Signs and Metaphors II

     A lot of people my age take health issues more seriously than the bigger moral, political and religious issues. The prospect of mortality will do that. When I or someone I love gets a serious diagnosis, I typically go into survival mode and try to soldier on regardless -- but that's followed sooner or later by cold fear and deep anxiety, and it takes a lot to shift out of those places. What helps? In my experience, three things help: information, time, and perspective. The more information I have, the more powerful I feel, especially if the knowledge comes with options. As to time, even bad news loses some of its punch as time passes. Perspective? Viewpoint can be everything sometimes; the day before my 82 year-old Irish grandmother died, my mother told her to hurry up and get well, "so we can take a trip to Paris." Not missing a beat, my grandmother replied, "Sure, and I can buy a bikini!" Her wit and attitude seriously helped us cope with our grief and sadness.

     Does faith help? I think so. Experience suggests to many of us that bad things pass. Good may come out of bad. And, sadness diminishes (even if only bit by bit). Is there good reason for our faith and hope that losses aren't the last word? In the late 1990's and early 2000's, I taught a class at Fordham entitled, "Faith and Critical Reason." I used to tell each new group of students that my personal governing asumption for the course was, "faith is not non-sense." Together we read Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Nietszche and Bertrand Russell and The Humanist Manifesto -- that latter document a powerful and creditable path of belief although it unecessarily caricatured "the supernatural" in an effort to promote a vigorous appreciation of the natural world. In the course, I didn't grade for opinions, but for intellectual honesty and courage in tackling the Big Questions. Tackling the conversation at all without caricaturing people of different views seems a rare commodity in this age of instant messaging and debate by sound bite. And I wanted the students to consider giving theism as much weight as atheism and agnosticism as intellectual choices.

     A college course is a bit of a hot house environment, rareified in atmosphere and tone, not quite like the booming, buzzy stuff of everyday life. I think we can get closer to our daily experience to look at faith and belief as viable options. Here's one of my favorite stories:

          An exhausted father is awakened in the wee hours of the morning by his crying and frantic 5 year-old son coming out of a kiddie nightmare."Everything's going to be all right," the father says soothingly as he hugs the distraught child and rubs his back gently. After a few minutes, the father, desperate to return to bed, says, "OK, now, son... time to go back to sleep. I'm going to tuck you in, turn out the light, and go back to bed." The boy immediately bursts back into tears and says, "No! No! Don't shut off the light -- I'm afraid of the dark! I don't want to be alone!" Near the end of his patience and definitely on his last nerve, the father pulls out one of the Big Guns of parental rhetoric: "You're not alone son... God is with you." The little boy looks up at his father and says, "Where's God? I don't see God!" Praying for patience and hoping against hope, the father says. "Of course you can't see God, son... He's invisible." The boy looks skeptically up at his Dad and says, "I want a God with skin on!"

     To be continued.

Signs and Metaphors I

     It's been a very strange winter, oddly mild and lacking the snow and ice whose bite I seem to feel more acutely the older I get. I don't know about you, but even the mild version of the winter we've enjoyed can still get me yearning for warm beaches and warm water to swim in. My version of heaven includes water I can walk into without shivering!
    
     The days are getting longer, even warmer, without doubt. But there are still enough gray, cold days and nights left that feel oppressive in the anticipation -- and that get me to muse on the sadder or more difficult sides of life. The dean of my theological graduate school once remarked that climates like the northeast were the most conducive to theological thinking. He thought that because we were located in California, our thinking might be watered down because we had it too easy! His point was sort of made that Christmas when I stepped outside my Berkeley apartment to toss a Frisbee. When you're that comfortable, John Calvin or Soren Kierkegaard lack some of their characteristic heaviness. If cloudy, cool days helped produce more than a few solid spiritual thinkers, perhaps these same days have some gifts for us, especially in the areas of meaning and symbol.

     The gardeners and landscapers among us know that this is a season of hidden energy and of expectant waiting. Several months ago, trees and shrubs pushed forward buds that "wintered over," and in the coming spring those buds will become the blossoms and fruit of the high season. Bulbs in the ground need the long, cold and dark "burial" of winter time to become the tulips, daffodils, gladioli and irises we love so much. And the seeds released by so many plants last summer "died" in the soil they landed in to resurrect later this year as the children and grandchildren of those original plants.

     In the Gospel of John, the writer portrays Jesus using a similar metaphor about himself and the death he volunteers to undergo:
        
         "... unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains
         only a single grain; but if it dies, it yields a rich harvest... " (John 12:24)

Written several decades after the events the gospel describes, these words form part of a tradition of important sayings attributed to Jesus. But they are also meant to comfort and inspire the generation of listeners who first heard them -- that community of believers then facing likely persecution by the Roman authorities and denunciation to those authorities by religious adversaries. Roman arrests, trials, and executions were purposely very brutal and very public as a means of controlling conquered peoples and the general citizenry. The metaphor of the seed of grain that dies to bring forth greater yield would have helped those early Christians cope with what must have been hardly bearable. "The blood of martyrs is the seed of faith," the saying went.

     As helpful as that metaphor may have been, I imagine it would still have been terrifying to those early Christians to face possible arrest, torture and execution as religious outlaws. Bringing it to our time, how do we make sense of the horrors done to others throughout the world or that we could see ourselves facing? How do we deal generally with the wounds to psyche and spirit that life inflicts?  How can we rebound from the worst life can throw at us?

     We'll start to try to answer those questions in the next entry. Peace.