Dangerbooks! The Wisdom of Stability

Once upon a time I was looking to change jobs, so I sought career advice from a fellow who'd achieved senior status in our industry. I told him my deal: I have roots where I live, but the other places I'd be interested in working are elsewhere. His advice: Be willing to go where God might want you.

He was probably right, but I find it interesting that you rarely hear career advice to the tune of "Be willing to stay where God has you" or "In whatever place you live, do not easily leave it." That has something to do with the culture we find ourselves in, where companies and even communities make few if any promises to a person, and the only power that remains for people is to make few if any promises to the places they find themselves. Companies ship whole divisions overseas. States threaten bankruptcy to escape pension obligations. The only way to protect ourselves, it seems, is by steadfastly keeping our options open, by committing ourselves to keeping our distance.

No wonder we find ourselves so easily distracted. No wonder we can so easily check out of conversations across a table, while logging increasing amounts of time on social media, where we interact with (or simply read about) people we rarely see and in some cases have never met. In his recent book The Wisdom of Stability, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove calls this trending topic like he sees it:

The great advantage of a Facebook friendship, of course, is that it is so easy. I get to choose who I want to "friend" and whose friendship requests I respond to. We gather around our common interests, share the stuff we want others to know, and log off when we feel like it. In many ways what we have is connection without obligation. But intimacy without commitment is what our society has traditionally called "infidelity."

I wrote "Boom!" in the margin. Of course, Facebook's potential for eroding friendship is not an insight unique to Jonathan (Lynne Baab has a great book on Friending in the digital era coming out this spring), but that's not ultimately what this book is about. Jonathan's book is, instead, about fidelity, obedience and stability--three precepts of the monastic movement.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is one of the chief voices of the "new monasticism," a network of voluntary (mostly Protestant) intentional communities modeled after the values of the monastic tradition. These communities tend to form in the "cracks in the empire," places that have suffered the neglect of a supereconomy and the governments that support it. But that's not what The Wisdom of Stability is about. It's rather about how we are grown, and how we fulfill our commitments to God well, when we are rooted to a place and its people. "In a culture that is characterized by unprecedented mobility and speed," he writes in his introduction, "I am convinced that the most important thing most of us can do to grow spiritually is to stay in the place where we are."

This is a topic Jonathan knows well and believes wholeheartedly; the book reads not as one for the moment (as so many books are these days) but one for the ages. His writing is slow-paced, sober and compelling--personal, but not personality-driven. He is concerned for his readers, and he's concerned for the life of faith that is eroded as handily as friendship is eroded when we untether it. A rootless disciple is an oxymoron; Jesus tells us that much in John 17 when he calls us the branches to his vine. Rootless disciples struggle to be obedient to the claim of God on their lives; in times of testing they find themselves "double-minded and unstable in all they do" (James 1:8); a rootless disciple can start to look suspiciously like an infidel.

Jonathan leans heavily into the image of a tree as a model for our discipleship, drawing our attention to the "drip line"--a new term for me that represents the outer perimeter of a trees branches, which then drip nourishment down to the root system underneath. Like a tree's branches and its roots, a disciple's commitment to stability and his or her faith-life are interdependent; they can't nourish themselves, but they nourish one another. As Peter the Venerable put it, "If they keep the first . . . they are held by the content of the second. If they keep the second, they are bound by the constraints of the first." Jonathan goes regularly to the desert fathers and mothers to make his case, but I'm reminded at this point of a passage from G. K. Chesterton's critique of Rudyard Kipling and his ilk in the great Heretics:

The moment we are rooted in a place, the place vanishes. We live like a tree with the whole strength of the universe. . . . In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, “Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?" But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

"But what about the Great Commission?" some pious critic might ask. After all, the early church set out to spread good news, not simmer in it, and we hear Jesus himself tell his followers to go "to the ends of the earth." Jonathan is hip to that, and no one could accuse him (or most in the new monasticism) of being stubbornly parochial to the neglect of the needs of the whole world. In fact, Jonathan argues that by stability our wanderlust is pruned and refined: he quotes Benedictine theologian Gerald Schlabach as observing that "we should expect authentic stability to nurture the virtues that allow Christians to become mobile in the best of ways--ready to hear the Abrahamic call, to live among the poor by both giving and receiving hospitality, and thus to nurture the newly deepened commitments by which God's people make Christ present in new communities and cultures." Those who have learned to love a place and its people, Jonathan contends, make for the best missionaries.

(I'm reminded here of my Peter Rollins-inspired reflection on Abraham's call away from his home; check it out here.)

Jonathan's book was featured on many "best of 2010" lists, for good reason. It's an incredibly well-written book on a salient topic by someone who has earned the right to represent all of us in this wrestling match. I like to think he had me in mind when he makes the sympathetic comment that "many of us who choose stability will have to struggle . . . with the midday demon of ambition." Of course, someone who struggles with ambition would imagine himself being written about in such a way, wouldn't he? But The Wisdom of Stability isn't just a self-help book, a slow-down guide for those who flit about. It's a manifesto of sorts, a call to everyone to tend to our drip lines, with the happy side effect of a well-tended world full of well-tended neighborhoods. "Maybe every attempt to keep faith with people wherever we are," he writes, "is a subversion of the spirit of the age." It's also an act of faith, and it's also a channel of God's peace.

***

I received The Wisdom of Stability free from the Englewood Review of Books on the condition that I would review it here. If I had hated the book, I would have been free to say so, and I would have said so; you'll just have to take my word for that. I received it as an e-book, which in this case is a fancy way of saying they sent me a print-ready PDF of the book, something publishers do all the time in their effort to secure book reviews. "Dangerbooks" are books that have crossed my desk and strike me as particularly compelling, countercultural, provocative and soul-stirring.
See my other "Dangerbook" reviews here.

The Real Meaning of Relativity

As a willing participant in the sins of the book publishing industry, I feel compelled to warn you: the people who have recently released Stephen Hawking's new book (The Grand Design) are trying to sell you something.

By saying this I mean no disrespect whatsoever for Dr. Hawking. That dude is a straight-up genius, I'm sure. Plus, he's been a leading scientist and cultural icon for decades, and should be given the respect due such a public treasure. Nevertheless, the "big idea" being culled from his new book is, I respectfully submit, no big idea at all. As publishing events go, this emperor has no clothes.

The central idea being promulgated is that, according to Hawking, there's no need to presume that God had anything to do with the origins of the universe. By saying that, Hawking is discounting the people putting forth "intelligent design" as a counterproposal to evolution. And by doing that, Hawking is joining the chorus of any number of his peers who have already sung the same song. An astrophysicist disputing the role of a divine force in the origins of the universe is not news, people; it would be only slightly more newsworthy to report that an astrophysicist had allowed for the possibility of a God bringing the universe into being.

I feel reasonably confident in how the debate will proceed from here--including, no doubt, the release of a handful of books along the lines of The Case for the Grand Designer or Debunking "The Grand Design." That's because this perennial argument across the divide of faith and science sells books. For the next several weeks, every time you see Stephen Hawking showing up in your Twitter trending topics or on your Yahoo breaking news board, it would be helpful to imagine a room full of publishing professionals brainstorming how they're going to move product. Consider that your grain of salt; don't say I never gave you anything.

Meanwhile, I've taken to reading the late great G. K. Chesterton's The Well and the Shallows, a relatively late entry in his corpus, contending with the controversies of his day (which, in case you're unfamiliar, was the first half of the twentieth century). Today's reading took me through a handful of reasons he offers for being inclined to convert to Catholicism--if only he weren't already a Catholic. Tucked in among the follies of state churches in the Protestant tradition and other musings of the modern era is a rant against materialist critiques of theism--the new scientists, taking on old-time religion.

Many scientists contemporary to Chesterton were particularly dismissive of religion, which they saw as an outdated artifact of a less sophisticated era. Chesterton prefaces his critique of such dismissiveness with the provocative phrase "In order theorise, it is sometimes useful to think." The presenting problem for Chesterton was a paper delivered by Dr. David Forsyth, whose "thesis" regarding what eventually came to be called the "non-overlapping magisteria" of science and faith

was essentially this; that science and religion, so far from being reconciled or even reconcilable, were divided by the vital contradiction that science belongs to what he called "reality-thinking," or we call objective truth; while religion belonged to what he called "pleasure-thinking," or what most people call imagination.

But this imagined divide between science and faith has a different source, according to Chesterton: not the intransigence of the Catholic but the "the very common combination of a superiority complex with arrested development."

Scores and hundreds of times I have heard . . . the repetition of that ultimatum: "You must accept the conclusions of science." The new scientists themselves do not ask us to accept the conclusions of science. The new scientists themselves do not accept the conclusions of science. . . . The finest intellects among them repeat, again and again, that science is inconclusive. . . .

The Victorian agnostics waited hopefully for science to give them a working certainty about life. The new physicist philosophers are in no way different, except that they wait hopelessly instead of hopefully. For they know very well the real meaning of relativity; that their own views may pass from being relatively right to being relatively wrong. And meanwhile, as I say, there is such a thing as wanting a working rule as to whether we should pay our debts or murder our enemies. . . . If we want a guide to life, it seems that we must look elsewhere.

Again, no disrespect to Stephen Hawking or any of the other great minds who have developed our understanding of the way the universe works. But regardless of the role of gravity in causing the universe to come into being, or the nagging question of where the law of gravity came from, meanwhile we ourselves are but dust--and to dust we shall return, and we must one day give an account for all we've done and left undone, and fall on the mercy of whoever calls us to account.

Up with Mediaeval Impracticality

My day job is as an editor for a publisher of nonfiction books, and as such I try to help people frame and structure their ideas so that their reader won't nod off. Often, that's not an easy task. There are many shapes that a nonfiction book could take that readers will tolerate, but my favorite is something along the lines of this:

1. Articulate the problem.
2. Trace the history of the problem.
3. Identify the core principles that pertain to the problem.
4. Tease out the implications of the core principles.
5. Reorganize the world around those core principles and their implications.

(Of course this presumes some prior identification with the problem and some hope of a solution on the part of the reader. And so the book is packaged around the promise--an introduction and a conclusion (perhaps better thought of as a benediction) assure the reader that the ennui that led them to the book can be confronted and contended with--and sold by its solutions with a catchy, memorable, hope-filled title. Instant classic. Or something like that.)

This structure is, incidentally, how practical theologians tend to think. Practical theologians emphasize the feedback loop between the abstract work that historically has characterized theology and the world-made-by-and-sustained-by-God that inspires such abstractions. They ask questions like "Why are so many people getting tattoos? Why is the Bible seemingly so opposed to tattoos? Are the tattoos of the twenty-first centuries A.D. and B.C. the same? If not, how ought we to think about contemporary body art?"

My utter lack of body art aside, I suppose my enthusiasm for such grounded theological reflection may make me an armchair practical theologian. My patron saint in this vocation is G. K. Chesterton, who wrote the following as an introduction to his Heretics, a collection of essays playfully challenging the prevailing post-Christian minds of his day.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good–” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

I've referred several new authors to this parable lately, a reminder that they have in a sense embraced the call of this monk, and while they thus may be occasionally and even "somewhat excusably knocked down," clear and cogent books are their gift to a world that too often doesn't know what it wants or even needs. I daresay their books are their ministry, their mission.

Light Humor

In my experience, there's always room for a little more G. K. Chesterton. I may have posted this in the past, but I was reminded of the following passage from his book Heretics recently, after an intriguingly complex office-wide conversation at work. I submit it for your pleasure, with hopes that you'll all become Chestertonians like me. For a further taste, click on the Daily Dose of Chesterton in the sidebar links.

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

Meme of the Day

Inspired by the effusive posting of Christianne and my own literary hubris, here's a meme for you to chew on and spit into the open mouths of the hungry little chickies in your midst. Name and make the case for five books you frequently foist on your friends. Here's mine:

1. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton. If I could have, I would have, but I'm so glad he did. So playful, so insightful.

2. Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Worthy of an endless conversation, so all the more reason to recruit more conversation partners.

3. Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose by Brian Mahan. Nature's most nearly perfect book; Brian approaches Chesterton in his apt mixing of wit and self-effacement with profound insight. It hasn't had nearly the effect on the people I've loaned it to, however, that it's had on me. Fair warning.

4. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. Jesuits in space. How can you lose?

5. Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller. Yeah, it's a comic book. Deal with it. Brilliant story telling, great revision of an aging character, remarkable secular appropriation of Christian imagery and language.

There are others, of course, but these five came to mind most quickly. How about you? Post a comment here or an entry on your blog--I tag everybody.

Quote of the Day

From G. K. Chesterton's essay on "William Blake":

I have often been haunted with a fancy that the creeds of men might be
paralleled and represented in their beverages. Wine might stand for genuine
Catholicism, and ale for genuine Protestantism; for these at least are real
religions with comfort and strength in them. Clean cold Agnosticism would be
clean cold water -- an excellent thing if you can get it. Most modern ethical
and idealistic movements might be well represented by soda-water -- which is a
fuss about nothing.

So, are you a mocker or a brawler? Or perhaps you're much a Mountain Dew about nothing. (Tee hee.) I'll also welcome nominations for alternate beverages for these and/or other worldviews.

The Great Art of Blogging

This morning I ran across this little ditty from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the great minds of the twentieth century, who spent the last years of his life in prison for his opposition to the Nazi German government during World War II:

We must keep on trying to find our way
through the petty thoughts that irritate us,
to the great thoughts that strengthen us."

This, my friends, is why I blog, whether I realize it or not. I think it's fair to say that I, jaded GenXer that I am, have mastered the art of petty thoughts. But the great art of blogging is, to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, to air out my self-righteous self-satisfaction and see more clearly the great art of the world around me. I'm reminded of a passage from the biblical book of Lamentations, which is fancy talk for "a profound sense of irritation":

I remember my affliction and my wandering,

the bitterness and the gall.

I well remember them,

and my soul is downcast within me.

Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning.

So, what's irritating you today? What's keeping you going?