Christmas carols

So why, if we don't really believe in Christ anymore, do we still find our culture looking forward to Christmas?  Everyone likes a holiday, no?  Isn't that enough?  Not if you care about how things happen in a culture.  It seems that enough of us have believed for a long enough time that Jesus' birth really should be celebrated that we have aligned our business year with the church calendar.  We have over time adjusted the meanings of the church celebration to make it more palatable to non-believers.  We changed "holy day" to "holiday," we changed "St. Nicholas" to "Santa Claus" but we still desire to gather our family together, exchange presents, hold feasts, and celebrate, even though we no longer have any real belief in the thing being celebrated.  But we still want to sing Christmas carols...

We should look carefully at the second and third and fourth verses of our familiar carols.

No more let sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground.
He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace, and makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness and wonders of His love.

How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given,
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.

God of God, Light of Light, lo, He abhors not the virgin's womb,
Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing… O come let us adore Him…

Good Christian men, rejoice, with heart and soul and voice!
Now ye need not fear the grave - Jesus Christ is born to save.
Calls you one, and calls you all to gain His everlasting hall.
Christ was born to save...

"And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience."

The mobility and immobility of the human being provides a variety of archetypal images throughout the Bible: Christianity is first called The Way; Psalm 1 uses the movements of sit, walk, and stand to indicate righteous and unrighteous behavior; Moses leads the Chosen People into pilgrimage out of the fleshpots of Egypt and into the Promised Land; Adam and Eve are ejected from Eden to wander until their son Cain, who who is cursed to be a fugitive and a wanderer, builds a city of Nod, which is a fabulous irony--staying put in the land of wandering, yet in that city that doesn't move the human being is still a wanderer from God even in the city--wandering in the soul in the land of wandering, dwelling in a city in pretense of having a place to stay put. Spiritually, we are wanderers even when we dwell, we think, secure in our own technological and cultural barriers against death and separation.

The book of Hebrews develops this theme at length, playing variations of the physical pilgrimage of Israel and the spiritual pilgrimage of the soul back home to the heavenly Jerusalem, the true city of God and rescued humans.

Movement--walking, traveling, being on the road, looking for home, exile and return--this spectrum is captured in Paul's teaching, quoted above, of our true condition, that we are by nature the walking dead. The Walking Dead. Does this felicitous conjunction of scripture and popular T.V. show say something to us? Might it be that zombies today and the current obsession with them indicates something profound that we habitually repress?

We are pilgrims, but outside of God's grace we are lost on the journey, our minds and affections damaged by viral sin passed on from one to another. We live in a miasma of misdirected love, a mental fog of incurving self-regard, a ravenous hunger for expanding our own identities at the cost of diminishing others'. Our original orientation to our beloved Creator has become confused, and now, spiritually speaking, we shuffle around, trapped in a kind of brainlessness when it comes to the knowledge of God and our true home.

In the television series The Walking Dead (and, from what I gather, in the original comics--err, I mean the graphic novels), the cause of the zombiefication of the world is never explained. Virus? Man-made or natural? Earth-born or extraterrestrial? Supernatural curse? Natural evolutionary development to kill off the plague of humans despoiling the planet? It doesn't matter in this case, and the narrative works with this calculated gap in the storyline. But in our own lives, we know what's up: Paul says in Romans 1, "they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. . . . "  In Ephesians 4 he reiterates: the Gentiles walk "in the futility of their minds, being darkened in their understanding." The walking dead have a "hardness of heart" and have become "callous." And thus we are all zombies, because we are all possessors of this deadly infection. (Paul, to invoke another film, could say, "I see dead people!").

The enlightening irony: we are the walking dead while we are living outside of Grace, but when we begin to be aware of ourselves as dead, we can begin to live by dying with Christ who is our real life.

Irony. Isn't that kind of a literary thing one is supposed to study?

The Story of Hell

Satan is Boring

Hell is boring. Dante understood this in a way that still impacts us with its power: in hell, you do the same damned thing over and over both because you want to and because you have to.

At the very center hell--and at the bottom, stuck in the drain of the cosmos as it were-- Satan stands encased in ice, miserably chewing sinners, flapping his wings, his face a mess of tears, blood, and snot, endlessly and mindlessly rebelling against God. Satan is boring, not frightful, in Dante's scheme. At first sight, Satan is pretty scary, but if you stood watching him for a few days or even a few hours, you'd get tired of it. "Let's move on, ok?" you would ask Virgil.

All the other sinners are boring, too, ultimately. If Dante the pilgrim had stuck around talking to them much longer than he did, he would have run out of things to say, and the damned would have said the same thing over and over. Imagine talking to Farinata for more than, say, 15 minutes. He would drone on and on about his family and how important he is, and you'd want to tell him to shut up but he wouldn't. Because he's is damned and so he will be talking about himself forever. How boring.

C. S. Lewis captured something of this cyclic element of forever turning against God's love in his magnificent The Great Divorce. In the endlessly sprawling city of Hell, people re-live their obsessions again and again, making everyone else want to move away from everyone else to some more distant point where you don't have to listen to others talk about themselves all the time, though you will continue to talk about yourself to anyone nearby. Artists, mothers, skeptics, everyone, yammer on and on. One reason they can't handle heaven is that they would  have to forget themselves to stay in heaven , and by definition being damned is being incurvatus est for all eternity. And we all know how boring self absorbed people are because we are all self-absorbed and damned to that incurving if it weren't for God's grace busting us loose.

Dante manages to tell a good story because he keeps moving through hell, seeing the sights on his way  back into the light, back to daytime on Mount Purgatory, and ultimately to the astonishing paradox of lighted nighttime in heaven as he ascends through levels of light up through the circles of stars, and then finally to see the love that moves the sun and stars. His movement as pilgrim allows him (and us) to keep the story-line moving, and this parallels our own pilgrimage through this present time. We move through time, never pausing for long because we are temporal creatures and are incapable of standing still, even if we wanted to. Though it sometimes feels as if our lives are passing far too quickly, that brief life is better than being frozen in an eternity of hateful repetition--being stuck in hell.

Dante the artist pulls off something marvelous--showing the spiritual truth of sin by telling a story of a man's movement through the immobility of hell. Yes, Francesca is moving, and yes the damned souls in the tar can jump in and out of it, and others can walk, crawl, or chew, but they make these motions over and over, mindlessly, without respite, and this is a kind of immobility. Dante tells us the truth of hell's boredom by coming up with the expedience of his journey. Part of Dante's artistic brilliance is to come up with this plot: the Inferno is a swiftly moving story about a place of ultimate boredom where nothing changes.

Hell, where everything is always the same

"It's All There In Plato"

At the very end of the Chronicles of Narnia, at the end of the book The Last Battle, Professor Digory makes the comment: "It's all there in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools." Digory is a character in several of the Narnia books, both as an adult and as a child who spent some time in Narnia. He speaks as a voice of reason, but of a certain kind of reason--one that is tempered with a transcendent viewpoint, a take on reality that says there is the real and then there is the really real that the real depends on (read that again; I think I got it right). Narnia is not a straightforward platonic version of our existence; rather, both Narnia and our world are reflections of a more perfect world, which you can call heaven if you want to, though that is not exactly accurate.

It's all there in Plato!

The point is that Earth and Narnia are real enough--food, war, friendship, sunshine, painful things are genuinely there and not delusions; but these are only impermanent, insubstantial instantiations of something even more solid, enduring, immutable.  Narnia and Earth are not somehow lesser places that in gnostic fashion are to be escaped from. Digory’s comments have more to do with the correct perception that as real as this present existence feels, the present corporeal world is relatively mutable, even insubstantial, compared with what is really Real.

Compare all that with St. Paul. In Colossians he writes, "Set your minds on things above, not on what is on Earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God." In another place he writes of some whose minds are set on earthly things: "their end is destruction, their god is appetite," whereas Christians are citizens of heaven, and they will be transformed from a humble state to a glorified state that partakes with the deified body of Christ (Phil. 3. 19-21). I could easily cherry pick other passages that sound platonic, which is an argument that some informed have made: that Christianity is merely warmed over, plagiarized, dumbed-down Platonic thought. But such passages would help prove that the Christian vision, embodied in the Narnia stories and in Augustine’s writing, reflect a solid biblical witness: this earth is passing away, and we will eventually wake up to the more solid reality.

From this point on, I could multiply examples from philosophy, poetry, music, architecture, and so on, to show how the Western tradition in its mainstream Christian form helps us see that all those physical things--sound waves in air, ink on paper, electrical activity in brains, stone shaped into pleasing shapes--are in a sense only carriers of a truth that goes beyond the supposedly solid, material elements. The upshot is this: culturally, we are in a position where these ideas seem foolish. When we think of the “spiritual,” we tend to imagine smoky, wispy realities that are intangible. One reason to study older works of art, theology, and philosophy is that they can help us break out of this contemporary prison of thought.

It’s all there in Plato, in the sense that, as the Bible witnesses, our perceptions of the solidity of this world is an optical illusion that needs healing for us to get to Real Truth.

This is an icon of the Harrowing of Hell, but it's a great metaphor for The Christian version of coming out of Plato's cave.

The Psalms and Poetry

Here is one version of Psalm 150:

Praise ye the Lord.
Praise him in his sanctuary; praise him in the firmament of his power.
Praise him for his mighty acts; praise him according to his excellent greatness.
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet; praise him with psaltry and harp.
Praise him with timbresl and dance; praise him with stringed instruments and organs.
Praise him upon loud cymbals; praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.
Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.
Praise ye the Lord.

That's the King James version, or the KJV, or the Authorized Version, or the Version Grandpa Used.

Here is the Coverdale version, which is the basis of the Book of Common Prayer:

Praise God in his sacntuary: praise him in the firmament of his power.
Praise him in his noble acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness.
Praise him in the sound of the trumpet; praise him upon the lute and harp.
Praise him in the timbrels and dances: praise him upon the strings and pipe.
Praise him upon the well-tuned cymbals: praise him upon the loud cymbals.
Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.

More people probably know the Authorized Version of this Psalm in America, though in England, for centuries, many (most?) people would have been more familiar with the Church of England use of Coverdale's translation. The difference between the two is negligible, I suppose, though a person learning one version through years of repetition would naturally prefer the one embedded in the deepest strata of memory, the one that sounds just right because of its imprint. Either version is melifluous and easily memorized due to the rhythm and the language (the rhythm in part because of the strong caesura of the lines, the pause created for antiphonal reading in worship services).

Donald Davie, in his book The Psalms in English, offers sample translations of Psalms, from this early strata of KJV and Coverdale, through various poetic renditions over centuries. John Milton took a crack at translating Psalms into poetic forms, as did other Greats such as Edmund Spenser. Authors we now label as hymn writers also produced rhymed paraphrases of Psalms, such as Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. Davies' argument is that the quality of this Psalmic poetry varies, but the hymn writers could produce poetry as good, if not better in some cases, than "official" poets. Here is Wesley, for instance:

Praise the Lord who reigns above
  And keeps his court below;
Praise the holy God of love,
  And all his greatness show;
Praise him for his noble deeds,
Praise him for his matchless power;
Him from whom all good proceeds
  Let heaven and earth adore.

And that is just the first stanza!

Davie also points to more recent poets who have taken a shot at making the Psalms sing for a new age. The British poet Gordon Jackson published his version of 150 in 1993:

Halleluja!
O praise God: in the holy chancel of his love
                     in the mighty nave of his creation.
O praise God: for all his intricate artefacts,
                     for all his grandeur of design.
O praise God: sound his name with brass,
                      pick it out on harpstrings.
O praise God: write in with dancing in the dust
                      sign it with flutenotes on wind.
O praise God: on cymbals wake the dead with it;
                      transmit it through all outer space;
every drawn breath speaks his honour.
Hallelujah!

I think what Davie shows us is interesting for several reasons.

For one thing, seeing the Psalms in different forms like this can help peel away some of the resistance contemporary people have against poetry as such. In our present cultural malaise, "artsy fartsy" forms of art like poetry (and art, and dance, and theater) are increasingly identified as an activity suitable only for certain effete, liberal, secular types--hence, the statement that x (fill in the blank, such as "museums") are so "gay." By connecting the Psalms with poetry in this conitinuous historical way, we can come to see that poetry is a form of language use that is blessed and can be a blessing. We can rescue poetry from being an elitist entertainment and make it central to our perception of the world.

For another thing, this all works in reverse: poetry can help us read the Bible better. By seeing that the Psalms are a form of poetry, we can read poetry with fresh vigor, and by gaining skill in negotiating this kind of language use, we can go back to the Bible and read it, well, in an invigorated way.

One final upshot of Davie's helpful book is that we can gain a sense of the continuity of the Western tradition. The Psalms generate their own vital tradition: in the early church as chant, in the Reformation church as hymn, in the modern world as poetry. We learn to take the long view, to see something of personal importance in a formative tradition. We don't master the Western tradition to show we are so smart, but because it is a resource for spiritual well being in the sense that we learn to place ourselves as one small part of an ongoing life that extends through generations, through centuries.

Another modern version of the poetic Bible

Nicholas Carr has become rather famous--or infamous--for his book The Shallows. A quick way into his argument in from his equally well known article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" from which the book was developed. In some ways, Carr is updating the argument that Neil Postman consistently made over the course of his career in such books as Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. Postman came back again and again to the idea that new technology causes "ecological" changes instead of additive ones. He meant that, for instance, the printing press didn't just add books to an already existing pre-print culture. Printing changed everything in a cascading way that resulted in new behaviors and ideas regarding religion, education, wealth, new knowedge vs. old, and so on. In the same way, television didn't just supplant radio; television fundamentally altered everything in modern culture, from dating, to ideas of masculinity, to pop music.

Carr argues that the internet, with its hyperlinks, embedded ads, pixelated screens, and so forth, retrains the way the brain thinks about things. People now have a harder time reading lengthy texts for extended amounts of time. Even hard core readers--such as Carr himself--now find it problematic to read more than twenty minutes without fidgeting and wanting to check e-mail or follow a link to another page without finishing an article. People are finding it more and more difficult to read lengthy texts (like a Tolstoy or Conrad novel) and to argue in assertion-evidence-conclusion format.

This is depressing stuff, but it seems unavoidably true. However, there is hope, at least for people like those involved in the Institute. The human brain is amazingly malleable, and even in this emotive, therapeutic, hyperlinked environment, people can still train themselves in the old way--the way of Western habits of thought rooted in disciplines like rhetoric and theology and music. It is not impossible to train up children as little Greco-Renaissance-Christian types, and neither is it impossible for adults, though it's harder.

So get out your Erasmus, and Aeschylus, and Calvin, and Faulkner, and get busy reshaping your brain for the Lord and for your neighbor's sake.

Reformation dudes with books

The recent movie On the Road  is a film version of the famous Jack Kerouac novel and it brings back to public attention the beatniks. The novel has been popular ever since it came out in 1957 (interestingly, he completed it in 1951, but couldn't get any publishers interested in taking it on since the story of hard drinking, hard living, and free loving was too much at first for mainstream publishers). But the novel was almost immediately commandeered by rebellious youths, and it has been used ever since as a kind of template for how to be cool by dropping out of middle class dullness. Many readers have embraced the beat mystique, from the time it was written through the 1960's counter-culture and from then on with every decade of hedonistic drug and alcohol-fueled scramble for "freedom." Today's Goths, for instance, (or are they already declasse?) mark out by their clothing, their music, and their attitude that they are way beyond dreary bourgeouise conventionality.

In spite of the in-you-face breaking of taboos and hedonistic romping in the novel, there is actually a serious angle to Kerouac that Christians do well to heed. The middle class can be dull. It can be conformist and oppressively anti-Christian even in the midst of Christianity in the way that it requires fealty to certain codes of behavior and certain idolatries instead of Christ. We need to drop out of it [Middle Class conformity] in some sense. In fact, it is a persistent religious insight across all religions that we need to drop out of the world in some sense. All religions and all religious perceptions (such as those of Plato) recognize that ordinary life is to some degree delusional.

Jack Kerouac

Keep in mind, too, that it was originally a conservative Republican soldier who told Americans to watch out for the military industrial complex (I like Ike!).

 Unfortunately, I think that most of those who read Kerouac's novel will take away from it only the parts that glamorize drunken sex without understanding that by the end of the work, all of the characters are burned out by their irresponsible flight from normality. Their rejection of the bland, secular world with its propaganda to buy your way to happiness is a correct instinct that is at bottom relgious, but rather than turning to religion--of whatever kind--to give shape to their longings, the various characters have nothing but their own needs to propel them, and so they fail in their quest for enlightenment. This is also a truth of the novel, one that will be ignored by this generation of readers and probably by subsequent ones.

Only by dropping out in the sense of giving one's self away to God is the true Christian beatnik road to somewhere.

Rembrandt's beatnik Jesus