“Only a sweet and virtuous soul, / Like season’d timber, never gives …”
Today is the feast day of George Herbert (1593-1633), one of my favorite poets. It is fitting that we remember him at the beginning of Lent, for his poems are imbued with the season’s themes of repentance and renewal. He was a student of what the Book of Common Prayer calls our “unruly wills and affections,” and could be brutally honest about his own need for divine grace.
The Herbert whom we meet in his poems is a person very much in process: unfinished, imperfect, always aspiring to something higher. He cared deeply about formation and growth – his own as well as that of his congregation. As poet and priest he used all possible art to move those with ears to hear.
Herbert’s spiritual environment seems so alive with correspondences between visible things and deeper, invisible realities. The Mystery of the world is met in the humblest of circumstances. The burning bush flashes through the surface of the ordinary. Everyday phenomena are saturated with significance.
This year let us honor “the holy Mr. Herbert” (as his parishioners called him) by examining a single poem. Perhaps we will make this an annual tradition on February 27. For today, the poem is “Virtue.”
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky; The dew shall weep thy fall to-night, For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye; Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie; My music shows ye have your closes, And all must die.
Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like season’d timber, never gives; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives.
“Sweet rose … thy root is ever in its grave.”
The poem has been called “one of the purest lyrics in the language.” [i] The predominance of one-syllable words exemplifies its “fine poetic thrift.” [ii] The sixteen short lines, divided into four quatrains, overflow—almost miraculously—with diverse images, references and meanings. For example, “The bridal [wedding] of the earth and sky“ invokes the Easter Vigil’s Exultet: How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined. “Thy root is ever in its grave” describes the paradox of mortal life with stunning brevity: even at our liveliest, we are dying creatures. Or as we say on Ash Wednesday: Remember that you are dust.
The poem’s opening line establishes rhythmic beat of successive iambs (short-long): “Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright.” This pattern is more or less followed in the first three lines of the first three quatrains, but each fourth line slams on the brakes with its sober message of mortality, delivered in a series of strong beats like the striking of a drum or the tolling of a bell: Forthoumust die … And thou must die … And all must die.
Although an apocalyptic wisdom throughout the poem reminds us that days end, flowers wither, seasons pass and worlds burn (“turn to [char]coal”), the first three quatrains seem more celebratory than melancholy. The word “sweet” occurs six times. The inevitable terminations of temporal existence need not diminish whatever pleasures and joys we experience in the moment. However, as the poem’s conclusion insists, the “soul”—our innermost self or enduring identity—can partake of something deeper and more lasting, an essential and enduring stability at its core.
The governing images of the final quatrain, “season’d timber” and “turned to coal,” each call up a constellation of meanings. Timber suggests both the cedars of Lebanon and the cross. And the seasoning of wood represents the testing of the soul, which, by God’s grace, “never gives”—never gives in, never gives up. As Herbert scholar John Drury explains, “Timber is seasoned by being left to dehydrate out of doors undercover for several years, enduring, like the soul, the extremes of weather and the seasons. After that it is stable and strong.” [iii]
But wood is flammable, and the doomsday image of a world-ending fire takes us to the brink of ancient fears of annihilation. But Herbert deftly steers us instead into a place of hope and promise. Wood tested by fire can become a glowing ember, an image of liveliness. Likewise can the tested soul become “a quick [living] coal / of mortall fire,” as Herbert says in another poem, “Employment (II).” And even should the world’s last embers cool and turn to dust, the soul which belongs to God will “chiefly” live. “Chiefly” means particularly, or mostly, but it may also reference Christ, the Chief of history, in whom all are made alive.
Unlike the last line of the first three quatrains, with their percussive stresses hammering out our doom, the stresses of the very last line, reduced from four to three, seem gentler and, aided by the use of a two-syllable word, more lilting: “Thenchief-ly lives.” Try reading just the fourth line of each quatrain in succession, and notice the difference in tone at the last.
As it always is with God, life has the last word.
[i] Arnold Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics (Johns Hopkins, 1968), cited in Helen Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 81. I am indebebted to Professor Wilcox for her richly annotated collection of Herbert’s English poems, each of which also includes summaries of the best Herbert criticism over the years. Since his poetry can be difficult and many of his terms archaic, her book is indispensable.
[ii] John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), 59. A must-read if you want to go deeper.
True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.
— Jonathan Edwards
“After Thursday, I was like, okay, I’m going to go sleep. But [God] was like, ‘No, I have more for you.’”
— Lauren, Asbury University student
On February 8 the morning chapel service at Kentucky’s Asbury University concluded, as usual, with a spiritual song. Then most of the students filed out to go to class, but the band kept playing, and a few stayed behind to sing along around the altar. What happened next has startled the world.
“I was like, all right, we’re just going to be around here for one or two more songs, and we’re going to go to class,” said Lena, an Asbury student. “But there was like something in my soul that said no-no-no, we’ve just got to stay here. So I just stayed. A little while later I thought I had only been there like maybe an extra 20 minutes. It had been like 3 hours. It just started turning into something bigger and crazier.”
Word spread through the campus that people were still singing and praying in the chapel. Classrooms and dorms began to empty, and by the end of the day the 1500-seat worship space was packed with students and faculty, singing, praying, and testifying to the power of God in their lives. Two weeks later, it’s still happening, day and night without ceasing.
Live video on social media quickly went viral. People from all over North America began to converge on Asbury to join in. Still others flew in from faraway places like Finland, New Zealand, and Indonesia. University officials estimate that tens of thousands of pilgrims have shared in the experience. The line to get inside can be hours long.
It’s been called the Asbury Revival, but some are wary of this designation. Too many have been wounded or betrayed by manipulative gatherings and domineering evangelists in the name of “revival.” Some prefer to call it an “outpouring” (the university’s preference), a “renewal,” or an “awakening.” One student said she was switching from “revival” to “encounter” because the divine presence, not the internal experience of the worshipper, was the central meaning here.
Whatever is happening, the watchword has been “radical humility.” Student Asher Braughton says, “I truly believe that the revival has been built on humility; that this revival isn’t focused just on one person—not one worship leader, not one pastor, not one speaker, not one student. It’s focused solely and only on Jesus Christ.” Or as one of the event’s speakers put it: “The only celebrity in this house is Jesus.”
During the “Great Awakening” in the eighteenth-century, the emotional excesses of the revivals worried the church establishment. Was it sincere? Was it of God? Historian George M. Marsden summarizes the criticisms in vivid terms: “Using vulgar appeals to sentiment, they would generate mass hysteria that they encouraged people to regard as evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit. Scores or even hundreds of people would shriek, swoon, or fall into fits.”
Although one student leader, mindful of the building’s aging fabric, had to announce that there would be “no jumping allowed in the balconies,” the tone in the room has been generally mellow. A youth minister described it as walking into “a holy hush.” There have been moments of exuberant cheering and clapping, but much of the music and prayer invites a tranquil surrender to the spiritual flow. Watching it online, I thought of Thomas Merton’s gently fervent plea: “Sink from your shallows, soul, into eternity.”
On the first day, Asbury professor Clint Baldwin was having lunch in the cafeteria when someone stopped at his table to say, “You know, the students are still in there, and they’re still worshipping the Lord. You should go over and see what’s happening. It’s a sweet, sweet thing.” Baldwin soon joined the awakening and saw that it was good. “This was just people saying we’re going to stay on and sit in the presence of the Lord and see what the Lord would have for us.”
Lauren, the student quoted in the epigraph, described the worship as all-consuming: “Nothing else matters anymore except being in the presence of Jesus and worshipping him for the rest of my life.” She acknowledged the hyperbole of this—she would of course continue with the life of a student—but her perspective on everything had been transformed. “Ways I have of viewing people negatively—it doesn’t matter anymore. Anxieties and worries that I have, it doesn’t even matter.… Whenever you can just let go and surrender and forgive, then, you’re just set free.”
The majority of worshippers are under 25. Living through a time of immense stress, they hunger for the healing peace of God. In spontaneous prayer groups around the chapel, or in testimonials from the stage, many have openly shared their deepest griefs and heaviest burdens. Their vulnerability has been met with tenderness and love. When a young woman shared her story of attempted suicide before the whole assembly, a multitude of women came forward to lay their hands on her. “An hour later she was dancing and smiling with a joy on her face that I had never seen before,” said one witness.
“God is moving through this generation that has been so affected by mental health,” says Asher. “Once this revival ends, we can carry this message of goodness and forgiveness … The chains of suicide, the chains of depression, the chains of anxiety can be broken in Jesus.” Many of the songs reflect this hope in their melodic repetitions of heartfelt cries:
Jesus, Jesus, you make the darkness tremble— your name is a light the shadows can’t deny … You’re never gonna let, you’re never gonna let me down … He is for you, He is for you, He is for you …
There are of course critics and skeptics. All religious experience is bewildering, even suspect, for those who stand outside it. It is a reality both given and received, not grasped or possessed. Its truth abides in its own domain of experience. You can’t judge it at a distance, as a spectator. You have to go inside it, open your heart to it, be in loving relationship with it. As the mystics testify, certainty is only found within the experience.
Among believers, there is certainly a proper concern about delusion and self-deception. “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14). But religious experience can be tested by its fruits. Asbury’s president, Kevin J. Brown, is an encouraging witness to the Outpouring’s authenticity:
“Since the first day, there have been countless expressions and demonstrations of radical humility, compassion, confession, consecration, and surrender unto the Lord. We are witnessing the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
Some may worry that the strongly personal nature of the Asbury Outpouring excludes concerns beyond the self like racism, social justice, global conflict, and the fate of the planet. However, nothing I have seen or read so far suggests that these young people disconnect personal transformation from social change. Surrendering to God is inseparable from a lifetime of service to neighbor and world. One’s own soul is too small a kingdom for the Lord of history. The collective witness and shared compassion of the Outpouring bears witness to that truth.
As for the abundance of deep feeling, vulnerability, open-heartedness, and the ecstatic willingness to be swept away, we need more, not less of that in the Christian life. Those kids are singing and praying and testifying as if their lives depend on it; as if God matters more than anything; as if Jesus will wipe away the tears from every eye; as if a new reality is breaking through the cracks of our broken world.
But can it last? The particular happening in Asbury’s chapel is winding down this week. The university needs to resume its institutional mission, and the town of Wilmore, hospitable as it has been, can’t handle the crowds forever. “It is not ours to hold alone,” Brown says. “We are not the keepers of this movement … Pray that what is happening here will spread.”
Although it seems a bit sad that this foretaste of heaven—singing around the throne for all eternity—must come to an end in the temporal world, the Holy Spirit blows where it will. Outbreaks of public Christian fervor and collective spiritual passion may turn up elsewhere, take new forms, or return to a dormant state until the next eruption. Revelation, not longevity, is the point of epiphanies. They have their moment and vanish, but their impact—and the truth they manifest—endures in hearts and minds and communities.
I have no doubt that many of those who are living through this experience will be forever changed by it, as will the worlds they inhabit and the people they touch. Professor Baldwin, recalling similar revivals at Asbury in the 1950s and 1970s, notes that “people still talk about those [past] moments in revival that shaped the trajectory of how they chose to live for the sake of the Lord onward from that. That’s a hope that we would have for this.”
Even watching online from afar, I have found myself deeply moved by the Spirit-filled assembly. I especially love the heartfelt singing and the manifestation of shared joy. One of my favorite parts was today’s invitation for people to come forward and recite their favorite verses from Scripture. When a small African-American boy read from the prophet Joel (2:28), delivering that luminous text with his boyish voice—innocent as Eden—I was blown away:
Then I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old ones shall dream dreams, and your young ones shall see visions …
Joel’s prophecy has taken flesh at Asbury, day after day since the eighth of February—all those beautiful young faces, shining with God’s future. Like the rest of us, they will lose it and find it again and again. But they have set their feet upon the sacred Way. God bless them.
The words of Clint Baldwin, Asher Braughton, Lauren, Lena and Kyle (the youth minister) are taken from a February 12 conversation with Shane Claiborne on his YouTube channel, Red Letter Christians: “Update from the Asbury University Revival”
The words of Asbury President Kevin J. Brown can be found at the Outpouring link above.
Merry Christmas, dear reader. May you find your heart’s desire in the stable tonight. Although we may stammer before such a Mystery, we are grateful for the writers who have bravely attempted to put it into words. One of my favorites is Frederick Buechner, who departed this life last summer on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin. Here is what he preached to students many years ago:
The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is ever the same again.
Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart, because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is most strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.
For those who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby’s skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that. God comes to us in the hungry people we do not have to feed, comes to us in the lonely people we do not have to comfort, comes to us in all the desperate human need of people everywhere that we are always free to turn our backs upon. It means that God puts himself at our mercy not only in the sense of the suffering that we can cause him by our blindness and coldness and cruelty, but the suffering that we can cause him simply by suffering ourselves. Because that is the way love works, and when someone we love suffers, we suffer with him, and we would not have it otherwise because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God’s love for us.
+
Buechner’s complete sermon was published in The Hungering Dark, and later in Secrets in the Dark. You can also find it here.
Our Lady of the Angels (Robert Graham, Los Angeles cathedral, 2002)
Gaudete! Gaudete! Christus est natus Ex Maria Virgine. Gaudete!
Rejoice! Rejoice! Christ is born of the Virgin Mary. Rejoice!
So goes the joyful refrain of a late medieval carol, and even though the celebration of the Divine Birth is still two weeks away, the note of rejoicing (Gaudete! Gaudete!) is already beginning to dispute the wintry gloom in our Scripture readings, our hymns, and our expectant hearts.
For many centuries, the Third Sunday of Advent has been called Gaudete Sunday—Rejoice Sunday. In the Advent wreath, the somber blue is replaced by a brighter, warmer shade of rose. Churches lucky enough to have rose vestments will be using them today. And in the Common Lectionary cycle of readings, the word “rejoice” turns up in each of the three years.
In Year C, the prophet Zephaniah exhorts his disheartened people, “Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem” (Zephaniah 3:14). And St. Paul, overflowing with the Spirit, urges the first Christians to make joy a constant spiritual practice: “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he said. “Again I will say, Rejoice (Philippians 4:4)
In Year B, Isaiah tells us, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my whole being shall exult in my God; for God has clothed me with the garments of salvation” (Isaiah 61:10), while Mary’s heart pours out the Magnificat’s ode to joy: “My spirit rejoices in God my Savior (Luke 1:47).
And now, in Year A, Isaiah promises that even the most barren and forsaken places will become a paradise in God’s future: “The desert shall rejoice and blossom,” he assures us. “God’s ransomed exiles shall return …Gladness and joy shall come upon them, while sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 35:10).
Such hopeful refrains lift up our hearts and light a bright candle in the dark. But we also heed the voice of St. James, who curbs our enthusiasm with his “Not so fast! The Kingdom doesn’t come all at once. We’ve got to be patient” (James 5:7).
And we know he’s right. We still abide in a severely damaged history which seems to repeat itself rather than make real progress toward the horizon of God’s future. We have been shocked in recent years to see such seemingly outdated sins as overt racism and anti-Semitism come roaring back, like the alarming return of “conquered” diseases like polio and measles.
The French thinker Jean Baudrillard wrote about the myth of human progress just before the Millennium, critiquing the optimistic talk of a New World Order by reminding us that humanity continues to have a serious waste disposal problem (theologians would call this Original Sin, the persistent flaw that burdens and bedevils every human endeavor).
As Baudrillard put it, “The problem becomes one of waste. It is not just material substances, including nuclear ones, which pose a waste problem but also the defunct ideologies, bygone utopias, dead concepts and fossilized ideas which continue to pollute our mental space. Historical and intellectual refuse pose an even more serious problem than industrial waste. Who will rid us of the sediment of centuries of stupidity?” [i]
I ask that question every day when I see the news! But the genius of Advent is its ability to perform the difficult dance of honesty and hope. It doesn’t deny the darkness, but it also refuses to accept the black hole of unredeemed history as an inescapable fate. “Give us grace to cast away the works of darkness,” we pray, “and put on the armor of light”—not just in some distant utopian future, but “now, in the time of this mortal life.”
Now, now, now. But also not yet. Gaudete, but also Kyrie eleison. Rowan Williams, borrowing an image from Diadochus, a fifth-century bishop, describes Advent spirituality as the practice of “looking east in winter.”
“Looking east in winter we feel the warmth of the sun on our faces, while still sensing an icy chill at our backs. Our divided and distorted awareness of the world is not healed instantly. But we are not looking at the phenomenon from a distance: we do truly sense the sun on our faces; and we have good reason to think that the climate and landscape of our humanity can indeed be warmed and transfigured.” [ii]
The next time there is a sunny morning, go stand somewhere on our island’s eastern shore. Feel the chill at your back, and the warming sunlight on your face. Do it without words. Let those contrary sensations of cold and warmth be your Advent prayer.
Not every morning brings a bright sun, of course. Sometimes the warmth of hope is a matter of faith, not immediate experience. Yet even when we can’t feel it, God is redeeming the time and preparing the dawn. And when we pray, “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us,” the Holy One is listening.
“Stir up your power” is such a striking prayer, a bold cry of the heart to the One who saves. [iii] And because it is always the Collect-prayer for this day, Gaudete Sunday is also known as “Stir up” Sunday. But what do we mean when we call upon divine power? What does the power of God look like in the world we inhabit?
Well, it looks a lot like what happened when Jesus arrived: “The blind see, the lame dance, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor receive good news” (Matthew 11:5). It’s not a violent head-on clash with the powers of this world—meeting them on their own bloody terms—but the liberation of the faithful into a new form of being, enabling the friends of God to “plant the seeds of resurrection amid the blind sufferings of history.” [iv]
In Roberto Rossellini’s film, Europe ‘51 (1952), Ingrid Bergman plays a wealthy woman who gives up all her privilege to serve the poor and vulnerable. Rossellini, who had made a joyful film about St. Francis two years earlier, wanted to explore what would happen if someone behaved like St. Francis in the contemporary world. As it turns out in Europe ‘51, Irene (Bergman’s character) is judged to be insane by her husband, her social class, her doctors, and her Church, and the film ends with her locked away in an asylum. The powers-that-be have decided that there is no place in the world for the impracticality of unconditional love.
But even as Irene suffers this sad fate, we see her continue to be who she is, embodying God’s compassion for her fellow inmates. Like the incarnate God enclosed within the finite space of the Virgin’s womb, she can still practice heaven within the confines of the asylum. As she comforts a despairing woman who has tried to commit suicide, we see Irene, in a close-up reminiscent of an icon, speaking the words of Christ: “You are not alone. Don’t worry. I am with you. I will not leave you.” She becomes, in that moment, what we are all invited to become: an image of Christ for others.
“I am with you,” Irene (Ingrid Bergman) tells a distressed woman in Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51.
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us. But God’s idea of “great might” is not the way the world understands it. No lightning bolts. No legions of angels. Just a babe in a manger, a tortured man on a cross, a disciple locked in an asylum. As W. H. Auden said in the Advent portion of his Christmas Oratorio: “The Real is what will strike you as really absurd.” Or as an old carol puts it, “Weakness shall the strong confound.” [v]
In another of his poems, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Auden suggests that poetry operates much like divine power. Poetry “makes nothing happen,” he says. In other words, poetry doesn’t force its will upon the world, but in offering an alternate perspective for engaging reality, it makes the world different nonetheless. Auden describes poetry as if it were a stream, making its own way through the landscape.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
In his analysis of this poem, John Burnside notes that poetry’s work is “to survive—not in some dogged but enfeebled fashion, hanging on, though barely noticed, in an indifferent world, but actively, on its own terms—that is, ‘in the valley of its own making.’” The ‘executives’—the powers-that-be—take no notice. It means nothing to them. But “poetry flows on, through and away from ‘the busy griefs’ and the ‘raw towns that we believe in and die in,’ its business is more fundamental, its true nature more elemental” than the ‘executives’ can imagine.[vi]
And just so does the power of God flow through the world. Not to force anything to happen in a blunt cause-and-effect way, but to exist, like the waters of baptism, as an inviting and life-giving reality: “It survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.”
We find this same image of the flowing, living water in today’s passage from Isaiah: “For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sands shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water” (Isaiah 35:6-7).
The concluding words of Auden’s stanza, “a mouth,” may strike our ears jarringly after the metaphor of a quietly flowing stream, but both poetry and God are given to speech: In the beginning was the Word.
And in the same way that the “Stir up” prayer beseeches the God who saves, Auden’s poem, written on the eve of World War II, calls upon the poet to speak a word against all the dark sorrows of the world:
In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate …
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice … [vii]
There’s that word again: rejoice. We have prayed for a word of power today, and what we are given is: Gaudete! Rejoice! God’s power will never compel us to rejoice, or to hope, or to love. But it will always seek to persuade us, until the end of time.
Maddy Prior and Steeleye Span sing my favorite version of Gaudete.
[i] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, trans. Chris Turner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 26
[ii] Rowan Williams, Looking East in Winter:Contemporary Thought and the Eastern Christian Tradition (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), 8.
[iii] The Collect for the Third Sunday of Advent in the Book of Common Prayer: “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and for ever. Amen.”
[iv] I can’t locate the source of this quote from an old homily, but it may be from either Paul Evdokimov or Olivier Clément.
[v] Auden’s line is from “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio” (Collected Poems, Random House, 1976, p. 274). The carol line is from Gabriel’s Message (trans. J. M. Neale). Like Gaudete, it is in the famous Piae Cantiones collection of 1582.
[vi] John Burnside, The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 23.
[vii] W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (Collected Poems, 197-198).
The Enthronement of Christ (Bamberg Apocalypse, early 11th century).
The extremists in American politics say that God is on their side, but such statements are lacking in content. Their “God” is not really expected to supply any concrete assistance, such as plagues or angelic legions, to carry them to victory. “God-on-our-side” language is just a dramatic way to say that “we are right and you are evil.”
However, a new video ad is selling the startling idea that God has indeed, in these latter days, directly intervened in history by anointing a human messiah to enforce divine will through political power. Over God’s-eye aerial views of land and sea, we hear a caricature of Charlton Heston recite a text with biblical cadences and a lot of reverb:
“And on the 8th day, God looked down on his planned paradise, and said, ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.… God said, ‘I need someone to be strong, advocate truth in the midst of hysteria, someone who challenges conventional wisdom, and isn’t afraid to defend what he knows to be right and just.… someone who will take the arrows, stand firm in the face of unrelenting attacks.’”
As we hear these words, photographic images of the Chosen One fill the screen. The new messiah is revealed to be—wait for it—Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida! I knew he had presidential ambitions, but now he’s in the running for the Antichrist! Are there really enough rubes out there to fall for the old false messiah gag? [i]
About 60 years ago a southern preacher named Clarence Jordan liked to ask his fellow Christians: “What’s the biggest lie told in America today?” He’d let that sink in for a bit, and then he’d say, “The biggest lie told in America today is: ‘Jesus is Lord.’”
In other words, if you say “Jesus is Lord” and foster racism, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and support white supremacy, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and foment bigotry and hate, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and afflict the vulnerable, you’re a liar. If you say “Jesus is Lord” and do harm to your fellow beings, you’re a liar.
Someone recently posted a short video on the internet depicting Jesus as the incarnation of our worst politics. It shows Jesus teaching his disciples in a variety of settings:
“I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. And behold: Now I’m all lazy and entitled. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“What is a man profited, if he gains the whole world, but loses his own soul? A lot! He has profited a lot. One soul for the whole world, that is an amazing deal!” [ii]
Sad to say, some people would prefer the anti-Jesus who does nothing but reflect their own pitiful values. In any case, as the song says, “You gonna have to serve somebody: Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you gonna have to serve somebody.” [iii]
So who’s it going to be? Whom do we serve? Who—or what—rules our life? To whom do we belong? To what do we surrender?
In a culture of hyper-individualism, the idea of submission to a larger reality, a greater good, goes against the grain. But we are all governed by something, maybe even a whole crazy stampeding herd of somethings, pulling us here, driving us there. Whether we are conscious of it or not, there are voices, inside us and outside us, which direct and rule our hearts in every moment.
A hundred years ago, Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth suggested that “The first duty of every soul is not to find its freedom, but its Master.” And then he added: “If within us we find nothing over us, we succumb to what is around us.” [iv] When that is the case, there is no shortage of impulses, passions, ambitions, ideologies, agendas and distractions to swallow us up and sweep us away.
On the last Sunday of the Christian year, the Feast of Christ the King, we pledge allegiance to the Divine Love that governs the universe. As Frederick Denison Maurice, nineteenth-century Anglican priest and social reformer, reminds us, the reign of Christ extends into every province of our common life:
When we say, ‘Thy kingdom come,’ we desire that the King of kings and Lord of lords will reign over our spirits and souls and bodies, which [belong to God]… We pray for the extinction of all tyranny…; [we pray] for the exposure and destruction of corruptions inward and outward; [we pray] for truth in all departments of government, art, science; [we pray] for the true dignity of professions [and labor]; [we pray] for right dealings in the commonest transactions of trade; [we pray] for blessings that shall be felt in every [dwelling].[v]
“Crown him Lord of all,” we sing at the Feast of Christ the King. But the gospel for the day does not show us a mighty ruler, but only a naked man nailed to a tree. Soldiers mock the pathetic absurdity of his “kingship.” The sign above his head—“King of the Jews”—is a mocking irony. His only apparent subject is the dying thief hanging next to him. “Jesus,” he gasps, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” [vi]
Some kingdom! Some king!
Does Christ’s kingdom exist only in the future? Or is it somehow breaking into the here and now, even in the killing fields of history, where you need the faith of a dying thief to see it?
The question we began with—whose world is it?—is, alas, undecidable within the flux of history. You can’t choose on the basis of the evidence, because for the time being the evidence is mixed, like the wheat and the tares.
But you can decide who’s got the better story—Jesus or Satan. And you can choose which story you want to belong to: The story which overflows with life, or the one that ends in death.
A medieval hortus conclusus: The Little Garden of Paradise, Upper Rhenish Master (c. 1410).
Outside, the mountains have been drawn into the garden, becoming a part of it. Aritomo was a master of shakkei, the art of Borrowed Scenery, taking elements and views from outside a garden and making them integral to his creation.
The Rev. James Bramston, an eighteenth-century English cleric, was known for his satirical verses. One of his targets was Archibald Campbell (Lord Islay), who wanted to improve his extensive gardens by removing some of the trees blocking his view of the world beyond his private Eden.
Old Islay, to show his fine delicate taste, In improving his gardens purloin’d from the waste, Bade his gard’ner one day to open his views, By cutting a couple of grand avenues; No particular prospect his lordship intended, But left it to chance how his walks should be ended.
With transport and joy he beheld his first view end In a favorite prospect — a church that was ruin’d — But also! what a sight did the next cut exhibit! At the end of his walk hung a rogue on a gibbet! He beheld it and wept, for it caus’d him to muse on Full many a Campbell that died with his shoes on. All amazed and aghast at the ominous scene, He order’d it quick to be clos’d up again With a clump of Scotch firs, that served for a Screen. [ii]
In those days, landscape design cultivated the idea of the “Picturesque,” in which a visual environment is composed like a painting. In a picturesque scene, whether discovered or constructed, every element presenting itself to the eye of the beholder plays a part in summoning a feeling, stimulating reflection, or creating a mood. “Views were created resembling paintings or recalling events from myth or literature with the aim of producing desired states of feeling in the observer.” [iii]
One of the more unusual elements of the Picturesque was the ruin. A decaying church or temple, a weathered pagan statue, a partially collapsed arch or a broken column—traces of human pastness amidst the greenness of the natural world—aroused “la douce mélancolie qui parle à l’âme sensible” (“the sweet melancholy which speaks to the sensitive soul.”) [iv] Since authentic ruins were few and far between, it became the fashion to build new ones, in either classical or medieval styles, fabricated to appear like ancient remnants. In 1767, Diderot described the intellectual and emotional effect this way:
“The ideas aroused in me by ruins are lofty. Everything vanishes, everything perishes, everything passes away; the world alone remains, time alone continues. How old this world is! I walk between these two eternities … What is my ephemeral existence compared to that of crumbling stone?” [v]
When the poem’s Lord Islay told his gardeners to “open his views” by cutting a couple of wide avenues in the woods around his estate, he was reaching for the Picturesque, though rather by chance than careful design. In the first instance he succeeded wonderfully. At the end of the first avenue, perfectly framed, was a ruined church, promising many pleasurable ruminations on time, history, and divinity in the days to come.
But when more trees were felled to make the second avenue, the results were less agreeable. Lord Islay’s eyes were met with a ruin of the worst kind: a human corpse hanging on a gallows. “Amazed and aghast,” he quickly closed off the terrible vista with a planting of tall firs.
I recently came across Bramston’s poem in Roy Strong’s marvelous anthology, A Celebration of Gardens. While I can’t vouch for the factuality of the story, it struck me as a vivid image of the challenge for spirituality in this troubled and suffering world. How can we enjoy our gardens—the necessary environments and practices for emotional and spiritual health—and yet remain vulnerable and responsive to the cries of distress from near and far?
Isaac Walton window, Winchester Cathedral (1914).
From the Garden of Eden to the medieval cloister, the hortus conclusus (enclosed garden), a tranquil space of beauty and calm, walled off from the outside world, has been a significant image of the interior life. We all need the kinds of spaces, both physical and spiritual, where we can shelter from the storm, sink into the depths of holy Presence, and “study to be quiet.” [vi]
But we are long past the innocence of the first Eden. We know, all too well, of the terrors and horrors raging beyond the protecting walls which nurture our peace and shield our joy. We may, like Lord Islay, be aghast at the sudden glimpse of the victim on the gallows—or the cross—but we are long past surprise. A row of tall firs cannot protect us. The knowledge remains. How do we live with it—and act in response to it—and still guard our heart in its hortus conclusus?
Tan Twan Eng’s deeply moving novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, suggests a way. The Japanese gardening practice, shakkei, is described (see the epigraph above) as “the art of Borrowed Scenery.” Sometime after the Second World War, Aritomo, a Japanese master gardener living in Malaya, agrees to teach his art to the Malaysian narrator, Yun Ling. But their collaborative garden project does not enjoy the innocence of Eden. Yun Ling’s sister had suffered abuse and death in a Japanese internment camp during the war, and she wants to create a memorial garden for her lost sibling. Years later, she returns to the garden while investigating war crimes by the occupying forces. Aritomo, who had participated in that occupation, carries his own secret burdens and sorrows.
Aritomo and Yun Ling are not insulated from pain, guilt, grief and loss. Even from their beautiful garden, they can glimpse the gallows. And yet, the garden’s beauty—and the spirituality it engenders—is not diminished by the pain outside its sacred enclosure. Yes, look just beyond the garden, and you will see immense suffering. But look further, beyond the gallows. Can you borrow what lies in the greater distance? Can you make the Transcendent an integral part of your view?
Are the mists, too, an element of shakkei incorporated by Aritomo? I wonder. To use not only the mountains, but the wind, the clouds, the ever-changing light? Did he borrow from heaven itself? [vii]
The rose garden in Portland, Oregon, “borrows” distant Mt. Hood for this view.
[i] Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists, (New York: Weinstein Books, 2012), 25.
[ii] Cited in Roy Strong, A Celebration of Gardens (Portland, OR: Sagapress/Timber Press, 1992), 105-106.
[iii] Diana Ketchum, Le Desért de Retz: A Late Eighteenth-Century French Folly Garden (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), cited in Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 224.
[iv] Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 158.
Balthasar van Cortbemde, The Good Samaritan (1647).
Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) is usually heard as a reminder to care for the needs of others, including strangers or even enemies. That’s why some hospitals have taken their name from the protagonist. I myself was born in the Episcopal Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles and, four days before my 22nd birthday, my father died in the Intensive Care Unit of the same “Good Sam.” So this parable carries some special meanings for me.
We all hope to be like the Good Samaritan, but the late Doug Adams, an extraordinary friend and professor of Religion and Art at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, proposed an alternative reading of the parable. Instead of asking us to identify with the Good Samaritan, he wondered, what if Jesus wants us to identify with the man in the ditch?
The Samaritan is the person with all the power in the situation. He has a donkey, oil and wine, enough extra clothing to make bandages, the strength to lift the wounded man onto the donkey, and money to pay for the man’s medical care. He gives, most admirably, out of his own abundance.
But the naked, beaten, half-dead man in the ditch has no power. He has no capacity or ability to help himself. He is entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers. And who is the one who stops to help him? Not the priest, not the Levite, not one of his own kind, but a Samaritan. For a Jew, including everyone in Jesus’s original audience, a Samaritan was a bad person, a despised enemy.
Now you don’t need to understand the history of the cultural and religious enmity between Jews and Samaritans to grasp Jesus’ point here. Think of anyone of whom you disapprove, or someone you have a difficult history with. If you are lying helpless in the ditch, you don’t get to be selective about your rescuer. You have to accept their help, even if they happen to be your worst enemy. And that would mean you’d have to change your mind about them and, like it or not, be in relation with them.
Remember the question that prompted Jesus to tell this parable: “Who is my neighbor?” And the answer turns out to be: Everybody! In God’s alternative version of reality (which the gospels call the Kingdom), everyone—even my enemy—is my neighbor.
When I first heard Doug talk about this parable, it was during the first Gulf War. “Imagine you are lying helpless in that ditch,” he said, “and down the road comes Saddam Hussein. When he sees you, he bends down, offers his hand and says, “Can I help you out of the ditch, brother?”
Today we might substitute Vladimir Putin for the Samaritan to experience the same radical discomfort that Jesus’ first listeners must have felt when they heard the parable. Or suppose the person in the ditch is a white supremacist, and the Samaritan is a person of color? What if the victim is homophobic, and the rescuer is gay? What if a misogynist is the helpless one, and a woman comes by? What if it’s a Progressive in that ditch, and along comes a Proud Boy?
Do you find any of these scenarios unsettling? Parables are meant to be hard. They are meant to break us open.
And as I listen to this parable in the Year of Our Lord 2022, it strikes me that America itself is in the ditch, wounded by its sins, torn by its conflicts, half-dead from innumerable unaddressed ills. White supremacists and so-called “Christian” nationalists seek a cure in the subjugation or even the elimination of those they consider to be “other”—that is, those who are “not our kind,” whether that be people of color, the LGBTQ community, empowered women, Muslims, Central American refugees, nonwhite immigrants, or whomever. That way lies madness and death.
If we are ever to be delivered from the ditch of our own national folly and sin, we desperately need the help of the “other”—the ones whose race, religion, class, gender and life experiences are different from our own. We need to listen to their voices, their perspectives, their pain, their anger, their sorrows, their hopes, their dreams. We need not only to learn from them and be taught by them; we need to receive their stories into our hearts. Otherwise, we’re just going to stay stuck in that ditch.
Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew (1599-1600)
Any number of things can happen when we encounter Jesus. We might be comforted—or we might be uncomfortable. We might be healed—or we might be wounded. We might be instructed—or we might be turned upside down. Jesus is a difference maker. For better or worse, he comes to interrupt—and disrupt—our lives.
Sometimes Jesus speaks to our heart. Sometimes he speaks to our mind. But every time, he speaks to our will, as he puts the crucial question:
Will you come and follow me if I but call your name? Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same? Will you let my love be shown? Will you let my Name be known? Will you let my life be grown in you and you in me? [i]
We can always say no, of course. Many people have; many people do. Or we may profess our unreadiness or our inadequacy. “Are you kidding me?” said Moses at the Burning Bush. “Who am I to go and talk to Pharoah? I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” In the same way, the prophet Jeremiah also resisted his call: “No way, Lord! Don’t ask me to be a prophet. I don’t know how to speak. I’m only a child.” God has heard all the excuses, but the Divine Intention is not easily dissuaded. “Just do it,” God says.
When Jesus tries to recruit a few followers in Luke 9:51-62, he hears plenty of excuses. “Lord, let me first go home and bury my father,” says one. This sounds reasonable enough, if he’s talking about a corpse back at the house that needs some prompt attention. But this line can also be understood to mean, “I can’t go anywhere as long as my parents are still living. Family obligations come first.”
Another makes a similar excuse: “I will follow you, Lord, but first I must go home to take my leave. I need to get permission from my family before I can come with you. And that may take some time.”
I don’t think Luke’s gospel is telling us to walk out of important relationships. Rather, it is prompting us to ask ourselves: What is so important in my life that I need its permission before I can follow Jesus? My true master might be something as big as the security of having somewhere comfortable to lay my head at night, or as trivial as my habitual routines. I’d love to follow you, Jesus, but let me check my calendar first.
The excuses in Luke’s passage suggest a world of expectations, obligations, and best-laid plans that prevent us from running away to join the Jesus circus. Today we may enjoy far more social mobility than a first-century Middle-Easterner, but we each have our own version of situations and circumstances that delay and distract us. Some things just won’t let us go. It might be something lingering from our past, like unhealed anger or grief. Or it might be a present concern, like a steady income, emotional needs, or personal ambition.
Jesus says: If you want to follow me, nothing can have more authority over you than the will of God. As for the things that hold you back, just let them go. Let the dead bury the dead. It’s time to move on, deeper and deeper into God. Seek ye first the kingdom of God. And once you’ve put your hand to the gospel plow, don’t look back. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!
The call to be a follower of Jesus may arrive unexpectedly. It may seem inconvenient, or even impossible. But as the saints all tell us, it’s what we are made for. To borrow a line from songwriter Bob Franke,
I can’t really say it’s the thing I do best, but it’s the best thing that I do. [ii]
True vocation is not so much surrender to an outside force as it is the recognition of an internal capacity. In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer makes this point beautifully. “Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to be something I am not,” he writes. “It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”
“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.… The word vocation … is rooted in the Latin for “voice.” Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” [iii]
When Jesus calls me, it is, as it were, “my life telling me who I am.” And Jesus has many voices. You may hear him in the Scriptures or the liturgy, or when you enter the prayerful state of “absolute unmixed attention.”[iv] He will speak through the need of your neighbor, or in your deepest longing. His voice may come as dissatisfaction with the old, or as the intuition of fresh possibility. It may proceed from the mouth of friend and stranger. It may thunder like the transcendent Other, or whisper like the intimate inward presence who has known you all your life.
However Jesus may call us, what happens if we say yes? How do we put our hands to the plow, keep our eyes on the prize, and not look back?When we decide to follow Jesus, when we consent to lose our old lives in the Paschal Mystery of dying and rising, we are born again into a new way of being. No turning back, no turning back. But what will that new being look like? How will we be different? How will we make a difference?
St. Paul gives us a good list to start with in his letter to the Galatians (5:1, 13-25). Everything that binds, enslaves, and weighs you down, forget it. Instead of indulging yourselves, start loving one another. Say goodbye to enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy and licentiousness. Practice love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Let the Spirit dance in you.
Paul’s advice seems radically countercultural in an America so sickened by hatred, division, malice, and fear—a contagion which has spread to a degree unimaginable just five years ago. As Judge Michael Luttig recently lamented in his testimony before the January 6th Select Committee, “In the moral, catatonic stupor America finds itself in today, it is only disagreement we seek, and the more virulent that disagreement, the better.” [v]
In such a country, such a world, such a time, what is a disciple to do? Well, there’s no easy answer, no single method or path. We must figure it out as we go, the way the saints of old did amid crumbling empires, or as Dietrich Bonhoeffer did in 1930s Germany, or as Martin Luther King did in a Birmingham jail. It will certainly require steadfast faith and boundless love, but perhaps it is courageous hope we will need most of all.
In the worst of times, hope is the engine of persistence and the antidote for despair. Never forget: God makes a way where there is no way, and as God’s friends we are called to shine with that truth every day, “planting the seeds of resurrection amid the blind sufferings of history.” [vi]
[i] “The Summons,” a song from the Iona Community in Scotland (GIA Publications, 1987).
[ii] Bob Franke, “Boomerang Pancakes” (Telephone Pole Music, 1986).
[iii] Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 10, 4.
Comet Falls, Mt. Rainier National Park (July 29, 2005).
The tables outside the cantina were full of beautiful laughing men and women.… Everyone who sat there looked on display, the women in their lovely summer dresses, the men with their hair oiled back on their heads, their tanned bare feet resting proprietorially on top of their Gucci loafers. One wanted to applaud them for presenting such a successful vision of life: you could almost believe they had lived their whole lives, had been reared and groomed from birth, for this one particular night: that this was the pinnacle, this golden summery evening they had all reached simultaneously.
Yet it made me a little sad to see them there, laughing and drinking champagne, for you knew it was all downhill from here.[i]
— Peter Cameron, Andorra
The narrator in Cameron’s novel experiences the “golden summery evening” at the cantina through the lens of his own unhappiness. He has fled a failed life in America for a Mediterranean idyll, but joy continues to elude him. This apparently happy scene of shared human pleasure only deepens his alienation. Unable to join the fun, he judges the beautiful, laughing people for their complacency, their privilege, and their shallow indifference to mortality.
In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Clarissa Vaughan recalls her own close encounter with happiness, when she made the mistake of thinking it would last.
It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still somewhat shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness.… What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right there. There has been no other. [ii]
What is happiness? It can be pursued, but can it be possessed? The word is derived from “hap,” an Old English term for fortune or chance—something that happens to us, for good or ill. But “happy” and “happiness” have come to denote only the good things, without the mishaps.
If asked to recall our happiest moments, a multitude of memories would rise to the surface. But if asked whether we are happy now, or living happy lives, how would we answer? The University of Pennsylvania is conducting an online Authentic Happiness Survey, with twenty-four groups of five statements each to measure the presence or absence of happiness. Group 24, for example, offers the following choices:
My life is a bad one.
My life is an OK one.
My life is a good one.
My life is a very good one.
My life is a wonderful one.
The #1 statement in a group is always pretty dismal (I’m usually in a bad mood … I’m pessimistic … I am unhappy with myself … I feel like a failure, etc.) The #5 statement sounds way too good to be true (My life is filled with pleasure … If I were keeping score in life, I would be far ahead … I always get what I want … My life is filled with joy … I could not be happier with myself, etc.).
The majority of my own answers landed in the middle (#3), reflecting a pretty typical mix of highs and lows. I had no #1s, a couple of #2s, six #4s (three due to privilege, three due to personality), and two #5s (“I truly love my work” and “Most of the time I am fascinated by what I am doing”—both of these reflecting a mixture of privilege, personality, and the good fortune of getting to do what I love). My authentic happiness score was 3.46 out of 5. That seems about right for a privileged white male occasionally beset by the minor melancholies of disappointed hopes, both personal and generational.
It was an interesting survey, one of many attempts to grapple with the unhappiness of our times. Currently, the most popular course at Yale is “Psychology and the Good Life,” created by Professor Laurie Santos in response to the mental health crisis among college students, who, she says, are “much more overwhelmed, much more stressed, much more anxious, and much more depressed than they’ve ever been.”
In a survey of Yale students taken before the pandemic, 60% said they had felt “overwhelmingly anxious” sometime during the last year. And 50% reported feeling “completely overwhelmed” in the past week. For many college students, and for Americans in general, “happiness feels increasingly out of reach.” The pandemic, climate change, and the politics of fear and hate have multiplied our sorrows and anxieties almost beyond measure.
According to University of California (Irvine) professor Sonia Lyubomirski, author of The How of Happiness, 50% of one’s happiness is determined by genes, while 40% flows from our thoughts, actions, and attitudes. That leaves only 10% attributable to circumstances, although many people believe that circumstance is the key factor in personal happiness. If I change my job, my home, my partner, I will be happier. Lyubomirski’s numbers assume, of course, that one’s basic needs are being met. For a war zone Ukrainian, a Central American refugee, or a long Covid sufferer, circumstance weighs far more heavily.
Santos’ course, and her ongoing podcast, The Happiness Lab, seek to help people address the more significant 40% factors: thoughts, actions, and attitudes. I’ve only listened to the first episode, but many have testified to the value of her efforts.[iii]
Happiness is a subject of supreme interest. Everyone wants it, but for many it seems in short supply. It’s also hard to define. A century ago, Vita Sackville-West questioned its usefulness as an index for life.
But what was happiness? Had she been happy? That was a strange, clicking word to have coined—meaning something definite to the whole English-speaking race—a strange clicking word with its short vowel and its spitting double p’s, and its pert tip-tilted y at the end, to express in two syllables a whole summary of life. Happy. But one was happy at one moment, unhappy two minutes later, and neither for any good reason; so what did it mean? … Certainly, there had been moments of which one could say: Then, I was happy; and with greater certainty: Then, I was unhappy—when little Robert had lain in his coffin, for instance, strewn with rose petals by his sobbing Syrian nurse—but whole regions had intervened, which were just existence. Absurd to ask of those, had she been happy or unhappy? … No, that was not the question to ask her—not the question to ask anybody. Things were not so simple as all that. [iv]
Well then. Am I happy or unhappy? I have had moments and days when it was indeed bliss to be alive. But what should I say about those intervening regions where the evidence is mixed? Is happiness only an occasional oasis in the desert of ordinary time, or can happiness reside in the barren places as well?
“Small things go a long way,” says Zadie Smith. “All day long I can look forward to a Popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth,” [v] Rebecca Solnit, arrested for demonstrating at a nuclear test site in the Nevada desert, said that “even when you’re in handcuffs, the sunset is still beautiful.” [vi]
In The Spiritual Meadow, John Moschos’ seventh-century collection of tales about desert monastics, an elder warns a wayward disciple, “Brother, pay attention to your own soul, for death awaits you and the road to punishment.” The disciple took little heed, and when he died, the elder continued to worry about his fate.
The elder fell to his prayers and said, “Lord Jesus Christ, reveal to me the state of the brother’s soul.” He went into a trance and saw a river of fire with a multitude of people in the fire itself. Right in the middle was the brother, submerged up to his neck. The elder said to him, “Didn’t I warn you to look after your own soul, my child?” And the brother answered, “I thank God, father, that at least my head is spared from the fire. Thanks to your prayers, I am standing on the head of a bishop.” [vii]
Even in hell, small things go a long way! And happiness can turn up anywhere, as poet Jane Kenyon reminds us:
There’s just no accounting for happiness … It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker, and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots in the night. [viii]
We are grateful when it comes, and for the memory it leaves. But happiness is more than the occasional perfect moment. It is a practice, a way of being, a fullness of life which transcends the inevitable fluctuations of fortune. Such a practice might be summarized in two words: authenticity and love.
At my ordination to the priesthood (September 17, 1970).
Authenticity is fidelity to your truest self: becoming more and more like the person you have been created and called to be. Sometimes the way is rough and steep. Sometimes you get lost or delayed. But by God’s grace, you embrace the journey. Parker Palmer describes this process as a matter of vocation:
Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” [ix]
Authenticity, then, finds its greatest expression in acts of love. Becoming our truest self takes us beyond our individuality, into the interdependent communion of the Divine Whole. My own happiness cannot be sustainably severed from collective well-being. Happiness, as it turns out, is not a private affair. It is the way of self-diffusive, self-offering love. And until justice and human flourishing are universally shared, the way of love will include suffering. Self-sacrifice for love’s sake can be costly and painful, as Jesus and the saints have shown. Happiness accepts the truth of that. No justice, no peace. But it is also true, as Catherine of Siena said, that “all the way to heaven is heaven.” You don’t have to wait until the end of time for happiness to show up.
“Do not look for rest in any pleasure,” said Thomas Merton, “because you were not created for pleasure; you were created for JOY.” [x] Happy are those with a hungry heart. Happy are those who give themselves away. Happy are those who do not mistake crumbs for the feast. Happy are those who know it’s not just about them. Happy are those who say yes to the gift. Happy are those who yearn for the Divine Beloved. Happy are those who don’t count the cost. Happy are those who love their story.
On the summit of Mount Sinai (May, 1989). Blessed is the way up. Blessed is the way down. The trail is beautiful. Be still.
We think of Saint Francis of Assisi as a joyful saint, but he was also pierced by the stigmata, the wounds of Christ. And he taught that the most perfect joy is to be found neither in worldly things nor in spiritual enjoyments. Nor is perfect joy simply a matter of pleasure, contentment, or delight. This was bewildering and counterintuitive for his brothers, so he explained it this way:
“Imagine coming home to the monastery on a stormy night. We knock on the door, but it is so dark that the surly porter mistakes us for tramps. ‘Go away!’ he shouts. And if we continue to knock and the porter comes out and drives us away with curses and hard blows— and if we bear it patiently and take the insults with joy and love in our hearts. Oh Brother Leo, write down that that is perfect joy! Above all the graces and gifts of the Holy Spirit which Christ gives to his friends is that of conquering oneself and willingly enduring sufferings, insults, humiliations and hardships for the love of Christ.” [xi]
Saint Francis wouldn’t have sold many self-help books, but he knew that happiness unacquainted with suffering and sorrow isn’t the real deal. “If it be sweet, if it be not sweet,” [xii] my story is what I was made for. My story is why I’m here. Happiness is saying yes to the story’s gift with a thankful heart.
The late Joseph Golowka, one of my most beloved elders, still roughing it in Baja at 86 (Sept. 24, 2005).
When I go back to earth And all my joyous body Puts off the red and white That once had been so proud, If men should pass above With false and feeble pity, My dust will find a voice To answer them aloud:
“Be still, I am content, Take back your poor compassion!— Joy was a flame in me Too steady to destroy. Lithe as a bending reed Loving the storm that sways her— I found more joy in sorrow Than you could find in joy.” [xiii]
— Sara Teasdale, “The Answer”
[i] Peter Cameron, Andorra (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 149-150.
[ii] Michael Cunningham, The Hours (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1988), 98.
[iii] The statistics and quotes from Santos and Lyubomirsky are found in Adam Sternbergh, “The Case for New York Face,” in Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. XII, No. 3 (Summer 2019), 81-85. Four times a year, Lapham’s Quarterly presents a marvelous and stimulating collection of writings and images from many periods and sources on a given topic. This issue’s subject is “Happiness.” Sternbergh’s article was originally published in New York Magazine in 2018. Additional quotes from Santos were taken from her podcast, The Happiness Lab, Season 1, Episode 1 (“You Can Change”): https://www.happinesslab.fm
[iv] This excerpt from Sackville-West’s novel, All Passion Spent (1931), is also in the “Happiness” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, p. 139.
[v] Ibid., 134. Smith’s excerpt is from her essay “Joy” (New York Review of Books, Jan. 10, 2013).
[vi] Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
[vii] John Moschos, The Spiritual Meadow (written c. 600), trans. John Wortley (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 1992/2008), 35.
[ix] Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 16.
[x] Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (1949), p. 172. Cited in William H. Shannon, Christine M. Bochen, Patrick F. O’Connell, eds., The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002), 231.
[xi] Adapted from The Little Flowers of St. Francis, 53 chapters on the life of Francis of Assisi written at the end of the 14th century.
[xii] Anne Sexton, “Rowing.” “As the African says, / This is my tale which I have told,/ If it be sweet, if it be not sweet,”/ Take somewhere else and let some return to me.…”
[xiii] Sara Teasdale, “The Answer,” in Christian Wiman, ed., Joy: 100 Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 138.
Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DeCaprio) discover a comet in Don’t Look Up. (Niko Tavernise/Netflix)
Human narcissism and all that it has wrought, including the destruction of nature, will finally be our downfall. In the end, McKay isn’t doing much more in this movie than yelling at us, but then, we do deserve it.
God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the mountains be toppled Into the depths of the sea.
— Psalm 46:1-2
Spoiler alert: If you want to see Don’t Look Up with innocent eyes, watch the movie before reading this. It is currently streaming on Netflix.
Kierkegaard once told a parable about the human capacity for denial. A fire broke out backstage in a crowded theater before the performance. With the curtains still drawn, the audience was unaware of the danger, so one of the actors stepped out to warn them. But he was dressed as a clown, and the people thought his cries of alarm must be some kind of joke. The louder he shouted “YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!”, the more they laughed and cheered. By the time they realized the peril for themselves, it was too late.
“I think,” said the Danish philosopher, “that’s just how the world will end—to general applause.” [ii]
One of the most popular current films, Don’t Look Up, is a farce about the extinction of life on our planet. It dresses its message of disaster and death in a comic premise: most of humanity is either too witless, deluded, or self-absorbed to acknowledge the threat. The more ridiculously the characters behave, the more we laugh—at least until the (literally) bitter end.
Like Kierkegaard’s clown, director and co-writer Adam McKay has serious intentions. “I’ve been really terrified about the climate, the collapse of the livable atmosphere,” he told an interviewer. “It seems to be getting faster and faster. Yet for some reason, it’s not penetrating our culture.”[iii] Since climate change is a gradual process stretching far beyond our attention span, McKay has substituted a more instantaneous disaster for our consideration. In the movie, an immense comet is headed straight for planet Earth. In six months, all living things will be destroyed.
An astronomy professor at Michigan State, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), and his protégé, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), discover the comet and try to warn the White House and the world. But their pleas for action go largely unheeded, and things go merrily downhill from there. As Manohla Dargis writes, Don’t Look Up is “a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freakout about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.” [iv]
In the Oval Office, Randall and Kate try to get the attention of a distracted President, played by Meryl Streep. (Niko Tavernise/Netflix)
During preproduction, the world was struck by a different disaster—the pandemic. The mismanaged Trumpian response, followed by the deadly denialism of the anti-vaxxers, added fuel to the satirical fire. McKay’s parable became as much about COVID as it is about climate change. It was hard to keep the fictional script ahead of the times. McKay said they had to make the film “20% crazier, because reality had played out crazier than the script.” [v]
In most disaster movies, human ingenuity and determination win out in the end, and the world manages to survive. But Don’t Look Up is not so forgiving. Human folly and sin guarantee global extinction. And no matter how much we have been entertained by the stellar cast and amusing scenarios, we are meant to come away unsettled. Complacency is not an option. The theater of Nature is on fire. This is not a drill.
The film has been embraced by the viewing public as well as activists, but many critics have been not only dismissive but contemptuous: “… it’s one joke, told over and over and over again”[vi] … “the attempts at mockery are broad, puerile, and obvious, unintentionally trivializing the issues it seeks to highlight”[vii] … “drowns in its own smugness”[viii] … “its simplistic anger-stoking and pathos-wringing mask the movie’s fundamental position of getting itself talked about while utterly eliding any real sense of politics or political confrontation.”[ix]
David Fear of Rolling Stone is particularly brutal: “… a righteous two-hour lecture masquerading as a satire .… So caught up in its own hysterical shrieking that it drowns out any laughs, or sense of poignancy, or points it might be trying to make … it’s never able to find a way to crawl out of the tarpit of its own bone-deep despair … it doesn’t mean that one man’s wake-up-sheeple howl into the abyss is funny, or insightful, or even watchable. It’s a disaster movie in more ways than one. Should you indeed look up, you may be surprised to find one A-list bomb of a movie, all inchoate rage and flailing limbs, falling right on top of you.”[x]
There have been more measured critiques. Some find Don’t Look Up heavy-handed and misanthropic. Most of the characters, they say, are too cartoonishly stupid or corrupt to make us care deeply about their fate. Some think the filmmaker is too cynical about our collective capacity to counteract moral blindness and systemic evil, leaving us discouraged rather than empowered. Others, weighing the effectiveness of the relentlessly over-the-top caricatures, ponder “the question of whether our culture has become too depressing, too absurd, too lamentable to satirize.” [xi]
In a lengthy and sober analysis, Eric Levitz judges the comet scenario to be a misleading metaphor for climate change:
“In the film’s populist, polemical account of the ecological crisis, there is … no need for Americans to tolerate significant disruptions to their existing way of life, no vexing question of global redistribution, no compelling benefits from ongoing carbon-intensive growth, and thus no rational or uncorrupted opponent of timely climate action. Don’t Look Up casts the conflict between minimizing climate risk and maximizing near-term economic growth as one pitting the interests of billionaires against those of everyone else.” [xii]
What I find missing in all this criticism is a sense of genre. The lack of political nuance, psychological depth, or aesthetic rigor is beside the point. This film embraces the method of the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, where stock characters “make sport of human foibles and universal complaints while burlesquing the most socially or politically prominent members of a given community.” [xiii]
In the early 20th century, the Commedia model was adapted by Russian “agitprop” theater, “noted for its cardboard characters of perfect virtue and complete evil, and its coarse ridicule.”[xiv] Agitprop’s aim was not to create great art, but to inspire collective action. In the American 1960s, groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe practiced a similar “guerilla theater,” whose purpose, as stated in a 1967 manifesto by R. G. Davis, was to criticize “prevailing conditions … expressing what you (as a community) all know but no one is saying … truth that may be shocking and honesty that is vulgar to the aesthete … There is a vision in this theater, and … it is to continue … presenting moral plays and to confront hypocrisy in the society.” [xv]
It’s a playful form of politics, using laughter to dethrone the powers of this world by undermining their pretensions to ultimacy. As the Psalmist says, “God is laughing at them; the Lord has them in derision” (Psalm 2:4). Prophetic mockery is the genesis of revolution. It’s liberating and cathartic. But if it remains merely a way to blow off steam, or a refreshing but temporary lightening of spirit, that is not enough. Action must follow. We must become the change we seek.
Kate and Randall on a mission to warn the world. (Niko Tavernise/Netflix)
Millions of people have seen Don’t Look Up. Its content and aims are being widely and passionately discussed. Is it a good movie? How accurate is its central metaphor? Which actors stand out? Is it funny? Given the film’s vast global reach and the urgency of the crisis, these become secondary questions. What I want to know is: Does it make a difference? Can it provoke repentance? Will it produce change?
Every preacher and every liturgist wonders the same things. How do our sermons, images, rituals and stories contribute to the transformational mix? In a podcast conversation about the film, Atlantic writer Spencer Kornhaber addresses this issue:
“I think this quest for movies to deliver a message that changes people’s minds is maybe quixotic. There aren’t a ton of works in history like that. But what they do do is give you a set of images and characters and metaphors and clichés that, when they work, become absorbed into our language. They help us talk about the world in ways that are hopefully progressing our discourse and society.” [xvi]
Of course, a film about global annihilation is a hard sell (and released at Christmas, no less!). The prospect of unimaginable loss opens the door to nihilism and despair. Why bother? Why go on? The director himself describes his film as a place where “absurdist, ridiculous comedy lives right next to sadness … so the trickiest part of the movie was to ramp down that tone in the last 20 minutes.” During a script conference before shooting started, one of the producers asked McKay, “Where’s faith in this movie?” And the director, whose mother was a born-again evangelical, exclaimed, “Oh, you’re right. You’re right!” [xvii]
The last supper in Michigan. (Niko Tavernise/Netflix)
As the comet nears its collision with earth, we see people facing extinction in various ways. Some are praying, some are partying, some are weeping, some are just staring at the sky in disbelief, fear, or hopeless resignation. But in a dining room in East Lansing, Michigan, a small group of friends and family have gathered around a table for a communal last supper. Among them are Randall and Kate. For six months they had tried and failed to awaken humanity to effective action. Now they are back home, choosing neither anger nor despair for their final moments on earth, but gratitude and communion.
As the food is shared, each of them names something they are grateful for. Then Randall says, “Well, we’re not the most religious here in the Mindy household, but, um, maybe we should say ‘amen?’ Should we do that?”
Most of them are unpracticed in prayer, so this suggestion creates an awkward pause. But Yule, a young Christian skateboarder (Timothée Chalamet), speaks up. “I’ve got this,” he says. Everyone joins hands around the table, and Yule begins to pray:
“Dearest Father, Almighty Creator, we ask for your grace tonight, despite our pride; your forgiveness, despite our doubt. Most of all, Lord, we ask for your love, to soothe us through these dark times. May we face whatever is to come in your divine will with courage and open hearts of acceptance. Amen.”
Somewhere across the globe, the comet strikes, and an immense tsunami begins to swallow planetary life like the biblical flood. Yes, there is a parodic ark, reserved for the billionaires, bearing them to a justly ironic fate in a galaxy far, far away. But the true ark of the righteous remnant is that Michigan dining room.
In their final minute on earth, the men and women around the table discuss small, ordinary blessings like the store-bought apple pie and the delicious home-brewed coffee. In an inspired ad-lib that had occurred to DiCaprio between takes, Dr. Mindy speaks his last words:
“Thing of it is, we really did have everything, didn’t we? I mean, when you think about it.”
The simple human beauty of this last supper, more than the script’s many earnest pleadings, makes the film’s best case for preserving the world. It seems no accident that the one who sets the spiritual tone is named Yule, an old word for Christmas. Even at history’s last moment, Love is being made flesh.
Then, as the walls around them begin to disintegrate, the screen goes suddenly dark. The circle of human love has vanished into the Divine Mystery.
After watching Don’t Look Up, I came across a poem by John Hollander which articulates for me the feeling of this moving finale. “At the New Year” is about the new beginnings that emerge from all the endings—those moments when we feel “every door in the world shutting at once.” Then the poet prays, “let it come at a time like this, not at winter’s / Night,” but “at a golden / Moment just on the edge of harvesting, ‘Yes. Now.’ / … as we go / Quietly on with what we shall be doing, and sing / Thanks for being enabled, again, to begin this instant.” [xviii]
So the apocalypse ends not with a bang, but with a softly spoken thanks for everything. Even when the worst arrives, the answering word is Yes, and the circle of love goes “quietly on with what we shall be doing,” and singing our thanks. Every moment, even the last one, is a gift to be savored. May our own precious moments on this earth be hallowed with gratitude, acceptance, and trust, now and at the hour of our death.
[xviii] John Hollander (1929-2013), “At the New Year,” in American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom, eds. Harold Bloom & Jesse Zuba (New York: Library of America, 2006), 442-443.
The religious imagineer 