Tsunamis, suffering and Grace

The following was written some years ago, after a 9.0 quake and the ensuing tsunami happened in the Indian Ocean. It has resonances of the recent Japanese quake and devastation.
The question of tragedy and evil in a world governed by God is a hard question; this excerpt from David Hart certainly points in the right direction.

I do not believe we Christians are obliged—or even allowed—to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”

Sacred and profane Love

"Till We Have Faces" - C.S. Lewis novel
"Between Man and Man" - by Martin Buber

What is love? You are perhaps aware that the ancient Greeks hand a number of words for 'love', ranging from eros to agape, from selfish, erotic love to unselfish, giving love. Dionysus versus the Crucified. In between them were such loves as brotherly love, love of country etc.

"Till We Have Faces" deals directly with the difference between two kinds of love - sacred and profane, in the form of a story - a quite wonderful story - of two sisters, idolatry, lust, sacrifice, and the supernatural; the setting is a pagan country at an undetermined time in history. Lewis's understanding of idolatry and paganism is spot on, and his analysis of love - well, I'm out of my depth here, but I understand it more as I try to develop the 'taste for the other."

Buber's work deals more with the subject "What is Man" rather than 'love', but his analysis and diagnosis of the (caution: over-used term alert!) 'human condition' is unparalleled. He also lived out, in a distinctive way, the 'taste for the other' as related by many witnesses.

"The taste for the Other" - the willingness and the desire to stop all pretending and pretentiousness, to drop selfishness and neediness and vanity and instead seek the good of others - by imaginatively and diligently trying to experience the world as they do.

Marriage, of course, gives us a perfect opportunity to practice this. It came to me recently that married men - or those contemplating marriage - only need one bible verse to last them a lifetime: "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church, by giving His life for it."
It's an easy verse to read; who could disagree with a command to love your wife? She's pretty, has a sense of humor, doesn't nag, an accomplished and eager lover, etc.

Recognizing and delighting in those things is good; is it the same as 'giving your life' for her? We husbands are pretty good at being passive enough to keep the the relationship afloat; NOT so good at proactively putting ourselves in our wife's place and really seeing things as she does. And not just our wives, and not just for husbands: the 'taste for the other' is, according to those much better than myself, the very essence of Heaven as we practice it with others as well.

You should read the books, I chose them to appeal to different tastes. I'm a novice, these authors can touch you and lift you higher.

My love goes out to K.J., a young woman in the Rogue Valley who has her own valley she is walking through, and it's kinda rough, and it has to do with what I've written today.

Delight as knowledge

In one of my favorite novels - Little, Big - by John Crowley - a chapter heading is: "What makes us happy, makes us wise." In light of what we have read so far of Hart's book, I would recast that sentence into : "What brings us delight can bring us wisdom and a glimpse of God."

(We are not in a philosophy class, so we needn't parse out the meanings of the words and end up with a pile of conjecture. In general we know what 'happy' and 'wise' mean, don't we? And we really don't think that extremes - such as a person who gets delight out of sadistic acts - are really 'happy' in any normal sense.)

Annie Dillard in her wonderful book 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek' tells of a moment when she gazed out on the beauty of a vast mountain view and that nature 'picked her up and rang her like a bell.' Similarly, on vacation a few years ago driving on Highway 50, the 'loneliest road in America' , Ronda and I were watching the flat flat sagebrushed prairie going by, looking hot and boring. Until we got out to stretch our legs. I remember it clearly - the utter lack of man made noise - a silence you could hear! - just the chittering of many small birds, a hawk way up in crystal clear blue skies, the very fragrant (and cool!) breezes that wandered through the sagebrush and other plants, and far off mountains (the Ruby Range, I think) topped with white, white snow. Beautiful. It pierced our hearts. We were 'surprised by joy.' We were delighted.

If we (all of us) have developed the right kind of 'seeing' - this type of experience is a kind of knowledge that yields wisdom. It carries with it a hint of the infinite pleasures that blow from the lands of righteousness, the kingdom of God.

That word 'pleasure' is certain to upset a certain kind of reader. We'll talk about that shortly.

David Bentley Hart on beauty in creation. Not easy.

Here is a selection from his book "The Beauty of the Infinite." It is excellent.
"None of this is to say that the soul can gain access to an immediate intuition of the divine form in the fabric of creation, unclouded by sin, untroubled by the misery of earthly life; what IS at issue is a hermeneutics of creation, a theological embrace of creation as a divine word precisely in its aesthetic excessiveness, its unforced beauty. Inasmuch as creation is not the overflow of some ungovernable perturbation of the divine substance, or a tenebrous collusion of ideal form and chaotic matter, but purely an expression of the superabundant joy and agape of the Trinity, joy and love are its only grammar and its only ground; one therefore must learn a certain orientation, a certain charity and a certain awe, and even a certain style of delectation to see in what sense creation tells of God, and to grasp the nature of creation's inmost (which is to say most superficial) truth. Creation is a new emphasis in the divine dialect of triune love, whose full, perfect, and infinitely diverse expression is God's eternal Word."

More on this later.

Delight - St. Nicolas of Cusa

Nicolas claimed that eternal wisdom, eternal pleasure and eternal desire are 'tasted' whenever we savor the beauty in earthly things, or desire earthly things. He goes on to say that a man who sees a beautiful woman, and 'is agitated by the sight of her' , gives glory to God and admires God's infinite Beauty.

Augustine had a similar thought that clarifies this: he says delight is 'the weight in the soul' that causes it to tend toward or away from the love of God - according to how it ORDERS THE HEART in regard to the beauty of God's creation. (emphasis mine)

So in other words, a man agitated by the sight of a beautiful woman could in fact just be lusting for her, but even in that experience there is a kernel of response to God's infinite beauty, if the man would just pay attention to it. And that seems to hold true for all of our pleasures, desires, and wisdom. More on this later.

Back in the Saddle

After a short hiatus - a couple of years - I am back and happy to continue on.
I also have a facebook page that you are welcome to view.
There has been a lot of water under the bridge the past two years; but this blog is about ideas, not my autobiography. :-) Enjoy and comment!
Dave