Secularism
A modern secularist quite often accepts the idea of God. What, however, he emphatically negates is precisely the sacramentality of man and world.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
The prophet Stanley speaks
Atheism slips into the church where God really does not matter, as we go about building bigger and better congregations (church administration), confirming people’s self-esteem (worship), enabling people to adjust to their anxieties brought on by their materialism (pastoral care), and making Christ a worthy subject for poetic reflection (preaching). At every turn the church must ask itself, Does it really make any difference, in our life together, in what we do, that in Jesus Christ God is reconciling the world to himself?
Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens
Undermining Early Power
Israel seems to be the first instance in which the forgiveness of debt and the practice of Sabbatarian rest – for people, land, and animals, came to be written into the very fabric of life and given divine sanction. And, even in the non-Sabbath years, there was a prohibition against harvesting an entire field. A portion had to be left standing so that the poor could “glean” the fields for their needs. Maximum efficiency was forbidden. This way of life was not an effort to solidify earthly power, but to undermine it with a radical understanding of the purpose of human existence.
Doing the next thing
I was very struck as a young man reading the fiction of Iris Murdoch, particularly her novel “The Bell.” At the end of that, you’re faced with a chapter about the experience of somebody who has been intensely involved in religious activity and has just had an absolutely traumatic shock to everything that he believes in and everything he holds dear.
He’s living next door to a convent, and all he can do is to go to Mass every morning. And I thought, “Yes, I see what’s going on there. He’s doing the next thing.” He’s treading water, you might say, but also he knows something can be done — not to keep the darkness at bay but to keep breathing, to keep moving, to keep open to something. I think that sense of wanting to keep open to something is probably quite near the center of what I believe about a spiritual life. You don’t pray or meditate or contemplate in order to get results, exactly.
Rowan Williams with Peter Wehner.
More:
I discovered Dostoyevsky as a teenager and read him fairly intensely as a student and as a graduate student. What struck me most was two things. One is he’s very good at depicting characters who are holy, who are in some sense transparent to the divine and also letting you see that they’re not going to have all the answers. They’re going to be the window that lets the light in. And I thought, “That tells me something about holiness. Don’t look for the leader, the controller, the problem solver. Look for where the light gets in.” In Leonard Cohen’s famous image, the persons who are part of the crack that lets the light in.
Hiding God’s word in our hearts
“Thy word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against Thee” (Ps. 119:11) does not, I think, mean “I’ve memorized a lot of proof-texts for my tribe’s view of things.” I even suspect that someone with very few proof-texts on the tip of their tongue may have more of God’s word hidden in their heart than, say, Jack Van Impe.
New Measures then, Standard Operating Procedure now
The most prominent evangelist of the [Second Great Awakening] was Charles Finney. Often painted as a religious salesman and professional revivalist, Finney believed that success as an evangelist was measured by the number of conversions one could elicit. When accused of using emotional manipulation to push people toward accepting Christ, Finney responded by saying,
“The results justify my methods. Thousands upon thousands of converts prove my methods are sound.”
What methods exactly did Finney utilize? In his evangelistic crusade, Finney implemented what he called the New Measures, which can more accurately be described as mood management. Finney often used hymns to emotionally prepare audiences for a religious experience, creating an atmosphere that was conducive to conversions. As the genesis of today’s altar call, Finney called unsaved men to come sit at the mourner’s bench, or mercy seat, in front of the crowd and receive a special prayer for salvation. Finney popularized the mourner’s bench, which led to it appearing more often in different churches. From the pulpit, Finney also occasionally called out non-Christians by name, increasing the pressure on them to make a conversion to Christianity. According to Finney, conversions would certainly occur if evangelists planned, advertised, utilized the emotional impact of music, and strategically managed emotions.
In many ways, it could be argued that modern evangelical megachurches operate in the same way as Finney’s SGA meetings.
Many megachurches seem to ascribe to Finney’s New Measures, using emotional music, lighting programs, and foggy haze to create an emotional atmosphere. Modern megachurch pastors rarely call out non-believers by name, but altar calls are common as an emotional culmination for a worship service.
Isaac Cullum, Megachurches: A Striking Resemblance to the Second Great Awakening? – Juicy Ecumenism (bold added).
I cannot vouch for altar calls being common in megachurches, but coincidentally, these techniques are another instance of the “man behind the curtain” I described last week.
On leaving a church
Yesterday I saw a man in his late thirties who recognized me, and approached to say he is a fellow convert to Orthodox Christianity. I asked him for his story. He said he was raised in a Protestant church (he didn’t specify which kind), but it left him cold. It was cold, formal, and devoid of any passion for the faith. He drifted away.
“When I attended my first Divine Liturgy, it was — I don’t know how to describe it,” he said, with tears coming to his eyes. “This was ten years ago, and I still get shivers. I didn’t understand the Old Church Slavonic language, but it didn’t matter. It was like I didn’t have to think of anything — God was so present.”
I mentioned to him a story of mine familiar to you readers: that during Covid, we began to see at my old parish an influx of younger people — married couples and single men, most of them from Evangelical megachurch backgrounds. They all had more or less the same stories: that Covid shook them to the core about the fragility of our civilization, and they concluded that their normie middle-class suburban churches were not forming them as Christians with the kind of spiritual depth that would allow them to endure a severe social crisis. They showed up seeking more.
He then said something profound: “In the old days, people left their churches because they didn’t believe in God. Now they leave them because they do.”
Rod Dreher (who I’m trying again after a sabbatical)
The guy can write every day more than I’m willing to read every day. I’ve got to learn to skim better.
Poetic Theodicy
The Knockdown Question
Why does God not spare the innocent?
The answer to that is not in
the same world as the question
so you would shrink from me
in terror if I could answer it.
(Les Murray, New Selected Poems)
Philistines
[T]rue Philistines are not people who are incapable of recognising beauty; they recognise it all too well; they detect its presence anywhere, immediately, and with a flair as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete—but for them, it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness. Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily assert themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresent rule. In every department of human endeavour, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity. If this is true in the realm of aesthetics, it is even more true in the world of ethics. More than artistic beauty, moral beauty seems to exasperate our sorry species. The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.
Simon Leys, “An Empire of Ugliness,” which I gather is one essay in The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (via Brad East)
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 