Letter #119: Until We Have Faces
Relics and Rituals
Spong.
Reading your description of re-inventing the rite of morning prayer, I couldn’t help but think back to that time I invented prayer itself. You were probably wondering who it was who did that. But who else has lived long enough to make the claim?
It’s hard to describe to anyone who grew up in any sort of Christian tradition how entirely estranged from that tradition I was. When I was a boy, Jesus was a cultural joke to me when he was anything at all. Like many Jews who stray from their native religion, I found that the history of Christian antisemitism made it difficult for me to regard the church as anything but an enemy. I believe this is why so many fine secular Jewish thinkers cling to materialism long after it ceases to make sense. The hate of hate-filled “Christians” obscures the path forward.
For me, though, logic ultimately made it impossible to deny the existence of God. With no tradition to turn to then, I had to learn to pray from scratch. I described the experience in my conversion memoir The Great Good Thing.
“I experimented. I tried different kinds of prayers. Could I ask for stuff? I wondered. Did it have to be good stuff? Serious stuff? Moral stuff? Did I have to pray for world peace? Or could I put in a request to win the lottery?”
I finally settled into a sort of personal liturgy combined with open-ended conversation. There are ways in which it echoes the Book of Common Prayer, and ways in which it is wholly a thing of my own.
Which really is, as you suggest, the underlying message of relics and rituals. It is also the source of the tension between faith and works.
Which is this: there is only one God for all, but he is imaged anew in each. To love God with heart and soul and mind is to seek the single truth within. To love your neighbor as yourself is to see the multiplicity of its expression in others.
It's a difficult practice. You can’t unwrite the ten commandments, or change the border between good and evil to suit the oh-so-wondrous individuality of your personal ambitions and desires. But to cling to the law is to stone the adulteress, and will ultimately lead you to join some mob somewhere calling for some new crucifixion.
To remember that the saints had fingernails and faces — that Christ had a body — that even so simple a prayer as the Our Father means something different to every broken heart that prays it — is to draw your mind slowly out of the dead letter and into the living Word. To begin to know yourself truly is to begin to see the vast variety of creation. It is so very dark and beautiful. So much suffering and one great yearning. So much to pity and so much to love.
Excelsior.
Dad
I was raised secular Jewish and always regarded Christianity as the enemy. The cross was ugly to me and I would get chills when we drove past a church. All my best friends were Jewish and I was uneasy around my Christian friends.
In college I studied theoretical physics to learn the fundamental truth of physical reality, but I lost my mind. It didn’t connect with me or make me a better person. I thought, “Are we not made for truth?”
So I switched to studying spiritual truth via Peterson and then Jung. Years of thinking and reading went by and I finally read the gospels. And in Christ I found the fundamental truth of spiritual reality that did connect to me and united me to my fellow man.
I so enjoy these essays because they give me a chance to reflect on my faith and relationship to others. They call me to try to be a better husband, father, and neighbor. A few sentences always strike me in each essay. The first one here was “tension between faith and works”. This has long been a favorite passage of mine (I know, I have quite a few, but that is how it is with truth). I have reflected on faith and works. Neither one itself is sufficient, as James pointed out. I’m not sure they are in tension, except for those who believe one or the other will be sufficient. You might as well ask whether inhaling or exhaling was sufficient. You simply cannot have one without the other and have life within you. The Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations came to an understanding years ago and identified Grace as the central focus, not faith or works alone, but by grace do we have both and demonstrate both.
The second was the discussion of loving one’s neighbor. The present age has attempted to bring everything down to emotions. Love is an emotion, but it is also a theological virtue. An emotion is a feeling, and cannot be forced and is difficult to direct, although hatred seems to thrive on nurturing. However, virtue can be practiced and improved, when understood as desiring a good for another as if it were for your own good. When directed outward, focused on another, not directed inward, not on what I feel, but on what I can do for another, is the virtue of Love truly expressed. There’s that pesky “works” again. Why would I do such a thing if I did not have faith, however? I’m not that nice a guy that I go around randomly doing good things, but that it brings me closer to God. Would that I was.
Thank you Klavans Elder and Younger, and keep it flowing.