But Love Troubles My Head

In my last post, I wrote that love doesn’t trouble my head much anymore. But it does.

My freshman year of college, I met my first boyfriend – his name was Biblical Studies. I hadn’t been particularly studious as a high school student. We were homeschooled and school was what we did all the time (it was nothing to get too excited about). But just a few weeks into my Bible classes, I was enamored of it all – the primary texts, the commentaries, the discussion of probing questions that charmed and vexed the soul.

For the first time in my life, I’d found something more thrilling than a boy. Here was a quest for which I would gladly forego meals. (I see now my obsession with Biblical Studies was worse than love – I would never have forsaken food for love of a boy.) The following summer, I took a series of summer classes back-to-back. I got into the habit of going from my (4-5 hr) morning class straight to the library and studying until supper. My stomach would knot with hunger, but my elation was so visceral that I barely felt the knots.

This kind of love still troubles my head from time to time. When I met Josh, the old, troublesome sort of love began to show its true colors. Over time, I began to see that what I had understood to be romantic interest or physical attraction (I never dared to call anything “love”) had less to do with interest in a particular person or subject and more to do with my need for distraction. Of course, it’s never that simple – most of what we do is a complex mixture of real interest and the need for distraction. But mostly it was distraction.

This is why love still troubles my head from time to time – because it isn’t about romance or attraction or sex. It’s a quest to keep our ghosts at bay, to distract us from our raw, wounded insides. This troubles me, but I’ve gotten better at resisting it, refusing to let it rob me of real interest, real love. The source of every human love is God, and when someone loves us as we are, that gives us the confidence to face who we are. We no longer need to be distracted from ourselves. (Josh’s love helps a lot.)

I think of distraction as a kind of gluttony. It keeps you from really focusing on what’s in front of you and loving it. Instead of encountering the gift before you, you’re always searching for more, not because you’re interested in genuine knowledge, but because you’re interested in acquiring, possessing.

As I reflect on my undergraduate education, I see that in many ways, I was not taught to love knowledge. I had to learn that on my own. I was taught to be thrilled with knowledge, and this carried me for a time. But the leisure of four years of full-time study has a way of encouraging gluttony – a swift love affair with books and the meaning of life. It fattens you up with knowledge, but does not give you the tools to pursue knowledge when you no longer have the leisure to do so. And you begin to starve.

At the end of this affair, you are unsatisfied. You have not learned to live with knowledge, only to gorge on it. You are unable to maintain the vigor you once had now that the pressures of work and family life make it difficult to devote many hours to study. You learned to love knowledge in one context: the classroom. You did not learn to talk about the questions when you sit at home and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you get up.

Since knowledge was just a distraction, an erotic pang in your love-sick gut, you feel justified in leaving it behind. Fantasies are quickly exhausted, and you need to move on to something new.

When Love Doesn't Trouble My Head

Love doesn't trouble my head these days, but it used to -- a lot. I've been married for well-nigh five years now, and I forget how harrowing life seemed back then in those days before I met Josh.

Before Josh, there was always someone I fancied, whether or not the lad reciprocated my affections (most often not). There was always the flutter, the highs and lows of he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not, the anxious but excited wondering, the hope at an unexpected conversation, the despair of absence or uncertainty.

And, of course, the butterflies that I have always called butterflies because we had no language to talk about sexual attraction.

Then I met Josh. And not one butterfly.

I bumped into him on the steps leading to the college chapel. He told me about his upcoming senior recital. I mentioned that I was writing a novel. He said he'd like to see it when I was done.

He looked older than when I'd last seen him two years ago.

Those early sightings had been fleeting, certainly. He spent most of his time in the bowels of the music building, and I only ever saw him briefly in the cafeteria or on the sidewalk on his way to the music building. I remembered a young man with enthusiastic hand gestures whose shirts and khakis had clearly been purchased in the 90s. And he wore sneakers with those khakis, sneakers laced super-tight for good ankle support.

He'd grown a beard since then and his eyes looked older, sadder, wiser. 

And I thought, "He seems to have shaped up nicely. I wonder if he's still with that Amanda-girl. I hope he is with someone who deserves him."

It was an innocent thought. You may not believe me, but I had no thought of him for myself. Because there were no butterflies.

Instead of butterflies and drama and confused, angst-ridden prayers, all I felt was an almost startling ease. We talked often in those next few weeks, and every time we met, I felt more and more like my real self.

This was not how love was supposed to work. I was supposed to be intimidated, happily anxious.

I emailed him a draft of my novel, but we didn't talk over the summer. In August, when we came back to school, we got together for tea. And it was at that tea, that I was certain of what I had suspected over the summer -- this was the man I was to marry.

This was not how love was supposed to go for me. I had always been suspicious of the stories people told and how they "knew" when they first met that they would fall in love. You can't know, I thought. You can't know after only having known someone such a short time. You can't be sure of someone's character so soon.

Yet here I was, so sure that Josh and I were meant to be together. And I wasn't even in love. I have not been certain about many things in my life, but I knew that Josh and I fit. For the first time in my life, I wasn't worried about being in love. Love didn't trouble my head.

I wasn't worried about butterflies (or the lack thereof). I knew they would come when they needed to come.

And they did.

Do We Control What We Believe?

How much control does a person have over what she believes? Can she choose to believe in God? To believe in no God?

I am not thinking of the tiresome debates about predestination and free will (though the close connections between these questions are obvious). I am thinking of the nature of belief and the frequent tensions between cognitive (and verbal) assent and what a person actually thinks (and how this influences her life in the world). In short: there is usually a disparity between what we say or think we believe and what we actually believe. One can give verbal and mental assent to all manner of orthodox doctrines and remain a functional heretic. I acknowledge the reality of the Triune God, but what does it mean to live Trinitarianly and to what extent can this be done?

Our beliefs are always based in experience even when those experiences are what might rightly be called 'revelation.' (One could argue that all right belief is a result of revelation.) What we believe is based on our encounter with the world and consists of what we have, in those encounters perceived to be true or real (even allowing for the locality of some kinds of knowledge). We may pay lip-service to all manner of belief -- that God is love, distant, all-powerful, ineffectual, non-existent or what have you -- but does this cohere with our experience of reality?

As Protestants, we like to think "Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so," but is this really how we knew the love of the incarnate Son of God? I don't doubt that some (perhaps many) experience God's love directly through the reading of scripture. But when I reflect on my own experience, I realize it was probably the love of my parents (in particular, my mother) that first communicated God's love to me, not the Bible. Mom was the face of God to us. In many ways, my belief still operates this way. I believe in God's love because I have people who love me and whom I love.

The difficulty, as anyone who has suffered beneath the sun knows, is that we can just as easily (perhaps more easily) believe in God's unlove because of how we have encountered unlove through others. These people (if God, in fact, is love) are false images, images that do not embody the person of God.

Still, how much do we control what we believe? I don't mean to imply that we are simply sponges that absorb whatever realities we encounter. This is, I think, even impossible, since we daily encounter (what seem to be at least) competing realities, conflicting voices that vie for our attention, and we cannot absorb it all. (Or: perhaps we do. Perhaps we hold in ourselves more tension and conflict and reality than we can ever know or bear to know, the whole world warring within us, waiting to be born.) We experience both love and hate, both mercy and cruelty. And we also find ourselves capable of both great love and great cruelty.

We do not just absorb, however. We interact. We weigh our experiences in the balance and respond, shape, act, believe.

Where am I going with all this? (Perhaps that is the real question, a question of location and movement instead of stillness and immobile being.)

What we think we believe and what we really believe do not always cohere. You can say (and even think) the orthodox creeds of Christianity but live a functionally godless life. I suppose I am intrigued (and perhaps unwittingly believe?) in the kind of Christian universalism depicted in Lewis' Last Battle, where some who did not know Aslan by name actually honored him in how they lived their lives. 

If God is the creator of the world and committed to re-creating it through his Son, Jesus Christ, are all who re-create (those who facilitate the renewal of life) in some way serving God, albeit unwittingly? Perhaps they do not believe in God. But if they live as though God is in the world (and in some sense become God in the world), do they believe even when they do not believe, their bodies working against every cognitive objection to the presence of God?

I am not saying this is what I believe, though my own declarations of belief may bear only a distant resemblance to what I believe. I am speaking in order to get to my belief, to plot how I've experienced the world and what I've encountered as true.

These reflections are (of course) evoked by experience: the fact that many of my friends and acquaintances from Bible college no longer identify as Christians  (most are atheists or agnostics). And, no, these are not people who "fell into a life of sin" and became distant from God. These are honest, questioning friends who have serious doubts about the form (and content) of the faith bequeathed to them from their parents or Church community. Their questions are not unlike many of my own, and their critiques of Christianity are (often) valid.

All this makes me wonder about the nature of belief. Why is it that I say I "believe" in the God revealed in Jesus Christ and his Church, as witnessed through Judeo-Christian scripture and the testimony of the saints throughout history? Why do I (if I do) actually believe? In what or whom do I believe? What (perhaps more importantly) should or do my husband and I communicate to our son about belief in God? Faith, like any living, breathing relationship, must evolve or die. What shape does my faith take now and what shape ought it to take in this transitory life? And how much control do I have over its shape?

My Bible Education: Does It Mean Anything?

As I near the end of nearly seven years of formal training in Bible and theology, I wonder if it means anything. I’ve had enough divine sovereignty hammered into me to know that it will end up meaning something, but I’ve also breathed in enough eschatology and incarnation to know that the present event and the ending up are in constant tension. And there’s no glory gained for the ending up by glossing over the present futility.

*

“We must follow the evidence where it leads,” a Bible professor of mine once said, “and trust that the truth will be made known.”

I believed in these words for many years. When it came to the Bible, I tried my best to lay my presuppositions aside and follow the evidence where it led, trusting that if God was true and the Bible was his word, then the Bible would be able to bear up under academic scrutiny. 

What I didn’t realize then–in those early days when I was drunk on dead poets and the musk of crumbling books–was that my professor’s statement was limited by its own rationalist assumptions and the myth of objectivity that form the philosophical basis of the Western academy. This philosophy assumes that we can follow the evidence without bias to some logical conclusion–to truth, if you will. It advocates a mode of “knowing” that assumes we can submit to truth as discovered through empirical means, and that the truth leads us.

But the evidence itself is siphoned through our own selectivity and assumptions. The evidence may not end up leading us to the truth, but simply back to ourselves. (In a rationalist system, this is a negative thing, for if we inculcate ourselves into truth, it has no authority over us since it stands within us instead of outside us.)  Although rationalist philosophy uses the rhetoric of “being led” to the truth by evidence, the idea behind the rhetoric (how the divorce of form and content haunts our words, both confirming and contradicting them) is that we are able to lead ourselves to the truth by the sweat of our intellect, tapping into a higher truth by gaining mastery over it.

In a rationalist system, the ideal is to remove ourselves from the equation so that abstract truth can reign. The system collapses, however, because we are still attempting to know truth by standing outside of it. By trying to stand outside, we set ourselves up as the authority over it. We also abdicate our hope of knowing, for knowledge does not come by standing outside, but stepping within.

So I believed that if I followed the questions raised about the Bible by higher criticism that I would arrive at a fuller understanding of the Bible since I would be able to better understand the messages of the biblical authors in their original contexts. I was persuaded that if I used the proper tools, I would somehow come to see the Bible for “what it is,” since I would be setting the text free to speak on its own terms.

I am now persuaded that the questions lead back to the questioners.

For people of faith, the evidence would lead to scripture’s divine authority (however that authority might be mediated through the limitations and concession of human language and culture). For people of no particular faith but rationalism, the evidence would lead to the Bible as a merely human book sans any divine trace or authority. For the former, the evidence led to a history of revelation (God reaching down to humanity), but for the latter, the evidence led to a history of religion (humans reaching up to God). In both cases, the evidence led back to the assumptions.

The problem that I did not perceive as an undergrad was that the bulk of conversation about the Bible in the academy was had in the context of this rationalist framework, which could only lead back to the Enlightenment illusion of objectivity (with a big helping of functional deism to boot).

My professors seemed to think everything was okay (and so did I). The cultural context of the Bible “properly understood” would lead to a re-affirmation of the Bible as the word of God, mediated in human speech.

But it was that assumption–the presupposition that “proper understanding” came through the tools of grammatical-historical exegesis–that began to become a barrier to actually hearing the word of God.  In the early days of my Protestant faith, I did my fair share of harping on the Catholic church of Luther’s day and the monopoly it held on biblical interpretation. Only later did I realize that the rallying cry of ad fontes (“back to the original sources!”) and the development of critical tools for the study of scripture meant that the final authority on interpretation had simply shifted from the Church to the individual scholar (who, through use of the proper linguistic tools, was able to somehow determine the “meaning” of scripture).

These are the tools I have been learning to use for almost seven years now, freighted with all the philosophical presuppositions described above. And for the past two years, I’ve been in a program that’s given me all the ammunition to pick apart the Bible and virtually no theology with which to put it back together.

The grammatical-historical method is founded on distance. The ideal is to disentangle yourself from theological presuppositions–to suspend your history with the text and the God it proclaims–in order to come at it with some sort of disembodied, objective, God’s-eye-view of the thing.

Sometimes I feel like the Israelites staring at the manna, this bread from heaven, asking, “What is it?”

What is it? Just eat it. You’ll see.

“There’s nothing but all this manna to look at.”

So don’t look at it. Eat it. It will nourish you and preserve your life.

“Is YHWH really among us or not?”

Eat.

But eating is the very thing we must not do with texts. For when we eat, we lose perspective. When we eat this word, letting it live in us, letting it know us, it changes us. We learn to love it instead of interrogating it in the old way.

And if I’ve learned anything in the past seven years, it’s that I mustn’t love this word.

Gudea to Jesus: Shepherd-Temple-Builder

I’ve been reading up on a Sumerian ruler named Gudea of Lagash in order to learn more about how his statues functioned as “images” of the king. There are some parallels between this mode of representation and how cult statues functioned as “images” of gods. The following is a (draft) excerpt from my book-in-progress, in which the concept of humans as the “image of God” in Genesis 1 features quite heavily. As I was wading through the inscriptions on the Gudea statues in order to write this narrative section, it reminded me of how texts like these can inform our understanding of the relationship between gods, kings, and temples in the ancient Near East and in the Bible (but I’ll talk more about that below).

*

His oval, dark green diorite eyes stared at me, unblinking. His whole face was carved of the same smooth, green stone, his pursed lips framed by a strong, dimpled chin and full cheeks. The nose, too, was full and round, like an unbroken dewdrop on a date palm leaf. A sturdy royal crown encircled his forehead. He was seated, his hands clasped together, firm and dignified, at his waist. The top of his robe was gathered to his left shoulder, leaving his strong right arm bare and unflinchingly still. The hem of his robe reached to the tops of his naked feet, and was covered with line upon line of cuneiform script. On his lap was what looked to be a board or book of some kind.

The statue of Gudea of Lagash was less than a meter high, but those eyes, perfect and impenetrable as a crow’s, seemed to take in the room. The glass display case that separated us did little to mute their gaze.

“He can’t see you, you know.” The voice belonged to a rotund, straight-backed woman with a docent tag pinned to her navy blazer.

“Can’t he?” I tilted my chin to look at her. Her long, silver hair was stretched taut from the edge of her high forehead and coiled into an unimpeachable bun in the middle of her skull.

“The ancient Mesopotamians thought he could, but only when he had undergone the proper rituals and been set in a special room in the god’s temple. Until then, our friend Gudea was just a block of cold diorite–blind, mute, deaf.”

“What’s this writing on his skirt?”

“We’re very lucky that the writing on this statue is intact,” she said, her painted eyebrows raised with excitement (which made the bun quiver a little). “We have the remains of twenty-seven Gudea statues in museums around the world, but many of them are severely damaged or, in some cases, just fragments. But this little guy,” she said, gesturing toward Gudea with one leathery, manicured hand while the other remained calmly at her side, “tells us a lot about himself.”

“He’s a king, no?” I said. “Why is he sitting? I thought only gods sat.”

“Gudea was deified after his death, and this statue may be trying to reflect that. But what’s most interesting–well, what I find most interesting–is how this image functioned as a representation of the flesh-and-blood Gudea. Over the course of his life, Gudea built temples to the gods in the places he governed, many in the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu. Kings like Gudea believed that they had been chosen by the gods, or a particular god, to be the ruler (or ‘shepherd’) of the region. Building temples to the god who had chosen the king accomplished two things. It showed gratitude toward the god and also showed the people, in a very public way, that the right ruler was on the throne, endorsed by the gods. The writing on the image’s robe extols Gudea as the shepherd chosenby the god Ningirsu out of 216,000 people, and tells the story of how Gudea built a house, the temple Eninnu, for Ningirsu. Once he built Eninnu, Gudea fashioned an image of himself out of diorite mined from the mountains of Magan, placed it in the temple before the cult image of Ningirsu, and commanded it to speak to the god on his behalf. ‘Statue,’ Gudea says, ‘tell my lord, Ningirsu…’–and then proceeds to tell the statue the details of how he built the house and installed his statue in order to convey messages to Ningirsu.”

*

The inscriptions on the Gudea statues frequently refer to Gudea as “the shepherd,” and emphasize that he was chosen by the god to whom he built the temple. The Gudea texts are not unique in this regard, as rulers in the ancient Near East were often called shepherds. It comes as no surprise, then, to find out that the biblical writers portray King David as a shepherd in the days prior to his becoming king. What better way to remind your readers that David is a king than to show that he was an actual shepherd before becoming a metaphorical “shepherd” as king?

David, as you’ll remember, wanted to build a house for YHWH. He believed that he was YHWH’s chosen king, God’s anointed. It was good religion and good politics to build a temple. What better way to express his gratitude to YHWH for choosing him as king than by building him a house where the people could worship?  And what better way to show the people that David was God’s man than by building the temple?  David’s son, Solomon, ends up building the temple for YHWH, but it serves the same purpose. God promised to David that he would establish his dynasty, that a son of David would continue to sit on the throne (2 Sam. 7).

When we get to the Gospels, Jesus emerges in various ways as a New Solomon. In Matthew’s genealogy, Jesus is the messiah (“anointed one”), the son of David (Matt. 1:1). He is not just the temple and temple-cleanser, but the temple-builder like Solomon (except here, Jesus builds the “temple” of his body by raising it from the dead) (John 2:19).

By rebuilding the temple of his body, Jesus accomplishes two goals. His resurrection is the public declaration that he is YHWH's chosen ruler, the messianic son of David who is the king, the son of God. Rebuilding YHWH's temple is also an act of gratitude. Jesus thanks YHWh for establishing his kingship by creating a place for YHWH's presence to rest, where people can come to worship him. And that temple is Jesus.

At least, that's my working theory. There’s obviously a lot more to explore here, but these are some initial thoughts.

When Nothing Arrives

When Josh picks me up from class, I sometimes ask for his smartphone as we drive home. “I need to check the ‘likes’ on my Facebook status,” I say.

“Dear, you’re so Facebook-popular,” he says. “I’ll bet you have fifteen ‘likes.’”

“You’re the one who makes me popular,” I say. “Everyone loves when I quote your witticisms.”

It’s just a running joke between us. We both know the ‘likes’ mean nothing and that Facebook updates are just part of a persona. Still, there’s a small boost in my mood when I see a ‘like.’ A ‘like’ means acknowledgement. It means someone has heard. Conversely, when there are no ‘likes’ or comments, it’s as if I’ve spoken up in a crowded room and no one has heard. My voice falls on nothing and void.

That sounds a bit dramatic when we’re talking about Facebook, but I view the desire for Facebook affirmation as microcosm of a broader gap that I often feel – a bigger nothingness that comes periodically (most often during times of transition). First comes the sense that I have been speaking and speaking and Nothing answers back. Nothing hears. And then comes the feeling that I myself am Nothing. My labors are for Nothing. My writing says Nothing. I am good at Nothing. I am worse than a waste of space – I do not even occupy space.

I can write such disparaging thoughts without misgivings because I think most of us feel this way from time to time. Writing helps me assuage the gnawing sense of Nothing. For you, it might be another creative activity – telling stories, baking, building, painting, crafting a mosaic, learning a second language. These activities, these Somethings, dismantle Nothing brick by brick. But you’ve got to face the Nothing first – the blank page, the empty canvas, the scattered mess of tiles and wood and letters.

I think the majority of human activity is spent trying to beat back Nothing. That quest is what’s behind our routines and rituals and roles. We create structures so that the world will be full of Something instead of Nothing.

I know why Nothing arrives in times of transition. It comes because the old routines, traditions, and identities begin to fall away, and I am faced with the dreadful silence.

Many people take this Nothing as evidence that Nothing is, that God is not (or at least inactive), and that all our busy Somethings are attempts to fill the void with meaning. I don’t think that’s an unfair conclusion, but this answer has never satisfied me. It only accounts for the Nothing. And the Nothing – though troublesome and dark – has never been a source of cognitive dissonance for me. I know the Nothing. I feel the Nothing. I am that Nothing.

For me, the source of dissonance (if I can call it dissonance) is the excess of joy that cuts through the Nothing. The meaning that somehow, someday always breaks through, filling me with gratitude for life, both this present life and the “life of the world to come,” as the Nicene creed calls the new life that believers in Jesus look forward to after the resurrection of the body.

I want to explore this more in a future post, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how to go about building wisely in an intellectual climate of deconstruction. My generation of Christians (or perhaps my “brand” of Christianity) has a kind of allergy to easy answers, absolutism, and certainty. This is a natural and, to an extent, healthy reaction to the religious dogmatism of previous generations. That very dogmatism was (I suspect) bound to fall apart because it was forged in the fires of rationalism. Rationalism assumed that the best (nay, the only) kind of knowing resulted through human reason and objective observation. Western Christianity could survive in that climate when church dogma was assumed to be part of the truths of human reason, but once everyone figured out that the truths of Christianity were not universally “self-evident,” Christian dogma had to be relegated to the sphere of subjectivity (of revelation rather than human deduction) – which had already been deemed inferior to the sort of knowing that was “provable” through experimentation.

By now, most everybody in the academy (regardless of religious adherence or lack thereof) has figured out that no one can view anything objectively, which is why we’re always awkwardly apologizing in our papers for our limitations and unobjectivity. It’s embarrassing, really – the fact that we're not God. Because we are limited human beings, we’re only allowed to say “I believe” and not “it is” – but our intellectual heritage has already taught us that the subjective “I believe” is inferior to the objective “it is,” so we feel bad about “I believe.”

All this to say: my generation knows it needs to find a different kind of knowing, not one that is necessarily antithetical to Christian dogma, but one that sees faith, doubt, and dogma working together. But we are often at a loss as to how to rebuild our faith without resorting to cookie-cutter answers and insincere platitudes in responses to real suffering and tough theological problems. The unfettered dogmatism of our forebears frightens us – we cannot go back there, nor do we wish to. 

But what do we do when Nothing arrives in its place, when even our shanty towns of meaning crumble and we are left in the dark surrounded by rubble?