Letter #63: Commandments and Strategies

A Church Key

Splendor,

Count me in. “Revitalizing something eternal… new idioms… hear Jesus speaking as if he really were alive right here, right now…” That would be my middle name if I had more room on my business card.

Because, after all, the issue is never really outward forms. It’s always the life within. “Those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature,” to quote Lewis again.

When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, it wasn’t sex that made them suddenly ashamed of their nakedness, it was their corrupted inner experience of sex.

“In the state of innocence nothing of this kind would have happened that was not regulated by reason,” said Aquinas. “Not because delight of sense was less, as some say (rather indeed would sensible delight have been the greater in proportion to the greater purity of nature and the greater sensibility of the body), but because the force of concupiscence would not have so inordinately thrown itself into such pleasure.”

Likewise, when God rejected the offering of Cain, it wasn’t because God liked meat better than vegetables (although, let’s face it, who doesn’t?). It was all about Cain's inner state. “By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did,” writes Paul.

People often ask me if I think video games are art. And often I’ve replied, yes, they can be. But that’s a careless response. Even the games that rise to the level of art are only art if you experience them as art. Play them mindlessly and they are mindless.

That’s true of anything. You can read even Shakespeare with an empty mind, listen even to Bach with a dead ear, look even on the Pieta with a blind heart. You can deal with human beings that way, too. We are called upon to love one another not because love is nice, but because love is the only way you can truly experience anyone.

Which returns me to religion. Back in letter #55, I said, “churches and rituals and doctrines and even scripture itself are only worthwhile if they are vessels that carry Christ. And they can only carry him if we look for him there.”

So many of the New Testament epistles we read as commandments are actually strategies to make that possible. In first Peter, he says Christians should obey earthly authorities. Why? Sometimes to be a good Christian, you have to tell earthly authorities to pound sand. Yes, but Peter thought “by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people.” He didn’t want the message to be obscured by the rowdy behavior of the messengers.

I'm a great believer in traditions and rituals, especially when they are handed down to us from the earliest believers. But they are mechanisms, instruments, meant to serve the things they carry within them.

So are we.

Yer loving,

Pops