A Poem for Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday is a strange day in the church calendar. There is really no Scripture that applies; the Gospels are silent on this day. It was a day of rest, a day of fasting, a day of remembrance. And so it should be. Christian tradition says that Jesus descended into hell on this day, when Christ victorious emptied hell of those who had been waiting salvation. Whatever you believe about this day, it is one that must be approached soberly. We are not yet at the triumphalism of Easter. The image most indelible for me on this day is that of the tomb. The real, rock structure that housed the murdered God. Today's poem is George Herbert's "Sepulchre." 

O Blessed bodie!  Whither art thou thrown?
No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone?
So many hearts on earth, and yet not one
                                                Receive thee?

Sure there is room within our hearts good store;
For they can lodge transgressions by the score:
Thousands of toyes dwell there, yet out of doore
                                                They leave thee.

But that which shews them large, shews them unfit.
What ever sinne did this pure rock commit,
Which holds thee now?  Who hath indited it
                                                Of murder?

Where our hard hearts have took up stones to braine thee,
And missing this, most falsly did arraigne thee;
Onely these stones in quiet entertain thee,
                                                And order.

And as of old the Law by heav’nly art
Was writ in stone; so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart 
                                                To hold thee.

Yet do we still persist as we began,
And so should perish, but that nothing can, 
Though it be cold, hard, foul, from loving man
                                                Withhold thee.

Again, I will keep the commentary brief and mostly trust the poem to speak for itself. The poem I have chosen for tomorrow's Easter post is similar to this in its focus on the hard physicality of the event. Herbert is astonished here at the ease with which we discarded Christ, throwing him into a "cold hard stone." Our hearts are, too, like the stone that entombed our murdered Lord. The miraculous fact, though, is that in the same way the cold hard stone in which Christ was laid and which was rolled across the entrance to his tomb proved incapable of preventing his triumph over death, so our own hard hearts are capable of softening. Not because we are good, but because nothing can withhold the love of Christ from turning the heart of stone into a heart of flesh. 

As we sit in the darkness and the waiting of this day, let's not miss this fact. The tomb was real, the rock was heavy and immovable, yet it rolled away at the merest whisper of the being who spoke it into existence. It recognized his voice. May we hear his voice as well. May the heavy and immovable rock covering our hearts be moved aside at a glance.

A Poem for Good Friday

In order to honor Easter weekend, I though it would be good to have a poem each day for Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Today's poem is John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward." I offer it with (blessedly) little commentary.

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, 

The intelligence that moves, devotion is, 

And as the other Spheares, by being growne 

Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne, 

And being by others hurried every day, 

Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey: 

Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit 

For their first mover, and are whirld by it. 

Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West 

This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East. 

There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, 

And by that setting endlesse day beget; 

But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall, 

Sinne had eternally benighted all. 

Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see 

That spectacle of too much weight for mee. 

Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; 

What a death were it then to see God dye? 

It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke, 

It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. 

Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, 

And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes? 

Could I behold that endlesse height which is 

Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, 

Humbled below us? or that blood which is 

The seat of all our Soules, if not of his, 

Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne 

By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne? 

If on these things I durst not looke, durst I 

Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye, 

Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus 

Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us? 

Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye, 

They'are present yet unto my memory, 

For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee, 

O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree; 

I turne my backe to thee, but to receive 

Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. 

O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, 

Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, 

Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, 

That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face. 

The conceit at the poem's beginning (and Donne was all about poetic conceits) is that he is like a heavenly body that is out of sync with the motion it should follow, being instead "subject to foreign motions." So, too, Donne, whose thoughts are focused to the east (presumably Jerusalem and the site of the crucifixion) is riding west and away from the place his motions ought to take him. He then moves into a paradox of the place of the sun's rising being linked to Christ's rising and falling and the now "endless day" that we get to live through on the other side of the cross. 

One of my problems with Donne as a poet is that he often feels cold to me. It is all very well and good, immensely talented poetically speaking, but his poetry often feels less like an expression of deep sentiment and more like a guy good at faking it and being awesome. The initial conceit and the paradox of the rising and falling fit into that for me. The poem shifts once Donne moves beyond this and begins reflecting on what it must have been to see God die. The two best lines in the poem, per my preference, are "Who sees God's face, that is self life, must die; / What a death were it then to see God die?". There is no relief for the eye in beholding this scene of death and therefore the poet looks away. The rest of the poem focuses on this averted gaze. 

Donne's characteristic strong language returns in the final ten lines as the poet demands God's overwhelming intervention in order that he can turn back and view Christ. Donne turns his back to "receive corrections," to be whipped. He wants to be worthy of God's chastisement, to be burned of his dross, to have his deformed image restored to its intended perfection, and be able to turn and face his Savior. Donne is utterly aware that this is all a matter of grace. It is grace, after all, to receive discipline from the Lord (Hebrews 12:4-12). 

It is a beautiful poem that finds its heart as it goes on. I couldn't help but thinking of the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ as I read it this year. The desire to look away. Part of this impulse is obviously due to the fact that the act of crucifixion is revolting and horrific to behold. But part of the impulse stems from the fact of our complicity in this act. We look away because our own impurity is exposed. And since to look on and believe in the Savior as he is lifted up is to be saved, so by grace we need to be cleansed in order to turn back our ashamed eyes and gaze upon our Savior.

Have a blessed Good Friday.

Resume vs Eulogy Virtues

We are redesigning some of the curriculum for our junior level English class at my school. One component that we are going to add next year is an independent reading book that the students will work through mostly outside of class time and then write about and present to the class on. As such, I have been working through some popular-level nonfiction choices that I thought might be enriching for the students. One such book is David Brooks's The Road to Character. Brooks is the right-leaning pundit who writes a bi-weekly column for The New York Times. I have benefited a lot from his work as an editorialist over the years, but this is the first time I have actually read one of his books.

The premise of this book is that there is a notable dearth of character in contemporary America. We are selfish, morally lazy, and egotistical. Part of the reason for this is the distinction between what can be called the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues. Our culture accommodates the resume virtues--the things that stand out while we apply for jobs--while it has seemingly little time (or notion of what to say, I would argue) about the deeper eulogy virtues. Brooks is not arguing that we should cast aside resume virtues entirely and withdraw from the world, but that we need to put these two competing poles of virtue back in tension with one another. The goal of the book, then, is to emphasize people throughout history who have excelled in the eulogy virtues to act as a counterweight to our near constant glorification of the resume set. 

Brooks's introduction fleshes out what the distinction between these two ideas of virtue looks like: in large part it seems to boil down to humility. One statistic is worth noting here. In 1950, responding to a Gallup poll that asked high school seniors "if they considered themselves to be a very important person," 12 percent of the survey population responded in the affirmative. In 2005, that number was 80 percent. This lack of humility manifests itself in the utter narcissism of our culture. Brooks notes that out individual greatness is hammered home into young people through every medium available: television, movies, teachers, parents, broader cultural authorities. 

Brooks argues that this turn toward narcissism has prevented us from cultivating the eulogy virtues that our culture so desperately lacks. It prevents this cultivation by convincing us that there is really nothing wrong with us in the first place that requires cultivation to fix. In order to put ourselves on the path of eulogy virtue development, we need to willingly engage in moral struggle and often harsh self-reflection. Brooks quotes the British writer Henry Carlie on the subject: "If we acknowledge that our inclination to sin is part of our natures, and that we will never wholly eradicate it, there is at least something for us to do in our lives that will not in the end seem just futile and absurd." There is a definite paradox lurking in that comment. Our futile and absurd battle over ineradicable sin prevents our lives from being futile and absurd. 

Resume virtues can be accomplished; eulogy virtues cannot be accomplished in the same way. We can grow in humility, self-sacrifice, love, obedience, etc. but our grasp of such things is always tenuous, always subject to change and deterioration if we slacken our pursuit. Resume virtues are easier, in a very real sense. Eulogy virtues demand our whole self. I think it is fairly evident at this point which path conforms most to the Christian faith. As an educator, it is my prayer that I train students to desire, pursue, and fix their eyes upon the resume virtues. In our credentialing culture, we need people who cultivate the inner self. 

Literary Humility

One of the harder things about trying to be a writer is that so often it seems like I am shouting into a void. Who actually reads this thing? This site is starting to get quite a bit of traffic, but for all I know it's a bunch of Russian hackers. Or, even think of something like the recent publication of Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option. The book seems like it's making quite the stir--and for a religious nonfiction book, I think it is--but I imagine I could walk into the bar down the street from my house and no one inside would have heard of the book, the author, or the controversy swirling around it. Even a work that is in the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list is barely going to make a splash outside of the small niche of people interested in such things. Which is kind of bleak, especially for someone like me who will likely never be read much outside of a loving circle of friends and family.

But, worry not, modern writers. This problem is fairly old. I'm reading The Scarlet Letter which I haven't read since I was a junior in high school (which, let's be honest, likely means that I've never read it). The opening chapter, I guess you'd call it, is autobiographical, focusing on a period in Hawthorne's life when he worked as the chief officer at a customs house in Salem, Massachusetts. He had achieved some degree of literary merit before his employment there, mostly riding the coattails of the transcendentalists from what I can tell, but no one in his sphere of influence at the Customs House knew the first thing about his literary career or gave one fig about it if they did know.

Hawthorne took this as an encouragement to humility, which it definitely is. He writes:

It is a good lesson--though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieve, and all he aims at.

As dour as that can seem, I think it is a good warning to writers to not overestimate our influence. This doesn't mean that writers should stop writing, or that the work is ultimately meaningless. Hawthorne has been dead for a century and a half and he's still outselling most contemporary novelists, after all. But it is proper to recognize that for the vast majority of people the act of writing is superfluous to a meaningful engagement with the world. In the invocation to Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton prays that his work would "fit audience find, though few." This is the prayer, I think, for every writer. That we find the audience that is ready and open to what we have to say. The humility that inheres in the recognition that such a group is likely small is good for one who sets pen to paper or fingers to keys.

I am by no means a Stoic when it comes to life, but I do appreciate their insights on many things. Epictetus once wrote that "to live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals, that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him." Equanimity is a valuable goal for all people, but maybe especially important for the one who, in the words of the philosopher, lives in the presence of great truths and eternal laws. 

Such a rarefied experience of life can easily lead to pomposity, but if we remember that very few people actually give a crap about what we're doing we can be brought back to a level of humility that might actually make us useful both to the people who don't give a crap about us and the very small number that do.

Benedict Option 3: Should Christians Opt Out of Public Education?

The chapter in The Benedict Option on education ("Education as Christian Formation") is certain to elicit negative reaction. Indeed, at times it almost seems calibrated to do so. Dreher is here inclined to make absolutizing statements that alienate an audience. 

Here is one: "Because public education in America is neither rightly ordered, nor religiously informed, nor able to form an imagination devoted to Western civilization, it is time for all Christians to pull their children out of the public school system." Apparently you can take your nuance and shove it. And I say this is as one who does not necessarily disagree with Dreher on this point. We, personally, have chosen to opt out of the very good public school system in our neighborhood in favor of home education. I think that most public schools in our country are a flaming pile of garbage. However, I do not think we are at the place where all Christians everywhere need to abandon the system. Indeed, given that 40% of public school teachers are Christian and that your tax money is being funneled into these institutions whether you like it or not, such a wholesale abandonment does not seem to be in the spirit of charity or integrity. Also, I don't know that the notion that the public school system is somehow unredeemable is proven. Dreher is unfortunately data-deficient in this chapter. Such a total claim requires more than anecdote for justification.

But maybe such an absolutist claim is required to drive an audience to think. Here are some questions I am asking: 

• What are the teleological values of the public school system and do they conform to the faith I am trying to form within my children? And, maybe as importantly, do we even know?
• What is the nature of the influence of peers and the social values of the school on children? How do you measure such a thing? Formation is a long-term game; not something as simple as whether or not they are smoking behind the gym.
• Can you count on the few hours you get with them in the evening to act as an antidote to the secularizing impulse of public education? 
• Are they actually learning anything in that building worthwhile or is this more functionally a daycare facility than a place of education? This is a big question.
• Are kids really cut out to be mini-evangelists in the walls of their schools?

These are all questions we ought to ask. They are questions I struggle to answer in the public school system as it currently stands. So, I am going to lay out what I think on the issue with some Dreher sprinkled in.

In an earlier post on the book I noted that Dreher feels strongly that strict media avoidance is a two-pronged need: one, for content; the other for the dependence it provokes. I think the same principle applies to education. It is not merely the content of the public educational system that I object to (though I do object in large measure to the sequencing--kids love facts and memorization, but we run away from this--and basic utilitarianism of the whole endeavor--gotta compete with China! STEM, STEM, STEM), but the sort of dependence on government institutions and the farming out of education to the caprice of the government that is implicit in the system.

Still, I think this decision ought to be left to the judgment of discerning parents. And we ought to be free to disagree, and maybe we should try to do that with charity. Parents don't enroll their kids in Christian schools because they don't care about the lost; parents don't enroll their kids in public schools because they don't care about the spiritual formation of their children.

But I will say something in response to one of the critiques of Christian schools and homeschooling that I have heard in the past that Dreher addresses here: Some critics of home/private schooling say that it is necessary for Christian students to be embedded within these schools to act as salt and light. Here is Dreher's response:

As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in hopes that she'll save another drowning child.

Your mileage may vary on the chosen metaphor, but I think his point is basically this: the system is so inimical to our values as believers we can hardly expect our kids to do more than simply survive the onslaught they face within that system. To expect them to subsequently act as church bait is naive. Especially given the poor job the church in general does at equipping young believers and training them in the faith. There are ways of having the same endgame of outreach, putting your children in sports or arts programs, that allow the level of meaningful interaction with peers and help you get to know other parents that don't involve giving your children over to the government for 40 hours per week.

In a following post on the same chapter I will address the issues confronting Christian schools.

Benedict Option, 2B: The Domestic Monastery & The Monastery Effect

My last post on what Dreher calls the Domestic Monastery of the home got me thinking about the Neil Postman book The Disappearance of Childhood that I read last fall. I actually emailed Dreher a passage from that book that he posted to his blog. It's buried deep in that post if you're interested. But I thought I would dust off Postman a bit to interact with Dreher here.

Dreher's central metaphor for the family is that we ought to function within our homes like little monasteries, with fathers as abbots and mothers as abbesses. The goal is to create a rule of life for our families similar to what exists within the walls of a monastery. I really like that metaphor as a way of thinking about passing down meaning and truth to my children. 

Postman's concerns are not as religiously motivated as Dreher's own, but the result of each man's diagnosis of culture is remarkably similar. Postman's concern is that the ideal of childhood, created by the inception of mass literacy, is being steadily and perhaps irreversibly denuded by our technopoly. In his concluding chapter, Postman floats a hypothetical question: Is the individual able to resist the techification of all things. His response is beautifully articulated and very Benedict-y.

The answer to this, in my opinion, is "No." But, as with all resistance, there is a price to pay. Specifically, resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion against American culture. For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value. It is also at least ninety percent un-American to remain in close proximity to one's extended family so that children can experience, daily, the meaning of kinship and the value of deference and responsibility to elders. Similarly, to insist that one's children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend. Even further, to ensure that one's children work hard at becoming literate is extraordinarily time-consuming and even expensive. But most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media's access to one's children. There are, in fact, two ways to do this. The first is to limit the amount of exposure children have to media. The second is to monitor carefully what they are exposed to, and to provide them with a continuously running critique of the themes and values of the media's content. Both are very difficult to do and require a level of attention that most parents are not prepared to give to child-rearing.  

Nonetheless, there are parents who are committed to doing all of these things, who are in effect defying the directives of their culture. Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood but are, at the same time, creating a sort of intellectual elite. Certainly in the short run the children who grow up in such homes will, as adults, be much favored by business, the professions, and the media themselves. What can we say of the long run? Only this: Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition. It is not conceivable that our culture will forget that it needs children. But it is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood. Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.

I concluded my post last fall by saying the following in response (sorry to quote myself; that seems weird): 

This is the solution Postman denied in the introduction he would give. And the solution must begin at the individual level, expand to communities of faith who unite together to maintain and reclaim what is humane in our tradition, and only then can it ever expand to enact mass change. All other paths of resistance are Luddites smashing the machines. That will not work as long as the majority love the machines. We have to restore a vision of the world that makes the machines superfluous. That will be extremely difficult. But if we value not only our children but childhood itself we will put our hand to the plow. 

This, I take it, is the goal of the Benedict Option. Not to fully extricate ourselves from modernity, but to resist its dehumanizing impulses for the good of modernity. To help people see beyond the immediate and the pleasurable and find joy. To drink from the well that quenches our thirst eternally. It is a large and monumental task. But the evangelization of the world has always been the mission of the church. And I don't think it was ever meant to be easy.

Benedict Option, 2: A Domestic Monastery

Chapter 6 of Dreher's book is called "The Idea of a Christian Village." Here Dreher mostly looks beyond the walls of the church to the type of Christian community necessary to foster the type of spiritual formation we long both for our lives and the lives of our children. 

He begins in an interesting, and perhaps counterintuitive, place: the family. One of the faults of conservative evangelicalism, at least as I've seen it, is the often insular view of the family we are tempted to hold. I've known parents who won't let their kids play a sport because they are concerned about allowing any other influencer into their children's lives. And while a myopic view of formation as family alone is wrong, it is undeniable that the family is of monumental importance for shaping the life of everyone in what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons." Therefore, it is an ultimately appropriate place to begin the chapter. Our greater life in the broader Christian community will emanate out from the life we live in our homes.

Here is how the section of the chapter on family, "Turn Your Home into a Domestic Monastery," begins: 

Just as the monastery's life is oriented toward God, so must the family home be. Every Christian family likes to think they put God first, but this is not always how we live. (I plead guilty.) If we are the abbot and abbess of our domestic monastery, we will see to it that our family's life is structured in such a way as to make the mission of knowing and serving God clear to all its members.

The negation at the beginning is important. Most Christian families would say that "God comes first in this family," but when this claim is weighed in the scales it is often found wanting. We just need to acknowledge this. Such a claim is not something confirmed verbally but something borne out in our practices in the world and within our home. Are we bearing this out in the way we orient our home life? 

But the affirmation is even more important: we are the abbots and abbesses of our houses. This is an ultimately positive view of what goes on within the home. In this role it is incumbent upon us to structure the lives of our families in a way that makes our familial mission clear. This instantly reminded me of Martin Luther's famous "priesthood of all believers" claim. As parents we are not merely passive vehicles in the formation of our children, but clergymen and women within our homes. How differently such a vision would shape our lives together. The practical applications abound. I will end with the one given by Dreher.  

Dreher's concluding paragraph for this short section keeps the metaphor of the home-as-monastery intact. He advises: 

A monastery keeps outside its walls people and things that are inimical to its purpose, which is to form its members in Christ. For families, this means strictly limiting media, especially television and online media, both to keep unsuitable content out and to prevent dependence on electronic media. (emphasis mine)

I love the double edge of Dreher's reasoning: we don't limit media consumption simply because there is unsuitable content involved. This as a sole standard lets parents off the hook. And I often hear modest content used as justification. "Well, they're not watching Game of Thrones so it's fine. This show is about pirates, and stuff. It's a cartoon, chill out. Daddy needs some me-time." However, according to Dreher we don't merely limit for considerations of content; we also limit our media consumption because we want to prevent dependence on electronic media. This is every bit as important to the actual content of what we watch or allow our children to watch.

Sometimes I feel like I bash on media and technology too often. I know my students get tired of hearing it from me. But then I think about how deeply addictive and worldview shaping my average student's consumption of media is and I just stop caring. The media we consume shapes us. The media we implicitly or explicitly endorse within our homes shapes our children. That's the content angle. But the way we lean on media to provide a break or quiet the kids down for a few minutes shows our dependence on a very capricious god. Which might in the end be an even bigger problem. Every time we lazy out and hand over the iPad or let Netflix cycle through episodes while we do our own thing we are willfully abdicating our influence over our children. We are training them to go to the glowing screen for relief and joy. We are selling out the job we've been given for 22 minutes of free time (that, using myself as a case study, most of us squander). 

If we want our homes to be different, we need to conceive of our task in a different way.