Journal

In their book “The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century,” authors Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, a husband and wife psychiatrist team, offer a thought provoking commentary on the increasing state of isolation experienced by a rapidly growing number of persons in this country.  Studies from evolutionary biology, social and neuro psychology are piling up and serving up the same story: we are far more social creatures than we realize; it is built into our brain’s circuitry (not to mention our reproductive biology).  The more one reads about and meditates on these realities of our nature the more one can conclude that the ultimate bliss for us as human persons is a state of profound, permanent communion with one another. We seek this level of communion regardless of our beliefs. For those adhering to a religion it is found in the liturgical celebration.  Others find it in the ecstasy of a U2 concert when everyone is singing in unison “We are One..not the same, but One.”  One.

If ultimate bliss is profound, permanent communion then hell is permanent exclusion.  Again in “The Lonely American,” the authors explore the childhood terror that every human person has experienced at some level: being left out by the group. But what we’re finding is that the fear of exclusion never really goes away, in fact it is behind and informs much of the extraordinary complexity of social interactions, especially in small groups.  A great deal of our brain’s neocortex is dedicated to the exceptionally complicated task of deciphering the myriad ways in which another person’s face is reacting to ours as we speak. (This critical function, incidentally, is thwarted when face to face interactions are supplanted by other means of communication) “Do you get me? Am I accepted by you? Are we understanding each other?”  Humans made it off the African plains because of our ability to unite together in small, tightly knit bands, so the reward for growing in social intelligence is survival and acceptance by the group while the cost of refusing to do so is, ultimately, death alone. The mere thought is deeply troubling.

There is a Gospel passage which talks about heaven as permanent communion and hell as permanent exclusion. It is Luke 13.22-35. “The door will be shut.”  The finality of those words bring either comfort, uncertainty or disbelief, depending on the person.  It is passages like this which seal the deal for many.  “I don’t believe in a God that would do that to others,” as though it is God’s choice instead of theirs. God’s choice is to let us know ahead of time.  Our choice is to accept, ignore, or construct a kinder, gentler version of God in our minds – one who will let us pursue whatever life we want on earth and then reward us for it at the end.  That would be quite a sweet deal if it weren’t pure fantasy.  I’m sure children would like that kind of deal from their parents.  (Isn’t it interesting that the deal we’d like from God is not one we view as healthy for our children?)  Or perhaps the over-used image of souls baking in the flames while being stuck with forks has become so comical as to suggest there isn’t even the possibility of something other than heaven. But if the promise of bliss through union is so sweetly compelling there has to exist an alternative, in fact our free will demands it.  Permanent communion or eternal dissolution.

The drama critic Terry Teachout recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal a piece entitled “Denying Shakespeare.” It talks about James Shapiro’s book “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” which discusses the obsession in some circles throughout history with the contestation of the authorship of the literary genius’s canon. Teachout writes: “It doesn’t surprise me that such lunacy has grown so popular in recent years. To deny that Shakespeare’s plays could have been written by a man of relatively humble background is, after all, to deny the very possibility of genius itself – a sentiment increasingly attractive in a democratic culture where few harsh realities are so unpalatable as that of human inequality. The mere existence of a Shakespeare is a mortal blow to the pride of those who prefer to suppose that everybody is just as good as everybody else.”

This idea of the dilution of inequality has parallels in contemporary Christian thought as well. After all, everyone knows that “God’s sun shines on the just and the unjust.” What is the point, then, of diligence? The problem lies in the confusion of reception and responsibility. The parable of the talents clears it up: all receive in differing amounts and all are responsible according to what was received (and, it should be noted for those who have an inclination to anxiety stemming from performance expectation, what is given is strictly according to the abilities of the receiver – we are not responsible for what we have not received. Remembering this, the mandate to not judge another becomes easier).

When Jesus invited the Samaritan woman to seek his “life giving water,” she responded enthusiastically – “Please give it!” He then invited her to return to the well with her husband, knowing that she had none currently and the man she was living with was not her husband. One of many messages here is this: deeper union with the divine, and ultimately eternal salvation, implies responsibility and repentance on our part. When the ten lepers who asked for healing in Luke 17 received it, they went off rejoicing. Only one returned to give praise to God – a foreigner. Jesus rewards the man with a spiritual healing of faith exceeding the physical miracle. There are temporal graces and eternal graces, and some of them presuppose action on our part.

We could stop here if we believed divine munificence lasted straight through death and into eternity. And stop we will if we have constructed an idea of god in our mind, contrasted with that given in revelation history (thus relieving mankind of the burden of the subjective ideas of billions of well meaning souls) . But for those who are interested in the external reality of what will face them after this prologue of life on earth, a continued reading is in order. The giver of the talents seeks a reckoning. Why do we Christians tend to skip over these less savory parts of revelation? Perhaps it is just too hard to reconcile our inner idea of an infinitely loving God with the God who said he would kick out of his banquet those who did not come prepared, that is, all those who came because they assumed the King rewarded all, regardless of personal behavior. On this point, if God is to be believed, some will be terribly, dreadfully, wrong.

We can look to revelation itself for an explanation of this mystery of why we expect all good to come to us now and after death, regardless of personal comportment. For one thing, we are commanded to take an entire day each week for the express purpose of remembering who we are, where we came from, and our ultimate destiny. (Deuteronomy 5.15) This precept to rest and recollect is essential to the Christian, who, like the Israelites being settled in the promised land, are continually warned by God that the customs and ideas of the indigenous people will rub off on them. Without frequent recollection we won’t have a chance to hear in our hearts God’s constant warning: “The pleasures, riches and worries of life drown out my word” (Luke 8.14) and “What I say to you I say to all – Stay awake!” (Mark 13)  In large part we have not stayed alert and we have let pleasures and temporal distractions displace our faith. We have transformed the fourth commandment into a mandate to seek amusements, pleasures and entertainment before returning once again to our workaday world. To be frank, we simply don’t like being told what to do. This hardness of heart extends back to our earliest ancestors in the faith.

Once we hear this word of warning, however, we are responsible for it. On the last day, it will be this word which rises up to condemn the one who heard but refused to act. (John 12.48) Some will get to stay at the banquet, others will be kicked out. Who those will be depends entirely upon our faith and obedience. (John 3.36)

Belief ranks high among the mysteries of what it means to be human. This is such a murky topic that we have to start with a definition, and the one which I will use is “Confidence and reliance without evidence or proof; acceptance based on testimony or authority.”

An atheist friend of mine once told me, “I would believe in God if he appeared right now, in front of me.”  He made this declaration as both a promise and a challenge to God.  God did not see fit to comply, so his unbelief persists.  I quietly laughed to myself.  A visual appearance is no guarantee of anything, as some of the disciples discovered for themselves when Christ rose from the dead and appeared to them.  Jesus accepted the difficulty of the matter, eating fish in their presence to show them he was not a ghost.  Another persisted in his unbelief: “I don’t believe my eyes, so I won’t believe until I touch his wounds with my own hands.”  Christ said, “come and touch them; don’t persist in your unbelief but believe.”  He touched them and declared “my God!”  Still others continued in their unbelief after all this.  Even when they witnessed Christ ascend into heaven some of the disciples “still doubted.”  Seeing, touching, hearing – a complete reliance upon the senses is certainly no guarantee of belief.

Of course we can disbelieve that any of those events even transpired at all.  But even atheists are faced with the challenge of disbelief on a regular basis.  Many atheists think of themselves as highly intelligent and enlightened, certainly much more enlightened than the silly fools who would accept the testimony of a group of folks from two thousand years ago.  Yet there is something about being human which makes it difficult to cast off the need for myth, ritual and belief.  Many atheists have their own religion – science, and the priests of their religion are scientists.  And so the revelation of science becomes their dogma.  Even so, I have encountered the mystery of unbelief here, too.  I have presented the results of scientific studies to them which conflict with their own thoughts of things.  “Well, I don’t believe that,” they have told me.  “Believe what?” I ask, “the scientists who conducted the research?  The data which they gathered?”  What exactly are you not “believing” when you disbelieve what your priests and your religion are serving up for you?  The result can only be a profoundly narcissistic retreat into the prison of one’s own mind, where one can only accept one’s own thoughts, which are generated not from external reality, or from the testimony and witness of others, but from a simple, fantastical wish of how one wants things to be.

If there were a God, you’d think he would be most interested in revealing himself to help save man from himself. For the believing Christian, two thousand years of a Judaic revelation history of covenants, prophets, judges and kings culminating in the fullness of time by the incarnation of God as a human person, followed by another two thousand years of salvation history expressed as testimony and authority, offer more than enough substance for an engaged, active belief. But it comes at the cost of a certain kind of violence against the lower nature of man which, for the astute, is itself a sign of authenticity.

“We are giving our testimony to what we have seen, heard and touched with our own hands – the Word of life, so that you may share our life.”  (1 John 1.1-2)

I’ve been wondering why I didn’t get as many this year as in the past.