Still enjoying U2: real joy

Here's where we gotta be / Love and community / Laughter is eternity / If joy is real

- Bono, "Get On Your Boots" from No line on the horizon

Love and community are the great marks of Christian discipleship. "By this, shall everyone know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (John 13.35)

This is hard. This is where we have got to be, but find ourselves continually slipping away from. Community takes time, commitment, forbearance, repeated attempts at communication, and forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness. For many people, such a message seems hopelessly idealistic. They have been hurt too many times, misunderstood, ignored, abused or rejected by the very community that is meant to be the place where we learn love. Are love and community even possible?

Here's where we gotta be / Love and community / Laughter is eternity / If joy is real. And yet the Christian message is, in the end, a message of joy and of reality. It claims that being touch with reality is to be in touch with the deepest of joys, that existence is not ultimately tragic, that pain is not the final word.

Of course, being in touch with reality now also means mourning and weeping. Jesus said, "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh." (Luke 6.21). Life in a broken world yearning for God's healing breath will remain a life of groaning. But such sadness is due to the depth of love that God leads us into. It is love that leaves a mark, that opens us to the wounds that hurt so much. But love is also the only path to laughter and joy. And the good news is that God promises to comfort those who mourn, to turn weeping into laughter. It is God's redeeming love which means that weeping may linger for the night, / but joy comes with the morning.

And this hope - that the story of the world will, in the end, be a comedy rather than a tragedy - this hope is what makes possible a commitment now to "love and community". If our love springs from desperation then sooner or later, faced with difficulty, it will wither and die, or at least retreat to a safe distance. Love must be sustained by hope and faith. But just like love, faith and hope cannot sustain themselves, or be merely wishful thinking in the face of desperate need. Only love can sustain faith and hope, not our love, but the fact that we are first loved. We do not yet know how loved we are. We do not know how beautiful we are. We do not know how beautiful we will be.
Image by CAC.

Lewis on the body

"And what, you ask, does it matter? Do not such ideas only excite us and distract us from the more immediate and more certain things, the love of God and our neighbours, the bearing of the daily cross? If you find that they so distract you, think of them no more. I most fully allow that it is of more importance for you or me today to refrain from one sneer or to extend one charitable thought to an enemy than to know all that angels and archangels know about the mysteries of the New Creation [...]. Yet I will not admit that the things we have been discussing for the last few pages are of no importance for the practice of the Christian life. For I suspect that our conception of Heaven as merely a state of mind is not unconnected with the fact that the specifically Christian virtue of Hope has in our time grown so languid. Where our fathers, peering into the future, saw gleams of gold, we see only the mist, white featureless, cold and never moving.

"The thought at the back of all this negative spirituality is really one forbidden to Christian. They, of all men, must not conceive spiritual joy and worth as things that need to be rescued or tenderly protected from time and place and matter and the senses. Their God is the God of corn and oil and wine. He is the glad Creator. He has become Himself incarnate. The sacraments have been instituted…. After that we cannot really be in doubt of His intentions. To shrink back from all that can be called Nature into negative spirituality is as if we ran away from horses instead of learning to ride. There is in our present pilgrim condition plenty of room (more room than most of us like) for abstinence and renunciation and mortifying our natural desires. But behind all asceticism the thought should be, ‘Who will trust us with the true wealth is we cannot be trusted even with the that perishes?’ Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body? These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may someday be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world-shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King’s stables. Not that the gallop would be of any value unless it were a gallop with the King; but how else – since He has retained His own charger – should we accompany Him?"

- C. S. Lewis, Miracles, 171-72.

Despite frequent platonic tendencies elsewhere, in this passage Lewis manages to keep resurrection at the centre of Christian hope, and thus allows the gospel to provide the controlling categories of eschatology, rather than the Augustinian time/eternity split he commonly uses.

The good is not (always) the enemy of the best

Ought we despise the day of small things? When the promises made to those in Christ are so overwhelmingly gracious, does this make 'the things of this world grow strangely dim'? Does Christianity lead away from the everyday and the issues of the moment, trumping them with what is eternal and bigger and more important? Quietism or quotidian quests?

Paul does consider his present sufferings not worth comparing to the glory that is to be revealed in us (Rom 8.17), but this leads him into consideration of this groaning world, bound to decay as it presently is (Rom 8.18ff). The solution for which he hopes is indeed the resurrection of the dead, the defeat of death and thus the liberation of all creation along with the children of God. But where does this leave us now? Ignoring irrelevant 'worldly' concerns and trying to save as many souls from this sinking ship as possible? No, the Spirit groans for this world - and so those who are Spiritual also groan. This hope leads not away from creation, but into suffering solidarity with it. It's cry becomes ours, because it is also God's longing.

So, is the good the enemy of the best? Should Christians abandon their day jobs to throw themselves fully into gospel ministry as the only task that really matters for eternity? No and no. The continuity (despite discontinuity) between Jesus' corpse and resurrection body is for me a key anticipatory vindication of (and promise for) this world. So I don't think that the work we do in the Lord - which is not futile (1 Cor 15.58) - can be limited to evangelism and helping Christians: that way leads to a new clericalism and a retreat from concern for the very world that Christ died to reconcile (Col 1.18-20).

There's obviously a lot more to say here, and one day I might get round to saying some of it (if others don't get there first in comments). I'll conclude for the moment by noting that perhaps here we have the link between recent discussion of futility and posts mentioning global warming and peak oil.
Ten points for naming the location from which this pic was taken.

Transience

If the solution to the human problem is a timeless eternity of changelessness,* then is our problem transience? No, because the world, the very good world, had transience built-in. The sun set before the fruit was picked. Transience is a feature of creation, not fall. Yet the fall is what makes transience deadly, what brings bitterness to old age and fear to the open horizon of the future. God created a world with a telos, a goal, a purpose, a project: be fruitful and multiply, extend the garden, serve the soil, enjoy. The world was made good, very good, not one that was utterly complete and with no more perfections to be reached.
*Is this true? Perhaps a subject for a future series...
Eight points for guessing which part of this image has been doctored.

Time for a change? Time & eternity II

My new-found Scandinavian friend Patrik has responded at length to my first post on time and eternity, which in turn was a response to some of his earlier posts (he's already done a good job of cataloging the history).

My own grip on patristics being somewhat slim, I nonetheless realise that the idea that God is somehow outside of time has a long and noble history reaching back into the first few centuries of the church. Yet I just don't buy it. Let me fly a kite and see what happens. Happy for it to be shot down...

Can God change? A fascinating question. The early fathers argued that change either means God's getting worse (and so is no longer perfect), or better (and so wasn't perfect before). However, I guess I find problematic the notion of perfection that lies behind the Greek fear of transience. I'm not sure that mathematical perfection is the most fruitful model for conceptualising divine perfections. And there's the key: perfections. God's perfections remain open-ended and so capable of growth and multiplication. For instance, although he was Father (and Son, and Spirit) without the world, he is now Creator, a new perfection. In a similar manner, the Incarnation brings about a new state of affairs for divine identity. There is more that can be said of him now. Not because he was deficient prior to the Incarnation, nor because he was already incarnate and we just didn't know it yet. But his perfections have been multiplied.

Does this threaten divine faithfulness? No, in fact, I sometimes wonder whether temporality is a condition of faithfulness. If God is outside time, then does his ability to stay true to himself constitute a virtue? Do we praise a triangle for its faithfulness - always, no matter what, having three sides?

Paul Ricoeur makes a very useful distinction between ipse and idem identity. Both are Latin words translated 'same', but with a slightly different spin. Am I the same person I was yesterday? Yes, and no. No, many of my atoms have changed, millions of cells have died, I have different memories, a slightly different outlook on life, a little less hair, a little more weight, a little more wisdom (I hope). But yes, it's still me - I'm still the same character in the story of my life. The former kind of identity (mathematically exactly totally the same) is idem identity - the same what-ness (unchanging substance). In this sense, I am not the same as yesterday. But the second, ipse identity, is the same who-ness. Self-same versus same self. I believe that God's faithfulness, his constancy, consists of ispe, rather than idem identity.

Time for eternity?

Years ago, a friend of mine said, 'at least we won't have to deal with time once the Last Day comes.'

Until that point, I'm not sure I'd ever really thought about time and eternity, or at least not in terms of time versus eternity. I'd always assumed there would still be time for time after the Last Day, after 'the end'. But apparently not. Apparently, "It is a firm belief of the Church that time will not be a part that existence," as a much-loved fellow blogger recently said. And then I looked, and behold, he was (more or less) right: for most of its history, much of the Church has been looking forward (or sideways, or upwards, or inwards, or something), for the dissolution of time, the defeat of transience through sneaking out of the whole equation into the realm of a timelessly eternal God.

Why is that? I've never felt the reason for it. Certainly Moltmann rejects any conception of a 'timeless eternity'. If time is part of God's good, very good creation (rather than part of the fall, as Augustine needs to end up saying, since he is the one who really introduced this time/eternity split), then won't it too be redeemed in the 'restoration of all things'? Moltmann develops the concept of 'the fullness of time' - at the end, every moment will be completed, summed up, gathered together, purified and transformed into redeemed time. God will have time for us, because he takes his time with us. Let's have a good time with God.
See also here for more.