“He felt, too, that he was utterly weak again, that he was carried along by a peculiar outside force, that it was not he himself who was running, but, on the contrary, that his legs were giving way under him, and refused to obey him.”
— Dostoevsky, The Double
On the suggestion of Mitzie I borrowed Jonathan’s copy of The Normal Christian Life, by Watchman Nee. It’s full of simple truths that I have never learned. He explains how the Christian is faced with two apparently insurmountable difficulties in his search for God: individual sins, and the fact that he possesses a nature which allows those sins. The first problem is remedied by the blood of Jesus—Jesus’ blood flows over them and takes them away. I don’t understand how, exactly, but at this point the only thing that matters is that it does.
But that leaves the problem of our wicked flesh, whereby those sins occur. And this problem God apparently solves by crucifying us with Christ. I remember that verse I memorized in Bible Drill, though I can’t say I ever understood what it meant until now: “For I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me; and the life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loves me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).
What this appears to mean is that the flesh is dead, and that the Christian life is not a process of trying to please God, for that would be to live in the flesh, but to let Christ live within us. Nee even goes so far as to say we need to declare that from henceforth we will never again try to do anything for God. CHRIST does everything. What a radical thought. I’m sure others will be less impressed than I am (since in retrospect this seems to be the whole of Christianity, and half our songs are built around it), but I find it surpassingly profound. I’m willing to venture that I’ll become the leading proponent in our circle of “Let’s stop trying to please God!” theology. I love this. I could sit and meditate on it for days and days—and have, in fact. From now on, when anyone comes to me with a problem, I will direct them to Jesus. I mean, it’s hard for me to conceive how I could have missed this my entire life. The ENTIRE purpose of Christianity is letting JESUS live through us. We don’t do ANYTHING. We love Him. That is all we do. We love Him. We center our lives around loving Him more. I want God to give me a softer heart; I want to sit before Him every day in prayer and explore the depths of His kindness and brilliance; and that’s ALL He requires—that we rest in Him; that we look upon Him; and in so doing, HE changes us into His likeness. We don’t do a thing. I can’t explain to you enough how enormous this is. Yet, since I live, let Jesus wear the crown. The Bible is suddenly inconceivably immense. I’m realizing I know NOTHING about it. Now it makes perfect sense, how people always tell you we’ll be reading the Scriptures for the rest of our lives and beyond. It’s an infinite book, in part because we’re almost infinitely blind. I love it; absolutely love it.
* * *
So I think I might have figured out how all this started. It began with a question. I’ve noticed that in the last two chapters, there were pointed mysteries involving seeming inconsistencies of character which eventually led me to some deeper truth. For example, at the end of what is now the third chapter, I asked myself how two people such as me and Corey with so little in common could have ever been the friends we were; curiously, God led me to reread my favorite “Father Brown” story, “The Hammer of God,” which involves two men who are brothers, a priest and a drunkard. Both share an obsessive love of beauty—though in the priest’s case, this manifests in an absorption with Gothic architecture, in his brother’s case, with women and liquor. Both are corrupted by their obsession, in some interesting ways.
Now in writing the fourth chapter, I ran across a similar question involving [[Miranda]]. I noticed that I was both fascinated by the similarities between us, and repelled by them. At lunch I chided Booth and Corey for comparing us to one another; then I made a thirteen-page chart listing every instant where she quoted me unknowingly. Why the contradiction?
It involves something which I’ve hitherto avoided discussing in every single draft of my novel (of which there have been about five or six at this point). You see, I sensed that God was using [[Miranda]] for a very specific purpose in my life. But I wasn’t entirely certain what this purpose was. I thought it was probable that He wanted us to be married, because when you’re sixteen, that’s the only the purpose you know. But, here’s the strange thing about it—I didn’t want to marry her. I protested against it. I went even further than that: I rebelled against it. I remember one Wednesday night when Booth and I drove to church together, and on the way we fell into a discussion, as we tended to do, on the purpose of [[Miranda]] in my life. Booth told me all these coincidences had been “providentially arranged,” and that he felt [[Miranda]] was “just like a big present from God” (because that’s the way Booth talked back then). I told him I didn’t like the idea; it seemed creepy and weird. I was fascinated by the similarities, but no one wants to marry their identical twin. “I mean, it’s bad enough that we talk and act alike, but we even have the same face!”
But then we arrived at church and the moment we stepped into the room, Krystal Cervantes was speaking about God’s will for your life, and pleading with us not to resist Him, and imploring, imploring us to surrender in those moments when we heard Him calling us, however hard, however steep, the road might seem. And Booth turned and looked at me and he had that sage, knowing look in his face which he wore so often, always with the most un-self conscious sincerity, and he clenched his fists into a ball and said, “We must join with Him…”
It confirmed my suspicions, which I know I had been feeling in one way or another since the afternoon of Doppelganger Day: God wanted me to marry [[Miranda]], and I didn’t want to marry [[Miranda]].
Yet when I read back through my Journal, in particular my Journal from that afternoon (the thirteenth day of school), I find that I was flightily fascinated with her. You have to understand, it was genuinely creepy. I would say something to Booth, and then three hours later, she would say the exact same thing to me. This happened on probably two dozen occasions. As I mentioned in the chapter, I told Booth I wanted us to start a rock band and name our first album, Life is Beautiful; not more than a few weeks later, [[Miranda]] mentioned in passing that if ever she had a band, she would title her first album Life is Beautiful. She started a “Current Events” binder in which she collected news clippings. She would sit in her desk and read and take notes. I told Booth I thought it was obnoxious being compared to another person every single day—only to have [[Miranda]] make the exact same complaint, word for word, later that afternoon.
And in reading my original Journal entry from Doppelganger Day, I can see I delighted in the fantastical possibilities. Maybe she came from a parallel world! Maybe she was my long-lost twin. Maybe God had given me the chance to see what I would be like if I had been born a girl under different circumstances.
What makes this even more complicated, and scarily affirming, is that all the ways in which we ended up being different, I now realize, are ways in which we were actually the same. At the end of the first trimester, she revealed herself to be shallow, manipulative, vindictive, legalistic, cruel, and self-righteous—someone who used her friends with no great love, and then got rid of them the moment they began to cause her problems—someone, in short, exactly like me.
Yet when (as God had forewarned me would happen) [[Miranda]] turned wicked, my immediate reaction was not to think, “Oh, perhaps these are all problems I have as well.” No, rather, I thought to myself, “Oh, perhaps we are not as similar as I imagined.” Which, as I realize now, was entirely wrong.
And I could see now, for the very first time, what had been [[Miranda]]’s true purpose: to reveal those sins to me, to show me the wickedness of my own heart, to hold the mirror up to the face of the Gorgon, as it were, because I couldn’t see those sins in myself; it required another to show me.
And I asked myself, how did I miss the lesson? If that was God’s intention, then how did I miss it?
And then it all came together…
The last seven years of my life have been a gradually, incrementally-escalating series of judgments from God, each designed to show me the extent of my own legalism and wickedness. With each year that passed, the judgments grew more severe because I was so blind and obtuse, I could never figure out why my life was so dismal, and I had no friends. [[Miranda]] was the beginning of that. God sought to show me in the cleverest and coolest way possible what I looked like to others (because of course I wasn’t the only one who had noticed the similarities; others argued with me over it, when I denied them). It had NOTHING to do with doppelgangers; that was just my mystical construction. Of course [[Miranda]] and I are different people, but it was all in the appearances. He allowed me to see her in such a way that she unfailingly reflected me.
Yet at the same time, it was a judgment. And I sensed that God had a purpose in showing me [[Miranda]], but I knew not what it was. I thought the purpose was marriage, but it was actually judgment (not that the two are always necessarily mutually exclusive).
And this is what I did: I stared at that chart during fourth period on September 2, on Doppelganger Day, and I thought to myself, “God wants me to marry [[Miranda]],” and my heart immediately said, “NO.” It willfully, violently, flagrantly resisted the will of God. It’s entirely possible for a person to resist the will of God while being in some measure mistaken about what that will is. I was resisting His judgment without knowing it. And then, to make it worse, I implicitly rejected it by immediately retreating into a fantasy world, of doppelgangers, parallel universes, and time-travelling twins. This is HUGE. Tyler has always maintained that something happened that day that propelled me into a fantastical realm, a realm of surreal, twisted, fantasy escapes, and ultimately into the demonic. THIS is what happened. I rejected God. I rejected Him by telling Him I didn’t want to marry [[Miranda]], and then I rejected Him by creating a mythical world to inhabit where I wouldn’t have to marry her, because she was my sister from another galaxy/time. (Isn’t that intense?). Is it any wonder, is it merely a coincidence, that no more than an hour later, I was physically attacked by a demonic spirit in the computer lab?
And that act of rebellion made it easier to resist Him the next time; and then the next… so that by the time I finally arrived at the point where I would have realized, “Oh, [[Miranda]] has all these sins, and I probably have all these sins as well,” my heart was too hardened and too blind to see it. And so I ran on, from judgment to judgment, sliding all the while ever deeper into the demonic and the dark fantastical.
So, let this be a lesson to you, whosoever you be who read this blog: Don’t ever resist the Holy Spirit. Even if you don’t like what He appears to be telling you, even if you’re eventually proven wrong about it, never, ever say no to Him. His purposes are good; His ways are sound; and He will never lead you astray.
Trust Him.
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jesus. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Friday, December 10, 2010
"You are Not Under the Law, but Under Grace": Escape from Mt. Sinai, Part III
[[ Note: This is the third in a many-part series on overcoming the spirit of legalism and religion. In the first part I delineated the symptoms of a legalistic heart; in the second, looked briefly, though not for the last time, at the psychology of Pharisaism, and delved for a moment into the conflict at the heart of the Protestant Reformation ]].
When last I left off, we were engaged in a close reading of the fifth chapter of Walter Marshall’s Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, which provides as clear a picture as was ever painted of the inner machinations of works-based religion. A few pages further along into the chapter, he makes this crucial point:
“The difference between the law and gospel doth not consist in this, that one requireth PERFECT doing, the other only SINCERE doing; but in this, that the one requireth DOING, the other NOT DOING, but BELIEVING for life and salvation. Their terms are different, not only in degree, but in their whole nature.”
Here we find another cunning and deceitful subterfuge of legalistic thinking: It invariably masquerades as a doctrine of grace. In this day and in these times it would be altogether too easy for Satan to come out and forthrightly proclaim that the work of the cross was in itself insufficient to atone for our sins, that we stand every moment on the brink of annihilation, and that only the most mortifying acts of penance and contrition can appease the burning wrath of God. For who would believe that? We are Lutherans, all.
Yet here’s what he tells me: “You’re right; you’re absolutely right. You cannot earn redemption. I’m as much a Protestant as anyone,” says Satan. “Eternity is yours now. But how will you keep it?”
And so I find myself having this conversation with myself a hundred times a day:
Q: He’s right, you know. You have your salvation; now what will you do?
A: Well, surely not nothing. Nothing would be contemptible and lazy and ungrateful, and would likely only lead me further into sin. Right? So I have to do something; that’s decided.
Q: What is the purpose of the Christian life?
A: To strive after holiness, surely.
Q: And what is holiness?
A: Why, the doing of things that are right; the avoidance of things that are not right. Purging your heart of its wickedness through fasting, prayer, and obedience. Commitment to the precepts of the Word.
Q: And why do you do those things?
A: Because without holiness no man shall see the Lord. Because only the pure in heart shall see God. Because otherwise how will I persuade Him to answer my prayers, grant me His revelations, and visit my bed in the night with the sound of His voice?
Q: Do you really believe that it’s your obligation to persuade God to do things through the force of your goodness?
A: Well, not when you put it that way. But I have to find some way to earn His attention… I mean, look at my friends, how He loves them…
Q: Earn? Did you just use the word earn?
A: Did I? I meant, win his attention… win it, not earn it…
Q: Practically, what’s the difference?
A: Well, you can’t earn anything, of course, silly; it’s all freely given. But He won’t hear my prayers and reveal to me the joy of His presence if I don’t create a holy habitation for Him in my heart.
Q: Boze, why do you suddenly look so sad and dejected?
A: I… I don’t know. I feel great!
Q: Well, you don’t look great. You look angry.
A: But I’m not angry, I promise!
Q: Oh, it’s understandable. I would be angry too if I thought God loved my friends more than me, that He was more willing to visit them with light and warmth and joy and revelation because they had proven themselves in all respects better Christians than I was, if I thought the Christian life was nothing more than pressing a button a hundred thousand times until you were finally given a pellet, and then doing it all over again the next day, and doing this every day of your life.
A: {{ Sobs }}
Oh, where to begin? Holiness is the result, not the requirement, of fellowship with Christ. Dr. Marshall speaks of those who “would heal themselves, and save themselves from sin and pollution, by sincere obedience. They lay their own obedience lowest in the foundation of their salvation, and build the enjoyment of Christ upon it, who ought to be the only foundation. They would sanctify themselves before they have a sure interest in Christ; and going about to establish their own righteousness, they do not submit themselves to the righteousness of Christ [Rom. 10:3-4].”
What I have been earnestly and zealously attempting to do in attaining the favor of God through hard-earned purity of heart is called “salvation by works of the law.” It is an offense unto God—of all offenses possibly the greatest—because it renders not only the cross, but Christ Himself, of no effect (Gal. 5:1-3). This is the literal truth. “You cannot hide the soul”—and, over time, it occurs to you that something is definitively lacking in your Christian faith. It troubles you, and you ask yourself questions—questions like, Why do I never read the New Testament? Why do I always skip over the passages about the crucifixion when I read the Gospels? Why does everyone else always get so emotional about those passages? Have I been missing something all these years? Why am I strangely attracted to Judaism? How do I know so much about God’s wrath and judgment? Etc…
Moreover, it is no true path to holiness. The only way to holiness is found through Jesus—resting in the presence of the Son of God, through faith, not works—in confident assurance of His goodness towards you—believing, in short, that He is, “and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him” (Heb. 11:6). Salvation by works of the law is actually contrary and destructive to the true means of holy practice. Those means are: the realization of our reconciliation with God by justification; our knowledge of our everlasting happiness; and of our sufficient strength to will and to perform every duty—all of which is only to be found in Christ, by union and fellowship with Him, through faith (not a right of procurement, but an instrument only, like the hand that reaches up to take its nourishment from its provider).
However, Religion makes these practical means of holiness the means and cause of abundant life, when the reality is that that life, having already been placed inside of us, is the actual cause of holy practice. In other words, Religion asserts that holy practice is necessary before fellowship with Christ can be attained; when fellowship with Christ is the only way to true holiness. It tells us, says Marshall, “that it is presumptuous to take him as our own
until we have performed the condition for our right and title to him; which is another kind of saving faith, otherwise called sincere obedience. By this devised conditional faith, Satan keepeth many poor souls at bay, poring upon their hearts for many years together, to find whether they have performed the condition, and whether they have any right to Christ for their salvation, not daring to venture to take him as their own. It is a strong partition-wall, that will certainly hinder the soul from coming to Christ, until it be thrown down, by the knowledge of salvation by grace, without any procuring condition of works.
So that then, as I did, we become frustrated, irritable, angry, hypocritical, and powerless against sin. This is the very progression which the apostle Paul describes in the first chapter of Romans—a passage which we (or at least I) typically relegate to the category of “passages about non-Christians which don’t concern me.” But look at what he says here: “Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Rom. 1:21, NKJV). Again, one of the most readily discernible, most pernicious effects of a spirit of religion is the near-continual recurrence of ingratitude, “that marble-hearted fiend”—for why be grateful when you’ve earned your way yourself? These verses may apply to a Christian no less than an unbeliever. What is the ultimate effect of resistance to grace? He tells us a few verses later: “Therefore God also gave them up to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, to dishonor their bodies… For this reason God gave them up to vile passions” (vs. 24, 26). Remember now, this is the mercy of God in correction; though of course, if you live a life of works, not grace, it will be hard for you to see the mercy in His judgment. God gives us up to vile affections that we might remember from what a height we have fallen, and repent (Rev. 2:5). In His kindness He allows us to see what our lives would be like were we left to ourselves in our hardness of heart. He loves us too much to let us throw away eternity so lightly.
Salvation by the works of the law is a perverse, corrosive doctrine, which will leave us in more sin than it found us, through the futility of attempting to war against the flesh by means of the flesh. It’s like trying to climb a mud slope to escape a pit; you simply cannot do it, any more than Christian could escape the Slough of Despond on his own, without the aid of Help, and Steps of Grace.
The paragraph that follows might easily have been written for the sake of Ignatius of Loyola—or for me:
Those that endeavor to perform this sincere obedience… shall never be able to perform SINCERELY any true obedience by all such endeavours. Though they labor earnestly, and pray fervently, fast frequently, and oblige themselves to holiness by many vows, and press themselves to the practice of it, by the most forcible motives, taken from the infinite power, justice, and knowledge of God, the equity and goodness of his commands, the salvation of Christ, everlasting misery, or any other motive, improved by the most affectionate meditation; yet they shall never attain to the end which they aim at in such an erroneous way. They may restrain their corruptions and bring themselves to many hypocritical performances, whereby they may be esteemed among men as eminent saints; but they shall not be able to mortify one corruption, or to perform one duty in such a holy manner as God approveth… And what a disappointment… when, after all this ado, the remedy is found to be as bad as the disease, equally unserviceable and destructive to that great end for which they designed it; and that it hath an antinomian effect of operation, contrary to the power of godliness.
Spirit-less, Christ-less rending of the flesh will only lead you deeper into sin. You cannot hide the soul.
Anatomy of a Pharisee: Escape from Mt. Sinai, Part II
“O Lord, I am not worthy
O Lord, I am not worthy
Only say the word”
— T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
[[ Note: This is the second in a many-part series on overcoming the spirit of religion and legalism. In the first post, I defined the spirit, explained the nature of the evil attendant on it, and related my own history with the struggle.
In this post I shall begin to examine the psychology of a works-based faith, and briefly relate how the conflict between grace and works was played out in the Reformation and Counter Reformation ]]
So then, after nearly two weeks of waiting, as I studied and worshipped in the Prayer Room at six on the morning on the day of my twenty-fourth birthday, I finally found it.
The key—the answer to all of my questions—a thorough and perfect dissection of the legalistic heart, the manifestations of Religion, its origins, its symptoms, the peculiar mechanics of the love-frightened mind—and, what was more—a way out. A light shone on my path. I saw a door open in heaven, and the sudden possibility of deliverance.
But there was more to it, more, much more even than that—as I shall explain in due time.
I had been reading Andrew Murray’s little book, Abide in Christ, and I noticed that at the end of several chapters he referenced an obscure but apparently incredibly helpful work entitled The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, by a Puritan divine named Walter Marshall. Curious, I looked it up on Google Books—though it had lately been reprinted, I immediately sought out the older scan—and whilst perusing the table of contents I was struck by the title of the fifth chapter: “Those that endeavour sincere obedience, as the condition to procure a right and title to salvation, and as a ground to trust in Christ, do seek salvation by the works of the law.”
That sounded like something that I might have done; so I clicked on the link and began reading—
And was immediately thrust into another dimension—a dimension of inescapable TRUTH!
Look at how the good doctor begins his indictment:
The most of men, that have any sense of religion, are prone to imagine, that the sure way to establish the practice of holiness and righteousness, is to make it the procuring condition of the favor of God, and all happiness.
Why, that sounds great! I thought.
This may appear by the various false religions that have prevailed most in the world.
Immediately, I came crashing down to earth.
He goes on to explain how, not only the idolatrous practices of the heathens, and the absurd, mortifying rituals of the Eastern religions, and the terrified servitude of the Muslims, but the over-zealous work of many a professing Christian, is warped and corrupted by a paralyzing fear of God’s judgment which takes not into account, nor even sees, the measure of His love and grace through Jesus.
This creates a sort of paradox in the soul. You see, being at the deepest levels profoundly aware of the sin and ingratitude and cunning and cruelty and hatred and evil that infests our hearts, knowing that we have fallen so short of the standards God demands, we persuade ourselves that He will treat us lightly if we only do the best we can. We are so horrified of the sin in our members that, strangely, we overlook it, evade it, treating it as a light thing. “Because our own consciences testify that we often fail in the performance of our duties, we are inclined, by self-love, to persuade ourselves that our sincere endeavours to do the best we can, shall be sufficient to procure the righteousness of God.” This suggests, among other things, that there is a direct connection between religious striving to procure the favor of God, and thereby to avoid the dark fires of judgment, and evasive inability to acknowledge wrong—because we seek to shore up our elaborately-constructed and laboriously-sustained self-image when we fail in our performance, not grasping the reality that already and forever we have attained God’s unmerited pardon and favor.
So we strive all the harder, though always in vain, against evil, while at the same time pretending that the evil isn’t really there, or isn’t quite as bad as we suppose. Inevitably, this creates a split in the personality, whereby delusion and hypocrisy develop.
Having established all this in the first few paragraphs, Dr. Marshall proceeds to lay out a complete psychological profile of the religious, works-based personality:
[They] are not brought to hate sin as sin, and to love godliness for itself, though they be convinced of the necessity of it to salvation, and therefore they cannot love it heartily.
Only in the last six or seven months have I discovered that it’s possible to loathe and rebel against sin for reasons other than its arbitrary wrongness. Frequently people would ask me, Why is lying wrong? Why stealing? Why would it be wrong to give your Jewish friends up to the Nazis if they asked? Or, even more personally, Can you explain why it’s wrong to spend the whole time reading when you go to visit someone else’s house? Can you think of a reason it might be wrong to pace upstairs all night when everyone is sleeping down below? And, well, it was just… wrong. Right?
Then, during the summer, Tyler made the important discovery that “The worst thing in every sin is that it is against God” (as someone, I think Tozer, phrased it), that everything is relational, and sin is wrong because sin is relationally hateful. This revelation was inexorably, inalterably realigning. It would seem the law is not an arbitrary set of right and wrong commandments; but a guidepost on the path to love. “Love,” said the apostle Paul, “is the fulfillment of the law” (Gal. 5:13-14). But that was too high, too unattainable for me. I tried to understand what I meant when I told people sin was relationally hateful to God. Did it hurt Him? Was it possible that God had feelings? Could He feel as a man felt? Could He be moved as a man? Did He yearn in pity? Was He grieved like us? If I pricked Him, would He bleed? If I smote Him, would He weep? The record of the Scriptures seemed to indicate that He would—and, certainly, that’s what I was supposed to think, so I thought it—but I could not understand.
The only means they can take to bring themselves to a hypocritical practice in their old natural way, that they may avoid hell, and get heaven, is by their works. And their own consciences witness, the zeal and love that they have for God and godliness, their self-denial, sorrow for sin, strictness of life, are in a manner forced and extorted from them by slavish fear and mercenary hope; so that they are afraid that if they should trust [in] Christ for salvation, by free grace without works, the fire of their zeal and devotion should be quickly extinguished, and they should grow careless in religion, and let loose the reigns to their lusts, and bring certain damnation upon themselves. [They thus] preach little or none of the doctrine of free grace, but rather spend their pains in rebuking sin and urging people to get Christ and his salvation by their works, and thundering hell and damnation against sinners.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. I remember being irritated with Tyler a few months ago because, when I glowingly tried to narrate the life story of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits and leader of the Counter Reformation, he immediately interrupted me to note, “This person sounds very religious.” I admit, in retrospect he does sound very religious. That might, in fact, be putting it lightly. The following passage is taken from the chapter on the Counter Reformation in The Story of Civilization, Volume VI, by Will and Ariel Durant:
An old woman directed him to a cave for shelter. For some days he made this his home; and there, eager to surpass the saints in asceticism, he practiced austerities that brought him close to death. Repenting the proud care that he had once taken of his appearance, he ceased to cleanse, cut, or comb his hair—which soon fell out; he would not trim his nails or bathe his body or wash his hands or face or feet; he lived on such food as he could beg, but never meat; he fasted for days at a time; he scourged himself thrice daily, and each day spent hours in prayer.
Apparently in the midst of his torments he received visions of the Trinity and Virgin, who helpfully explained such matters of consequence as how God could be Three Persons in One, and how He had created the world—but nothing on the cross, or redemption, or grace. I scanned through the rest of the chapter to see if he ever experienced a Lutheran flash of insight, but it seems unlikely: “From the experience of this struggle, almost a year long, he designed the Spiritual Exercises by which the heathen flesh could be subdued to the Christian will.” Alas. It is an unbroken story of self-mortification and self-glorification, right up to the end.
Now at last I think I understand what made the Reformation so important; exactly how much was at stake in the war between Luther and Calvin and the cardinals and popes; and something of the truth of the mystery contained in those words, “By grace, through faith.” Somehow the abiding reality is obscured beneath the avalanche of bloodless abstractions which our high schools teach us. It might have proven more beneficial, if, for the sake of posterity, the Reformation had rather been labeled, say “The Revolution of Grace,” and the Counter Reformation labeled, “Revolution Against Grace.” At least then, you would know right off what you were getting yourself into.
I had been drifting towards Catholicism (and even Judaism, of a sort) for well over a year now; it seems hardly a coincidence that in the rest of this chapter, Dr. Marshall brings the fury of his whip down on the Catholics every time he gets a chance. “The texts of Scripture which [works-based believers] usually [employ] [as a pretext for salvation by works], are either contrary to it, or distant from it; as they might learn from many Protestant interpreters, if their affection to a popish tenet had not blinded them.” Ha!
Carl Trueman, professor of historical theology and Church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, sums it up admirably in this newly-posted meditation on the importance of the Heidelberg Cathechism:
At the pastoral heart of the Protestant Reformation lay the doctrine of assurance, the idea that every individual believer could know—indeed, should know—that God was gracious to them. This was critical because, as the Reformers rightly saw, it lay at the heart of the Christian life, a life which was to be marked not by works done in a servile manner in the hope of thereby earning God’s favour, but rather by works done out of gratitude to God for his grace, and in a spirit of confident freedom…
Of course, we need to understand that the assurance of which the Heidelberg Catechism speaks is not the kind of assurance so common in our Christian culture today: the idea that God is a kind-hearted, sentimental chap, that fallen human beings are not really all that bad after all, and that at the end of the day everything will turn out for the best. Not at all. Reformation assurance is Pauline assurance: in ourselves, we are utterly lost and undeserving; but in his glorious grace, God himself has overcome the mountain that was sin and, against all hope and expectation, delivered us through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, a deliverance that is made ours by grace through faith.
It is not for nothing that the saints, heroes, and reformers went to their deaths defending what seem to us abstruse and esoteric remnants of forgotten theology. The subtlest nuance in a person’s thinking, if left unexamined and unaltered, will affect the whole rest of his life. In the deepest, and gravest, and most fundamental sense, what we think is what we are. In determining the course of our thoughts, we determine the world.
"Near the Ending of Interminable Night": Escape from Mt. Sinai, Part I
“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless.”
– T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
(“East Coker”)
[[ Note: This is the first in a many-part series on overcoming the spirit of legalism and religion. In it I will define the religious spirit, explain the nature of the evil attendant on it, and relate my own history with the struggle. ]]
Well, I’m twenty-four. I’ve been looking forward to this year with irrepressible anticipation for some time.
My birthday? Better than I had ever expected.
Did I get everything for which I asked?
I did.
But in order to explain to you the manner in which that occurred, I need to talk about some hard things. I have had what’s called a “spirit of religion” for most of my life. It is a mindset rooted in shame, fear, and distrust, at the core of which is a near-unassailable conviction that I can make myself pleasing to God if I only try hard enough for long enough. It denies the reality of the cross and the totality of grace. It manifests in busyness, over-work, distraction, evasion, freneticism, overly-grandiose performance-based religious acts, irritability, anger, and sometimes outright cruelty towards others.
Given this, you’d think it would be fairly easy to identify. It is—for those who don’t already have it. And for those who do, it’s blinding. Pride forbids them seeing, even for a moment, anything that threatens their elaborately-built and stubbornly-sustained self-image. Jesus told the Pharisees, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, ‘We see.’ Therefore, your sin remains’” (John 9:41, NKJV). Yet—and here’s the trick—anyone befriending such a spirit will be likely to insist, “That can’t be me; I’m very aware of my sins. I don’t think I’m better than everyone else; in fact, I think I’m worse!” The other half of Pride is Shame. As Rick Joyner notes in his pamphlet on “Overcoming the Religious Spirit,” and as I’ve experienced again and again in my personal life, any time you attempt to confront a person living a life of works-based righteousness about the evils of Religion, they can easily slip out of it by running in the other direction—through wild acts of prostration, through theatrical attempts at redemption, through overly-earnest, near-excessive apologies. Then, if you confront us about that, we go back in the other direction—into pride, into anger, into hatred. Yet on the surface, it looks great—and it feels great; it looks like nothing more than an over-abundance of zeal and compassion for others. Yet it is altogether vile—murderous, hypocritical, and self-consumed.
Oh God, have mercy.
If at this point you’re still questioning whether or not your life is under the control of a religious spirit, here are a few potential indications:
(1) When you read the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18:9-14, you find yourself defending the Pharisee’s prayer (for example, I once tried to argue [without much success] that the Pharisee is actually acknowledging the grace of God in his life when he says, “God, I thank You that I am not like other men…”);
(2) You find yourself nodding along in agreement with the lyrics to the Smith’s song, “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby”: “You just haven’t earned it yet, baby / You just haven’t earned it, son / You just haven’t earned it yet, baby / You must suffer and cry for a longer time…” (Seriously!)
(3) The whole time you’ve been reading this entry, you’ve found yourself thinking of people you know who really MUST read this;
(4) Or you even make it all the way to the end of the article, and vaguely it occurs to you, “This is a definite problem in my life; I ought to look into it more deeply.” Then you never think of it again. You might even forget you ever read it. This is an indication that the stronghold is particularly strong. I’ve done this. If it happens to you, then you should know that the situation is almost certainly chronic.
I’m journaling this entry for my own sake; blogging it for that of others. In scanning the Internet seeking assistance in defeating the religious spirit, I found only the aforementioned pamphlet by Rick Joyner. It’s likely that at some point, somewhere in the world, some other poor soul will be confronted with the reality of utmost evil in his life, and not know where to turn for help, and if he does, perhaps my own experience and reading may provide some spark of hope.
So for seven weeks now I’ve been actively resisting, and attempting to destroy, the spirit of religion. I was making hardly any progress, though, until Thanksgiving, when for two whole days I hid inside a cupboard to evade the distractions that were beginning, anaconda-like, to strangle me lifeless. In the end I decided that, whatever the possible merits of such an approach, it was probably feeding Religion; there was a definitive whiff of theatricality and self-mortification about it; yet it accomplished what I wanted, and when I emerged from the cupboard at last on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I was much less distracted. I could hear God again—with astonishing clarity.
Whilst hiding in the cupboard I had read selected sections from Andrew Murray’s book Abide in Christ, in particular the section from Day 18 on “Stillness of Soul,” in which he describes how the believer’s one duty is to rest in Christ. “Above all,” he writes, “there is the unrest that comes of seeking in our own way and in our own strength the spiritual strength which comes alone from above. The heart occupied with its own plans and efforts for doing God’s will, and securing the blessing of abiding in Jesus, must fail continually. God’s work is hindered by our interference. He can do His work perfectly only when the soul ceases from its work. He will do His work mightily in the soul that honours Him by expecting Him to work both to will and to do” (pp. 120-121, author’s italics).
I immediately thought of a verse God had pointedly given me at the beginning of this journey seven and a half years ago, during my last year of high school: “In returning and rest shall you be saved; in quietness and confidence will be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). (As it happens, this was the epigraph of the chapter). At the time, I had received this as an exhortation to refrain from telling anyone about the strange things that had happened, and continued to happen—thus filtering a loving command to shun striving and labor into an invitation to embrace paranoia and self-protection. In a cold blast of clear-sightedness I suddenly realized that virtually every treasured remembrance of a word spoken in that season had been a gentle but unyielding warning to avoid the very legalism and distrust through which the words were filtered. What else had He said? Through Mike Saladino He had warned me, “You need to hide My Word in your heart; that way, when the counterfeit comes by, you will recognize it; otherwise, it will get you.” Yes, it was an invitation to shun sorcery—but only in part. Religion was the true counterfeit which at that point was only beginning to manifest in a prominent way, after three years of near-silence—works-based legalism, which Rick Joyner and Walter Marshall have both labeled “the enemy and counterfeit of all true religion.” And all this time I had thought He was speaking of poor Marina!
And then, from the same sermon, Zechariah 4:6—long one of my personal mottos: “‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the Lord.” Oh, if only I had understood what that meant at the time, it would have saved me years of failure, years of grief, years of heartache! Are you beginning to see a theme in the words He spoke?
Then last, and not least of all, the great prophecy He gave me at the end of that year (December 2003): “The world has a wrong understanding of what it means to be a hero. A hero is not characterized by his wit, cleverness, or strength, but by the level of his surrender to Me. You and your friends will be examples to the world of what a hero truly is.”
When finally I arrived at this, remembering, I laid my hand across my mouth. So it was true. That prophecy was true. It must have been, because it demonstrated a level of understanding years beyond my age—for, obviously, I still didn’t get it!
“God talks to me,” I said slowly, into the untrammeled darkness of the stairwell. “I can hear His voice!” (In the Spirit I honestly imagined I could see angels throwing confetti at the belated revelation).
Then something must surely have lifted, for in the days that immediately followed I could hardly fail to hear it. He was everywhere I went—and speaking constantly, unless of course I made it clear to Him I didn’t wish to talk. Whiles I was still in the cupboard He lovingly, patiently explained that there were three concentric layers of distraction circling like an asteroid-belt of space junk round my heart. The first was external—books, the Internet, novelling, anything else I could get my hands on; the second was inward, the distractions of the mind—my near-continuous thinking about politics, trivia, music, movies, celebrities, popular culture, which erupts in my speech with unmitigated persistence and renders me a nuisance and a bore to almost everyone I know.
Then, once I had surmounted those two barriers, I ran across a third—a sheer, cold wall of resistance, tight and constricted, like a clenched fist. I realized that I didn’t want God. I realized I harbored not a little the anger and venom I had so vociferously warred against in Corey—rebellion from His plans; resentment of His purpose. I began to see how, in a very real sense, though I honored Him with my mouth, my heart was far away. I was the wife who in the course of a long marriage grows bitter, and grudging, and distant, towards her warm and loving husband. I was the son who hates his father, but couldn’t even give you a reason if you asked him. I was Eustace Clarence Scrubb—before he turned into a dragon—sulky, pretentious, condescending, fearful of Aslan, incontrovertibly convinced that his friends are leagued against him in a secret conspiracy of shared hatred.
And I began to see how much I hated hating—specifically, how I hated the manifest hatred of loneliness, alienation, evasion, and self-martyrdom. I could see where it had brought me—to the bottom of a cupboard, unlit by the sun, friendless, foodless, on Thanksgiving Day. I realized this was all my fault, and that no one had brought it on me but myself. I could see that where God was, there was light, and joy, and fellowship, and warmth, and love, and food, real food, and all the things I lacked here in this self-created pit—this tiny Tophet. And he sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding; and they would not come. Again, he sent forth other servants… Again and again, He had beckoned. It was not because of Him that I was here. He had not been scheming ways to drive me to the utmost point of misery for years. It was never His intention to hurt me.
But it was someone else’s.
There in the darkness I could feel him—as plainly and closely as though he was right there beside me. It was a feeling I had not felt with such strength, such conviction, since high school. And I realized that he wanted to destroy me, just because—because hatred does not understand love, because misery envies the happiness of others, because in his own pride and pretension and self-glorification and love of the darkness he had separated himself from all that was good and pure and real and loving in the world, in God, and there was no redemption, nothing but ossified grandeur, perpetual self-pity, and isolation unending—eternally alone in a bed he had laid down for himself, burning in a torment that roared from within, outside the very gates of a city where dwelt myriads of bright, shining people, happy and alive.
And I suddenly knew that I hated it, all of it—hated all the evils to which I had clung in my rebellion against God—hated the loneliness and the darkness and the terror of night and the horror in horrifying things and the willful pretension that asserted its own superiority over love, and romance, and friendship. I was no longer lying on the floor of the Katzen’s, eight other people above me, wildly declaring, “You’ll never have love, or friends—and I feel sorry for you!” I had become the very person to whom I was speaking—but a ray of light still shone, there was still hope for the future, I could still feel the pain of longing, numbed and choked and almost blotted out although it was, and I wanted it, and with everything in my power I just wanted to throw myself at the feet of Jesus and say, “Please, receive me back again. Please, take me back. I will become a hired hand…” But could I even mean it if I said it, and if so, for how long? I was as wayward as the prodigal son, but as proud, as lofty, as his brother. I was drifting towards a world without hope.
At the end of it all, I began a poem which reads, in part:
Thould’st shun a bear
Because I could not stop for love
Thould’st shun a bear
Because I could not stop for faith
Thould’st shun a bear
Because I could not stop for grace
Thou hast broken,
Thou hast broken me asunder
Thou liftest me up on the whirlwind,
And dissolvest my substance.
Yet for the first time, I was beginning to trust Him. He had smashed all my bones—but only to rebuild them. He had rent my heart in pieces—but only, in the end, to save my soul.
Is the wisdom of humility. Humility is endless.”
– T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
(“East Coker”)
[[ Note: This is the first in a many-part series on overcoming the spirit of legalism and religion. In it I will define the religious spirit, explain the nature of the evil attendant on it, and relate my own history with the struggle. ]]
Well, I’m twenty-four. I’ve been looking forward to this year with irrepressible anticipation for some time.
My birthday? Better than I had ever expected.
Did I get everything for which I asked?
I did.
But in order to explain to you the manner in which that occurred, I need to talk about some hard things. I have had what’s called a “spirit of religion” for most of my life. It is a mindset rooted in shame, fear, and distrust, at the core of which is a near-unassailable conviction that I can make myself pleasing to God if I only try hard enough for long enough. It denies the reality of the cross and the totality of grace. It manifests in busyness, over-work, distraction, evasion, freneticism, overly-grandiose performance-based religious acts, irritability, anger, and sometimes outright cruelty towards others.
Given this, you’d think it would be fairly easy to identify. It is—for those who don’t already have it. And for those who do, it’s blinding. Pride forbids them seeing, even for a moment, anything that threatens their elaborately-built and stubbornly-sustained self-image. Jesus told the Pharisees, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, ‘We see.’ Therefore, your sin remains’” (John 9:41, NKJV). Yet—and here’s the trick—anyone befriending such a spirit will be likely to insist, “That can’t be me; I’m very aware of my sins. I don’t think I’m better than everyone else; in fact, I think I’m worse!” The other half of Pride is Shame. As Rick Joyner notes in his pamphlet on “Overcoming the Religious Spirit,” and as I’ve experienced again and again in my personal life, any time you attempt to confront a person living a life of works-based righteousness about the evils of Religion, they can easily slip out of it by running in the other direction—through wild acts of prostration, through theatrical attempts at redemption, through overly-earnest, near-excessive apologies. Then, if you confront us about that, we go back in the other direction—into pride, into anger, into hatred. Yet on the surface, it looks great—and it feels great; it looks like nothing more than an over-abundance of zeal and compassion for others. Yet it is altogether vile—murderous, hypocritical, and self-consumed.
Oh God, have mercy.
If at this point you’re still questioning whether or not your life is under the control of a religious spirit, here are a few potential indications:
(1) When you read the story of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in Luke 18:9-14, you find yourself defending the Pharisee’s prayer (for example, I once tried to argue [without much success] that the Pharisee is actually acknowledging the grace of God in his life when he says, “God, I thank You that I am not like other men…”);
(2) You find yourself nodding along in agreement with the lyrics to the Smith’s song, “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby”: “You just haven’t earned it yet, baby / You just haven’t earned it, son / You just haven’t earned it yet, baby / You must suffer and cry for a longer time…” (Seriously!)
(3) The whole time you’ve been reading this entry, you’ve found yourself thinking of people you know who really MUST read this;
(4) Or you even make it all the way to the end of the article, and vaguely it occurs to you, “This is a definite problem in my life; I ought to look into it more deeply.” Then you never think of it again. You might even forget you ever read it. This is an indication that the stronghold is particularly strong. I’ve done this. If it happens to you, then you should know that the situation is almost certainly chronic.
I’m journaling this entry for my own sake; blogging it for that of others. In scanning the Internet seeking assistance in defeating the religious spirit, I found only the aforementioned pamphlet by Rick Joyner. It’s likely that at some point, somewhere in the world, some other poor soul will be confronted with the reality of utmost evil in his life, and not know where to turn for help, and if he does, perhaps my own experience and reading may provide some spark of hope.
So for seven weeks now I’ve been actively resisting, and attempting to destroy, the spirit of religion. I was making hardly any progress, though, until Thanksgiving, when for two whole days I hid inside a cupboard to evade the distractions that were beginning, anaconda-like, to strangle me lifeless. In the end I decided that, whatever the possible merits of such an approach, it was probably feeding Religion; there was a definitive whiff of theatricality and self-mortification about it; yet it accomplished what I wanted, and when I emerged from the cupboard at last on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, I was much less distracted. I could hear God again—with astonishing clarity.
Whilst hiding in the cupboard I had read selected sections from Andrew Murray’s book Abide in Christ, in particular the section from Day 18 on “Stillness of Soul,” in which he describes how the believer’s one duty is to rest in Christ. “Above all,” he writes, “there is the unrest that comes of seeking in our own way and in our own strength the spiritual strength which comes alone from above. The heart occupied with its own plans and efforts for doing God’s will, and securing the blessing of abiding in Jesus, must fail continually. God’s work is hindered by our interference. He can do His work perfectly only when the soul ceases from its work. He will do His work mightily in the soul that honours Him by expecting Him to work both to will and to do” (pp. 120-121, author’s italics).
I immediately thought of a verse God had pointedly given me at the beginning of this journey seven and a half years ago, during my last year of high school: “In returning and rest shall you be saved; in quietness and confidence will be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). (As it happens, this was the epigraph of the chapter). At the time, I had received this as an exhortation to refrain from telling anyone about the strange things that had happened, and continued to happen—thus filtering a loving command to shun striving and labor into an invitation to embrace paranoia and self-protection. In a cold blast of clear-sightedness I suddenly realized that virtually every treasured remembrance of a word spoken in that season had been a gentle but unyielding warning to avoid the very legalism and distrust through which the words were filtered. What else had He said? Through Mike Saladino He had warned me, “You need to hide My Word in your heart; that way, when the counterfeit comes by, you will recognize it; otherwise, it will get you.” Yes, it was an invitation to shun sorcery—but only in part. Religion was the true counterfeit which at that point was only beginning to manifest in a prominent way, after three years of near-silence—works-based legalism, which Rick Joyner and Walter Marshall have both labeled “the enemy and counterfeit of all true religion.” And all this time I had thought He was speaking of poor Marina!
And then, from the same sermon, Zechariah 4:6—long one of my personal mottos: “‘Not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the Lord.” Oh, if only I had understood what that meant at the time, it would have saved me years of failure, years of grief, years of heartache! Are you beginning to see a theme in the words He spoke?
Then last, and not least of all, the great prophecy He gave me at the end of that year (December 2003): “The world has a wrong understanding of what it means to be a hero. A hero is not characterized by his wit, cleverness, or strength, but by the level of his surrender to Me. You and your friends will be examples to the world of what a hero truly is.”
When finally I arrived at this, remembering, I laid my hand across my mouth. So it was true. That prophecy was true. It must have been, because it demonstrated a level of understanding years beyond my age—for, obviously, I still didn’t get it!
“God talks to me,” I said slowly, into the untrammeled darkness of the stairwell. “I can hear His voice!” (In the Spirit I honestly imagined I could see angels throwing confetti at the belated revelation).
Then something must surely have lifted, for in the days that immediately followed I could hardly fail to hear it. He was everywhere I went—and speaking constantly, unless of course I made it clear to Him I didn’t wish to talk. Whiles I was still in the cupboard He lovingly, patiently explained that there were three concentric layers of distraction circling like an asteroid-belt of space junk round my heart. The first was external—books, the Internet, novelling, anything else I could get my hands on; the second was inward, the distractions of the mind—my near-continuous thinking about politics, trivia, music, movies, celebrities, popular culture, which erupts in my speech with unmitigated persistence and renders me a nuisance and a bore to almost everyone I know.
Then, once I had surmounted those two barriers, I ran across a third—a sheer, cold wall of resistance, tight and constricted, like a clenched fist. I realized that I didn’t want God. I realized I harbored not a little the anger and venom I had so vociferously warred against in Corey—rebellion from His plans; resentment of His purpose. I began to see how, in a very real sense, though I honored Him with my mouth, my heart was far away. I was the wife who in the course of a long marriage grows bitter, and grudging, and distant, towards her warm and loving husband. I was the son who hates his father, but couldn’t even give you a reason if you asked him. I was Eustace Clarence Scrubb—before he turned into a dragon—sulky, pretentious, condescending, fearful of Aslan, incontrovertibly convinced that his friends are leagued against him in a secret conspiracy of shared hatred.
And I began to see how much I hated hating—specifically, how I hated the manifest hatred of loneliness, alienation, evasion, and self-martyrdom. I could see where it had brought me—to the bottom of a cupboard, unlit by the sun, friendless, foodless, on Thanksgiving Day. I realized this was all my fault, and that no one had brought it on me but myself. I could see that where God was, there was light, and joy, and fellowship, and warmth, and love, and food, real food, and all the things I lacked here in this self-created pit—this tiny Tophet. And he sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding; and they would not come. Again, he sent forth other servants… Again and again, He had beckoned. It was not because of Him that I was here. He had not been scheming ways to drive me to the utmost point of misery for years. It was never His intention to hurt me.
But it was someone else’s.
There in the darkness I could feel him—as plainly and closely as though he was right there beside me. It was a feeling I had not felt with such strength, such conviction, since high school. And I realized that he wanted to destroy me, just because—because hatred does not understand love, because misery envies the happiness of others, because in his own pride and pretension and self-glorification and love of the darkness he had separated himself from all that was good and pure and real and loving in the world, in God, and there was no redemption, nothing but ossified grandeur, perpetual self-pity, and isolation unending—eternally alone in a bed he had laid down for himself, burning in a torment that roared from within, outside the very gates of a city where dwelt myriads of bright, shining people, happy and alive.
And I suddenly knew that I hated it, all of it—hated all the evils to which I had clung in my rebellion against God—hated the loneliness and the darkness and the terror of night and the horror in horrifying things and the willful pretension that asserted its own superiority over love, and romance, and friendship. I was no longer lying on the floor of the Katzen’s, eight other people above me, wildly declaring, “You’ll never have love, or friends—and I feel sorry for you!” I had become the very person to whom I was speaking—but a ray of light still shone, there was still hope for the future, I could still feel the pain of longing, numbed and choked and almost blotted out although it was, and I wanted it, and with everything in my power I just wanted to throw myself at the feet of Jesus and say, “Please, receive me back again. Please, take me back. I will become a hired hand…” But could I even mean it if I said it, and if so, for how long? I was as wayward as the prodigal son, but as proud, as lofty, as his brother. I was drifting towards a world without hope.
At the end of it all, I began a poem which reads, in part:
Thould’st shun a bear
Because I could not stop for love
Thould’st shun a bear
Because I could not stop for faith
Thould’st shun a bear
Because I could not stop for grace
Thou hast broken,
Thou hast broken me asunder
Thou liftest me up on the whirlwind,
And dissolvest my substance.
Yet for the first time, I was beginning to trust Him. He had smashed all my bones—but only to rebuild them. He had rent my heart in pieces—but only, in the end, to save my soul.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Chapter 8: The Air Loom Gang (Complete)
“The intense concentration of self in the middle of such an immensity, my God! Who can tell it?”
– Melville, Moby-Dick
(Ch. 93, “The Castaway”)
In my study of abnormal psychology I had encountered the strange case of a man named James Tilley Mathews, the first schizophrenic on record and a resident of the Bedlam asylum in London in the early part of the nineteenth century. Such was the clarity of his mind and strength of his belief in the delusions he espoused that a team of medical practitioners examined him and found no evidence of insanity (a diagnosis apparently bolstered by the fact that the stories which could be verified one way or the other—for example, his claim that he had been involved in the drafting of a secret peace treaty between Britain and France and thrown in jail to die by the prime minister—were invariably proven true).
Mathews believed he was privy to the machinations of a vast criminal conspiracy, centered in London but with tentacles spread throughout the British Isles, that was actively working to arrange a war between the major European powers with the ultimate goal of destroying the West. At the heart of this ruthless organization stood a small but nefarious band of Dickensian villains, four men and three women, who were stationed for many years in an apartment hard by London Wall. Among them were Bill, or “the King,” the leader of the band and foremost operator of the Air Loom Machine; Jack the Schoolmaster, so-called because he continuously recorded the gang’s doings in shorthand (merrier than the King, he was fond of remarking, “I’m here to see fair play!”); the Middle Man, an engineer and manufacturer of air looms; Augusta, a small, reedy woman with sharp features, who, though sunny and amiable to outward view, was savagely and incontestably temperamental when she failed to get her way; and Charlotte, a ruddy brunette, a “steady, persevering sort of person” who sometimes felt herself to be a prisoner, and lived in a state of perpetual remorse .
Mathews was determined to expose the secrets of this dastardly assembly to the world at large. However, he was prevented from doing so by means of the extraordinary machine that they operated. This machine was an air loom, a convoluted series of tubes and valves which could “assail” its victims with a warping fluid from a thousand feet away. The assailments were varied, but invariably effective. “Fluid-locking” held the tongue in check, preventing speech; “cutting soul from sense,” a chemical means of severing the mind and heart, dissociated memory and intellect; “kite-ing” lifted an irrelevant, ridiculous idea into the brain and made it hang there, like a kite borne high on the wind, to the exclusion of thoughts more purposeful and sane; “lengthening the brain” distorted any normal thoughts the brain might have and warped them into primal, agonizing forms; and “lobster-cracking” was a sudden, spontaneous assault on the entire nervous system, likely to result in death.
For years the “Air Loom Gang” had forestalled Mr. Mathews’ diligent attempts at exposure by “assailing” him with gruesome acts malign and shiny metal wands, which, being waved, would instantly transport them out of sight.
In my attempts to unravel what was happening at Alvin High School, and what had now grown, apparently, to incorporate at least one other person elsewhere (that I knew of), I had asked myself, “What if the religious explanation for this is the wrong one?” In other words, “What if there’s an explanation lying somewhere between ‘whacky coincidence’ and ‘cosmic warfare’ that I haven’t even thought of?” This, at least, was Booth’s initial opinion. While he found it odd, as I did, that events were stacking up in such a linear, literary manner, and for that reason thought it unlikely that this was all but a fevered coinage of my brain—especially not now that others were involved who could attest to having undergone experiences similar to mine—he was hesitant to frame the unexplainable in terms of my Judeo-Christian understanding.
“The universe is really vast,” he told me, in his probing, forthright manner. “And it has a lot of dimensions. I’m not saying that ‘weird’ things can’t happen, I just don’t think that we should confine our interpretations to something written by a small group of people living in the first century. Do you see how narrow that is?”
I conceded his point—it was certainly narrow. The problem was, if not coincidence, if not a case of mass psychosis, what other explanation was there but religious? I could lower the barriers of my epistemology only so far—then, after a certain point, I was living in Rapture Ready world, a perverse, illimitable, unguarded universe with no constraints, no rules, reasonless and void, where the explanation was as likely to be a wolf in a granny costume, or a group of baton-waving British conspirators, as anything else. It could be the Leviathan! It could be Zarathustra. It could be anything at all. I preferred not to live in that world. I would rather my novels remained my novels, not my whole existence. In short, the limitations on my reason, undergirded by religious (and specifically Christian) understanding, were what kept me sane. If I should lose that—if I drifted out into the boundless waste of all-permitting chaos—if I lost my sense of possibility and finitude—then I was utterly, completely lost.
Thus in a sense, I agreed with Booth, but not in the way that he intended. He was right, the universe is vast—too vast, I felt, to wander through it wantonly unguided, all alone. The narrowness of my worldview was among its chief attractions—as who should suggest to a shepherd that he “broaden” the borders of his sheepfold by removing its gates? There was a certain kind of safety in restriction. I tried to look at it as Booth suggested, but I simply couldn’t do it—it was frightening—and, after earnestly attempting for a time, eventually gave up in despair.
– Melville, Moby-Dick
(Ch. 93, “The Castaway”)
In my study of abnormal psychology I had encountered the strange case of a man named James Tilley Mathews, the first schizophrenic on record and a resident of the Bedlam asylum in London in the early part of the nineteenth century. Such was the clarity of his mind and strength of his belief in the delusions he espoused that a team of medical practitioners examined him and found no evidence of insanity (a diagnosis apparently bolstered by the fact that the stories which could be verified one way or the other—for example, his claim that he had been involved in the drafting of a secret peace treaty between Britain and France and thrown in jail to die by the prime minister—were invariably proven true).
Mathews believed he was privy to the machinations of a vast criminal conspiracy, centered in London but with tentacles spread throughout the British Isles, that was actively working to arrange a war between the major European powers with the ultimate goal of destroying the West. At the heart of this ruthless organization stood a small but nefarious band of Dickensian villains, four men and three women, who were stationed for many years in an apartment hard by London Wall. Among them were Bill, or “the King,” the leader of the band and foremost operator of the Air Loom Machine; Jack the Schoolmaster, so-called because he continuously recorded the gang’s doings in shorthand (merrier than the King, he was fond of remarking, “I’m here to see fair play!”); the Middle Man, an engineer and manufacturer of air looms; Augusta, a small, reedy woman with sharp features, who, though sunny and amiable to outward view, was savagely and incontestably temperamental when she failed to get her way; and Charlotte, a ruddy brunette, a “steady, persevering sort of person” who sometimes felt herself to be a prisoner, and lived in a state of perpetual remorse .
Mathews was determined to expose the secrets of this dastardly assembly to the world at large. However, he was prevented from doing so by means of the extraordinary machine that they operated. This machine was an air loom, a convoluted series of tubes and valves which could “assail” its victims with a warping fluid from a thousand feet away. The assailments were varied, but invariably effective. “Fluid-locking” held the tongue in check, preventing speech; “cutting soul from sense,” a chemical means of severing the mind and heart, dissociated memory and intellect; “kite-ing” lifted an irrelevant, ridiculous idea into the brain and made it hang there, like a kite borne high on the wind, to the exclusion of thoughts more purposeful and sane; “lengthening the brain” distorted any normal thoughts the brain might have and warped them into primal, agonizing forms; and “lobster-cracking” was a sudden, spontaneous assault on the entire nervous system, likely to result in death.
For years the “Air Loom Gang” had forestalled Mr. Mathews’ diligent attempts at exposure by “assailing” him with gruesome acts malign and shiny metal wands, which, being waved, would instantly transport them out of sight.
In my attempts to unravel what was happening at Alvin High School, and what had now grown, apparently, to incorporate at least one other person elsewhere (that I knew of), I had asked myself, “What if the religious explanation for this is the wrong one?” In other words, “What if there’s an explanation lying somewhere between ‘whacky coincidence’ and ‘cosmic warfare’ that I haven’t even thought of?” This, at least, was Booth’s initial opinion. While he found it odd, as I did, that events were stacking up in such a linear, literary manner, and for that reason thought it unlikely that this was all but a fevered coinage of my brain—especially not now that others were involved who could attest to having undergone experiences similar to mine—he was hesitant to frame the unexplainable in terms of my Judeo-Christian understanding.
“The universe is really vast,” he told me, in his probing, forthright manner. “And it has a lot of dimensions. I’m not saying that ‘weird’ things can’t happen, I just don’t think that we should confine our interpretations to something written by a small group of people living in the first century. Do you see how narrow that is?”
I conceded his point—it was certainly narrow. The problem was, if not coincidence, if not a case of mass psychosis, what other explanation was there but religious? I could lower the barriers of my epistemology only so far—then, after a certain point, I was living in Rapture Ready world, a perverse, illimitable, unguarded universe with no constraints, no rules, reasonless and void, where the explanation was as likely to be a wolf in a granny costume, or a group of baton-waving British conspirators, as anything else. It could be the Leviathan! It could be Zarathustra. It could be anything at all. I preferred not to live in that world. I would rather my novels remained my novels, not my whole existence. In short, the limitations on my reason, undergirded by religious (and specifically Christian) understanding, were what kept me sane. If I should lose that—if I drifted out into the boundless waste of all-permitting chaos—if I lost my sense of possibility and finitude—then I was utterly, completely lost.
Thus in a sense, I agreed with Booth, but not in the way that he intended. He was right, the universe is vast—too vast, I felt, to wander through it wantonly unguided, all alone. The narrowness of my worldview was among its chief attractions—as who should suggest to a shepherd that he “broaden” the borders of his sheepfold by removing its gates? There was a certain kind of safety in restriction. I tried to look at it as Booth suggested, but I simply couldn’t do it—it was frightening—and, after earnestly attempting for a time, eventually gave up in despair.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Answers that Need Questioning: Dostoevsky, the Millennium, and Freedom
My reading of the first hundred pages of The Brothers Karamazov has given me some new ideas about the manner in which the subject matter of the novel ought to be approached. You look at a man like Dostoevsky; his power wasn’t so much in the answers he presented as the questions he asked. This is deeply freeing, not least because I have so many questions. When I finished the fourth chapter of my novel a year ago next week, I had resolved that the importance of my novel was in giving understanding; in teaching. One of the great realizations of the summer was that I could not know everything, and no one would hurt me for it.
The strength of a novel, in fact, is in not knowing everything. Walter Russell Mead this morning wrote a fabulously scintillating review of a novel by Rajendra Pachauri, the now widely-reviled former head of the UN International Panel on Climate Control. The novel is entitled Return to Almora, and remains sadly unavailable here in America, but Mr. Mead has done an artful job of satiating our excitement in the meantime with a foretaste of the many pleasures to be found there.
The intellectual vapidity and narcissistic self satisfaction of the book is unsurpassable. Politics, science, religion: characters spout the most shopworn cliches in the apparent belief that they are uttering profound truths. After Sanjay writes an angry letter to the editor denouncing Ronald Reagan for reasons that will sound silly to the reader but are evidently convincing to the narrator, Senator Chuck Sommers, the junior senator from Pennsylvania begs Sanjay to be accepted as a student of meditation — and speaks to him about the importance of enlightened political action. To quote Pachauri’s own scintillating prose and sparkling dialog:
“Sandy, you must work for larger causes in which you believe,” Chuck Sommers said, putting his arm around Sanjay’s shoulder. “I greatly admire what you are doing to bring peace to so many human souls. But we must also bring peace on earth. There is too much strife around us, and too little compassion. Political leaders use people and events for their own narrow purposes, putting a spin of superficial nobility and righteousness on everything. We have to raise our voices against this evil.”
Sharp, focused, useful: that is our Sanjay’s political approach. As for the politics of Shirley MacLaine, here is how Pachauri describes them:
“Shirley talked about the rally in which she had come to take part. She had decided, along with a few other committed people to protest US foreign policy and to demonstrate in favor of pro-choice legislation. She would handle General Zia and Pakistan, a bit later on, after she had mobilised support from other quarters.”
That is pretty much the level of ‘intellectual’ conversation in the book. No one really struggles with ideas; no one grapples with logic or evidence. No piece of platitudinous claptrap is ever contested, and no religious doctrine or precept ever seriously interferes with anyone’s desire to do as they please. In Return to Almora, at least, the truth is what ‘we’ think, and we recognize it not because we sift evidence and chop logic. We perceive the truth because of who we are; some people just happen to know what is right and, fortunately, we just happen to be that kind of people. Whether it is the impending doom of the glaciers (whose disappearance is a recurring minor theme), the errors of American Republicans (another theme), or the superiority of Hinduism to all other religious traditions (the dominant underlying message, expressed with extraordinary naivete that is almost but not quite endearing), we are guided by the inner light rather than anything so vulgar as logical disputation.
(http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/08/22/rajendra-pachauri-voodoo-scientist-and-lone-ranger-of-love/)
This is the very thing that you are not allowed to do in a religious novel, or, really, in any novel. I haven’t read any of the novels of Ayn Rand, for example, but from what I understand, her greatest failing as a novelist is believing so strongly in the truth of her ideals that her characters become one-dimensional vessels, heroically strutting about, square-jawed and muscular, conversing with one another at length about the virtues of unfettered capitalism, free of all doubt and regret.
If my translation of the Psalms has taught me nothing else, it’s demonstrated amply that the Bible was never the question-quenching, sorrow-stifling book I once believed it was. There are times when it’s not so much a sermon as a two-way disagreement. “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! For then would I fly away and be at rest.” There’s a delightful passage in Psalm 39 where David (in the Hebrew) begs the Lord to turn away His face, “that I may smile again, and regain strength, before I go hence, and be no more.” He seems to think he would be better off if God forgot about him altogether. Job regularly exhorts his sympathetic friends for thinking they can comprehend the ways of God. At the end of the book, the Lord reiterates this point.
The world is too complex for simple answers. This is as prominent a theme in the Bible as it is in Dostoevsky. “The words of the wise are as goads; and as nails driven by the masters of assembly, which are given from one shepherd” (Ecclesiastes 12:10). Goads are long, nail-like devices which shepherds use to herd sheep towards safer pastures, when the sheep are proving (if you’ll pardon the expression) intractable. Solomon is suggesting that he wrote the present book as a goad to inspire his readers towards deeper thought. He doesn’t necessarily believe, for example, that the spirit is consumed with the destruction of the body (Ecc. 3:19), or that it is better to have been miscarried than to live (the bulk of Chapter 6). He’s engaging in a (remarkably effective) rhetorical strategy to “goad” his audience into thinking critically about the nature and purpose of their existence under the sun. It’s the same strategy used by Jesus in the Gospels when He answered the Pharisees’ questions with questions. (Side note: The advice columnist Ann Landers was once asked by a reader, “Why is it that Jews always answer questions with questions?” Ms. Lander’s response was, “How do you expect them to answer?”)
This, I suppose, is the difference between novelists and theologians. Theologians give answers; novelists ask questions. Both, however, have their place. In the story of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, Jesus returns to fifteenth-century Spain, performs a few miracles, and is immediately taken in to be questioned by the Spanish Inquisition. The old arch-inquisitor fixes him with “jealous leer malign” and demands that He speak; but Christ says nothing. There follows a long speech, in which the Inquisitor reveals that the Catholic Church has willingly usurped the role of Christ on earth by accepting the three temptations which Christ resisted in the wilderness. The devil tempted Christ with miracle (the turning of stones into bread), mystery (the leaping from the temple), and authority (the kingdoms of the world). Christ refused all. The Inquisitor explains that this was utter folly; folly which the Catholic Church has now undone, with the understanding that human beings cannot bear to be free. “For in those three questions,” says he, “the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature.”
Of the temptation to miracle the Inquisitor notes:
"Choosing “bread,” Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity—to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!” And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same. Thou didst know, Thou couldst not but have known, this fundamental secret of human nature, but Thou didst reject the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to make all men bow down to Thee alone—the banner of earthly bread; and Thou hast rejected it for the sake of freedom and the bread of Heaven… I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born."
There is something almost Kierkegaardian in the manner with which Dostoevsky refuses to accept the traditional meanings of standard texts. In its own way, it anticipates Borges. Everything is challenged. Dostoevksy was a believer, not a blasphemer; as with Kierkegaard, he seems to have believed that the inability to question the accepted interpretations of the sacred was the greatest blasphemy of his age. Here he suggests that the reason God shrouds Himself in mystery and leaves us guessing at His mere existence is because, if He revealed Himself with unassailable clarity and evidence indisputable, as Richard Dawkins has insisted that He do, we would immediately worship Him in the wrong way. In worshipping God the Supreme, the Incontrovertible, the Proven, we would have hewn for ourselves an idol; and we would fall to worshipping that idol, rather than the true and living God. It’s the old, old story of the calf in the desert; only the Inquisitor (rightly or wrongly) suggests that it will continue even after His return.
Think of it this way. Even if your wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, and you have every guarantee that she’ll remain that way to the end, you still don’t want to love her for that reason only. Otherwise, you’re not really in love with her at all. Christ came to earth in meekness, not in power, because He knew men worship authority and indomitable strength; thus, when He resisted their attempts to make Him king, they did away with Him. And He will not return to the earth until the people of the earth are desperate for a king who exercises His power not through tyranny, but love. He will “execute kings on the day of His wrath,” that’s true! But a few verses earlier in the same psalm, David prophesies, “Your people will offer themselves to You freely in the day of Your power” (Psalm 110:3). He is meek and He will reign in meekness with a rod of iron. If that was the kind of king men truly wanted, Christ would have returned a thousand years ago. Men claim that they want peace and freedom, but what do they want, really? They want to be ruled over; they want to be told what to do; they want to be controlled. The natural inclination of man is to seek someone to control him. That’s why in America we have a “soft tyranny” of entertainment and distraction. Unconsciously, we all must truly sense that our superiors are keeping us in line by offering this endless train of toys and gifts; but, as Booth said, what do you do when the people want to be controlled? The promise of the Millennium is something altogether different, and, to the natural mind, more frightening: real freedom. Christ offers men real freedom in the age to come. But they don’t know what to do with it; don’t even want it, really; which is why in every age they sell themselves to sin.
“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Why? Because he wills it so.
The strength of a novel, in fact, is in not knowing everything. Walter Russell Mead this morning wrote a fabulously scintillating review of a novel by Rajendra Pachauri, the now widely-reviled former head of the UN International Panel on Climate Control. The novel is entitled Return to Almora, and remains sadly unavailable here in America, but Mr. Mead has done an artful job of satiating our excitement in the meantime with a foretaste of the many pleasures to be found there.
The intellectual vapidity and narcissistic self satisfaction of the book is unsurpassable. Politics, science, religion: characters spout the most shopworn cliches in the apparent belief that they are uttering profound truths. After Sanjay writes an angry letter to the editor denouncing Ronald Reagan for reasons that will sound silly to the reader but are evidently convincing to the narrator, Senator Chuck Sommers, the junior senator from Pennsylvania begs Sanjay to be accepted as a student of meditation — and speaks to him about the importance of enlightened political action. To quote Pachauri’s own scintillating prose and sparkling dialog:
“Sandy, you must work for larger causes in which you believe,” Chuck Sommers said, putting his arm around Sanjay’s shoulder. “I greatly admire what you are doing to bring peace to so many human souls. But we must also bring peace on earth. There is too much strife around us, and too little compassion. Political leaders use people and events for their own narrow purposes, putting a spin of superficial nobility and righteousness on everything. We have to raise our voices against this evil.”
Sharp, focused, useful: that is our Sanjay’s political approach. As for the politics of Shirley MacLaine, here is how Pachauri describes them:
“Shirley talked about the rally in which she had come to take part. She had decided, along with a few other committed people to protest US foreign policy and to demonstrate in favor of pro-choice legislation. She would handle General Zia and Pakistan, a bit later on, after she had mobilised support from other quarters.”
That is pretty much the level of ‘intellectual’ conversation in the book. No one really struggles with ideas; no one grapples with logic or evidence. No piece of platitudinous claptrap is ever contested, and no religious doctrine or precept ever seriously interferes with anyone’s desire to do as they please. In Return to Almora, at least, the truth is what ‘we’ think, and we recognize it not because we sift evidence and chop logic. We perceive the truth because of who we are; some people just happen to know what is right and, fortunately, we just happen to be that kind of people. Whether it is the impending doom of the glaciers (whose disappearance is a recurring minor theme), the errors of American Republicans (another theme), or the superiority of Hinduism to all other religious traditions (the dominant underlying message, expressed with extraordinary naivete that is almost but not quite endearing), we are guided by the inner light rather than anything so vulgar as logical disputation.
(http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/08/22/rajendra-pachauri-voodoo-scientist-and-lone-ranger-of-love/)
This is the very thing that you are not allowed to do in a religious novel, or, really, in any novel. I haven’t read any of the novels of Ayn Rand, for example, but from what I understand, her greatest failing as a novelist is believing so strongly in the truth of her ideals that her characters become one-dimensional vessels, heroically strutting about, square-jawed and muscular, conversing with one another at length about the virtues of unfettered capitalism, free of all doubt and regret.
If my translation of the Psalms has taught me nothing else, it’s demonstrated amply that the Bible was never the question-quenching, sorrow-stifling book I once believed it was. There are times when it’s not so much a sermon as a two-way disagreement. “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! For then would I fly away and be at rest.” There’s a delightful passage in Psalm 39 where David (in the Hebrew) begs the Lord to turn away His face, “that I may smile again, and regain strength, before I go hence, and be no more.” He seems to think he would be better off if God forgot about him altogether. Job regularly exhorts his sympathetic friends for thinking they can comprehend the ways of God. At the end of the book, the Lord reiterates this point.
The world is too complex for simple answers. This is as prominent a theme in the Bible as it is in Dostoevsky. “The words of the wise are as goads; and as nails driven by the masters of assembly, which are given from one shepherd” (Ecclesiastes 12:10). Goads are long, nail-like devices which shepherds use to herd sheep towards safer pastures, when the sheep are proving (if you’ll pardon the expression) intractable. Solomon is suggesting that he wrote the present book as a goad to inspire his readers towards deeper thought. He doesn’t necessarily believe, for example, that the spirit is consumed with the destruction of the body (Ecc. 3:19), or that it is better to have been miscarried than to live (the bulk of Chapter 6). He’s engaging in a (remarkably effective) rhetorical strategy to “goad” his audience into thinking critically about the nature and purpose of their existence under the sun. It’s the same strategy used by Jesus in the Gospels when He answered the Pharisees’ questions with questions. (Side note: The advice columnist Ann Landers was once asked by a reader, “Why is it that Jews always answer questions with questions?” Ms. Lander’s response was, “How do you expect them to answer?”)
This, I suppose, is the difference between novelists and theologians. Theologians give answers; novelists ask questions. Both, however, have their place. In the story of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, Jesus returns to fifteenth-century Spain, performs a few miracles, and is immediately taken in to be questioned by the Spanish Inquisition. The old arch-inquisitor fixes him with “jealous leer malign” and demands that He speak; but Christ says nothing. There follows a long speech, in which the Inquisitor reveals that the Catholic Church has willingly usurped the role of Christ on earth by accepting the three temptations which Christ resisted in the wilderness. The devil tempted Christ with miracle (the turning of stones into bread), mystery (the leaping from the temple), and authority (the kingdoms of the world). Christ refused all. The Inquisitor explains that this was utter folly; folly which the Catholic Church has now undone, with the understanding that human beings cannot bear to be free. “For in those three questions,” says he, “the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature.”
Of the temptation to miracle the Inquisitor notes:
"Choosing “bread,” Thou wouldst have satisfied the universal and everlasting craving of humanity—to find someone to worship. So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or the other can worship, but to find community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!” And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same. Thou didst know, Thou couldst not but have known, this fundamental secret of human nature, but Thou didst reject the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to make all men bow down to Thee alone—the banner of earthly bread; and Thou hast rejected it for the sake of freedom and the bread of Heaven… I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born."
There is something almost Kierkegaardian in the manner with which Dostoevsky refuses to accept the traditional meanings of standard texts. In its own way, it anticipates Borges. Everything is challenged. Dostoevksy was a believer, not a blasphemer; as with Kierkegaard, he seems to have believed that the inability to question the accepted interpretations of the sacred was the greatest blasphemy of his age. Here he suggests that the reason God shrouds Himself in mystery and leaves us guessing at His mere existence is because, if He revealed Himself with unassailable clarity and evidence indisputable, as Richard Dawkins has insisted that He do, we would immediately worship Him in the wrong way. In worshipping God the Supreme, the Incontrovertible, the Proven, we would have hewn for ourselves an idol; and we would fall to worshipping that idol, rather than the true and living God. It’s the old, old story of the calf in the desert; only the Inquisitor (rightly or wrongly) suggests that it will continue even after His return.
Think of it this way. Even if your wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, and you have every guarantee that she’ll remain that way to the end, you still don’t want to love her for that reason only. Otherwise, you’re not really in love with her at all. Christ came to earth in meekness, not in power, because He knew men worship authority and indomitable strength; thus, when He resisted their attempts to make Him king, they did away with Him. And He will not return to the earth until the people of the earth are desperate for a king who exercises His power not through tyranny, but love. He will “execute kings on the day of His wrath,” that’s true! But a few verses earlier in the same psalm, David prophesies, “Your people will offer themselves to You freely in the day of Your power” (Psalm 110:3). He is meek and He will reign in meekness with a rod of iron. If that was the kind of king men truly wanted, Christ would have returned a thousand years ago. Men claim that they want peace and freedom, but what do they want, really? They want to be ruled over; they want to be told what to do; they want to be controlled. The natural inclination of man is to seek someone to control him. That’s why in America we have a “soft tyranny” of entertainment and distraction. Unconsciously, we all must truly sense that our superiors are keeping us in line by offering this endless train of toys and gifts; but, as Booth said, what do you do when the people want to be controlled? The promise of the Millennium is something altogether different, and, to the natural mind, more frightening: real freedom. Christ offers men real freedom in the age to come. But they don’t know what to do with it; don’t even want it, really; which is why in every age they sell themselves to sin.
“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Why? Because he wills it so.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Oscillate Wildly
Then I described how, after I returned home that night, a shadow appeared on my body; how it followed me around the room; and how the source of its origin remained mysterious until the moment that it disappeared. Then I gave a long, volatile, highly-charged, and, unfortunately, not very clear explanation of how I had given so much authority to my own belief in the supernatural that its powers were almost equal that of mine; that it acquired a kind of sentience; that it began reinforcing my convictions through external means, by actually causing the accidents, betrayals, horrors, visions, and fulfillments of prophecies, which I had experienced in the last five months; and now, at last, was beginning to encroach on the physical world through physical means.
In the revision stage of the chapter, I appended this passage, which proved to be the key to the rest:
Ah, foolish Boze! If only you had spent as much time seeking after Jesus, as you did in seeking after tokens of His coming! If only you had looked up from your charts and maps, but once, and seen the fire in His eyes!
Sadly, I bungled the ending (at least on the first public reading) by mangling the passage on the sentience of ideas. Reading it, you wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. My intention was to explain the process by which an idea can take on consciousness and power; how it becomes, in effect, a self-created, self-sustaining demonism, whose relation to the true demonic is mysterious, but at least in my view highly probable. In the future I should remember that when I’m introducing unusual, convoluted, and (apparently) controversial ideas into a story, expositing on those ideas in an oblique and convoluted manner only further fogs the understanding of my readers. They won’t even get to the part where they find it controversial if they miss my meaning altogether. And I want my meaning to be clear. People will find fault with my convictions here, but I want them to grapple with it, mull it over, ponder it at length. I don’t believe the Holy Spirit gave me so much insight into the psychology of monomaniacs and men of morbid mind for the sake of my own acquisition of knowledge.
And the last part is convoluted in thought, but not so much in expression, which I like. It’s grand and full of passion, which of course I also like, and it would work very well in the context of the chapter if I hadn’t tried too hard and gone too far, immediately before. This is exactly what Carl Hovde was speaking of in his introduction to the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Moby-Dick: Attempts at writing in a soaring and sublime style are doomed to failure if they haven’t been prepared for in the rest of the text through striking characterization and a scintillating brilliance with ideas. It almost works… almost. But the parts that came before it need to be clearer. By the time we get to the emotional part of the passage, I’ve already lost the audience way back in the exposition.
“We know screw-ups are an essential part of making something good,” says Lee Unkrich, the director of the forthcoming Toy Story 3. “That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.” Agreed! You can’t be afraid to make mistakes; you won’t get anywhere at all that way.
But, as it happens, God has been speaking to me rather constantly about the need for clarity within the last two weeks. Shortly before I began my seventh chapter, He released me from a suffocating focus on my style. Essentially He said, “Your style is very good as it is. Let it be what it is; let it go.” Then, a few days ago, before I had even finished the eighth chapter, He actually started recommending that I reread Harry Potter and listen to secular, popular music. I’ve been talking with God for a long enough time now to know when it’s Him and when it’s me, and I can promise it was Him (however blasphemous that might appear to certain people here). Indeed, this revelation proved prescient not long afterwards, when certain portions of the present chapter proved too convoluted, or at least too muddy, and even Tyler suggested that I take some time off and reread The Goblet of Fire.
God is telling me that for too long now I’ve placed almost my whole understanding of what it means to be a great writer on how I said what I said. It seems that when He promised me that level of anointing, eleven years ago, He wasn’t merely speaking of a certain kind of style. Of course I still believe that’s important: How a person says something is just as important as what he or she says, and the reason I couldn’t have written that emotional passage at the end of the last chapter in any other way is because my intention was to convey what it looks and feels like when a person is suffering from a psychological collapse—in other words, descending into hell. It feels very grand, but you’re living on fumes; yet those fumes have the power to eat you from within. I think it’s pretty fair to say that I’ve suffered emotional calamities unknown to the majority of people, so if I want to describe what those calamities were like in any manner approaching accuracy, I can’t portray them in a normal way. And while that will certainly alienate some people, there are others who will really get it; who will love it all the more, in fact, for having gotten it; and who may even, for the first time in their lives, feel truly understood.
At the same time, the majority of people won’t understand the true horrors of those emotional calamities unless I can learn how to relate them in a way that they can grasp; just as most people have never know what it’s like to be trapped in a pillar of Eternal Night, but understood the emotional ramifications readily enough in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
But I think I will write at least part of my next chapter from the perspective of Booth; first, because my story is beginning to encompass so many different perspectives, that I need to have three pairs of eyes in place in order to describe what I want to describe in the next chapter, which is full of horrors; second, because I like the idea of a chapter written in the style of the Christ Clone Trilogy, with shifting narration and quick, short moments of suspense, which inevitably intensifies the sense of something dark and ominous at work; and third because it would be helpful for people to see that my shift into grandiosity and convolution at the end of the previous chapter wasn’t so much a result of personal quirks on the part of the writer, as it was a necessary reflection of my internal state during the section in question. Booth was always precise and matter of fact. Showing a scene from his perspective will solidify that what’s happening at our school isn’t just an extension of my own exaggerated fancies, and will bring it into starker contrast through his simple and straightforward telling, so that it will become all the scarier for being so relatable and real.
And I aim to maintain that starkness through the rest of the “high school” chapters. Of the eight chapters which I’ve so far written, the fourth and the sixth have been the ones which inspired the fiercest, most burning affection in the hearts of my readers. Yet the odd thing about the sixth one, “Philosophers and Prophets,” is that it managed to be simple, and breezy, and quick, and yet at the same time complicated, dense, and multi-layered. More than one person compared it to Harry Potter; yet it wasn’t lacking in meaning, or exposition, or atmosphere, or character, or emotion, or subtlety, or any of the other qualities which God has been trying to tell me constitute a work of genius, apart from mere style. Indeed, it had a good deal more of several of those qualities, than almost any of my other chapters, and it was far subtler. I don’t understand how that happened; it lacks nearly all my excessive tendencies, and this was at a time when I was inalterably driven to excess. I have, as always, oscillated wildly between extremes.
[1] The lancet liver parasite, or, as it is also commonly known, the lancet fluke (dicrocelium dendriticum). This parasite, first discovered in 1819, develops and breeds in the liver of cows and sheep. When freed against its will through excretion, it will invade the body of an ant and seize its ganglion, a cluster of nerve cells at the bottom of the esophagus. The ganglion it then uses to manipulate the ant’s actions. Night after night, at sunset, the zombified ant is drawn away from the rest of its colony and wanders out into the field by itself, where it climbs to the top of a blade of grass. This it will continue to do until freed from its appalling existence by a passing cow or sheep, which, eating it, returns the parasite to its place of origin.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Addendums and Predictions
I had to take down the end of my eighth chapter because the temptation continually to go back and rewrite it had proven irresistible. However, the full chapter is finally finished, and I don't intend to change another word. It's a turning point in the novel, just as it was in my own life; I haven't yet written anything so emotional as this. And I've gotten much better at being truthful, without being expository. This is very much an end-times chapter.
But we've come to it at last - the second half of Senior year; it only escalates from here.
My intention is to post another entry, either tonight or tomorrow, on the importance of popular music. Knowing how these things tend to go, I'll probably post a lot of links to songs by the Killers. So, you can look forward to that.
P. S. This is why I love Ross Douthat, and why I loathe the "historical" Jesus:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/choose-your-own-jesus/
But we've come to it at last - the second half of Senior year; it only escalates from here.
My intention is to post another entry, either tonight or tomorrow, on the importance of popular music. Knowing how these things tend to go, I'll probably post a lot of links to songs by the Killers. So, you can look forward to that.
P. S. This is why I love Ross Douthat, and why I loathe the "historical" Jesus:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/choose-your-own-jesus/
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