Resistance by Theater

Pope John Paul II died over a decade ago.  In his lifetime, he has been widely credited with helping to resist the Soviet regime’s attempt to undermine Polish Christian culture, which was the pope’s homeland.  George Weigel writes in his biography of Pope John Paul II – who went by the name Karol Wojtyla before becoming pope – that the young Christian had earlier resisted the Nazi’s attempt to undermine Polish Christian culture.  Although he would later resist as pope, at this earlier time, he resisted as a playwright:

“Karol and his literary friends were determined that the German attempt to stamp out Polish culture would not deter them.  In fact, the deliberate effort to decapitate Poland seemed to charge these young actors and authors with an even more intense sense of purpose.  In October 1939, a few weeks after returning from his trek to Poland’s eastern borderlands, Karol and his Jagielonian classmates, Juliusz Kydrynski and Tadeusz Kwiatkowski, joined by Danuta Michalowska, a high school student passionate about the theater, met at the Kydrynskis’ home to recite classic Polish texts, each taking different parts.  Two months later, Karol wrote his first play, David, which has been lost.  A letter to Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk described it as a “dramatic poem, or drama, partly biblical, partly rooted in Polish history…” (Witness to Hope 62)

He also joined a theater troupe:

“Another aspect of Karol’s intensified dramatic activity involved the famous Polish actor and director Juliusz Osterwa, whom the Nazis had forbidden to practice his craft.  Like Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, Osterwa thought of theater as a vocation as well as a career.  During the Second Polish Republic he had founded a theater company, Reduta, to bring the classics of the Polish stage to a mass audience.  The members of the company lived as a community, in an almost monastic style, and were deeply committed to the ideals expressed in nineteenth-century Polish Romantic literature.  Meeting Osterwa through Juliusz Kydrynski, Wojtyla soon found himself involved in various of the older actor’s projects, including fresh translations of the world’s dramatic masterpieces into contemporary Polish.” (63)

This theater came to be called the Rhapsodic Theater.  Weigel sums up the meaning of this time in Wojtyla’s life:

“The word of truth, publicly, indeed almost liturgically, proclaimed was the antidote the Rhapsodic Theater sought to apply to the violent lies of the Occupation.  The tools for fighting evil included speaking truth to power.  That was what Kotlarczyk and his Rhapsodic Theater believed, and lived.  That belief and that experience made an indelible impression on Karol Wojtyla, who would not forget when, on a different kind of stage, he would confront another totalitarian power in the future.” (66)

More:

“Some have suggested that, confronted by the horror of Nazi-occupied Poland, Karol Wojtyla retreated into a religious quietism.  In the light of the evidence, it is clear that he had a decision to make.  Some young Poles chose armed resistance or clandestine sabotage.  The evidence makes clear that Karol Wojtyla deliberately chose the power of resistance through culture, through the power of the word, in the conviction that the “word” (and in Christian terms, the Word) is that on which the world turns.  Those who question the choice he made are also questioning that judgment about the power of the Word and words.” (66)

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once made the mysterious remark that although politics wouldn’t, “beauty would save the world.”  It sounds as though the young Karol Wojtyla and future Pope John Paul II would have had some thoughts about that.

Leisure

Philosopher Josef Pieper describes leisure:

“…Leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit.  The inner joyfulness of the person who is celebrating belongs to the very core of what we mean by leisure…Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself (whereas idleness is rooted in the denial of this harmony), but also that he is in agreement with the world and its meaning.  Leisure lives on affirmation.  It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet.  It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.  In Holderlin’s poetic fragment, die Musse are found the following three verses: “I stand in a peaceful meadow / as a beloved Elm tree, and as vines and bunches of grapes, / the sweet play of life coils around me.”  And as it is written in the Scriptures, God saw, when “he rested from all the works that He had made” that everything was good, very good (Genesis 1:31), just so the leisure of man includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation.” (Leisure the Basis of Culture 33)

As Pieper describes it, true leisure is not idleness, nor is it quietness, and yet it does resemble a kind of stillness.  This is something we struggle to grasp.  Perhaps a good place to begin is with where Pieper says that leisure is only possible not only when “man is in harmony with himself” but when “he is in agreement with the world and its meaning.”  We might ask, “what does the world mean?”  What does it mean that there is a world?  What is the significance of food, water, trees, people, dirt, sky?  What communication do these things give about themselves?  Then we might be able to answer what it means to live in agreement with such a world as this.

Stars and Soil

Why is the date of Easter different every year?

Philip Pfatteicher points out that the answer lies in the stars and in the soil.  First, the stars:

“Passover was originally a spring new moon festival, its date determined by the vernal equinox and the first full moon of the spring.  We cannot now know all that the moon meant for the origins of Passover, but that ignorance is reason enough to leave the date of Easter as it is and allow it to vary from year to year.  Ancient intuitions embedded in the mystery of the moon, three days dark, are fulfilled and perfected in Christ, three days in the darkness of the tomb.  The moving date of Easter, varying as does Passover, preserves the Christian connection with the tradition from which it came.  That connection with Judaism, Christianity’s elder brother and first to hear the Word of God, is essential for an understanding of who Christians are and what the Church is.” (Journey to the Heart of God 230)

Second, the soil:

“The ancient Hebrews counted seven weeks from the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the Feast of First Fruits.  These were two agricultural festivals, the first the consecration of the grain harvest by waving a freshly cut sheaf of barley (Lev. 23:9-11), the second, the Feast of Weeks, fifty days later, ended the harvest.  After the destruction of the temple and the exile in Babylonia, a new awareness of the work of God in human history developed, and the festivals of the ancient Hebrew calendar were reinterpreted and associated with great historical events of past ages.  Events thus had meaning for the generation in which they occurred but also for all who followed afterward.  Every devout Hebrew was thus a participant in the formative events.  Passover became the anniversary of deliverance from slavery and thus had meaning for all who were in any kind of bondage.  The Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), once a spring festival associated with the barley harvest, became the anniversary of Moses’s reception of the Law on Mount Sinai and a reminder of God’s will and human obedience to it.” (231)

Our Christian holy days are intimately tied to Hebrew holy days, just as the New Testament is intimately bound to the Old Testament.  And Hebrew holy days were intimately tied to cycles of the earth, and to changing seasons.  The value of this?  It reminds that it is inescapably part of human existence that the world around us does not accommodate itself to us, but that we learn the ways of the world, of the stars and the soil, and accommodate ourselves to laws of life that we can never change no matter how hard we would like to try.  We learn to look on the world and ask, not “how can I get all this to do what I want?” but “How do I use this wisely as my home, but also as a tool, not for what I want, but for what God wants?”

Discipleship Curriculum

If I had to come up with a curriculum for discipleship for this day and age, to go through with one other person who is motivated to know God, it would include: 

1) your inner voice is not God’s voice.  

2) Being drawn to Jesus is the surest sign that God is with you.  

3) God’s greatest work is to build a church.  Contribute to the church’s singing, confessing, praying, listening, communing, and serving.  Think very locally about how to give of yourself.  

4) Have very deliberate morning and evening rituals of prayer.  Include others if you can.  

5) Be a good steward of words first, and this will teach you to be a good steward of everything else.  

6) Be child-like and do something you love for its own sake, everyday if possible.  What can you begin to write, paint, read, craft, or do in five minutes a day?  This is a practice that will likely embody a basic truth about the Christian worldview for insiders and outsiders alike: that God creates and redeems not as a means to an end, but simply because it is good.  

Thoughts on Accountability

Accountability is described by Patrick Morley as the missing link for discipleship.  In this context, discipleship can include any number of good biblical practices, knowledge of biblical concepts, a strong community of Christ-followers, and still be missing something.  What it is missing is something like a constant friend.  They could meet weekly or bi-weekly, but the regularity is determined not by obligation, but by desire, the sense that accountability is a lifelong endeavor that is the gateway for faithfulness to become habitual.  What is required above all is a particular understanding of the Christian life – that it is a battle that doesn’t end until the grave.  The Christian must be on guard, not only for one’s own behalf, but on behalf of the community of people around this person.

Key to this is realizing two seemingly contradictory things which actually are both essential to the one who seeks accountability.  1) I don’t want to be held accountable, and 2) I want very much to be growing in my faithfulness to Christ, and I see that accountability can only help me to do this.  The one who wants accountability will realize that the first thing will always be there to an extent, but then also realizes that the second thing has become stronger in them than the first.  In other words, the person simultaneously doesn’t want to be accountable and wants to be faithful and realizes that accountability is the best way to grow in this.  That person will long for accountability in such a way that it will coexist with, and also overcome their disdain for it.  They will have a love/hate relationship with accountability but will also experience it to be lifegiving.  They learn to love challenge, and identify facing challenge with Jesus’ command to them to take up their cross.

There are three models of this type of one-on-one relationship that all have insights as to clarifying what we mean by Christian accountability.  The first is the 12-step program.  12-step programs include on-going accountability relationships between a recovering addict and a sponsor, who is also a recovering addict.  The relationship is not optional.  It is necessary for the person to function well and to thrive.  Their thriving is not a matter of personal virtue, but it is a byproduct of recognition of their own weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and sins, and a strength they receive from outside themselves – from God and from an encouraging community.  The conversations are so life-giving that they happen everyday.  The two often don’t feel a need for any sort of small-talk or banter because they might talk everyday to get clarity on the challenges each of them may face that day, and these conversations achieve personal depth and transparency and play their part in as little as 15-30 minutes of conversation.  The growing Christian learns more and more to see him or herself as a sin addict, who needs Christ everyday to actually be Christian.  

The second is the business coaching model.  The coach for leaders in the business world is paid money to identify catalytic practices that leaders should give up or take on for the benefit and profitability of their company.  Thus, too much small talk and banter are inefficient and a poor use of the money that is being paid to the coach to achieve real results in the private working life and the relational networks of this leader.  As the business leader engages with a coach for the sake of fellow employees and to be a contributing team member of the business, the Christian also engages in an accountable relationship with another Christian for their own growth and also for the growth of those they influence, so they can be a better-contributing team player to their family, their church, and to the world as a Christian.  The coach verifies that action steps will be taken.  

Third, there is the spiritual direction model.  Spiritual directors do not themselves direct, but think of themselves more as witnesses to what the Holy Spirit is doing in the life of the person being directed.  Thus, the spiritual director invites the Holy Spirit into the session, listens with the intentness of one who is convinced that the Holy Spirit is already at work in the person before you.  They facilitate a deeper connection between the directee and the Holy Spirit for discernment.

Christian accountability is a combination of the three of these.  12-step groups remind us that Christians too are addicts who need a larger community to overcome addiction.  Leader coaching reminds us that it is in our own best interest and the best interest of those around us that we seek efficiency and excellence in our pursuit of God.  Spiritual direction reminds us that we are in this not so much to determine what we will do or won’t do, but to see what the Holy Spirit is doing.

The Grooves of Virtuous Character

Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung writes in her book Glittering Vices about how habits are developed:

“By way of an analogy, think of a winter sledding party, in which a group of people head out to smooth a path through freshly fallen snow.  The first sled goes down slowly, carving out a rut.  Other sleds follow, over and over, down the same path, smoothing and packing down the snow.  After many trips a well-worn groove develops, a path out of which it is hard to steer.  The groove enables sleds to stay aligned and on course, gliding rapidly, smoothly, and easily on their way.  Character traits are like that: the first run down, which required some effort and tough going, gradually becomes a smooth track that one glides down without further intentional steering.  Of course, a rider can always stick out a boot and throw the sled off course, usually damaging the track as well.  So too we can act out of character, even after being “in the groove” for a long time.  In general, however, habits incline us swiftly, smoothly, and reliably toward certain types of action.” (Glittering Vices 14)

In other words, practices create grooves.  Initially, the groove is not created yet, so it is easy to veer off path.  As practices are habituated, the groove is actually quite difficult to veer from.  This is powerful to consider with regard to practices like worship, confession of sin, prayer, listening to and responding to Scripture, considering Christ and his body in the church - all of which happen within the realm of one service of worship.  The disciplined Christian, then, has grooves which are habituated and are hard to veer from.  For this Christian, ‘keeping the faith’ often feels like that one is being ‘kept by the faith’.  Intentionality and effort are not forced, but are built into routine.

Self-Deception about Sin

Writing 20 years ago about sin in his book Not the Way It's Supposed to Be, Cornelius Plantinga noted that its become harder and harder to speak about what is wrong with us:

“The newer language of Zion fudges: “Let us confess our problem with human relational adjustment dynamics, and especially our feebleness in networking.”  Or, “I’d just like to share that we just need to target holiness as a growth area.”  Where sin is concerned, people mumble now.” (Plantinga x)

This mumbling comes from a lack of confidence as to how sin functions in this day and age:

“Books on sin today must meet concerns and untie knots that did not worry Augustine and Calvin.  They were not worried about the flattening of human majesty in modern naturalism or of human corruption in Enlightenment humanism.  they did not wonder at the Californian tendency to conflate salvation and self-esteem.  Nor did they meet a widespread cultural assumption that the proper place to inquire about the root causes of human evil is a department of psychology or sociology.” (xii)

Still, Plantinga holds out hope that understanding sin and grappling with it can free us from crippling anxiety and thus be deeply therapeutic:

“Indeed, for most of us a healthy reminder of our sin and guilt is clarifying and even assuring.  For, unlike some other identifications of human trouble, a diagnosis of sin and guilt allows hope.  Something can be done for this malady.  Something has been done for it.” (xii)

In other words, a diagnosis of sin, under the circumstances that a Savior did deal with sin 2000 years ago, would not yield despair, but would yield hope.  After all, there’s a cure.  But we’re not sure we believe sin is real.  Plantinga explores the consequences of this with a metaphor of the human nervous system:

“For slippage in our consciousness of sin, like most fashionable follies, may be pleasant, but it is also devastating.  Self-deception about our sin is a narcotic, a tranquilizing and disorienting suppression of our spiritual central nervous system.  What’s devastating about it is that when we lack an ear for wrong notes in our lives, we cannot play right ones or even recognize them in the performance of others.  Eventually we make ourselves religiously so unmusical that we miss both the exposition and the recapitulation of the main themes God plays in human life.  The music of creation and the still greater music of grace whistle right through our skulls, causing no catch of breath and leaving no residue.  Moral beauty begins to bore us.  The idea that the human race needs a Savior sounds quaint.” (xiii)

Note how Plantinga does not actually leave the metaphor of the nervous system.  The human soul who is suppressing and tranquilizing any sense of sin also misses the “music of creation and the still greater music of grace” which would otherwise cause a “catch of the breath.”  In other words, we would be moved, not only by the sin we are trying to ignore, but also by the beauty which we also lose as a side effect.  Insensitivity to sin inside of us and outside of us causes a similar insensitivity to glory inside of us and outside of us.  Plantinga’s point about narcotics is not that narcotics are moral or immoral - it simply depends on what is being subdued.  His point is that we have been participating in a culture that subdues, subverts, downplays a sense of sinfulness and diverts us from any sense of the reality of sin.

What are Children For? What is Education For?

What are children for?  What is education for?

Anthony Esolen writes about a theme park which prepares children to be adults.

“As a reporter from the New Yorker described it, “children can work on a car assembly line, or move furniture, or put out a fake fire with real water.”  Through role playing in adult occupations, they earn a “salary” that can be “deposited in the central bank and accessed with a realistic-looking debit card” – after a “tax” of 20 percent is deducted.  (Here is a fun way we teach them to pay tax,” says the company’s founder and CEO.)  Their pretend money can be used to purchase goods and services at stores operated by very real corporate sponsors – Sony, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Domino’s Pizza, and many others.  (The park offers “a good platform in terms of building brand loyalty,” another executive boasts.)" (Life Under Compulsion 16)

Esolen thinks we don’t know what children are anymore.  They are just mini-adults and the sooner they learn the ways of adults the better:

“This theme park, unusual though it may be in its field, reflects an understanding of childhood that has become all too common.  It is childhood as mere preparation for adulthood, and a dull, drab limited adulthood at that.  Every year millions of parents take their children to this theme park, happily handing over the large admission fee, so that their children can…what?  So they can take their position on an assembly line, or deliver packages, or prepare fast food, or make plastics, to earn enough to amass the latest consumer gadgets and pay their taxes to an unseen government overlord.  Here we see a firm commitment to the tyranny of the useful.  Consider: Children attending the theme park quickly learn that the less interesting the job, the more it pays.  And the adult staffers end their conversations with children by saying, “Have a productive day.” (Life Under Compulsion, 16)

Esolen thinks the real purpose of education is to provide wings to learn about the wonders of love:

“To free oneself from the accumulated sludge of sin is to free oneself for the freedom of heart that is love.  “He seeks his freedom,” says Virgil to Cato, the guardian of Purgatory, as he begs to allow Dante to climb the mountain.  Virgil does not mean that Dante is looking for a democratic republic.  He wishes for Dante to learn about sin, but more, to learn about the wonders of love.  He wishes Dante to grow wings, so to speak.  Without wings, you may say that you are free to fly, and say it all day long, but you will not get one foot off the ground.” (21)

A little further on, Esolen talks about these wings as though they were the ability to contemplate what is good and to act in accord with it.

Dreamland by Sam Quinones - a book about the opiate epidemic

Sam Quinones’ book Dreamland is subtitled: “the true tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.”  The preface focuses on Portsmouth, Ohio, and in recounting many residents’ idyllic memories of swimming pools and graduations, sustains unbelievable tension in the setup of what will inevitably be a tragic story.

The memories are beautifully evoked in descriptions of the swimming pool, the Dreamland of the title:

“In fact, the cycle of life in Portsmouth was repeated over and over at Dreamland.  A toddler spent her first years at the shallow end watched by her parents, particularly her mother, who sat on a towel on the concrete near the water with other young moms.  When the child left elementary school, she migrated out to the middle section of Dreamland as her parents retreated to the grass.  By high school, she was hanging out on the grass around the pool’s ten-foot deep end, near the high dive and the head lifeguard’s chair, and her parents were far away.  When she married and had children, she returned to the shallow end of Dreamland to watch over her own children, and the whole thing began again.” (Quinones 2)

As one generation gives way to another, Dreamland is there to nurture kinship and community.

Another passage suggests the town’s vibrancy:

“Through these years, Portsmouth also supported two bowling alleys, a JCPenney, a Sears, and a Montgomery Ward with an escalator, and locally owned Marting’s Department Store, with a photo studio where graduating seniors had their portraits taken.  Chillicothe Street bustled.  Big U.S.-made sedans and station wagons lined the street.  People cashed their checks at the Kresge’s on Saturdays, and the owners of Morgan Brothers Jewelry, Herrmann’s Meats, Counts’ Bakery, and Atlas Fashion earned a middle class living.  Kids took the bus downtown to the movie theater or for cherry Cokes at Smith’s Drugstore and stayed out late trick-or-treating on Halloween.  On Friday and Saturday nights, teenagers cruised Chillicothe Street, from Staker’s Drugs down to Smith’s, then turned around and did it again.” (3)

The particularity of these places feels universal to the reader.  Other than JCPenney or Sears, I’ve never been to any of these places, but the names sparkle with the collective memory of a vibrant, lived-in place.

And then in the second to last paragraph, Quinones breaks all the tension he’s built up:

“Two Portsmouths exist today.  One is a town of abandoned buildings at the edge of the Ohio River.  The other resides in the memories of thousands in the town’s diaspora who grew up during its better years and return to the actual Portsmouth rarely, if at all.” (4)

One is a dead town.  The other is the painful memory that there once was a town.  The two actually equal zero.

Is God Kind or Stern? Reflections from the Heidelberg, Week 1

This week, we began a class on The Heidelberg Catechism that I’m calling ‘The Basics’.  In the class, I explained that the baby who learns the basics of walking will continue to use those basics as an adult for any number of tasks, whether walking across the street to give a neighbor a gift, or running into a burning fire to save someone.  In a similar way, Christians really must learn the ways of the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments so that they will think, feel, and live the Christian faith in all seasons.  Whether one’s faith is ‘on fire’, reaching out like flames into the world – this person, that person, connections, coincidences that AREN’T coincidences – or if one’s faith is dry – undernourished on account of anxieties, fears, or sins – these ways of thinking, feeling, and living provide us ancient and authoritative steps back into the story of God and his people.  We all need to be habitually re-oriented to this story.

One of my favorite questions from that first class was about a strange word I’d used to describe the Heidelberg Catechism: ‘kind.’  I was asked to talk about how the Heidelberg Catechism was ‘kind’ when Calvinism as a whole has a reputation of being ‘stern.’  What came to mind was that Calvinism – the tradition inspired by pastor/theologian/reformer John Calvin – conveys such a strong God that those who champion this God have little patience for any of the odd quirks of humanity.  I am a subscriber to Ken Myers’ Mars Hill Audio podcast and he recently interviewed James Bratt, the author of a biography of Abraham Kuyper, a Calvinist theologian, professor, journalist, and statesman from the Netherlands who lived in the 19th century.  In describing some of the influences of Kuyper’s young life, Bratt talked about a Calvinism which described a God of such strong sovereignty that there really wasn’t much emphasis on the way we know God through Christ.  Intriguingly, Bratt described the risks of adhering to a faith in a remote distant, stern Creator without much emphasis on Christ in that it gave way to the equally remote, distant, but kind, benevolent god of Unitarian Unversalism.  Both miss out on Christ.  Instead, the Heidelberg Catechism invites us into its lessons about God, people, and world by asking “What is your only comfort in life and in death?”  Its answer drives us primarily and exclusively to Christ: “That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ…”  In Christ, God comes to give us comfort.  Properly understood, this is Calvin’s vision as well.  God is strong, sovereign, and holy.  But through Christ, we see that his judgment has been poured out at the cross.  Through Jesus’ sacrifice, we have been received anew into God’s house to know him and to gaze upon his beauty, and to live for him in our lives by the power of the Holy Spirit and not by our own strength.  God's kindness in Christ shows us the true face of God without losing the serious business of God's holiness by allowing it to degenerate into a sort of humorless, stern frigidity.

Lost in the Woods

Humorist Patrick McManus ruminates about the various best ways to get lost in the woods.  He thinks the absolute best way is to go as a group, including invoking the power of magic:

“Undoubtedly, the surest way to get lost is to venture into the woods as a member of a group.  Sooner or later one of the boys, on a pretext of offering up a riddle, says, “Hey guys, I bet none of you can tell me which direction the car is in.  Heh heh.”  (The “heh heh” is tacked on to imply that he knows the right direction, but truth is he couldn’t tell it from a kidney stone.)  Everyone now points firmly and with great authority in a different direction.  In every such case, the most forceful personality in the group gets his way.  The effectiveness of this method arises out of the fact that the most forceful personality usually turns out to rank on intelligence scales somewhere between sage hens and bowling balls.  He is also an accomplished magician.  With a wave of his arm and the magic words “the car’s just over that next rise” he can make the whole bunch of you vanish for three days.” (A Fine and Pleasant Misery 16)