So I had a dream in which I made the following appetizers. I haven’t had a chance to try them out in waking life because we are out of propane and enduring our first October chill with no heat, no stove, no oven, and no hot water.

As far as I can make out, the recipe is as follows:

Graham crackers, trimmed into bite-size squares (half of a half of a half?)
Banana, sliced thinly into circles
Pieces of chocolate or chocolate chips
Mini marshmallows

On a baking sheet lined with foil, set out the graham crackers, top with one slice of banana, one small piece of chocolate and two mini marshmallows. When you have the desired amount assembled, broil them until the chocolate melts and the marshmallows brown. Enjoy!

Caitlin

Dear Ms. Robinson,

I have been a fan of your work since my then friend, now fiancé, read your essays aloud to me. You lay claim to a deep knowledge of the English language in your opening paragraphs, but then go on to use it. Not flaunt it. “All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.” You exploit the sparsity of our language, and then indulge in its unnecessary, although common, phrases.

You draw one into the experience of something so painful and quiet that it usually takes years of therapy to do the same. This causes me to wonder if some sections of psychological therapy would be made obsolete if we, as a culture, read more widely. You’ve chosen the circumstances that we didn’t think formed us to dwell upon, digging slowly into them with a slowness that we rarely can sustain.

The pastor. Loneliness. The youngest child. These are the portions of human existence that you delve into. Not rape, not murder, not war. Not romance, but disappointment. Not the salvation of humanity, but regrets and unvoiced repentance. You are no Dostoevsky (but then, who is?). You are life between the grand fasts and feasts of the year, the summer and the autumn.

We wouldn’t think that returning home, after a disappointing life, deserves space on a page surrounded by margins. But it is in the quiet sadness of Glory that we see the growth of the self, or the merely the self.  Yes, it is the story of Jack (the prodigal son) returning, or rather, learning that he can’t return. But it is mostly the story of a youngest daughter who was never told what was going on, who tried to make her own way and instead allowed herself to be used by a selfish man, letting it drag on for years in the hope that humanity would not disappoint. It is the story of a faithful man of God who ends his life loved, but lonely and disappointed.

It is the story of unanswered prayers. This is the reality of life as a human.

I am loved by the truth and beauty of your words. Thank you.

Sincerely,

R. Card

“When all eyes are on you, wink.”

– from a Mike’s Hard Lime bottle

Today, I drove up to CSD’s new home and painted walls with her.  This raised fond memories of painting theater sets into the early hours of mornings before opening night.  We have been painting things since we met, over six years ago.

Friendships change, people move, and “love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter,” to quote Mr. Eliot.  Love is divine.  It is not limited to place, to being in physical presence.

R

G.K. Chesterton on his pre-conversion experience with Christianity: (please excuse the ellipses — Gilbert was a loquacious fellow)

“As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradluagh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind — the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing… It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons…One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men, by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of Nature. But another accusation was that it comforted men with a fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery…One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise. This puzzled me; the charges were inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world…

It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced that Christianity must be something ever weirder and wickeder than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape…This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with…

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only conluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed…if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and blooodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solumn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique…The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not the Christ, He must have been the Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him to dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall…Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad — in various ways.”

(From his book, “Orthodoxy”. A favorite of mine.)

In class last night, we began arguing about whether or not we should be optimists or pessimists. Both sides felt that their perspective offered the best conditioning for the unexpectedness of life. Thinking of the above quote from Chesterton, I said I thought that perhaps as Christians we are not called to pessimists or optimists; we are called to be reality-seeking-truth-tellers. To the secular optimist, our views of human depravity and the ultimate destruction of the world as we know it will seem the most despairing pessimism. To the secular pessimist, our views of redemption, hope and joy will seem irrational optimism. Regardless, we are called to be the normal which appears extraordinary.

CSD

“There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about “isms” and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said. The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”

– C. S. Lewis, in his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation

jeremiad – noun

a prolonged lamentation or mournful complaint.

I recently commented on the Wall Street Journal article which pitted Richard Dawkins against Karen Armstrong. I hadn’t heard of Ms. Armstrong before that time, but her name came up again today on NPR.org. It seems she’s written a book called The Case for God, which seems to be an extension of her thesis in the WSJ artcle:

“Until the modern era, Armstrong claims, religion was not something people thought, but something we did. It was a series of practices and rituals designed to help us ‘discover new capacities of mind and heart.’ And God was unknowable — undefinable, in fact.”

NPR calls it “exhaustive and invigorating”. I call it misguided.

CSD

Today, Michael and I got the keys to our very first house! Horray!!

CSD

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Weekend Journal” two articles were placed side by side, with the title “MAN vs. GOD” in large red print between them. Here’s the link.

Richard Dawkins on the left, speaking for atheistic Darwinist evolutionists, doesn’t say anything really new: “We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that this [Darwinian evolution] is the process that has generated life on our own planet…. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex–statistically improbable–and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe–the miracle-free zone that is physics.” What is interesting is that he essentially tells “sophisticated theologians or postmodern relativists” to stop deluding themselves–God either exists or he doesn’t, and if you try to ride the fence you’re a fool.

On the right side, supposedly batting for our team, was Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun and author of several books on comparative religion. She starts with “Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived.” As she goes on, her thesis emerges: Western faith in the 19th century mistakenly tried to understand God in terms of logos (reason and the realm of science) but really, He should be understood in terms of mythos, a complementary means of arriving at truth which “refers to the more imponderable aspects of life.” She says, “Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words.” In fact, “Religion was not supposed to provide explanations that lay within the competence of reason but to help us live creatively with realities for which there are no easy solutions and find an interior haven of peace.” Hence, “we cannot regard God simply as a divine personality, who single-handedly created the world. This [new premise] could direct our attention away from the idols of certainty and back to the ‘God beyond God.’ The best theology is a spiritual exercise, akin to poetry. Religion is not an exact science but a kind of art form that, like music or painting, introduces us to a mode of knowledge that is different from the purely rational and which cannot easily be put into words.”

Her answer to the problem of evil and suffering? Without it, “the compassion that lies at the heart of faith is impossible.” In other words, pain justifies our religious impulse.

________________________

Now, I’m not really going to bother with Dawkins. The man makes so many assumptions as to make himself ridiculous; for example, that the universe is eternal, that physics is immutable, that intelligence is necessarily created. Wow. His cosmology takes more faith than mine does.

But I hereby declare Ms. Armstrong does not speak on behalf on orthodox Christianity, despite the Journal’s usage of an Ichthus. To begin, let’s start with the Gospel of St. John 1:1-4, 14 (NIV):

In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

As far as I can tell, this passage alone demonstrates that Christianity’s understanding of itself is not in keeping with Ms. Armstrong’s depiction of it. Let’s review:

(1) The second person of the Trinity was called LOGOS, with John writing in AD 70 with a full understanding of the Hellenistic tradition of that word. Not only must God be understood in a logos way, He is its very definition.

(2) God, who is full of truth as well as grace, can be known through words and in the flesh. Through human linguistics and in historical fact, in the person of Jesus Christ. It’s not like music or painting, although it might be poetry.

(3)  God is eternal Creator: without Him nothing was made that has been made. Whether or not He used evolution to accomplish his purpose, He is Creator (N.B.: Dawkin’s main point is that evolution makes God redundant; I’d like to point out there are theistic evolutionists who are comfortable with God using the evolutionary process as a tool. If Dawkins insists evolution is the only way for life to have begun, it’s not incompatible with a belief in God’s existence and importance). Additionally, God is a benign Creator: his life is the light of men.

(4) Jesus Christ is the One and Only, who said “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Religion is not a comforting therapeutic intended to placate us in the face of an incomprehensible, ineffable reality. Religion is the outer garments of a relationship between two real Persons—the created with the Creator.

And in answer to her last point, making pain the reason for religion is just dumb. Many people use the existence of evil and suffering as arguments against God’s existence or His goodness: “If God’s all-powerful and all-good, why is there evil and suffering in the world?”

But if Dawkins is right, and “God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place”… how do you explain goodness? Did compassion evolve, too? In a world where only the fittest survive, a religion like Hinduism, which says “Sucks to be you! I can’t intervene in your pain–I might interfere with your karma” seems the most appropriate. In a evolutionary worldview, pain is not evil, it’s necessary. It’s the means by which the universe makes us stronger and improves us. In fact, Nazism has the right idea: Help the universe along by culling the weak and breeding the strong!

Christianity offers a different explanation with a logical rational for Goodness and Evil, Cruelty and Compassion. Christianity says: “God is good and He made all things good. But He recognized that love is only good when volitional, and so gave His creatures the freedom to choose to obey Him or disobey Him, with consequences for each. His creatures who chose to disobey Him introduced evil into the created order, and the natural by-product of evil was suffering. But God did not leave us in our disobedient state. He provided the ultimate example of compassion by becoming a creature to redeem creation by dying on a cross. Through His Spirit, we are able to once more choose to obey Him and live with Him forever. This regeneration allows us to extend compassion to others, not because it’s ‘enlightened’ but because we want to imitate our Savior.”

A far cry from the First Noble Truth, “Existence is suffering,” which Ms. Anderson calls “the indispensable prerequisite for the transcendent enlightenment that some call Nirvana—and others call God.”

CSD