What I’m wondering about here is how our basic form of communication seems to be withdrawn from the person who suffers. We find that the only kinds of words that we can appropriately share with a suffering person are words that refer constantly to their suffering. We have a sense that to not do this would be to ignore the most significant fact about this person. But this means that in every conversation the sufferer is continually being marked out as different, separate, not part of the rest of us. No matter how much we are seeking to comfort, we are also fixing them in their pain, and excluding them from our blessing.
I’m also suggesting that our ordinary talk is perhaps under-recognised as our most comforting kind of talk. The ability to talk about ordinary things is an extra-ordinary act of trust in the simple goodness of God in sustaining and providing for our common life, and its an act of trust in the people we talk with, that we have shared interests, loves, and that we will stand and fall by them together. The suffering person has been wounded in this trust, and whenever trust is broken in one instance it threatens to overthrow all acts of trust. Which is why we are so keen to exclude the sufferer, to make him or her exceptional in some way. The question is, how do we talk to suffering people in a way that acknowledges their suffering but re-affirms that the promises of our community have not been withdrawn from them? The problem is intensified by the fact that the definitive word/acts that would re-affirm the promises of community cannot be spoken by us. We don’t have the strength to make that kind of guarantee. In fact, one of our most serious mistakes when confronted with a sufferer is to try.
What we need is to be able to say to the sufferer: “I see your suffering, I care about it. It is particular to you but it is also mine because the wound you have suffered to your trust also wounds mine. I also am a man of sorrows, the suffering I bear is particular to me, but my wound is also yours. I dwell in the eternal ‘yes’ of my Father, I have heard the word of affirmation whose writ runs right to the outer limits of hell. And I have believed it for us both. Would you like to come over for dinner?”

Only He can say it, but we can repeat it in him. Especially the bit about dinner.
For Christians, the word of affirmation spoken in the death and resurrection of Jesus enables us to gladly begin a new conversation, a ‘holy small talk’, which is the sharing of our common life in him. Through him we have a new foundation for our trust, a new hope, and thus a renewed ability to give ourselves in conversation. Actually, ‘holy small talk’ should be more properly thought of as ‘table talk’, the kind of words spoken over a shared meal. We can acknowledge suffering and still talk about our common joys. We can walk through the valley of the shadow and remark on the beauty of roses. We can be locked up in a Philippian gaol and singing choruses.

Image by the sea the sea

as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. (Isaiah 53:3 ESV)

I was chatting with a friend a month or two ago about the difficulty I find talking with people who are affected by deep suffering. I know I’m not at all unique in this experience. Our ordinary conversation consists in the transaction of ordinary objects, the giving and receiving of plans for the day, eyes on the weather, stories of times when this or that happening happened to me. It’s easy in our sillier moments to disparage these mundane exchanges, to say we long for deeper, more heartfelt talk, for a discourse of epiphanies. I have nothing to say against these desires other than that they are about as sustainable as my desire to eat cheese for every meal.

Don’t despise the days of small things, or the conversations about small things that such days hold forth. Small talk is the patois of our common existence, a currency that implicitly speaks of the promises that bind us together. If you could flip the words and examine their undersides, I’m sure you would find a King’s head printed. Even a passing nod in an alley way is a moment of recognition by which I come to know myself as present for you. The exchange of small change over a counter is a tacit sharing of our common loves: here is a coin for our love of family; here is one for our love of beauty; here is one because we like to sleep in on weekends.

Much of what is good in this life is ephemeral and apparently trivial, it derives its only substantiality from a word of promise. It has precisely the same reality as a piece of paper money: a fragile little note that circulates trust. It’s hard to talk to a person who’s suffering precisely because the implicit promises that underwrite our daily conversations appear to have been broken in their particular case. In this case, the difficulty we feel about small talk is a pointer toward the threatened failure of our Big Talk.

The presence of the sufferer feels like a silent word of judgement upon the inadequacy of our common life. We were not able to protect this one, we could not ward off the predation of death from him or her. A black light radiates from them relativising and trivialising our common ends and means, unleashing the possibilities of desperation that would unravel our bonds of trust. Whatever the particular character of a sufferer’s affliction, it has this universal character of threat. Is it any wonder that I can’t look him in the eye?

Suffering gives birth to the individual. It is in the context of wrong that a person comes to understand him or herself as set apart from the community. The sufferer marks the frontier beyond which the currency of trust does not circulate. The promises which are foundational to community have not been honoured here and the inevitable impulse toward exclusion is the communal attempt to preserve trust by preserving imagination. It’s hard to look a suffering person in the face when they are a living word to you that speaks of your powerlessness and a universe of broken promises.

What is needed is an affirmation that comes first of all to the sufferer, the word of explicit and personal comfort, but also, without taking our eyes from his face, through the sufferer to all those watching on: to the mourners, the inarticulate friends, the fearful bystanders, and even the perpetrator. An affirmation that the promises upon which we base our daily acts of trust will be honoured, and will be honoured here. Who could say that word? Who could say it and be believed? Who could say it in such a way that we could repeat it, believing it and being believed?

We lament the distressing individualism of our Western societies. What we should mourn is the nature and depth of the wound which gives birth to the individual. And from this understanding we might be able to begin to realise the conditions under which we can hope and pray once again for the birth of the social.

“Rejoice, barren one, who did not give birth; burst into song and shout, you who have not been in labor! For the children of the forsaken one will be more than the children of the married woman,” says the LORD. “Enlarge the site of your tent, and let your tent curtains be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your ropes, and drive your pegs deep. For you will spread out to the right and to the left, and your descendants will dispossess nations and inhabit the desolate cities. (Isaiah 54:1–3 HCSB)

Image by D Sharon Pruitt

I loved those times. I was a little hermit right throughout my early teenage years, actually. We lived about 7kms out of Tumut and we didn’t exactly have close neighbours, but I couldn’t wait to get up into those mountains, away from people. I had this deep, semi-articulate hatred for society.

On reflection it was probably an emotional defence against the feeling that our family were outsiders in our community. We were poor (my parents were faith-missioners at the time) but much more highly educated than our peers (both my parents had been to Uni in a town where most people worked at the Timber Mill). We stood out morally as Christians: we didn’t watch the same TV shows, speak the same vernacular, drink at the pub, play sport because it clashed with Church, etc. It was very difficult for a kid to understand or articulate this sense of not belonging. An adult, with his or her wider experience of the world, is able to draw upon the comforting knowledge of a world which includes spectacular human diversity and mentally invokes this as a buttress against the conformist pressures of a small community. An adult Christian is also able to orient him or herself to an unseen community of unrivalled temporal and physical extent which is well equipped with narratives designed precisely to fortify the isolated. A grown-up Christian might feel all alone but is comforted by the knowledge that he or she is really part of the something big. But a little baby offspring-of-Christians is sadly pink and helpless.

It really is so very worthwhile to send teenage Christians away on Christian youth camps. Emma and I have been up at CMS Summer School for the last week and heard a number of times how significant the youth programme has been for helping Christian teenagers grow into Christian adults. A friend who teaches at a large Sydney school even told us that he started bringing his family to Summer School after seeing the difference that it made to the lives of Christian kids at his school.

This week we are camping in Ulladulla. We’ve got a really pretty spot on the headland looking out over Ulladulla harbour. The hammock is set, books are being read, there will be snorkelling.
Oh yeah, It’s in a Caravan Park…

We’re still different. But now I know that it’s not so much about me not belonging in this society, as us belonging to a different one.

Tom Waits – “Chocolate Jesus” Live on David Letterman from Anti Records on Vimeo.

In the armpit of a tree
between striking chords of grass
everything chasing
nothing
everybody chasing
breaking wind to interrupt
the symphony of airconditioners

I think he left a note somewhere
Waiting on the obverse of a kite.

Imaginatively exploring questions of faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism – and intersections thereof – A Serious Man is the new film from Academy Award-winning writer/directors Joel & Ethan Coen.

A Serious Man is the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik (Tony Award nominee Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. Larry’s unemployable brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job.

While his wife and Sy Ableman blithely make new domestic arrangements, and his brother becomes more and more of a burden, an anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry’s chances for tenure at the university. Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. Plus, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person – a mensch – a serious man?

Interestingly, a number of people who have seen the film have picked up parallels between Larry’s search for answers and the trials of the biblical Job. This would make sense to me, the Coen brothers have a habit of choosing texts to interact with in their films (occasionally they tell you: Homer’s Odyssey – O Brother, Where Art Thou?; sometimes you just have to think about it: Camus’ The Outsider – The Man Who Wasn’t There; and sometimes, well… Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men – No Country for Old Men.
But there is more to Job than just a handy textual basis for film exploration. The story of Job resonates with one of the key themes in the Coen brothers’ work – the problem/possibility of theodicy. The Coen brothers wrestle with a world in which apparently inexplicably evil things happen: a dude can pee on your rug, or your mate Donnie can get killed by Nihilists, who knows? It can be funny, as in The Big Lebowski, or terrifyingly bleak, as in No Country for Old Men. Always the disturbing question is, why? The humour, the tension, the tragedy, comes from people who keep asking this question in a world that refuses to answer. There is something strikingly powerful and completely absurd about the human quest for sense.
But ultimately, the only place to direct those questions is toward God, and not any kind of god – only the kind of God that Jews and Christian point to could hold out the possibility of answers. In fact, most polytheistic religions tend to create hierarchies of gods, or at least hierarchies of being, under the pressure of these dreadful questions. Many, many of the idols we have manufactured were forged under the hammer blows of this particular interrogation. In theological jargon it’s called the ‘problem of theodicy’. It is the point at which our questions inevitably becomes prayers, even if the form of prayer involves screaming in the darkness and wondering if you’ll hear an echo.

Christian philosophers have plied the world with arguments for the existence of God since before the World really thought it was a question. But the inescapable question for God is not, ‘are you there?’ But, ‘what on earth are you doing?’. Sometimes our experience of evil can be so destructive, so awful, that the only possible thing we can imagine saying to God is, ‘how dare you? How dare you BE in the light of this…’ Not, ‘can God’s existence be proven?’ But, ‘can God’s existence be justified?’ The people who wrote the Bible thought about that question. A Lot.

“But now apart from the law the righteousness of God (which is attested by the law and the prophets) has been disclosed – namely, the righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ for all who believe.” (Romans 3:21-22 NET)

On a different note: Zondervan has published a book about the theology of the Coen brothers. It’s called The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers.
Awesome.

Having said that, I can’t imagine that Wolf Hall was an easy novel to write. On the contrary, it is an incredibly and painstakingly well-researched recreation of an historical character. The novel follows the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, the organisational and legal genius behind Henry VIII’s civil and ecclesiastical reforms. (As a side note, there are more Thomases in Wolf Hall than you could reasonably swing a sword at – but that is the fault of Tudor England, not Hilary Mantel. Who would have thought that so many men named ‘Thomas’ would be involved in shaping modern Anglophone society)
Tudor Britain was a society gripped by a series of transformations within which the lineaments of our contemporary world began to take shape. It is the lives and loves of some of the men and women in these pages that effected a legacy of change to which our current global culture continues to be heir. Wolf Hall is a chance to meet these characters and dwell with them in the daily weave of life. It’s a rich experience. You shouldn’t for a moment expect a hagiography though. Mantel leaves us in no doubt that Cromwell was both a ‘Bible Man’ and also a ruthless political operator. Something of a cross between Tony Soprano and the Anglican Church League (I leave you to decide which is which).

Wolf Hall is not just an historical novel, it is a novel about history. It is about the ways in which our paths are directed by choices other people made, the way our lives are intertwined with characters who walked ahead, sometimes out of sight, but whose presence still vibrates in the air as we pass. Mantel achieves this through a series of very daring effects: she situates the reader on the shoulder of Cromwell, not giving us a first person narrative, but free access to his thoughts and feelings. For a while we know Thomas, we live closer to him, than even his beloved wife. It is the most intimate form of ‘indwelling’. This is an opportunity to experience a knowledge of the world given through transmissible experiences rather than directly collated our own nervous encounters. Wolf Hall takes fiction seriously.

But perhaps too seriously? Wolf Hall will never be accused of insulting the reader’s intelligence. I’ve been studying and reading books about this period of history for a few years now, and I honestly think Mantel assumes more Tudor history than she communicates. But this is also the effect which makes Wolf Hall brilliant. Mantel has consciously written a novel in which the tension that drives the narrative doesn’t come from the narrative itself, but what the reader will bring to the narrative.
The secret of Wolf Hall lies in what the book isn’t about: Wolf Hall.

Francis Bacon is widely regarded as the Father of modern empirical science. A courtier in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, Bacon was best known in his own time as a lawyer and jurist. People have often observed that his contribution to the development of modern scientific method came through the application of forms of legal reasoning to natural philosophy. Baconian scientific method – the method of empirical experimentation – is a way to put the World on trial. The rhetorical devices that Bacon employed to sell his vision are instructive. Bacon conceived of Nature as his coy mistress: a lady who could be more or less willing to give up her secrets. The Baconian scientist would put her to The Question, peeling back the layers, and even, if necessary, putting her on the Rack (his image, not mine).
(Has anyone considered that maybe this is the reason why Scientists have never been good with the ladies?)

You know, sometimes when sleep is scant, it can feel like we are wrestling with the books, torturing the secrets out of recalcitrant ancient languages, putting obfuscating theologians to The Question, conducting our inquisition of the tradition.

But even if essaying is tortuous, should you let it make you a torturer?

(For more on Francis Bacon there is a brilliant ‘In Our Time’ podcast here)

The Essay is a test put to the student: a challenge to demonstrate mastery of concepts and communication. But within the network of relationships that make up a learning environment, an essay is very rarely ‘just a test’. It is a Trial, an Ordeal – in the old fashioned ‘dunkin’ witches’ sense – something which easily bleeds over the edge of assessing aptitude and becomes intimately bound into revealing identity. Obviously, this is not always the case, and not always the case for every student.
But look at the levels of anxiety that are associated with essays and exams, think about the structures of our ‘meritocratic’ society, our agent-oriented ethical systems, the functionalisation of human relations to each other, the commodification of the world, and tell me that it’s not true.

The Essay is the particular sphere through which a student can be justified by works. The Instituted Order is called upon to examine his or her effort and the extent to which he or she has co-operated with the means of learning (lectures, etc), but ultimately grading must be done against an objective standard and a mark must be given. There are rumours of Academic Saints, those who scored 100% (usually in the more ascetic disciplines like Language), but the taint of sin upon human toil suggests that this must be rare. Perhaps praying for their assistance will bring some relief but, honestly, most of us are just going to have to settle for time in purgatory.

By the time anyone gets to studying a second degree (like most theological students), they have survived at least 16 years of a graceless education system. Particularly if a student is academically gifted (and not particularly otherwise) then he or she has faced years of reinforcing behaviour that shapes them to live by the approval and acceptance of the gods of learning.
It is a most unevangelical form of education.

Is it any wonder that our theological colleges are full of people who are more deeply trained to seek a secure foundation for identity in results rather than relationships?