AllTheseThings

Dare One Read the News?

I once had a friend in England who, in order to justify his habit of reading the admittedly gossip-laden newspapers each day, tried to pray for each catastrophe he read about.  “It got too tiring,” he said, “there were too many sad things: murders, rapes, deaths, lies, and more”.  One can understand the sentiment: sometimes it’s simply easier to keep the hardships of the world at arm’s length.  One’s own personal problems are more than enough to shoulder after a certain age. 

Nor is this pure selfishness.  T.S. Eliot rightly noted that human kind cannot bear too much reality.  To drink in all the world’s woes, to be sensitive to every ounce of suffering even in one’s family and friends, can overwhelm one’s basic psychological equilibrium.  The psychologists themselves find that those most prone to depression are often also those most responsive to sufferings which are not their own; it pays off in happiness, psychologically at least, to restrict one’s own concern about the problem of evil to oneself.  One can hardly bear more than one’s own burdens without real sanctity.  

But people of faith do wonder why a good God would allow suffering – close or distant – and the philosophers and the theologians have much to say to us.  Christians do want to address the intellectual problem of suffering since suffering invades all aspects of life, bodily, spiritual, and intellectual.  Here are some admittedly academic distinctions I have found to be very helpful. 

The problem at hand is the so-called “problem of evil”: the assertion that the type, degree, and extent of evil in this world makes God’s existence improbable.  God may exist – but the extent of suffering in the world makes it less likely that He does.  A “theodicy”, in response, attempt to give positive, factual, reasons to believe in God despite such abundant evils in the world.  One here thinks of the famous “free will” theodicy which attempts to account for our world’s suffering as a result of misused free will – the very free will which a good God gave us and whose abuse neither negates His goodness nor jeopardizes His existence. 

Theologians, unlike many philosophers, often find such terms off-track.  They often deem it impious to try, as Milton famously put it, “to justify the ways of God to men”.  The sheer ambition of a theodicy to show the logical compatibility of a loving God alongside suffering appears too great for finite, fallen, creatures such as we are.  Is it not prideful to attempt to account for God’s ways or to create a calculus which could weigh the values of the goods and evils of the world?  Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man articulates these misgivings as elegantly as any. 

Nevertheless, theologians need not (nor ought to) shrink from the task of addressing the problem of evil.  If full-scale theodicies seek to answer the problem of evil, what scholars call “defenses” are less ambitious.  Defenses do not attempt to know God’s thoughts or know the universal picture from the Divine vantage point.  Rather, defenses simply give models of why it might be that God’s existence is not implausible given human suffering.  Defenses  (unlike theodicies) do not try to give the knock-out blow to the problem of evil, but simply shore up the mind with reasons for the probability of a good God despite contrary data. 

A classic “defense”, from a Christian perspective, is not to run away from suffering in terms of faith but towards it.  In other words, it is through human suffering, though evils themselves, that God meets us in a distinct way.  It is not only the good and beautiful things of the world which potentially mediate God’s goodness, but all things.  Or, to use theological language, all things are ‘sacramental’ – God will use every tool – and the Cross itself witnesses powerfully to how God will take the evils of this world as the very means of communion and connection to Him.  Evil and suffering are real: but God’s ability to take the worst the cosmos can throw at us and transform it is more real still. 

Nevertheless, such theological language can obscure the fact that most of patients in the hospital I meet – and probably most normal Christians – are, understandably, not formulating either “theodicies” or “defenses”. Rather, they often ask why God allows this evil to happen to me.  When it comes to the wider woes of the world, from earthquakes in China to greed on Wall Street, the threat of suffering to our souls is most acute when it is close to home.  So, naturally, the questions are more like, ‘why did my daughter have that car accident, my grandfather that cancer, or my spouse that breakdown?’  People regularly show a desire for meaning in personal, particular suffering. 

And quite rightly do we turn to God for answers.  Surely meaning can be found from the Maker of meaning.  The problem grows worse, however, when He (apparently) offers no answer.  Divine silence in response to our own suffering makes that suffering only worse.  Or does it?  As Metropolitan Anthony Bloom astutely notes, meeting God is no light matter and hearing the Divine voice is a terrifying experience.  Every meeting with God in Scripture, much less an angel, is a crisis.  Remember Job.  Do we really want the Divine answer as to why we or a loved one suffer?  Would it “satisfy” us?  If it does, and this is a perilous question, who is judging Whom?  We risk placing God in the defendant’s position when we ask for answers, as if we were to judge the Judge of all.   

The tempered humility in realizing our limitations to arrive at or assess an answer, and yet the persistent hope that meaning can arise from suffering create a peculiar situation.  It forces us to wait.  As with mothers who miscarry a child or spouses who lose their beloved, so often the process of grieving ends up after considerable time revealing a good which could not have been had in any other way.  But it takes time.  A certain communion with God is possible (if sought) which has a different tenor from communion with Him in sunnier circumstances.  So often those answers take years and come upon us like an unexpected dawn.  And that’s why one has to keep reading the news; the process of redemptive suffering is exactly that – a process.  Even at the end of one’s life, when there are no more earthly chapters to be written, one trusts in Him who has the first and the last Word.

St. Nicodemus

When You Visit A Billionaire’s House…

…you take your shoes off.  At least that’s what we did when a friend took us to a palace on the beach in Florida.  It was a private tour.  A friend of a friend arranged a visit when the Master was away but the servants were still working.  One side of the house broached the inlet, the other the wild ocean itself.  Beach: private.  Pools on property: multiple.  Bottles in the cellar: tens of thousands (such people invest and sell the wine, in case you were wondering how any soul could consume such vast amounts).   Cool marble on bare feet isn’t too disagreeable, nor are Monet’s hard on the eyes.  Rooms “themed” upon countries of the world means one can step from a Roman mosaic to an English parlor with the turn of a hallway.  But there are alarms, private keys, gates, cameras, the entire apparatus of precarious wealth.  A small price to pay for 30 years of….what?  Security, perhaps, physical comfort, certainly, a global array of diverting activities (one can boat, fly, glide, and dive), and yet, the refrain of many who worked around the Master knew that the Master wasn’t happy.  “You know”, said our old salt of a tourguide, “I’ve been around this place for over a decade, and I’ve seen what money means and what it doesn’t; I believe now more firmly than ever that what matters most to me, and what gives the greatest satisfaction are my wife and my 3 children.”  He spoke truly.  Top class wealth, in the Master’s case, translated into utter boredom, which is a problem money can scarcely solve.  The American dream is, well, dreamlike when achieved, but I’m not sure it’s the same as being awake to reality.   

St. Nicodemus

A Slower Walk is a Better Walk

Isn’t it strange that time has elasticity to it?  Certain hours go by very quickly and certain hours go by very slowly.  Nor do all days or minutes seem the same length.  On the one hand, it seems as if we have very little control over how fast things seem to go; we simply ascribe the fast days to days which were “fun” or “good” and slow days to the ones which were boring or tedious.  However, there is at least a connection between how much we try to do and how short time is.  When we have a myriad of things to do, the time seems like quicksilver.  Or, when little needs be done, the days themselves yawn with laziness and fullness of space.  The less we stack into an hour, the more time we are given back – not mathematically, of course, but at least in how time feels to us.

All this is very abstract, I know, but it stems from a walk along a river I took today.  With no need to get anywhere, no need for “fun” or recreation, and no need, really, other than to amble, I found that one hour lassoed an eternity.  Walking along the river, in the deep redwood forest, I had time for all sorts of distractions, though that’s the wrong word.  In fact, the slower I walked, the more things there were to notice: a root in the river, lapis-coloured snakes, a frightened fawn, the heat of the sun.  Hornets had built a nest in the riverbank and monarch butterflies shared the waterway with dragonflies and every buzzing thing.  I’m not sure these are “distractions” insofar as to attend to them gave time just that quality of length: such attentions stretched time.  In our frantic lives, where most duties stretch us thin, it’s nice to stretch time back a little in return.  By walking slowly.

St. Nicodemus

Verbal Cues

This past week I had the privilege to be part of a group of seminary students who were being trained to visit hospital patients.  One might think (I did) that visiting previously unknown patients is fairly straightforward stuff:  simply go in to a person’s room who, say, is suffering from cancer, and exercise the same social and listening skills that we wield at a drinks party.  Of course, the man at the drinks party has a tremendous ego who can’t listen to another person’s words and is more concerned about himself and how he is perceived than listening to the content of speech across from him.  At least I am, such is the grip of vanity.  But a patient who has saline solution instead of a gin and tonic, and who doesn’t care in the least about YOU has, naturally, different needs.

Some of those needs come out in verbal cues.  The female readers of this blog probably already know this by instinct, but for a tone-deaf male like me, this is news.  Little things, like when the patient says,

“It’s been a long stay – and the food stinks.”  Or,

“You’re the first person who has come by to visit.” Or,

“It’s a beautiful day outside – I hope I can be discharged tomorrow.”

….are all like doorways.  The emotion, the worries, the thing that concerns them are floating up to the surface of their conversation, and in their way, asking for attention. The teacher at the hospital this week gave as much help as she could to assist us in catching these cues, perhaps knocking at the doorways such conversations present, and helping a patient go one step further in expressing what it is that most troubles them.

I do not mean to parade a discourse about active listening, but the wonder at how often people mention things in the course of their speech which indicate hurt, worry, fear, and loneliness.  And it’s not only in hospitals.

St. Nicodemus

Prince Caspian

It has been, perhaps unsurprisingly, a very Lewisian weekend. A good friend, Rev. Dr. Michael Ward, visited our family and we all ventured to see the new film release, Prince Caspian. In general, I am an unshakeable purist as far as cinematic “adaptations” go: virtually no book I have loved has ever been improved by screenwriters in the transition from page to screen. Whether it be Austen, Lewis, Tolkien, or Dickens, the Faustian bargain of exchanging word for image has always been disappointing, and at times, infuriating. It only gets worse when quite modest (at best) screenwriters and directors put their stamp on exquisite dialogue and plot. With all that admitted, and in many instances replicated in the case of Prince Caspian, this film satisfies the viewer more than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Perhaps The Lion on screen wrestled viewers sufficiently away from the book to allow an even greater freedom for future Narnia Chronicles. Indeed, all of Prince Caspian’s variations and permutations suggested the original book but obviously did not feel obliged to it. The additions to plot and dialogue echo, in a sense, the classical tradition of retelling by authors and playwrights who really had no strong fidelity to an original, authorized, version. Homer’s Iliad and Sophocles’ Oedipus all benefited – and suffered – from successive retellings. Has Narnia become so mythic as to join the stockpile of characters and plots who can all be, within reason, reconfigured for a given version? Will its flexibility mean resilience and continued imaginative power? Perhaps, and purists such as myself would do well to avoid an Ossified Version that crosses all genres. Moreover, it was a powerful and violent film. It was martial from the word “go”, with early battles leading to ever greater and more massive final battles; its character development depended on conflict to an almost absurd degree (e.g. Caspian and Peter in a perpetual adolescent battle of ego’s). Yet, and again yet, the fundamentals of belief in redemption against all hope and the absolute power of the Lord of heaven and earth (and water) made for a highly thrilling story.

Even more satisfying on Narnia was Dr. Ward’s recent talk on C. S. Lewis at “Socrates in the City” in New York, a fantastic outfit run by Eric Metaxas. Dr. Ward is a scholar, who through decades of love for the Narnia tales, first discerned an astonishing depth to Lewis’s “childrens” books. OUP was so taken by his discovery about Narnia that they published his dissertation on the Chronicles in the book Planet Narnia, which details the way in which C.S. Lewis used an imaginative conception from the Middle Ages to create the governing scheme for all seven Chronicles. In short, no one for fifty years had seen, before Dr. Ward, the manner in which a medieval conception of the cosmos as articulated in their astronomy – and taught by Lewis for decades as a scholar – made for that perfect number seven in Lewis’s books. Nor had anyone seen the way in which the seven planets gave the very atmosphere of each of the Narnia books. For more, read the book (or visit www.planetnarnia.com), as the author does a masterful job in explaining why the Chronicles are far more than bald Christian allegories. By Jove!

Nicodemus

Da Bronx

My father and mother actually grew up in the Bronx, but I think it was a different place then. For only recently did I have the pleasure of returning to the Bronx for some auto repairs on my minivan. After fighting through some fierce traffic, I made it past Little Italy and onto one of the main drags: as I was driving along, weaving between cars and people (there are NO laws in the Bronx) the car next to me ripped off the door of another parked car who had opened their door a bit too far. I kept driving. I made it to my autorepairs shop, a little Sheol of grease and sunlessness, where I waited for top notch work.

As it was a long repair I slipped across the street to the “Best Hispanic Food in the Bronx” for lunch. ‘This will be good,’ I thought to myself, ‘real Mexican food. I can’t wait for a burrito.’ I asked for a burrito, not being able to read the menu. “Dorrito?” they asked me back quizzically, and repeated attempts at rolling my r’s in burrito did nothing to help translate. Oh well, I settled for the sandwich Cubano, being the only white man not only in the restaurant, but in the whole neighborhood

The lunch wasn’t half bad. Just as my car was fixed, the secretary called me into the office and pulled out his flask for a swig while filling out my bill.“Oh, I suppose it’s Friday afternoon, isn’t it?”, I offered. “Oh no, I’m an alcoholic! I can’t live without this stuff – I’d pass out without it!”. During the tales of how he survived September 11th (with photos), how he salvaged the autobody shop and made it into a thriving business, and how he jolly well wasn’t going to pay the medical bills that THEY keep sending to him (throwing a $900 bill from the hospital in the bin before my eyes, as well as tearing up a few unopened bills), I noticed an unusual poster on the wall. “Oh yeah, that’s a warrant out for my arrest after my DUI”, he explained. True enough, it was. He then pointed to another poster on the wall and said, “you know who that is?”. I said “no, I have no idea”. “Really?” “Really”. “That’s my hero: Al Capone” (and it was). “He was a great man. He got things done. Sure he had to go above the government at times, but he was a great businessman”. At this point my day in the Bronx was turning surreal, but thanks be to God, the bill came, I paid, and drove out of the jungle, knowing that multiculturalism mustn’t be underestimated.

St. Nicodemus

Baby Alligators

The Gator state – from whence we have just come – is a marvelous state for vacations. Where else can you crack open fresh coconuts, ride 4-wheelers, and call lizards “baby alligators” to entertain the children? Even more entertaining of course is seeing a real alligator, that relic of peanut-brained reptilian evolution. Alligators work well as threats for the kids: “don’t go in the back garden because the gators sometimes lay there”: as training in safety – “when an alligator runs after you, run and change directions because they can’t turn easily”: and as prophecies – “if you keep complaining you’ll turn into an alligator yourself”!

Children must be kept firmly in check on vacation. That’s why we gave them sugar cereals every morning, Dunkin’ Donuts surprise stops, fresh-squeezed orange juice, endless digital movies of their antics, and pool time till they turned as blue as the water itself.

As for the parents, it’s hard to overstate the value of doing no work for a stretch. Somehow the spatial distance from home, the 80-degree weather, and fresh mahi-mahi made many issues shrink in importance. Greek grammar can’t argue with the beach and sunshine helps gloss over the grey hairs. The sun also baked out every runny nose or sniffle in the children. What’s more, January 6^th was Theophany on the Orthodox Church calendar (a.k.a. The Baptism of our Lord) where a service takes place called The Blessing of the Waters. A true title is many respects when one thinks of fish, the ocean, and even those rivers which have those pesky alligators.

St. Nicodemus

The Grave Matter of the Manger

One of the most interesting aspects of reading the early church fathers this past semester has been to see just how curiously they perceived the incarnation of Christ.  Some of the biggest names – Ignatius, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Origen – regularly presented a picture where the very birth of Christ was viewed through the lens of the cross.  That is, it was only by encountering the crucified and risen Lord that one could begin to make sense of the birth of Christ: chronology here was secondary as far as theology was concerned.  This didn’t mean that “Our Lord was born to die” or any such reduction of the event; rather, they emphasized that Christ was fully born in the process of the Passion.  The full man was completed on the cross. “It is finished”, from a certain standpoint, completed the Genesis creation of man, the true Adam, not just the physical life of Christ in Judea.  The moment Christ breathed His last He entered the Sabbath rest as the True Adam. 

For this reason, so many of the early Christian martyrs were celebrated and commemorated on the day of their martyrdom, i.e. the day of their death was the day they were born, “finished”, and made truly human.  What this meant was a wrapping together of the womb and the tomb, so much so that even early Christian art began to reflect this paradoxical theology.  Many of the earliest depictions of the Nativity, the earliest icons, have Christ shown in a virgin cave (remember Joseph of Arimathea, remember Mary), wrapped tightly in white bands (remember the grave clothes), placed in a manger, i.e. an animal’s feeding trough (remember what you eat in communion), born in Bethelehem (which in Hebrew means “house of bread”: again remember the eucharist).  Even the frankincense, gold, and myrrh were traditional burial ointments, not just gifts. 

The fascinating way in which the fathers wrapped together the Passion with the Incarnation was of course not merely foreshadowing with symbols; what they implied was that Christ was born, fully born, on the day we slew Him.  For all the glibness about the phrase being “born again”, it is salutary to remember how the early fathers saw this in Christ’s death – and hence our own, too.  As Ignatius of Antioch said about his own martyrdom in Rome: if I die for Christ, “I shall become a real human”. 

St. Nicodemus

Gobble, gobble

One of the most violent things the villains in Homer’s Odyssey do is to live at Odysseus’ home while he’s been gone for twenty years and feast – every night – while the hero is gone. They eat up the storehouse of the king. Moreover, each of the villains aspires to marry Odysseus’ wife (nearly a widow after 20 years!) so they continually court her. As my friend once put it, the villains of the Odyssey go after the two most central things in a civilization: the bed and the board. They attack the source of community – the table – and the source of the family – the bed. Those two most central things also happen to be the most sacred. It is no coincidence that the fall of man is ushered in by a thievery of eating and mankind is likewise healed by the meal “of the tree”. It is also no coincidence that the attack on our present civilization aims at the marriage bed and the interruption of the family at the table.

It’s a commonplace these days to note that the Greek eucharist means “thanksgiving”, but it never hurts to remember. Christ heals us, restores “communion” with a meal. Every other meal we eat, in a lower fashion, echoes that power. Every feast is derivative of the great feast. Of course, it seems too basic to us that salvation could involve something as ordinary as eating; nevertheless, the gathering for the eucharist mattered to the church every bit as much as the doctrines, the high principles, the intellectual creeds, the sermon – all of which aim more at the head (which is fine) than the stomach. And each non-eucharistic meal echoes that salvation. I still marvel at the mystery that something so simple as eating is sacred; unfortunately, if I do not see the sacred in the small I shall hardly see the sacred in the large.

One of the early desert fathers, Evagrius, notes that if a monk has a grievance with a brother, have him ask his enemy to share a common meal. Odysseus does quite do that, but may our own meals this day be a source of life, thanksgiving, reconciliation, community, and holy joy.

St. Nicodemus

allthesemore@yahoo.com

"Move" Is a 4-Letter Word

Well, our family finally made the transition from the palmy mid-West to the urban jungle of New York.  As one dear old lady warned me, "move" is a four-letter word, but in earnest, now that it's all done, it's good to be in the Big Apple.  Half the fun of the whole endeavor was driving a ponderous 22-ft moving truck with a friend, packed with all our worldly goods (all of which were rued, by the way), and learning how to be a trucker.  Stops at diesel stations: chatting with drivers of big rigs: being forced to use the trucks-only lanes: being asked to stop at weigh stations: finding in the last 5 miles of our trip that Parkways means "no trucks" and Mapquest had only given us directions for a normal car....

Getting back into a normal car was great fun after inadvertently pruning trees, flattening curbs, and threatening the residents of Scarsdale, NY.  So I drove back to Michigan to retrieve my family after unpacking our furniture in NY, and the trip to Canada land began.  Despite my beard at the border crossing and having to switch to kilometers once in Ontario, it couldn't have been smoother.  Ontario boasts towns in close succession with the names of Paris, Milan, Oxford, and Cambridge.  Who needs Europe?  But a true boast of our northern neighbors is their marvelous Niagara Falls.  It far exceeded expectations, and truth be told, the Canadian falls are much more impressive than the American side.  We even took a boat (the so-called "Maid of the Mist") which takes you so close to the Falls that you think this time the captain has had it and is ready to submerge us all permanently.  What a fantastic sight to look *up* as thousands of tons of water are pouring down at you.

So, after 3 days in the land which, as a native informed me, cares most about beer and hockey, we entered New York and drove to the Seminary in Crestwood, NY which is to be our home for the next 3 years.  A glorious home.  Loads of families with children all attending the Seminary, mandatory chapel twice a day when the school year begins (the chapel and choir are very hard to describe, but splendid), and lots of Italians in the area.  But the thought of our children obtaining NY accents is troubling!

Nicodemus

allthesenicodemus@yahoo.com