Dear Grumpy Person,
There was an odd and revealing little jump between my final letter last week and the two letters of yours that followed. I was talking about how faith had strangely darkened my worldview yet brightened my life. I ended by describing a relief on the tympanum of a cathedral: the Virgin crowned in heaven. My point was that Christianity proposes a living, fluid font of relational meaning toward which we move with humility and without judgment.
You answered by railing against the ugliness of the online world. It seems you’ve developed some sort of cantankerous prejudice against pornography, Nazism, cruelty and stupidity. Get with the times, lad!
But more seriously, my first reaction was, wait, did I miss something? How did we get from Mary enthroned to discussing some bonehead spewing noxious garbage at his two million equally boneheaded followers?
Actually, though, the link is clear. The internet—maybe all technology—throws us up against the question: where does meaning originate?
For instance. A materialist might say that evolutionary necessity leads men to value a chaste woman. She can guarantee the paternity of her child, and so make it worthy of a father’s protection. Technologies like birth control, paternity tests, abortion, and a welfare state eliminate that necessity. They free women to become promiscuous without consequence. If such women are utterly miserable, the problem is that their new freedom is bumping up against outmoded evolutionary patterns. All can be made well with the latest antidepressants.
But if her chastity represents a moral pattern separate from ourselves—a relational pattern exemplified by the enthronement of Mary—the situation is different. We all then have a responsibility to represent portions of that moral reality to one another. A father must incarnate the justice of God, a mother his mercy and so on. The meaning is above nature, supernatural. It takes its form from human contingency, but not its content.
So with the internet—or indeed, as Plato points out in the Phaedrus, with the technology of the written word—which separates communication from the living communicator. Do the rules of politeness, kindness and logic still apply? Or does the greatest number of likes win?
Sigmund Freud looked upon the pagan gods and saw emanations of the human condition. The myth of Psyche’s secret love for Eros was the working of the mind made visible in story. C. S. Lewis, in Till We Have Faces, turned that tale around to say that the workings of the mind were themselves a story that told of something more than human.
As you say, God knew the day would come when we would separate ourselves from our necessities. He promised he would write his law on our minds and hearts so we might live morally but free of constraint.
How then do we prepare the page for him to write upon? That’s the goal of the discipline you’re talking about.
Love,
Also Grumpy, Not to Mention Dopey and Sleepy
Yes - discipline - I love that word. Whenever I listen to the sermon in church, there is always what I call the "feet to the fire" moment. I know a passage is telling my to do something I know is right, but is diffucult to do, and God is trying to mold me into a better person. I am always drawn to stories of struggle and triumph - of course the Resurrection being the greatest story of all. My favorite passage of the bible is Hebrews 12:1-2 - "Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith."
I love the direction of this. That we can actively participate in God's will for us, even if that is something like, "stop wiggling - you're going to feel a small pinch." This is one of the best parts of prayer, aligning us correctly... but I wonder what else we could do to best position for a God that loves us and wants us to do well?