Everything that can go wrong...

...is going wrong.

Man, I hate this.

My sister, whose 60th birthday is today, is having a horrible stomach flu. She is freaking out about everything. She's now reconsidering taking my father with her to New Mexico. She moved her departure forward by three weeks, and has no time to get together his documentation and is worried that they won't let him on the plane with an expired passport for ID.

There are lawyers everywhere, but talking to them is a nightmare.

My work life is a nightmare. I can't concentrate, and I feel like a complete and utter failure.

I have eight loads of laundry to do but I can hardly bring myself to shower and change out of my pajamas.

This is not a good time.

Client Bitchslap

It wasn't the very best work I'd ever done, I knew that. It was an improvement on what was there before, though.

Still, I wasn't thrilled.
The client was very not happy.

I'm wondering why the hell I ever thought I could design my way out of a paper bag.
I'm in a bad, bad mood.

[Oh, and I'm still having intermittent problems with Blogger.]

This Could Be A Very Creative Post (according to Rollo May)

Providence, Evil, and Suffering: Assignment 4

I'm intrigued by how angry I get reading some of these texts. I take these topics tremendously personally, which catches me by surprise. For example, it just infuriates me to read in Rollo May's essay that "for any great creation there must be rage" (p. 73). Not only do I think this is factually incorrect, I also believe that it is a pernicious, somewhat romantic notion that seeks to redeem certain pathologies by tying them to something positive or, conversely, to take certain gifts of creativity and deglorify them by linking them inextricably with something negative. I can think of many, many brilliant works of art that were neither motivated by nor in any way expressive of rage. And let's suppose we accept that the universe in all its magnificence was the result of a supreme act of creativity; do we really want to say that God harbored rage in the act of creation? I don't think so.

Rollo May seems to specialize in sweeping generalizations that sound good at first blush but don't make sense to me. Here's another: "I think wiping [evil] out is quite impossible, and is itself the most evil thing imaginable." (p. 73) I'm prepared to grant that wiping evil out is impossible for anyone but God. I'm NOT prepared to grant that wiping evil out is the most evil thing imaginable. I would venture I can name a dozen things that are worse than wiping evil out (presuming God can and does do it), starting with, say, the torture and murder of puppies and innocent children.

On page 74, I believe May misunderstands the quote from Faust, "I am that which always does evil which turns into good." May interprets this to mean "Evil as that which is caused by the Good," which seems exactly backward to me. I see the quotation as Mephistopheles's acknowledgment that all his evil-doing is ultimately made into an instrument of Good (by God).

May then goes on to a tangent about how American society and Western civilization are foundering and vulnerable to evil because, essentially, nobody in America reads the classics anymore (or listens to Beethoven), and cites Harold Bloom to bolster his claims. He declares, "This present illiteracy is the destruction of the souls of modern young people," (p. 79) which also enrages me. (I must develop a thicker skin.) Is this not the cry of the elder generation of the educated elite in every society throughout all time? It boils down to: "Kids these days!! They have no culture and their morals are degenerate!!" We can be sure that Rollo May is unlikely to ever see how, for example, the evil of the drug and crime-ridden circumstances of the underclass are expressed and brought into the good through the aesthetics of rap. (I'm not a rap fan, myself, but that's not the point; substitute the medium and genre of your choice.) The nostalgia for "a previous America" and a golden age when "great discords were turned into great beauty" conveniently glosses over our very blood-soaked history of oppression and genocide, as well as the vast quantity of mediocre, kitschy, and downright embarrassing cultural product that has mercifully faded into obscurity with the passage of time.

By contrast, Karl E. Weick is a model of analytical probity, who actually offers some useful strategies for addressing evil. He gives us a useful analysis of how evil can, as he puts it, "start small" (p. 87) and grow if empowered by conformity and unchecked by empathy. He claims, however, that to understand evil would "strip it of its raw wickedness and make it more distant and acceptable" (p. 84), and that "if we understand evil and how it works, then it may be easier of us to dismiss it or become indifferent to it" (p. 89). Personally, I don't see why it follows at all that we would become dismissive of evil or indifferent to it if we understood it thoroughly; I should think quite the contrary. (On some level I wonder if this isn't the reaction of an academic who is used to his intellectual activity diluting some of his emotional response, like the literature student who complains that his joy in a poem is destroyed by analyzing its rhetorical strategies.)

Gregory Curtis opened up a useful insight for me in his discussion of the appeal of evil: "Evil accepts us. Evil does not require us to improve. No matter how great our faults, evil will embrace us. Evil validates our weaknesses and our secret appetites." (p. 94) I was struck that one could substitute "God" for "Evil" in the first and third sentences and they would still be true, but that it would not be true for the second and fourth sentences. God does require us to improve, and forgives us when repent of our failure to do so. God acknowledges our weakness and our secret appetites and saves us in spite of them. Because God is love, God prompts us with guilt to help prevent us from getting worse. God is not indulgent of—but rather generous in response to—our sins.

Curtis gets to the heart of evil's greatest challenge when he discusses how evil has its own values. (p. 95) He rightly points out that the greatest evils are perpetrated by those who are entirely convinced that they are acting for the good. We do not have to look far into the past to see how "true believers" can be the most dangerous people in the world. Their certainty of moral rectitude should serve as a humbling reminder to the rest of us that we are in constant peril of making the same disastrous error.

Reading:
Facing Evil, eds. Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, Open Court: Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 2001. pp. 71-96

Blogger Problem

I am bouncing around in Blogger limbo, between old version and new. Don't know if or when I'll be able to log in again. VERY FRUSTRATING.

In the meantime, if you comment and you don't see it published, or if i don't post for awhile, it's because I'm having technical diffculties.

[Update: Well, temporarily have access again. Goodness knows how long it'll last.]

Doubt & the Devil

There's nothing like having actually put in an application for an M.Div program to cause every rational doubt you've ever had about a Call to come surging to the surface. Not to mention the irrational ones.

Assessing the current state of my life, which is not pretty, I have to say that it would be convenient to lay it all at the foot of some external evil trying to foil my progress toward God and service to God. I don't think that's what's going on though. I think that I've got a lot on my plate and the stress caused by my busy-ness is compounded by a significant underlying, but well-masked, bout of depression.

I am: taking two seminary courses; clumsily juggling a daunting workload; having first dates with strangers I meet through an online dating service; trying to cope with family stuff. And somewhere in there, I've got the black dog lurking. It's not the best situation.

Last night, in amongst some malformed dreams, I received some kind of message — whether from God or from my subconscious, you be the judge. I woke up thinking this way... It occurred to me that very few people ever have the notion that they are meant to be ordained. And that of those that do, very few are quite sure about it all the time.

If only those who are sure go forward, there will certainly never be enough ordained persons to sustain any institutional church. Should all institutional churches die? (I don't think so, although I suppose an argument could be made for it.)

I think about the conversations I've had lately — at my apartment building's front desk, over a poker table, in a noisy bar — with people who are curious about theology, who want to understand Christianity, who are clearly if perhaps not consciously hungry and thirsty for a live-giving faith. I have been (I still am, perhaps) in their shoes. They are so afraid of being judged and condemned for thinking about these matters.

I think maybe I have something to offer. I think maybe that with more thought, prayer, education, and the approval (deus volente) of my institutional church, I might have something really different to offer as an ordained person. I am never going to be a cookie-cutter representative of the faith.

Maybe that's a good thing.

Recognizing & rebuking evil

Providence, Evil & Suffering: Assignment 3

James Burton Russell defines the Devil, or Radical Evil, as “a powerful, centered, destructive force of hatred that exists within us — in our minds” and “a fundamental warping of the will that underlies individual actions.” He goes on to state that it is not just that some people do evil things, but that they themselves become evil: “I believe that there are people who have allowed their wills and personalities and lives to be swallowed up by Radical Evil.”

This begs the question: how does evil gain dominion over a person (or a group or a whole society)? It seems that there might logically be three ways: a person might be so afflicted by Evil and so unexposed to goodness and love that they come to see evil as normal and right, never really perceiving an alternative; a person might through laziness, shallowness, or simple cowardice allow evil to predominate in his or her life, passively taking a road of least resistance; or a person might, in full awareness of the choice, perversely seek out and court evil, fueled by a hunger for power over others or a desire for selfish fulfillment at all costs. Even if the outcome in behavior is the same, I find that I am inclined to rank the responsibility, or perhaps the “evilness-index” if you will, of these three cases differently, with the first being lowest on the scale and the last highest.

Should the person who suffers as a victim as a consequence care why or how the other came to be an instrument of evil? Does the child abuse victim find it easier to forgive the abuser when she learns that he too was a victim of abuse? Does the tortured political detainee experience some measure of meaning in his suffering because he knows his captor’s whole world-view has been warped by the totalitarian regime he serves? And does a society breathe a sigh of satisfaction when it identifies a stone-cold thrill-killer, whom it feels it can justifiably put to death without remorse because there are no mitigating circumstances whatsoever to be found?

Despite a popular culture that seems to be fascinated with depictions of extreme evil (mostly fictional), I think most of us in the affluent U.S. have little or no personally recognized experience of Radical Evil. (I think, for example, that Russell’s examples from his own life — while perhaps painful and negative for him and his family — really don’t rise to the level of Radical Evil.) We don’t easily identify the pervasive, systemic evils in which we participate, or the profound evils which we fail to prevent or to oppose. If we pay attention to it all, the news is a spectator sport for most us.

Russell claims that “human nature is not intrinsically good.” I’m not so sure about that. Scripture tells us that, at our creation, God called us good. But when we came to a knowledge of good and evil, we came to responsibility to know our own capacity for good and evil, and to choose good. We can no longer do and be good except deliberately, with knowledge aforethought. We can’t just “luck into” avoiding evil; like a kind of entropy, evil will cause us to slip into the dark if we do not actively identify and resist it in ourselves, calling upon the promised grace of God to give us the courage and strength we need to do so.

Harrington asks us to look at how Jesus dealt with suffering; we may also use him as an example of how to respond to evil. Jesus recognized and rebuked evil by his every word and deed. I think of Jesus in the wilderness, resisting three temptations to worldly power proffered by the Devil. I take note of Jesus freeing those held captive by demonic powers of evil and calling for the protection and support of those oppressed by social evils. I bow my head in awe as I contemplate Jesus on the cross, suffering the consequences of others’ evil without hating them in return, but rather offering forgiveness instead. And I rejoice in the gift of the Risen Christ, whose presence then and now through the Holy Spirit refutes the dominion of evil by demonstrating the sovereign power of love.

Readings:
Why do we suffer? by Daniel Harrington, S.J., Sheed & Ward: Franklin, Wisconsin, 2000. pp. 107-143
Facing Evil, eds. Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, Open Court: Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 2001. pp. 47-69

Spam Poem

Strange beauty in the attempt to bypass my mail filter.

At the earliest bye-elections by.

Out of our.
From the.
The people who were.
Railway accident or.
Soldiers who had done.
A comprehension of.
Amid the obscene din.
Point of view.
British sport should get a.
Not the time to show.
Braved death in.
On fully proved.
Of mind to.
Of action are always inveterate.
And partly of.
Trivial a phrase.
Live strange that.
For lack of an opportunity.
No more to them than.
By advancing age.
Have their minds formed for.
Have been done by.
By illusions of splendid.
Mental distress of living.
The coupon candidates.

Lord, don't move your mountain

Providence, Evil, and Suffering: Assignment 2

Like the Jewish apocalyptic literature, with its epic temporal struggle between forces of light and darkness, Maya Angelou describes each of us as little microcosmic mirrors of or vessels for transhuman forces of Good and Evil. We run the risk of focusing upon and being overwhelmed by evil, and overlooking or deprecating our own power for good. In the apocalyptic literature, we are promised that the sovereign God will intervene at the end of days to inaugurate a realm of justice and peace.

But, as Angelou insists, in our own internal battle and in the world we are in fact agents, not just subjects. If we dare to love one another — not superficially or sentimentally, but bravely and honestly — we foster that spirit of hope and courage that represents our best armament in the struggle against our own evil and the evil around us. It cannot be coincidence that the apostle Paul describes these virtues in much the same way, as spiritual armor and weaponry provided by God and wielded in service to God.

It is not given to us to eliminate evil from the world or even within ourselves. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask rather to be delivered from evil: to be freed from service to evil, to escape from the dominion of evil so we may claim our citizenship in the Kingdom of God. We can do that, in part, by understanding what good and evil are, by persistently reaching for the grace offered to us and, again as Paul exhorts us, by working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.

We are going to die, we are going to suffer. These things are inevitable in the life of every creature. But we will be remembered for good or for ill — as Angelou puts it, we are either a blessing or a curse. This is something that we can choose. Angelou describes the dynamic energy roiling between good and evil, an energy that we can tap into and use for our own internal battle to set aside evil and act for good. She commends to us the voice of Edna St. Vincent Millay: “I shall die, but that is all I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.”

The coming Kingdom of God in apocalyptic literature does not absolve the oppressed and suffering people of the present age from living faithful lives. To the contrary, it is precisely because they trust and expect that God will triumph and God’s justice will prevail that they should persevere in righteous behavior against all odds. With the advent of Jesus’s preaching of the Kingdom as ‘very near’ or ‘among you’ as well as “yet to come,’ Scripture describes our suffering and the prevalence of evil as something very real, but yet far from the last word about our reality.

We are asked to see our suffering and our encounters with evil in the light of our activity in helping to welcome in the Kingdom of God: they are to be expected and endured as a natural consequence of discipleship. Where suffering is allayed and evil is beaten back, we are asked to see signs of the Kingdom breaking through into our ordinary lives. The blind man was not being punished for his or his parents’ sins; he was blind so that he might be made whole, as a sign of the Kingdom being inaugurated through Jesus Christ. One consequence of framing suffering in this way is that it makes it a participatory, sacrificial, and communal experience (shared with Jesus, human and divine, as well), and gives it a deep dimension of meaning and significance.

It is pointless suffering and banal, random evil that are the most intolerable to our hearts and minds. We cannot bear the idea that bad things just happen, that suffering can go unredeemed, and that evil will casually win the day. It’s possible that our intolerance for the notion of an utterly random and arbitrary universe — where virtue goes unrewarded in perpetuity and evil remains unvanquished — is simply a survival trait favored by evolution. Those of our ancestors blessed with a bias toward justice and the creation of meaning may have been more successful in reproducing than their anarchic, amoral relatives. But maybe, as well, it is in this context of shared pain and yearning that our human faculties are most highly tuned to listen for and to God and to respond with faith and love.

Lord, don’t move your mountain,
Give me strength to climb it;
You don’t have to move that stumbling block,
But lead me, Lord, around it.

– Gospel Song

Readings:
Why do we suffer? by Daniel Harrington, S.J., Sheed & Ward: Franklin, Wisconsin, 2000. pp. 53-105
Facing Evil, eds. Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, Open Court: Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 2001. pp. 17-46.