The Light of the World

If you came over for a meal, I would hope that the conversation would soon turn to a large print we have of this picture by William Holman Hunt prominently displayed in our living room. Over scotch or possibly gin (depending on the season), I would tell you how much I love it. I bought it at Keble College in Oxford when I was at a conference a couple of years ago. The legend beneath it is the beautiful verse, “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and with me.” (Revelations 3:20) While I was there I also spent a good deal of time in Balliol College Chapel, which was originally built in 1328. The Chapel is a kind of spiritual home for me because so much of my academic research has been on scholars who attended Balliol.

As for the picture, I think it tells us that the door of human identity is closed shut; its bars and nails rusty. It’s got creeping tendrils of ivy sticking to it, it is overgrown with brambles and nettles and wild grass. Nobody has opened this door in a very long time. This is a sense of selfhood that is brittle, risk averse, sterile and static. There is even a bat hovering above (hard to see in the jpeg file I’ve posted here). Christ the Prophet, Priest and King approaches at night. His white robe represents the power of the Spirit in Him. The jeweled robe and breastplate makes Him a High Priest. He’s got a crown of gold, threaded with a crown of thorns.

In his commentary, printed in The Times on May 5, 1854, John Ruskin said that when Christ enters any human heart, He bears with Him a twofold light. The lantern in Christ’s left hand is the light of conscience, which displays our past sin. Its fire is red and fierce and shines on the closed door and the weeds and on an apple shaken from one of the trees. Ruskin and Hunt were thinking of the old saying that the apple never falls far from the tree. So the awakening of conscience is not merely to committed, but also to hereditary guilt. Human families have sicknesses, the violent cycles of which the Christians in the family can and must, with God’s help, de-amplify and overcome.

Ruskin goes on to note that the light is suspended by a chain wrapped around the wrist of the figure, showing that the light which reveals sin also appears to the sinner to chain the hand of Christ. The light which proceeds from the head of the figure, on the contrary, is that of the hope of salvation; it springs from the crown of thorns. Although it is soft and subdued, Ruskin suggests, it is yet powerful enough that it entirely melts into its glow the forms of the leaves and boughs, which it crosses, showing that every earthly object must be hidden by this light, where its sphere extends.

For me, the picture proclaims to visitors where our deepest convictions and allegiances lie as a family and why we teach our boys to pray. At grace before the meal we might pray the first verse of “Of the Father’s Love Begotten”, let the boys make something up on the fly, or if they are too shy or silly, use this doxology: Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more that we can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation, in the Church and in Christ Jesus, for ever and ever. Amen. Then we’d eat! Oi! Young man, elbows off the table please. Honey, where's the corkscrew?

Holding Fast in the Search for Truth

Many of us, at some point in our lives, embark on quest for the truth of things based on some kind of investigation or evaluation of science and religion. We set out to contrast and compare science's claim to truth, with that of religion and its practices and rituals. We do this so that we can find the way of seeing and interpreting reality that we think is true. Our search assumes that we have the ability to view the world of religious and philosophical differences with impartiality, and from that vantage point (presumably) we will select ways of life that happen to meet with our individual needs, ideals or preferences. Many people, old and young, take courses at college and university with just this purpose in mind.

The problem with this project is not just the consumerist mentality that it reveals. The more serious difficulty is that a person’s deepest beliefs about science, morality, religion, and philosophy or otherwise, are not the objects of autonomous choice. Our deepest convictions about what constitutes the good life come out of the way we live, our sense of community, our sense of belonging, and the way that we imagine a future for our way of life.

If, on the other hand, we take our deepest beliefs about truth, goodness and right action as principles that we would choose, after giving the matter some serious thought and reflection, then we are on the wrong track. We go wrong at this point because without our deepest beliefs about such matters in the first place, we are not going to have the basis or the context for making a choice. Our deepest beliefs and convictions about life set the terms of the choices we make in life – so it is misguided to imagine that we can somehow step outside them in order to make choices.

The problem is that we can never make our given way of life choice-worthy on the basis of reason or rationality alone. “Rationality alone” is what most people take to be the facts -- "just the facts, ma'am." In other words, we are enabled by reason to be scientific, impartial, precise, and we think we can stand back from a given way of life or practice, and evaluate it "objectively" by assessing its merits and flaws. But this way of approaching things only leads to a dead end. If we stand back from our way of life as a whole in order to listen to what reason can say about the conduct of our life then we won't have any real guidance at all.

Reason does play crucial role in our lives. It helps us to determine whether or not we should continue with our beliefs, whether or not we should go on with investing in and sustaining the loyalties and convictions that we already have in place. Our rationality can help us draw logical conclusions and inferences, and to test for consistency. But reason, narrowly conceived, cannot take the place of those loyalties and convictions.

This is because reason works within the terms of the way of life to which and through which we feel a sense of belonging. On the basis of the way we live our life, we can (and should) examine the merits of our particular practices from day to day - but always in the light of the deeper commitments revealed to us in that to which we “hold fast”.

Moral discernment

Some curriculum design I did for an internet course received the following critical feedback from a colleague: "The task at hand is to alert the students to the different understandings and to the intellectual histories that inform the usages [of words and concepts]. Refinement, not correctives; deconstructions, not replacement; attentiveness to discourse fields, not reductionism is the goal."

There is a great deal of pressure in my profession to confine myself to refining student understanding, and to avoid any semblance of correcting it. I can deconstruct but dare not supply a constructive alternative. And if I do not pay sufficient attention to “discourse fields” in this way, then I am accused of “reducing”, and oversimplifying. My question in response is this: Is teaching morally neutral? Is learning morally neutral? Or are both morally directive, but we can't say that out loud?

What it is

Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not
persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is
irresistible.
~W.B. Yeats

Sons

A boy’s heart is like a fiddlehead

Unfurled, bobbing in the breeze,

Green stems springing up in the concrete crevasses of our adult days.

And they are also sidewalk crack-stepping, back-breaking, heart-bursting boys.

Watch now, as he catches yours unawares,

and blows it open.

Love's Work

Gillian Rose, British professor of philosophy, died in 1996 of ovarian cancer at the age of 48. I've written an article on her that is coming out in a philosophy journal this month. (My earlier blog on the Syrophoenician woman is part of the article.) Rose wrote her last book, Love's Work, while dying. Here are two short excerpts which rather blew me away:
"A crisis of illness, bereavement, separation, natural disaster could be the opportunity to make contact with deeper levels of the terrors of the soul, to loose and to bind, to bind and to loose. A soul which is not bound is as mad as one with cemented boundaries. To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love."
And then this:
"I reach for my favourite whisky bottle and instruct my well-wishers to imbibe the shark's oil and Aloe Vera themselves. If I am to stay alive, I am bound to continue to get love wrong, all the time, but not to cease wooing, for that is my life affair, love's work."
I pray that God teach us to accept boundaries, to remain vulnerable and woundable, and to woo till we die.

To be a good host in the house of self

As we grow older, we are given more and more opportunities to adopt the role of chaperone, to sit at the edge of the dance on little chairs gossiping and watching; spectators, as our young people innocently pair up, and as some of the older ones, not so innocently, in the ever-changing formations of the dance of life. How difficult is it for us to accept the sidelines? Not to be invited to the dance? Not ever again to be invited to the dance?

But I am beginning to see the charm. I can read the meaning of the observer's role, a meaning inaccessible to an eighteen-year-old, to a thirty-year-old. For the observer is not, as we might suppose, charged with envy or malice, or consumed with fear of death. No, the observer is filled and informed with a quick and lively and long-established interest in all those that move and circle and wheel around, is filled with intimate connections and loving memories and hope and concerns and prospects. Nor is the observer powerless, for it is through the potency of the observer that these children take their being and take the floor. Actual children, children of the heart and the imagination, old friends, new friends, the children of friends, they circle, they weave, and the pattern is both one's own and not one's own. It is of the making of generations. One is no longer the hopeful or despairing guest: one is host in the house of oneself.

(With thanks to Margaret Drabble, The Radiant Way)

The Poem

And then there was St. Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: Now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird,
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.

-Seamus Heaney

Syrophoenician, eh?

The transition from seeing somebody as "other" to seeing them for real often feels like a breach of protocol in our various worlds of political correctness. There is an example of what I mean in the rather comical Gospel story of the Syrophoenician woman. There is so little that scholars agree on regarding the “historical Jesus”, but this much seems true: Jesus’ ministry was primarily oriented to the Jews of his day. This fact explains the insulting and callous indifference with which the Syrophoenician woman is first met when she calls out to Jesus. When she tries to engage him, his contempt for her is palpable and politically correct. It is consistent with what is taken to be her otherness – indeed as (the story says) she was, to him, a miserable dog. The encounter might have ended there. But then we have this: "Sir, even the dogs under the table get to eat scraps dropped by children!" In other words, “Sir, be reasonable! I am not merely your other.” A feminist analysis of this story might stress that it is meant to say something important about the role of women in the Gospels, or Jesus’ attitude toward women. But this is to stay within the loop of otherness. Try a different direction. Can you imagine Jesus’ surprise as the woman comes into focus, not as other, but as actual? The Gospel accounts go on: "Then he said to her: "For that retort, be on your way, the demon has come out of your daughter." The gentile has become a friend of the Jewish miracle-worker.