Category Archives: religion

Tidings of comfort and joy . . .

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“O Magnum Mysterium” is one of the responsories in the Gregorian liturgy of Christmas and as such is much older than “In Dulci Jubilo,” which dates from the early fourteenth century. “O Magnum Mysterium” has about it a formality and high seriousness that one writer refers to the irony of the Incarnation, “the fact that the field animals—mere beasts of burden trying to sleep in the same manger—would witness the birth of the holy Christ child.” “In Dulci Jubilo,” in which we are asked to sing and be merry around the manger, is less formal but also bears the signs of liturgical trope. Both texts depend upon the “in praesepio,” theme from Luke’s gospel.

Unsres Herzens Wonne leit in praesepio.

. . . ut animalia viderent Dominum natum jacentem in praesepio.

. . . et venerunt festinantes et invenerunt Mariam et Ioseph et infantem positum in praesepio.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger.

It’s a lovely story, taken all together, the holy birth surrounded by signs and portents, the plain circumstances suffused with swarms of angels and the the swagger of magician kings. And it’s part of a larger story that one could wish were true even in the face of certain conviction to the contrary, As professor Tolkien has put it:

There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.1

The text of the story surely came first, but I love this image of Giotto’s that foregrounds the animalia,2 with its wonderful donkey and the angels hiding in the attic. “O Magnum Mysterium” foregrounds the mystery, but “In Dulci Jubilo” seems to address the Christ child, himself, much as Dante addressed Beatrice on the margin of the earthly paradise, Alpha es et O, “Blessed are you who come.”

1See “On Fairy Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis, Erdmans, 1966 [1947].
2The original is in the Scrovegny Chapel.

And I said that was good

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This needs poetry, but prose is all I have to give it, at least today. An old friend and colleague at St. Barnabas Church in Denton, Texas, has died—Bob Lockwood. The obituaries will tell you he was Robert Minturn Lockwood, III, M. D., whose profession as a radiologist hardly defined him. They will tell you of his devotion to Ann’s Haven Hospice in Denton, a pioneering effort in the hospice movement and one of the large works of his life. I didn’t know Bob at the time Ann’s Haven began and can’t speak of that, but his friends and acquaintances who are quoted in the newspapers speak eloquently of his service to the community and how it grew out of his grief over the death of his beloved first wife.

Bob was almost a renaissance man when I knew him, as close to that ideal as any son of the twentieth century could come: physician, scholar, poet, playwright, churchman, birder, naturalist, gentleman farmer—a longer list could be made. He was also an idealist with an almost Emersonian edge of Yankee shrewdness (though he wasn’t literally a Yankee) in spite of all the years he spent in Texas. He was a brilliant man who chose to find his destiny in the community of scholars assembled around two universities in the little town of Denton, Texas, a long way from Harvard and Penn Med. Circumstance was part of the reason why, but also a certain venturesomeness, I thought, coupled with a tendency to discount his accomplishments. Bob sometimes spoke of his career at Harvard as though he had been a failure and treated his medical credential as slight achievement. He was not a proud man, at least not when I knew him. When he retired he sold his radiology practice and went to work for the people who bought him out. But he also translated Brecht’s Theepenny Opera once, because he thought the popular adaptation (Blitzstein’s, I guess) was too tame. Bob’s father had been a professor of Latin and the Librarian of Haverford College, also the college’s informal historian and a devoted teacher. Students dedicated their yearbook to him in 1924. Maybe some of Bob’s interests, as well as the shaping of his character, began at home.

For the better part of ten years I knew Bob at St. Barnabas—many knew him better than I. But we served together for a year in a discernment process that brought us close, and we shared a heart-wrenching experience of the death of a beloved priest and friend that surprised us like a thief in the night. When I learned of Bob’s own death, I first turned to a poem he wrote in 1993 as a memorial to Charles Williams, the rector of our church at that time. Charles had been diagnosed with lung cancer just shy of his fiftieth birthday and was taken from us swiftly, in less than six months. Bob’s poem is a powerful reflection, not just upon Charles’s time with us and his death, but also upon how Charles talked with us about his death as he was dying—in a series of wonderful pastoral letters. Just before he died, Charles asked me to put together a small book of his sermons; I asked Bob if I could include his poem in the volume. I’ll not quote it entirely, just the conclusion.

And then you died—and were no longer there
       I saw your chest x-ray myself.
       It said DEATH—soon, no matter what.

So then, we cared for you (with a little help from the hospice).
And as you died
       you learned
       you grew
       you bloomed.
It was beautiful, it was terrible.
We wept.

Now please live on in us your friends
We are now more connected, more a Church, more the Body
Because you cared about us.

In the willow-meads of Tasarinan—may we meet again in the spring.

In his second life, the only life in which I knew him, Bob devoted himself to land and to practicing what we are now coming to call sustainability, raising chickens and bees, the farm where he lived with his second family a favorite resort of at least a couple of generations of children at St. Barnabas—a chosen place, a Vergilian place if you will—it’s useful at my age to learn what one thinks. I didn’t know Bob’s family, never went to his farm. He always came to church alone, as I do mostly now, myself, church being something my beloved and I do not share. I knew about Bob’s second life, the private part of it, only from conversations with him; but I believe the farm had been his renewal, or perhaps his last reinvention, of himself.

Now as I reread Bob’s poem I particularly think about its last line, an allusion to a place invented by Professor Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. Treebeard sings of it in a wonderful song that recalls one of the Genesis creation stories:

In the willow-meads of Tasarinan I walked in the Spring.
Ah! the sight and the smell of the Spring in Nan-tasarion!
And I said that was good.

Tasarinan, in the legendarium of Tolkien’s Elves, is part of the lost flat world, now “under the waves,” that preceded middle earth in the same way that the legendary world of gods and heroes preceded classical antiquity, where the stories of that former world were regarded as history. As the members of the ring fellowship bid farewell to Treebeard midway in their journey, Treebeard speaks these poignant words: “I too must bid you now farewell. I do not think that we shall meet again. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I—I smell it in the air.” To which Elrond replies, “Maybe not in Middle-earth, Fangorn. But when the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again, then in the willow meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring.”

Did Charles and Bob read Tolkien together? I don’t know—I’m not sure I even want to know. But I think I understand that in wishing his dear friend and priest a pagan immortality, Bob meant to wish Charles a place in a time out of time wherein the difference between Pagan and Christian has been erased—and the world in which humans dwell with fire and water, beasts and great trees, no longer innocent, has found a new beginning.

—I can think of no better wish for Bob himself, or for us all.

more godspeak . . .

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Religion editor Lisa Miller’s essay in this week’s Newsweek, combatively entitled “Harvard’s Crisis of Faith” troubles me. One can easily grant her point (not actually hers but Louis Menand’s) that Harvard ought to provide undergraduates with a serious opportunity to study present-day religious discourse, especially now when “conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians; between Christians, Muslims, and animists in Africa; between religious conservatives and progressives at home over abortion and gay marriage—all . . . relate, if indirectly, to what rival groups believe about God and scripture.” One can even grant her subsidiary argument that it’s a pity “for Harvard, its students, and the rest of us who need leaders better informed about faith and the motivations of the faithful” if the university fails to do these things.

However, it’s by no means clear to me (and certainly not clear from Miller’s essay) that Harvard indeed doesn’t do these things. Sociology, history, anthropology, literature, philosophy, and other disciplines, each and all, might contribute to understanding of the cited concerns. But that seems not to be the issue. Whilst reporting on Harvard’s debates about a proposed undergraduate requirement entitled Reason and Faith, Miller notes with disapproval that Harvard has neither an undergraduate religion department which can hire and fire and grant tenure, nor a specific religion requirement, but rather relegates religious study to an interdisciplinary program some faculty seem to regard as an academic poor relation or to the divinity school where students “can take graduate-level courses about belief from people who are, by tradition, believers.” She then notes, simplistically, that “This separation of ‘faith’ from ‘reason’ occurred in the early part of the 19th century, when the American university evolved into a secular place,” and concludes:

Even now, in an era when a presidential candidate cannot get elected without a convincing “faith narrative,” the scholars who study belief continue to reside in the Divinity School [at Harvard], and when the subject of religion comes up, the scholars on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences sniff at its seriousness.

 

It’s a curious position for a Jewish writer, given Judaism’s historic emphasis on practice, but the target of Miller’s critique is unbelief. Not only that, she makes the frightening claim that today’s global conflicts legitimate religious faith. She seems, as in another Newsweek piece, “Faith in love” to occupy a positon somewhat like that of an Israeli friend who advised her, “This is the new world . . . . Deal with it,” in which rhetorical zingers acquire truth in proportion to their effectiveness as weapons. And again and again, she seems to stick a rhetorical thumb in the eye of skeptical readers like me, gloating “Deal with it” when we squirm.

“Harvard may or may not be the pinnacle of higher learning in the world,” Miller solemnly intones,

but because it is Harvard, it reflects—for better or worse—the priorities of the nation’s intellectual set. To decline to grapple head-on with the role of religion in a liberal-arts education, even as debates over faith and reason rage on blogs, and as publishers churn out books defending and attacking religious belief, is at best timid and at worst self-defeating.

The priorities of the nation’s intellectual set? To study religious discourse in any respectable department of religion (as opposed to, say, talking about religion at a cocktail party) is not, as Miller supposes, to toss rival truth claims about in a Proufrockian fog. Moreover, it’s one thing to argue, as Menand does in The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, the book Miller takes as her starting point, that “college is a time to ‘unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what’s going on beneath and behind appearances'” and quite another to claim in the next sentence, as Miller does, that “[f]orcing kids to grapple head-on with the world view of a Christian or Muslim fundamentalist, . . . would be a part of this unsettling.”

“Harvard faculty cannot cope with religion,” Miller announces in her second paragraph. Regardless of what Menand may have meant in championing the proposed Reason and Faith requirement, it’s clearly not religious assumptions that Miller believes should be unsettled at Harvard but rather what she characterizes as secular fundamentalism, something she seems to identify with the Harvard establishment and particularly with Professor Steven Pinker, who opposed the Faith and Reason course. “In Pinker’s view,” says Miller, “human progress is an evolution away from superstition, witchcraft, and idol worship—that is, religion—and toward something like a Scandinavian austerity and secularism. (Pinker is one of those intellectuals who speak frequently about how sensible things are in Europe; one suppresses the urge to remind him of the Muslim riots in the Paris and London suburbs).”

 

Ad hominem arguments are odious, but Miller has made her own religious practice into something of a cause, portraying her adult reaffirmation of Judaism and raising her daughter as an observant Jew (who also conveniently celebrates her father’s diverse background) as part of an approach to life that celebrates everything.

Our Jewish daughter knows about her Jewish heritage and can say the Shema. She also knows that she comes from generations of French and Irish Catholics, and WASPs, and Native Americans on her father’s side. She’s obsessed with the statue of the Virgin Mary in the garden of the church down the street. She believes in Santa and we celebrate Christmas — with a tree, and lights, and bright green cookies made of Rice Krispies.

In another sentence Miller admits that the exclusivity of Judaism troubles her but seems to dismiss that concern as she affirms the value of a serious cultural grounding.

Only in marrying a non-Jew did I become aware of how much of the Jewish story one learns by osmosis. Without two Jewish parents, my child would not absorb these stories automatically. We would have to teach them to her.

And so we joined the Temple. My daughter and I go, every Saturday morning. Together, we’re learning the prayers. My husband supports us, though he rarely joins — partially because he’s ambivalent about God, and partially because this is not his tradition and he feels like a foreigner there.

Why, one might ask, does Miller’s faith take precedence over her husband’s unfaith. I think perhaps because whatever she believes about God she passionately believes in a kind of religious entitlement. As she puts it more or less directly, “If my husband and I were of different races rather than different religious backgrounds, our daughter would no more be able to ‘choose’ her identity than she would the color of our skin.”

Of course a child with parents of “two different races” must perforce “choose” an identity—we now can cite the life and experience of the President of the United States as a case in point. And, one might argue, Miller’s daughter will in her turn have to choose, in spite of her mother’s protectiveness. No less, the Harvard student Miller quotes as part of her final anecdote in “Harvard’s Crisis of Faith.”

On one of my visits to the Yard, I met a sophomore named Ryan Mahoney in a basement pub. Raised in Queens, N.Y., and educated, as generations of Irish Catholics have been, by Jesuits who saw in him some promise, Mahoney was forthright about a despondent feeling he had, in class and among his friends: neither the Catholic theology that framed his thinking nor the religious community that gave him comfort were appropriate subjects for discussion. He once overheard students in the dorm making fun of his rosary. “I do not think there would be any openness to discussing God in any of the classes I took last year,” he said. “But acknowledging the fact that religion exists and that it’s not lunacy to believe in God would be helpful.”

So much for unsettling presumptions and defamiliarizing the familiar. Miller tags this story with the observation (her last word) that “[t]o dismiss the importance of the study of faith—especially now—out of academic narrow-mindedness is less than unhelpful. It’s unreasonable.” By “the study of faith” Miller seems to envision some sort of sensitivity training in a safe zone where religious beliefs and practices constitute protected areas of individual identity and are therefore not legitimate objects of criticism. This might be a good thing, but it isn’t the critical study of religion Miller affects to admire—“Fluency in religious history and texts, in fact, is the sharpest weapon against fundamentalism, as Sam Harris demonstrates in his polemic The End of Faith.”—and it belongs in the Hillel Yeshiva or the Canterbury House or the Baptist Student Union or the Islamic Center, not in the classroom. Miller’s readers get the point. As one of them puts it,

It is outrageous that a Catholic student should be ridiculed by other students for his Rosary. I bet those same students would not make fun of a Muslim student in a hijab. That would not be politically correct now, would it? The Catholic student should transfer to a Catholic college/university. Harvard is so overrated.

 

I greatly admire the work of Louis Menand, and I support the now familiar trend that seeks to infuse present day undergraduate education with a new emphasis upon citizenship. To that extent I am in sympathy with Miller. And to be fair I should admit that the movement of my own mind over many years has been away from faith. Both my commitment to secular humanism and my commitment to Christianity are cultural, but the humanist commitment is deeper because it is a product of my adult experience. I think a systematic interrogation of religious faith and practice (indeed of all ideology) ought to be part of undergraduate education, as it was part of my own. I don’t think simplistic claims that universities insult the pious serve any useful purpose.

And I think Miller’s primary point is that Harvard disrespects religion; albeit that’s an argument worthy of somebody like Brit Hume or Sarah Palin. Miller has defended Hume in another column, in which she also defends Christian proselytizing—”I’m not at all sure why the liberal left is always so shocked that evangelical Christians want other people to become Christians.” There is secular bigotry just as there is religious bigotry. Miller’s own critical perspective reflects neither; it is sharply political at best. But it is sloppy and impressionistic at worst. Harvard students don’t need to study religion as an exercise in identity politics. Still less do they need to study religion because supposedly religious controversies are all the rage in popular culture.

In the final analysis we all choose and do not choose our identities. And in the final analysis the old-fashioned positivist tradition, which seems to have won the day at Harvard for the present, “isn’t the only—or even always the best—tool for understanding human experience,” as Miller puts it. I agree with Miller (and Menand) that undergraduates should “engage fully with the messiness and contradiction of clashing ideas.” The Harvard argument over Reason and Faith exhibits just such a messiness, and it isn’t a bad messiness. Actually, it’s normal. Miller might have pointed that out, instead of trying to score cheap points in a tired culture war whose only remaining antagonists are people like Hume, Palin, and maybe David Horowitz.