The casual way that American Christians have of talking about God is not simply dispiriting, but is, for some sensibilities, actively destructive. There are times when silence is not only the highest, but the only possible, piety.
See also Naomi Shihab Nye.
Coworker 1: “I haven’t been watching the olympics much, but I just think Snoop Dogg such an American treasure.”
Coworker 2: “Totally! 100 percent.”
Coworker 1: [Sharing phone screen] “Look at him! He’s so cute. And so genuine, I feel.”
Me:
Stanley Hauerwas, still fighting the good fight:
The disavowal of violence is to create a world in which alternatives exist that I couldn’t have imagined if I thought that reaching for the gun takes precedence over the possibility of sharing a meal with an enemy.
Mary Catherine Bateson:
Learning is perhaps the only pleasure that might replace increasing consumption as our chosen mode of enriching experience. Someday, the joy of recognizing a pattern in a leaf or the geological strata in a cliff face might replace the satisfactions of new carpeting or more horsepower in an engine, and the chance to learn in the workplace might seem more valuable than increased purchasing power or a move up the organizational chart. Increasing knowledge of the ethology of wolves might someday replace the power savored in destroying them.
We reach for knowledge as an instrument of power, not as an instrument of delight, yet the preoccupation with power ultimately serves ignorance.… Ironically, in our society both the strongest, those who have already succeeded, and the weakest, those who feel destined for failure, defend themselves against new learning.
While they may never properly iron linen table napkins, children and adults alike gain much from cultivating the skills required to bring livable order to ordinary chaos. It is a balm to have that skill in one’s pocket, not because it exercises proto-dominance on an indifferent universe, but because it can also bring clarity and calm to one’s cluttered interior. It mirrors exactly what thinking effects. Yet why is it bestselling brilliance for psychologist Jordan Peterson to say “make your bed,' but not when your mother teaches you to do it?
This essay, and its references, reminded me a lot of Mary Catherine Bateson’s Peripheral Visions, which I’m also freshly reminded was one of the best books I’ve ever read.
To be resigned or hopeful, calculated or surprised — Jürgen Moltmann
Pure Joy
When I see people who have never set foot in Russia or Ukraine or Gaza or Israel, with no family ties to those countries, spouting the propaganda of foreign lands, I wonder whether I am witnessing the genuine adoption of an identity or a consumer for whom sampling the spice of nationalist fervour is just one of the commercial choices you’re offered when you purchase a cell phone that connects to the internet.
Erin Plunkett’s essay “Temporal Houses, Eternal Mysteries: Leaving the Faith, Seeking Faith” is a wonderful biographical extension of something Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Simone Weil (and others, like Christian Wiman, who has often quoted both of these) were getting at when they spoke of, in Weil’s description, a second kind, or a second aspect, of atheism.
Here’s Bonhoeffer, writing to his friend Eberhard Bethge, April 30th, 1944:
I often wonder why my “Christian instinct” frequently draws me more toward nonreligious people than toward the religious, and I am sure it’s not with missionary intent; instead, I’d almost call it a “brotherly” instinct.
I wonder whenever I read that letter whether Bonhoeffer thought of scratching out the “almost.” He goes on to say that the use of religious terminology, and even the naming of God, has become a source of confusion and anxiety for him — when it is done among religious people.
Here’s Weil:
A case of contradictories which are true. God exists: God does not exist. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am quite sure my love is not illusory. I am quite sure that there is not a God in the sense that I am quite sure nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word. But that which I cannot conceive is not an illusion.
There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
[…]
Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith: in this sense atheism is a purification.
My own experience is not as extreme as Plunketts’s, but I wrote a little about my experience with Bonhoeffer’s “almost-brotherhood of secularity” a few years ago. I’m probably due for an update to this thinking, but I don’t think I’ve yet gotten very far beyond this “poem, prose, & praise” from the year before.
That said, when I hear stories like the one I heard a couple months ago about a devout Muslim girl who moved closer to some Christians just to have some friends who actually believe in something, I get that too. And I don’t find these impulses contradictory.