Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 224

liturgical reform

here; see also this

Merton and the quest for God

I warmly encourage you to read this lovely and thought-provoking essay by my friend Matt Milliner. Here’s a key quotation from the essay:

For readers of my time and place, Thomas Merton remains an important guide. I had heard varying opinions as to whether he remained faithful to Christianity in his Eastern experiments. I was surprised, therefore, to realize that Merton never lost his bearings. Merton died in 1968, and in his 1967 Mystics and Zen Masters he insists, “[Zen] is not by itself sufficient. We must also look to the transcendent and personal center upon which this love, liberated by illumination and freedom, can converge. That center is the Risen and Deathless Christ.”

I think Matt is right to quote this passage, which is very important — though “deathless” is a carelessness — but there are other passages from the late Merton that may point in other directions. For instance, here’s a passage from my own recent essay on Merton, concerning the Asian Journal he wrote at the very end of his life:

The most interesting sentence here is: “May I not come back without having settled the great affair.” Two years earlier, when recuperating from back surgery in Louisville, he had fallen in love with a student nurse and had thought of abandoning his vows for her, though they never had sex. But that cannot be the “great affair” he had in mind; his rededication to the monastic life had been settled by then. It is hard to see “the great affair” as anything other than the status of Christianity among the religions of the world. Is Jesus Christ the world’s one Savior? Or is Christianity just one among several ways to reach toward the divine?

There are hints of how he might have settled it. For instance, he wrote of meeting an Indian hermit called Chatral Rinpoche, “The unspoken or half-spoken message of our talk was our complete understanding of each other as people who were on the edge of great realization and knew it and were trying, somehow or other, to go out and get lost in it.”

The passage Matt quotes from Mystics and Zen Masters is indeed very late Merton, but later still is this passage from Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968), the last book published in his lifetime:

Suffering, as both Christianity and Buddhism see, each in its own way, is part of our very ego-identity and empirical existence, and the only thing to do about it is to plunge right into the middle of contradiction and confusion in order to be transformed by what Zen calls ‘the great death’ and Christianity calls ’dying and rising with Christ.’

Is Christianity’s “dying and rising with Christ” the same thing as Zen’s “great death,” just under different names? My answer would be No: they are not the same, and indeed are utterly incompatible. But did Merton really mean to identify them as closely as he does here? Or was that just a concession to an ecumenical context? I don’t know, and I don’t think Merton knew. Trying to decide his answer to that question was, I think, “the great affair,” and I would not venture to say with any confidence where he might have settled if he had been spared. Matt seems sure that Merton “never lost his bearings”; I am not. Or maybe I should say that I am not sure that he never altered his bearings.

To be sure, there’s no doubt that Merton understood that he needed to pursue his spiritual vocation from within Christianity — that was effectively settled for him as early as his fateful 1938 meeting with Mahanambrata Brahmachari — but that’s not the same as saying that it would be best for everyone to follow Jesus. In the end I suspect that we are faced with a quite fundamental question of theological anthropology, and what may well be the incompatibility of two anthropologies.

I think in the last decade of his life Merton moved closer and closer to an understanding of human beings, or at least human beings called to the contemplative life, as people who seek God, who are on a quest for God. And indeed this model has a strong presence in Christian tradition: think, for instance, of Bonaventure’s great Itinerarium mentis in Deum. But over-reliance on this model can lead to an image of God as a kind of fixed monad, a transcendental Rome to which all roads at least potentially lead; or a sun which all contemplatives, Christians and Buddhist and Hindu alike, orbit. And I am not sure that that image can be wholly harmonized with one in which God is — not just might be figured as but fundamentally is — a loving Father who sees us in our self-chosen misery from a long way off and comes running to greet us and welcome us home.

Maybe the Merton model, or the model that he was flirting with, has a great appeal to those who have already dedicated their whole lives to the monastic life, who eagerly seek some “great realization” and hope to get lost in it; but for the rest of us, talk of “the human search for God” may sound as it did to the ears of the young C. S. Lewis: like “the mouse’s search for the cat.”

Diderot

“Rameau’s Nephew” is, in this way, the first debate between two such materialists, both of whom reject superstition and the supernatural but end in radically different places. We live within that dialogue today, with some of us accepting that the material view of a world without inherent meaning can produce only fatalism, others that it can give us the great if ambiguous gift of freedom.”

— Adam Gopnik. “We.”

a very, very great deal

Men’s ultimate ends sometimes conflict: choices, at times agonising, and uneasy compromises cannot be avoided. But some needs seem universal. If we can feed the hungry, clothe the naked, extend the area of individual liberty, fight injustice, create the minimum conditions of a decent society, if we can generate a modicum of toleration, of legal and social equality, if we can provide methods of solving social problems without facing men with intolerable alternatives — that would be a very, very great deal. These goals are less glamorous, less exciting than the glittering visions, the absolute certainties, of the revolutionaries; they have less appeal to the idealistic young, who prefer a more dramatic confrontation of vice and virtue, a choice between truth and falsehood, black and white, the possibility of heroic sacrifice on the altar of the good and the just — but the results of working for these more moderate and humane aims lead to a more benevolent and civilised society. The sense of infallibility provided by fantasies is more exciting, but generates madness in societies as well as individuals.

— Isaiah Berlin, “The Three Strands in My Life” (1979)

out on the town

The combination of Corey McIntyre’s food and Matthiasson wines is one I won’t forget for a very long time. It was wonderful to have Jill Matthiasson at the table to describe the wines and her family’s approach to winemaking.

UPDATE: In response to questions, the food you see is (a) duck fat salted caramel popcorn; (b) carrot and cabbage “barbacoa” on blue corn tortillas, with some amazing queso fresca; (c) scallops and pork tenderloin with some kind of delicious sauce; (d) biscuits with blackcurrants marinated in Matthiasson vermouth with sliced strawberries, candied fennel, and sweet brown butter. AMAZING stuff.

nested

I just came across this chart I made for my students a few years ago when we were reading the Arabian Nights — I wanted to show them the layers of nesting of tales.

placeholder for further reflection

The one central and indispensable axiom of metaphysical capitalism is “I am my own” — I am a commodity wholly owned and operated by myself in service to my own interests, as defined by me. I am my own store of capital.
Therefore, the socio-political order is to be evaluated strictly in terms of whether it helps or hinders my autonomy.
Also therefore, questions of political economy are empirical and pragmatic rather than dogmatic. Should I determine that the pursuit of metaphysical capitalism is best aided by economic socialism, then a socialist I shall become.

Kathryn Tanner’s altar call

Consider this a follow-up to my recent posts on metaphysical capitalism and some stories about the commodification of emotion and connection — and also a kind of pendant to Derek Thompson’s story in the Atlantic on the religion of workism. This one’s gonna have some long quotations.

Here’s how Kathryn Tanner describes her task in her new book Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism:

Whether amenable to capitalism at its start or not, my own Christian commitments as I hope to show are inimical to the demands of capitalism now. I am critical of the present spirit of capitalism because I believe my own, quite specific Christian commitments require it. But I also suggest over the course of the chapters to come that the present-day organization of capitalism is deserving of such criticism whatever one’s religious commitments, because of its untoward effects on persons and populations, its deforming effects on the way people understand themselves and their relations with others. Every way of organizing economic life is flawed. Besides having especially egregious faults (relative to other ways that capitalism has been organized, this one foments, for example, extreme income/wealth inequality, structural under- and unemployment, and regularly recurring boom/bust cycles in asset values), what is unusual about the present system is the way its spirit hampers recognition of those faults. The present-day spirit of capitalism needs to be undermined, therefore, in order for the current system to be problematized — seen as a problem amenable to solution, an object of possible criticism requiring redress. And in order for that to happen, in order for the spirit of present-day capitalism to be effectively undermined, it needs to be met, I suggest, by a counter-spirit of similar power. Without the need any longer of religious backing, capitalism may now have the power itself to shape people in its own image; its conduct-forming spirit may now be its own production, in other words. But as one of the few alternative outlooks on life with a capacity to shape life conduct to a comparable degree, religion might remain a critical force against it.

That bolded sentence is a reminder that, as I often say, “the liberal order catechizes,” and that it will catechize us right out of Christianity altogether if we don’t provide what I call a “counter-catechesis,” a radically different “conduct-forming spirit.” Tanner makes a very similar argument at length.

In so doing, she repeatedly reminds us that Christianity is, among other things, a counter-economics. Everyone knows how thoroughly economic language is woven into the fabric of the Christian story: we are bought with a price (agorazo); we are bought out of slavery (exagorazo). Though Tanner doesn’t do exegesis in her book, it’s clear that she wants her readers to understand how completely the biblical picture reorients, or ought to reorient, our self-understanding. In a capitalist order it becomes easy, even natural, to think of God as a metaphysical banker, keeping our moral accounts as thoroughly as the hidden gods of capitalism track our FICO scores. But if we can escape that tendency, if we can understand God as the one who has delivered us from bondage, then “rather than being tallied against one’s account, one can be assured one’s sins are forgiven, their burden erased, when casting them upon Christ’s mercy in confession. One can honestly admit faults without fear, assured of God’s mercy in Christ. It is not the lapse that threatens to separate one from Christ but the refusal to confess it, out of fear and a lack of trust in God’s graciousness.”

But if we cannot manage this reorientation of our understanding, then we can come to be terrified of the future and at the same time confined to an understanding of the future as a mere continuation of what now exists:

In order to profit from the difference between present and future, or at least to prevent it from doing any harm, one employs financial instruments that collapse the future present — that is, what the future will turn out to be — into the present future — that is, into the present view of the future…. By virtue of such a collapse of future into present, the future one anticipates loses its capacity to surprise; the future to come simply reduces to the future it makes sense to expect given present circumstances. Those circumstances themselves become a kind of self-enclosed world, as one learns to hope for nothing more from the future than what the given world’s present limits allow, what it is reasonable to expect from within them, assuming their continuance.

To live within these constraints — constraints which our capitalist order teaches us we must think about constantly if we are to be rational actors and responsible citizens — is to be deprived of both imagination and hope. What is required, for those of us so bound, is to be redeemed from this bondage, to be bought ought of slavery to it, and that requires conversion.

So I was delighted to find, at one important juncture in this book, this liberal Episcopalian giving her readers what amounts to an altar call. I’ll close with that call:

The present does not, however, become urgent here due to scarcity. One has everything one needs — more than one needs — to turn one’s life around: the grace provided in Christ. In marked contrast to the efficiency-inducing scarcities of finance-dominated capitalism, it is the very fulsomeness of the provisions for conversion that makes the present an urgent matter, an opportunity to be seized with alacrity and put to good use. There is no point in looking longingly to any past or future with the capacity to make things easier: the time is ripe for action right now and never has been or will be any better. Delaying a present decision to turn one’s life around, and neglecting to make the best of what is currently on offer out of a distracted sense of what was or might be, suggest one is simply never likely to turn one’s life around, no matter how many times one is offered the opportunity to do so in the future. Any such distraction from the present moment is always available as an excuse in the future, so as to produce thereby a never-ending deferral of decision. The present is urgent here not because the opportunities of the moment might be lost but because they are just so good, so perfectly suited to the predicament one is in and the needs one has, because of their not-to-be-passed-up character, so to speak. Instead of being here today and gone tomorrow, what allows one to turn one’s life around in the present — the grace of Christ — is permanently on offer. It has no fleeting character. What prompts one to seize it right away is not the fear of missed opportunity, then, but the immediate, overwhelming attractiveness of the offer…. No failings in the past or present can disrupt the efficacy of a grace designed specifically to save sinners…. There is thus no point in harping on the past or worrying about the future — the present is one’s only concern. Not because one cannot do anything about past mistakes or about an uncertain future — because neither is under one’s control — but because one can let go of the past without consequence — one’s sins are forgiven — and because the future will never be any more threatening than the present is. Contrary to the Stoic-inflected temporal sensibility of financial players, the present is no more under one’s control than the past was or the future will be: at every moment in time, one is enabled to turn oneself to God only by God’s grace and not by one’s own power.

Preach it, sister!

three stories to reflect on

Ross Douthat:

The sexual ethic on offer in our own era should make Catholics particularly skeptical. That ethic regards celibacy as unrealistic while offering porn and sex robots to ease frustrations created by its failure to pair men and women off. It pities Catholic priests as repressed and miserable (some are; in general they are not) even as its own cultural order seeds a vast social experiment in growing old alone. It disdains large families while it fails to reproduce itself. It treats any acknowledgment of male-female differences as reactionary while constructing an architecture of sexual identities whose complexities would daunt a medieval schoolman.

From the Economist, “An entrepreneur brings professional grieving to eastern Congo”:

Deborah Nzigere, a 65-year-old Congolese woman, is nervous when she sits down for her job interview. Her hands are clasped tightly together, her words are slow and deliberate; she is blinking too much. “What inspired you to pursue this career?” asks one of the two people on the interview panel. Her answer is garbled, she mentions money. When asked to give a demonstration, she giggles awkwardly and leaves the room. She comes back in crying.

“Bettina,” she howls and throws herself to the ground. “Bettina, Bettina, why did you leave us?” She thumps the floor with a flattened palm, her body convulses with sobs as she moans and wails. The interviewer’s eyes fill with tears. Mrs Nzigire has got the job.

Christopher Mims in the WSJ:

Through Papa, college-age young people can sign up to help seniors by going to the store, doing housework or just hanging out. For these “pals,” Papa works on the same gig-economy model as Uber or Postmates. Ten hours a week of Papa service is covered for members of Humana ’s Medicare Advantage insurance who are in a pilot program in and near Tampa.

Ms. Sumkin’s Papa pals take her on trips to the store since she can no longer drive, and they also help combat her loneliness. Ms. Sumkin says that, aside from occasional visits with her children and grandchildren, her only regular human contact is a bi-weekly stretching class and time with those insurer-provided friends. “They’re all very nice and, you know, I’ll converse with them and find out what they’re doing and studying and so forth,” she says. “It’s for me a very important service.”

stock and flow in newsletters

A few years ago my friend Robin Sloan wrote a post in which he applied the economic concept of “stock and flow” to our current media scene: “Flow is the feed,” he said: “It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.” But “Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.” And:

Flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons — but I think we neglect stock at our peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

Funny thing: I had completely forgotten that another friend, Austin Kleon, had been struck by the same post of Robin’s and wrote about it here. Austin’s post turned up when I was searching for Robin’s original one.

Anyway, it’s a powerful metaphor — because it’s more than a metaphor, really — and I think about it often, but lately I’ve been thinking about it in relation to email newsletters. Probably because I recently started one. It strikes me that there are two basic kinds of newsletter.

The first — and by far the most common — is a device for flow management. You know, the “cool stories I read this week” kind of thing. And those can be useful and illuminating! — I mean no disrespect at all — I subscribe to several such newsletters. But I want to make the other kind.

That other kind is an aid to stock replenishment. Interestingly enough, I think both Robin’s newsletter and Austin’s are of this type: they focus on matters of evergreen rather than topical interest. And that’s my aspiration too. I typically don’t want to link to whatever people have been talking about recently, not because I’m hostile to current events, but because many other newsletters already provide that. Basically, and to put the point in what might be an overly elevated way, I want to point my readers towards things that are true or good or beautiful. And surely we’re not oversupplied with any of those. (I also do “funny.” Or try to, sometimes.)