AS A FIRE AND A HAMMER

The real question, John [of the Cross] suggests, is about what you are really after: Do you want ‘spirituality’, mystical experience, inner peace, or do you want God? If you want God, then you must be prepared to let go all, absolutely all, substitute satisfactions, intellectual and emotional. You must recognize that God is so unlike whatever can be thought or pictured that, when you have got beyond the stage of self-indulgent religiosity, there will be nothing you can securely know or feel. You face a blank: and any attempt to avoid that or shy away from it is a return to playing comfortable religious games. The dark night is God’s attack on religion. If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your own religious world shattered. If you think devotional practices, theological insights, even charitable actions give you some sort of purchase on God, you are still playing games. On the other hand, if you can face and accept and even rejoice in the experience of darkness, if you accept God is more than an idea which keeps your religion or philosophy or politics tidy – then you may find a way back to religion, philosophy or politics, to an engagement with them that is more creative because you are more aware of the oddity, the uncontrollable quality of the truth at the heart of all things. This is what ‘detachment’ means – not being ‘above the battle’, but being involved in such a way that you can honestly confront whatever comes to you without fear of the unknown; it is a kind of readiness for the unexpected, if that is not too much of a paradox.

The Gospel came to the Greeks and the Greeks turned it into a philosophy. The Gospel came to the Romans and the Romans turned it into a system. The Gospel came to the Europeans and the Europeans turned it into a culture. The Gospel came to America and the Americans turned it into a business.

Why did the scale of the Islamists’ triumph so surprise Egypt’s mainly secular pundits? Mostly this reflects the success of Egyptian governments, beginning long before Hosni Mubarak came to power, in denying that the bulk of Egyptian society has always been deeply conservative and fervidly religious.

The reality is that most Egyptians remain grindingly poor, ill educated and alienated from a ruling class seen as more attuned to Western fashions than local custom.

The programmers of the commercial web have always seen their goal as the elimination of distance and friction from transactions, and that objective has, not surprisingly, come to shape online social networks. But, when carried too far, the minimization of transaction costs in personal relations ends up having the effect of reducing those relationships to mere transactions. Intimacy without distance is not intimacy, and sharing without friction is not sharing. Qualities of tenderness become, in the end, forms of commerce.

The problem, I think, is that the nearly everyone has accepted the Occupiers’ anger as validating their movement, but an anger so general has no political value. It gets you nowhere. It offers no critique of, no challenge nor any alternative to the vague abstract thing at which you are angry. “We are the 99 percent” angry at the remaining 1% doesn’t tell anyone who the 1 percent are, and what they’ve done wrong, and what they should have done, and how the system itself encouraged them to do some things and not others, and what the nation should do now.

They make you, as I say, miss Marx. Or not Marx, exactly, but the kind of coherent and thought-out leftism he represents, ideas you can engage and challenge, and be challenged by, which is very different from the establishment liberalism of (to mention them again) the editors of the New York Times.

The loss of a left worth engaging hurts the country, not because that left will answer the questions of the moment, but because the country needs the challenges only the left will (at the moment) provide. The mainstream right will not challenge those who’ll exploit the system for their own ends, and exploit others for their own profit, because so many have off-loaded their moral thinking to the market. Nor, not in a million years, will the Republican Party.

That may be one of the worst results of the sixties, that the politics of gesture and emotion have been privileged, as the academics put it, which means a politics with no actual political content will drive a publicly successful movement like Occupy Wall Street—even though it is not going anywhere in particular.

I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.

[Evangelical] barriers [to productive thinking] include an immediatism that insists on action, decision, and even perfection right now; a populism that confuses winning supporters with mastering actually existing situations; and an antitraditionalism that privileges current judgements on Biblical, theological, and ethical issues (however hastily formed) over insight from the past (however hard won and carefully stated). In addition … we evangelicals are susceptible to a nearly gnostic dualism that rushes to spiritualize all manner of corporeal, terrestrial, physical, and material realities (despite the origin and providential maintenance of these realities by God). We also much prefer to put our money into programs offering immediate relief, whether evangelistic or humanitarian, instead of into institutions promoting intellectual development over the long term.

Some verbs need an object. Some verbs don’t. Some can go both ways. A comment on the human condition.

Yesterday my wife says she read some report: six in ten kids say they don’t believe the earth will be around by the time they reach adulthood.

What a failure of imagination is this. Or worse. A failure of discipline.

Not theirs, of course, but ours. What a great noisy doom-saying din we’ve raised for our children, and what has the doing undone? We have become so literal, so scientific, and so prescriptive about what we tell children that we’ve effectively rid the world of wonder. A child must love the world in order to want to save it.

[H]e believes in nature as that which is not ourselves, and he regards culture as the measure of our attendance upon natural events, and our attention to them a debt he joyously pays.