In defence of the proximate.

Themes: Art and Imagination, Beauty, Hope, Philosophy, The Future, The Trinity

Defence of the Defence (2 sentences)

1. Not the ‘approximate’, although it is worthy in its way. It is an attribute of God to be proximate to all and thus (a)proximate to human understanding. There are pleasant idle hours to spend in contemplation of the alpha privative. (Particularly one as odd as the ‘a’ in approximate). I nod in friendly estimation toward the Negative Theologian. But the via negativa is hardly a road, more of a fence to keep you on the road. We must journey further on the Way who proceeds.

2. And I challenge anyone to question my commitment to the ‘farther off’. Many of the finest things are farther off, don’t you think? Mountain ranges are an obvious case. In fact a double case: fine to behold from afar, and when you’re perched on the crest, making far-off things fine.
I long for the Delectable Mountains, to be shepherded in Immanuel’s Land; for the glimpse from Mt Clear of the gates of the Celestial City. I am tortured with the thought that perhaps they will always be farther off.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?

Psalm 121:1

This, of course, is the dangerous ambivalence of the ‘farther off’. It can be constantly removing itself to the horizon. Perhaps because something in the human heart was created for visions, for anticipation and expectation, the ‘farther off’ is the most powerful of the modern techniques of power. Some things that appear farther off are not really there at all, no matter how fast you run. No trophy, no flowers, no flashbulbs, no line. The desire for the ‘farther off’ when undisciplined, when cultivated without wisdom or direction, flowers into an infinite dissatisfaction whose-not-entirely-approximate name is Hell.

The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages a double aesthetic: on the one hand, a disciplined appreciation that somethings are fine simply because they are distant; and therefore one must keep one’s proper distance to love them truly. On the other, acknowledging that there is a ‘farther off’ which beckons us come closer: its name is ‘promise’. The true lover of the ‘farther off’ engages in this aesthetic discipline: cultivating joy, wonder, reverence, sublimity at the contemplation of the essentially ‘father off’; and yearning to come closer to the promised. (the cultivation of this discernment in human affairs is one of the true uses of philosophy, even of the post-modern hermeneutic of suspicion). This double aesthetic is the heart of Christian worship: it is its dynamism and transcendence; it is what makes it interesting for all eternity. It is the double aesthetic of the resurrection: the place where the true lover of the ‘farther off’ learns to cultivate discernment, to learn what it is that beckons us closer, and what demands that we remain distant. It is the double aesthetic of the Trinity and Incarnation. It is the character of God.

3. I rest my defence of the defence.

 

In defence of the proximate:

The proximate is neither approximate, nor farther off, nor promise.
It is what we must be in order to love them truly.

You and me and the friend
who draws near in faith.

“And they said one to another,
Did not our heart burn within us,
while he talked with us by the way.” (Luke 24:32 KJV)

I rest my defence.

(for Emma on her 30th Birthday)

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Grieving the Future

Themes: Grief, Selections, The Future

Sometimes, barrelling along the highway between here and there, I get caught up in the sense of history flowing. Our little jelly-bean bubble of conversation is a trapped pocket of air in the stream of time. The fixed point in a river rushing, the wheels of our vehicle madly spinning to keep us still. I had this thought while driving:

Grief is a mood through which we experience the transmutation of time from future into past. Grief, like music, is the consciousness of time. The contrast might be instructive: music is a formal structure for bringing time to consciousness. Within this structure many further (more particular) relations to time, and to the timeful-world (the world viewed as a timeful order) can be communicated. Music allows us to intuit time. In any particular musical moment we are full of the patterns of communication and coherence that the score has built up through its flowing, we are anticipating the particular notes and figures which will extend this musical coherence, and we passing from this anticipation, through a particular articulation – a note, a silence – which may or may not be what we anticipated, and we are refiguring, re-cohering, the total piece in the light of this moment. In music, when the music truly captures us, we catch a glimpse of that rarest of moments: the present.

Grief is also consciousness of the present. The multiple futures toward which we have invested, sustained by the natural uncertainty of future-time, collapsing into a particular, unitary, actuality. Possibility becoming a story. The coherence and order which the universe requires comes at the expense of these unrealised potentialities. Grief is the consciousness of the perishing of futures.

I guess that’s why it’s so hard to explain to each other, and to comfort, redress, justify grieving. How can anyone console another for the loss of something that never was? The love that was never returned, the children who were never born, the trip that was never taken, the work that was never completed. The loss of these ‘nothings’ is, in a sense, infinite. The lack of definition, the non-concrete nature of these hopes, makes their loss harder not easier. The loss of the possibility of a child includes, in some ways, the loss of the actual child, and the sweetness of his childhood, the glory of his maturity, the loss of all his hopes as well.
The loss of a love that was never returned includes all the loss of all the pathways opened up for us by that love: the friendships never shared, the places never visited together, the histories never told, the further futures never anticipated.

What word of comfort can we speak to someone grieving the future? Each hope was a little singularity, pregnant with universes. And thus the loss of each future threatens to overwhelm us with an incalculable, infinite loss.

How can Jesus be the Lord of this time? How is Jesus the Lord of the futures that never were? If we are comforted in this grief, how is it with the comfort we recieve from God? And, as the sufferings of Christ overflow to us, how also, through Christ, will our comfort overflow?

 

Image “Angel of Grief” by maryn0503

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What will not be?

Themes: Doctrine, The Future

We’ve been studying eschatology in our doctrine classes for this past term, normally that would mean lots of discussion about the end of the world: whether we all get RAPTURED before or after the TRIBULATION, whether the ‘MARK OF THE BEAST’ is some sort of barcode or RFID tag, and whether the UN is really paving the way for THE ANTICHRIST. You know, interesting Sci-Fi type stuff, like in ‘Left Behind’.
Hey, that’s what ‘eschatology’ meant when I was a kid.

There’s certainly plenty of material in the news at the moment to give a Rapture Watcher pause for thought: The Global Financial Crisis, the arming of nuclear Iran and North Korea (Gog and Magog anyone?), a pandemic of Swine Flu (can anything be more clearly a sign of judgement than a plague of swine flu? clearly the work of the Pale Rider). The RAPTURE INDEX must be well into the Red Zone.

(Seriously, you should check out the Rapture Index, bookmark it! You’ll be pleased to know that: “To help the site survive the crush of traffic that the staff assumes will follow the Rapture it has a number of mirror sites that include raptureme.com, tribulation.us, rr-rapture.com, raptureready.net, and anti-antichrist.com.” Because everyone will want to know what happened to all the Christians after the Rapture, see?)

Sadly, that’s not what we’ve been doing in class. Instead, we’ve been working through the Lord’s Prayer as a framework for thinking about God’s purposes for this world and how, by the Spirit, they are brought to fruition in the person and work of Jesus. It’s been really good stuff.
David Höhne (our lecturer) is right to point out that the basic experience of prayer is eschatological. When we bring our prayers to God we are involving ourselves in the observation that this world has not come fully under the Lordship of Christ; we acknowledge that God has decisively acted against this condition; and we anticipate that God will bring his Kingdom to completion thus satisfying our deepest needs beyond all possible comprehension or desire. Every act of asking God for something is a gesture towards the End of the Age.
Every prayer is ultimately an elaboration on:

Our Father in heaven,
Your name be honored as holy.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.

But that’s not really what we talked about today either…
Uncharacteristically, today our class discussion did stray heavily towards the topic of THE END OF THE WORLD, although strangely enough, the actual topic was meant to be the eschatological implications of the prayer for forgiveness…

So what can we say of God’s plans for this creation? On the one hand we have the unmistakable implication that the New Testament draws from the Resurrection: that God’s new creation is a redemption of the Old – the buying back of something which had been lost and enslaved. It is the redemption from the grave of a lifeless corpse – one dead body raised is the living, breathing evidence that God can and will act to overcome the power of sin and death that has held the old world captive.
That act, is not less that a fundamental refoundation of the world, a reconstitution, it is re-newed, but it would not be ‘redemption’, there would be no ‘re-‘ if the new-ness which God brings involved forgetting the old and leaving it behind. Such an act would destroy the concept of redemption: you don’t buy back a child from slavery by having another child.
When he promises to ‘make all things new’ this does not mean that the old things are forgotten and set aside. They are the seeds out of which he will cause a new garden to burst into flower.

But on the other hand, we shouldn’t avoid the strong language of 2 Peter 3, which talks about the world in these terms:

They willfully ignore this: long ago the heavens and the earth existed out of water and through water by the word of God. Through these the world of that time perished when it was flooded by water. But by the same word the present heavens and earth are held in store for fire, being kept until the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. (2Peter 3:5-7 HCSB)

That is a promise of real destruction: before the resurrection came a real death. There is no path to the new creation that does not lead through violent destruction: what was true of Christ is true for all the world, it is true for us precisely because his death and destruction was for us.
Jesus, “who rescues us from the coming wrath” does so by suffering it for us, not by stopping it from coming. It is because we have already lived through the destruction of ourselves and our world in him, that we can speak now of being a ‘new creation’ in him. But there is no escaping the inverse conclusion that whatever is not in him has no future, or rather, its future is fire.

What is ‘in him’ and what is not? What will be, and what will not be, that is the question.

pic by siokaos

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Astro-Ignominy

Themes: Apologetics, Critique, The Future

I was having a coffee at Campos today with Emma and casually reading the paper over her shoulder. She was reading the Daily Telegraph (my glasses feel soiled from refracting light beams that have touched that Paper). Emma appears impervious to its evil muck. I noticed this ‘pearl’ from Jonathon Cainer, the Tele Astrologist:

‘Nothing is certain but death and taxes.’ So said American founding father, Benjamin Franklin. His politician’s soundbite still echoes through the centuries, but it omits another certainty: the movements of the planets. Astronomers can say, with confidence precisely where Venus or Mars will be this time next week or even on a given date in 3009. That’s why, for those who seek to foresee the future, the sky is so fascinating. Not everything up there, though, is predictable. Comets for example, can surprise everyone. With each day, it looks more likely that Comet Lulin will soon surprise us all.

Ah, the movements of the Spheres – Aristotle would be so proud. Us, dull sublunary lovers, bound to change and decay can only gaze wistfully at the perfection in motion of the heavenlies. At least we could, until Kepler worked out that the Planets were dancing around in a kind-of Oval shape. It turns out that the level of determination/certainty in the movements of the planets is precisely the same for that of any physical object. Not more or Less.
Which makes the whole business of fortune telling slightly bizzarre and contradictory, as can be seen from my particular horoscope:

‘All things bright and beautiful…’ So goes the popular old hymn. But of course, that’s not all the Good Lord (or Lady) made. The Devil, we are reliably informed by the good book, is a fallen angel. So who made him (or her)? It is all, we are told by those who consider themselves entitled to interpret such things, to do with ‘free will’. We all have it, but we don’t all use it. Currently, you feel as if you have a serious lack of choice. Whatever put you in this position, has also put, within your reach, an opportunity to get out of it.

Hmm, here are three reasons why Jonathan Cainer is a turkey. [sadly, his being this particular species of turkey is contingent upon there being a whole posse of turkeys who take him seriously]

1. We either have Free Will, which would make telling the future from Celestial Bodies (other than my wife) seem like a deeply, wildly, and breathtakingly fraudulent activity.

2. We don’t have free will, and our level of causal determination would be precisely the same as that of the Planets, unless of course the Planets have free will…
Hey, maybe they just, kind of, like, going around in not-quite circles… who knows?
If we assume that the Planets don’t have free will, and neither do we, then it is still possible that there is a cause-effect relation between Planetary Behaviour and our own, but what direction does the relation flow?
As Robin Williams in The Fisher King demonstrates, this is no easy thing. Maybe our behaviour determines the movement of the Spheres? (perhaps if I concentrate hard enough I can break up clouds with my mind – you’d have to be nude to focus the psychic energies…)
3. Whatever weird and twisted cosmology could be formulated to prop up this chicanery, surely it gets grievously disturbed by the arrival of a UNEXPECTED COMET. To be fair, Comets really messed up Aristotle as well. A practice that pretends to predict the portentous from the regular motions of heavenly bodies takes a fair knock on the head when something shows up out-of-the-blue/black, and not only that, is heading in the wrong direction.
I love you Comet Lulin – you gloriously shiny, silver, turkey bullet.
Ahh, maybe I’m just old and grumpy…
after all, when I was your age Pluto was still a planet.

comet photo by Karzaman-Ahmad

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An Open Letter of Welcome to All The Peoples of the Future

Themes: Friends, The Future

Hello, people of the future.
Thanks for dropping in.
Apologies for our antiquated interests and modes of expression.
I’m hoping to come and visit you soon.
And maybe we can become better acquainted.
Love, dan

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