Dear reader,
Recently I had the pleasure of joining in remotely to a conference at Wheaton College on wonder and the imagination. The speakers have all given me much to think about, both in their papers and their panel discussions. At one point, digital technology came into the conversation (inevitable, I think, given this past year of much of life forced into the digital space). Jeremy Begbie, a fantastic scholar on theology and the arts, mentioned his Bible study group, which continued to meet weekly through the pandemic. To his surprise, during these online meetings they grew closer together and saw a depth of relationship that they had not experienced before.
I’m wondering about this, and I’m wondering about a distinction that writer John O’Donohue makes between connection and community. He argues, briefly, that most of us seek and are satisfied with the former, but that this interest leaves the rich potential for friendship and love out of our reach. Connection, he describes, is a deadening of our depths, a way of presenting ourselves superficially.
Most of our digital spaces, I think, seemed designed for this kind of superficial presentation. From the early days of email, AOL, and the beginning of blog culture, through today’s culture of instant access to messaging and video calls, much of digital technology focuses on enabling us to link up with someone for quick communication or information. When a digital space allows relationships to deepen, as Begbie described, I think we witness something unusual.
Communion, in contrast to connection, reaches into the depths of our selves. It requires a willingness to give sustained attention, to open oneself in intimacy. The picture of the Lord’s Supper, also called “Communion,” comes to mind here: in it, we eat and drink, a physical expression of our intimate union with Christ. We cannot remain closed off—we must open our mouths and receive. We offer our selves to be open before and to the Lord.
I wonder how this year of physical distancing has impacted your ability to commune with others. Has the mediation of technology made it easier or more difficult for you to open yourself to others, to speak about the depths of your heart?
But perhaps digital spaces are not all that unusual in their limitations of preventing us from going beyond connection and truly communing with others. Our fear of being known and our desire to protect ourselves from intimacy goes as far back as Adam and Eve’s desperate attempts to create clothing out of fig leaves. Should it surprise us that in a fallen world, what is good often proves difficult, and rare?
Last month I spent several weeks reading and discussion Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with my secondary students at our homeschool co-op. I’ve been greatly helped by Karen Swallow Prior’s new edition of it, and one of the threads our class followed throughout the book was the innate human need for community. The monster, as a hideous and solitary creature, faces loneliness to a crushing degree. He blames this loneliness, caused by the repeated rejection he experiences from the human community, for his wickedness. “Misery made me a fiend,” he claims to his creator. “Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.”
But Frankenstein, too, is isolated—by choice, not by nature. He has a doting family and fiance who at every opportunity express their concern for him and desire for his happiness. Yet throughout the novel he cuts himself off from true communion with them. He keeps back his true self—his desires, his guilt, his anguish. Any connection he has is doomed to be superficial, because he refuses to tell them of the monster he has created. Most striking to me about his refusal of communion with those who love him is the impact this has on his moral life: with only his perspective from which to evaluate, he distorts reality. He indulges in intense emotional anguish, both zealously justifying his treatment of the monster and despairing for any peace in the future. He fails to see clearly, and thus fails to act virtuously. Again and again he fails, and yet he clings to his isolation. He puts himself outside the possibility of both virtue and absolution—without a willingness to confess his hubris, he cannot be forgiven.
I’m in danger of putting this too simply. Often, there is more at work than our own fear of exposure or refusal to let others see our weaknesses. If we’ve ever felt the sting of misunderstanding or judgment, we feel as keenly as a knife wound how painful the risk of intimacy can be. Not all are trustworthy companions, and we would be foolish to believe otherwise.
Knowing this, turning to look at Jesus ought to arrest us with wonder. Here is the friend, the bridegroom who will never betray our intimacy. He does not despise us when we bring our failure and sin and grief to him. As Dane Ortlund writes in Gentle and Lowly, “the heart of Christ not only heals our feelings of rejection with his embrace, and not only corrects our sense of his harshness with a view of his gentleness, and not only changes our assumption of his aloofness into an awareness of his sympathy with us, but it also heals our aloneness with his sheer companionship.” We can come to him with confidence that we will find sweet communion.
If this is our saviour, how can we risk otherwise?
When I look at this painting, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, I can feel the ache of alienation. I’m struck by his use of color and space, both emphasizing the unnaturalness of the scene. The pallid greens and yellows are artificial, a creation of the age of electricity. The people, off-center and small, are cut off from us by a wall of glass—specimens for our examination? Creatures of curiosity? Separate from us, and mostly from each other as well. The diner scene has faded in cultural significance, but I wonder what other public spaces might convey a similar sense of alienation and disconnection today?
One of my quick but important reads of the last month was Chuck DeGroat’s When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse. DeGroat brings the wisdom of many years of counseling experience to this book, outlining the problem of narcissism that seems, disturbingly, to flourish in the church and other religious organizations. I appreciated his approach: not only does he helpfully identify and describe narcissism in its different forms, but he helps us to look in the mirror. Where might I be hiding or protecting a vulnerable or ashamed part of myself and working to project, instead, a self that is successful and in control?
I also appreciated William Dyrness’ Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life. Dyrness covers a lot of ground in this book, trying to bring together traditionally Catholic and Reformed ways of understanding the role of aesthetics in everyday life. He insists that we pay attention to the culture making that is happening around us, to the way that people in all situations and cultures desire to create a beautiful life.
Human culture and creativity are not the only sources of beauty—the natural world that God has made is brimming with it. I loved reading Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders. Part memoir, part love song to the vast and varied creatures and plants of our world, her book is playful and serious in all the right ways.
The boys and I are reading Henry Winterfield’s mysteries set in the late Roman empire, having finished Detectives in Togas and now beginning The Mystery of the Roman Ransom. They are just as exciting as I remember them being from when I read them—and also, they’ve given me an opportunity to think about the question of the classics. Dr. Anika Prather, an African-American woman and professor in Howard University’s Classics department, talks about the way that too many classical educations obscure non-Western cultures and peoples. Through her own teaching and influence she seeks to uncover what is often hidden, and I’m wondering as I read these books how to do the same—how to widen the lens, how to make sure the world my children read about is as diverse and beautiful as the real thing.
From “Love in the Marketplace”: “The act of embracing commitment to others is the key to finding a way beyond selfhood, to making space within our inner worlds for others not just as vehicles for projection, but in their otherness.”
From “Cancel Envy”: “We’re all committed to our priors and we’ve done a great job of building up silos for ourselves—comfortable places that echo and amplify our opinions. But the thing about a silo is that it radically restricts your vision of the world. And we’re all better off when we can see a little more of it.”
From “The Art of Dying”: “There is a way in which art stirs us to moral action. Beauty provokes desire, to be sure, but art can also prompt other responses. In the case of the ars moriendi [art of dying], the art of human finitude provokes anticipation and preparation for an inevitable end.”
My writing elsewhere this month: “Plum Harvest” at Curator Magazine, and “Come and Look: Lilias Trotter, the Artist’s Vocation, and the Mission of God” at Plough Quarterly.
Jesus, my feet are dirty. Come even as a slave to me, pour water into your bowl, come and wash my feet. In asking such a thing I know I am overbold, but I dread what was threatened when you said to me, “If I do not wash your feet I have no fellowship with you.” Wash my feet then, because I long for your companionship.
Origen, c. 185–254
On the road with you,
Laura