The Wing-Beat

There may be more provocative statements in a recent Christianity Today article on Ayn Rand and “Randism,” but not by much:

Those who spend a lot of time and money on books and videos speculating about the antichrist can devote themselves to more immediate concerns. As I have explained elsewhere repeatedly, key candidates for the job have been running the American economy the past 30 years with our unwitting assistance.

That’s Gary Moore, “Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Great Recession,” online at:  http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/september/2.36.html?start=1

Moore’s article is part of a current wave of awareness of the kinds of conservatism and libertarianism (well, yes, and liberalism!) that not only run against Judeo-Christian teachings and ethics, but against the general welfare.  These speak, too, about the varieties of spiritual and functional disabilities in the churches–the dark underbelly of popular Americanism combined with Biblical ignorance or disregard, hostility to God, and selfishness.  Selfishness with respect to the neighbor whether next door or next day in our globalized world.

I tried to read Atlas Shrugged and Ship of Fools too young, in the sixties, and am surprised now (or should I be) that Dad brought them home from his job at Vandenburg along with None Dare Call It Treason and some John Birch Society titles.  I never talked with Dad about his reading, and I’m not sure how it influenced him–maybe it was just reading to kill time, borrowed from a co-worker at Convair or GDI.  I could not get into those books, and maybe it is just as well.   Whatever their influence on Dad, I think he turned in several ways from the past when he entered full-time Christian ministry in his late thirties.  I’ll never know how completely he changed, but he and Mom paid too much into the lives of others in tiny inner-city and rural churches, sometimes rebuffed and ill-used, but the evident truth of servanthood, even at times in brokenness and bad judgment serves vindication.  They received a lot of good in turn, too, but doesn’t that show the virtue of lasting communities where real caring and sacrifice are normal?  I don’t think Rand would understand.

Really, the title refers to two seemingly unrelated, provocative quotations this morning, from one of James V. Schall’s books. I recommend all of his books to you.  The first quote from a chapter called “On Spiritual and Intellectual Life” simply is striking, I think it holds its power even out of context:

On August 22, 1957, Flannery O’Connor wrote a letter about her cousin’s husband, a man who taught at Auburn University. The professor finally had come into the Church. Flannery O’Connor explained his conversion as follows: ‘We asked how he got interested and his answer was that the sermons were so horrible (when he had gone to Mass with his wife), he knew there must be something else there to make people come.’ The mystery of conversion remains not merely a question of successful rhetoric.

The second quotation follows a Chesterton comment on Thomas Aquinas, “It was his special spiritual thesis that there really are things; and not only the Thing; that the Many existed as well as the One.” (i.e., he was a realist who told others to “get real” in their thinking and believing).  So, then:

Not everybody needs to be an intellectual. Not everybody is a saint. Yet we must acknowledge that it is dangerous for ourselves, for the public order, when there are no philosophers. We suspect it is even more perilous for there to be no saints. When we wonder why, the answer returns to “receptivity”, to the realization that the highest things, which we rightfully seek because of what they are, are not for us to “make” or concoct. Aquinas wrote:

Nature is a prelude to grace. It is the abuse of science and philosophy which provokes statements against faith. These mistakes can be confuted by showing how impossible or unconvincing they are. Remember this, that as the truths of faith cannot be demonstratively proved, so the denial of them sometimes cannot be demonstratively disproved, though any lack of cogency can be exposed (Exposition, de Trinitate, 2, 3).

It is well to make note that Aquinas was referring to proof on the mystery of the Trinity, just for context’s sake. Schall has much else to say, about the compatibility of the spiritual life with that of the philosopher (contrary to the presuppositions of many a twentieth-century philosopher), the “liberty of the sons of God” in seeing that “what is is larger than what we are,” (contrary to the modern era’s rejection of “a God larger than itself.”) He writes that “This openness we possess to all being is our grace and our blessing, what we have accepted because we receive, not make, our own being. When wonder is addressed by grace, we are. This is the spiritual life given to intelligent beings.”

We receive, not make, our own being. I wonder at, and like, that statement. The truth of it is strength for me today. I hope it is for you also.

Schall quote from Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being, p. 347, in James V. Schall, “On Spiritual and Intellectual Life,” in Another Sort of Learning–Selected Contrary Essays on How to Finally Acquire an Education While Still in College or Anywhere Else: Containing Some Belated Advice about How to Employ Your Leisure Time When Ultimate Questions Remain Perplexing in Spite of Your Highest Earned Academic Degree, Together with Sundry Book Lists Nowhere Else in Captivity to Be Found (Ignatius Press, 1988), pp. 260-1; on Chesterton and Aquinas, pp. 267-8.

Buzzing swarms, snatched crisp;

Sing! Swoop! Swish! Wing syncs with beak,

Swallows’ dusk sortie.

-js

I have read lovely phrases recently; e.g., in Franz Rosenzweig’s writings on the “literary and human aspect of the Scriptures” and on translating the Scriptures (he collaborated with Martin Buber on a new OT translation in the 1920s); first, his reference to the painters’ depiction of St. Francis’ halo (Latin nimbus) as an “aureole of light”, second, his metaphor about the deep spirit of translation.  After noting the “history of translation” starting with the translator’s attempt to achieve the essential meaning of the text despite its spirit being lost in the process, he wrote,

 ”Then, one day, a miracle happens and the spirits of the two languages mate.  This does not strike like a bolt out of the blue.  The time for such a hieros gamos, for such a Holy Wedding, is not ripe until a receptive people reaches out toward the wing-beat of an alien masterpiece with its own yearning and its own utterance, and when its receptiveness is not longer based on curiosity, interest, desire for education, or even aesthetic pleasure, but has become an integral part of the people’s historical development. . . .”

[Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, 3rd ed., presented by Nahum N. Glatzer (Indianapolis:  Hackett, 1998), 257, 259.]  Emphasis mine.

I do still need to compare the passage with the original German, when I find a copy.  I wonder, did you think “oriole” when you saw the word aureole as I did?  Yes, they are related (aureolus=golden).  The passage above suggests far more than words, including Rosenzweig’s reverence for the Jewish Scriptures, what he called the “Only Testament.”  When I reflect on his conviction the Scriptures used words-beyond-words to reveal the proper relationship between God, Man, and World, I find his passage and its translation into English to have been inspired.

Some loved ones create delight by keeping their bird feeders stocked (with the avian-approved, “good stuff”) and waiting for the delight.  Hours of it come in flashes of cardinals, blue jays, orioles, finches, variegated blackbirds, black-capped chickadees, mourning dove, sparrows, and the seasonal many others.  They are delight on the wing, “wingborne” snatches of a common grace present in the general environment but focused at the feeders.  Yes, there are the fat squirrels and the after-dusk racoons, interlopers in something not intended for them, but who are they to turn down a good deal in that extension of common grace?  All are distinctive, and all take part in what is offered.

That wingborne delight comes from the givers’ provision.  The “good stuff” is not cheap, nor is it second-rate, the kind some birds turn away from–they understand stingy giving and simply choose something else.  The givers give for the sake of present and anticipated joy, liberally, and they get to share in grace redoubled.  It all comes from a life-attitude, not a singular, selfish desire just to enjoy the local wildlife, but to show they share somehow in a common life borne of a common provision.  It is so with the birds and is potentially true for all their relationships!  As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. 

The Father provides, and so do his children.  Grace is a gift received and given.  Providence is divine, but people pass it on to others.  It is not only spiritual or only material, mostly these are inseparable in the gift.  Either way or together, through the Spirit there is provision and there is delight.  It is the wingborne foundation for a life of joy. 

Our international culture lore and our use of domesticated birds abounds with the birds and the “wing-beat” of their work and significance:  storks bring children to parents; the hummingbirds–Mayan divinities incarnate–do they not sip the gods’ nectar?  The gospel dove descending upon the Son of Man (or in gospel songs on people as the Great Speckled Bird or the Snow White Dove); the swallows heralding spring at San Juan Capistrano; the American Bald Eagle, bird of peace first, then war; the albatross of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; the California Sespe condors–a weak flock though they are outsized fowl.  The pampered peafowl of India.  Moving closer to our hearts, and table habits, the Thanksgiving Turkey (the wild turkey does indeed fly, yes, Sir, Mr. Franklin of Philadelphia and the Pilgrims of Plymouth!), and, just as with the chicken-domesticators of the Indus Valley, 6,000 b.c.e., do we not all (well, most of us) partake of the yardbird, aided these days by the Arkansas Tysons and the Texas Pilgrims?  And eggs, too. 

About the wing-beat, in another entry.

Franz Rosenzweig still challenges the West eighty-plus years after his death.  But as a teen-aged student, his often pithy diary comments suggested the later direction of his thinking and word-speaking.  Consider for example November 17, 1906:

Words are tombstones.

Words are bridges over chasms. One usually walks across without looking down. If one looks down he is liable to feel giddy.

Words are also boards laid over a shaft, concealing it.

To be a philosopher is to open tombs, look into abysses, climb down shafts.

Word-speaking, word-pictures — such as we find in his Star of Redemption later.

[from Nahum N. Glatzer (presenter), Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998]

R. Scott Rodin’s latest is The Steward Leader: Transforming People, Organizations and Communities (Intervarsity, 2010).  Already I know the book demands a careful, deep reading (or, more accurately, like Scripture itself, the book demands a deep reading of the reader!).  I want to mention by way of quotation Rodin’s take on honesty and humility in leadership; these are suitable, pithy statements from his first chapter.

. . . when God uses any of us to lead effectively, it is nothing short of a miracle. When we place the complex and demanding role of a godly leader next to an honest self-awareness of our sinfulness and incompetence, we are thrown wholly on the grace of God and his faithfulness if we are ever to lead anyone anywhere. (20)

. . . great, godly leaders have always worked at that miraculous intersection where humility and faith meet the awesome presence and power of God’s Spirit–and the miracle of leadership happens. (21)

Lest anyone mistake his drift, godly leaders are first servants, always.

To read the Christian classics old or new is to wander eventually into the thought-realms of Augustine or Aquinas–that’s what happens regularly–and I suppose it was Merton, decades ago, with stronger doses of Lewis, that fed my appetite.  Presently A. G. Sertillanges (The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, trans. Mary Ryan from the French) is asking the hard questions and giving seasoned direction, though among others Aquinas stands invisible though perceptible with his hand on Sertillanges’ shoulder.   What about my work, your work?  Consider:

Everyone in life has his work; he must apply himself to it courageously and leave to others what Providence has reserved for others. We must keep from specialization as long as our aim is to become cultivated men, and, as far as concerns those to whom these pages are addressed, superior men; but we must specialize anew when we aim at being men with a function, and producing something useful.  In other words, we must understand everything, but in order to succeed in doing some one thing. (120)

Sertillanges assumed the role of the liberal arts for general, foundational preparation, but he recognized the role for each person to work toward aptitudes, to excel in  special vocation, and to so excel by a “probing of the depths” that all of knowledge and understanding is enhanced.  (119-120)

This hews closely to life in community and in the church: one may not be all things to all the people, but one certainly may strive to be the epitome, the best, in serving out of giftedness.  One’s singular service makes all the difference in the particular and in the whole.

The best thinkers often are best, too, at prayer wherein they gain the choicest insights.  The burden for a nation expressed in prayer and thought needs also to be fulfilled in the act.  So it was in the life of Eberhard Arnold (d. 1935) who led the Rhoen Bruderhof in Germany, and whose best-known work (the fifth German edition) was hidden, buried in metal boxes, from the Nazis before its publication in 1936.  This morning’s words seem apt and are thus presented here:

     Every great and deep experience must lead to the deepest self-examination.  Then, from within, we will be equal to the onslaught of unaccustomed events.  War is a challenge to inwardness in the sense of self-examination because the developments that lead up to war lead us further and further away from the roots of all strength.  The increasing prosperity of any country and all the work that is achieved are significant outer blessings for which we cannot be thankful enough.  But they lose their value entirely and turn immediately into a ruinous curse as soon as they begin, like a top-heavy load, to crush the inner life.  With precipitous speed, we are being deprived of the inner blessing of our human calling by the outer blessing of our rapid development.  Our public life has lost its human character; and inwardness has been damaged as a result of the rush and hurry of all the work there is to do on the one hand, and on the other hand by the luxury, excess, and feverishly accelerated pleasure-snatching that has become part of life.

     He has more to say, of course, to bring a consistent message home:  in the inner land of man’s soul where God dwells there is peace, strength, security.  And so forth.  You can read his entire book online, or download it for free at http://www.plough.com/ebooks/innerland.html

The 2010 banquet on February 22 was a high point for me, and that was satisfying, but it was another great event for East Texas Baptist University.  We honored Madeleine Segal Hall with the first annual Sam B. Hall Jr. Civic Service Award, and I was glad the Hall family could enjoy the gratification from that recognition.  The citizens of Marshall, Texas, may not recognize it, but they should be gratified as well — and for as long as the award is presented, the Hall example of civic and public engagement will be remembered.  So, we start looking for next year’s awardee.

Dr. J. David Holcomb, Associate Professor of History and Political Science from Mary Hardin Baylor in Belton gave us an outstanding lecture–relevant, evocative, and erudite.  Thanks, David, for exemplifying the highest standard as we want it for the Lectureship.

Over 100 local and regional community leaders, citizens, public servants, students, and faculty were present for our exciting evening at ETBU.  The fellowship was marvelous!  We look forward to next year’s event.