Hat tip to Genevieve Austin.
I tried to pick out my favorite line from this video for a caption, but there were too many good choices. I had the distinct honor of rooming with this poet for three years.
The commentators excoriating today’s students for studying the wrong subjects are pursuing certainty where none exists. Like the health fanatics convinced that every case of cancer must be caused by smoking or a bad diet, they want to believe that good people, people like them, will always have good jobs and that today’s unemployed college grads are suffering because they were self-indulgent or stupid. But plenty of organic chemists can testify that the mere fact that you pursued a technical career that was practical two or three decades ago doesn’t mean you have job security today.
I was lucky to graduate from high school in the late 1970s, when the best research said that going to college was an economically losing proposition. You would be better off just getting a job out of high school — or so it appeared at the time. Such studies are always backward-looking.
I thus entered college to pursue learning for its own sake. As an English major determined not to be a lawyer, I also made sure I graduated with not one but two practical trades — neither learned in the college classroom. At the depths of the previous worst recession since the Great Depression, I had no problem getting a job as a rookie journalist and, as an emergency backup, I knew I could always fall back on my excellent typing skills. Three decades later, nobody needs typists, and journalists are almost as obsolete.
The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyze texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn’t that I didn’t learn Fortran, but that I didn’t study Dante.
“All pastoral ministry has gone the way of youth ministry.” I don’t think so.
They knew a lot, those savants from the East,
And much of it was wrong.
In hindsight we can see that very clearly.
And we too know a lot, and much of it
Must likewise in its turn prove wrong.
So what to do?
Our finite knowledge cuts two ways:
Can hold us frozen in suspicion
Or give one clue sufficient for the venture.
The easterners were wise because they took their chance
And won.
Robert W. Jenson
At 9 o’clock tonight propose a toast in memory of JRR Tolkien born 3 January 1892.
Guido Reni, Saint Joseph and the Christ Child
Perhaps the most memorable of the moments Mumford describes is the story of the monastery and the clock. In Benedictine monasteries of medieval Europe, spiritual and working life was divided into precise units of time, the canonical hours, as a way to magnify the strength of the monks’ religious devotion. This regimen gave rise to a need for devices that could measure time: hence the development of the first simple, reliable clocks. The monasteries, in Mumford’s view, “helped give human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for the clock is not merely a means of keep track of hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men.”
Ah, so big a question! That is the whole question of theology, you see! I should say, I hope that during your studies you have visited yourself earnestly with the message of the Old Testament and of the New Testament. And not only of this message but also of the Object and the Subject of this message. And I would ask you, are you trained to visit not only yourself now, but a congregation with what you have learned out of the Bible and of church history and dogmatics and so on? Having to say something, having to say that thing. And then the other question: are you willing now to deal with humanity as it is? Humanity in this twentieth century with all its passions, sufferings, errors, and so on? Do you like them, these people? Not only the good Christians, but do you like people as they are? People in their weakness? Do you like them, do you love them? And are you willing to tell them the message that God is not against them, but for them? That’s the one real thing in pastoral service and that is the question for you. If you go into ministry to do that work, pray earnestly. You’ll do difficult work but beautiful work.
But if I had to begin anew for myself as a young pastor, I would tell myself every morning, well, here I am; a very poor creature, but by God’s grace I have heard something. I will need forgiveness of my sins everyday. And I will pray, God, that you will give me the light, this light shining in the Bible and this light shining into the world in which humanity is living today. And then do my duty.
Karl Barth, answering a student who asked him, “What one thing, sir, would you tell a young pastor today if you were asked, is necessary in this day and age to pastor a church?
Saint Peter: Next!
Man [defiant]: Christopher Hitchens.
Saint Peter [a half-beat late]: Personal account?
Hitchens: Do you know who I am? Of course you do, it’s one of the drawbacks of omniscience. And this place… It’s obvious where this is. I haven’t seen taste this bad on such a scale since I last liberated one of Saddam’s palaces. No, no, let me finish. I suppose I should have known you’d turn out to be one of those drivelling relativists who thought that war was a bad idea. But answer this: has even one of the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve passed through your gate since I was so thunderingly right about Iraq blamed me at all? They probably just snivelled about Satan. The pathetic prisoners of religion.
Saint Peter: So you still don’t think you might have been wrong about God?
Hitchens: Oh, don’t think you can catch me with that old chestnut. Just shows how religion poisons everything. Let me tell you: death is certain, replacing both the siren song of paradise and the dread of hell.
Saint Peter: So you aren’t in the least bit surprised to find yourself here…
Hitchens: Here? [repeats with rising, scornful incredulity] Here? This… continent of spacious heaven, adorned with plant, fruit, flower ambrosial, gems and gold… This kind of divine North Korea? Come off it. Where are the ashtrays? I’m off somewhere I can get a drink. [exits]
in today’s Guardian …
So we got on well with each other, because each of us knew where the other one stood. Eugene Genovese, before he became a believer, once commented on the tendency that some have to try to garner respect by giving away portions, big or small, of what they profess to believe. “If other religions offer equally valid ways to salvation and if Christianity itself may be understood solely as a code of morals and ethics, then we may as well all become Buddhists or, better, atheists. I intend no offense, but it takes one to know one. And when I read much Protestant theology and religious history today, I have the warm feeling that I am in the company of fellow unbelievers” (The Southern Front, pp. 9–10). Ironically, the branch of the faith most interested in getting the “cultured despisers” to pay us some respect is really not that effective, and this is a strategy that can frequently be found on the pointed end of its own petard. Respectability depends on not caring too much about respectability. Unbelievers can smell accommodation, and when someone like Christopher meets someone who actually believes all the articles in the Creed, including that part about Jesus coming back from the dead, it delights him. Here is someone actually willing to defend what is being attacked. Militant atheists are often exasperated with opponents whose strategy appears to be “surrender slowly.”
G. K. Chesterton once pointed to the salutary effect that the great agnostics had on him — that effect being that of “arousing doubts deeper than their own.” Christopher was an heir of the Enlightenment tradition, and would have felt right at home in the 18th-century salons of Paris. He wanted to carry on the grand tradition of doubting what had been inherited from Christendom, and to take great delight in doubting it. This worked well, or appeared to, for a time. But skepticism is a universal solvent, and once applied, it does not stop just because Christendom is gone. “I think, therefore I am. I think.” We pulled out the stopper of faith, and the bathwater of reason appeared undisturbed for a time. But modernism slowly receded and now postmodernism is circling the drain. Our intelligentsia needs to figure out how to do more than sit in an empty tub and reminisce about the days when Voltaire knew how to keep the water hot.
I hope you’ll read it all at Christianity Today.
Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it.
I don’t have much of this myself, so I recognise it (and envy it) in others. I have a memory which I cannot place precisely in time, of the two of us scrambling on a high rooftop, the sort of crazy escapade that boys of our generation still went on, where we should not have been. A moment came when, unable to climb back over the steep slates, the only way down was to jump over a high gap on to a narrow ledge. I couldn’t do it. He used his own courage (the real thing can always communicate itself to others) to show me, and persuade me, that I could. I’d add here that he was for a while an enthusiastic rock climber, something I could never do, and something which people who have come to know him recently would not be likely to guess.
He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him. Like me, he was small for his age during his entire childhood and I have another memory of him, white-faced, slight and thin as we all were in those more austere times, furious, standing up to some bully or other in the playground of a school we attended at the same time.
This explains plenty. I offer it because the word ‘courage’ is often misused today. People sometimes tell me that I have been ‘courageous’ to say something moderately controversial in a public place. Not a bit of it. This is not courage. Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to. My brother possessed this virtue to the very end, and if I often disagreed with the purposes for which he used it, I never doubted the quality or ceased to admire it. I’ve mentioned here before C.S. Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I’d most wish to remember.
Christopher Hitchens is dead. I’ll miss his fiercely vital voice. As for his book *God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything*, I wish he’d mounted a more formidable argument. I’ll say this for *God Is Not Great*: I’m sympathetic with its title (if not its subtitle). Philosophically speaking, it’s not illuminating to say God is great. My son will tell you, accurately, that my Cook’s Illustrated recipe beer-battered chicken fingers are great. The superlative, saying God is the greatest, is an even lower-watt bulb. It makes a category error, making God a specimen among other specimens. What is useful, it turns out, is the comparative. To say God is greater allows that whoever it is we’re talking about when we talk about God — saying “God” doesn’t willy-nilly establish an identity the way that “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” establishes one — may be in another category altogether, a category different from the one I am in with Chris Hitchens.
Twitter
Facebook
Subscribe via RSS
Follow me on Tumblr
View mobile version
Show a random post