are asking the question: what exactly is it about this album that makes it so praiseworthy? Might it be the case that the album is being judged more on the basis of U2’s stellar reputation, rather than by the music itself? Few rock stars this side of John Lennon have been as deified as U2’s Bono; some wonder if even the critics have been blinded by his legendary charisma. Past U2 albums have been characterized by an almost prophetic concern for social justice and global peace; Atomic Bomb, by contrast, hardly even touches on politics. Has Bono, tired of his endless crusading, decided to make a feel-good, “safe” album in this politically charged time? Some critics have accused U2 of doing so, becoming complacent in their old age, but this charge actually couldn’t be further from the truth. With Atomic Bomb, U2 has created an album with incredible spiritual depth; perhaps more depth than any of their albums to date. Most commentators have by and large missed what U2 is trying to say with their latest album because they have overlooked Bono’s Christianity. But How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, by design, is impossible to understand without it.

My first time listening through the album, I found myself almost agreeing with U2’s more negative critics. Although Atomic Bomb isn’t a bad album by any measure, at first glance, it seems to musically be not much more than an above-average pop rock album. Some of the music is great, but on the whole, the album simply doesn’t measure up to past masterpieces like Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby. The Edge is still on top of his game, notably with his solo in “All Because of You.” He’s still writing his signature riffs, and especially with songs like “Miracle Drug,” reminds us of earlier classics like “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “With or Without You.” But sadly, more often, the music is more pedestrian than one might have hoped for from a band like U2. For example, while earlier songs (“Where the Streets Have No Name”; “New Year’s Day”) utilized the piano in interesting ways, the keyboards in Atomic Bomb will sound strikingly familiar to the majority of listeners. “City of Blinding Lights” (written in honor of post-9/11 New York City) may be lyrically moving, but is nothing special musically; the song reminded me immediately of contemporary Christian worship songs (e.g., not very musically innovative). One song, “A Man and a Woman,” does have an interesting Spanish-acoustic feel; other than that, there is nothing about the music itself that is worthy of the critical praise that Atomic Bomb is currently receiving.

But those customers who purchased the album’s special edition also received a small book, which is a critical part of understanding the album. The book, which is quite eclectic and erratic—full of odd scrawls written by Bono, pasted-on photographs, and so on, in a sort of mix of collage and diary—begins with a verse from Hindu scripture, famously quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer at the detonation of the first atomic bomb: “I am death, the mighty destroyer of worlds.” On the opposite page, as one might expect, there is a picture of what seems to be a mushroom cloud. Throughout the rest of the book, Bono systematically reclaims the ominous phrase, using each word to symbolize a different characteristic of Christ. “I am,” for example, is reclaimed as the very name of God, “I AM,” as found in the Book of Exodus. He continues to take each part of the verse, piece by piece, transforming it from a statement of death and destruction into a reaffirmation of our need for God’s love. The book ends with another famous quotation, this time from Mahatma Gandhi: “We must become the change we want to see in the world.” This quote is also parceled out page by page, but in reverse, so that when seen together, the “world” from both quotes coincides. The answer to the question, then—how do you dismantle an atomic bomb?—is finally given. Asked this question by an interviewer, Bono gave a very simple answer: “Love. With love.” The atomic bomb, which epitomizes the darkness in mankind which is “the destroyer of worlds,” can only finally be dismantled by transforming the darkness within our souls into light. We must become the change we want to see in the world, but we cannot do it on our own—only God’s love, in the end, is able to transform us. “Only true love,” Bono sings, “can keep beauty innocent.”

Once one realizes this by looking through the book, it becomes clear that the album itself has the same message and also follows the same pattern—from darkness and confusion to divine love and transformation. The album’s first track, “Vertigo,” (its biggest single so far), is a loud cacophony of noise and confusion, intended to re-create the ambience of a crowded nightclub. But even there, Bono sings that he sees a girl with “Jesus ‘round the neck”; a reminder of peace and love even amidst the confusion of the club. His message becomes even clearer in the next track, “Miracle Drug”; a song filled with direct references to Christian scripture. “I was a stranger, you took me in,” he sings, and cries out “God, I need your help tonight.” On the track “Love and Peace or Else,” he surveys our war-torn world, and asks, “Where is the love?” Love, he says, is found in God: “because of You,” he sings, “I am.” The album ends with the daring 21 st-century rock hymn, “Yahweh,” completing the album’s journey from the confusion of “Vertigo” to the peaceful worship of God found in the last track. He asks God to “take these shoes, click-clacking down some dead-end street… take this soul, and make it sing.” Although he acknowledges that there is “always pain before a child is born”—that this world, as the Irish natives of U2 know so well, is racked by war and suffering—he still chooses to place his trust in the God who is Love, who promises to come again one glorious day and make all things new. “Still,” he sings, “I’m waiting for the dawn.” This, finally, is where Bono leaves us—like him, waiting for Christ to come.

Benjamin Woodruff ’08 is a Government and Philosophy concentrator in Grays.

Frodo’s Gospel

Laura Shortill — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 04:08:02 +0000

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle Earth. By Bradley J. Birzer.

The Gospel According to Tolkien: Vision of the Kingdom in Middle Earth. By Ralph C. Wood.

I’m writing a bit too late to break the news that J.R.R. Tolkien, was, in fact, a devout Catholic, who firmly believed in the eternal truth of the Christian faith. In 1896 Mabel Tolkien was widowed and left with two boys, John Ronald and Hilary, to raise by herself, as neither her own family nor her in-laws were willing to provide her or her sons financial support because of her choice to convert to Catholicism. By 1904, Mabel died from complications arising from diabetes, and the boys were left in the care of Father Morgan, their mother’s friend and confessor. J.R.R. Tolkien later wrote that he considered his mother a martyr for the faith; relinquishing that faith would have been unimaginable to him.

But while the religious nature of the man is beyond question, the religious nature of his writings is still fair game. Tolkien’s writings have recently enjoyed a renaissance due to Peter Jackson’s film trilogy based on The Lord of the Rings. Some movie critics have conjectured that the trilogy struck such a strong chord in the U.S. because of the story’s timeless central conflict: the struggle between good and evil. But although Tolkien wrote that “The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally religious and Catholic work,” the Christian nature of Tolkien’s works was overlooked until quite recently. Tolkien’s legacy was greatly influenced by the fantasy genre, filled with grizzled wizards, loin-cloth-wearing heroes, and buxom elfin maidens that followed in his wake. As an unfortunate result, the serious side of Tolkien’s writings was all too often forgotten. Recent scholarship, however, has brought to light the Christian foundations of Tolkien’s masterwork. Bradley Birzer, author of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, and Ralph C. Wood, author of The Gospel According to Tolkien, both argue in their books that, as Tolkien claimed, the theological, ethical, and moral underpinnings of Middle Earth are Christian at heart. Both authors draw upon works outside of The Lord of the Rings, such as the Silmarillion and “The Debate of Finrod and Andreth,” as well as Tolkien’s academic essays and personal letters. Both authors examine Tolkien’s views on divinity and evil in the context of the Christian faith he loved and the pre-Christian Norse lore he studied.

In Sanctifying Myth, a short analysis of Tolkien’s life and writings, Birzer uses the biographical method of literary analysis, which means that his book is neither an in-depth biography nor an in-depth literary criticism. The book is therefore quite well-suited to the casual Tolkien reader who has not read much more than The Lord of the Rings, and desires a quick introduction to the books’ background. Birzer allows Tolkien to speak for himself through extensive quoting of his letters and essays, as well as through reporting numerous anecdotes about the Oxford don. The book is well researched; Birzer’s extensive citations allow any curious reader to find the works upon which he draws. The more serious Tolkien scholar, however, will find Birzer’s book slightly repetitive, since the author summarizes many of Tolkien’s lesser known books, as well as the arguments of well-known commentaries (e.g., Barry Gordon’s interpretation of Gandalf, Frodo, and Aragorn as fulfilling the Old Testament roles of prophet, priest, and king).

Birzer’s thesis is that Tolkien’s goal in the creation of his mythologies was to make a story that, as it were, “baptized” the best aspects of European pagan religion. Birzer’s thesis shows great insight into Tolkien’s character, since as a medievalist, Tolkien was in the intellectual company of Christians who had attempted to do the same, such as St. Augustine , St. Boniface, the Venerable Bede, and the anonymous author of Beowulf. Birzer’s book barely skims the surface of these connections; another work by this author that more deeply delves into the same thesis would be a very interesting read.

In The Gospel According to Tolkien, Ralph C. Wood compares the moral, ethical, and theological views expressed in Tolkien’s works on Middle Earth to those in the Christian Bible, managing to be quite engaging, enjoyable, and original along the way. “Tolkien’s work,” contends Wood, “is more deeply Christian for not being overtly Christian.” In Tolkien’s classic essay, “On Fairy-Stories,” he proposes that as creation is the domain of the Creator, the artist and the poet’s task is therefore to make something which reflects eternal Truth, a process which he dubs “sub-creation.” Tolkien applied his theory to his own work, avoiding overt allusions to God and organized religion, and shunning any hint of allegory. Instead, Tolkien’s goal was to allow the fantastic, the miraculous, and the providential events in his stories to themselves point to the involvement of a greater being in the workings of the narrative. Any reader of Lord of the Rings is therefore free to see or to be blind to God’s involvement in the story, just as he or she is free to accept or reject God’s workings in the real world. By allowing his audience the liberty of choice, Tolkien has “sub-created” a world that reflects one of God’s greatest gifts – free will.

Wood and Birzer also comment upon Tolkien’s vision of evil and the similarities to Augustine’s definition of evil as privato boni, the absence of good. The most potent metaphor that Tolkien employs to describe evil is the Shadow, the absence of light. As Birzer writes:

By placing evil in the background of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has created an evil that is outright ominous, for it seems to be everywhere, pervading the entire landscape of Middle Earth, surrounding the Fellowship from all sides.

Bizer and Wood also observe that Tolkien’s conception of evil is not a sort of Manichaean dualism. In Middle-Earth, evil is not an independent force; it does not have the power to create, only to mar and twist what has been created by Eru (the deity whose name means “the One” in Tolkien’s Elvish language). In a particularly beautiful moment from The Lord of the Rings, which both Wood and Birzer highlight, the hobbit Sam sees a star in the midst of the darkness of Mordor and senses that “the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.” Wood compares the passage to the first letter of John: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Birzer gives great attention in each chapter of his book to Tolkien’s relationship with C.S. Lewis. Both men were friends for many years, and were members of the Inklings, a small literary club founded by Lewis at Oxford . In one of the better chapters of Birzer’s book, “The Nature of Evil”, the author uses a comparison between the characters of the two men to good effect. Tolkien strongly disapproved of Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, which testifies to Tolkien’s strong aversion to the study of evil. This aversion explains Tolkien’s avoidance of exploring the psychology of his villains, a feature of his writing that has been a favorite target of certain critics. These critics label the villains as “one-dimensional,” since it seems they are morally perverse without any motivation (as if Sauron’s bad nature could be explained by his not being hugged often enough as a child). Birzer uses this anecdote to illustrate Tolkien’s firm beliefs that evil and the Evil One are a reality, not a fairy tale, and that the study of Evil invites it into one’s life.

Wood, in his book, spends much time investigating the parallels between evil in Middle-Earth and in the Bible. He compares the murder of Deagol by Smeagol, the hobbit who is eventually twisted into the creature Gollum, to the slaying of Abel by Cain. He also compares Smeagol’s attempt to justify this wicked act (the Ring, he said, was his rightful birthday gift), to the fruitless attempts of Adam and Eve to justify their disobedience in the Garden of Eden. Wood’s best example of Tolkien’s Christian understanding of evil is the way that the dilemma of free choice in Middle-Earth reflects the dilemma of free choice in the Gospels. Christ’s yoke is gentle, but bearing it requires humility—Jesus taught that no man can serve two masters, for choosing a master other than God is idolatry, and choosing oneself as master is vanity. Through this vain pride, individuals are truly enslaved by evil. The same principle is also at work in Middle-Earth: the “Enemy” enthralls and ensnares people by appealing to their sense of pride and love for power, in the end trapping them in abject, debasing, degrading servitude. The “free peoples of Middle Earth” stand in contrast to the orcs, goblins, trolls, and men who have allied themselves with Sauron. The Ring, which first seduces with illusions, eventually coerces and bullies in order to enslave the will of its bearer. Wood notices that the hobbit Sam is able to defy the illusions that attempt to sway him because of his humility, whereas powerful characters, such as Gandalf and Galadriel, are more easily tempted because their inherently powerful natures tend to create in them a false confidence.

The Christian understanding that evil is less potent than goodness has no parallels in the cosmologies of the Greeks, Romans, Norse, or Zoroastrians: most of the major deities in Indo-European cultures have a “good side” and a “bad side.” Tolkien’s mythology, however, explicitly revises this dualistic conception. Tolkien’s divine order, as outlined in the first chapter of the Silmarillion, describes how Eru sent down twelve Valar (“powers”) to act as regents over the Earth. Iluvatar, the alternate title of Eru, means, “All Father.” “All Father” is the etymology of the Roman deity, Jupiter; the most common epithet of the Greek god Zeus, Zeus Pater (PIE *dyeus-*peter); and also the epithet of the Norse god Odin. Although the Valar are explicitly beneath Iluvatar in the order of the universe, they display many parallels to the gods of pagan myth. Ulmo, lord of the sea, reminds the reader of Poseidon; Mandos, lord of the dead, of Hades; Yavana, lady of growing things, of Demeter; Aule, the smith, of Hephaestus. All of these gods seem, at first glance, to be but pale reflections of gods in the pantheons of Norse and Greek myth.

The gods Melkor and Varda, however, are both characters that seem to be based on Biblical figures. Melkor, whose name means, “he who arises in might,” is very similar to Lucifer, the fairest of all angels before the fall. Both Lucifer and Melkor’s greatest sins are pride and disobedience, and both become princes of darkness. Tulkas, who throws Melkor into the Void, reminds readers of the archangel Michael, who strove against Lucifer and threw him down from heaven. Varda, or Elbereth, the Star-Kindler, is reminiscent of Mary, “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head” (Rev 12:1) as she is venerated in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Both are compassionate Queens of Heaven.

And, most importantly, Tolkien’s Valar are never dualistic. The War Valar, who could not decide whether to join with Melkor or fight against him, were ultimately deleted from the story altogether. All the Valar, save Melkor, are very attuned to the will of Eru, and perform their duties with grace and dignity. In contrast to Norse or Greek gods, the Valar are either wholly good or wholly evil, much more akin to angels and demons as described by the Bible than to pagan gods. Wood observes that when Frodo and Sam call upon Elbereth in the lair of Shelob the spider, “The Queen of the Valar seems to be praying through them as much as they are praying to her,” as both hobbits call for her intercession unconsciously, as if they are impelled to pray by something outside of themselves.

At the heart of Christianity lies the struggle for salvation from evil, with the climax of the story as Christ’s resurrection. Although it seemed that malice had triumphed by killing the Son of God, Christ redeemed death and removed its sting. Tolkien’s writings, which emphasize that darkness is only a shadow, and that light will in the end prevail, is very unlike the teleological outlook of the Greeks, who saw the gods as warring powers of good and evil, or of the Norse, who held that their warring gods would ultimately destroy other in a great, final battle—and, in fact, is very different from the teleological outlook of much of the modern world, skeptical as we are about things like Good, Evil, and the possibility of redemption. But there is something yet about this ancient story that resonates deep within our souls, even if we might not always be able to place our fingers on it. Tolkien placed his hope for God’s salvation and deliverance from evil at the center of both his life and his stories, and it is this message, in the end, that has endeared The Lord of the Rings to generations of readers, touching as it does a deep and hidden chord in all of our hearts.