I'm writing this post on September 25. Yesterday, September 24, I delivered the chapel talk at Bushnell University, which also served as the keynote address for a gathering hosted by Bushnell. The title of our conversation and my keynote was "Faithful Engagement: Navigating Anxiety in a Polarized Election." Instead of posting this three months out, like most of my posts (which would have had this post appearing in late December) I've decided to drop it here, the first post after the election.

Given that it's September I don't know what we're waking up to today, November 6th. It's possible we don't know who won, that votes are still being counted or that the outcome is being contested or questioned. But maybe the winner is clear and a concession speech has been offered.

Regardless, I think it's safe to assume that the nation is feeling pretty fragile this morning, either anxiously awaiting a final verdict or half the country feeling intense dismay. Which brings me back to my Bushnell talk.

I framed my talk yesterday around two sermons I gave at my church, Freedom Fellowship, in 2016 and 2020. Freedom meets on Wednesdays, which means, like today, we always gather the day after elections. On both of those Wednesdays in 2016 and 2020 I was the one, just because of luck, scheduled to give the lesson. In 2016, after Trump had defeated Clinton, all my Democrat friends were dismayed and shell-shocked. Seeing this, I delivered a sermon entitled "How to Lose an Election." Four years later, my Republican friends were dismayed when Trump lost to Biden. And so, I delivered the exact same sermon for second time: "How to Lose an Election."

I told those stories at Bushnell to set up a conversation about how to deal with anxiety during a polarized election. Basically, as Christians, we need to learn how to lose elections. And while I don't know who won or lost as I write this, some of us are feeling anger, fear, and dismay today.

So, how do you lose an election?

In my Bushnell talk, one of the points I made comes from Jeremiah 29. Some of the Israelites have returned home from their Babylonian exile. But many remain behind in Babylon. These write to the prophet Jeremiah asking if they should come home. But Jeremiah writes back to say, no, you should stay in Babylon. And not just stay, to multiply and thrive:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. 

Seek the welfare of the city, for it its welfare you will find your welfare. Crucially, the Israelites remain in Babylon as a marginalized, disenfranchised, exilic people. They do not control Babylon, nor will they ever control Babylon. Political power is not in their hands. And yet, there is work to do! Seek the welfare of the city.

And let's be clear on this point, this is Babylon we are talking about. Babylon, the epitome of wickedness, oppression, injustice, violence, and evil in Biblical history and imagination. The point here is that the People of God thrive in places of political marginalization. The People of God thrive in Babylon. So there's no excuse for us not to thrive, even if we lost the election. No matter the outcome today, there is good, creative, generative, and beautiful work to do.

How do you lose an election? It's simple.

You plant gardens in Babylon.

I recently finished reading Jeffrey Stout's book Democracy and Tradition and wanted to share some of his insights and my takeaways here on election day. 

The book was a bracing read for me as Stout takes on some thinkers who have profoundly shaped my political thinking, thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre. Hauerwas and MacIntyre, along with John Milbank whom Stout also takes aim at, have leveled strong criticisms at Western liberalism. This argument has been echoed and elaborated by many, but the main thrust of the argument is that liberalism is hostile to and corrosive of religious faith. Or, at least in MacIntyre's case, hostile toward any shared moral worldview that defines the collective good we pursue as a people. In adopting a posture of indifference toward values, the liberal state is antagonistic toward the value claims made by its citizens, demanding that those values be regulated to the private sphere. The only thing allowed in politics are appeals to instrumental reason. Faith claims are to be rejected.

This line of argument should be familiar to many. It's been a common line of attack from political theologians since MacIntyre published After Virtue. But Jeffrey Stout pushes back and argues that these attacks are both confused and highly destructive.

As for the confusion, Stout makes the point that thinkers like Hauerwas and MacIntyre mistake liberalism for democracy. Liberalism and democracy, argues Stout, are two different things. Christian political theologians, however, tend to conflate the two. In their vigorous attacks against liberalism these theologians have unwittingly disparaged and undermined democratic norms and traditions. This has caused many Christians to view democracy itself as an evil, or at least an obstacle to overcome. Dreams of a theocratic state emerge, calls for Christian nationalism. And much of this has been caused, according to Stout, by thinkers like Hauerwas, MacIntyre, and Milbank who, in decrying "liberalism", have thrown democracy under the bus. This lack of a distinction between the two, liberalism versus democracy, has had catastrophic effects upon the Christian political imagination and witness.

What does Stout mean when he claims that democracy is different from liberalism?

Stout argues that democracy, at its heart, is a virtue tradition. Democracy is characterized by civic virtues and norms by which a diverse and pluralistic society agrees to conduct the shared project of governing themselves. Generations ago we used teach these virtues in "civics" classes. Virtues such as mutual respect, practical wisdom, humility, patience, justice, and friendship. Respecting the will of the people and accepting the outcomes of elections. Stout points to people like Walt Whitman as among those who helped define and laud the virtues of the democratic tradition. Consider Whitman's poem "Election Day, November, 1884":

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara--nor you, ye limitless prairies--nor
your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite--nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic
geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones--nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes--nor
Mississippi's stream:
--This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name--the still
small voice vibrating--America's choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen--the act itself the main, the
quadriennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous'd--sea-board and inland--
Texas to Maine--the Prairie States--Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West--the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling--(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:) the
peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity--welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
--Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify--while the heart
pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.

The grandeur of America isn't found in our natural beauty. Not in Niagara Falls, the Rocky Mountains, or Yosemite. The most awe-inspiring sight of America is election day. Our diverse population, full of "paradox and conflict," peacefully coming together to make a collective discernment about the future of our nation, the next test in our on-going experiment in popular government. 

True, election days are risky. As Whitman says, things could go "good or ill." Today we welcome "the darker odds." But those bad outcomes, says Whitman, only help ferment the wine. Our mistakes become a purifying process. In a democracy we try things, and if things go badly, we change and correct course. If this next administration is a disaster, well, it'll be voted out in four years. We will be back at the polls to course correct in four short years. Electoral politics create "stormy gusts" but on those turbulent waters waft the "precious ships" of the democratic dream of "We the People."

A lovely vision. But a vision that requires civic virtues. Stout's point is that, yes, liberalism demands you keep your values to yourself. But democracy doesn't. True, if you want people in a pluralistic society to care about your values and share your political project you're going to have to figure out a way to create political collations. But people with diverse values can make common cause. So do the work. Engage in the democratic process.

Given this, we must take care not to demonize democracy when we attack liberalism. For when we do so, argues Stout, we undermine the virtues needed to do the hard work democracy demands of us. And we are starting to reap that whirlwind. By lumping democracy in with liberalism, Christians have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. In attacking liberalism Christians have jettisoned democratic norms and virtues. But democracy has never been opposed to religious values. Vote your conscience. That's America. As Whitman's poem describes, our values showing up at the polls are what makes our politics so paradoxical and conflictual. But in this "swordless conflict" Christians must not turn their back on the experiment, to run away from "We the People" to enthrone a Christian king. 

What is demanded of us, therefore, on an election day are virtues. Civic, democratic virtues. Showing mutual respect to our fellow citizens, accepting the outcome of the election, patiently waiting for the next election, and doing the hard work of collation building in the meantime. Liberalism may be opposed to your values, but democracy is not. 

Today is our "choosing day." Show up and vote. And do so as a person of both Christian and democratic virtue.

The book of 2 Samuel ends with what many scholars call "appendices," bits of poetry and narrative that are tacked onto the end of the book. These appendices are found in 2 Samuel 21-24.

The last story from the appendices, found in Chapter 24, recounts the census David undertakes and God's judgment upon him for doing so. Explanations vary as to why God was angered by the census. For whatever reason, the census was judged as an act of hubris by David, a usurping of God's prerogatives as the True King of Israel.

David realizes his sin and confesses. God, through the prophet of Gad, gives David a choice of punishments: three years of famine, three years of being chased by enemies, or three years of plague. David chooses the plague. And so the destroying angel begins to work, killing 70,000 people.

But then something interesting happens. As the destroying angel approaches Jerusalem God changes his mind and says "Enough!":

When the angel stretched out his hand to destroy Jerusalem, the Lord relented concerning the disaster and said to the angel who was afflicting the people, “Enough! Withdraw your hand.” The angel of the Lord was then at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite. (2 Samuel 24.16)

David sees the angel stopped at the threshing floor of Araunah and asks for God to end the plague. David then buys the threshing floor, builds an altar on the spot, and offers sacrifices to God.

What I've always found interesting in this narrative is that God had already stopped before David's request and his sacrifices. Various translations of verse 16 read that God "relented," "repented," "changed his mind," and "felt sorry." The destruction stopped because something happened in the heart of God prior to any human appeal or sacrifice.

I think this is interesting because of why this story is included as an appendix to 2 Samuel. Specifically, the story was included to explain why the temple was built where it was built. The threshing floor of Araunah was on Mount Moriah where the temple was built:

Then Solomon began to build the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah, where the Lord had appeared to his father David. It was on the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite, the place provided by David. (2 Chronicles 3.1)

I think this is interesting because, from this point forward, the temple becomes the location of sacrifice in ancient Israel. You would come to the temple to offer sacrifices so that God would forgive your sins. And because of those rituals you might be led to believe that God needs or requires these sacrifices in order to show and extend mercy.

And yet, in the primordial account of the threshing floor of Araunah we note that mercy wasn't triggered or effected by sacrifice. Mercy was found in the heart of God who relents and changes his mind. Mercy was found in a God who says "Enough!" to punishment, without needing sacrifices or blood. This is the same startling turn we find over and over again in the prophets. After a season of punishment there is a sudden, unpredicted, eucatastrophic turn. God simply says, "Enough!" Perhaps the classic example of this turn is Isaiah 40:

Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins.

Israel's had been punished, twice over, and God says "Enough!" 

I find the events at the threshing floor of Araunah interesting for two reasons. 

First, as noted, what would later become the site of sacrifice in Israel's life was primordially associated with a moment of non-sacrificial mercy, pardon that flowed solely from the freedom of God. That insight is important as many visions of atonement posit the necessity of sacrificial appeasement, our pardon contingent upon some mechanism of forgiveness. But such a mechanism has never been true of God. Even the temple, with all its sacrifices, was built upon a site where God's pardon was extended from God's own freedom and prerogative. Nothing need happen for God to forgive. Mercy is the Lord's.

Second, no punishment can ever be considered final. God always has the prerogative to say "Enough!" If God exists there is always hope. 

"They set your sanctuary on fire"

Following up from last week's reflection on Psalm 73, I'm struck by how the Psalms sound given our political moment in America. Reading the Psalms during an anxious election season has been good for my soul.

In Psalm 74 the destruction of Jerusalem has occurred. The poem is written in the midst of national disaster and calamity. The temple has been razed. As the poet sings, "They set your sanctuary on fire."

I can imagine standing there, as a Jewish person, watching those flames, seeing God's house go up in smoke. The invaders smashing and looting sacred things:

Your adversaries roared in the meeting place
where you met with us.
They set up their emblems as signs.
It was like men in a thicket of trees,
wielding axes,
then smashing all the carvings
with hatchets and picks.

Devastated, the singer cries out to God:

God, how long will the enemy mock?
Will the foe insult your name forever?
Why do you hold back your hand?
Stretch out your right hand and destroy them!

God doesn't act in this moment. Israel goes off into exile. The temple will be, eventually, rebuilt. But I've been convinced by N.T. Wright that the Second Temple period was still haunted by a sense of exile, and that the full and final answer to the lament of Psalm 74 was still being looked for in a Davidic messiah. And if that is so, Jesus is the Lord's answer to the singer of Psalm 74.

But what a strange answer! Making things worse, Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple for a second time. God's response to "They set your sanctuary on fire" is to say things like this to the Samaritan woman:

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

God's presence is divested from place and is found, rather, in the man Jesus. He become the temple, the intersection of heaven and earth. God is Spirit, and wherever God's Spirit is the Lord's presence is enjoyed and experienced. This is how the people of God, filled with the Holy Spirit, become a living temple made of living stones. 

It seems clear to me, if we trace out the whole story, that the narrative here is one of religious and political divestment. The presence of God is being extracted from both nation and temple and is relocated. This message is timely. Next week, Christians, not sure which ones, will look upon the United States of America and wail: "They set your sanctuary on fire." They will fixate upon national ruin. Understandably so. The singer of Psalm 74 can empathize. But when we look at how Jesus is the answer to Psalm 74, and the political and religious divestment he both represented and demanded, are we able to disentangle ourselves from visions of political, social, and religious ruin to find the God whose Spirit blows unpredictably in the world seeking his true worshippers? 

In light of yesterday's post, I wanted to follow up about both the capacity and value of listening to others even we have strong political disagreements. 

First, thank you to Doyle Srader at Bushnell University for putting this research on my radar screen. Over the last two years I have visited Bushnell to talk about faith and politics. (You can see my first talk here and my most recent one here.) During my second visit, Dr. Srader shared with our gathering the research of Guy Itzchakov about the impact of high quality listening upon prejudice.

Specifically, a 2020 study conducted by Itzchakov showed that exposure to high quality listening reduces social prejudice. High quality listening, also known as reflective or therapeutic listening, involves empathic attention and providing a non-judgmental space which creates a sense of what Itzchakov calls "psychological safety." Empathic and non-judgmental listening provides opportunity for insight, self-exploration, and attitude change. Poor listening, by contrast, tends to create defensiveness and causes people to more deeply entrench into currently held views. Defensiveness is particularly characteristic of extreme views. Consequently, poor listening tends to exacerbate prejudices. 

In his 2020 study Itzchakov had Israeli participants talk about their prejudices regarding "Black, homeless, immigrants to Israel, gay, and transgender" persons, selecting the group from this collection they felt the most bias against. Participants were provided either normal versus high quality listening as they described their prejudice. Overall, exposure to high quality listening reduced self-reported prejudice at post-test. 

Itzchakov's research suggests that listening can either reduce or exacerbate social prejudices. People who hold social prejudices tend to be defensive. When such people are not listened to their prejudices harden and grow more extreme. High quality listening, by contrast, in providing empathy and psychological safety, tends to reduce prejudice by inviting people into a process of self-examination and self-discovery. 

I bring up Itzchakov's research to make the point Dr. Srader shared with us at Bushnell. In our increasingly polarized political climate, where viewpoints are getting more extreme and social prejudices are on the rise, we often wonder what can be done to change people's minds, especially people we are close to. Well, one thing that might help is listening to people rather than debating them. Debating increases defensiveness and exacerbates extremism. High quality listening, by contrast, tends to reduce bias and prejudice. 

Which brings me back to yesterday's post. Specifically, do we have the psychological and moral capacities to provide high quality listening for others? To be sure, wisdom and discernment are needed here. There are public spaces and group contexts where listening to extreme viewpoints wouldn't be warranted. But such spaces aren't the private, intimate, one on one contexts where high quality listening occurs, the conversations we have with friends and family. Itzchakov's research suggests that in those contexts listening rather than debating can be the better path forward, at least if we want to change people's views. Listening isn't passivity, a failure of courage, or capitulation. Listening is a prejudice-reduction intervention that can gently lead some people out of the darkness and into the light. 

All good psychological theories start like this: "There are two kinds of people in the world..."

I'm joking about that, but a lot of psychological descriptions do start with noticing contrasts in the world, like the difference between introverts and extroverts. 

I've noticed something about myself that contrasts with what I've observed in others. The issue concerns reactivity to political disclosures, the degree of dismay and outrage experienced when someone shares political views or affiliation different from our own. Relatedly, there is also our emotional response upon making a political discovery about another person, like seeing something they post on social media.

As we know, friendships have ended and families broken up by politics. Political views are shared or discovered and we find these so upsetting that the friendship ends and the family stops seeing each other. 

For my part, I don't have strong emotional reactions when people disclose their political views or share who they will be voting for. I am also to see, as an expression of cognitive empathy and perspective-sharing, other people's political concerns, even if I think those concerns wrong, overblown, delusional, or inconsistent. I can, and have, calmly chatted with conspiracy theorists. And in all this, I don't have a lot of emotion. I might be puzzled or perplexed, but I'm not upset. I don't have a sympathetic stress response talking about politics with people who hold different views. 

I've wondered about this lack of a stress response, given the strong reactions I've observed among others. Narcissistically, I pride myself on this equanimity, given the state of our current political discourse, but I also worry about it. As I ponder my lack of reactivity, I've floated the following hypotheses:

Privilege and Social Location: 

As a white, middle-class male I'm more insulated from political marginalization and so can adopt a more "objective" and detached view since I'm going to be okay regardless who wins an election. 

Temperament:

Concerning the Big Five personality traits I score very low on Neuroticism. Which is to say I'm not prone to negative emotional states. My mood is pretty steady, positive, and non-reactive across the board. Given this, it's possible that my non-reactivity to political disclosures isn't a specific capacity but is rooted in my general temperament. I don't get worked up about politics because I don't really get worked up about anything.

Practiced Tolerance: 

In training to be a therapist you grow practiced in providing unconditional positive regard to people no matter who they are, what they have done, or how they think. Most people haven't had much practice sitting with difference or being non-reactive in the face of disclosures, especially shocking disclosures. It's like being a priest hearing a confession. Also, as a college professor I've become very practiced at speaking to "both sides" of political issues so that my liberal and conservative students each will feel safe and feel heard. I've become practiced at presenting and discussing controversial issues in a very unbiased way which aids in perspective-taking. 

Idolatry: 

This is my most judgmental take on the world, that our excessive reactivity to political disclosures reveals an over-investment in electoral politics and a tribalized political identity that has lost its grounding in Christ. Non-reactivity, and I admit this view is very self-serving, may indicate that our relationship to politics is a "well-ordered" desire, put in its proper place, rather than excessively disordered and idolatrous.

For my social science readers, I'd love to perform a regression analysis on all this, to see how these four variables might predict our degree of reactivity to political disclosures. I wonder what the beta weights would be, which variables would have the greatest impact in predicting reactivity. 

Regardless, this reactivity to political disclosures, our sympathetic stress response to people sharing how they are voting, is something that seems to vary among us. And the degree to which this reactivity is rooted in idolatry would make it an object of spiritual formation. 

After hitting the wall of theodicy, the mental ruminations she cannot get past, we come to the conclusion of Denise Levertov's poem "Human Being":

The human being, each night nevertheless
summoning—with a breath blown at a flame,
               or hand’s touch
on the lamp-switch—darkness,
            silently utters,
impelled as if by a need to cup the palms
and drink from a river,
         the words, 'Thanks.
Thanks for this day, a day of my life.'
             And wonders.
Pulls up the blankets, looking
into nowhere, always in doubt.
And takes strange pleasure
in having repeated once more the childish formula,
a pleasure in what is seemly.
And drifts to sleep, downstream
on murmuring currents of doubt and praise,
the wall shadowy, that tomorrow
will cast its own familiar, chill, clear-cut shadow

into the day’s brilliance.

We're back to the cross-pressured experience. To the one side, as described above and in the last post, there are the storm of questions we have about suffering. But to the other side is this profound desire to express thanks: "Thanks for this day, a day of my life."

In Hunting Magic Eels I make the provocative claim that you can't be grateful for your life and be an atheist, at least not emotionally. The Shape of Joy describes gratitude as an example of self-transcendence, which research is revealing to be the pathway to mental health. Levertov's poem illustrates why. Gratitude is our emotional response to receiving a gift. So when we express thanks for our life we step into an experience of grace. (Grace and gift are the same word in the New Testament.) True, as increasingly skeptical people we offer up this expression of thanks "into nowhere, always in doubt." Offering prayers of gratitude seems "childish," like believing in fairy tales. Regardless, expressing thanks is "seemly," proper, and right. Our heads can't believe, but our hearts do. We face the Mystery and offer of prayers of thanks. 

This is religious experience in a secular age, living between "doubt and praise." We are trapped in our heads trying to solve theological puzzles, banging our heads against intellectual walls. Yet our hearts long to express thanks, thirsting to praise, to step into the light of grace. 

Today we move into a critical portion of Denise Levertov's poem "Human Being." In the last post we described how the mind hits a "wall." What is this "wall"? The poem continues:

Always the mind
walking, working, stopping sometimes to kneel
in awe of beauty, sometimes leaping, filled with the energy
of delight, but never able to pass
the wall, the wall
of brick that crumbles and is replaced,
of twisted iron,
of rock,
the wall that speaks, saying monotonously:

   Children and animals
           who cannot learn
   anything from suffering
   suffer, are tortured, die
   in incomprehension.

The problem of innocent suffering. Children and animals who suffer, are tortured, and die in incomprehension. 

In Levertov's spiritual biography theodicy was the spiritual "wall" she couldn't get past. Many of us face this same wall. In my experience the problem of suffering is the major source of religious doubts. 

"Human Being" provides a haunting description of this struggle. We experience moments of beauty and the mind can be filled with delight, but we are "never able to pass the wall." A wall that monotonously drags our hearts and minds back toward tragedy, pain, and grief.  

In the last post I described how excessive and morbid rumination characterize a lot of doubt. Here we face the content of that rumination, what the mind is chasing, the wall we keep banging our head against. The problem of suffering, what Marilyn McCord Adams has called "horrors." This was my own experience. For two decades, from graduate school into my 40s, I keep hitting this very same wall. I started this blog during the final years of that season. The wall showed up a lot in this space.

Does "Human Being" provide us an answer? No. No intellectual answer is offered, but the poem will return us the cross-pressured nature of religious experience. The problem of evil is placed in tension. And I think that is really the best you can do, to place the problem of evil in tension with other experiences and convictions you know to be true. That tension proved decisive for Levertov, as it did for me. We'll explore that tension in a last and final post.

In his influential treatment of the Psalms Walter Brueggemann describes three types of psalms, psalms of orientation, psalms of disorientation, and psalms of reorientation.

Psalms of orientation are songs that describe a well-ordered moral universe. The righteous are thriving and the wicked are getting their just deserts. Psalm 1 is an example. The righteous person is blessed but the wicked person is like chaff the wind blows away.

Psalms of disorientation are the songs of lament. The cry of these songs concerns the moral disintegration of the world. The wicked are thriving and the righteous are suffering. Consequently, the singer calls out to God asking the Lord to act and bring the world back into moral order and coherence. 

Psalms of reorientation display a journey, orientation through disorientation and culminating in a new reorientation. In these songs we hear about a season of struggle recently experienced. We've returned to faith, but only after undergoing a dark night of the soul. Psalm 73 is an example of this. As a psalm of reorientation the song takes us on a journey.

The psalm begins on a note of orientation:

Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart.

From here, the song quickly moves into the season of disorientation. Faith begins to falter as confidence in God turns to doubt: 

But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled,
my steps had nearly slipped.

What causes the doubt? What is the source of the disillusionment? The trouble comes from the moral incoherence of the world, how the wicked live easy, untroubled lives:

For I was envious of the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
For they have no pangs until death;
their bodies are fat and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are;
they are not stricken like the rest of mankind.

Witnessing the flourishing and prosperity of the wicked, the singer despairs over their pursuit of virtue. Following God, doing the next right thing, being a good person...what's the point? Struggling after goodness in a world where no one cares and where virtue won't be recognized or rewarded seems futile and pointless:

All in vain have I kept my heart clean
and washed my hands in innocence.

Making things worse, trying to penetrate into the mystery of why God allows wicked people to become successful is an exhausting task, like banging your head against a wall:

When I thought how to understand this,
it seemed to me a wearisome task.

Let me pause here to say that a lot of us are about to undergo this very trial. On November 6 half of us, if the polls are to be believed, are going to wake up to what we'll experience as the victory of the wicked. And beholding that victory we'll step into the experience of Psalm 73. A sense of despair, weariness, and futility will threaten to drown us.

So, what do we do in that moment?

In Psalm 73, the psalmist enters the temple and experiences worship:

I went into the sanctuary of God...

There, in the midst of the worship of God, the singer perceives the precarity of the wicked. They may be flourishing now, but it will not last. God will bring them low:

Truly you set them in slippery places;
you make them fall to ruin.
How they are destroyed in a moment,
swept away utterly by terrors!

If not in this life, then the next. But the truer and deeper reorientation of the song isn't found in seeing the wicked finally get what they've got coming. "Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord. So we'll leave that work to him. 

No, the deeper and truer reorientation is experienced when the singer comes to realize that God is our reward. We observe how the prizes of life are unevenly allocated. We experience elections won and lost. And in all this we come to realize that our happiness isn't found in any of these things. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, we've attached our hearts to the things of earth. Our joy had become connected to all that is fragile and fleeting, events and objects that I do not control. Because of this, our mental health has become very precarious. True and sturdy ground is found in Psalm 73 only after the singer finds his home in God:

Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

This is the shape of joy. Here is the geometry of mental health. As Psalm 73 concludes, "it is good to be near God."

Let's continue on in Denise Levertov's poem "Human Being":

Always the mind

walking, working, stopping sometimes to kneel
in awe of beauty, sometimes leaping, filled with the energy
of delight, but never able to pass
the wall...

I'm struck by that phrase "Always the mind" and how Levertov sets that line off by itself to draw our close attention.

In the next post we'll get to "the wall" in the mind, but I want to pause here to simply note how the spiritual quest is characterized in the poem as mental wandering. Recall the lines we discussed in the last post:

Walking

the mind’s imperial cities, roofed-over alleys,
          thoroughfares, wide boulevards...

The vision here is how religious experience has become excessively, even morbidly, introspective and ruminative. We look for God in the mind, wandering mental alleys, thoroughfares, and boulevards. Always the mind, walking and wandering. This ruminative, self-referential experience, and documenting its mental health consequences, is the focus of Part 1 of The Shape of Joy.

During my long season of doubt and deconstruction this was my own experience. Always in my mind. My spiritual searching wasn't much of a searching as it was extremely self-referential. Looking for God in my head. Charles Taylor describes the modern self as "buffered," as walled off from the world and closed in upon itself. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, we've become locked inside our own heads. Imprisoned within ourselves. Just about every person I've counseled in a season of doubt and deconstruction is characterized by this sort of excessive introspection and morbid rumination, chasing thoughts in their own heads. God is a Rubik's Cube they are trying to solve. Atonement. The problem of evil. Life after death. Evolution. Question after question. Puzzle after puzzle. Book after book. Podcast after podcast. Coffee chat after coffee chat. On and on and on and on it goes, always the mind, wandering its corridors. 

And yet, as described in the last post this experience is cross-pressured. Our morbid introspection becomes interrupted. An encounter with beauty, for example, throws us out of ourselves. We stop thinking "to kneel in awe of beauty." As I describe in both The Shape of Joy and Hunting Magic Eels, borrowing from Hartmut Rosa, in these moments life becomes resonant again, suffused with significance. Introspection gives way to sacred encounter.

Fundamentally, that is the critical insight of both The Shape of Joy and Hunting Magic Eels, the two books complementing each other: A meaningful, joyful, and resonant experience of life involves getting out of your head to restore a proper experiential relation to the world outside of your head. 

Today, let's ponder the opening lines of "On Human Being" by Denise Levertov:

Human being—walking
in doubt from childhood on: walking

a ledge of slippery stone in the world’s woods
deep-layered with set leaves—rich or sad: on one
side of the path, ecstasy, on the other
dull grief.        Walking

the mind’s imperial cities, roofed-over alleys,
          thoroughfares, wide boulevards
that hold evening primrose of sky in steady calipers.

In his influential treatment of secularity, Charles Taylor describes religious experience in modernity as "cross-pressured." 

Typically, we describe "secularity" as a process of disenchantment, the collapse of transcendence. Heaven falls due to materialism and scientism. All the cultural pressure is experienced as "downward," toward unbelief, doubt, and skepticism. The sacred canopy evaporates and all we are left with is what Taylor calls the "immanent frame"--a one-dimensional, flat, wholly material existence. We move from faith to skepticism.

And yet, as Taylor recounts, this is not the whole picture. Secularity remains haunted by transcendence. The question of God persists. As I put it in Hunting Magic Eels, God might be dead but we sure do miss him. We grow disenchanted with disenchantment, disillusioned with our unbelief. Our skepticism is restless. We question our questions and doubt our doubts. Yes, in our secular age Christians come to doubt the existence of God, but at the same time atheists wonder if God might actually exist.

In short, in addition to the downward pressure of skepticism there are also updrafts of transcendence, wonder, and awe. We are pulled upward toward heaven. There is a longing for God, what I call "the Ache" in Hunting Magic Eels. 

Levertov's poem "Human Being" is a lovely illustration of our cross-pressured religious experience, a tension that carries from the beginning to the end of the poem. We see two examples of this in the lines above.

First, human experience is walking a path where "on one side of the path, ecstasy, on the other dull grief." Human life is composite and conglomerate, a mixture of bliss and pain, beauty and ugliness, wonder and desolation. The agony here is how these experiences do not allow the other easy resolution. Our grief and disillusionment are interrupted by moments of goodness and beauty. Our steady convictions are repeatedly unsettled by tragedy, cruelty, and loss. We are pulled back and forth between doubt and belief.

Beyond this experiential tension, we also become disillusioned with the scientistic mind that has come to characterize our default epistemology, an age of science and technology that reduces Truth to facts. Our minds try to "hold evening primrose of sky in steady calipers." The image of "calipers," as a mechanical device used to measure physical objects, is evocative. How can the calipers of science quantify or capture the beauty of an evening sunset? A word of revolt is spoken here. There are things in human being that cannot be reduced to empirical measurement. Life transcends the facts.

Such are the cross-pressures of religious experience in a secular age.

The other day I began to reread The Stream & the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes, the short collection of poems by Denise Levertov that traces her spiritual journey from doubt to her conversion to Christianity.

The very first poem in the collection "Human Being" interrupted me. The poem captures so much of the tensions of religious experience in a secular age, tensions I highlight in Hunting Magic Eels. These are tensions Levertov wrestled with, as have I, especially during my long season of doubt and deconstruction. 

Given all this, I thought I'd do a series giving "Human Being" a close reading. By no means will I try to "explain" the poem to you. I simply want to share how I think the poem captures our experience of God in those spaces between faith and doubt, spaces particularly diagnostic of secularity and modernity. In that sense, this series is less about poetry and more about the phenomenology of religious experience in our increasingly post-Christian culture.

To get us started, you need to read the poem. Here is "Human Being" by Denise Levertov:

Human being—walking
in doubt from childhood on: walking

a ledge of slippery stone in the world’s woods
deep-layered with set leaves—rich or sad: on one
side of the path, ecstasy, on the other
dull grief.        Walking

the mind’s imperial cities, roofed-over alleys,
          thoroughfares, wide boulevards
that hold evening primrose of sky in steady calipers.

Always the mind
walking, working, stopping sometimes to kneel
in awe of beauty, sometimes leaping, filled with the energy
of delight, but never able to pass
the wall, the wall
of brick that crumbles and is replaced,
of twisted iron,
of rock,
the wall that speaks, saying monotonously:

   Children and animals
           who cannot learn
   anything from suffering
   suffer, are tortured, die
   in incomprehension.

The human being, each night nevertheless
summoning—with a breath blown at a flame,
               or hand’s touch
on the lamp-switch—darkness,
            silently utters,
impelled as if by a need to cup the palms
and drink from a river,
         the words, 'Thanks.
Thanks for this day, a day of my life.'
             And wonders.
Pulls up the blankets, looking
into nowhere, always in doubt.
And takes strange pleasure
in having repeated once more the childish formula,
a pleasure in what is seemly.
And drifts to sleep, downstream
on murmuring currents of doubt and praise,
the wall shadowy, that tomorrow
will cast its own familiar, chill, clear-cut shadow
into the day’s brilliance.

As I described in the last post, if we understand that nature is grounded in God then we need not posit some hard contrast between "natural" versus "supernatural" virtue. As described by Maximus the Confessor, God is the ground of all virtue. Consequently, wherever we find kindness and goodness we are beholding the sacred aspect of creation, which necessarily exists in every human person, ascending to God.

What, then, does the spiritual life add to our growth in virtue?

The main difference, I would argue, between virtue found among believers and non-believers is doxological. When we come to understand the Source of our kindness and goodness we can give thanks and praise. To be sure, people can manifest virtue without thanksgiving, but without doxological recognition the Source and Goal of our virtue goes unrecognized. There are, for example, many kind and generous people in the world. But without doxological recognition they assume that they are the source of their own virtue, that their kindness and generosity are personality traits, natural endowments, they just happen to possess. In addition, these virtues are not intentionally directed toward their true Home. This doesn't make people any less generous or kind, but this lack of doxological recognition limits the developmental potential of the virtues we "naturally" possess.

This, then, is what we mean when we say "grace perfects nature." Through doxological recognition, knowing where our virtue comes from and where it is going, we participate with God's Spirit in the developmental maturation of our character. Grace leads our nature toward its fulfillment. Knowing our Source and End we gain navigational clarity and influence over our lives. No longer do the virtues appear within our character as genetic happenstance, the random luck of being born with a certain personality trait. Through doxological recognition we come to recognize our capacities for kindness and love as the accompaniment of God, the inner Voice within our hearts calling us Home.   

Like wild flowers, the virtues grow all around us. And like wild flowers, we are delighted whenever and wherever we encounter them. Kindness and goodness in the world are a blessing. They are windows into heaven. But we can do more than delight in these encounters of sporadic beauty. We can give thanks. We can recognize the Source of goodness in the world and come to participate more deeply in widening its influence. To adopt a doxological posture toward virtue, to know its Beginning and its End, is to participate more fully in the Grace that calls all beautiful things back to Itself.

"For he will rescue the poor who cry out and the afflicted who have no helper."

The phrase "social justice" has become, like so many other things, a tribal marker in the culture wars. To call for "social justice" is to code yourself as left-wing. To decry "social justice" is to code right-wing. And this is why, as a Christian, I struggle so much with our current political discourse. 

Here's what liberation theology gets right: God really does have a preferential option for the poor and the oppressed. I don't know how any Biblically literate person can avoid that conclusion. Psalm 72 is a great example of this:

For he will rescue the poor who cry out
and the afflicted who have no helper.
He will have pity on the poor and helpless
and save the lives of the poor.
He will redeem them from oppression and violence,
for their lives are precious in his sight.

That said, this vision of peace and justice is placed in the hands of the Davidic king. And as the Biblical story unfolds, the Davidic monarchy fails to realize these ideals. The prophets begin to look forward toward a Messianic king who will usher in God's good and righteous rule. Psalms like Psalm 72 become songs of messianic hope. 

At this point, when it comes to the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, interpretations start to divide. Does Jesus spiritualize and eschatologize these visions of social justice? Or does Jesus call us to seek social justice, as in the Hebrew imagination, in the here and now? 

I think it's both. If Jesus rules the cosmos from God's right hand as the Anointed One, then the affairs of earth should be brought into conformity with his rule. As Jesus prayed, may the kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

And yet, the full and final establishment of God's just rule can only be realized by God's decisive intervention in history. Until then, we are left with a broken politics and broken political leaders. So we seek social justice, but know that we shall only ever secure a tenuous and poor approximation of the kingdom of God. Christian political engagement, therefore, is a mixture of both lament and hope. 

Now, as to the shape and content of Christian political engagement, I think Psalm 72 is a great place to start. Call it social justice or call it whatever, but let us "rescue the poor who cry out and the afflicted who have no helper."