Memory and the Season

Posted on March 11, 2019 by awtraughber

Hans Boersma, whose Heavenly Participation I hope to write through over the next week or so, just had a short piece published over at First Things.  While it is tied to the season of Lent, it definitely has implications for other areas of life.  The piece, “Memorization and Repentance,” says much about the human condition in the 21st century, particularly as it relates to the digital real.  In many ways, it reads like a theological gloss on another book I recently read, Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human.  From Boersma:

All animals have storage capability. Only humans, however, have the ability not just to store things in the mind but also to recollect them. Aristotle therefore distinguished between memory (memoria) and recollection (reminiscentia). Past experiences shape who we are and enable prudent decision-making. In other words, virtue depends on memory.

From there, Boersma brings up memory and the nature of God in a way that dips deep into the Old Testament.  Then he pivots back to the human condition:

Nothing is as toxic to the mind as distraction. Monastic writers devised all sorts of mnemonic devices to assist in memorizing Scripture and eliminating distraction. For Hugh of St. Victor, Noah’s ark became a storage place whose innumerable cabins contained biblical events, doctrinal truths, and moral practices that offered safety in the storms of this world. For Bonaventure, the twelve branches on the tree of life contained fruits of Jesus’s life, passion, and glorification. Savoring these fruits would revive and strengthen the soul. Meditating on the ark’s cabins or the tree of life’s fruits gave stability in an age of distraction. As Hugh put it: “If, then, we want to have ordered, steady, peaceful thoughts, let us make it our business to restrain our hearts from…immoderate distraction.” Ordered thoughts make for ordered lives.

The language of the “ordered life” has root today thanks to the writings of ancients like Augustine and contemporary writers like James K. A. Smith (see You Are What You Love).  It even, at least for me, goes back to an early reading of Gordon MacDonald’s Ordering Your Private World (at least on some level).  From there, Boersma makes a final pivot to the season of Lent:

Memorization is a Lenten practice, reshaping our memories to be like God’s. When our memories are reshaped and reordered according to the immutable faithfulness of God in Christ, we re-appropriate God’s character—his steadfast love, his mercy, his compassion.  Repentance, therefore, is a turning back to the virtues of God as we see them in Christ.  Being united to him, we are united to the very character of God, for it is in the God-man that God’s virtue and human virtue meet. The hypostatic union is the locus of our repentance: In Christ human memory is re-figured to the memory of God.

It’s an interesting read, one that hits on a lot of different aspects of living a particular kind of good life in “an age of distraction.”  I encourage you to read the whole piece here.

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The Journey of Lent

Posted on March 8, 2019 by awtraughber

One last Lent-specific post for the week.  From a recent essay from the folks at Public Discourse:

In important ways, both the story of Jesus’ tempting by Satan and the season of Lent evoke the traditional Christian practice of pilgrimage. Pilgrimages are spiritual journeys in which we leave behind comforts, incur costs, face difficulties, and endure disciplines. Christians undertake pilgrimages to encounter God in a more direct way—traditionally, at a holy place related to the events of the Gospels, or to the life of a saint.

Santiago-Shell-and-PilgrimsWhat follows in the essay is a nice distilling of some aspects of the Christian journey that seasons like Lent can help clarify for us.  Beyond that, props to the writer for bringing in Tolkien and Lewis.  I like the essay’s first point quite a bit:

First, the Christian life is aptly described as pilgrimage, because it is more appropriately understood as a story than as the acceptance of a philosophy. We Christians move through time, journeying toward the holy goal of glorifying God and enjoying him forever. Along the way, we experience trials, discomforts, disciplines, camaraderie, conflicts, highs, and lows.

Yet the analogy extends further: not only is the life of each Christian a story, but so is Christianity itself. Christianity is the story of God coming to earth as a first-century Jew from Nazareth, living among us, dying, rising, and redeeming us. This story of salvation through Christ is part of the larger, cosmic story that runs from creation to new creation: a purposeful story with a beginning, a middle, and an end . . .

This is one of the things that modernist forms of Christian faith—whether liberal or fundamentalist—have gotten most disastrously wrong. Inasmuch as modern Christians have framed faith as cognitive assent to an ethic (whether social or personal) or a science (whether Darwinist or Biblicist), they have made Christianity a thing of conventional knowledge and fidelity to rules rather than personal knowledge and loyalty to God. The Lenten practice of prayer draws us back from such inadequate, intellectualized, legalized understandings to faith as it really is: intimate connection to our Creator and Redeemer.

It’s such an interesting conundrum: this weird relationship between the cognitive  and the personal.  I see it tweaked and twisted in multiple ways, almost like no one can understand a middle way that embraces both ends well.  Perhaps that is something to wrestle with during this season, too, as we journey together.

(image of the Camino de Santiago from backroads.com)

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The Hunger and the Hope

Posted on March 7, 2019 by awtraughber

This past Sunday I found myself really wanting to watch Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  While I enjoyed it as a theatrical release, it hasn’t really aged well on the home-player.  Something about the whole Canto Bight subplot is just a real turn-off for me.  But the Luke and Rey stuff: that’s why I enjoyed the movie so much.  Consider this quick conversation:

So many interesting little things to unpack from this scene.

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Last week I was getting a ride with a friend to pick up my car, which had been in the shop that morning.  As is often the case, we spoke a lot about our work and how the Christian faith is felt (or not felt) in the broader school community.  It can be easy to sense that there’s just not much hunger “out there” for spiritual things.  There are many reasons for this, I’m sure.  But I’m also sure that I myself am hungry.  The only problem is that at this point in time, I should be more Luke than Rey.

Which is part of what makes Luke such an interesting figure in The Last Jedi.  He’s jaded, has experienced the worst, has turned off his connection to what made life vibrant.  And at this point, he wants to “save” Rey from such an existence, knowing how bad it could actually get for her . . . and for those she loves.

The conversation has some nice, unexpected humor.  And it gives you a sense of the hunger and the hope that hovers around a world held together, revealed by, the Force.  And how rare, really, that Rey “woke up” in the first place.

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Lent and the Unintentional Hermit

Posted on March 6, 2019 by awtraughber

MonksFor some time now I’ve been meaning to post this quote from the  beginning of Leah Libresco’s Building the Benedict Option:

I’ve never felt called to imitate Saint Simeon Stylites.  I’ve never sensed God calling me to build a pillar on top of a tower or a mountain and to live an ascetic life on it, far from other people.  But God doesn’t need to call stylites anymore.  It’s easy to become one accidentally.

Although marriage and monasticism would both require me to seek out someone else– husband or mother superior–  to discern with and to guide me, the atomized nature of modern life makes it possible to become a hermit unintentionally.  This situation is a big departure from the history of hermits.  At the time of the Desert Fathers, a monk who wanted to live alone had to get the permission of his spiritual father, because living alone, just he and God, was not something to undertake lightly.  It was an unusual calling that required exceptional spiritual discipline.  Living one’s faith alone, without preparation, is the religious equivalent of trying to run a marathon without so much as a jogging habit as preparation.

The book is about establishing “thick practices” in Christian community that can help clarify the place of Christian faith in a context more hostile to the faith than many of us understand.  But it also says something significant about the situation of the single Christian striving to live a faithful life . . . . often without the wisdom and guidance of those further down the road.

There’s more to being a single adult Christian than simply lacking a spouse.  Don’t get me wrong: that alone changes the landscape in ways both obvious and subtle.  It’s particularly true in a culture that has all but deified marriage.  The assumption made by many is that the single life is easy and free from constraint.  Neither of those assumptions is true.  But often people either can’t or won’t sit with us long enough to get a real sense of that.

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One of the things that makes the liturgical calendar, and particularly the daily office, appealing to me is that it gives me scriptural structure and intent that is too often unavailable from a local Christian community.   And it’s not just that I get to read widely from the Bible regularly.  There’s also a sense of it having been lived in for a while, that it’s something passed down to me that I don’t have to come up with myself.  Granted, there are some limits to such tradition (which I hope to write about next week).  This is particularly helpful during seasons like Lent or Advent, even though I don’t necessarily take part in any fasting or extra church services.  These things, along with seasonal music, helps me as I find myself an “unintentional hermit.”

(image from mysticmonkcoffee.com)

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Preparing for Lent

Posted on March 5, 2019 by awtraughber

Great LentThe season of Lent begins this week.  It’s also one of the craziest weeks of the school year for me, which is a way of saying that there’s a good chance my mind won’t be too much on Lent.  Beyond that, my recent readings in Boersma have me thinking in good ways about my own faith tradition and the broader Christian tradition, but that’s a tale for a later post or two.  Either way, this entry will post on Mardi Gras, which is an interesting concept in every way.  And then tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, when many Christians will attend a service to be reminded of their mortality through the imposition of ashes.  (Already I’ve seen people on Twitter asking people NOT to post #ashtag selfies from the day’s events.)

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At the beginning of this semester, we started a series the picks up in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus “resolutely set his face towards Jerusalem.”  I was first made aware of this “travel narrative” unique to Luke though the works of Eugene Peterson.  And so each week in chapel, a speaker focuses on at least one story from the next successive chapter in the book.  Already we’ve heard about the Good Samaritan, the woes to the Pharisees, the dangers of the yeast of the Pharisees, Jesus’s sorrow for Jerusalem, and the story of the prodigal son.  It’s been a good journey.  And it will end with Jesus in Jerusalem for the week of his passion and the morning of his resurrection.  But we’re not there yet.  It is good to be on the road with Jesus, though.

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In Great Lent, Orthodox priest and teacher Alexander Schmemann calls the season of Lent a journey, a kind of “being on the way” with Jesus on his way to Good Friday and Easter Sunday.   Schmemann asserts that “on Easter we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us.”  Too often, though, we forget the significance of this “happening and happening to us still,” which is part of how Lent enters the picture.  “The liturgical traditions of the church,” Schmemann asserts, “exist first of all, in order to help us recover the vision and the taste of that new life which we so easily lose and betray, so that we may repent and turn to it.”  Whatever else it might be, Lent is an opportunity for “rediscovery” and “recovery.”

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I won’t be able to commemorate Ash Wednesday this year.  I’ll be out at camp with students learning about “the Way of the Cross.”  And I’m not sure what the season will look like beyond that.  I do hope to read W. H. Auden’s Age of Anxiety over the next few weeks (if nothing else, this is an attempt to mirror my reading of his For the Time Being during Advent).  If it’s not particularly clear yet, I hope to be more consistent with posting here during this season.  That will definitely be a discipline for me.  Like I mentioned previously, I hope to use this time to articulate some thoughts on tradition and Tradition, particularly with the assistance of Boersma (as mentioned yesterday).  Spring break is coming up in a couple of weeks, too, so I’m hoping to be extra-fruitful with reading and writing.

(image from amazon.com)

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Transfiguration

Posted on March 4, 2019 by awtraughber

Transfiguration-RubensWhile it wasn’t acknowledged much in my own church besides the children’s literature for the morning, yesterday was celebrated as “Transfiguration Sunday” in many churches across the world.  It’s a little like the “last breath before the plunge” that is the season of Lent.  The day is a remembrance of Jesus and his friends on a mountain for the appearance of Moses and Elijah and a theophany from heaven.  As we cover it in class, it’s one of the moments that turn Jesus towards Jerusalem for His passion.

I had not realized it until recently that the Transfiguration was at the heart of a number of “truths” in the early church.  In Seeing God, Hans Boersma surveys church history to get a better understanding of the “beatific vision,” the belief that Christians will see Jesus face-to-face and will know as we are known.  Boersma asserts:

In particular, the conviction that the transfiguration revealed God’s glory in Christ and his eschatological kingdom was important for the early church, and so Christology and eschatology played key roles in most theological reflections on the transfiguration.  The transfiguration appeared to render both Christ’s divinity and the eschaton present to the three disciples.  The event served not as a symbol pointing away from itself to the glory of God and to a future kingdom that he would bring about, but it was a sacrament that rendered God himself and his future kingdom really present to the disciples on Mount Tabor.  Thus, although in some respects the future kingdom may remain veiled, many have looked to the transfiguration narrative for an account in which God appeared in such a way as to reveal himself most fully and gloriously in Jesus Christ, and in so doing transformed or deified the disciples, drawing them into his beautifying light and thus into his eternal kingdom.  What is more, the theophanic character of the transfiguration rendered it transformative in character, not only for the three disciples at Mount Tabor but also for later Christians.  As a result, for centuries, the transfiguration was the subject of meditation, reflection, and debate throughout the Eastern and Western traditions.

Which is a fancy way of saying that maybe I’ve been underselling the significance of the Transfiguration for a long time (even though I render it with a capital T).

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I’ve been reading quite a bit of Boersma lately, mostly on a lark thanks to a blurb in Christianity Today.  I stepped away from Seeing God after just under 200 pages so I could read a short, earlier work: Heavenly Participation.  It’s been a good challenge for me that I hope to go into some over the Lenten season.  A lot of it has to do with his approach to a “sacramental ontology,” a sticky point close to the heart of my own faith experience.

It is enough for now, though, to hold in the mind’s eye that odd scene of Jesus shot through with holy light, his closest friends blessedly confused, and the Father affirming the Son as he prepares for all that is next.

(image of The Transfiguration of Christ by Peter Paul Rubens)

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Early Running with the Doctor

Posted on February 20, 2019 by awtraughber

2019 was supposed to be the year that I revisited some of my favorite British television.  Doctor Who.  Spaced.  Downton Abbey.  Sherlock.  The movies of Edgar Wright.  Simon Pegg movies not directed by Edgar Wright.  The claymation of Nick Park.   That kind of thing.  But January kind of got away from me, and February has been its own beast, too.  I did just start the first “new” series of the rebooted Doctor Who from 2005.  I wasn’t a big fan of the series when it first aired . . . on Sci-Fi, I believe.  It was hit or miss for me.  And it’s been a while since I’d seen any of the series one episodes, so I thought it would be a good place to start.

What a great series!  True, it’s no where near as “polished” as successive seasons.  And there are some small plot holes that I think of as evidence that they were still “making it up.”  But it’s really nice to see a Doctor not question every. single. move. he. makes. in any given episode.  Beyond that, it’s cool to see the show through the eyes of having been in England a few times since.  For instance, I had totally forgotten about this scene from “Rose.”

The show really does feel “stripped down.”  The sets and shots are simple.  The effects aren’t all that great (but maybe weren’t intended to be).  And the cast is appropriately small: pretty much the Doctor and Rose.  None of the bloat of some of the more recent stories.

I’m not sure how far I’ll get with my British “re-invasion” in 2019.  But it’s been a nice start.  (I watched the second episode last night, a very “Restaurant at the End of the Universe” episode.  Surprisingly touching, really.  Not sure how I’ll feel after revisiting the Charles Dickens episode, though.)

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Faring Well

Posted on January 29, 2019 by awtraughber

smith finaleNear the end of 2018, James K. A. Smith announced his departure from Comment Magazine as its editor. Each quarter, Smith would write about his perspective on some in-the-moment issues using his “World View” column, something he called “an annotated reading for your world.”

His final column, which came with the journal’s December issue, reflected on his time as an editor, tracing out some of the reasons why he took the position and relating some of the benefits of the task (which was beyond his role as teacher and writer).

That he would take an editorial position at a journal is cool in its own right.  But when he agreed to step into the role, he did so out of a passion for the genre (he describes himself as a “magazine junkie”), knowing the good work periodicals can do to create a kind of community. Smith says,

As someone who spends a lot of time on the road, I never tired of meeting Comment readers face to face. It has been humbling to have readers thank me in person for what our team does. Their faces and names provided a tangible sense that this “community” of Comment readers was an actual thing. And for many of them, Comment stemmed a certain loneliness they often felt in their contexts, giving them a sense of being hooked up to something bigger—that they had friends they’d never seen but who “got” them.

Beyond that, Smith acknowledges that the journal has been a kind of education, both for the readers and for the contributors, who often were tasked with working specific themes.  And as much as it was about education, it was also ultimately about friendship.

But it’s when Smith gets to the change that has happened to the public arena since he started with the journal that you get the sense of something deeper going on, something that Smith perceives as a step in the right direction.  From the end of the essay:

There were times when I couldn’t imagine not editing Comment. The work came naturally to me; I was energized by the range and variety of the work; and I believed in what we were doing (and still do). But over the past couple of years, I have found the space that Comment needs to speak into—the realm of politics and civil society—is more toxic than when I started. At some point over the past couple of years, I’ve realized I don’t have the stomach for being a pundit. Some might say it’s a lack of courage. Perhaps. In any case, it’s important work that has to continue. As for me, I feel my tour of duty in these trenches of public debate is up.

There is something prescient in this, I think.  Even the last two weeks of public discourse have revealed how quickly we are to jump to “precluded possibilities” that line up with our own narratives.  And that’s caused at least some reflection amongst those who “write about the moment in the moment.”  Which makes Smith’s next move all the more interesting:

In the new year I will assume a new role as editor in chief of Image journal, a quarterly devoted to art, mystery, and faith. Curating such a space resonates with the outcome of a period of discernment over the past year and my sense that God is calling me, in the next season of my career, to work at the intersection of the arts, imagination, and culture.

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I’ve written a few times about my “temporary vocational stretch.”  And while it’s gone on at least twice as long as I’d hoped or expected, what I have learned in the process continues to accumulate.  This about myself, sure.  But also things about a larger culture, a larger moment, an understanding of what it looks like for God to work and an understanding of what it looks and feels like when He seems silent.  It makes you wonder about what has become the common approach and if there are other and better ways of faithful engagement.

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Smith has already posted his first full article for Image.  I’ll get to it here soon.  For now, it is enough to remember that you can take a vocational stretch and that it can be used by God to change us and continue making us.  He can teach us and shape us through friendships.  And He can prepare us for other things.

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New King on the Block

Posted on January 27, 2019 by awtraughber

newkingontheblockI should start by going on record as saying that one of my favorite moments in Aquaman was at the end when someone says “Hail, King Arthur!” While the world of Middle Earth is key for me, the world of Arthur’s England isn’t too far behind.

Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King really is one of the best movies you might see these days.  It is smart, simple, and practices a kind of restraint that you don’t often experience with contemporary fantasy cinema.  From the moment the movie begins with an animated retelling of the King Arthur legend to a closing moment that echoes it, the movie wastes no time in telling a medieval tale with an appropriately modern twist.

One of the best things the movie has going for it is that it’s the closest we’ve gotten to The Lord of the Rings in many a-year.  Some of that is a matter of cinematography: the movie’s beautiful vista shots are part of the reason why I love traveling to broad, green places.  This movie does that wonderfully.  Beyond that, there are some story moments that resemble some great LOTR moments. But those LOTR moments are great because they are almost-primal moments handled well (mostly moments of fear and being afraid in dark places, really).  This movie is also closer to LOTR in the handling of relationships, particularly with comradery and friendship.

Something else that sets the movie apart from much of the herd these days is that it does a great job earning its ending.  I don’t want to give anything away here, but it does its own kind of Never-ending Story ending (only moreso).  Things play out almost seamlessly in a way that doesn’t just feel like a “boss level” confrontation at the end has to play out. It’s actually a tricky move, one that requires the restraint that I mentioned earlier.

There is a political dimension to the movie that is almost part-and-parcel of any ideological undertaking these days.  You can’t talk King Arthur without talking about hope and loss and leadership.  This is another place where the movie’s restraint works well.  It tries to settle on something like a universal “truth” about leading well . . . and the things that leading well requires.  For young Alexander, the movie’s protagonist, leading well first and foremost involves living by the chivalric code.  And so even though Merlin might think that “his time is done,” that’s not quite true.  In fact, even the overly-used trope of “everything you need you already have” doesn’t quite ring true because of the book that Alexander keeps in his bag and holds in his hands.

Speaking of Merlin . . . or Merton . . . the cast is quite good.  It’s not easy casting young actors, I imagine.  But the key quartet of the show blend together nicely.  It’s good to watch a movie where character can actually develop (and without requiring a sequel).  Plus there’s one pleasant surprise in the casting . . . at least it was a surprise to me, as I hadn’t actually seen any trailers for the movie before going in.

The Kid Who Would Be King is the first movie in a good while that kind of makes me want to see it a second time in the theater, if only for the good handling of people traversing beautiful landscapes.  There are also a few gags that just work out really well.  I highly recommend the movie to people who enjoy children’s movies, and movies in general, done well.

(image from polygon.com)

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Writing Reflection

Posted on January 26, 2019 by awtraughber

This past Monday I made a commitment to try and post something each day this week using Kevin Vanhoozer’s “The Drama of Discipleship” essay as a prompt.  I’ve been way too sporadic with the site the last few months and have wanted to try and “get back in the saddle” for some time.  This was my week to give it a try.

One thing the week taught me is that it’s easy to start strong but difficult to finish well.  Part if that is having some weekend to help buffer things.  And then by the time I hit Wednesday, I’m often kind of wiped out.  I found myself doing most of my writing at night for the same night, not for the next morning.  So there is definitely a “lead time” issue for blogging.

I was also reminded that a series on one thing can be both a blessing and a curse: a blessing because you have something consistent to work with, a curse because things don’t always flow as well as you’d like . . . the downside of doing a little bit each day.  On some level, “one and done” posts are much easier: a tv preview here, some concert footage there, and wham-bam-you’re-done.

My hope for next week is to post three thoughtful pieces: one Monday, one Wednesday, and one Friday.  Preferably in the morning.  Maybe post some not-so-thoughtful things the rest of the week.  We’ll see how it goes.  I’ve also been considering a “WordPress Theme” change, but I can’t find one that fits what I’d like for the site (which is always intended to be text-heavy).  I’ve got some essays and articles that I’ve been sitting on for some time that I’d like to write about.

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A few concluding thoughts on Vanhoozer’s essay about the Greatest Commandment.  First, I liked the essay’s comprehensive nature.  A statement like the Greatest Commandment allows for that, of course: heart, soul, mind, and strength can account for a lot of things in the life of faith.  And so he used the framework wisely . . . and all while keeping it relatively short.

Second, I liked the concepts that Vanhoozer built into his thematic spiral.  Yes: vocation, formation, and culture.  But also: sapience and “canon-sense.”  You see these often in Vanhoozer’s longer pieces, so it was good to see him reference them in something shorter.

And speaking of “canon-sense,” the third thing I liked about the essay was how Vanhoozer always came back to Scripture.  I come from a period of time where the biblical text, while not everything, was something essential to understanding and living the Christian life.  I don’t get that sense from many all that much any more.  It is a curiosity at best and an annoyance at worst.  To see him come back around to the text was an affirming thing for me, both as a believer and a teacher.

Finally, it was cool to see Vanhoozer reference writers like James K. A. Smith and N. T. Wright.  They have definitely been “prior” in my experience when compared to Vanhoozer.  This was also an affirmation to me.  It is good to see something like a “web” of connections materialize with the threads I’ve had a chance to follow over these last few years.

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And so tomorrow: this Sunday’s best comic strip.  And then probably a quick review of a couple of movies and some thoughts on James K. A. Smith’s final editorial for Comment Magazine.

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