Letter #129: Burning Man

About Falling off a Building While on Fire

Spencercino

First of all, I want you to know that, if you’re going to be getting into arguments with the Pope, I’ll be standing right behind you. I’ll be saying things like, “I don’t know this kid, Mr. Pontifex sir. We have similar-sounding names, but we’re totally unrelated.” But I’ll be right behind you when I’m saying them. That will make it easier for me to run away when things get tough.

Really, though, there’s a way in which our theological differences are urgently important, and another way in which they don’t matter at all.

Recently, I had a conversation with our friends over at RAPT. We were discussing favorite restaurant experiences, and I mentioned how much I enjoy gathering with friends over steak and whiskey and cigars to discuss, among other things, religion. You have been at many of those dinners and, indeed, our private conversations along these lines are what inspired this exchange of letters.

I love these discussions and I often feel the Holy Spirit attending them and overseeing them, as I do during our conversations here. But for me, there’s always an underlying purpose to them.

That is, I want to know how best to live. How to become the image of God within me. How my life can express the idea God had when he fashioned me in my mother’s womb. I do not believe the final exam will resemble a catechism — either of the Roman church or any other. Rather I think it will be a simple question of whether I have shaped my soul so that it knows the next step on the road home.

To return to an old example, I have often argued the question of Mary’s perpetual virginity. And there’s one level on which I think this is very important, and another on which I don’t care at all. The underlying question to me is about the meaning of the female body and the proper way for both women and men to approach it. This, not the facts of the matter, is the true source of the disagreement. This is the reason it raises such passion when it’s discussed.

Likewise — and to the present point — the gospel revelation that we are living in what you rightly call the “howling darkness of sin’s dominion,” is important because realism is essential to a good life. But equally important is the command to rejoice because it means a life spent moaning and groaning and picking at the scabs of your peccadilloes till they bleed is a life misused.

I want to know the truth about the unseen spirit world for the same reason I want to know the truth about unseen forces like gravity and heat. Sure, I’m interested in talking about the bend in space-time and the way hot fuel and oxygen make flame. But mostly I don’t want to set myself on fire and fall off a building while I’m trying to get where I need to go.

Dad