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Jonathan Franzen and the Danger of Seeing Through Everything

Since my last post, I’ve still been reflecting on the nature of epiphany in contemporary literature, particularly in the novel Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Despite my reservations about the real possibility of actual epiphanies in novels like Franzen’s, I haven’t read a recent novel that better captured the world as it is right now. Franzen’s stated purpose as a writer is too write novels that are accessible to as many people as possible but that still grapple with big ideas (see his essay “Mr. Difficult” in How to Be Alone).

One way he accomplishes this is with a liquid and inviting prose style that shows you his literary world without drawing much attention to itself. His prose is transparent. But transparency characterizes more than his prose style—it also describes how he views the world. He wants to see to the heart of things, and as a very good novelist, his gift as a cultural observer is in making things transparent. Much of the novel occurs post 9/11, so thematically the novel grapples with rise and fall of the political topography resulting from that tragedy. But in his quest for  transparency, he has just as much venom for environmentally motivated liberalism as he does for war profiteering neo-cons. No one, it seems, is immune from his critical eye.

For example, Franzen uses the occasion of a Bright Eyes concert, an event he describes as being “almost religious in its collective seriousness,” to explore generational attitudes toward music. And with nothing more than a couple of lines he is able to conclude some fundamental things about my generation:  “They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming.” In a flash all my earnest allegiance to indie music was exposed for what it often is—a highly selective and somewhat pretentious kind of consumption. And the novel is full of these barbs. But the prose is so crisp and the characters so compelling, that you are willing to risk his unrelenting gaze.

The benefit, of course, of seeing through everything is that not much is lost on you, and Franzen has an amazing ability to skewer hypocrisy and to layer everything in irony. In reading the novel though, I couldn’t help but be reminded of C. S. Lewis’s observation that to see through everything is to ultimately see nothing:

The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles…If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

So after reading a book that saw through everything, and after thinking about epiphanies, I wanted to read a book that was undergirded with a sense of the divine. It is the divine that not only makes real epiphany possible, but that also ensures there is something more than total transparency. With that in mind, I decided to reread Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces, which retells the myth of Cupid and Psyche through the eyes if Psyche’s sister. It is a novel about encountering the divine, about epiphanies in the original sense of the word. And in reading it I realized the main character and narrator, Orual, is a lot like Franzen. She can often see through things and describe things as they are, but in the end, her willful blindness to see what is actually there leads to her undoing. Over the next few posts, I want to explore the nature of epiphany in Till We Have Faces.

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Water into Wine – The True Nature of Epiphanies

“I disapprove of epiphanies and their phony auras but I am besotted by them — can’t get enough of them in life or elsewhere. So sue me. Seriously though, as a person who was brought up with religious faith and then got out of it, I’m always looking for secular manifestations of the sacred.”  Charles Baxter

I wrote a paper on John 2 this past semester, and in his feedback my professor noted that the water into wine story is part of the lectionary reading for the feast of Epiphany. He thought this was an interesting connection between the story itself and the idea of epiphanies in literature.

Indeed it is an interesting connection. And I got to thinking about it and reading up on it, and it turns out the epiphany has fallen on hard times. The epiphany in it’s truest form comes from Greek Mythology. Gods and goddesses break into the human realm, and people are overcome with the presence of the divine. In the Bible the epiphany is more properly called a theophany or christophany. Think of the burning bush. Think of Jacob wrestling the angel. Think of the Mount of Transfiguration. Think of the Ascension. The Bible is so thick with epiphany that it is almost commonplace. Indeed, the Bible is an ever increasing cascade of epiphany culminating finally in the eternal epiphany of God dwelling with his people (Rev. 21:3). What is interesting is that n both the Greek and Christian understandings, the epiphany’s center of gravity is the divine. The human’s experience is one of revelation. It is not experience, in other words, that comes from within, but from without.

But epiphanies are very different in literature, and we have James Joyce to thank for that. He was the fist to self-consciously use epiphany as a literary term. For him the epiphany was, a “sudden and momentary showing forth or disclosure of one’s authentic inner self.” It was a way to describe a particular moment of clarity, usually towards the end of a story, that characters have about themselves and their lives. (To see a beautiful example of this read Joyce’s story “The Dead.”) Typically, if and when we say we’ve had an epiphany, we mean it in this way. With Joyce the moment of divine encounter became a moment of personal clarity. The center of gravity shifted from the divine to the self.

So why would a writer like Charles Baxter hate epiphanies and write an essay called “Against Epiphanies?”  I suspect that Baxter senses on some level that the epiphany as Joyce describes it is a sham. If there is the possibility of revelation or the divine, the epiphany seems inevitable. If there is a voice on the other side, we would, it seems, in moments of clarity, distress, comfort, euphoria, in those moments, that is to say, where we come to the edges of human experience, hear that voice or encounter the divine. But in a voiceless world, the epiphany first becomes a “secular manifestation of the sacred,” and eventually, disintegrates because in our world the self is so incoherent that any moment of inner clarity would only reveal a sliver of a fragmented whole. For us truly postmoderns there is no authentic inner self to be revealed.

Without a true sense of the divine and without a coherent self, the literary epiphany becomes, as Baxter says, “phony.” Life, he insists, isn’t like that, since if epiphanies happen at all, they happen rarely. And yet he still longs for them. His self-contradictory impulses reveal an appetite for transcendence, for the divine, for there to be a voice on the other side. But contemporary literature has no space for the divine, no category for the possibility of revelation.

Despite these tensions, you don’t have to look far in contemporary literature to find epiphanies. Take Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom.  This scene towards the end of the novel records the reunion of Patty and Walter Berglund, who had been estranged by adultery and betrayal:

Her eyes weren’t blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in the sum of everything they’d ever said or done, every pain they’d inflicted, every joy they’d shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.

Here is epiphany in the Joycean sense—a moment of clarity and closure. And perhaps even of forgiveness and reconciliation. But what does it amount to? Two estranged characters reconnect and in their connection see past themselves into what lies beyond them and what lies beyond them is nothing. This is an epiphany, yes, because the characters come to see some truth about the world but it is an epiphany without transcendence.  There is no voice, only void. And if in the end both joy and sorrow weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind, then what use is either?

So where does this all leave us? When I think of epiphanies in any sense it becomes clear to me that I ought to be wary of my own capacity for insight. I ought to be suspicious of my own sense of clarity. I am waiting for the world to act on me, to arrange itself in scrutable ways. Art is a path to such clarity, but as a Christian I sense that this is only true because there is a voice on the other side. To be an artist is to have an appetite for transcendence, and yet, in what seems to me to be the height of irony, many artists reveal that appetite in their longings for epiphany but refuse it’s true nature by denying what an epiphany really means—that the divine seeps into the world, that there are moments when we see behind the curtain and what we see is not the void, but something almost more horrifying (if we are really honest). We see the terror of God’s beauty, a beauty that exposes ugliness and strips pretense. And though we might walk away with our faces shining like Moses, we are first disintegrated like Isaiah.

Unless.

Unless that God comes to us in our form, and spends his days as a human gradually unfolding his glory, a kind of epiphany by degrees. Read the Gospel of John with that in mind—“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”  Each of his signs points to his glory, and for those with eyes to see he is the epiphany of epiphanies, the theophanies of theophanies. He is the first and final word who gives all other insights their meaning. He is our assurance that when the world becomes transparent to us, what we see on the other side is not void but the vast abundance.

 

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Homeless Dung Bread or Cooking from the Bible! Ezekiel 4

“And you, son of man, take a brick and lay it before you, and engrave on it a city, even Jerusalem. And put siegeworks against it, and build a siege wall against it, and cast it up a mound against it.” Ezekiel 4:1-2

Say you have just spent a night out in the city, enjoying downtown, perhaps taking in a show, at the very least dining somewhere, and after dinner you decide to walk the streets and take in some air before heading home. And suppose you turn the corner and pass an alley only to hear the grunt and rustle of a human body, and peering in the dark down the alley you see a man on his side, laying next to what appears to be a model of a city.

As you look closer you realize it isn’t just a model of a city, it’s a model of your city, skyline and all. And more than that this model is surrounded by tanks and artillery and soldiers—it’s a city under siege. Next to him is a small fire on which he cooks what appears to be a loaf of bread, and yet when you smell the fire’s flames, they carry the pang of manure.

Of all the things you might think of this, ranging from curiosity to pity to revulsion, perhaps the last thing you would think is that this man is a prophet of God who speaks the very words of the Lord. In fact, if you could have made out any of his mumblings, and you heard his supposed divine proclamations, then you would be instantly convinced that that he harbored delusions of grandeur and that he needed serious help.

And yet this scene—the model city, the man laying on his side, the food cooked on dung—is the scene of Ezekiel 4. God asked Ezekiel to do all of those things in order to enact the judgement that was about to befall Jerusalem.  And Ezekiel did them. So the only way that he isn’t completely insane is if God actually spoke to him. If there isn’t a voice on the other side, then Ezekiel was nothing more than insane, a seeming schizophrenic.

***

 

When I was in high school, my mom started buying something called Ezekiel Bread. It was the first health food that I ever remember eating and enjoying. And I still enjoy a toasted slice with bananas and honey. But what is interesting about the bread is that it is made from a recipe taken from Ezekiel 4. You can read the verse that contains the recipe right on the bag—“And you, take wheat and barely, beans and lentils, millet and emmer and put them in a single vessel and make your bread from them.” Bread of Life actually makes this bread using this exact recipe. Amazingly enough the bread is actually good, and more amazing than that is that the combination of ingredients forms a complete protein. It is a perfect health food. And you can still find it at Whole Foods today.

What the bag doesn’t tell you is that God first told Ezekiel to cook it over a fire of his own dung, but that after some bartering Ezekiel talked God down to a manure fire instead. I can assure you that the makers of Ezekiel Bread are not literalists when it comes to the bread’s cooking method.

But when I think of Ezekiel Bread as a commodity in light of the scene of the man in the alley, I feel a disconnect. I wonder is that what this text means? Are we supposed to walk a way from reading this disturbing scene with nothing more than a bread recipe? The reason I ask is because this question really gets down to what we believe the Bible is for. If all Ezekiel 4 is good for is a bread recipe, then the text is both manageable and practical. It’s healthy! It’s a complete protein! Isn’t God good? And this plays in to the dominate impulse that we have about living and applying Scripture, namely that it must be practical. That we must seek out the timeless principles of a text and live them.

Now the longing for practicality can be a noble impulse, but it can also be a kind of pragmatic fetish and a veil for taming those Scriptures that confront and offend our sensibilities.

Don’t get me wrong.  Seeking principles from Scripture can be a way of honoring the text. After all aren’t we meant to be doers of God’s Word and not just hearers? But what is there to do in this text? What are the principles in Ezekiel 4? Are we called to build replicas of our cities, lay on ours sides, and enact God’s judgement? Moreover, if we are going to go ahead and bake the bread, why not cook it on dung like Ezekiel did? But people who do things like that either live on the streets, in an institution, or are starting cults. Surely, God can’t mean that. So we bake the bread  the way we want to and then say thanks for the protein, as if that is all this chapter or this book has to tell us.

Here’s the truth. If this text has a principle at all, then that principle horrifies us, and that principle is this—because God is our maker and our redeemer, there is no limit to what he can demand of us. If there really is a voice on the other side, that if God actually speaks (and speaks still to us through his Word) then what he asks we must not refuse, even if it appears insane. When we read the Scriptures with only practicalities and application in mind, then we can often go hunting for recipes, when God is trying to confront and overwhelm us with the reality of his character and might, with the actuality of his grace and judgement, with the centrality of his voice. 

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How High School English Helps You Read the Bible

“As I was among the exiles by the Chebar canal, the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.” Ezekiel 1:1

“Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being 

“A metaphor is not merely an ornament; it has communicative power that transcends literal language.” McCartney and Clayton, Let the Reader Understand

Though you may not have consciously thought about metaphors since high school English class, and even then perhaps only reluctantly, you live with metaphors every day. Take love. Love catches us so off-guard and throws us so off-kilter that we describe it as falling. Or take time. Time is not money, and yet how many are slaves to both watch and wallet because they believe it is?

And this makes metaphors dangerous because metaphors are often stealth. They sneak in and imprint themselves like a thumb on the cortex, changing the way we think. How many lives have been destroyed because people operate with the metaphorical understanding that sex is power or that people are animals? Conversely, and beautifully, how many lives have been enriched by the thought that life is a story?  Donald Miller, in A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, uses this metaphor to powerfully shape and ultimately change his life. Read the book. Without the animating metaphor of life as story there would have been no movement forward.

Movement is actually one of the best ways to think of metaphors. Metaphors are a way of moving our thoughts and language from one place to another. Standing on the edge of a lake, I might be able to describe the other shore. But I need a boat to take me to that shore. In the world of language, metaphors are the boats that move us from one shore to another. With literal language, I can look over the edge of a cliff, but with a metaphor I can repel down its face. Literal language is a still shot of a cityscape. Metaphor is a sweeping crane shot through the streets.

All of this is a way of answering the question—how do you describe a vision of God? How do you describe the one who dwells in everlasting light? How do you give form to the invisible one? The simple answer is metaphor. You trace the face of the ineffable with metaphor and simile, and all the other tools of poets. It is no accident the prophets of Israel are also the poets of Israel. Without a poet’s sensibility of sensory language, without a poet’s feel for the metaphorical, what the prophets wrote could not communicate the beauty, depth, and power of what they saw.

This is not to say that the metaphors  contain God or grasp him. They are still at best approximation; they are just the best we have. We must stretch language as far as it can go in our effort to honor God, but we must also fall down in worship before him, knowing that no language can fully contain him. Ezekiel may have been an exile on the shores of the Chebar, but without metaphor and poetry he would have been language’s exile because he would have had no words, however feeble, however approximate, to describe his experience. And without metaphor we too can become language’s exile.

Ezekiel is so overcome that he uses the word “like” eighteen times to try capture the vision. What he sees is so overwhelming, so other, that he can only pile up approximations. He must use metaphor. The sights are “like the appearance of lighting” and “shining like awe-inspiring crystal.” The sounds are “like the sound of many waters” and “like the sound of an army.” Here we see the metaphorical in all its glory, because here metaphor becomes an act of worship. Let us be as Ezekiel. Let us be overcome–“Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking” (Ezek. 1:28).

Read through Ezekiel 1-3 with all this in mind. Read it like you might read a poem. Don’t try to understand every detail or explain the imagery. Instead let the utter strangeness and beauty wash over you. Be as Ezekiel-slack-jawed and stunned that God would appear. Be overcome.

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Why you should be eating your Bible

“And whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house) they will know that a prophet has been among them…be not rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you…When I looked, behold, a hand was stretched out to me, and behold, a scroll of a book was in it. And he spread it before me. And it had writing on the front and on the back, and there was written on it words of lamentation and mourning and woe…And he said to me, ‘Son of Adam, feed your belly with this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.’ Then I ate it, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.”  from Ezekiel chapters 2 and 3

Ezekiel is a very difficult book. Its images are strange. Its pronouncements are harsh. And more than that, its world is foreign. We are not, after all, post-exilic Jews living in Babylon. In light of all these obstacles, the ESV study notes advises readers to “give themselves to the sheer strangeness of what is presented.” This is actually really good advice, and I think it’s what Ezekiel did himself. He sees incredible visions, so he pulls at the very hem of language trying to describe what he sees. He hears God speak, so he enacts living parables, becoming himself a sign to the people. He gives himself to the strangeness.

Before all of that, Ezekiel does something that is even more striking—he eats the very words of God. This is how things begin for Ezekiel. He is in Babylon with the rest of the exiles, and God shows up, in all his glory and strangeness. And in the midst of an overwhelming vision, of God wrapped in light carried by seemingly mythical beasts on a chariot with spinning wheel within wheels, Ezekiel falls to his face. In the same way that the vision stretches language to its limits, Ezekiel is taken to the edge of himself. He is so overwhelmed and weakened that as the Son of Adam that he is,  he must be reanimated by the Spirit of God (Ezek. 2:1-2).

But then something else happens that is almost more incredible. To nourish and refresh him, God spreads before him a scroll and commands him to eat it. God commands Ezekiel to eat the word of God. The scroll is spread before him like a feast, and Ezekiel takes and eats, and what he tastes, though its contents were lamentations and woe, is as sweet as honey.

There is something in Ezekiel’s experience that helps us approach the book ourselves. We like Ezekiel must feast on the words of God. It has all the complexity and depth of a five course meal prepared by the most meticulous and subtle of chefs. And the implication is clear. If we will not savor, then we will not taste. This is not a meal to be scarfed. It is meant to be savored. This is not merely functional food meant to fuel the body so that you can get you through the day. It is food as art, food as culture, food as community. Bu we, it seems,  don’t want such a feast. Ezekiel, like foreign cuisine, turns the stomach, and like so many Americans in Paris, we crave McDonald’s over the city’s richest fare. We want all that is pungent and earthy in the Bible processed and made palatable.

And our problems with Ezekiel are indicative of our unspoken problems with all the Scriptures. We really don’t want metaphor and mystery. We really don’t want narrative and poetry. We would prefer the Bible to say what it means.  We want the Bible to explain things precisely with the concern and care of a technical manual, complete with attendant diagrams. Don’t believe me? Flip through your favorite study bible and you are likely to find outlines, charts, diagrams, maps, all of them means of, if I can say it this way, digesting your food for you. I am not against such helps (I did, after all, just quote the study Bible of the hour). They are often wonderful. But they can also whitewash the Bible’s inherent strangeness. And more than they can obscure the flavor and taste God intended, a flavor and taste we can only get if we are willing to feast.

Will you take the scroll, will you taste, and savor?

Over the next few weeks, I plan to blog through Ezekiel in an attempt to feast on it and give myself to its strangeness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Some Reflections on Preaching

I took a class on preaching this semester and was asked to write a one page summary of the course. I thought I’d share it here too.

“Any notion that the preacher is less than an ambassador of the kingdom of God reduces the pulpit from prophetic urgency to timid homilies on marginal matters.” Merrill R. Abbey, quoted in Preaching Christ from the Old Testament by Sidney Greidanus

In reflecting on Gospel Communication, I think first of the the image of John Stott preparing sermons on his knees. His Bible is open before him and his head is bowed. Why? Because he is not simply studying abstract truth that he means to relate in a lecture. Rather he is encountering the living God and asking the same for the people he will preach to. This has been the semester’s primary theme for me–though the Gospel itself  is central, the centrality of the Gospel must first be evident in the life of the preacher. If I want to faithfully proclaim the Gospel, I must faithfully live the Gospel.

So the living of the Gospel and the preaching of the Gospel are interconnected, and sermons themselves must reflect this reality. This is because “accuracy is not the ultimate goal of preaching…It is encounter with the King so that the rule of Christ extends over the lives of the hearers.” And an encounter with Christ through preaching can only come when there is clarity, compassion, and conviction. Clarity so that the hearers might see Christ. Compassion so that the hearers might feel the love of Christ. And conviction so that the hearers might leave to live for Christ.

And clarity, compassion, and conviction are intimately tied to character. If encounter with Christ is the true goal of preaching, then as a preacher I must be encountering Christ.  If I preach a Christ I do not believe in and love, then those who hear me will not encounter a Christ to believe in and love. If character is central, then my union with Christ is central, not simply for the effectiveness of my preaching, but for the sake of my own soul. So I walk away with this question–does my proclamation of Christ vibrate with the clarity, compassion, and conviction that come from preparing in his presence and feasting as a son at the table of his word?

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Digital Altars

Jer. 11:12-13

“Then the cities of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem will go and cry to the gods  to whom they make offerings, but they cannot save them in the time of their trouble. For your gods have become as many as your cities, O Judah, and as many as the streets of Jerusalem are the altars you have set up to shame, altars to make offerings to Baal.”

Much that has survived from the ancient world is a testament to man’s ability to build in the name of worship.  Go to almost any museum of history or antiquity and you will see a whole parade of gods.  Gods etched on walls and carved in stone, gods delicately painted onto clay, gods written into and illuminated in manuscripts. And when we see these gods, seemingly fragile and crude, tamed behind tinted glass or standing limb-less on sanitized blocks, surrounded by explanatory text, it is easy to wonder how they stirred anyone to worship and devotion.  Though they may be beautiful and a testament to man’s creative capacity, the lesson of history is that idols always seem silly in retrospect.

Reading the prophets is a lot like that museum tour.  Much of their work was to pull Israel and Judah out of the now and help them view their idolatry in retrospect.  Jeremiah, for example, cries out, “Every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols, for his images are false and there is no  breath in them (Jer. 10:14).   This is also the work of the prophets for us–to pull us out of our now so that we might see our idols as trinkets that will make museum goers of the future laugh at our reckless and misguided devotion.

But we don’t believe this.  Tracing the whole parade of gods through human history it is easy to believe that we have advanced, that  trinkets and gods no longer captivate us, that in the modern world we have moved past superstition. But this is not so. Though we might not call it worship, there is plenty that captivates our devotion and demands our attention.  This only begs the question–who are the gods in our culture?  On what altars do we spill the libations of our time and money?

We need not look much further than our homes for the answer.  In ancient homes the altar was the center of gravity.  The whole of domestic life orbited around and bent toward their household gods and altars.  Think of the distress of Laban when he finds that his bevy of household gods have gone missing with Jacob’s departure (Gen. 31:25-30).   So where is the center of gravity in our homes?  For many it is the glow of various screens.  We bend our lives toward our televisions, our monitors, our phones, our tablets.  Like icons in the Orthodox tradition, we often think of those flickering screens as  windows to a vaster and greater world.  We act as if they are portals to the transcendent.  Though we won’t leave stone altars behind, we will leave digital altars, trails of code that lead the archaeologists and historians of the future directly to the heart of our devotion.  The internet as we now know it will become a digital dig site.  What will they make of our fascination with social networks?  What will they make with the deluge of porn?  How will they explain the inordinate amount of attention payed towards individuals were simply famous for being famous?

The irony of blogging these reflections doesn’t escape me.  I am as prone as anyone to the pull of the flicker.  In fact as I write this entry, I’m using an app called Freedom that blocks my internet access for a block of time so that I can concentrate.  That I need such an app is telling.  And so is the fact that it is called Freedom.  In the face of the possibility of unbroken access it is unplugging for a stretch of time that now feels like freedom.  We live in the information age.  It is a fact, and it has the potential for both curse and blessing.  How can live so that these tools stay as tools and do not become idols?   I am still working out the answer to that question myself.

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Reflections on Turning 30

“I know, O Lord, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps.” Jer. 10:23

“Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.” Prov. 19:21

Maybe it was because of the New Year or maybe it was because of my rapidly approaching 30th birthday, but I decided to spend the month of January studying the book of Proverbs. I’ve always loved Proverbs, not only for it’s pithy practicality, but for it’s ground-level honesty. And I’ve lived enough life now to cross paths with every shade of fool, every sniveling scoffer,  every infantile sluggard to know that the book of Proverbs has the human race pegged. I’ve also lived enough life to have seen the fool, the scoffer, and sluggard rear their heads in my own heart. Because of this, I’ve learned that I need wisdom.  For that reason, I can I honestly say that it is the thing I most frequently ask God for in prayer.

As I was reading Proverbs this time, one thing I found myself thinking about was the idea of wisdom’s location.  Where can wisdom be found?  The answer of course is in God himself, which is simple enough, but in saying that we are actually saying something rather profound.  When Proverbs repeatedly tells us that wisdom is costly and more to be desired than gold or silver, the thing we need to get is that wisdom is rare.  But we need to get more than that.  This description also tells us wisdom’s location–namely that it is outside of ourselves.  Gold and silver are in gold and silver mines that must be explored and mined.  In other words, I am not a gold or silver mine.

That wisdom is not inherently inside of me is a fascinating reversal of most popular wisdom.  Many shelves groan under the weight of books that all say something to the contrary–the path to wisdom is within.   Another way to say it is with this gem of bumper sticker wisdom–Listen to your heart.  And I’ve got to tell you, I’ve spent some time listening to my heart, and it sounds a lot like a petulant child, a veritable Veruca Salt stomping and screaming for a golden goose.  My heart is a snotty, whiny, demanding, insatiable lump of pure appetite.  It’s  a two-faced trickster and master of sleight of hand, bent on talking me into all manner of nonsense and depravity.  And I’m not the only one.  If your heart had it’s uninhibited, unrestrained way for even 24 hours, you’d probably end up in a ditch or a jail cell. That is to say that I leave my 20’s less convinced of my own goodness, and more convinced of God’s.  And if that is that case, then if there is such a thing as wisdom, it certainly can’t originate inside of me.

Jeremiah put it like this–the way of man is not in himself.  We will never discern our paths by looking within.  We are not the source of wisdom.  I spent more than a small part of my 20’s, that precarious decade, shaking myself like some sort of 8-ball hoping that something useful might float to the top. The best I ever got was pseudo-truth and haze, like Dr. Phil, if Dr. Phil were high.  As I move into my 30’s, I realize that if I can get this insight, that the source of wisdom, and more than that, my identity is located outside of me, then I will understand at least two important things.  First, I will understand that I will always be prone to idolatry because I will always be looking to something to name me and to give my allegiance to.  Second, I must continually turn to God as the source of wisdom, as the one who directs my path because I’ll realize that I haven’t got a chance otherwise.

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Jeremiah: Cartoon Prophet or Stunning Realist?

“For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” Jeremiah 2:13

Sometimes I read the prophets and it feels like a morality play, a kind of after school special in ancient garb.  The prophet’s voices are a little too booming, the teeming masses are a little too evil, and the morality is a little too mathematical to seem at all real. But because I really do believe its God’s word, I often have to remind myself that these stories are never just historical curiosities  that I can abstract myself from.  As far as God is concerned, the history of Israel is the history of the world. The Old Testament is a record not simply of what Israel did, but of what we do. If you would know the way your heart bends, peruse the Old Testament.

And a passage like this helps me remember that the prophets have us moderns squarely in their sights. To forsake water is to forsake life. And to forsake water in the desert is a special kind of folly. Living in Dallas I see people broker there sorts of lopsided deals all the the time. I see people gnaw on discarded bones, as if they were fat and rich food, when the feast is spread before them.  I see people pluck out tunes on warped instruments, calling them songs, while symphonies rise and fall in their hearing.  Everyone here has whiffed the musk of American abundance and become a coordinate on the suburban grid.

This is all to say that I have stopped wondering if it is true, and moved on to wondering why it is true. Have people imagined God to be something he is not, imagined him not as good and true, but as too good to be true?  Do they see him as a snake-oil huckster whose potions do no heal, a back-alley dealer whose watches never wind, a flushed faced,  TV-racketeer whose goods never arrive? Maybe so. In the case of Israel, the promise of living water, that is, an actual moving stream, would be so rare as to seem like magic.

But I think it’s the second half of the passage that points the way.  To store water in containers that cannot hold it has a willful, snot-nosed arrogance to it. It’s not that people have shot the moon on God and come up short.  It’s that people would rather wave the tattered flag of their own independence, then come on bended knee to the embassy of God.

So if that’s true, then maybe my aversion to the prophets is not their cartoonishness at all.  Maybe I just don’t want to meet my own gaze in the mirror of their words.  In that case, I am the one in the alley who refuses shelter simply because I did not build it. And when it comes down to it, it seems that most of our unwillingness to read the Bible at all revolves around this truth. It is not simply that the Bible is hard to read; it is that the Bible’s truth is often hard to hear.  But where else can those who thirst come and find true drink, or those who hunger come and find true food?

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Wounds and Glories

When art comes to terms with both the wounds of the world and the promise of resurrection and learns how to express and respond to both at once, we will be on the way to a fresh vision, a fresh mission. N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

Lately I’ve been reading Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, a book length transcript of a 4-day interview with David Foster Wallace. Wallace was considered by many to be the most brilliant writer of his generation. Sadly, in 2008 he succumbed to crippling depression and hung himself.  In light of his suicide, the book bears a poignant sadness, as throughout the interview Wallace talks extensively about the weight of fame and the seduction of hype, and about his own struggles with depression.  In reading Wallace’s account of writing and fame, I thought of Wright’s quote about art and wounds and resurrection.

Wallace knows wounds.  For him the point of books, “was to combat loneliness,” and the best books create a “kind of stomach magic” because they “talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings.”  That tingle, that stomach magic, is exactly what I’m after as a reader, and what I long to do with words.  But more than that, in reading this interview, I realized that as a reader I too often settle for books that are long on diagnosis and short on cure.  A writer like Wallace is a perfect example of this tendency in me.  He sees things more clearly and says things more brilliantly and with more humor than anybody I’ve read in a long time. He gets brokenness.  He gets that the world often doesn’t make sense.  He gets that somehow art is way to rail against all that. But even though he gets wounds, he doesn’t get hope.

I realized too that my problem with Christian art has been just the opposite because most Christian art is dishonest about the wounds of the world.  Often there is a kind of willful ignorance about brokenness. If there are wounds, it seems, then they exist out there, in the undefined regions of the world. The world–John’s poignant word for all that is broken–has become a lazy catchall for all that we chose to ignore and refuse to engage with. Wounds are something out there, not something we harbor and nurses in ourselves.  Christian art often hides its limp and hopes that its outstretched, pointed fingers at the world will draw the eye away from our own hobbles.

Though this is the opposite impulse, it actually ends the same.  In a world without wounds, there is no need for hope and you end up with platitudes scrawled in golden, gaudy fonts on landscape portraits of pastel, gazeboed gardens in neighborhoods where no burglars lurk and no drugs are dealt and no families disintegrate.  Art that only sees wounds can’t see hope, and art that denies the wounds has no need for it.

In all of this I realized, if I want to write, or if I want to make anything that might truly be called art then I must not simply be acquainted with the wounds of the world–I must became a cartographer of my own wounds. I must map their terrain and navigate their crevices to trace their fissures and fault lines. The gangrenous stench of their festering must sting my nostrils.  I must learn the cadence of my own limping.  But I must also hear the voice that echoes off the walls of the empty tomb–He is not here.  He is risen.  It is only in Christ where both the sorrow and the joy of the world perfectly meet.  It is the wounded one who purchases for us a woundless world where all the sad things become untrue.