This passage here about stress is very plain and straightforward, but I have to admit, at one point it hit me like a ton of bricks.
We can start by considering some everyday problems of living, in order to discover the needs and intentions which give rise to them. Consider the problem of stress. Stress is pressure caused by the convergence of strong, conflicting claims upon the self. If, for example, a a person feels under the pressure of having to perform at peak efficiency in his work at all times, and also desires to be an attentive partner to his spouse and present parent to his children, he will almost certainly experience stress. How can he balance the strong, conflicting claims upon his time? Add to them his desire to have time for his own interests, and he will have a very hard time reconciling the demands. This is a type of stress that is familiar to many of us.
It is all the worse in a period like the present, when the law of capability is in force. This is the law that judges us wanting if we are not capable, if we cannot handle it all, if we are not competent to balance our diverse commitments without a slip. Who among us does not live under the dread sign of the law of capability?
In a commencement address, the columnist Ellen Goodman once described the Model Woman of today, somewhat along the following lines. She gets up at six-thirty in the morning and jogs five miles. At seven-thirty she cooks a totally nourishing breakfast for her husband and two beautiful children. By eight-thirty the children have left for school, her husband to his office, and she is on the way to her incredibly demanding job: she is advertising director for a major firm. All day long she attends meetings and makes important decisions. When she finally arrives home, it is quite late because she had to attend a board meeting for a community-service organization of which she is chairman. But she does not get home too late to fix her children a totally nourishing supper. She helps both of them with their homework and has meaningful good-nights with each. Yet she still has time to plug in the Cuisinart to prepare a gourmet, candlelit supper for herself and her husband. As the day comes to an end, the Model Woman has a totally fulfilling yet deeply honest sexual relationship with her admirably sensitive husband.
Under the law of capability the Model Woman, like any of us, is bound to sicken. We are all simply human. Stress, which takes innumerable forms in our lives and of which the law of capability is one, results from strong, conflicting claims upon the self. Ultimately, stress involves a religious problem. The problem underlying our need to reconcile conflicting demands is this: What establishes my identity? What IS my identity?
Many of us act as if the answer to this question were performance. If I can do enough of the right things, I will have established my worth. Identity is the sum of my achievements. Hence, if I can satisfy the boss, meet the needs of my spouse and children, and still do justice to my inner aspirations, then I will have proven my worth. Their are infinite ways to prove our worth along these lines. The basic equation is this: I am what I do. It is a religious position in life because it tries to answer in practical terms the question, Who am I and what is my niche in the universe? On this reading, my niche is a proportion to my deeds. In Christian theology, such a position is called justification by works. It assumes that my worth is measured by my performance. Conversely, it conceals, thinly, a dark and ghastly fear: If I do not perform, I will be judged unworthy. To myself I will cease to exist.
-Paul Zahl, Who Will Deliver Us?, p.9
My entire life, I’ve had the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith (versus justification by works, or “dead works”) driven home to me repeatedly. It is the heart of the gospel of Christ. And yet, how could I have acquired such a limited conception of it? You see, I’ve always seen “justification by works” as simply stuff we do to try to earn God’s favor, or stuff we try and do to “work our way to heaven” instead of giving up and relying on the work of Jesus. Most other religions are accused to living and dying by this method, in some fashion.
Here is the catch though, and the way that Zahl speaks of it makes it unusually clear: We use our dead works not just to justify ourselves before God, but also before others and especially ourselves. The pressure we put on ourselves to perform, our painful hesitancy to forgive ourselves when we fail – this is again the weight of the law pushing down on us, crushing us.
As Christians, we know that justifying ourselves to God is impossible and unnecessary. How quickly we miss the wider reaching implications though!
One rather incongruous situation comes to mind: In college, I took a Catechism class where we spent several weeks on the topic of “turning from dead works to serve the living God” (Hebrews 9:14). All the teaching and theology was sound. We read tons of scripture. But during this time, we were under an incredible amount of pressure to perform well and participate in church activities. If we didn’t show up for Saturday morning work crews, we got a phone calling asking where we were and wanting a pretty legitimate excuse, (for example, lying bleeding in the hospital). Getting in a fight with your roommate would get back around quickly to your small group leader and you were likely to get a talkin’ to. Despite being dressed up in spirituality, being buddy with the pastor or his kids was an effective and sought-after passage to climbing the social ladder. I don’t think any of this was at all unique to this particular church either. In fact, in many respects it was well above average.
What I’m getting at is that in this context, “justification by faith”, the heart of the gospel, was communicated and instilled in such a way that it was a doctrine only meaningful for eternal salvation. You don’t have to make Jesus happy to receive his love, but you still very much need to make everyone else happy, especially yourself if you want to get any love from them. In fact, putting a lot of pressure on yourself, (just like in the competitive business world or in the arts) was considered to be a good and even Godly thing to do. Yes, you rest in the Lord, but that’s only about going to heaven when you die. Right now, on earth, you had best pull yourself up by your boot-straps, “do hard things”, and kick some ass. The Holy Spirit will help you keep all the plates spinning.
No. I reject this now. It’s just more dead works. The gospel sets men free from that too. That’s why it’s a total scandal.
I’m waiting here in the pediatric surgery wing of this sprawling high-rise hospital. The waiting room sports some unusual toys, like a Little Tikes toddler car with an IV pole bolted on the back. The sweet syrup on every spoon induces amnesia so they won’t remember being wheeled away from their parents by masked men. No routine check-ups here – all the incoming adults are apprehensive.
The stars and moons on the carpet repeat over and over in every direction. Thousands of stars, and hundreds of moons. It makes me wish there were stars with only one moon, hiding in a corner somewhere for a curious child to find as they wandered in their gown, covered with prints of Tigger and Eyore. Why did God give us only one moon? More would have made the night sky far more interesting. I think he must have kept it simple out of compassion for the mariners. The sea is treacherous enough as it is without overlapping and uneven tides.
Back in the waiting room, caretakers are lounging in fluffy chairs, but their minds are out among the ocean waves. Some play games on their phones. Others read a page in their novels, then read the same page over again. Cell phone calls come and go, touching base, calling the same number again, just because. The nurses try to strike a balance between encouraging and not too perky.
Soon she’ll wake back up. They tell me she will be herself an hour later and won’t remember a thing. Neither will I as her little life supplants and replaces mine, bit by bit. As Capon warned us, it’s them or us and inevitably, it’s going to be them.
Later, it is revealed that the surgery was not a success. Must we remain in the ship? I’ll take any harbor about now.
As for plenilune and argent, they are beautiful words before they are understood – I wish I could have the pleasure of meeting them for the first time again! — and how is one to know them till one does meet them? And surely the first meeting should be in a living context, and not in a dictionary, like dried flowers in a hortus siccus!
Children are not a class or kind, they are a heterogeneous collection of immature persons, varying, as persons do, in their reach, and in their ability to extend it when stimulated. As soon as you limit your vocabulary to what you suppose to be within their reach, you in fact simply cut off the gifted ones from the chance of extending it.
Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #234, 22 November 1961 (via the Oxford Inklings blog)
I like his notion that meeting words “in the wild” is the best way. Oddly enough, I think it is close-minded adults who need to be addressed with a trimmed down vocabulary. Use a big word on them and they might dismiss you as a snob. Use too many in a row and their eyes will glaze over. It is assumed that children will do this for certain and perhaps sometimes they do, but the eager ones will keep listening and derive it’s meaning from context as soon as possible.
I’ve been to student art exhibits that were truly cringe-worthy. I’ve been to student composition recitals that could curl your hair. More than a few have noticed this over the years. How come so much terrible art, especially in our institutions of higher learning? Is it because the bar is so low for undergrads?
No, it is because the bar has been philosophized out of pedagogical existence. It still remains in a few class. An artist in “Drawing II” may be given an assignment to properly darken the angular shadows in a particular scene. He may complete it skillfully or in a shoddy fashion. A young musician in a style course may be allowed to come up with a melody on her own, but must write it “in the style of a piano solo by Debussy”. That’s a very good (and somewhat challenging) assignment. At the end of the day, it can be given an A, B, C, etc.
Aw, but the final show – the capstone, the student’s personal collection to show the last semester before graduation – who dare criticize it? Of course, it COULD be criticized, but will it be? We have taught our children that nothing is sacred because God is dead. We’ve taught them they deserve to be astronauts. We have taught our children that nothing is objectively beautiful – it all depends on how you look at it. We’ve thrown not just St. Thomas Aquinas in the garbage can, but even Aristotle right along with him. The old Greeks at least could say something like “That guy’s face isn’t symmetrical. It looks silly.”
Seriously though, what can a major professor say to a student who wants to present a ridiculous and slipshod sculpture? It’s not good enough? It’s ugly? No, he is not allowed to say anything like that. The secular relativism of the institution (even if this is not his own deeply person view, it rarely is) will not allow him to make any sort of value judgement upon his pupils work. The only aesthetic measuring rod he has left to enforce with is originality. An accusation of plagiarism is probably the only thing he can do to get a piece of art removed from an exhibition. The only other useful argument is possibly against laziness. A composition teacher may legitimately still say that a student has not “spent enough time” developing her symphony or whatnot. The final result can sound awful, but as long as there is a LOT of it, he has surprisingly little sway to direct the novice through the school of hard knocks. They may choose to journey there themselves, and more than a few do, but little can be done but to point them towards its door.
You can find a music critic, published of course, who will say whatever you want to hear. Do they simply all cancel each other out into meaninglessness? No. Some are wise, inspired, and correct. Others are foolish, twisted, and wrong. Secularism says it is impossible for aesthetics to be “twisted” or “wrong” – for it’s philosophy has nothing to twist and nothing to opposed except for unbridled personal liberty. Our teachers, especially in the humanities, are not empowered to teach what is beautiful. Fortunately, they can still model it themselves. Michelangelo and Bach are both bound to rub off.
Here is a fantastic quote by philosopher Slavoj Zizek:
Postcolonial critics like to dismiss Christianity as the “whiteness” of religions: the presupposed zero level of normality, of the “true” religion, with regard to which all other religions are distortions or variations. However, when today’s New Age ideologists insist on the distinction between religion and spirituality (they perceive themselves as spiritual, not part of any organized religion), they (often not so) silently impose a “pure” procedure of Zen-like spiritual meditation as the “whiteness” of religion. The idea is that all religions presuppose, rely on, exploit, manipulate, etc., the same core of mystical experience, and that it is only “pure” forms of meditation like Zen Buddhism that exemplify this core directly, bypassing institutional and dogmatic mediations. Spiritual meditation, in its abstraction from institutionalized religion, appears today as the zero-level undistorted core of religion: the complex institutional and dogmatic edifice which sustains every particular religion is dismissed as a contingent secondary coating of this core. The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.
What he is describing here is what nearly the whole western world assumes, from the ground, to be what “spirituality” and religion is all about. There is this generic base-line core mystical experience that is legitimate and clearly valuable to the lives and experiences of people all over the earth, throughout history. Then, all the religions tack on extra stuff, extra junk to this meditative white pillar. They tack on morals, institutions, worship forms, myths, superstitions, power structures, etc. Hindu’s add in some incense, chants, and some neat statues. Christians tack on a bunch of commandments and structures for getting together and singing and praying. Islam does the same, but with a different flavor. Primitive tribal religions, like that of the Native Americans, are praised for being more minimalistic and less cluttered. Really stripped-down systems like Zen are considered acceptable since all the supplemental – obviously NOT spiritual elements – have been tossed aside. All religions are the same because when you take away the lies and nonsense, you get the same blank generic spirituality underneath.
Why? What is driving this view? Why has it become so normal in the past century? High criticism? The triumph of rationalism? Zizek says no. The answer is capitalism. This model works the best for a West full of little autonomous individuals who define themselves by adding on products to their persona: what they wear, what music they listen to, what car they drive, what color their hair is, what microbrewery they frequent, who they marry and marry again later. They still believe in God, to some degree, but their chosen (of course they get to choose it) fashion of religious devotion is going to be mix-and-match, just like their iTunes playlist. You can listen to old Run DMC or new hip hop, metal or Yo Yo Ma, it’s all cool, but at everyone is still using an iPod and a pair of headphones. That’s the baseline. This popular conception of religion fits in naturally with our daily consumption. It is king and gets to tell everything else how work.
Here, Girard describes our deep desire to put a finger on on the author of evil. We keep fighting because we demand “an original cause which could be rectified”.
At least half of the combatants always believe that justice has been done since they have been avenged, while the other half try to reestablish that same justice by striking those who are provisionally satisfied with a blow that will finally achieve their vengeance. The circumstances are so confused that they will only be brought to an end by both sides recognizing the evil reciprocity. It is asking too much to expect them to understand that the relationships within the group not only feed their misfortune but generate it… Everyone is more or less equally responsible but no one will admit it. Even if men were truly aware of their evil reciprocity they would still want to identify the author, a real and punishable source; they might allow that his role was less significant, but they would still want an original cause which could be rectified, as Evans-Pritchard writes, a pertinent cause on the plane of social relationships.
-Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, p.86
In our modern world, where we are aware, at least to some degree of our own folly and the innocence of victims, the only one we have left to blame or hate is God. Nihilism (existence has no meaning) is ultimately just another philosophical flavour of hating God. Both of these lead us to pick our weapons back up.
Ethnologists have known these facts (of horrific violence in past societies) for centuries, ever since the first deciphering on the representations of persecution in the Western world. But they have not drawn the same conclusions. They spend most of their time minimizing, if not actually justifying, among the Aztecs what they rightly condemn in their own universe. Once again we see the different means of measurement characteristic of anthropology when dealing with both historical and ethnological societies…Scholars show an extraordinary reluctance to examine so-called ethnological societies as ruthlessly as they do their own.
-Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, p.62
What Girard is describing here is a strange double-standard in modern social science (which includes modern politics). On the one hand, we are so incredibly sensitive to victim’s rights that a person yelling a racial slur in America today can be fired and even arrested and charged with hate crimes. On the other hand, the ridiculous ritualistic murder of tens-of-thousands during the Aztec reign is glossed over as simply an interesting cultural artifact. The forced conversions and ethnic cleansings by Muslims in the middle ages is intentionally kept in the mists of history and no one dare bring it out into the open to demystify the recorded rhetoric of the oppressors. Still today, secularists can’t decide whether atrocities such as honor killings and female circumcision need to be loudly denounced or given a free pass in the name of multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance. We are incredibly inconsistent. We need better philosophy, better theology.
Yes, I’ve had this blog for nearly four years and I’ve never taken the time to put up a simple description of who I am and what this is all about. I’m sure I’ve left the few people that have stumbled in here scratching their heads. To make amends, I have finally posted a proper “about” page here! It even includes a “best of” list.
I’m waiting at the restaurant, watching the big-screen TV. The food channel is on. The last three commercials in a row all featured a family cooking and enjoying a meal together. They all featured exactly the same setting: an impossibly spacious kitchen in soft-focus, hermetically sealed off from all life forms. Only lab-coated men with graduate degrees after there names are permitted inside once a year on the appointed day. They bring their cameras and conditioned actors with highly conditioned hair. Kiss your “mother”. Hug you “brother”. Gush over the frozen chicken nuggets taken from the beautiful oak fixture freezer drawer.
Don’t be jealous of this family. When the camera switches off, they cease to exist and the spotless granite counter tops return to the cold vacuum of deep space.
I recall, as a young man of 16, playing Bass Violin with the Oregon East Symphony in Pendleton. One of the concerts for the season featured only one work: Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (Solemn Mass). His last symphonic work, written after the ninth symphony, it takes a full 80 minutes to play and calls for a lot of personnel.
I’ll never forget the long rehearsals, the continuous sawing away and the turning of page after page of music. It must have been 30+ pages long. I remember thinking, even on the day of the performance, more than once, “I have no memory of this page. Have I ever played this before?”. My music education was hit and miss, but that was one of the finer moments: Participating in the generation of a beautiful epic while simultaneously being run through the sight-reading gauntlet. It’s exciting to discover you can properly concentrate on something for that long without a moment’s interruption. I can’t say many other things in life have lent themselves to that.
One late-night rehearsal also comes to mind in particular. It must have been about 10:30 PM. Everyone was exhausted. It was past time to leave. Some of us lived nearly 2 hours away. The conductor sighed and announced, “I think we need to run through the fugue again.” I had never before heard a collective groan (though it was quiet) rise up from a room of adults before.
Like many of my favorite memories, they have virtually nothing to do with my own alleged cleverness, coolness, or other such thing. This one sort of just fell in my lap. Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua.
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