The Wing-Beat

In her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard tells about life experiences on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest.  She related the story of her conversation with a painter friend; asked how his work was going, Paul Glenn told another story.  He reminisced about Ferrar Burn, a man long dead, who had rowed his eight-foot skiff out one evening into the strait to salvage a stray Alaskan cedar log–the locals watched for these logs so prized as building material.  With a towline on the log, Burn rowed toward his beach, but the swift outbound tide swept his skiff and the log miles down the channel from evening until the tide reversed in the early morning.  During the night hours, in the northern twilight, Burn kept rowing until the swift, inbound tide carried him and the log home, to his own beach.  Glenn’s response merits reflection:

‘You asked how my work is going,’ he said.  ‘That’s how it’s going.  The current’s got me.  Feels like I’m about in the middle of the channel now.  I just keep at it.  I just keep hoping the tide will turn and bring me in.’  (p 88)

Two points here.  One, that your life’s work can feel that way.  You’re either rowing against the tide, or with it, but it’s not your call.  Two, that life is like a story within a story.  No surprise there, but your — my –  faith story needs to be understood rightly:  I tend to think God’s sovereign place and work is a story within my own, but that’s reversed from the greater truth.  My story can only be, at last, a story within God’s story.  You and I need to know our places and roles.  Like Burn in his skiff, our role is to keep rowing, to keep relying on the rule of the tide.

Quotation from Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, Harper Perennial, 1989.

Copyright 2012 by Jerry Summers.

When I think about the paradise called Eden, I am torn between two visions (just two, but not that there are no more possibilities).  The first vision, much like the Persian paradeizia or walled garden, is a place of cooling shade and breezes in a desert or semi-desert.  Such a place is indeed a delight in the predawn or early dawn and later in the evening, and at the least a welcome break during the heat of the day.  The second vision suggests a humid, subtropical or tropical, verdant jungle where the heat of the day still is quite comfortable and the evening and morning will balance rising humidity with coolness.

This is not what I find in East Texas right now, here, in the seam between summer’s hottest period and the decisive cooling trend that is still to come, and especially when the days are humid and still or misty and rainy like today.  It is as if the seasons have almost agreed on a boundary between themselves, and they cannot decide when and where to mark it.  So it is a transition, yes, that is what we say.   The astronomical summer season ends  in just nine days by the calendar, but we do not dare to hope that its heat will leave us quickly, though we will still feel it during many days in October and perhaps even November.  Autumn will enter gloriously and at a time  not of our choosing.  This year, with our late summer rains, the browning and dying are to be a bit late, following surely the later greening that surprised us, that conflicted with our expectations of August and September.

In his book, Real Presences, George Steiner asserts a “wager on transcendence.”  He is referring to

“the wager on the meaning of meaning, on the potential of insight and response when one human voice addresses another, when we come face to face with the text and work of art or music, which is to say when we encounter the other in its condition of freedom, is a wager on transcendence.” (4)

He argues for that which is real or substantiated when people use language or create forms, when in making meaning they arrive at “meaningfulness.”  Now, all that is possible, Steiner argues, because God is present and is the transcendent reality that makes it possible for us to truly create art and to communicate.

We are talking about interpretation or hermeneutics in class.  Steiner writes that hermeneutics defines “the enactment of answerable understanding, of active apprehension.”  We may have to unpack that a bit in class . . . .

He also mentions three “principal senses” of interpretation:

An interpreter is:

• a decipherer and communicator of meanings;
• a translator between languages, between cultures and between performative conventions;
• in essence, an executant, one who “acts out” the material before him so as to give it intelligible life.

An actor interprets Agamemnon or Ophelia.  A dancer interprets Balanchine’s choreography.  A violinist a Bach partita.  In each of these instances, interpretation is understanding in action; it is the immediacy of translation. (8)

Interpretive response under pressure of enactment I shall, using a dated word, call answerability.  The authentic experience of understanding, when we are spoken to by another human being or by a poem, is one of responding responsibly.  We are answerable to the text, to the work of art, to the musical offering, in a very specific sense, at once moral, spiritual and psychological.  (8)

In his essay on “Goethe (there’s that Grrr-tuh again), the First Father of the Third Age of the Church,” Matthew del Nevo speaks about the “whole Kingdom of God” as “a raising up, a transfiguration and glorification of humanity and the world.” This is accomplished through being lost in love, and in hope: “Hope lifts us.  This is exactly what the Gospel is supposed to do, and what the Church is supposed to do for the poor:  lift them up, raise mankind.”

Del Nevo introduces lines from Goethe’s Urworte. Orphisch.  about hope:  ”This poem captures the spiritual nature of hope.  We are caught in the traps of necessity, chance, destiny, and eros, but there is a way out.  We are free if we have hope.  Hope lifts us.”  And so, Goethe:

Let these impediments, these walls of iron [of Ananke]

Stand in their wonted rocklike endurance:

But the repulsive gate shall be unlocked!

One being [hope] moves, light and untrammelled,

through curtains of clouds, rain and fog,

Lifting us up, giving us wings:

You know her well, she swarms through all zones,

And one beat of her wings leaves behind us eons.

It is this Goethe that so inspired Franz Rosenzweig, though FR’s German reading surely must have surpassed this particular English translation. I am re-thinking Goethe’s Christian-ness, persuaded to grapple with this by del Nevo’s stunning arguments that focus on the assertion of a link between Goethean thinking and Pentecostalism, and, quoting Gianni Vattimo, “secularity as the authentic destiny of Christianity.”  There are references to the writings of Berdyaev and to the religionless Christianity of Bonhoeffer.  Del Novo makes the challenging assertion,

Pentecostalism, for all its theological roots in the holiness movement, and for all its theological vagaries and reactions, is the Christianity of a secular world.  And for those in a part of the world that is not secularized (and in a world that is fully mapped, where would that really be?), Pentecostalism will pull new believers out of their old beliefs, in the name of Jesus, and dispel all the old gods, witches, and demons.  Christ will break the chains.  The person set free, though, will be a more secular person, rather than, as one might expect, a more somehow religious person.

Here I see connections between Rosenzweig, Bonhoeffer, and so much that has been happening in “post-modern” Christianity, and what del Novo refers to as “the philosophy of redemptive speech thinking,” Rosenzweig’s “the new thinking.”  Here is the point:  wherever and whenever Christ-followers are doing the work he calls them to do, they are living and working within a set of relationships that resists all philosophical, theological, metaphysical and political critique–the work is as fundamental as the varieties of human needs yet it applies just as much to education and cultural development.  It comes from the Spirit of God and produces good things for people.  It is, in fact, a principle of incarnation and of restoration to the Creator’s intention.  So, Bonhoeffer (Nachfolge, 221):

Er ist den Menschen gleich geworden, damit sie ihm gleich seien.

He became like humanity, that they should be like him.

Bonhoeffer follows with the biblical teaching on the Cross and Trinitarian communion-in-life.  There one finds himself or herself while forgetting self; carrying the new image one looks not to his or her own life, but “only upon him whom he or she follows,” who then as one who follows after Christ also imitates God (as a beloved child; Ephesians 5:1; Nachfolge, 224).  The very assertion means so much for us all.

Citations except for Bonhoeffer from:  Matthew del Nevo, “Goethe, the First Father of the Third Age of the Church,” in Wayne Cristaudo and Frances Huessy, eds., The Cross and the Star: The Post-Nietzschean Christian and Jewish Thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 243-275.

Whom have I in heaven but Thee?  And there is none upon the earth that I desire beside Thee.  My flesh and my heart may fail; but God is the rocky summit of my heart and my portion (secure place of life and refuge–home place).  For, behold, they that are far from Thee will perish; Thou has destroyed all those who are unfaithful to thee (a-whoring, adulterous, looking for lesser substitutes, entrusting one’s life and passions to anything or anyone else). But drawing near to God is good to me; I have made Adonoi The Lord Hashem The Name my refuge, that I may declare all Thy deeds.

What is it like to be distinctly, securely a member of God’s people?

(With restricted liberty and faint apology to translators of the NET Bible, the Orthodox Jewish Bible, and the NASB.)

So pithy, this student statement of Franz Rosenzweig about his history professor, Friedrich Meinecke, at Freiburg in 1908:  ”He treats history as though it were a Platonic dialogue, not murder and manslaughter.”

Rosenzweig, citizen of the militant Kaisersreich, the German Empire, knew about war as a contemporary fact.  The quotation shows his frame of mind about war–it was no abstraction to him.  Before long he had the opportunity to serve the state during the Balkan Wars and the Great War, though not in direct combat.  His opinion of war did not improve, and war sharpened his focus on the ultimate things.

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) continues to challenge and engage me.  So, too, his mentor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), the steel to Rosenzweig’s flint.  They escort me roughly out of the easy seats onto the stone seats of a contentious forum; there they bid me listen until I squirm, my butt on the hard limestone, my brain on their hard arguments.

Yet this I want to do, it’s worth the effort and discomfort.  Rosenzweig was the skeptical Jew converted to his own people’s religion; Rosenstock the acculturated Jew who was baptized a Christian in his teens, and who eviscerated Rosenzweig’s sloppy thinking about reality, forcing him to dare to face God.

Right now I am working through Judaism Despite Christianity and find in Rosenstock’s letter to Cynthia Harris in 1943 many stunning comments making a unified argument that prayer is an absolute necessity–and his definition of prayer encompasses the entire life of a people.  Nineteenth-century biblical scholars did not represent Jewish history accurately or fairly.  The missed the “No” of the Jews to idols–Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and God’s three “No’s”:  the Fall, the Great Flood, and the Exodus.  “‘Revelation’ is a knowledge of God’s will, after his ‘No’ to our will has become known.” (181)  But the “No” was necessary if Israel was to recognize “herself as God’s servant, merely a man in the face of God’s majesty.”  (181)  This is not just strong stuff, it is the basic stuff.  It undergirds everything else Rosenstock wrote in the letter to Cynthia Harris in 1943.

One example will be enough:

The Germans all knew in 1918 that the World War had been lost deservedly.  Faith accepted the defeat.  But it takes faith in God to accept defeat fully.  If there be no divine will, then our will must reign supreme.  Naturally the whisperers came–those all-knowing ones who cannot be named but who are always being quoted–those who said, “It was a stab in the back,” “It was this or that,” “It was unnecessary,” etc.  The reaction was inevitable:  “We shall undo the defeat.”  Whispering is unauthorized speech.  The devil is any person who does not wish to be quoted; and so he never attains the rank of a person.  For a person accepts God’s judgement over what he has said or done.  Thus can he come to know the truth.  The devil never receives his verdict because he whispers only and never speaks truly and confidently.

. . . The people who had believed only in science, and who could not distinguish between spell-binding magic and prayer, now fell for the stump speakers.

Rosenstock summarizes the German history of persecution and repression against Lutherans (after 1825) and Catholics (certainly after 1871) and identifies Hitler as “the third attempt to free the German nation from any check on its nationalistic conscience.  This time, the triangle Luther-Rome-Israel is attacked foremost at the Jewish corner.  Also, the attack is far more violent than the two former.”  The furor Teutonicus runs a system of hatred, and there are other arguments to illustrate, but I will finish this statement with a few more of Rosenstock’s sentences:

Hitler hates everything started by the Jews, including democracy and the Freemasons.  Why?  They all know of the insertion of God’s “No” into history as a vital element.  But a spellbinder must be sure that his spell will work under all circumstances.  This prevents him from admitting God’s “No” to the fabric of history.

Hitler’s will and his god’s will are nauseatingly one.  The great art of speech has made Hitler crazy.  Since he has the privilege of speaking, of inflaming the masses, he spellbinds.  And so he hovers as a ghost from the abyss of paganism, a ghost of the days before God touched Israel’s lips with his fiery coal:  ”My will, O mortal, not thine, be done.”

The specific character of biblical prayer explains the uniqueness of the Bible.  We can’t forget the Bible because the divine “No” was created, in our speech, during those thousand years of Jewish prayer.  And all the other departments of our linguistic faculty rest on this clear distinction between prayer, on the one side, and science, poetry, fiction, and law, on the other.  If we do not pray with Israel, we cannot retain our Greek mathematics or our Roman law.  This will sound arbitrary or exaggerated at first reading.  But it is simple truth. (183)

Rosenstock goes on to illustrate examples that bind ancient and modern paganisms together while they show biblical prayer (faith, religion, core of revelation) to be absolutely distinct from them.  It is the distinction and emphasis that energized the philosophical, faithful thinking and dialogue that Rosenstock and Rosenzweig conducted over many years — theirs was an astonishing interchange between Christian and Jew; it started a century ago and lasted until Rosenzweig died.  Rosenstock lived to write voluminously on themes that grew out of scholarship as — I would like to say this —  a form of prayer.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, letter to Cynthia Harris (in 1943 a freshman at Radcliffe College): “Hitler and Israel, or On Prayer,” first published in The Journal of Religion (University of Chicago Press, April 1945).  Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ed., Judaism Despite Christianity:  The 1916 Wartime Correspondence between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (with a new  foreword by Paul Mendes-Flohr, a new preface by Harold Stahmer, and a new chronology by Michael Gormann-Thelen (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Yes, Barton is forceful.  He saws heavily on the “Judeo-Christian principles of our Founding Fathers,” and in that he is right, but less so because he ignores the equally, perhaps more important founding principles based in Enlightenment rationality and the then truly liberal economic and political principles (having no king is radical as is equality of all before the law) that undergird our Constitution.  And no, I do not discount but do recognize the strong influence of Christianity that helped to shape those principles, as for example in Puritanism–yes, Puritanism (John Locke was a Puritan, for one)!  And yes, Jefferson and Madison and other leading Fathers saw reality both through the Enlightenment rationalist lens that recognized either a Deistic God (Jefferson, Franklin) or the God of orthodox theism and trinitarianism (Washington may be there, for example, but he is truly hard to gauge as to his churchmanship). That is different from the contemporary lens through which many leaders, even some Christian leaders and scholars see reality, that is, through a modern, naturalistic lens, dismissive of the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition. Thankfully, many do not. Most do not see sharply enough the implications of their own fuzzy thinking about the relationship between public life and policy and biblical faith.  Beyond that, to say that America is a Christian nation is a statement that always requires explanation:  does that mean cultural Christianity, or does it refer to a vibrant biblical, orthodox (that is “right teaching”) Christianity that dominates the thought life, moral and ethical way of life, and our relationships domestic and international?  How do most Americans live?  There’s quite a range, there!  I wonder whether Barton is to the point of admitting that despite the Judeo-Christian influences on our Constitution and civic life in the Revolutionary Period, the Founding Fathers decided it was best that our founding documents and government constitute a secular establishment and that the government would have no sway over religion in the nation.  That would be the citizens’ responsibility, individually and corporately, and initially that was left to the states.  The First Amendment religious liberty and free exercise clauses were the product of the citizens holding out for protection from the interference of government in religious matters.  I think knowing the distinction would help to solve confusion about whether America is a “Christian nation.”  If nation refers to the society, even there we have plenty of evidence to the contrary, and that kind of evidence has always been present to varying degrees (major instance–institutionalized slavery); if it refers to majority opinion or identification, then even there I have some questions–it seems that so many professing Christians do not understand their responsibilities and obligations actually to live as Christians; many actually live contrary to Christian principles and convictions.  Christianity is divorced from actual lifestyle and commitments. Perhaps our president is in that camp; uncomfortable as it is, there are many who profess Christianity whose values and political identification are indeed “liberal” in that sense–that is, modernist, naturalistic, pragmatic, anti-faith and unevenly tolerant in practice.

There is a Dear One who lives in Washington D.C. and who would move back to Texas but for a few things, two of them being “Texas has tornadoes” and “D.C. has lots to offer.”  True, very true.

Surely there are many delights for folk who live inside the Beltway.  But one of them, certainly, is simply that there are many delights Beyond the Beltway, in many most sociable and historic locales, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, just to start a list, one rather long as you know.

Far from the Beltway, perhaps far enough to gain treasured perspective about matters within and without the fabled, enchanted, fantastical Beltway, lies the Great State of Texas.  As Mr. Tubb used to sing, “There’s a Little Bit of Everything in Texas.”  Yes, more and more, I say, a little bit of everything for most everyone. Again, as Ernest Tubb put it, ” . . . and a little bit of Texas in me!”

And, yes, even tornadoes, twisters, cyclones, what have you.  But is there one for everyone?  I think not; no, not enough tornadoes for everyone.  Why, a fella or a gal might live to be ninety-nine in Texas and never see, or hear, a tornado, at least not “up close and personal” as some like to say.  It’s true most folk want to avoid that type of encounter.

The topic brings to memory a story about a Kansas girl swooshed up in a tornado to the land of Oz.  Oz was L. Frank Baum’s fantasiacal, allegorical double for the Good ‘Ol U.S.A., and the Emerald City for Washington, D.C., the enchanted capital where the Yellow Brick Road ended.  I refrain from recapitulating the adventures of Dorothy and her companions in Oz, and her disenchantment upon learning that the Wizard of Oz was just a man like any other.  Baum’s Wizard stood in for the Gilded Age American presidents, according to one interpretation.  I agree with it.

We have a love-hate relationship with our capital and the doings in the Capitol chambers, the presidential and congressional politics, and the profound weight of bureaucracy in service to our Republic.  Asked how much of the bureaucracy we would like to keep, we would have to admit that much of it seems to meet more than a few of our needs. And asked whether we would do away with our government, we might pause long enough to ask how we could replace it. We will settle for improvements.  And we will accept that our government is as humanly limited as any other institution, it’s just bigger.

From the founding of our republic, indeed before that, presidents, congressmen, civil servants, students, interns and others have come to the point in life’s journey when they know it is time to “go home,” to “come home.”  Their work is done, able to do no more, they leave what is yet to be done to others.

Dorothy, once delivered to OZ by tornado, finds her way home (after having helped others out in her sweet, Kansasy-American way) by clicking her silver shoes together (in Baum’s reference to the Silver Crusade of the late 180os).  In the cinematic version, her heart’s deepest desire does the real work while she clicks the heels of her ruby red slippers together; no balloon ride for her!  She wakens as from a dream and finds herself at home, among her loved ones.

Such is the allure of the Emerald City, but no match for the allure of home.  It cannot replace the thousands of other places that Americans call “home.” Yes, Dear One, Jen, there’s no place like home.  Home is where one’s “people” are.  That being so, the real question becomes who one’s people are, and the where can become secondary.  That’s more the truth among us Americans wherever we land in the world.  Or, as is the case, wherever  the peoples of the world land among us!  At the end of it all, we are all sojourners in far countries.  We may not actually be far from home, for even our home can be for someone else a foreign land, a far country.

In reflection on Jim and Cathy’s experiences lately, I have been reminded that our own communities hold and keep great distances between individuals.  Economic status, religious groupings, social identity, ethnicity, in-group traditions and settled attitudes make it seem as though our neighbors live great distances apart from us, and we from them.  There are all kinds of distances. Some of them we should be impatient to do away with; it should not be that way among all us locals.  These kinds of things make it hard to feel right at home.  What could be more important than that?

Traditional Chinese philosophy/religion assumes a continuity between the world and the above-world, between nature and the supernatural, between earth and heaven.  This appears in Confucianism and Daoism, especially in their blending.  That Chinese tradition is “secular” as we would say yet there is a difference:  the object is to achieve or accept harmony between heaven and earth, “nature” as the fundamental order of things and the conduct of life, governance and relationships in collective society.  The Chinese tradition carries insights into basic ethical and moral rules familiar in various ways in all the major historical complex societies and their traditions.  Throughout the human past we also find exceptions or violations of those general standards agreed on during an axial period about 2,500 years ago.

Before that period a sizable group of Hebrews had become Israel in a sustained revelatory experience.  God gave the Covenant amid a growing and distinctive relationship.  The Covenant was the mode and the result of the continuing revelation, yet undergirding the Covenant was, and is, the God who revealed himself in it.  Even at that point, if I hear Hans Boersma correctly in his writing on “heavenly participation,” the Christ of God himself took full part in that Covenant (yes, and came to fulfill it) just as he always has been in relationship to the Creation.  Trinitarian teaching demands that conclusion; the Scriptures are shot through with references to the presence of God, with emphasis on his presence and availability or his presence even when he is hidden.

The Chinese cosmology entertained the presence of ancestors and exalted leading ancestors to a type of godhood–the Yellow Emperor is an example.  From the Zhou period forward, kings and then emperors carried the title tianzi or Son of Heaven.  They were expected to be sage–knowledgeable and wise; virtuous; beyond reproach; and committed to the proper ordering of things, to the Ordinances of Heaven, by which authority they sat on heaven’s throne.  Starting with the first emperor Qinshihuangdi, it was earth’s throne, the throne of the “Middle Kingdom,” Zhongguo.  My understanding of the system stops not far beyond this point.

Chinese tradition leaves no room in itself for Christology; the Old Testament does, and the New Testament tells us so.  The hunger of God for relationship (not out of any deficiency of fellowship in the Trinity) shows through and in all of the Creation, even if the general revelation stops at a certain point as in the Chinese tradition.  Yet I find that the human hunger for both transcendent and immediate relationships (and security, relief, protection) is expressed in that tradition.  And that tradition allows that people are predisposed to respond appropriately to authority, even more so the authority that can come right down among the people, to share in their hunger for purpose and relationship, and to fulfill it.  Not through the ancestors, not through the emperor, but in a renewed family that we sometimes thoughtlessly call the “family of God.”  We are right to say it, but we must also take its importance more to heart.

It is no wonder that so many Chinese are following Christ.  They, too recognize in Christ the satisfactions intended for them in the hunger of God.  Again, it is not that God needs more fellowship than the Trinitarian perfection in Himself, it is that he yearns to expand that fellowship among his family, those he created in his own image and ordained to enjoy the fellowship as He does–as well, as deeply, as joyfully, and as long as time beyond time–on earth as in Heaven.