In yesterday’s comments in our ongoing blogversation about 9/11, evil, the Holocaust, God, and so on, I suggested that David and I see much the same thing when we observe the horrible sights of last year. I emphasized “see,” because that was what David asked; he wanted a phenomenological account of a believer’s encounter with the terrorist attacks.
So David reasonably responds today (in an email, I now notice; this sporadic-narrowband lifestyle, uh, is not my favorite), “If we see pretty much the same thing, what difference does faith make?” One could answer that in a myriad of ways, most of which boil down to “none at all” or “all the difference in the world,” which (so far as I understand faith) gets it just right.
It’s easy to talk big about faith, to emphasize its significance and its life-transforming power, to underline the pivotal importance of walking by faith to stand aright with God, but (as I was saying a few days ago) talking about faith, inevitable though it is, constitutes part of the problem. Some folks can speak theological poetry, just as some can write love poetry, but when I try to tell Margaret how much I love her, I deploy a pretty standard repertoire of cliches and hackneyed asseverations of undying affection. She doesn’t love me for my love lyrics, but she knows from how I live with her that the tired old catchphrases mean something that they might not mean if a smooth-talking, good-looking dogmatician with raffish looks sidles up to her at a scholarly meeting and whispers them to her over cheap refreshments.
For that reason, I try not to talk big about faith very often. Indeed, I try to talk small about faith, not because it doesn’t matter, but because it would falsify the magnitude of faith’s importance if an ordinary guy like me starts mouthing pious platitudes.And faith is a small difference, a mustard-seed difference, and faith doesn’t begin by demanding that your whole world collapse and begin anew, different (though it ends that way). The only way I can sound plausible about faith would be for people to observe faith at work in me—and that’ an elusive, perhaps impossible nuance reliably to detect in an online persona. For all you know, I might be down here on Nantucket without my family, quaffing jeroboams of champagne, nibbling showgirls’ ears, pickpocketing from the over-casual upper crust, and generally pursuing every form of carnal self-indulgence.
So when I do answer David’s question here, I do so haltingly, quietly, in the hope that I don’t come across as suggesting that my words matter all that much. The difference that faith makes, in my life, has to do with hope and trust. Terrorism, and tyrannical ethnocide, and grotesquely self-serving politics: faith asserts that these do not touch hope, do not dim trust—because I hadn’t vested my hope in terrorists or elected officials or demagogues in the first place. When I see outrageous violence or other evils, I see people enacting a way of life (what we might call a tacit theology) whose premises warp from the only truth I know, the truth that we live here now not for ourselves of for those to whom we feel attachments, but for an Eternity and a Wisdom whose contours are revealed only in laboring for peace and harmony. So I wince and mourn when I see humans acting out of their allegiance to untruth, but I do not despair or lose faith. In a world made for concord and joy, vicious savagery and agony cannot prevail; we may align ourselves with that savagery and havoc, setting ourselves at odds with the telos of the world we inhabit, or we may align ourselves with that concord, and endeavor to live lives that testify to a Way different from the way of violence and destruction.
Which is still not an adequate answer, but I’m trading off too much vacation time and must now help Margaret with dinner. Again, please be patient.
Speaking only for myself, David and I saw mostly the same thing. Here’s my story.
Last year Margaret was still not fully weaned from AOL. She was checking her mail, reading the headlines, when she saw a half-inch-by-half-inch-sized image of the Two Towers with a splotch of fire. The headline suggested that a plane had collided with one of the World Trade Center Towers. We both figured that some confused charter pilot had fallen asleep at the wheel, and turned on PBS for details. Those details weren’t ample at first, so supposing that our impression was right, I went in to my office for the first day of academic advising. My advisee stopped in on time, and since he had not been listening to radio or watching TV that morning, he had no idea what was up. I told him, “Listen, Jay, you’ll want to remember this,” and turned up the radio. (Incidentally, we saw none of the chilling video footage at all that day—we don’t use our television for viewing broadcast stations, and we don’t have cable.)
After a few minutes it became clear that some of the details had come available, and we reckoned that it must be some kind of terrorist attack. At that moment, I got a phone call from Northwestern’s business school asking me to come across the street to take part in pastoral care to visiting students at their MBA program, some of whom had come to Evanston from Manhattan. At Northwestern, I saw some of the live coverageon CNN—but from a distance, as I didn’t want to elbow out any of the students who were watching.
What did I see? A purposeful act of mayhem by humans, the kind of furious, desperate act of violence that makes sense only to people whose lives have been so beclouded that they confuse good and evil. As I pointed out yesterday, people have been doing as much—and worse—as long as we remember. It’s the mark of humans’ inclination to ascertain for themselves that some causes are so important that other people must die, whether those causes be personal or political or religious. That’s one of the cornerstone reasons that pacifists decline to take part in coercive violence: Cain’s attack on Abel, the murderous violence that makes someone else’s life pay the price of my envy or moral outrage or thirst for justice, arrogates to human judgment (however apparently well-justified) the prerogative that belongs to God alone.
There’s a lot more to be said about this (of course), and I’ve only just opened to topic up at the most shallow level—but I’m blogging outside, and it’s beginning to rain. Be patient, y’all, for my superficiality, and I’ll try to say more tomorrow if I can.
It’s a question much older than last year, of course, and it seems awfully presumptuous for Christians to fret about 9/11 as though they had never heard of the Holocaust. Indeed, the effort to annihilate Judaiism bears an even more penetrating theological twist, since that persecution derived specifically from people’s identity as Israel, as God’s chosen people. Let’s not ask where God was last September until we have a decent response to the question of where God was at Buchenwald.
Which, of course, we won’t be able to do.
That’s why the wisest responses to catastrophic calamities take more of the texture of how we live than what words we say. Our words remain one-dimensional, our words are the same devices that clueless marketers use to whip us into frenzies of self-serving desire. Much as I respect the Rt. Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams, he missed a trick when he lamented that “all I had was words.” He had his respectful silence to offer, too—and the energies and integrity and commitments with which he enacts that silence.
Moral of the story: blog offline, then paste it into Blogger window. Or check ahead of time for broadband connections.
He seems like a nice guy.
Has he written any books?
Would he come speak to us?
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