Don Quixote and the Gospel of Christ

What can possibly be said about that knight errant extraordinaire Don Quixote that has not already been said? He is that great knight who took his bidding from the brilliant books of chivalry. After having cleaned his long-forgotten lance, shield, and metal cap he mounted his steed to seek adventure. Don Quixote is that knight who with great determination sought to right wrongs, correct injustices, and rectify abuses. He also just so happens to have been that mad knight who mistook an inn for a castle and who was subsequently humored by a disgruntled innkeeper. Our magnificent Don Quixote read too many adventure books, which consequently so consumed his mind that it left him totally mad, and thus he rode into the sunset of absurdum charging at windmills with his lance mistaking the windmills for monstrous giants. And I suppose every lunatic needs a follower or two, and hence Sancho, a completely inane donkey-rider, followed Don Quixote into every contrivable misadventure imaginable.

Proclaiming and embodying the gospel of Christ in our culture of pop psychology, preemptive-war, and self-obsession may seem as absurd as charging at windmills with a lance, though we might say that the person who charges at windmills is an intriguing case study.

Jesus looks like Don Quixote to our eyes. We, like the innkeeper, seek merely to appease Jesus. We go along with his fanciful babbling until it proves unprofitable and disruptive. We, like the innkeeper, wish for Jesus to leave us alone as soon as possible, and when he finally leaves, we are relieved to see him leave our peaceful town without further ado.

We seek to ensure safety and stability. Jesus did not make those things a priority for himself nor did he for his followers. It is easy to say the gospel is counter-cultural. However, I am beginning to feel the gospel’s foreignness. I am beginning to feel it in my bones. It seems so foreign to us that we don’t know what to do with it, so we make it into something else that we may continue augmenting our own priorities in our own way and according to our own rationality. We continue talking about “carrying our crosses,” but we make it compatible with our wish for safety, which is far more absurd than charging at windmills with a dilapidated lance.   

I imagine if Jesus were to walk down Wall Street or for that matter “Main Street,” he would appear to us to be a ludicrous dreamer, an absent-minded vagabond who has read Isaiah too many times and who knows nothing of honest pragmatism, for he is an alleged king who thinks victory comes through crucifixion. We wouldn’t vote for him; his health plan is too costly.  We do not want to carry a cross and walk a road that leads to bloody crucifixion. We, like Jesus’ disciples, duck for cover.

After spending several weeks eating, sleeping, and breathing the Gospel of Matthew, it struck me as foreign, foreign from the world we have constructed for ourselves. This feeling was accentuated when I watched the latest Batman movie. We simply do not want a king who is killed by his antagonists; we want a hero who protects us and who survives in the process. We want heroes who will keep us safe. None of us want a murdered king as our king. None of us believe that a war can be won without weapons, for believing that a war can be won without weapons would be like mistaking dangerous giants for harmless windmills.

We say it is “just” to kill rather than be killed. And so we kill our enemies and even celebrate their deaths. We murder for “liberty” and call it “justice.” If a person is a domestic murderer, then that person deserves the death penalty. However, this rationality knows nothing of the gospel of Christ, but we prefer doling out death because it is more conducive to our self-obsessed schedule and budget than the dangerous business of peace and restoration. At the foot of the cross, we divide and conquer instead of seeking forgiveness.

The absurdity of the gospel of Christ remains absurd without the vindication of Christ and those who follow him. It remains absurd without resurrection. We wish to make the cross and safety compatible because we have forgotten the last sentence of the Nicene Creed, the Apostle’s Creed, and the last act of the gospels. We have forgotten (or perhaps disbelieved) resurrection. And so the gospel of Christ remains absurd to our eyes. We then content ourselves with mythologizing Jesus, which is conducive to our attempts to live as long as possible at the expense of others. 

“What is Truth?”

We are born, we live, and we die. And somewhere in between we want to know and feel something real, something true. Whether or not we are able to come upon a grand theory of the universe, we want to experience something real. Pilate’s question, “what is truth” is our question, and it the question that has rung in our ears through the centuries.

Henry Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Walden). This is the visceral horror.

Part of the trouble is that we don’t know precisely what we are looking for, but we hope that when we come across it that it will be apparent: we will know that is it.  However, everywhere we look somebody has claimed truth, but when we look a little closer we think, “No, that’s not it.”

Naming shapes our perception of others, the world, and ourselves: take the word “immigrant” as an example. We name this and that; we label “those” people and ourselves, and in the process we poison the waters and pretend that we haven’t done so. Our troubled perception bespeaks our propensity and incapacity to name things. 

We are in the hunt for something real, but in the process our proclivity for misnaming things sends us south when we should probably go north. And so our troubled perception continues; we continue to shake our heads when we see people claiming to “possess” truth. We all seem to want it, but then maybe it’s not an it that we seek. Have we misnamed it as an object? However, objects are easier to handle, to possess, to manipulate and wield as weapons. We then prefer lies to the truth as long as the lies help us augment our own security. We long for truth. But we opt for cheap imitations, and we name those cheap imitations as “true.”   

We want to cut to “the truth,” and so we use words as swords when they could be used as plowshares. With guns and tanks it would seem easier to take captive truth than to do the precarious thing of letting truth captivate us. I would add, however, that usually we do not have much of a choice; it sneaks upon us without us knowing and so we take up arms fearing that our cheap imitations will be uncovered for what they are. 

For various reasons, Christians are often misled into thinking that Christians possess the truth, albeit “the truth” of which they speak frequently slips into generic affirmations that are safe and superfluous. I would suggest that Christians do not have possession of much at all, but they are to bear witness to truth. And it is with words that Christians bear witness to an incarnated truth they cannot control.

“What is truth?” This question may seem to be an easy question to ask if it is held at a distance as if it does not have dire implications for the one holding it at a distance. How truth is named is of special importance because what we perceive as “true” will be according to our naming of it. To our horror, we may awake to learn that not only have we not lived, but also we have intentionally misnamed life in order to name death as “life,” which is perhaps the life we would rather live as “good” and “true.”  

Images of Horror and Hope

I do not know many people who cook over poop, and I doubt it takes much argument to conclude that the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel was a strange person. Cooking over poop was on his to do list among other unconventional things. He enacted theology in the weirdest ways imaginable in order to grab people’s attention and to unsettle them with truths about their situation.

Stanley Hauerwas has said that description is everything. He has said, “If I say, ‘World War I, World War II, what comes to mind? Now if I say, ‘World Slaughter I, World Slaughter II, what comes to mind?’ Description is everything” (Lecture at Fuller, Spring 2011).

In each generation, it is the task of pastors and theologians to communicate good news as actual good news with fresh and vibrant imagery that captures the imagination.

I doubt, however, if I would ever recommend following Ezekiel’s procedures for creating theological imagery. However, it may prove helpful to take note of the fact that vivid images can potentially speak to us on a visceral level. We may understand what the imagery is seeking to communicate, albeit we may remain unable to articulate why it resonates with us and how it is we understand. It’s been said we don’t always need to know how we know (which may be in part due to do our inability to articulate how it is we know something; it’s then perhaps a matter more of an incapacity to articulate than much of anything else).

In short, images and for that matter stories do what discourse often fails to do. Images can capture a person’s imagination and facilitate inroads for comprehension on a rather basic level. This may be in part why metaphors and vivid imagery are indeed so necessary for theology. We understand ideas with metaphors, and we speak of human affairs in relation to God metaphorically because metaphors are what we have linguistically to describe the significance of God’s conspicuous and inconspicuous sublime ubiquity. Strange and perhaps even horrifying metaphors may very well awake us to the uncomfortable and yet hope-filled truth of God’s reality in our midst.

For as long as I can remember, my mom has told my dad to involve more stories in his sermons. This is not merely for purposes of entertainment; this is for purposes of communication.

Imagery has of course done much for philosophy. The metaphors of buildings and webs have done much to frame philosophical endeavors. Similarly, imagery has done much for theology. There is no need, however, to limn the hosts of theological imagery here.

In part truth as we know it is a description of reality, and in part theology is symbolized reality that seeks to articulate reality’s significance. This was the business of Ezekiel, and this is the business of pastors and theologians today. It may be said that Ezekiel was an excellent theologian because he sought to vivify the reality of human affairs in relation to God, and he did so quite provocatively.

Sometimes I wonder if we have grown so diffident about the business of theology that we have morphed it into a timid academic discipline writing with abstract wisps of air in the clouds completely unrelated to our earthy, gritty somatic existence. 

Learning to Lie

When I was young, my mom paid me to read books. She would pay me by the page, and so I tended to pick either thick books or mounds of thin books. On one particular occasion, I piled up a stack of books and proceeded to negotiate with her for a new mountain bike. We came to an agreement, and I began reading through the rather tall stack of books. It was slow going, slower than I would have liked. That new mountain bike remained at the forefront of my mind the entire time. After making some progress through the mountain of books, I came upon an idea, a simple idea with a high reward. I decided to lie. I decided to wait another week or two and then to tell my mom I had finished reading all the books.

My plan worked smoothly and without a single flaw or suspicion. I had my new mountain bike and nobody was the wiser. Everything about the bike was perfect. It had the gears, breaks, and shocks I wanted. I rode it all over the place, and one day a friend and I raced on the country road between my house and our church. The road was about a mile long and was really rough. It was mostly just tar and gravel. We raced down the first big hill and kept going faster and faster, and we continued peddling as hard as we could down the next hill.

Then a fateful thing happened. My right foot slipped off the pedal and into the spokes of the front wheel. The front wheel came to a lurching halt. I was sent hurtling over the handlebars, and I imagine my legs were flailing as my body flipped in the air. I landed face first onto the knife-like gravel and tar road. I blacked out, and I barely remember any of it. When I regained consciousness and began to get up, I couldn’t feel my lower lip. I turned to my friend and asked, “Am I bleeding? Is my lip still there?” I panicked and began scanning the road for my lower lip. I didn’t see my lip on the road, so I got back on my bike and pedaled as hard as I could back up the big hill and back home.

I burst into the front door, and I am sure blood was dripping everywhere though I do not remember much about it. I went to the bathroom to look in the mirror to check my lip, to see if it was still there. My mom came in wondering what was going on. She saw blood everywhere and the imprint of the road on my forehead. I had a split from my bottom lip down to my chin, not to mention numerous other cuts all over my face.

My mom began to bandage me, and I felt guilty. My stomach was in knots, and I felt a lump in my throat. It was difficult to get around the lump in my throat, but I managed. I cleared my throat, and I told her everything, though there was not much to tell. I told her I had lied about finishing the books. I had read about half of them and lied about the rest.

It was the perfect opportunity for my mom to teach me about the consequences of lying. It was my first new bike, and though I do not have that bike anymore I still have a scar right below my lower lip.

A Jewish rabbi whose name currently evades me said, “Bad guys don’t get away with what they do. We all pay for what we do with one currency or another.”

Les Miserables: “the immense”

Like War and Peace, Les Miserables is a book that many people reference but few people read. Both books each seem longer than Webster’s dictionary, which is reason enough for people to avoid them. To compare them would perhaps be a temptation, but they are as different as they are long.

In recent weeks, I have trekked through the fields and allies of Les Miserables, and I am beginning to think that even if people begin to read it they will not finish it simply because Hugo spends so many pages providing “back stories” for the characters. This, however, does not detract from the narrative; in my opinion, it adds layers to the story.

It would seem that the twentieth century would have us believe that there is one way to go about writing a novel: showing the story that the reader might eavesdrop. Hugo, however, has reminded me that there is a real art and beauty in telling a story. Layer after layer, Les Miserables unfolds divulging events from various persons’ lives that converge into conflict, terror, and redemption. It’s a five-act play with all the drama and irony Shakespeare could imagine.  

It’s no secret that I enjoy reading novels and that Dostoevsky is my favorite novelist. It would likely make sense then that I make a smattering of comments contrasting Hugo’s Les Miserables with bits of Dostoevsky’s corpus. First, however, a few notes of similarity are in order. Both seem to focus on the underbelly of society, and this focus sets a variety of trajectories that color the complexions of their respective narratives. In this bleak context of criminality and moral ambiguity, both paint poignant pictures of abuse, neglect, and deliverance of women – consider for a moment the tragic stories of Fantine in Les Miserables and Sonya in Crime and Punishment. This is especially appropriate considering it is most often women’s abuse that is ignored. There are numerous other similarities, but that will suffice for the moment.

Their respective anthropologies are no doubt a point of departure. For Hugo, it would seem that people are basically good and that it is society that grinds people into the sort of corrupt people that would commit abominable crimes. This would almost seem to be the case in Crime and Punishment, but Dostoevsky does not quite give us the luxury. Because the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, is a destitute student at the end of his rope who then commits murder, we might be inclined to deduce that like Hugo Dostoevsky shows Raskolnikov to be a product of a system that failed him. However, as the story builds, Dostoevsky shows Raskolnikov’s motives for crime to be sundry and inscrutable (in a letter to a friend, Dostoevsky admits that even he does not know why Raskolnikov committed the murder). Unlike Hugo, for Dostoevsky humans are not basically good. For Dostoevsky, rich and poor alike are prone to crime and/or immorality. Dostoevsky’s anthropology of rather cynical ambiguity and depravity seems to be at a different point of the spectrum from Hugo’s. It may prove illuminating for future considerations if Hugo’s focus on systemic complicity and Dostoevsky’s focus on personal complicity are held together.

This then sets the stage for another point of difference: the path to redemption. Because Hugo is in the business of disparaging the corrupt justice system, it is precisely the corrupt system that must break down before Jean Valjean can be free. For Jean Valjean good deeds, escape, and the cessation of the system’s pursuit shall pave the road to redemption. However, Jean Valjean still battles with his conscience even when he evades the justice system. In contrast, it is the justice system that paves the road to redemption for Raskolnikov; for Raskolnikov confession and prison shall be the road to redemption. In my judgment, it seems that the breakdown of corrupt systems and confession could beneficially be held together. For both Hugo and Dostoevsky, conscience is a major player in the lives of their protagonists, albeit the justice system is portrayed variously.

Intertwined with their respective anthropologies and their notions of redemption are their exemplar humans or Christ figures. Setup as the exemplar in Les Miserables is the Christ-like bishop who rides on a donkey and who quite literally cares for the poor and disenfranchised. This seems to focus on Jesus’ acts towards the poor – e.g. see the gospel of Luke: the gospel is for the poor. And by the end of Les Miserables, Jean Valjean the convict has evolved into an angel and Christ-figure from the seed that the bishop planted at the beginning of the novel. In The Idiot the Christ figure is a protagonist who basically lacks common sense not because the protagonist is stupid but because the protagonist has not been corrupted by the “common sense” of the world; for example, the protagonist is completely naïve in regards to relations with women. This seems to focus on Jesus’ sinlessness. It seems that their Christ figures bespeak their differing anthropologies: while Hugo focuses on acts of justice, Dostoevsky focuses on innocence.

There are numerous other comparisons that could be mentioned, but these are merely a few considerations that kept cropping up in my mind as I meandered through the shadowy cobblestone streets, dank sewers, and battlefields of Les Miserables.

Les Miserables is a touching story of abuse and healing, and it is no surprise that quite a few movies have been “based” on this story. It’s a story about the evolution of a galley slave becoming an angel, a convict becoming a christ. It’s one of the most memorable stories in world literature. I would like to recommend this novel. However, considering that we live in an age of sound bytes, I suspect almost nobody would be too keen on having such an immense adventure.

Competition: Making Enemies and Friends

“Comparison is the hidden worm that consumes in secret and does not die at least not until it takes the life out of love” (SK, Works of Love).  

Participating in recent soccer intramurals in seminary has reminded me of something Flannery O’Connor said, “Extreme situations reveal what we are essentially” (my paraphrase). The context of athletic competition was not at all what O’Connor had in mind. However, perhaps it is not too far fetched to connect her statement with soccer intramurals because in the heat of the game we discover much about ourselves and others as tempers flare and voices grow edgier. In some cases new friends are made, and in other cases new enemies are made.

In competition we may discover that we are monsters.  

Over the years I have done a pretty good job of competing poorly in so far as I have frequently let my tongue get the best of me. While I was in junior high and high school, ping-pong was a major area of competition between my dad, my brother, and me. On several particular occasions, I remember my brother and me growing so heated and angry at each other that we had to stop playing. In fact we stopped playing each other all together for a long time. From my childhood, I could provide many similar examples particularly from my years playing soccer.

But of course athletic competition is merely one of many sorts of competition. There is competition in academics, reality TV, employment, and dare I say politics. The upcoming presidential election is a sort of competition. And not least among various sorts of competition is that strange leviathan we call capitalism. I do not intend to broaden our understanding of competition to such a degree that it is a useless word, but I would like to point out the propensity for competition in human relations in general.

Competition is something many people enjoy. However, many other people seek to avoid it because either they simply do not have a taste for it or they see how divisive it can be. Obviously, there are usually winners and losers in competition. Winning can be exhilarating, and even losing can be edifying. Some winners, however, do not merely get some sort of trophy at the end; they usurp the place and even the dignity and potential for life of the loser. To make matters worse, some of these losers were not even aware of the competition until they had already been born into the losing team – let your imagination run wild with regard to global politics. What then shall the winning side do to the losing side?

Perhaps, there are some things about which competition is potentially appropriate and healthy, while there are other things about which competition is simply inappropriate.  

A theology that says something about competition is needed lest we continue walking a vague tightrope between the borders of love and hate, morality and immorality.

When I started to write this blog, I intended it to be focused on particular sorts of competition, namely those which are in controlled environments, but as I reflected a bit more I realized that it was terribly insufficient. My brother and I had a scuffle over ping-pong, but that is quite trivial when compared to global politics.  

What then should be a trajectory-setter for thinking about appropriate competition and appropriate participation?

Could love be the standard for good and bad competition? Oh, but what a lofty standard! How could that ever be practiced in competition? Shall we concede to Ivan Karamazov who says, “It’s possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever close up”?

“Love your enemies.” I imagine this probably means something akin to not trampling the other into the ground when such an opportunity arises.   

There are many sides and dimensions to the pervading issue of competition that I have not touched, many of which I have intentionally omitted for lack of space and many of which I have not yet considered. Not least among my omissions is my lack of reference to the canonical witness. Consequently, here I am merely welcoming us to think about competition theologically because there is such a desperate need for us to do so considering we are living in a world so entrenched with competition. It is in the very air we breathe, and we need to be aware of it lest it annihilate any hope of building “ecumenical,” hospitable communities characterized by love.

A few concluding comments are in order to tie together this smattering. First, competition is not inherently good or bad, albeit it may be used for good or ill by those involved. Second, folks who like to think that they have righteously avoided competition should probably reexamine themselves and recognize their potential complicity in bad sorts of competition. Third, something as risky as competition requires a large degree of candid accountability from all sides; no one should be exempt from such accountability.

There is of course much more to say, but this shall suffice for a start, however small a start this may be.

Old People and Big Books

In America we often sweep our parents off to the side and out of the way, lest they slow us down. It seems that we forget that old people have lived life and know a thing or two. We forget that they have already climbed life’s tallest mountains and explored life’s deepest and darkest caves.

In America we like aphoristic books with pretty covers, though they don’t say much of anything. They merely give us equivocal anthems to post on our bathroom mirror or on our status update. There’s no substantial content, just a wisp of ephemeral air tantamount to a fart.

Old people and big books are alike in some ways. They are like treasure chests frequently teeming with wit and wisdom. Unfortunately for us, we in America seem to dislike old people and big books. We prefer young people with enthusiasm, and we prefer thin books with clever titles. Neither young people nor thin books generally have much wisdom to offer.

Old people belong in the mainstream of culture, and big books should be the thrones on which they sit. They should be our philosopher kings, but alas we prefer anarchy as long as the anarchy is shiny, bright, and young.

Of course, I’m being a bit facetious. But this past Sunday after church I had lunch with several older gentlemen from church, and it was fascinating and amusing to hear them talk about all sorts of things not least among their stories were their misadventures in China. Listening to them talk made me think it odd that we younger people don’t do more listening.

In a culture infatuated with prolonging youth, we shouldn’t forget that older folks have stories to tell, and we younger folks may do well to sit and listen.