“Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart”

–Unknown

Of late, I’ve been (trying) to keep up with a discourse on the voluntary/involuntary nature of faith.There has been an intellectual interplay of arguments, thoughts, and propositions, all aimed to answer whether faith is voluntary or involuntary. I suppose one could accuse me of taking a cop out and choosing to evade the question, though I wonder if the question is the correct question to ask in the first place.

A couple days ago, I tried to clear through some boxes filled with snippets of high school. During my shuffles down memory lane, I came across a sheet of paper from summer 2008. On such a page, there was a quote that particularly struck a chord with me. It relates love to playing the piano (I remember getting the guys who were piano minors at camp that year to agree to have this cheesy quote on our shirts–see above for quote).

In light of the ruminations that take place in one’s time of solitude, such as the summer, I think it’s worth applying this quotation to our faith. In many ways, playing the piano does demand playing by the rules; the correct notes, the correct rhythm, the correct balance, the correct tempo, endless hours of practice, memorization, performance, repetition, and, all too often, it takes only a couple of careless lapses of time for the finesse to slacken. Yet, it is within the confines of these “rules,” that the performer reaches a place to truly flourish and play music. Oddly enough, the rules enable the freedom.

Similarly, rigorously engaging with one’s beliefs is important. Reading the Bible is important. Standing on solid theology is important. Thinking about how to live one’s life as a “light and salt” is important. In a similar, but different way, facts are important, and reason has its place in the world. However, I have noticed within myself a wearing. I can only take certain abstract and often verbose thought trains for so long, before I grow simply exhausted.

Because the truth is, the rules will never get you there. Only Christ will get you there. This may sound even more abstract, but I think that’s the beauty of the Christian faith. There is so precious little that we as humans are capable of before our Creator.

There is a passage in Mark that often resonates with me:

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

-Mark 9:24 (KJV)

Personally, I feel that asking whether faith is voluntary or involuntary seriously misses the point. The question itself implies a non-existence of God; that is, it implies that God is not involved in the faith of a man. I see the question as peripheral, because the answer to the question provides only minimal advancement, and serious detour. If faith is voluntary, it seems to follow that man is in perfect control, whereas very few ever feel completely in control of anything. If faith is involuntary, it seems that something else exercises control over, and I struggle to answer what this “something else” could be. I consider it a detour, because I feel that it strays from the root of the issue: that is, “Does God exist?” After all, what is the fundamental difference between voluntary/involuntary belief? If belief is voluntary, well, voluntary belief is based on something, since belief is very rarely based on nothing. If this belief is involuntary, this “involuntary belief” is still the result of something, namely that which might be the influences in one’s life. Which also comes down to be a sort of voluntary belief, since such influences and their reliability is questionable and inconsistent at best, and at some point there is a leap of faith (not in the religious sense, but even in a practical sense. e.g. a lot of things can go wrong when I choose to sit on a chair that looks sturdy. It may be a mirage, it may be rotten, it may be broken, it may be a number of things–but at some point, I will probably just choose to get over my thoughts and sit in it. One could say that my belief that most chairs that appear to be sturdy are sturdy is “involuntary,” but it seems to me that it is oddly voluntary, just as “voluntary” belief is oddly involuntary) …and the cycle seems to go ’round and ’round…

Returning to the passage from Mark, Charles Spurgeon has interesting insight into this passage:
“What was his discovery? Why his discovery was  that he did not believe—and that is where the real difficulty lay. When did the man make this discovery? When he began to believe! Is it not a very singular thing that as soon as ever he had a little faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, he discovered the great abyss of his unbelief? “Lord,” he said, “I believe, but, oh, I do also disbelieve so much that my unbelief seems to swallow up my belief!” Until a man receives faith, he may think that he has it—but when he has real faith in Jesus Christ, then he shudders as he thinks how long he has lived in unbelief—and realizes how much of unbelief is still mixed with his belief! …While men have no faith—I repeat what I said just now—while men have no faith, they are unconscious of their unbelief, but as soon as they get a little faith, then they begin to be conscious of the greatness of their unbelief! When the blind man gets a little light into his eyes, he perceives something of the blackness of the darkness in which he has been living—and so you must be able to say from your heart, “Lord, I believe,” or else you will never be able to pray, as this man did, “help my unbelief.” Even a small measure of faith is necessary to discover the great measure of the unbelief.”

So at the end of the day, sometimes I have to forget the rules and tune out the arguments. I have to humble myself and come before the Lord. And ask…and believe. And I can do this, not because I’m actually “forgetting the rules” or “choosing to forego reason, logic, and intellect,” but because all of those faculties that God has given me frees me to come before him and just believe.

This was posted last year around prefrosh weekend, but seemed equally applicable to freshmen who have just come on campus. Enjoy! – The editors.

My dear Wigglesworm,

It has come to my attention that your charge has been admitted to Harvard, and that you are inordinately proud of this development. I write to issue you a warning. You have a difficult task ahead of you, which may end in unmitigated disaster for the Lower Kingdom, particularly if you persist in your present attitude. Have you – a diabolical creature with the best education the Lower Realms could provide – actually been taken in by the human blather that surrounds and constitutes the aura hovering around this University? Have you been encouraged by the various titters your charge’s fellow church-goers have made about “Godless Harvard”? Do you anticipate a hearty meal on the patient’s despair before even putting in an ounce of work? I have said this time and time again, and I will restate it now: every and all temporal circumstances can be used by either the Enemy or Our Father Below; all perceptions of the “inherent” good or evil about places, events, even emotional states, are false illusions we wish to cultivate in humans and guard against in ourselves.

Firstly, there is nothing “Godless” about any place –

this is a source of immense frustration to Our Father. Remember that the Enemy has so interpenetrated the very fabric of the Universe as to leave us not even a last preserve that is free of Him. It is a matter of opprobrium that even Hell itself has been cruelly and ruthlessly invaded in that most regrettable incident that concluded the Incarnation. This is not, of course, to say that Harvard has not been progressively and cleverly emptied of God by our efforts since its regrettable inception as a college for the education of the laity by that noisome little band of humans called the Pilgrim Fathers; However, human actions done in the name of the Enemy tend to cast notoriously long shadows, often preserved through the cunning use of sacraments and symbols, such as the University’s shield and constitution. As such, our job is to distract students such as your patient from the deeper layers of meaning that lay in the University’s past, instead directing her euphoria to the frivolous things she may accomplish through the name of “Harvard” in her imagined future.

Now the present situation affords you three delectable directions in which to work on the patient. The first is, of course, overweening arrogance. Human beings, you must remember, are often blind, to all intents and purposes, to the ultimate nature of causality. Conceit is easily manufactured by allowing a human who has just accomplished something to trace its causality back to their own hard work, or sacrifice, or talents, without taking the next logical step in asking from whence these talents and time and privileges come in the first place. Pride is the ultimate mark of Our Father, and one should fan it into flame at every opportunity. In particular, the patient’s admittance to Harvard will no doubt generate a certain amount of social awkwardness due to the overwhelming reaction of friends and family – often a mixture of admiration and envy. The patient will be forced to enact a little dance of false modesty, for which she will later congratulate herself, and furthermore seed in her an “insider/outsider” mentality, in which she can only confide her genuine happiness and gratitude to people of similar privilege or “caliber”. This is the beginning of snobbery, which I also encourage you to cultivate. Under no circumstances should you allow her to say things like “by the grace of God”, or “I am so grateful” about her admission – ideally, she should falsely wave away all congratulations with something as patently untrue and unmeant as “Oh, it was nothing”, or “I think they may have made a mistake”.

Now, some of your elation at the potential to turn your charge into an atheist or materialist is justified – not by the Harvard name itself, which you so naively rely on, but by the sheer fact that the patient will be entering the realm of Academia, which humans have elevated to a minor Personification. Our brightest scholars have done an admirable job in turning the realm of Academia from one of the hotbeds of worship and truth-seeking into the wide ocean of despair, hollowness and cowardice it is today. Much of this can be credited to the great Thurbucular, who almost singlehandedly lent intellectual credibility to atheism with his admirable work on Nietzsche. Ever since, we have systematically excised the most vital questions to human life from Academia altogether, leading academics to dismiss them as “unscientific”, “unreasonable”, and best of all, “unanswerable”. Thus we have Political Science which does not talk about Love, Economics that presupposes a dumb selfish machine to be the standard human, Literature more concerned with its own form than its substance, and best of all, Religion that is so obsessed with reaching consensus it practically ignores the Enemy altogether. Unseat the desire for truth in your patient and replace it with a desire for academic respect, and your job is half done.

Lastly, and most importantly, the patient’s new-found sense of self-importance should be used to eliminate all pleasure from her life. This can be simply done by applying the illusion of ownership to her time and effort. As soon as she gets the notion that the privilege she has received was a result of her own efforts, she will be haunted by the possibilities that every second of her time and every iota of her effort must be leveraged towards some goal or other – it does not matter what the goal is, so long as it is not the Enemy’s Purpose – because the potential yield is so high. This will prevent her from making any real friends, to enjoy reading for its own sake, or spend time talking to people who love her, turning even pleasurable conversations into a means to an end. In a matter of months, she will be using other humans as means – the most delightful of the Diabolical Principles, always convinced that her ends are pure and noble! If you can keep this up for four years, you may well be on your way to producing a little tyrant of a politician, a nihilist of a writer, a burn-out of a social worker, or, even better, a hungry, disillusioned human incapable of enjoying ordinary life, doomed to dissatisfaction without action, and a particularly delightful blend of selfishness and despair.

Do not, under any circumstances, allow your charge anywhere near the Christians on campus. They tend to be of a particularly resilient strain, unusually humble and curious, and would inevitably corrupt your charge with their example. Let your charge anchor her image of the “Christian” to the disapproving titters of her church friends, driving a wedge between the “intellectual” and “spiritual” sides of her in her imagination. There is nothing more dangerous than an intelligent Christian who “loves” the Enemy with his mind! Cf. the very unfortunate telepathic leak that occurred of my correspondence with the late Wormwood by one such mind. I still rankle at the memory.

I wish you all the best, and hope to hear of your progress!

Your concerned supervisor

Screwtape

- Culture Making, Andy Crouch.

I have pretty much spent my entire life trying to figure out what a real artist does. I am slowly coming to believe that to a far larger extent than people are willing to admit, we are all artists. It comes with the territory of bearing the image of God – an undeniable aspect of the Imago Dei. I’m not just playing with definitions here – every kindergartner, given a crayon, can, and will, draw. There is something wonderful about children’s drawings – Quentin Blake, the distinguished British illustrator, once had to produce drawings of dinosaur machines that a young boy would have drawn as part of a picture book. He was pleased when a critic praised them as being “so good they could almost have been drawn by a four-year-old”.

Quentin Blake, my personal hero, in a self-portrait

Now, I remember being frustrated when I made those very charming drawings as a child. I suspect most of the time, it isn’t a child’s project to produce something cute. They are all trying to be accurate, and are infuriated that their chubby hands are unable to draw something that looks more like the real world. At least, that’s how I felt. Also, there is that tiresome insistence on the part of kindergarten teachers that drawing is an intrinsic part of childhood. So we try, try, and try again. But time passes, and as our skills improve, as drawing class becomes more advanced, and eventually dropped out of the curriculum, most adults give up the original project of mimicking the real world, leaving it to the “real artists” to master perspective, light, shade, and these days, high concepts, while they relegate themselves to the vast majority of people who “don’t understand art”. Just as insistent as the kindergarten’s philosophy is the adult world’s message that drawing ends with childhood – anyone who stubbornly continues to pursue it into adulthood is considered mad, or at the very least, childish, selfish and foolish.

As I’ve been traveling around, I was surprised and saddened by how many people I met who confidently, and even proudly, said that they hadn’t the least interest in poetry or art. I suppose it shouldn’t have been that surprising, considering how alienating high culture is and all the economic barriers to entry that prevent most people from appreciating it, but these same people take lovely photographs, write carefully crafted sermons, listen to rap and pop music, look at their children’s drawings and say, “that’s a good picture”. Just as everyone can create art, everyone knows what they like. Which makes everybody an art critic, whether they realize it or not. And sure, taste is individual. But that doesn’t make it unimportant. And it doesn’t make it any more or less valid than the individual taste of the accredited “taste-makers” of the world. In fact we would do well to be warned with Jesus’ parable of the talents: if you have ten talents, you have ten talents’ worth of responsibility; if you have five, you had better make use of that five, and not go around whining that somebody else has ten; if you have one talent (and notice: no one has zero talents. If you think you have zero talents, you’re probably behaving like the guy with one talent), the worst possible thing you could ever do is go bury it under the ground and expect no one to notice.

This discovery – that everyone is creative, that everyone makes art, makes artifacts, makes things which have an intentional, visible effect on the world – has in turn freed me, a person who recognizes art-making as part of her vocation. For the longest time, and particularly in the accolade-driven economy of Harvard, I felt under continual pressure to please critics. To please professors, to please peers, to be published in all the “right” publications, to be reviewed, to be praised. The last thing on my mind, of course, was to please God. And for about three miserable years at Harvard, my previously prolific spring of writing dried up completely. I was so worried about my poetry’s quality that I second-guessed every word, scratched out every stanza I put to paper. It was like being so well-trained in taxonomy that you didn’t want to get a pet anymore, just in case it had a maladjusted bladder. I know it’s a bit of cliche, but it was really true for me.

I was suffering from paralyzing performance anxiety. I did all sorts of things to validate myself in my own eyes – I started dressing like an artist, talking like an artist, hanging out with other people whom I thought were “legit” artists. But somehow I always felt like I was on the outside looking in, and it didn’t help that I wasn’t producing any art anymore. My credentials as an artist, while gleaming, began to mask an increasingly hollow soul. One of the problems was my need to be the best. I would either be the best at something, or I wouldn’t be it at all. Everyone who was good at what I was doing became a threat. And everyone seemed so much better than me! Slowly I came to conclude that I wasn’t an artist. That seemed a bit more comforting. I decided maybe I was something else – an editor, or a critic, or maybe a potential literary agent in the making. But not an artist. It seemed increasingly unbearable. There was nothing I wanted more to do than to make art, and yet it seemed that God had closed the portals of my creativity. I got mad at Him. I thought it was His fault for misleading me my whole life.

Then I realized something: I didn’t have to be the best. If my writing could move just one person, decenter them for a moment, make them look at the world with fresh eyes, tilt the world just a little off-kilter, I would have done something worthwhile. I stopped worrying about publishing my poetry. Right about then, I realized that a friend who was being baptized might like a small collection of things I had written, so I made a chapbook for her as a baptism gift. She loved it, and I have never had so grateful a recipient of my poetry before in my whole life. It didn’t matter anymore whether or not I was a real artist – I had shipped. It had been delivered. It was an audience of one, but I knew that the joy that had been generated within me was greater than for any poem I had had published anywhere else, no matter how broad the audience or what the critics thought. It was the best reward ever.

The statue of Mary in the Ely Cathedral, by David Wynne

Then came Henry VIII and the stripping of the monasteries. In 1541 all the windows were smashed, the paint stripped from the walls, the statues destroyed, and the heads of all the figures carved on the walls broken off. It is, of course, impossible to gauge the mindset of the men who smashed this chapel; perhaps they were sincerely afraid of the dangers of idolatry, and only wanted to save souls. However, it is hard to sympathize with those who would destroy beauty that has been made for the glory of God, no matter how misguided its use.

The chapel hasn’t been restored, besides the new clear window glass put in to keep out the elements. The figures on the walls are still headless, the statue niches are still empty, and the windows still naked of stained glass. Compared to the rest of the cathedral, which is filled with color and decoration, the tall chapel seems very bare. Only one new statue has been put in, one flame of color in the bleached room: at the front of the chapel stands a depiction of Mary. This is not an ordinary Victorian depiction of the young woman, however; she is not the meek, demure girl with downcast eyes and a shy face. This Mary has flung her arms into the air, rejoicing that she will be the mother of her Lord. This is the Mary who risked being ostracized for bearing a child not her fiancé’s in a world that was very hard for an unmarried woman; this is the Mary who sang with joy of the power of God to overthrow the mighty and powerful and raise up the poor and the weak. This is a bold and joyful Mary, who trusts God enough to rejoice in his works. And it is very appropriate that this statue should stand in the middle of the destruction of the Lady Chapel. It reminds us of one woman who had to stand and watch as her world crumbled around her, as her firstborn son was executed as the worst of criminals, as God’s promise of redemption seemed to come to nothing. And it reminds us that after this destruction of hope there came, incredibly, victory out of death; and Mary rejoiced once more.

The only reason I really gave Song of Solomon a second thought came when I was thumbing through the Bible in search of my daily devotional’s assigned verse. When I happened upon Song of Solomon, I decided to stay and peruse it for a few minutes, as it was one section of the Bible I hadn’t heard excerpted in church or covered in my Bible studies. What stunned me most is the incredible poetry and artistic construction of the verses. It is God at His artistic finest, even if the content is, at times, admittedly cheesy and a little awkward. But the intense love between two people that is communicated in each passage speaks to me not only of our capabilities for love, but also of how strong God’s love is for us.

Song of Solomon is the only love poetry that I’ve come across so far that has truly captivated me, and engaged me emotionally in a way that I can’t duplicate or really describe. I am left in awe of God’s vision, His creation, and the capability for love and romance that He has so generously given us. The Bible is full of beautiful storytelling and poetry, but I have to say that Song of Solomon is hands-down my favorite book and favorite set of poetic works, period, that I’ve ever come across. I would love to read the original work in order to more fully experience the artistry of it, but that, unfortunately, requires knowledge and capabilities beyond what I possess.

I’ll leave you with my favorite passage, quoted from Song of Solomon 5:10-16:

My lover is radiant and ruddy, outstanding among ten thousand. His head is purest gold; his hair is wavy and black as a raven. His eyes are like doves by the water streams, washed in milk, mounted like jewels. His cheeks are like beds of spice yielding perfume. His lips are like lilies dripping with myrrh. His arms are rods of gold set with chrysolite. His body is like polished ivory decorated with sapphires. His legs are pillars of marble set on bases of pure gold. His appearance is like Lebanon, choice as its cedars. His mouth is sweetness itself; he is altogether lovely. This is my lover, this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.

In Romans 12:3, Paul calls us to look at ourselves with sober judgment – to think truthfully and honestly about who we are. Then he calls to love one another, and specifically to “let love be genuine” (Rom 12:9). I am convinced that there is an underlying logic to the progression of Paul’s thought at this point: that we can only truly love another, without hypocrisy, when we think vocationally, when we truly and graciously identify, accept and embrace who we are.

Any other posture is burdensome; it cannot lead to genuine love. Sometimes our generosity is misguided and our love for others is offered out of a busy and hectic spirit rather than out of serenity and joy. Sometimes we are caught up in the desire to be loved, in the hope that everyone will like us, and this inevitably undermines our capacity to love genuinely.

When we think vocationally, we are freed from what A. W. Tozer calls the burden of pretense and enter into the freedom of humility. Tozer reminds us of the joy that comes when we are freed of artificiality, of the burden of trying to impress others. When we recover the principle of vocation, we are able to embrace authenticity, genuineness and truthfulness. This is freedom; and it is a freedom to love others authentically.– Gordon T. Smith, Courage and Calling

It is said that Martin Luther King, Jr. sought a particular freedom, an emotional freedom from two things: an inflated head when praised and a crushed spirit when criticized.  – Gordan T. Smith, Courage and Calling

Consider the tree – The Giving Tree, that is, the tree which I invoked in my previous post, Why I am Liberal. I ended the post by affirming the importance of giving – that is, of unremitting Generosity. (Let’s just say I am taking this concept out of politics for a while – those are murky waters I’m not too familiar with, so let’s say we are in the realm of philosophy and literary criticism and creative non-fiction). However, there is a very important caveat to Generosity which I didn’t talk about in that post – Prudence.

Prudence is one of those virtues which has fallen out of fashion. It sounds like a girl’s name no one but a Puritan would give to their daughter (and by Puritan, I evoke the stereotypical Puritan, with a dour outlook on life and a perverse delight in squelching other people while hanging around with a plank in his eye). But all Prudence is is practical Wisdom, and one manifestation of Prudence is the ability to adjudicate to whom you give and when. It is guided by Telos – the fundamental question – Why? Why you give should guide the who and when and how. If you were to be asked – what is the most basic question that exists in the world? The answer would be: Why? Why the stars? Why the earth? Why are you you? Why mum? Why dad? Why me? It is the question any three year old would arrive at.

This is teleological thinking, and I am increasingly convinced it is the very key to the Kingdom of Heaven. To apply Telos to oneself is to search for vocation. What was I put on this earth to do? What must I pursue in the limited span of my life? I am still in the process of doing so, which is why I am reading Courage and Calling. So far, I am convinced it is my duty to give. I am convinced it is my duty to Love, to attempt to embody Love, and to Love extravagantly. Why? Because Jesus first Loved us. I have answered the first question. But now Prudence comes in – Love, yes, but who, and when, and how? These are impossibly important questions! I could unleash hell, still, even with Jesus at my side, if I answer them incorrectly! And all too often, I already have.

So let’s get back to the Giving Tree. When I first read this, when I was about nine, I was completely enchanted. It spoke to me. In fact, it spoke to me so much I wrote my own version of it, except with a giving river instead of a tree. And most people in my class of other nine-year-olds thought that the tree was right, and the boy was wrong. I mean, the tree loves so unconditionally! She gives, and gives, and gives – how can that be wrong? And the boy, he’s so selfish! He just takes, and takes, and takes…

However, upon reading it again at age twenty-four, I realize there is something profoundly broken in the tree’s giving: it breaks itself to give to the boy, and never lets him know that slowly but surely, her heart is breaking. Of course the Giving Tree is a love story. The tree resembles a mother, or a tireless lover, whose love is unrequited or at least unmatched by the one she loves. The Bible warns us against being unequally yoked. Paul said that in the context of not marrying a non-Christian, but I think it also points to the fact that love has to be equal. Perfection, I think, is a cube – Equality in three dimensions. The Love of God – three-pointed, the spirit issuing forth between the Father and the Son.

The Giving Tree is an impossible love story for this reason: She is a tree! He is a boy! Of course he will go and fall in love with some human girl. Of course he will want to see the world, for who wants to remain in a garden with a tree all their life? But aside from all that, the tree also makes it impossible for the boy to love her, because she never makes any equal demands of the boy. She never protests. Their friendship was appropriate when it was limited to swinging from branches, from giving apples, and from resting in her shade. But when the boy grows up, her love for him becomes inappropriate. She wants him to remain a boy forever, and she will not accept that he has to grow up, and will have different needs – needs which she cannot meet, and should not meet. She encourages his dependence on her, and turns him into a selfish taker by her reckless indulgence. In the end, the old man and the stump are equally depleted, because of her indiscriminate acts of giving. For all her giving, the boy has not grown up well. He’s grown into a twisted, selfish man, completely oblivious of the tree’s love, unable to hold down any other love. And for all her gifts, he comes back empty-handed.

And you know what? She is equally culpable in the story. If she had not given her branches, she would still flourish. If she had not given her trunk, she would still grow. If she had not given her heart, she would be able to love all the other children who exist in the universe and need trees to swing from. She tries to be all things to this boy, and ends up being the enabler of his selfishness. She may even feel self-righteous for giving, and we know that pride comes before a fall. She wants to be the boy’s one true love, but she is a tree, not a human. She becomes Daphne, a woman stuck in the form of a tree. And she cannot become fully human until she admits that human beings are radically dependent and out of control. Humans, unlike trees, cannot even make their own food from the sun. They cannot bear the whole weight of the world. They cannot save everyone they meet. They have limited energy – their passions are governed not just by their will, but a complicated amalgamation of the weather (how humbling!), whether they’ve had a square meal (how sobering!), chemicals like alcohol or drugs or medication (how terrifying!), their stage in life (let’s not forget that age matters), their relationships with their family, the state of their friendships.

Real friendship means accepting someone for their flaws as well as their strengths. We are not Atlas – we cannot hold the whole weight of the world. I try to do this sometimes. Or rather, it is my instinct. When I feel my pain, I go into the dark, and I cry. Because not only do I feel my pain, I push down the imaginary boundaries between me and other people, and somehow extrapolate to the world’s pain – If I, who am so privileged, so coddled, so well-fed, can feel this earth-shattering pain in my breast, then what of the world? What of the world – that is destitute, that is diseased, that is hungering for a God they do not even know to need? And I weep (I swear), for the world. And in that moment I am Atlas, trying to bear the brunt of all sin and all horror. But you know what? I can do that for an instant, but almost instantly I forget, and am my self again. And that is a blessing, because to presume to bear the pain of the whole world is the greatest blasphemy there is – it is the devil’s lie, to think that I can save the world. Because only One Man has ever done that, and will ever do. Only Jesus can bear the full brunt of Sin. Only Jesus holds the world in his pierced palms. I need only deal with the consequences of my own sin – and even then, the wages have been paid – so long ago, time out of mind – even before the dawn of time, I have been redeemed. Because if I think I am Jesus, there is only one solution: that is, to be crushed utterly, and to die. And O, I would die rather than kill! But it was I who hammered in the nail – and because He died, it has been given to me to live – the most unfair exchange under the sky. I’ve been commanded to live – I know not why.

In the deepest pits of my despair I pray this prayer to God, the Creator of all. I think of Him as the Cosmic Poet, if you like. As a poet I understand Him this way, because when I create a person in my head, I love him. And it is my love and my attention – my loving focus, that keeps this man alive. The moment I forget about him because my attention is elsewhere, he disappears. I imagine that we are all little flames in the mind of God, fueled only by the gas issuing from the kitchen stove of His Consciousness. The gas, perhaps, is composed of words – words, words, words – like Homer, reciting the Odyssey, around a fire. When the words stop, the men of the Iliad disappear like ghosts at a cock-crow, leaving not a rack behind. In my despair I yell at God and say, turn off that gas for me Lord. Stop uttering me. Just turn it off, I don’t want to burn anymore. It is given to You, and You Alone, to turn off the flame of my life. Extinguish it, for I do not want to exist anymore. It is a terrible prayer, but a true one.

And He says to me, very gently, every single moment I pray for it, No. No – you have work to be done. No – it is a sin to kill. It is a sin to hate, and as bad a sin to hate another as to hate yourself.  And look, all the saints whom you love intercede for you. They love you through the words they’ve left: Donne, Herbert, Shakespeare; David, Solomon, Mary, Elizabeth, Paul, Peter, John. If you are worthy of their love, how can you hate yourself? If you are worthy of My Love, how dare you denigrate yourself? The whole cloud of witnesses whom you know and love say it is not possible, not possible at all that I AM not, because if I didn’t exist, then every truth you have loved which you have known instinctively was Truth uttered by them, or embodied by their actions, was a Lie. And while you can deny yourself, you cannot deny them. No – little one, you have been given to Love, and the world does not have enough Love, and your great Love is needed in the world.

With these words he comforts me and by these words he bids me: Live. And so I get up out of my bed, and go. My God, I have loved you with a passion. Teach me the government of my tongue.

The film begins with a witty rabbity creation myth, then it really starts with Fiver and Hazel. Fiver is a little runt rabbit being bullied by the strong in his warren – he’s a tiny, sniveling thing, but he is also a prophet and a seer, disturbed by true visions. Fortunately for Fiver, Hazel, his elder brother, looks out for him and protects him. Hazel is a nobody in the warren – just an average rabbit. But he takes Fiver seriously when Fiver says there is something terrible about to happen in the warren, and they must evacuate or die. Of course, the chief rabbit will have none of it, and Hazel, placing his faith in Fiver’s vision, orchestrates a breakout. Several other rabbits join them, tired of the oppression of the warren’s system, believing in Fiver themselves, or just looking for a bit of adventure. In particular they are joined by Bigwig, a soldier in the Owsla (the soldier caste in rabbit political systems), who is fed up with the warren too – if not for his bravery in confronting his own general, they would never have made it out of the warren. Like Aeneas, Hazel leads his men to found a new warren in an ideal place – Watership Down. But they don’t know where they will find this promised land, they only have Hazel’s visions, Blackberry’s brains, Bigwig’s protection and Hazel’s common sense and mediation to go on.

In Plato’s Republic, Plato speaks of the different parts of society working together as one whole, using the metaphor of the body. This was a tradition that Paul probably picked up when he spoke of the church as Christ’s body – all parts working together as a whole, each equally valuable. Of course, Plato thought that poetry was terrible and dangerous and should be excised from the body altogether, so I don’t entirely agree with him, but he has a point – the different parts of society (government, military, civil society, artists and visionaries) need to work together in order to do anything of use and respond to any kind of crisis, mundane or spectacular. What is the role of leadership in this context? At least from watching Watership Down, I think leadership is the successful mediation between these different parts of the body.

Hazel doesn’t have any one particular gift that is outstanding. He’s of average build, unlike Bigwig, who looks every inch a chief. He’s not as smart as Blackberry, who discovers that wood can float and suggests they make a raft to cross a stream. He doesn’t receive visions like Fiver. But he’s not weak either. He’s calm, and considerate, and wise, and a good listener. He is a rock – solid, constant, utterly dependable. He understands the different kinds of languages that his people communicate in – so he can understand the portents and doom of Fiver’s vocabulary; he can motivate BigWig with militant galvanizing; he can tap into Blackberry’s inventiveness. Because if any one of these other rabbits were the chief rabbit, the new warren would err into one or another kind of tyranny. BigWig is too eager to leave the weak behind when they get to the stream and a dog is after them. Blackberry is clever but he’s not as kind as Hazel decides to be. And as for Fiver -

I have this special soft spot for Fiver, because he is a poet and a dreamer. He understands the power of stories, and evaluates situations in an intuitively analytical way. When the exiles reach a mysterious burrow with many empty warrens where a human feeds them carrots daily, it is Fiver who hears their fatalistic poetry and their rejection of the original rabbit trickster mythology and says, “I’ve had enough!” and leaves, even if he must do it himself. It is only then that Hazel takes him seriously and leaves to find him.

It turns out the warren is surrounded by snares – humans give them carrots in exchange for their deaths. I’m not entirely like Fiver, of course, and I am not always right (!) like he is. But one thing I share with him is a tremulous weakness and the terrible burden of insight, as well as a profound loneliness when no one understands or appreciates it. Fiver’s apocalyptic visions are a blessing and a curse – he is surrounded by death and hurt when he sees them, because sadly, the world is fallen and he sees this. He sees the skull beneath the skin – he can almost touch it when he brings his paws to his own face. He senses danger, but does not have the political power or clout or ability to do anything about it. He is paralyzed by his visions, quite literally convulsing in horror before the final battle when he prophesies about a dog loose in the woods.

If the world had its way, runts like Fiver would have been left in the dust long ago. It is only because of Hazel’s protection that Fiver exists at all – without Hazel, Fiver is as good as dead. He would be starved by the strong in his society; he would be ignored and his spirit crushed by rejection. But Hazel also cannot do without Fiver. Without Fiver, Hazel’s wit and bravery and even his worldly wisdom almost lead him to his own premature death. Realizing they needed does in the new community, he connives to free some domesticated hutch rabbits in a farm without consulting Fiver. (He’s just tired of Fiver being relentless and single-minded and insistent on his own way of doing things). Well, Hazel gets shot in the leg by the farmer for his bravado. This incident reminds me a little of Abram’s lame attempts in Egypt when he pretends Sarai is his sister and pimps her out, or any of Peter’s heartfelt but impulsive/poorly-conceived schemes to protect Jesus. They backfire. But there is space for grace – it is Fiver again, who instinctively knows that Hazel is not dead, because Hazel’s job is not done, who goes out to seek Hazel. His love for his brother makes him brave, and he heads out alone, past hills and dales, to find Hazel’s body, nursing him back to health.

So how does this all come together? Well, it is in the last war that Hazel finally gets the hang of it, and all the rabbits work together with their unique gifts towards saving their warren. The final war is between General Woundwort (a kind of amalgamation of Stalin and Hitler) of the tyrannical Alfalfa Warren and Hazel’s Watership Down. BigWig is sent into Alfalfa as a secret agent, in order to rescue some brave does and other oppressed political prisoners who are being tortured by Woundwort’s henchmen. Because BigWig is big and strong, Woundwort accepts him into his Owsla.

They bring off the escape beautifully by utilizing Blackberry’s idea of escaping on a boat. But Woundwort hounds them to Watership Down, and they are surrounded and outnumbered. Woundwort assumes that BigWig is the chief, and when he comes to the warren in order to confront and destroy it, he ignores Hazel when he runs out of the burrow in order to find the dog Fiver sees in his paralyzing vision. “There’s a dog loose in the woods!” Fiver cries, convulsing. Fiver senses death, but not whose death – he senses danger, but he is so terrified and seized by his vision he can do nothing. It is Hazel who interprets and mediates this vision. Hazel goes to the farmyard where he had seen a dog tied up on a leash. At terrible risk to himself, he sneaks out of the burrow, leaving BigWig and his men to do battle and hold off Woundwort as long as possible. Hazel realizes that he must free the dog into the woods – he is the fulfillment of the prophecy. And yes, he unleashes danger, but he does it with a prayer to Frith, the god of this world – “My life for theirs, Lord,” he says as he runs towards the doghouse, bites through the rope and tears away, leading the dog straight to his own warren.

The dog, it turns out, is their salvation. Because Hazel tears into the secret burrow he had dug, and while General Woundwort is doing bloody one-on-one battle with BigWig, the dog worries Woundwort’s footsoldiers and scatters them. Woundwort is furious! He charges at BigWig, but BigWig stands his ground. “My chief told me to defend this warren to the death!” he says. Woundwort is startled. “Your chief?” – he is suddenly terrified. If this strong general, every inch a chief, is not this warren’s leader, then what kind of terrifying rabbit must he fight now? Woundwort leaps out of the burrow, only to meet head on with the ravenous dog. And like a true megalomaniac, he leaps and attacks the dog one on one -

And it is in this way that Hazel-Rah and his followers establish Watership Down. Hazel-Rah lives to see it prosper, to see it generate little bunnies, and he is satisfied. One fine day, he meets the black rabbit of death, and this time the black rabbit is familiar – he wears Hazel’s own face, and is dear to him. He offers him rest (for he is weary), and a place in his Owsla (for he is brave, an elder among rabbits). Lying down to sleep, Hazel dies a good death, a good and faithful servant.

It’s been sweltering down here in the Lower Regions – you would think you were in the high summer of Boston, but no, it’s just hell. Anyhow, outbreaks of gonorrhea and florescent mosquitoes aside, things plod along as usual. But enough about the weather.

I note with some consternation that your charge has graduated from Harvard. How she managed this I am not entirely certain, given our strenuous efforts to achieve the exact opposite. Yes, we did a little grind of victory when she took a year off, but look what that did – she merely slipped further from our grasp thanks to the humiliation the disorientation produced! Again, the Enemy’s ways are clearly not our ways – curse his Heavenly Highness and his Unendurable Everlasting Sneakiness! I swear, He truly hits Below the Diabolical Belt! Not even our brightest philosophers can get their heads around his tiresome Divine Paradoxes. And now she has that awful little diploma, adorned with that noisome blinking “VERITAS” shield (which we can never seem to penetrate, and humans the world over venerate)! I am tempted to despair, Wigglesworm. Sometimes I look at my oeuvre, at my life’s work, and I must confess I am very near Despair.

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We were doing so well! Do you remember those first dark days of freshman year, when her overweening arrogance wafted in sweet waves, producing responsive aversion in all those around her? Her mindless ambition, her directionless hunger for praise and affection and validation? She was all potential! Yes, there was all of that tangled morass of her “conservative Christian background” (we are working on that particular phrase – hopefully the Cliche Factory will get their act together), but here she was, un-moored from her conservative little country, eager to be seduced by “American” “freedom” and “liberalism” (whatever humans mean by these terms! – the UnLit. Critics are still working to establish exactly what, though I am personally skeptical that department will ever get any definitions straight – why those particular faculty are still on the University’s payroll is one of Hell’s Unfathomable Mysteries, as far as I’m concerned). She was so eager to throw off the shackles of parental control! – In short, delightfully corruptible, an ingenue of the first order. You even steered her clear of most of the Christian organizations on campus, as per my advice, fairly successfully, by making them seem “lame”, self-righteous and racially or culturally or economically segregated to her own self-righteous self.

However, even then, cracks were beginning to appear. It was collective hubris of the first order that made the Council of Diabolicals conclude the Enemy had evacuated the liberal spectrum of New England churches – the entire Second Council of the Diabolicals has now retrospectively determined this judgment was entirely wrong-footed (again, never underestimate the Enemy or his infuriating persistence!). That she went to church at all should have set your alarm bells ringing – indeed, I remember expressly forbidding you to let her go! “Oh, Nuncle Screwtape, it’s just an itty bitty ultra-liberal service! The sermon isn’t even ever longer than twelve minutes!” You do recall, of course, that Time is merely one of 88,9087 dimensions? All those Quantum Catechisms! – What was it the Enemy says of himself? “One day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”?

I think He said this through that random fisherman he picked up along the way on which he built the church – it is so annoying when this happens! I mean, here we are, with all the best civil servants in the Lower Kingdom, laboring to understand dimensions, and then this burly bearded fellow who’s been catching fish his whole short human life goes and blurts that out and is handed the very keys to the Kingdom. I mean, it’s one thing to require us to keep tabs on highly educated people like your patient and one excellent ex-servant of Our Father, Saul of Tarsus (who nevertheless turned out disastrously good – cf. pretty much most of the New “Testament”), but fishermen? Come on! No matter, again – I digress!

I expressly forbid you to let her in a church! “But it’s only got old people in it!” you protested, when I pointed out your error. Wigglesworm, sometimes you exasperate me! Old people are some of the most dangerous Beings alive, particularly if they are in the Enemy’s Camp.  Yes, we have caused Human Society to denigrate the elderly; but don’t you see, that was a product of the Dark Lakes of Distortion, and not a reflection of Actuality! We made them obsessed with youth, obsessed with appearance impossible to upkeep beyond the age of 30. We made them worship at the Temple of Eternal Youth. Hell, Our Father Below is old, and wise, and proud of it. The Enemy himself goes by the pretentious, typically self-aggrandizing title of “Ancient of Days” – do not underestimate old people!

Furthermore, there were all those dead people to reckon with! Remember, we are talking about New England here: its very name rank with the memory of headstrong warriors of the Enemy’s Camp, the ground littered with their headstones. We have only begun to grasp the power of the Enemy’s aged fortresses, which seems mysteriously derived from the simple presence of these graves. In fact, our Archeologists (particularly in the Anti-Catholic Department) recently presented a paper on precisely this phenomenon – it seems that hefty generals of the Enemy’s camp, such as that rigidly incorruptible failed tyrant, George Washington, or that annoyingly selfless self-promoter, Martin Luther King Jr, seem to leave impenetrable barriers to diabolic entry in the places where they have blasphemed against Our Father. It is most curious, and we are hoping to harness this power to develop a portable prison-house for our own errant devils. But I digress -

Then there was that whole very fruitful phase when she worshiped at the fair-browed Temple of False Art, ingratiating herself with all the “right” people, breaking commandment after commandment in the name of “exploration” and the seeking of “wisdom”, which we encouraged in everything but the Enemy’s Book. She was so far gone that she even entertained thoughts of transferring to the Second University, thinking that it would have been better to be celebrated there as a writer than panned as a critic in her assigned English department. I was particularly proud of the moment when, realizing with my not-inconsiderable insight that your charge is by nature a ladder-climber, we placed ladder after ladder in front of her, every rung a good intention – ladders of popularity, academics, sophistication, veneration, spiritual purity – chuckling with anticipation as she exhausted herself and bled her hands and feet dry, growing thirstier and hungrier by the minute, the ladders plunging, in reality, into the Flames.

Then, there was that sweet, sweet moment in which we relished victory – her near vanquishing, when her sweet flesh was practically touching the tip of my tongue – her despair so ripe, her corruption so sweet, her devastation so deep and broad like some diabolic hymn. We had destroyed her – we had severed her ties with her family, trashed her friendships to shreds, completely stripped her of every shred of self-worth and dignity, starved her soul with a combination of derision and shame.

But did you seal the deal? Did you obey my instructions to consume her immediately? Oh no, you had to go and simmer that soup, you had to go find that Onion and that Carrot, and etc, etc. We were already warned about the power of Onions by Dostoyevsky, Wigglesworm! You should have known better. Really, if the UnLit Department were not squabbling all the time, and would actually teach the moral implications of true and false fiction, we would avoid a lot of these spectacular failures! This was your fatal flaw, Wigglesworm. In your hubris, in your complacency, you did not guard over her struggling corpse. No! You were bustling about, keen to make it all “perfect”, whatever that means (that must have rubbed off from her! I have warned you never to pick up your charge’s characteristics!). You were eager to impress me, eager to cook me a delicious morsel that would satisfy my ravenous hunger. Well, my dear Wigglesworm, your kind consideration ensures that I will not go hungry. You robbed me of this girl, Wigglesworm, with your silly infatuation with the goodness of a meal and the preparation of it. You allowed yourself to enjoy the process, when in fact you should have grabbed hold of the ends and tore! Ah, my delectable Wiggie, I almost pity you in my shriveled kernel of a heart.

Anyhow, thanks to your negligence, the Enemy sneaked one “true” friend to your charge. I honestly did not see this coming myself. I had thought there would be none of the Enemy’s Camp in the Temple of False Art. I do not know why it is so hard to move with the Enemy’s omnipresence in mind. Perhaps he uses one of those starry Invisibility Cloaks of his to prevent other Beings from sensing it most of the time; whatever it is, we must constantly tack our sails to account for it even if the wind does not fill them, because His presence is always greater than we imagine. Oh, if only we could replicate the technology!

Anyhow, this “true” friend mediated with her and her enemies; also, despite her rejection of them, her family came flocking about (families always do this! Why, I cannot begin to understand), and then there was that whole damned business about her great-grandmother, who passed into the realms of gold when she was a prefrosh, interceding for her. Again this has something to do with the dead lying around – a total nuisance to our work! Because this entire network of communication is sealed off to us, despite the Virulent Wreckers in the Sillycon Valley of the Shadow of Death hacking away at it day and night, we cannot breach or intercept these messages. Believe me, it’s like trying to read Demotic without the Rosetta Stone.

Anyway, we do not fully know how this happened, but somehow, by the skin of her teeth, she was snatched out of our hands. Oh, what howling fury resounded in hell that day! How the Harpies clawed and screeched, how they tore at their hair! How the Crustaceous Crabs scuttled left and right and left and right, pinching our buttocks and nipping at our ears! How the larval lakes boiled, how the boat on the Styx creaked and threatened to splinter to shards! How our stomachs growled, at the loss of this precious morsel!

And now she is off in some untouchable realm (temporarily, but still),  surrounded by that weird little cloud of buzzing insects that the Enemy calls “Grace” – and what’s more, she’s writing and drawing and filming and learning to govern her capricious tongue, singing songs and psalms and trying to be St. Peter and St. Paul and David and Isaiah and oldies of that ilk, as well as George Herbert and John Donne and that terrible mind that violated my psyche some fifty years ago now; silly and dark and bright and powerful and helpless, mourning and comforting and rejoicing and deliriously running around for all the world like some undiscovered child, and in short being fully alive and “truly” herself – and all through no effort of her own.

Oh the howls of frustration! What just really gets me is how utterly inappropriate her behavior is – like David dancing around half-naked like a wild thing at the head of a processional -  there she is, standing in the white-hot sight of the Enemy, feeling for all the world like some white wizard’s only beloved daughter, a wizard who rules a far-away kingdom from a little rock with a Book (even though she’s just a nerdy fresh graduate, unemployed, napping in bookstores, in danger of becoming an illegal immigrant with a homeless bunny) acting as though she’s Blessed continually! In her hand is a bright sword, and she raises on her arm a shield – yes, that very stupid shield with “Truth” written on it in bloody Latin, of all things; and the sword is of course the “Word”, and she runs around talking about “Peace” and “Reconciliation” from Above – complete poppycock, of course – we all know, especially in the Academy, this world contains only War and Division! And she’s not alone, too, there’s a whole bunch of them, swarming around like little bleeping satellites beaming messages around about the University.

This – this was supposed to be our Great Failure*, Wigglesworm! This was our “Godless Harvard*“! What the hell? Where did you go wrong? And worse still, she’s graduating, and she has no fear, for the Enemy is with her? His rod and his staff, they comfort her? It’s just too much to bear. I swear, we were ready to turn on one another and eat, and I believe that’s exactly what we did. And do, my delectable Monsieur Wigg.

You are to report to my chambers at doom doom o’clock this afternoon. You may bring a cardboard box along with you, to collect your things. As you know, in hell, no poor devil is ever relieved. We are tired, but none of us ever retire. Errant devilings like yourself are customarily fired – efficiently and quite, quite literally. Don’t worry about your patient – I will be reassigning her to the far more sophisticated and very accomplished Derthcliffe. If you have any next of kin, which I sincerely doubt, since they are apt to deny you considering your fatal failure, you may write short notices to them. But hasten, and come to the Feast, my little one, my  dove – come to the Feast, and I assure you, this time I will take, and eat.

Yours Hungerly,

Screwtape

* photos from the Harvard Crimson

But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. She looked up over her knitting an met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light.

- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

What exactly is going on here? She chants to herself that continual loop of consciousness, and suddenly her consciousness is intruded upon by something else. It does not come from her, she insists – but isn’t that a greater theological implication, if it came from someone else?

What if it comes from another consciousness? In To The Lighthouse, Woolf litters recurring phrases everywhere, and they always have a source. But there is no source for this phrase. Unless it is the Source itself – but would the novel possibly admit that? Then the empathetic denial – why this defensive rebuttal, if it is simply something that comes randomly to you? And why does it turn to searching, to the denial of lies, the searching of truth? Yes, “that lie” – is the lie of religion, or rather the lie of God, that she rejects. But can she really resist it? Is it simply language (my professor, James Wood asked) that forces her hand, or rather whispers through her mind – the simple remnants of a Christianity-steeped tongue that has simply accrued so much religion in it that it cannot be rid of so easily? Is it language that speaks her?

What if it IS language that speaks her? I think this is a marvelous thing, if true. It means that the ghosts of our ancestors are still with us, still eddying in the syllables we wrap our tongues around. And why should this not be, if it is the Word that made all in the first place? Isn’t it a blessing that even though Western Civilization may shun Christianity today, it is inevitably, and beautifully laced with it? Isn’t it worth being called beautiful?

I’m not, of course, calling To the Lighthouse a book with a Christian worldview – Mrs Ramsay seems to believe in something that endures – but it is without personality, whereas at the web of all thought and all events and texts and contexts and angels and principalities and powers and histories and nations – in the centre of all narration, to me, is Christ.

These are my illustrations of To the Lighthouse which I did for my final final project at Harvard. I am quite exhausted by them, but also very happy with them.

Just the brief version of what I was trying to do: These are recurring portraits of four main characters in To the Lighthouse, in order of appearance: Mrs Ramsay (the cover), Lily Briscoe, James Ramsay and Mr Ramsay. The portraits are interspersed with three landscapes of increasing menace, marking World War I that occurred in the middle segment, “Time Passes”. I was trying to weave the progression into modernity between the 19th and 20th centuries, which is when Woolf writes her novel. So I tried to demonstrate this in the evolving art style, from more 19th century impressionism through dark surrealism, cubism and finally pop art (the final portrait of James Ramsay). I was also focusing on Mrs Ramsay as the “lighthouse”, or centre of the novel, and also the Madonna figure (I had wanted to do one of her holding James, but I am better at single portraits than combinations). Also, fun fact: the lighthouse can be found in most of the paintings, if you look hard enough.

Church Going
by Philip Larkin

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

I recently made a list of the most influential foreign poems (I don’t do local – too much politics involved!) on yours truly, and I realize that dear old Philip Larkin is incredibly overrepresented. I love his style – he is so pared down, and yet so exact, and not at all pretentious. This is the sort of poetry I hope to write.

I’ve always felt this poem indescribably sad, and that it is. Larkin mourns something without fully knowing why he does, really. His literal conclusion is that, while churches in the form they took are obsolete, their function is still needed – “where all our compulsions meet”. Well, really, who can disagree with that? I’m glad that we don’t stop being human even after “Christendom” goes the way of the dodo.

But religion certainly has not died, and Christianity is as vibrant as ever – just located primarily in different parts of the world. You’d think then that Larkin would at least be right about the church buildings. But God hasn’t even let the church buildings fall into disuse! Yes, there is the occasional church in the UK that is overhauled into apartments (stained glass loft, anyone?) but I mean, the church I go to was a fine old New England church which laid empty for a while, until my young, vibrant, evangelical church moved in. I really appreciate worshipping in an old church building. There is such a wonderful sense of congregation there – not just with the people around me but with the living and the dead, who lie all around. And there is just the sheer beauty of cathedrals which I have visited the world over – the way that art is fused precisely with function – to draw the eye ever ever upwards –

Jacintha’s church rotates with 2 other churches to occupy an old house church in Central Square. I am thinking of doing a video of churches in Cambridge – they are in use, absolutely. And, tangentially, even the ones in China – I read an architecture magazine about this – they are being restored to their original use even as I type, to serve what is daily growing to be the largest population of Christians in the world as well as the history of mankind. But, movingly, with Chinese patterns in the stained
glass. What could be better? Christianity has, unfortunately, often been an excuse for the wiping out of indigenous art and culture. But I think that is now changing, and the Chinese stained glass is just one such example.

Tim Keller said in The Reason for God: Christ makes Africans more fully Africans. He quotes African Scholar Lammin Sanneh “when Africans read the bible in their own languages many began to see in Christ the final solution to their own historic longings and aspirations as Africans…People sensed in their hearts that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred nor their clamor for an invincible Savior, and so they beat their sacred drums for him until the stars skipped and danced in the skies. After that dance the stars weren’t little anymore. Christianity helped Africans to become renewed Africans, not re-made Europeans”.

Well, Christ can redeem culture the world over – Christ can redeem African culture; Christ can redeem Chinese culture; Christ can redeem Singaporean culture, Christ can redeem Harvard’s culture, Christ can redeem internet culture, Christ can redeem our culture (whatever it is) – astonishingly, Christ can even redeem Christian culture. So yes – fusty, overhip, multicultural Old England, watch out!

Why the furrowed brow, Larkin? I mean, you even kind of agree with me -

Water

If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.

Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.

- Philip Larkin