in search of gladness
Tony Woodlief in Image:
It’s a galling irony that I am frequently asked to speak to young people, to tell them something about life, and what I have learned in mine, and what they should therefore go and do with theirs.It is an irony because my life feels like a slow-moving disaster, and most nights all I can hope is that if the second half doesn’t bring redemption, perhaps it will bring something different than what I have lived thus far.
I don’t tell them this, because young people don’t want to hear about your mistakes, other than the salacious details. Our mistakes are usually more interesting to us, and they don’t help anyone anyway; mostly we each commit our sins thinking we are doing right, or that we can’t bear for another second whatever it is that’s crushing us. What good is someone’s else’s cautionary tale in the face of false virtue or aching hunger?
via Andrew Sullivan.
So I warn them that while I have hopes for them, my greatest hope is that they can live better lives than I.
Then I direct them to the words of Frederick Buechner.
I love Fred. More than once, when I’d thought too long about where I could go to put my 9 mm in my mouth, how I might arrange it so my children wouldn’t be the ones to find the corpse, it was Buechner’s words that assuaged my impulse to self-destruction.
Buechner, who found the body of his own father, a suicide. Sweet, tortured Buechner, the minister who does not preach in a church, but in pages.
The particular words of Buechner’s to which I direct them concern vocation. What he says is that our vocation is that place where our deep gladness meets the world’s great hunger. “In a world where there is so much drudgery, so much grief, so much emptiness and fear and pain, our gladness in our work is as much needed as we ourselves need to be glad.”
These are scandalous notions, that we need to be glad, that the world needs our gladness. Our Puritan forbears were certainly suspicious of gladness, and their modern, secular inheritors of grimness—professors and politicians and preachers—demand not gladness, but utility.
Finally:
Do you know what brings you gladness?
It would be a pity to reach the end of this life not having known, not having stretched out our hands toward the gladness for which we were surely crafted. But it’s a frightening thing, to look fully at our work and relationships and amusements, to gauge whether they bring us true gladness, or just momentary respite from fear, from hurt, from regret.
So here’s my offer to you, dear stranger: I’ll look if you look.
And may we each have the courage to embrace what is good for us, what draws us nearer to ourselves and to God, no matter from what it draws us away. Because if we don’t find our gladness, and pursue it to the deep-running needs of this world, how will our children ever know to do the same?
I just returned from a bike ride with Micah. That makes me glad, every time.
andrew sullivan
Sullivan had been lightly ill that week, so he slept unusually late, until almost two in the afternoon. Before he was quite ready to deal with the world, he checked his mailbox—and woke up fast. Along with the news of the shooting was an urgent question from readers: Andrew, where are you?
Sullivan winced. He e-mailed his four young assistants: “We have to go cable”—that is, pump out blog posts 24/7. Then he climbed four unpainted wooden steps to what anyone else would call a large windowed closet and he calls “the blog cave.” He pulled a velvet curtain shut to seal himself off from his husband and their beagles, settled into an armchair with his laptop, and began a siege of blogging that would last six days.
Sullivan is HIV+
Andrew Sullivan is a lifelong asthma sufferer. He has sleep apnea, and at night wears a mask connected to a machine that regulates his breathing. And since 1993, he has been HIV-positive. Although Sullivan isn’t the only writer with HIV to have survived for almost two decades, no other HIV-positive writer publishes anything like 300 blog posts a week, year after year; he needs to monitor his health.
His credentials:
Sullivan earned a first-class degree (equivalent to a summa) in modern history and modern languages at Oxford, where, in his second year, he was president of the Oxford Union, the debating body that claims to be “the most illustrious student society in the world.” He won a Harkness Fellowship to the Kennedy School in 1984; back in London, he interned at the think tank of one of his idols, Margaret Thatcher. He returned to Harvard in 1989 to write his doctoral thesis, “Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott,” which won the government department’s Toppan Prize, for the best dissertation “upon a subject of Political Science.” In 1991, when he was just 27, he was named editor of the New Republic; under his leadership, the magazine grew impressively in both circulation and advertising. He left the New Republic five years later, “at the tail end of a series of differences,” says New Republic owner Martin Peretz, Ph.D. ’66. Sullivan moved on to write books and become a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for the Sunday Times (of London).
"Too many..."
In 1996, when he revealed he had contracted HIV, a friend asked whom he had unprotected sex with. In Love Undetectable, his 1998 book about “friendship, sex, and survival,” Sullivan writes that he admitted it could have been anyone. His friend was incredulous: “Anyone? How many people did you sleep with, for God’s sake?”
In the book, Sullivan held nothing back. “Too many. God knows. Too many for meaning and dignity to be given to every one; too many for love to be present at each; too many for sex to be very often more than a temporary release from debilitating fear and loneliness.”
That is classic Sullivan: the unsparing candor, the over-sharing, the spiritual afterthought.
heresy & love
I don't always see things the way Greg Boyd does (though I love his clear and articulate voice), but in this he is spot-on:
Christians are known in the broader society for a lot of things, but their depth of love for one another — let alone for “sinners” and “enemies” — doesn’t make the list (see Kinnaman & Lyons, UnChristian). In this light, the beautiful vision of the Church that Jesus expressed in his prayer on the night he was betrayed — the vision of a Church that reflects the perfect love of the triune God — almost sounds comical.So what should we do? Whatever else might be said, I honestly don’t believe we’ll even begin to move in the right direction until we resolve that loving one another (and everyone else) is a higher priority than proving, protecting and enforcing the rightness of our doctrines.
I’m almost certain someone just now had the thought — “Here we go again, compromising correct doctrine in the name of love. More fluffy, post-modern, sentimental garbage!” Was I right?
The thing is, there’s absolutely nothing fluffy, post-modern or sentimental about placing love above doctrinal correctness, for this conviction permeates the NT! Truth be told, we shouldn’t even contrast “love” and “doctrinal correctness” in the first place. We should rather regard the command to love as the most foundational doctrine of the church and thus the most important doctrine to be correct on! Peter says, “Above all, love each other deeply, for love covers a multitude of sins” (and alleged “heresies”? I Pet. 4:8, cf. Col 3:14). If love is to be placed “above all,” then there simply can’t be any other command or doctrine or agenda that competes with it for the top position. It must stand on top alone.
grad school
The 9 years I spent in grad school were some of the most enjoyable ever. It made me sad to read this perspective (Bill Deresiewicz, who taught English at Yale for 10 years), realizing that there's more truth to it than I'd prefer to admit.
A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to even meet with her. “I won’t talk to students about graduate school anymore,” he explained. “Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.”The policy may be extreme, but the feeling is universal. Most professors I know are willing to talk with students about pursuing a PhD, but their advice comes down to three words: don’t do it. (William Pannapacker, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education as Thomas Benton, has been making this argument for years. See “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind,’” among other essays.) My own advice was never that categorical. Go if you feel that your happiness depends on it—it can be a great experience in many ways—but be aware of what you’re in for. You’re going to be in school for at least seven years, probably more like nine, and there’s a very good chance that you won’t get a job at the end of it.
At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts. And this was before the financial collapse. In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one.
via The Nation.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 11:07 am
"I should like... to utter an express warning against certain passages and contexts in my commentary on Romans"
"revelation will never be discovered by anyone who undertakes to arrive at a kind of timeless core by abstracting from all times..."
"revelation has its time, and only in and along with its time is it revelation"
"when I really give anyone my time, I thereby give him the last and most personal thing that I have to give at all, namely myself"
"as law, the covenant is grace, exactly as qua grace, it is law"
"it is not with pure, good, moral men that God makes & keeps covenant, but with transgressors, & incorrigible transgressors at that"
bits of barth
Barth CD I/1
"...inscrutability, hiddenness is of the very essence of Him who is called God in the Bible"
"when the Bible gives an account of revelation it means to narrate history"
"the threefold yet single lordship of God as Father, Son and Spirit is the root of the doctrine of the Trinity"
"The situation would be hopeless if it were our task here to say what is really meant by 'person' in the doctrine of the Trinity"
"revealer, revelation, being revealed; holiness, mercy, love; good friday, easter, pentecost; creator, reconciler, redeemer..."
"none of the Three may be known without the other Two but each of the Three only with the other Two"
"[the Trinity] ...we should not be surprised at the incomprehensibilty in which it remains for us as it becomes comprehensible to us"
"God is unknown as our Father, as the Creator, to the degree that He is not made known by Jesus"
"Jesus did not proclaim the familiar Creator God & interpret Him by the unfamiliar name of Father. He revealed [His] unknown Father"
"God [as] Father denotes the mode of being of God in which He is the Author of His other modes of being"
"the Son is from the Father & the Spirit is from the Father & the Son, while the Father is from Himself alone"
"the Father is not only God the Creator, but with the Son and the Spirit He is also God the Reconciler & God the Redeemer"
"It would be just as improper to say that God the Father died as to say that Jesus or the Spirit of Pentecost created heaven & earth"
"this Father of His is God. He who reveals Him, then, reveals God. But who can reveal God except God Himself?"
"only the son who is already recalling his father's house knows that he is a lost son"
"reconciliation or revelation is not creation or a continuation of creation but rather an inconceivably new work above and beyond..."
"Jesus is the revelation of the Father and the revelation of the Father is Jesus" word.
"As we owe life to God the Creator, so we owe eternal life to God the Reconciler"
"We believe in the one Lord Jesus Christ. He has a claim on us and control over us. He commands and rules"
(3) "...in the process in which creation & sin... are not interfused but opposed even as they exist together"
(2) "He has come into being as the worm has come into being... He has come into being as man comes into being"
(1) "begotten... He has come into being in the context of sex and the nexus of the species..."
"it is not true that these names [Father & Son] are just freely chosen and in the last analysis meaningless symbols"
"We can speak of the truth only in untruth. We do not know what we are saying when we call God Father & Son"
"He is the eternal Word of the Father who speaks from all eternity, the eternal thought of the Father who thinks from all eternity"
"The Holy Spirit is the authorisation to speak about Christ... He is the summons to the Church to minister the Word"
"The Holy Spirit is the Lord who sets us free and by receiving Him we become the children of God"
"Even in receiving the Holy Spirit man remains man, the sinner sinner"
"eternity comes first and then time, therefore the future comes first and then the present..."
"God remains the Lord even and precisely when He comes into our hearts as His own gift, even and precisely when He fills us"
"No other intercedes with Him on our behalf except Himself. No other intercedes with us on His behalf except again Himself"
"The Holy Spirit is the fellowship, the act of communion, of the Father & the Son"
"The Holy Spirit is the love in which the Father loves the Son, and in which the Son loves the Father"
"[God] is the Father of the Son in such a way that with the Son He brings forth the Spirit, love, and is in Himself the Spirit, love"
Paul Lehmann: the angels are alone among God's creatures in having the time to read Barth's Dogmatics. one down, twelve to go.