Having just finished the first season today, I was pleased to find this insightful piece at Slate on Netflix’s new series Marvel’s Daredevil. The article explains, “To really understand Daredevil—both the comic book and the new show—you need to understand his Catholicism.” And they are right. The show “tries to reconcile the lawyer who defends the law with the Daredevil who breaks it. Murdock’s brutal justice is more than his way of taking personal responsibility for the sins of others; it’s his way of atoning for his own. Murdock’s real superpower, and also his biggest foe, is his Catholicism.” The article concludes, “Daredevil is far from the perfect superhero. He makes mistakes. He doesn’t have “an iron suit or a magic hammer.” And his relentless sacrifice night after night, his ability to gain strength from his weaknesses, and his guilt over the terrible things he does to bring justice to Hell’s Kitchen may not make him the perfect Catholic either, but they do make his faith an ever greater superpower than his heightened senses.” While religious convictions or mere leanings tend to show up in passing in film[ref]For example, think of the ridiculous scene where Clark Kent randomly sees a priest following Zod’s threat in Man of Steel.[/ref] (unless it is portrayed negatively), their is a healthy dose of confession, the priest, and empty, post-Mass churches throughout the first season. There are frank questions about morality and spirituality between Murdock and the priest. And while it may not be earth-shattering, I sense a kind of metaphysical longing and pondering on Murdock’s part throughout the series. The show’s title sequence features a red liquid (wax or even blood?) that creates numerous images, which are linked to the three elements that shape Daredevil: (1) blind justice via the law, (2) his upbringing in Hell’s Kitchen, and (3) his Catholicism.
For me, the appearance of the cross and angel stir my own metaphysical ponderings.
In a recent article in Christianity Today, pastor and professor A.J. Swoboda writes the following:
This is how it looked on Saturday.
Christians defend certain days of the Holy Weekend. For instance, we’ll defend the idea that on Friday Jesus actually died on a cross to save the world from its sin. Then we’ll turn around and defend Easter Sunday as the day that Jesus actually rose from the grave, defeating the powers of evil running loose in the world.
But nobody defends Saturday. Nobody writes apologetics defending the belief that Jesus actually lay dead for one long, endless day two thousand years ago. What’s the defense for that? If you’ve got the power to rise from the grave, why would you wait one whole long day to do it? Why not just rise from the grave, like, just a little later Friday night?
Then, he offers this startling reminder:
So much of Christian faith is Saturday faith. I call it “awkward Saturday”: that holy day to sit, wait, hope—unsure of what’s to come tomorrow. Saturday is the day that Jesus, and all understanding, lay dead…So much of faith is living in the awkward Saturday, living in the dark mesh of twilight between the moments of hopelessness and utter blinding hope. At times, we are all like the two disciples on their way to Emmaus who were really close to Jesus but didn’t always know it. In Luke 24, two disciples walked away from Jerusalem, where they’d just seen their Lord and Master die on the cross. Leaving, dejected, upset, hopeless, and broken, to find the next stage in their lives and careers. Unbeknownst to them, Jesus had been resurrected and was actually walking alongside them on their way to Emmaus. The hope of Sunday hadn’t dawned on them yet. The Gospels tell us that, on their way to Emmaus, the disciples were “downcast.”
That experience is the kind of experience Saturday is all about.
This profound realization goes hand-in-hand with The Crucible of Doubt by Terryl and Fiona Givens. In our quest for certainty,[ref]Certainty and eternal learning has an especially paradoxical relationship within Mormonism.[/ref] we often stigmatize doubts, fear, and/or a lack of understanding. And sometimes all you can do in response is show up, like Joseph of Arimathea did:
According to John—after the crowds fled and the slowly muffled screams of the executed ceased—Joseph made the sorrowful journey to receive Jesus’ body as Friday drew to a close. Slowly, carefully, Joseph lowered the cross, pulled the large Roman nails from Jesus’ fragile hands and feet, and carried him in his arms.
Allow your imagination to paint the devastation of pulling those nails and along with them uprooting your greatest dreams and hopes…Years earlier, most likely, Joseph had left behind his life of predictability and safety to follow an unknown Savior, only to have his vision crushed the night before. Now Joseph held his dead dream in his arms. He hadn’t signed up for this. This wasn’t in the fine print. What a failure. What a waste.
But Joseph still showed up.
Joseph asked for Jesus’ body. It wasn’t forced upon him. He experienced the burden of it by his own choice…Who would ask for the heaviness of Christ?
…A Christ-follower does.
The feelings of pain and hopelessness that often come with the burdens of mortal life are not signs of weakness or lack of faith. They are the feelings of Christ’s disciples the day before his glorious return.
In anticipation of this Easter Sunday, perhaps we should take a moment to reflect on awkward Saturday.
I wrote a post for Times and Seasons today: Privilege and the Family. The post borrows heavily from work that Walker Wright has done right here at Difficult Run collecting research and data (like the chart above) on the impact of marriage and family for children’s outcomes, and also seeks to answer a couple of questions raised at By Common Consent recently: Who has two thumbs and doesn’t give a crap about the Family? The questions are:
Why should we care about the family?
What does it mean to stand up for the family?
If that sounds like an interesting post to you, then you should check it out.
The idea that America’s constitutional system might be fundamentally flawed cuts deeply against the grain of our political culture. But the reality is that despite its durability, it has rarely functioned well by the standards of a modern democracy. The party system of the Gilded Age operated through systematic corruption. The less polarized era that followed was built on the systematic disenfranchisement of African-Americans. The newer system of more ideological politics has solved those problems and seems in many ways more attractive. But over the past 25 years, it’s set America on a course of paralysis and crisis — government shutdowns, impeachment, debt ceiling crises, and constitutional hardball. Voters, understandably, are increasingly dissatisfied with the results and confidence in American institutions has been generally low and falling. But rather than leading to change, the dissatisfaction has tended to yield wild electoral swings that exacerbate the sense of permanent crisis.
Yglesias goes on to say that, despite all these handicaps, the American political system has been incredibly lucky. And that it’s luck is potentially about to run out.
Me? I’ve got one thing to add. As quaint as it may seem, I think that we spend a little too much time focusing on the formal infrastructure of government: on the bureaucracies and the laws, the offices and the branches. The most important ingredients, I think, are the social ones. This is why I have so little interest in politics these days. It’s not just the cynicism. It’s the belief that politics is just the surface, and that the problems–and the solutions–lay in the depths below.
And now, as the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them—therefore Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God. (Alma 31:5)
I recently presented at the 2015 Faith & Knowledge Conference at the University of Virginia. As the website explains, “The Faith and Knowledge Conference was established in 2007 to bring together LDS graduate students in religious studies and related disciplines in order to explore the interactions between religious faith and scholarship. During the past four conferences, students have shared their experiences in the church and the academy and the new ideas that have emerged as a result. Papers and conversations provided thought-provoking historical, exegetical, and theoretical insights and compelling models of how to reconcile one’s discipleship with scholarly discipline.” The conference is typically for those in religious studies and “related disciplines (e.g., women’s studies, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, literature, etc.),” so I was grateful to be a part of it as the lone MBA student. My presentation was titled “‘Labour…Is Their Religion’: Toward a Mormon Theology of Work.” The abstract is below:
Despite the Platonic ideal, ordinary people do not spend the majority of their time in the act of deep contemplation. Instead, they are performing the seemingly menial tasks of daily life. This largely consists of one’s form of employment. Finding meaning in the lone and dreary world of day-to-day work has been a point of increasing interest among management experts and organizational theorists. Their findings yield fruitful insights, especially given that one of Mormonism’s earliest forms of consecration was a business organization known as the United Firm. The “inspired fictionalization” of the United Firm revelations is an early example of Joseph Smith’s cosmological monism, transforming a business entity into the ancient “order of Enoch.” This sacralization of the mundane was further elaborated by Brigham Young and recognized by non-Mormons as an oddity of the Utahns. The metaphysical overlap of the temporal and spiritual realms can influence the way modern Mormons conduct their business, inspire “Zion-building” within organizations, and pave the way for a Mormon theology of work and eternal progression.
My father’s father’s bookstore, the place I miss most in the world.
My grandfather started a bookstore in Lynchburg, VA long before I was born. Over years of family vacations, it became my favorite place. I spent countless hours of my childhood perusing the covers in the used sci-fi section. I took my favorites back into a break room where I could always find space on an old church pew and occasionally even an off-brand root beer in the mini fridge. My mind took to the stars as I read the old books with their tattered covers, leaving my body behind amid the clutter of American antiques and artifacts. Today, my uncle continues to run Givens Books in a new building down the street from the old one.[ref]The city bought it and demolished it for a road that they ended up never building.[/ref] Another uncle operates another Givens Books in another town. Books, you might say, are in my blood.
And when my family isn’t writing books they are, of course, reading them. Lots and lots and lots of books. But at this point I have to specify that the Givens clan, by and large, reads serious literature. And, on that score, I’ve been a bit of a disappointment to everyone.
Other than the assigned books for school, I have always read pretty much exclusively fantasy and science fiction. From Brian Jacques to J. R. R. Tolkien, and from Alan Dean Foster to Orson Scott Card, I wanted books with magic and spaceships.[ref]Especially spaceships. I fast-forwarded to the space combat scenes in Return of the Jedi on our VCR copy so many times that I broke it and had to patch it with tape. Which totally worked, by the way.[/ref]
This was probably fine when I was just starting to read on my own in elementary school. I went through dozens of Hardy Boys and a lot of Tom Swift, Jr. (which I liked more) and several series of similar kid mystery books from England. Even in middle school it probably wasn’t too alarming. Who can say no to a little Susan Cooper? Others, like Madeleine L’Engle, were probably supposed to be the gateway drugs into more serious literature. But for me, they weren’t, and by the time I was in high school this was clearly something of let-down for all concerned.
The most pristine example of this dynamic was when my cousin (just a couple of years older than me) had his copy of Piers Plowman along with him at a family gathering. Piers Plowman is “a Middle English allegorical narrative poem… written in unrhymed alliterative verse…considered by many critics to be one of the greatest works of English literature of the Middle Ages.” At more or less the exact same time, I was reading Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy, which is “a series of best-selling science fiction novels…set in the Star Wars galaxy approximately five years after the events depicted in Return of the Jedi.” After all, they had spaceships.[ref]Actually, I might have been re-reading them.[/ref]
My parents were–and are–great. I don’t recall a single lecture about this, let alone any ultimatums or demands. When my dad realized how hooked I was on sci-fi, the best he could do was ask his colleagues in the English department to recommend the best sci-fi had to offer. This is how I got into Isaac Asimov‘s Foundation series[ref]Which, while a classic, is just not really well-written. I liked I, Robot a lot more when I found that on my own a little later.[/ref] and also Philip José Farmer. Unfortunately, no one recommended Ray Bradbury or Philip K. Dick or Ursula K. Le Guin at the time, which really goes to show you that English professors are probably not the best crowd to get sci-fi advice from.
The point, however, is that even though my father did his best not to look at me while my cousin was expressing just how fascinated he was by Pier and his damnable plow, I knew the comparison was too obvious to be missed.
To this day, my uncles and aunts ask me what I’m reading whenever we meet up. This question is both necessary and–in most cases–sufficient for all conversation at a Givens clan gathering. I reply, as often as not, that I’ve just read (e.g.) Jim Butcher’s newest novel and it was fantastic. They never recognize the books, and so they ask for more info with that voracious glint in their eyes that a Givens gets whenever they detect the proximity of satisfying literary prey. But, as soon as they hear “fantasy” or “science fiction,” they remember who they are talking to. Instead of a thick, juicy, literary steak I am talking about bubblegum and breath mints. Interest in literature wanes as they consider me with concern. It’s as though they asked me how work was going, and I told them that it was going pretty well: my boss had given me a promotion now that I knew how to fit the shapes into the correct slots on the first try most of the time.
The problem is, that somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that you were the kind of person who read serious literature or you were the kind of person who did not. You know, it’s the old:
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
I felt like I had to choose either-or, and I had some pretty compelling reasons not to go with the serious stuff. First, although I enjoyed some of the literature I got assigned to read in high school and college, the ones that I didn’t like I really didn’t like. Case in point: Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Oh man, I loathed that book with all the pure and fiery indignation of adolescence. The idea that spirituality requires detachment from ordinary life was (and still is) repulsive to me. If the sacred and the holy cannot survive close proximity to real life then what good are they? Maybe at 33 I’d be less judgmental than I was at 14, but my idea of monolithic categories meant that a couple of bad experiences poisoned the well. If the powers that be put Siddhartha in the same category as The Sheltering Sky, I felt I had to take or leave them together.
I loved The Sheltering Sky, by the way, even though it wasn’t a fun book. I also loved Hemingway, and For Whom the Bell Tolls was probably the one (and only) serious book I read voluntarily as a teenager. Not only had books like Siddhartha sort of peed in the pool, however, but there was also the way that serious literature was read. In college, we had a handbook in one class full of the different literary approaches. You could choose from Marxism, feminism, or deconstructionism. The same authority that said “these are the books to read,” was also telling me “and this is how you read them.” No, thanks.
It’s not that I’m averse to analyzing what I read. Far from it, I can almost never turn off the analytic side of my mind, and most of the time I enjoy it. Probing and critiquing is how I enjoy most of what I enjoy. It’s second nature. The two things that bugged me about the way literary analysis was taught in high school, however, were first that it was so dogmatic and second that it was pathetic to have a bunch of 14-year olds pontificating about books that were way, way outside our capacity to really understand.
As for the dogma: I think that’s kind of self-explanatory. It’s no secret that certain kinds of views are allowed in the humanities, and other views not so much. It’s not that I was so concerned about seeing conservatism recognized, but I just wanted to be able to be freely curious. At the extreme end of the spectrum, I signed up for an elective women in literature class my senior year of high school. I just wanted to understand different viewpoints. I expected to be one of the only guys in the class, but what I didn’t expect was the wall of hostility that greeted me every day. I wasn’t trying to debate anyone. In fact, I wasn’t even trying to ask questions or influence the conversation: I just wanted to sit and listen. But I soon realized that my presence was an unwelcome imposition, so I dropped the class. Even when the examples were not quite as flagrant the message was always universal: only certain kinds of perspectives and certain kinds of people were actually welcome.
As for the analysis: I don’t think that at 33 I’ve arrived at some pinnacle of understanding that I didn’t have when I was still in school at 14 or 18 or 22. But the greater life experiences and the historical and philosophical context make these books mean much, much more to me than they possibly could have then. Going back to The Sheltering Sky for a minute: that book came to life for me all over again when I took a class on existentialism in college. Even though I’d already liked it, my appreciation grew dramatically when I was able to put it in context. The lesson is simple: as a teenager the emphasis should have been more on understanding and less on critiquing the great works. Even most teenagers know that they don’t have anything special or unique to say about books that have been studied by scholars for decades or centuries, so the activity of forcing everyone to pontificate resulted in contrived, hackneyed, embarrassing experiences that undercut the possibility of approaching literature more as student and less as judge or critic.
So, given the political dogma, the pretentious critiques, and the boring books that I thought I’d have to take along with the good ones: I said no, thanks to serious literature. When school was out and I could read whatever I wanted, I glutted myself on fantasy and sci-fi to my heart’s content. But then a funny thing happened. After a few years of this, the books started to lose their taste. I found I’d lost the ability to lose myself in the stories.
My literary Peter Pan syndrome kept me deathly opposed to abandoning my sci-fi for classics, but I started cautiously moving out towards literary sci fi. I read more Vonnegut, more Bradbury, and more Dick. They were all great. Then I turned to more recent literary sci fi with books like Never Let Me Go and The Handmaid’s Tale. I loved them as well, so I kept exploring further. I was still dedicated to staying conspicuously away from outright serious literature, so instead I experimented with some classic American noir: The Big Sleep and Promised Land.[ref]Not really noir, since it was set in the 1970s, but definitely from the same tradition.[/ref] And I loved all of them, too.
Next thing you know, I started asking my family for the books they liked to read, and before you knew it I’d read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose and both of them blew me away. Most recently, I just finished Joseph Conrad‘s The Secret Agent and finally the dam burst. I mean, Joseph Conrad is as serious as you can get, really. His work is over a century old and I had, of course, read Heart of Darkness in high school. I didn’t get it then, but I got The Secret Agent now. And it wasn’t any of the nonsensical analytic hogwash that I’d rejected in school. It was the sheer power of his writing and, above all, the strength of his amazing metaphors and similes. Here was writing that touched my soul. Here was writing that lived up to Joseph Conrad’s ambition to “by the power of the written word… make you hear, … make you feel… [and] before all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm – all you demand – and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”
Not only had I finally fallen in love with some of the literature that I’d eschewed as a kid, but I also couldn’t help but see the obvious parallels between a writer like Conrad (serious literature) and a writer like Ray Bradbury (sci-fi). They are not very similar, all things considered, but they both have a gift for some of the most novel, evocative similes I’ve ever read, doled out with such breathtaking profligacy that I’m left in awe.
It also helped, by the way, that I read a few books I hated. Camus’ The Stranger did absolutely nothing for me, despite the fact that I had loved The Plague. And don’t get me started on Dorris Lessing‘s sci-fi catastrophe.
What really got through to me the most, however, was that at the same time that I was reading serious literature and loving it, I was finding that popular sci-fi and fantasy were starting to resonate with me again for the first time in years. During the same years where I discovered my love of Stegner and Conrad I was also devouring Brandon Sanderon’s epic fantasy tomes and re-affirming Jim Butcher’s place as my very favorite living author.
Now, this may very well be obvious to all of you, but it’s been a revelation to me. Entertainment is part of our identity. Or at least that’s how people usually think of it. In high school and college–when we’re all building our identities–the kind of music that you listen to is automatically connected to the clothes you wear and the friends you have. Turns out, the main reason for that is insecurity and inexperience, and that there’s actually no good reason why you shouldn’t alternate between Renaissance religious chants and screamo. Or, back on the topic of literature, between Fyodor Dostoevsky and John Ringo.
I’m not trying to equate the two. I have pretty strong opinions about who is better at the sheer craft of writing as an art form, and it’s going to be Dostoevsky over Ringo (and on down the line in favor of serious literature in most cases).[ref]I sort of doubt John Ringo would contest that.[/ref] But there are lots of different kinds of beauty in the world. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is one and riding on a roller coaster is another. Which is better? Do you want to have to pick just one? Because I don’t. I love going on very long runs (12 miles is my max so far) with all the pain and the sweat and the weakness and the satisfaction that comes with it. I love sleeping in when the temperature is just perfect and the blankets are at optimal coziness and there’s nothing that you absolutely have to do just yet. Is one of these a better way to enjoy the sheer physical sense of being a mortal, living, physical creature than the other? I don’t care to debate, because I choose both.[ref]Although not at the same time, clearly.[/ref]
Life is dark and disappointing enough as it is. I read a quote somewhere that said the secret of life is learning how to let yourself down gently, and it has always stuck with me. The most likely scenario is that none of your dreams are going to come true. Even if they do: they won’t be as beautiful as you imagined. That might sound depressing, but it’s reality. I think that if we could see, at age 14 or 18, all the pain and heartache that lies in store for us we would go literally insane with fear and horror. But there’s also beauty. And the really, really strange thing about being human is that the pain and the joy never seem to cancel out. The positive and negative just keeping adding up. The books are never balanced. If we could see all the beauty and happiness that life has in store for us, we’d be just as quickly reduced to a blubbering mess.
I have a depressing view of human existence, sure, but I have a romantic one, too. Every year I discover new bands, new songs, new books, new movies, new places, new ideas, new images, new people that I quickly come to love so much I can’t believe that I ever got along without them. What else is out there today, crafted by some unknown (to me) artist that will bring a light to those dark tomorrows? I have no idea, but since life has brought me enough of disappointment and never too much joy I am determined not to wall off any beautiful possibilities.
A while back someone asked me why this quote from Kurt Vonnegut means so much to me:
I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored. I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience — the accidental one.
So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, “He’s up in Heaven now.” Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this. My epitaph in any case? “Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.” I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on.
I love this quote–it brings me near to tears whenever I read it–because it is a lie, but it’s a beautiful one. It’s the same lie I tell myself so that I can keep going. It’s the same lie I hope my kids believe. It’s the same lie that–despite calling it a lie–I hope turns out to be true. The lie, and as long as we see only with mortal eyes it will remain an earthly lie, is that one day we will see something that makes it all beautiful. That one day we will feel something that makes all the hurt go away. That one day we will understand something that quiets the confusion we carry with us through our lives every single damn day. That one day we will be together with the people we have missed so much. That even though I can never go back to my grandfather’s bookstore again, one day I’ll be able to see him again.
Until that great day of hope, we’re stuck here in the darkness. But we can still see lights. There are tiny sparks that whisper to us of the promise of dawn. I believe one day the lie will become truth. I believe one day the sun will rise. Until then? I want to gather to myself every one of these flickers of light that I can. While I live, there will never be enough beauty. And I want it all.
Thrice is my favorite band, and Dustin Kensrue is the reason why. His songwriting and lyrics are incredible. He’s already put out a couple of solo albums, starting with Please Come Home and followed up by a Christmas album and a praise album. Neither one of those was really my thing, but I’m thrilled that he’s coming out with another solo album in April: Carry the Fire. And you want to know what’s even more exciting? You can already listen to one of the songs: “Back to Back”.
This is what Kensrue had to say to Billboard about the album, by the way:
Much of our experience in this life is defined by some degree of suffering. Because of this, sometimes to love someone well means simply sitting with them in their suffering, entering into that suffering with them without offering hollow aphorisms, minimizations, or easy fixes. And this is true in the big things as well as the seemingly small. Whether someone didn’t get the job they were hoping for or whether they just found out they have three months to live, our love is truly shown as we weep with those that weep.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I love Mr. Kensrue.
This American Life episode #544 has a lame title but really profound content. It got me to thinking about the nature of love and also the nature of symbolism. So I wrote a post for Times and Seasons: When Symbolism isn’t Symbolic. You should check it out.
Thomas Merton has remained one of my favorite spiritual writers for some time now. I often contemplate one passage in particular from his writings:
The West has lived for thousands of years under the sign of the Titan, Prometheus, the fire stealer, the man of power who defies heaven in order to get what he himself desires. The West has lived under the sign of will, the love of power, action, and domination. Hence, Western Christianity has often been associated with a spiritual will-to-power and an instinct for organization and authority. This has taken good forms, in devotion to works of education, healing the sick, building schools, order and organization in religion itself. But even the good side of activism has tended toward an overemphasis on will, on action, on conquest, on “getting things done” and this in turn has resulted in a sort of religious restlessness, pragmatism, and the worship of visible results.
There is another essential aspect of Christianity: the interior, the silent, the contemplative, in which hidden wisdom is more important than practical organizational science, and in which love replaces the will to get visible results. The New Man must not be a one-sided and aggressive activist: he must also have depth, he must be able to be silent, to listen to the secret voice of the Spirit. He must renounce his own will to dominate and let the Spirit act secretly in and through him…
I have seen this attitude both within myself and within Western Christianity in general. We are the do-something Christians, the sons and daughters of Protestant work ethic (even when we’re Catholic!). And like Merton says, this attitude has its positives. We are called to live out our faith in works of mercy and education.
Yet more and more I have come to appreciate that all the work in the world is fruitless and possibly dangerous without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, without interior direction from prayer and contemplation. Without this guidance, we can go out and do one thousand things, and for all we know, all one thousand of those things are misguided, unhelpful, or just wrong. I think this is especially true in our everyday actions, where we’re running on auto-pilot or caught off guard. In those moments when we’re not actively thinking, whatever resides in our innermost being will come out, and if our innermost being is not attuned to Christ, something less-than-helpful is probably going to come out. And whereas people without any particular belief are only responsible for themselves, we affect how people view the entire body of Christ. The stakes have been raised. Our need for direction is dire.
Prayer and contemplation also do more than preventing missteps. We can focus in on the parts of our lives that really matter, that bring us closer to Christ, and discard what does not matter. We can lay ourselves bare to the will of Christ in ways that we cannot do in passing daily thought. Speak, Lord, your servant is listening. Truly, only from love of Christ can all good things come. We cannot earn it. We cannot win it. We cannot buy it.
How indeed those persons delude themselves who locate holiness anywhere but in loving God. Some see perfection in austerities, others in almsgiving, others in prayer, others in frequenting the sacraments. For my part, I know of no other perfection than that of loving God with all the heart, because without love all the other virtues are nothing but a pile of stones. – Saint Frances de Sales
The action attitude also bleeds into other aspects of Christian life. For example, how often have we felt, even though we know better, that praying isn’t ‘doing something.’ I know I’ve had this thought before. As a Christian, this has got to be the silliest thing I can think if I know anything about the Gospels or the Bible in general, and yet I still sometimes have to walk myself through the simple logic of prayer. If God exists, and if God is a personal God who listens to prayers and answers them, then prayer is doing something. I recall the words of the Centurion in Luke 7:
Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof;therefore I did not presume to come to you. But say the word, and let my servant be healed.For I am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
The centurion says “I am a man set under authority.” In other words, I know how these things work. I will that something be done, and it is done. You, Lord, have ultimate power and authority. If you will it to be so, shall it not be so? So prayer goes. We need but ask and trust that the Lord will see it done, although not always in ways and times that we expect.
Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light for my path.
So let us turn at all times and listen to what the Lord is saying. We live in a busy world, busy with works, busy with responsibilities, busy with the thoughts of the day. Let’s step back for a moment. What do I want done, and what does the Lord want done. I abdicate my will. Let thy will be done this day.
I expanded my thoughts on the LDS Church and gay rights from a blog post into a piece that First Things liked enough to run with. Couple of quick notes. First, that article has even more typos than my usual posts. The “heard of Jesus’s message”? I can only hang my head in shame and try to do better next time. Second, I’ve been talking with a law professor about religious liberty to make sure I’m not too far off-base. The one thing he says I was missing from my analysis was that liberals don’t believe religious liberty is confined to only the liberties that you get via secular civil rights (like freedom of speech or privacy). They also tend to suggest that religion ought to be treated as a suspect classification like race or gender. This means that any law which explicitly targeted a religious group would be subject to strict scrutiny.
Practically speaking, however, that doesn’t change much. Most of the rules that would constitute a real burden on a person’s free expression of religion are not going to be crafted as explicitly anti-religious, so we’re still talking about a huge gulf between what conservatives have in mind when they talk about religious liberty (and also what the First Amendment strongly implies about religious liberty by mentioning it explicitly) and what liberals have in mind when they talk about religious liberty.
Despite the Platonic ideal, ordinary people do not spend the majority of their time in the act of deep contemplation. Instead, they are performing the seemingly menial tasks of daily life. This largely consists of one’s form of employment. Finding meaning in the lone and dreary world of day-to-day work has been a point of increasing interest among management experts and organizational theorists. Their findings yield fruitful insights, especially given that one of Mormonism’s earliest forms of consecration was a business organization known as the United Firm. The “inspired fictionalization” of the United Firm revelations is an early example of Joseph Smith’s cosmological monism, transforming a business entity into the ancient “order of Enoch.” This sacralization of the mundane was further elaborated by Brigham Young and recognized by non-Mormons as an oddity of the Utahns. The metaphysical overlap of the temporal and spiritual realms can influence the way modern Mormons conduct their business, inspire “Zion-building” within organizations, and pave the way for a Mormon theology of work and eternal progression.
It’s not just buying and selling, of course. My grandfather was a history teacher before he was a book store proprietor, and his passion for history was life-long. He wrote several books about American and Mormon history like 
and 
. Another book of his, a memoir of Christmas on the upstate New York farm where he lived as a child, was even picked up by Scribner: 
in 1997. He has been 
and 
). I also have at least one aunt who has written her own brilliant, albeit so far unpublished novels.[ref]I say “that I know of,” because I wouldn’t at all be surprised if some of my other aunts were writers, too.[/ref]
to 
, and from 
to 
, I wanted books with magic and spaceships.[ref]Especially spaceships. I fast-forwarded to the space combat scenes in Return of the Jedi on our VCR copy so many times that I broke it and had to patch it with tape. Which totally worked, by the way.[/ref]
This was probably fine when I was just starting to read on my own in elementary school. I went through dozens of Hardy Boys and a lot of Tom Swift, Jr. (which I liked more) and several series of similar kid mystery books from England. Even in middle school it probably wasn’t too alarming. Who can say no to 
, were probably supposed to be the gateway drugs into more serious literature. But for me, they weren’t, and by the time I was in high school this was clearly something of let-down for all concerned.
or 
or 
at the time, which really goes to show you that English professors are probably not the best crowd to get sci-fi advice from.
I felt like I had to choose either-or, and I had some pretty compelling reasons not to go with the serious stuff. First, although I enjoyed some of the literature I got assigned to read in high school and college, the ones that I didn’t like I really didn’t like. Case in point: 
was probably the one (and only) serious book I read voluntarily as a teenager. Not only had books like Siddhartha sort of peed in the pool, however, but there was also the way that serious literature was read. In college, we had a handbook in one class full of the different literary approaches. You could choose from Marxism, feminism, or deconstructionism. The same authority that said “these are the books to read,” was also telling me “and this is how you read them.” No, thanks.
My literary Peter Pan syndrome kept me deathly opposed to abandoning my sci-fi for classics, but I started cautiously moving out towards literary sci fi. I read more Vonnegut, more Bradbury, and more Dick. They were all great. Then I turned to more recent literary sci fi with books like 
. I loved them as well, so I kept exploring further. I was still dedicated to staying conspicuously away from outright serious literature, so instead I experimented with some classic American noir: 
and 
.[ref]Not really noir, since it was set in the 1970s, but definitely from the same tradition.[/ref] And I loved all of them, too.
and Wallace Stegner’s 
and both of them blew me away. Most recently, I just finished 
and finally the dam burst. I mean, Joseph Conrad is as serious as you can get, really. His work is over a century old and I had, of course, read Heart of Darkness in high school. I didn’t get it then, but I got The Secret Agent now. And it wasn’t any of the nonsensical analytic hogwash that I’d rejected in school. It was the sheer power of his writing and, above all, the strength of his amazing metaphors and similes. Here was writing that touched my soul. Here was writing that lived up to Joseph Conrad’s ambition to “by the power of the written word… make you hear, … make you feel… [and] before all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm – all you demand – and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”
. And don’t get me started on 
What really got through to me the most, however, was that at the same time that I was reading serious literature and loving it, I was finding that popular sci-fi and fantasy were starting to resonate with me again for the first time in years. During the same years where I discovered my love of Stegner and Conrad I was also devouring 
.
and 
.
