the harvard ichthus » truth

The Lie

Anne L. Goetz — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 05:43:20 +0000

What do you do about a lie? What do you do when a lie has taken hold of you, when it has wormed into your heart and mind and sunk in its claws, when it colors all your thoughts down to your basic view of the world? How do you get rid of the lie? How do you see the world as it really is?

Because, you see, I think that there is a lie at the heart of most of our lives. It might be different for everyone—one might think that she’s the center of the universe, another that she’s not worth anything at all; one might think that money will bring him happiness, another that the perfect relationship will. You probably know what lie has a hold on you. It’s what keeps you awake at night, what sends you into tantrums, what drives you away from the people around you. It’s that one thought that you can see poisoning the world around you, but that you can’t get rid of. Or maybe you can’t see the poison of the lie, but people have told you. Your mentors have urged you to think things over again. Your Christian friends have gently told you that you are wrong. You’ve read the Bible, and you have the sneaking suspicion that this one idea doesn’t fit in that well with the kingdom of God. So, what do you do?

Christ Healing the Blind Man, by El Greco

First, pray. You pray, “God, even though I know that this idea is a lie, right now I am completely convinced that it is true. Wake me up. Help me to see the rock-bottom reality of your love for me, your death for me, and your resurrection.” Because lies, in the end, all boil down to lies about the kind of God that we have. And you keep on praying, even when you hate it and see no way on earth that you ideas about yourself or the world can ever change. Find people who will pray with you, even when you are certain that it won’t work. Read the Psalms and find a prayer that seems to fit your situation. Write blog posts (like this one) about the necessity of prayer, in the hope that after exhorting the whole Internet to do something you’ll feel guilty about not doing it yourself. Find what works, but pray. In my experience, it’s easy to accuse God of not answering prayer when you’re so busy complaining about him that you never actually pray.

Second, find people who will look you in the face and tell you that the lie you’re carrying around is—well, a lie. These people might be friends, mentors, Bible study members, pastors—but you need people who can with utter conviction remind you, on a regular basis, of what the real world looks like. You need people who can tell you that you’ve latched on to a distorted version of reality, because without reminders your lie is going to look extremely convincing. Of course, these people will have lies of their own that need dealing with—who doesn’t? You will have to remind them of the truth just as often as they will have to remind you—and in reminding them, you will remind yourself.

Third, as far as you can, take yourself out of situations where you’re tempted to believe that the lie is true. If you feel absolutely secure in your perfection, don’t spend a lot of time telling everyone about your accomplishments. Similarly, if you think that you’re a complete failure, don’t pore over your disappointments and build up elaborate visions of the future that picture you living in a box under a bridge. Know yourself, and know what activities and situations make your lie seem stronger and more convincing. Avoid them—even if it’s not always easy to do so. Why make yourself an easy target for untruth?

Don’t just give in to the lie. Don’t let it engulf your life. Help one another to see true reality. Our God is the Truth, and he will open our eyes.

Seeing is believing but not understanding

Judith Huang — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:11:58 +0000

It’s been nine years since September 11th, 2001. I have never seen the World Trade Center. By the time I got to America, they were gone. I’m leaving New York today, and I don’t know when’s the next time I’ll be back. But I wrote this piece last summer about Ground Zero, and thought it would be appropriate to post it today.

It’s our last day in New York. I still remember the first time I saw this city with my dad, right this time after freshman year. But it’s my mum’s first time. Tired of walking, she insisted on getting three tickets for the open-top tour buses, so here we are, traffic wind in our faces, trundling down Manhattan. We pass the much-abused Wall Street bull, even now bearing a troop of tourists on his bronze back, and the tour guide directs our attention to the next attraction. “People come to New York and they want to see two things,” she says, “the Statue of Liberty and Ground Zero. If you want to see Ground Zero, get off at the next stop and turn right.” True to form, my mum feels she must not miss the site of the Twin Towers. So we get off the bus and pick our way towards the massive, grating construction site.

There is something peculiar about an attraction defined precisely by its absence. It’s been eight years since 9/11, and that date has not lost its vivid nearness – perhaps because the year has dropped off the end of the date, perhaps because, in the wake of all that’s happened since then, it is necessary for it to stay a fresh, open wound. Ground Zero does seem like a wound, a great gaping hole in the bristling forest of skyscrapers. Three years ago I had been shocked to see it was still a hole, the cardboard timeline of events posted on the wire fence somehow inadequate for the tourists coming to pay homage to the fallen towers. This time around it is still a hole, the construction dust, the grating sound of machines at work a constant from three years ago. Metal cranes heave and creak purposefully in the mess of earth and concrete behind the chain-link fence. A couple of enterprising people have set up booths selling little pamphlets about 9/11, the burning towers superimposed on the statue of liberty on the cover.

I don’t know what it is about all this that was unsatisfying. Everything about the place seems to say, “move along now – nothing to see here”, and yet at the same time it has the look of a recent catastrophe, too recent for anyone to begin to grapple with yet. But we kept on walking along the fence, as though expecting something more substantial – a museum, a memorial? – to appear, even my dad and I, who had been here before. We got to the entrance of what had been the subway station, where a middle-aged black man in a blue windbreaker howls at the passersby – tourists and locals alike, gesticulating wildly – “How many buildings was there, I ask you?” he yells, “Some of these people calls themselves New Yorkers an’ they don’ know! I ask you, how many buildings? How many buildings was in Ground Zero?” His eyes are wide, and he holds in his hand a folder filled with photographs and clippings, which he flips through wildly as he accosts first one and then another group of people, who mostly shuffle away as if to avoid catching the crazy. Around his neck he wears a navy lanyard with “9/11″ printed on it over and over again. I wonder if it’s a uniform he’s given himself – I wonder if he’s out here yelling every day. Something about his crazed fervor makes my parents swerve away from him. Most people give him wide berth, as though craziness, or even passion, can be infectious. But I want to hear what he has to say.

“How many buildings were there here, sir?” I ask. “How many do you think there was?” he asks back. “Two? The twin towers?” my dad ventures. “No, no, no! They always say the twin towers! The twin towers issa nick name, that’s what, look at this picture here…” he flips through his file. “Look, there was seven! You see, seven, but they don’ tell you that, do they? They don’ tell you that! It was like a whole family, you see, with the little ones – ” Sure enough, he has a couple of aerial shots of the World Trade Center before 9/11, and a whole cluster of buildings, now vanished, rise eerily in the shadows of the twin towers. “There was more than just two towers! You see these people, they call themselves New Yorkers, but they don’t know! You see that building there?” I shield my eyes and look up at the tallest thing one in sight. It looms above me. “You look at it here, it’s the same building as here – you see how big the towers was?” he says, showing me a picture of that same building dwarfed by the towers, more than twice its height. Height, I reflect, ceases to mean anything after a certain point, much like the way ten trillion and twenty trillion sound much the same to me. After a certain point, the brain simply ceases to register it and abdicates to infinity. Did the fact that the twin towers were twice as tall as this one make their fall twice as tragic? “So my mum asked me, if I had gone to work that day, and I work in security – how long would you have stayed in there helping people get out? You think about it – one hour, one hour and a half hour – that was not enough time, and the buildings, they just come crashin’ down.”

Happy to have our attention, he goes on to describe the horrors of the facts he’d gathered. He wasn’t working that day – his boss said to take the day off – he was taking his kid to school three blocks down when it happened. He shows us a picture of his son, smiling with the World Trade Center framed behind him. Then he shows us an aerial shot of the collapsed buildings, tells us about the man who was flying a helicopter past that day, who was puzzled to see a whole crowd drift towards the towers instead of away from it, until it dawned on him that they must have been following the first guy in front – blindly, like a lost herd, right into the heart of their deaths. He’d wanted to fly down, to warn them, but knew that the dust rising up from the site would simply sink his helicopter – that all he could do was watch.

“How many people you think died in that buildings?” he goes on, gaining momentum as he flips frantically through his clear folder of newspaper clippings, of photographs – “How many?” There was a list, wasn’t there? A list of missing people… “Yah, there be a list, but what about the little people? What about the illegals? The Mexicans mannin’ the doors? Wha’ about the cleaners? Dey ain’t got no paperwork – and dey died too – No one knows! No one even knows! Their families, they can’t claim insurance! They can’t claim nothin’! No one knows!”

All I could do is watch. I didn’t know what to say. This man had a mission. I don’t know what sort of price he was paying with his family, without his job, just to stand in that street corner however many days it was he stands in that street corner – but something changed in him the day the towers fell, just as something changed in me the day the towers fell. My dreams of America fell that day too, the moment the war machine ground open to a start. The America of Disneyland, of power and strength and generosity and commerce that had lived in my mind, was suddenly substituted for a far more dangerous leviathan. This man’s heart was ravished by the horror, compelled by something strong to tell the truth. A tiny, perhaps unimportant slice of the truth – but nevertheless, the truth. The least I could do was listen.

Screwtape on Graduating

Judith Huang — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:30:21 +0000

My dear Wigglesworm,

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.

img source

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

A New Thing: Or, Paul’s Amazing Springing Sentence

Judith Huang — Sun, 02 May 2010 05:13:46 +0000

“Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Isaiah 43:18-19

“Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:13-14.

A New Thing – what does that mean? Isn’t there nothing new under the sun? I must believe it though, I must believe it, even if my heart is skeptical, even though my heart is guarding myself from falling in love with him again.

Now it shall spring forth: what I do know about springing forth! If you have read this blog, and just click into the archives, you will realize I only blog in the Spring. Why? Because the entire summer, the entire fall, the entire winter, I am dead, a dormant little bulb in the soil, absolutely convinced I will never speak again, utterly resentful of the God I’ve praised for a good three months, wondering where all that morning dew evaporated to. I am terrified of dying again. I am terrified that dying before means dying again. And yet, here it is, movingly, a gentle call staring at me right out of the pages of my devotional: “He wants you to read your past like a history book, but not like a prophecy for your future.”(Stormie OMartian) This analogy is entirely appropriate, because we do learn from history books (or the presumption is we do, otherwise what are we doing reading them? – and before any historians storm my post yelling in their muffled historian voices that they are not Whig historians, seriously consider the use or the assumption that lies behind the writing of any history book – presumably it’s not just to get tenure…) but presumably they are not fatalistic, particularly if we believe in the Jesus-makes-all-things-new business.

Then there is Paul’s amazing springing sentence. You know I always bristle at the start of Philippians 3, just because I feel the bristle of self-recognition (those of you who know me know I have a longstanding love-hate relationship with Paul). There’s all that bit about boasting about not boasting, about being the model Jew, etc etc, with the best education, etc etc, with all the correct qualifications and all the zeal and pretty much then being the perfect Christian and yadda yadda, BUT he puts no stock by that! (Here you can pretty much hear the creaking strains on that particular ego!)But you know what? Paul had a pretty bad history to forget: He had murdered people. And not just people, he had murdered early Christians. In a genocidal frenzy. Talk about “forgetting what is behind”/emotional baggage!

I’ve always been terrified of my reputation from the past. I pretty much despise my fourteen-year-old-self. And actually any younger incarnation of myself. I am definitely very Pauline. I have given Judith Huang a bad name, I feel. This is particularly true when you come from a tiny little incestuous island, where almost every Singaporean I meet abroad has a cousin/uncle/classmate who knows me. What does that even mean, knows me? Has heard about me, has heard rumours about me, can in all probability google up all my past relationships, knows what I got in PSLE (that’s the national exam people take when they are tiny little twelve-year-olds), have seen me play a role in a school play, have heard me in my fiery and slightly bitchy incarnation as a debater, have read my juvenile poems in a blog somewhere sometime. Jesus knew me then and loved me then, God knows how. Because I was an insecure little bundle of nerves, graced with acne and several caked layers of obnoxiousness, hoping to be better than everyone else but knowing, as all teenagers know, that they are really vastly inferior. And not that I got a whole lot better as I got older, either.

And, on the cusp of graduating now, it is going to be hard to “forget what was behind” – there are dozens of things at Harvard I leave behind, good things and bad things, things still in the whirring dryer of my unconscious, being “processed” as I type.

But He makes all things new.
And I’m supposed to believe that, the songs I write, the posts I type out, the little tunes I sing to my bunny, the short video clips I compose, the illustrations I toss off, all these things are part of that new thing, and not something my inner materialist tells me is a complicated jumble of hormones, and the fever pitch a Harvard semester always concludes in, and the effects of the weather combined. And I’m supposed to believe in Jesus, creator of the universe, and the most gentle Person I know.
I’m supposed to fall in love with him again this Spring, and let Him keep me in love with Him this summer, and walk off into the sunset with Him into The Rest Of My Life.
And you know what? I’m still scared. But He gave Paul that sentence – that swooshing, whooping sentence, which I have always found beautiful and true:

and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus

the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus!
the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus!
the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus!

It is so irresistible, so exultant, so fresh, so new.
A friend wrote, THIS is literature – Paul, naturally, writing a letter, trying his best to say what is best for Philippians to hear, and accidentally, his pen lets off a wild whoop!
Not the poets laboring over a sheet of white paper, trying to say something intense, but simply a byproduct of Godly work, work for encouraging and helping. Something not too terribly seriously literary, but indeed, terribly serious. And you know what, it is read throughout the world, and echoes in the minds of millions across the centuries, and stands, stands always by the gate of life for all eternity. A new sentence. A new thing. That is truth. That is beauty.

A Balancing Act

Jordan Monge — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:00:25 +0000

Recently, a friend emailed me asking for help because his girlfriend has been having trouble accepting God’s grace. Over my short time as a Christian, I have met many guilty souls who struggle with grace. I spent the greater portion of the last year trying to figure out grace. Most of the time, I failed miserably.

At times, I preferred perishing to receiving grace. I wrote:

Righteous and wickedness can have no common ground.
In Heaven, you and I, oh Lord, ought never to be bound.
So send me to the depths of immeasurable despair
That Thy perfection may forever reign in holiness most fair.

It seemed like I couldn’t fully acknowledge how horrible all of my sin was without being terrified and mystified by grace.

But our Father is “full of grace and truth” (cf. John 1:14). He does not give us grace because he was blinking and didn’t see our sin. He knows everything that we’ve done – He knows our sin better than we do – but he still redeems us. Why? How? Because He loves us. “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.”

This was another idea that I couldn’t wrap my head around for a long time. I only fully grasped it when a friend wept over my lap, repeating the words “I’m sorry” over and over again. Even my saying, “I forgive you,” could not stop my friend’s refrain. Yet I did not want tears or weeping; I just wanted to enjoy time together. Yet it hit me that I was doing precisely the same thing with God: sobbing during all of our time together and constantly apologizing in prayer. But God’s love is infinitely greater than my feelings for my friends. How much more, then, must He be tired of my resistance to His forgiveness? God’s plan for us is not guilt, but repentance and salvation and freedom.

We are in a terrible situation when we cannot accept God’s grace. It leaves us disheartened and demotivated. If we don’t appreciate how much we have been redeemed, we cannot fully feel God’s unending love. We do not feel moved to serve Him or to flee our life of sin. It becomes easier and easier to be ungrateful and unloving in all of the other areas of our life.

We must accept God’s grace if we ever hope to live out a Christian life of love, forgiveness, and peace. You can see the difference between the man who has accepted grace and the man who has not: one is calm and peaceful, feeling loved by God, while the other one frets and worries, trying to earn his salvation.

Yet receiving grace is dangerous: we may easily forget the seriousness of the sin we commit. It is just as bad, if not worse, to feel loved simply because we do not grasp the horror of sin’s disgusting fetters. That is not accepting grace, but ignoring the Truth.

It is pride to think we are good enough on our own – to ignore our need to be set free from slavery to sin. It is also pride to think that our sin is so horrific that God cannot break the chains. As St. Bernard puts it, “The rivers of Grace cannot flow uphill, up the steep cliff of the proud man’s heart.” But the humble man will both acknowledge his sin and accept God’s solution. “That is why Scripture says: ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble’” (James 4:6).

So we are engaged in a constant balancing act: realizing the truth about ourselves while fully accepting God’s grace. It may not be easy, but it is the only way to maintain the drive to finish the race. It is our only hope if we seek to keep ourselves on the narrow path. Sometimes we will err on one side or the other. After many months of being too guilt-ridden, I have perhaps begun to focus too heavily on grace. Yet I can’t help but think that if we seek the balance humbly, with a childlike faith, God will not punish us for falling sometimes. He knows – most of all – that we are imperfect. The question is not “will we fall?” but “will we get back on the beam?” We are lucky enough to know that God’s got a little safety net known as Grace under there when we do fall.

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.

The Poet’s Corner #80

Maria Xia — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 05:14:34 +0000

After an aimless time
searching for an ambiguous truth,
I behold the idea incarnate.
It takes the shape my mind always dreamed–
a fantasy realized and released–
one pale lily among rough reeds.
Without reaching out to its beauty, I
fall back into tangibility, leave
all untouched in silence, with
nothing to show for sight.

____________________________________________________________________________
Eboné Ingram ‘12 is a Molecular and Cellular Biology concentrator living in Winthrop House.

On College Christian ecumenism

Samir Paul — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:00:52 +0000

Let me preface these thoughts by saying that I came back to Christian faith in a college Christian community and have been shown intense love over the past few years. And so it is with an equal love that I hope to think about some problems in how campus Christian fellowships relate to other Christians.

I perceive a mutual and abiding suspicion between liberal and conservative Christian forces on campus. It is grounded in a conservative perception of liberal Christians as flimsy and compromised and a liberal perception of conservative Christians as backward and fundamentalist. And to a certain degree, both are right about each other, even if only because they have, like water, conformed to the containers ready to receive them. We might say that they are filling the niches that demand (and fund?) them, but I don’t believe that such a situation is acceptable as a status quo. I recall one evangelical friend recounting how a freshman-year visit to Harvard’s Memorial Church left him feeling as though he had been “spiritually raped.” And a liberal friend spoke to me once with pretty shocking contempt for the hateful and disgusting “gay-basher fellowships.” I have worshiped Jesus Christ in Memorial Church and with several of those “gay-basher” fellowships; neither place is the barren spiritual wasteland that my friends would have me believe. But clearly both felt affirmed enough in their opinions to be comfortable speaking so ill of another body of Christians.

This is a problem. It is schism rearing its ugly head: Church organized around ideology rather than community allows conservatives and liberals never to mix, eroding any notion of Christians as people living together with Christ as the foundation. Schism has allowed us to erase the persistent tension that lies at the heart of community life, but it has done so at the cost of the community itself. It massages our bloated Pharisaic egos and gives license to our arrogant belief that We are the True Church. But it is wrong to train another generation of Christians to believe that “the Communion of Saints” is actually “the Communion of Saints who think exactly the way we do.” No! It is the Communion of all those people who find new breath in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, who proclaim the Cross and the empty tomb in a world ravaged by sin and injustice and violence and pain. It is unconscionable to teach the members of one’s church or body that unless another Christian believes exactly everything that we believe, there is nothing worth listening to.

This is, I’m sure, a very common frustration, and it’s one that I do not have a solution to. But I read last summer about an ancient Christian tradition that may be relevant:

Another consequence of the growth of congregations was that it soon became impossible for all Christians in a particular city to gather together for worship. The unity of the body of Christ was so important that it seemed that something was lost when in a single city there were several congregations. In order to preserve and symbolize the bond of unity, the custom arose in some places to send a piece of bread from the communion service in the bishop’s church — the “fragmentum” — to be added to the bread to be used in other churches in the same city.

> The Story of Christianity, by Justo L. González – page 95

This fracture in the early church was caused by size rather than theological battle lines. But reviving this ancient tradition of sharing each other’s Communion bread could at least produce a moment of reflection in which a desire for Christian unity might be kindled in all who partake. Even symbolic steps are steps in the right direction.

Christianity Disentangled

Jordan Monge — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:00:32 +0000

A few weeks ago, I finished an incredibly long-take home final for one of my favorite classes: the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics with Professor Ned Hall (I highly recommend it, even for people who are terrible at physics like me). Even though the course is now complete, I still have quantum mechanics in my mind and as I was puzzlingly over some theological issues while pouring over my final, I began to see some connections between the two.

Quantum mechanics is the study of how matter behaves at its smallest levels. The problem is that all of our experiments have demonstrated that particles behave in the most peculiar ways. This has allowed for the conjecture of many different (and bizarre) explanations for what’s going on. To figure out which of these interpretations are plausible, we run many thought experiments. One of the most famous is that of Schrödinger’s cat. One way of explaining the bizarre results of the two-path experiment is postulating that particles exist in a state of superposition – that is, they exist in two places at once. (There is a good explanation of this on page 11 of David Albert’s book Quantum Mechanics and Experience) But it only exists in two places until an observer looks at the device and causes the state of superposition to collapse into a definite position. This sounds a little crazy at first, but the problem is that we can’t run any experiment to figure out what the particle is actually doing. We can, however, as philosophers love to do, think about it for a really long time.

If the shameless plugs for the class at the beginning of the article didn't convince you to take the class, I hope that this lecture slide from the class to demonstrate the experimental set-up - complete with blood - will persuade you.

So a philosopher decides to rig up a device in which a particle is forced to go either up or down and hit a detection screen. If the particle goes up and hits the top of the detection screen, a heavy weight will be released directly above a poor kitty and the kitty will be promptly killed. If the particle goes down, the weight will not be released and the kitty will survive! Now, the theory states that the particle will exist in a state of superposition until an observer looks at the experiment. So what does that mean for our precious kitty?

Well, the state of the particle at the beginning can be written something like this:

1/√2 |up, 0> + 1/√2 |down, 0>

All that means is that there is a 1/2 chance that the particle will go up and a 1/2 chance that the particle will go down. If this superposition is real, it’s something like half up and half down until we look at the experiment and force it into the either the |up, 0> or |down, 0> state. But because of the way that the experiment is set up, this particle’s state becomes entangled with the states of other objects. If the particle goes up, then a certain state of the detector and the weight and the kitty will necessarily follow. That means that we can write the state as:

1 √ 2 |up, 0> |detector screen top> |weight falls> |kitty dies> +

1 √ 2 |down, 0> |detector screen bottom> |weight stays> |kitty lives!>

Under the superposition interpretation, the kitty is both dead and alive at the same time until someone looks at it. This rather absurd conclusion has lead some people to conclude that this superposition/collapse interpretation is untenable. That is, even though they could accept the initial claim that particles existed in a state of superposition, they could not accept the necessary conclusion from that assertion that cats could be both dead and alive simultaneously. These two conclusions were entangled in such a way that to accept the first, you must accept the second. If you rejected the latter conclusion, you could no longer hold onto the first conclusion.

At this point, you’re probably wondering why I’m writing all of this on the Ichthus blog instead of on, say, my philosophy class blog. Here’s the answer: it is very easy to entangle theological positions on Christian doctrine in such a way that it makes the initial claims untenable.

So say we’ve got a claim about Jesus:

|Jesus was the Son of God>

And we know based on His testimony that the scripture is reliable, so the states are entangled and can be rewritten:

|Jesus was the Son of God>|The Scripture is authoritative>

Because the Scripture is reliable, and based on what is written in Genesis, we come to the conclusion:

|Jesus was the Son of God>|The Scripture is authoritative>|Man comes from Adam>

This obviously makes us come to realizations about scientific claims regarding creation, so we have a new state:

|Jesus was the Son of God>|The Scripture is authoritative>|Man comes from Adam>|Evolution is false>

Most people (including myself, despite my last post) find this position to be an untenable one. Yet because these states are (seemingly) entangled, our rejection of the last claim demands our rejection of the first. (In particular, I think that if we keep this chain of entanglement up, we come to the even more troubling conclusion that: |Jesus was the Son of God>|The Scripture is authoritative>|Man comes from Adam>|Evolution is false>|Our very experience deceives us>|God deceives us> But that is besides the point.)

The problem is that these states aren’t necessarily entangled as the ones in the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. For example, there are lots of questions about what it really means when we say that the Bible is authoritative. Does that mean that it is a reliable guide for science? For morality? Does that mean it’s inerrant? Or can it still be full of error? Does every word come from God? Or is it simply that all parts are useful?

On the other hand, it seems like the Scripture’s authority is entangled with some doctrinal beliefs. My question is: how heavily entangled is it? Can we draw clear-cut conclusions about heaven and hell? The role of the church? The role of women?

My answer is that I’m honestly not sure. But I do think that it is easy to overestimate how entangled the claims actually are. We underestimate how doctrinally divided the early church was. There was a high level of tolerance for different theological doctrines, so long as there was still faith in Christ and repentance from sin. In 1 Corinthians, Paul does not suggest ending fellowship with a brother who denied any particular theological doctrine, but with one who has continued in grave sexual immorality. Our very own Nick Nowalk wrote a post last month that about how the early Church did not have our distinction between orthodoxy and orthopraxy; errors in practice were corrected by proper doctrine in the formula “Do You Not Know?” Yet each example of Christian error involves practice. There is little (if any) correction of doctrine which does not manifest itself in practical differences.

I find this to be very good news. Christianity is not like Quantum Mechanics. In Quantum Mechanics, there is no question of entanglement. The states are so obviously entangled that the false conclusion may lead us to reject the initial hypothesis entirely. In Christianity, the level of entanglement is unclear. False conclusions do not force us to reject the initial claim Jesus is Lord. Instead, they force us to re-evaluate our conclusions on every step of the way, enabling us to get a clearer and clearer image of the Truth.

The Difference Between the Iliad and the Incarnation

Nick Nowalk — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:06:59 +0000

“…the relation of the [biblical writer] to the truth of his story still remains a far more passionate and definite one than is Homer’s relation. The Biblical narrator was obliged to write exactly what his belief in the truth of the tradition…demanded of him—in either case, his freedom in creative or representative imagination was severely limited; his activity was perforce reduced to composing an effective version of the pious tradition. What he produced, then, was not primarily oriented toward ‘realism’ (if he succeeded in being realistic, it was merely a means, not an end); it was oriented toward truth. Woe to the man who did not believe it! One can perfectly well entertain historical doubts on the subject of the Trojan War or of Odysseus’ wanderings, and still, when reading Homer, feel precisely the effects he sought to produce; but without believing in Abraham’s sacrifice, it is impossible to put the narrative of it to the use for which it was written. Indeed, we must go even further. The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy. All other scenes, issues, and ordinances have no right to appear independently of it, and it is promised that all of them, the history of all mankind, will be given their due place within its frame, will be subordinated to it. The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels…Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, to feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history.” (Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, pp. 14-15)

“Behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel’ (which mean, God with us).” (Matthew 1:20-23)

“And the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.’ And Mary said to the angel, ‘How will this be, since I am a virgin?’ And the angel answered her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy–the Son of God…For nothing will be impossible with God.’ And Mary said, ‘Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.’ And the angel departed from her.” (Luke 1:30-38)

“And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, ‘Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.’” (Luke 2:8-14)

**A good Christmas sermon you can read or listen to here:

http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Sermons/ByScripture/14/1022_We_Have_Come_to_Worship_Him/

A Meditation

Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:00:10 +0000

Lord, may the fruit of our minds be to the praise of Your glory.

When I think, I think in words and pictures. The words and the pictures must be connected, because sometimes the pictures have something to do with the words or the words have something to do with the pictures. But I’m not sure what the connection is, or even what it could be. I can do something with the words where they follow one another and I feel like I’ve made a point. But I don’t really know what it is to make a point.

Where do the words and pictures come from? I don’t know. Since my thought is constituted by them, they must be in some sense prior to my thought. But then do I have control over my thoughts? And is there a right way to use the words and pictures? Sometimes, I think, I find out that I’ve been using them wrong. But do I have any way of knowing when I’m not using them right? Sometimes I think I have clear thoughts about something, but later I find out that I was confused because I wasn’t using the right words or pictures.

Conceptual confusion shrouds thought; its dissolution is the chief aim of philosophy. The task is exceedingly difficult. “We feel,” says Wittgenstein, “as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.” And in the most important sense, our clarity or lack thereof is beyond our control. The moments of understanding, when we see through a little of the darkness, come to us sporadic and unexpected. We do not arrive at insight as we arrive at the top of a mountain, by planning a route and following it with determination; it is much more like climbing into a boat and casting ourselves out onto the sea, hoping the currents will carry us to some beautiful island, or at least a quaint atoll. Certainly there are important seafaring techniques without which we have no hope of survival. But even the most skilled sailor has no guarantee that he will ever arrive anywhere, nor even that he will see home again. Thinking is dangerous.

A thinker, then, is a restless man. For what other kind of man would climb willingly into a boat and push off from shore? He is not content with his country; he must see the world. He must find the unknown and possess it. He is an explorer in the old fifteenth-century sense. Will he find the Fountain of Youth?

But what is a Christian thinker? He is restless like a child; he wants to go play in the creek. The creek is beautiful, therefore he seeks it out. But the field is beautiful also (perhaps more beautiful!), and he will soon leave the creek to play in the field. A Christian thinker delights that God has made the ocean on which he floats. He delights to be carried here, he delights to be carried there. A Christian thinker’s thinking is a kind of psalm, a kind of worship, a kind of prayer. A Christian thinker thinks to the praise of God’s glory, and the fruit of his mind is a sweet fruit indeed.

Lord, may the fruit of our minds be to the praise of Your glory.