What I'm Reading Now

The contention between the "new" atheists and the devout is causing a resurgence in agnostic studies. Krasny (Off Mike) is a public radio host and a self-declared agnostic, maintaining a position that "stands open to verification of either side of the God question." Deftly balancing biography and literary scholarship, the book is both a personal examination of agnosticism and a balanced voice in the complex debate over faith's role in society. Krasny grew up a strong believer in his Jewish faith, until adolescent questioning led him to declare he just wasn't sure. Despite a lost connection with God, the young Krasny continued to seek a divine presence, even admitting to feelings of envy toward those possessing "the consolation of faith." In this book, agnosticism is a tool to philosophically engage with various manifestations of faith including organized religion, spiritual-but-not-religious sentiments, and even paranormal theories. Readers expecting a late chapter conversion will be disappointed; Krasny remains agnostic to the end, even while declaring his respect for the benefits religion can bring to believers.


You can access Krasny's NPR interview here.

What I'm Reading Now

From the Back Cover

There have been times when you've felt that if there isn't a God, there ought to be. Swept up in the mystery of the night sky, you've felt the closeness of its designer. Nature's extravagant diversity, unfolding in living color, has made you long to know the artist who dreamed it all up. Imagine what that might be like---to actually know God in a way that fills your heart and whispers tremendous value and purpose to something deep within you. But how can you experience a being you're not even sure exists? Religious jargon and games can't satisfy such a longing. It's got to be real ... or nothing at all. A Search for What Is Real helps you sort through the questions, objections, and concerns that arise when you consider God not as some theological abstraction, but as someone you can actually connect with ... and want to connect with, perhaps more than you know. FINDING FAITH The Finding Faith books A Search for What Makes Sense and A Search for What Is Real don't try to tell you what to believe; they are guides in learning how to believe. If you think the spiritual journey requires turning your back on honesty and intellectual integrity, these two companion volumes will speak to both your mind and your soul.

What I Just Finished

From the Back Cover
Does having faith mean abandoning reason? It's easy to get that impression. Still, it seems reasonable that a supremely intelligent God would want you to use your God-given intellect on your spiritual journey as much as in any other aspect of your life. Faith may not stand on rational thinking alone, but a solid faith should walk hand in hand with intellectual integrity. Does it really matter what I believe? What is the relationship between faith and knowledge? Why are there so many religions? Do all paths lead to the same God? This book helps you sort through the questions, objections, and concerns you can't help but raise. A Search for What Makes Sense will help you think your way clearly and honestly to answers that satisfy because they're your answers---conclusions you've arrived at personally without manipulation, coercion, or game-playing. For faith to exist and grow it's got to make sense---good sense, carefully-thought-out sense. And chances are it does. FINDING FAITH The Finding Faith books A Search for What Makes Sense and A Search for What Is Real don't try to tell you what to believe; they are guides in learning how to believe. If you think the spiritual journey requires turning your back on honesty and intellectual integrity, these two companion volumes will speak to both your mind and your soul.

Holy Violence

This week, in our Brit Lit I class, we studied the works of John Donne. I've loved his poetry ever since I first read it for my own undergraduate British Literature class--it's so shocking, so beautiful, so different from the poetry that comes before it, especially the religious poetry.

We laughed over his carpe diem poem "The Flea," and we all appreciated the conceits in his "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," but the poem that engendered the most discussion was this one:

HOLY SONNETS. XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you

As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,

Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Not every student liked it, of course. But most did. And not just in a "That's an okay poem" kind of way. The fervor of the poem was mirrored in their responses to it. In a world full of bland clichés about God, the idea of someone longing for Him enough to beg for his violent posession holds a strange attraction.

I love classes like that.

Reunited

Monday evening, about 8:30 or so, I was sitting at home, talking to my daughter, when I happenned to notice that one of my rings was missing. And not just any ring--my paternal grandmother's wedding ring. It's a tiny thing, white gold with a chip of a diamond, not worth a lot in dollars but high in sentimental value. I'd had it sized down to a pinky ring and have worn it daily for years, and I'd planned on giving it to my daughter one day.

I jumped up and started looking around the house--my bedroom, the bathroom, the closet, even in the laundry hamper, anywhere it might be. I looked in my car, in my husband's truck. No luck. I felt a little sick to my stomach.

As soon as I got to work Tuesday morning, I began going to all the offices to see if it had been turned in. Nope. I asked one of the cleaning ladies. No. I looked in all the rooms I'd taught in the day before, searched my office and the breakroom. No luck.

On my way back in from lunch, I saw the other cleaning lady and asked her. Before I could even describe it, she smiled and said, "A little silver ring with a tiny diamond? It's in the small second floor Ladies Room on the vanity."

I ran down the hall and up the stairs, thinking "What are the chances that it's still there?" Down another hall, through the door, and yes, right there on the vanity, 24 hours or so after losing it, was my ring.

As I later found out, a friend in the office next to mine, LQN, had found it on the floor and debated about whether to take it to her office or leave it, finally decided to leave it, and placed it on the vanity so whoever lost it could find it if she came back.

I can't help but wonder how many people saw that ring and left it there for the rightful owner. My faith in humanity is renewed. My heartfelt thanks to all those honest people.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

OK. So what were the other two books I bought?

After nine years serving on the staff of a big urban church in Atlanta, Barbara Brown Taylor arrives in rural Clarkesville, Georgia (population 1,500), following her dream to become the pastor of her own small congregation. The adjustment from city life to country dweller is something of a shock -- Taylor is one of the only professional women in the community -- but small-town life offers many of its own unique joys. Taylor has five successful years that see significant growth in the church she serves, but ultimately she finds herself experiencing "compassion fatigue" and wonders what exactly God has called her to do. She realizes that in order to keep her faith she may have to leave.

Taylor describes a rich spiritual journey in which God has given her more questions than answers. As she becomes part of the flock instead of the shepherd, she describes her poignant and sincere struggle to regain her footing in the world without her defining collar. Taylor's realization that this may in fact be God's surprising path for her leads her to a refreshing search to find Him in new places.Leaving Church will remind even the most skeptical among us that life is about both disappointment and hope -- and ultimately, renewal.

From Booklist
Collins is a jester and a double agent. A poet readers flock to, he gets the laughs and the applause, he paces and bows, concealing his weapons and serious mien. His self-portraiture is mordant, his drollery preemptive, his insouciance camouflage, his intelligence of the stealth kind, and his intricately constructed poems detonate as they blossom in the reader’s mind. Collins is fanciful and mindful, cocky and prayerful, blissful over ordinary things and intimate with dread and loneliness. Here he is morose in Paris, staring down a fish staring back on a plate in Pittsburgh, rain-harried in Dublin, awake and repentant at the fringe of night in a bright bathroom, loitering with intent in the kitchen. Collins’ seductive poems are decoys drawing us into deep waters where memories waft like tangled weeds and death lurks in the cold spots. Wryly philosophical, caustically whimsical, disarmingly beautiful, Collins’ covertly powerful lyrics deftly snare all that is fine and ludicrous about us, from the old habit of poetry itself to the spell of love and the long, rolling song of the self. --Donna Seaman

Intentional Spirituality

It's hard to pursue a graduate degree in English without questioning your faith. We are trained to parse words, to analyze texts for multiple meanings, and to recognize the inadequacies of interpretations and translations. Throw into the mix extremely intelligent, well-spoken fellow graduate students who either regard the Christian faith as outdated and irrelevant or who are openly antagonistic towards it, and your uncertainty is intensified. And if, as I do, you have the type of personality that always searches for the answer, that must be certain, that has to know, well, you may be headed for a dark night of the soul even as you search for some small ray of light.

I was groping through that darkness. I think the physical and mental exhaustion of completing a PhD in three years (teaching full time one of those years and Honors Symposium all of the summers, driving so far back and forth the first year, living away from home and family the second) contributed to my spiritual dryness. I poured all my energy into completing the degree, slowly crowding out time for Scripture, prayer, meditation.

Life is funny, though. Right in the midst of my barren times came synchronicity. I guess you could also call it providence. First, I read a book called Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd. This is a beautifully written book by a woman who left Christianity to pursue the Sacred Feminine, and while I did not agree with her journey into paganism, I did admire her intentional spirituality and was intrigued by her research into the nature and being of God. This led me to books on theology, where I encountered this appellation for God: The Divine Mystery.

Everything in me reacted to this name. How beautiful! And how freeing! Augustine said that if you have understood, then that which you have understood is not God. Elizabeth A. Johnson says that the "incomprehensibility of God [is] a mystery of free and liberating love, love that draws near, chooses us without our deserving it, accompanies and bears us, walks the path of struggle, promises victory, dwells among us to gather us in." This name for God, The Divine Mystery, allows us to not understand, to not comprehend completely, and to know that we never will. Yet, at the same time, it validates our pursuit towards understanding. It's almost as if this name gave me permission to believe and cling even through all my questions and doubts. It gave me permission to not have all the answers.

Then at the same time, because Marilynne Robinson was going to be speaking at the Christian Scholars Conference, I began reading her book Gilead. I have never read a more beautiful novel in all my life, and maybe I never shall. When I read the Twilight series, I said that I'd read almost two thousand pages without wanting to underline one sentence. This novel was the exact opposite. I wanted to underline every sentence of Gilead, and double underline some parts. I have never read a novel with so much Scripture and so little dogma, such holiness coupled with such humanity. It is a celebration of mystery and love, of the spiritual as well as the physical. Nothing I can say about this novel could do it justice. It is the story of a life lived in honor of The Divine Mystery.

Then, as I said yesterday, while at this conference I met some wonderful people who have chosen to live with such spiritual intentionality, searching for and worshipping God even as they realize that The Divine Mystery can never be fully comprehended in this life. I guess maybe all my life I've been drawn to this idea of God because I've always loved I Corinthians 13:12, especially in the King James Version: "For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part, but then I shall know even as also I am known."

I want, though, for my pursuit of God to be characterized by love instead of fear, by the desire for relationship rather than oughts or shoulds or guilt.

Suddenly, my cup seems full.

Disagreeing with Dr. Johnson

I admire Samuel Johnson. I really do. A man who can compile a Dictionary of the English Language in seven years with exacting precision is hardly to be argued with. But I am today.

Dr. Johnson wrote:

Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topicks of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression. Of sentiments purely religious, it will be found that the most simple expression is the most sublime. Poetry loses its lustre and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more excellent than itself. All that verse can do is to help the memory, and delight the ear, and for these purposes it may be very useful; but it supplies nothing to the mind. The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for fiction, and too majestick for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere.

I don’t claim to have the analytical powers of Dr. Johnson, but I do have a few things to say in rebuttal: John Donne. George Herbert. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Christina Rosetti.

Have anything to add to the argument?

Wish I'd Said That

I have always loved to read because of the sense of discovery—new people, new worlds, new times, new ideas. I also love to read because of the sense of escape. For a little while, I can leave my old familiar world and live in a new, exciting, and very different one—even different ones on different days. But one of the greatest pleasures of reading comes when discovery becomes recognition, when I encounter a passage that so beautifully expresses something I’ve thought or felt, and something deep inside me says, “Yes! That’s it exactly!”

Here’s one such passage from Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith:

“A folksy bluegrass trio began playing, the mandolin offering the quavering melody, then two guitars joined in, and then three voices singing. We turned slowly to look at the musicians. A woman got up from her table and began to dance on the lawn between us and the stage, all by herself, and I thought to myself, I wish I were the kind of person who could dance in public, not caring what everyone thought. And I wanted to be this way so badly that after a minute I just got up, moved closer to the music, toward the one woman dancing, and slowly and very shyly and without enormous visible grace, began to move in time with the music. I figured that once I stepped forward into that spotlight, another would appear somewhere near my feet, and if it didn’t, at least I’d have had the chance to dance.

So I did, dancing with my eyes closed so as not to be distracted. Nietzsche said that he could only believe in a God who would dance, and I feel the same way . . .”

Boy, I wish I’d said that.

Woody's Angst

On April 8, 1966, the cover of Time magazine shouted a question many readers of that time would have considered rhetorical: “Is God Dead?” After all, enlightened mankind had it all figured out, and his growing rationalism had led gradually to a totally secularized view of life. Man was finally free of God, free from the superstition of religion, from its restraints and demands. Man was free to be the center of his own universe, to make his own choices, to construct his own truth.

The problem with this is that man, apart from some centering force, some universal, has no meaning. He becomes an insignificant cog in the great machine of the universe. Yet something deep inside him demands that there must be more. So he searches for significance through philosophy, through drugs, through materialism, through art.

All this too philosophical for you? Think it’s just exaggeration? Here’s how it sounds in real life:

Jennie Yabroff interviewed actor and director Woody Allen for Newsweek magazine. She reports that, “at 72, he says he still lies awake at night, terrified of the void.” He makes movies, “not because he has any grand statement to offer, but simply to take his mind off the existential horror of being alive. ‘Movies are a great diversion,’ he says, ‘because it’s much more pleasant to be obsessed over how the hero gets out of his predicament than it is over how I get out of mine. . . . I can’t really come up with a good argument to choose life over death, except that I’m too scared . . . I need to be focused on something so I don’t see the big picture.” He sums up his lifeview: “Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is. You see how meaningless . . . I don’t want to depress you, but it’s a meaningless little flicker.”

Contrast that with Paul’s view of life and its inevitable end: “The time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me . . .”

All of us choose a philosophy for life. I like Paul’s better.