This post a reflection on a series of newsletters that a friend of mine sent recently. Actually, it is a series of replies that I filed as drafts until I read all of the installments. I don’t know if this will make sense without the original context, but I will at least try to connect one to the other. My interlocutor started with the thought of our being caught at an intersection of structuralism and structuralism. He elaborated on this intersection as an interconnected web of social, political, environmental, and familial elements (among others) which can render us powerless to act on our own behalf. This description resonated with an experience I had one recent Wednesday morning.
It all started at breakfast. I had been invited to a “pastor’s appreciation event” at a local social service agency. They are actually doing some pretty great stuff in terms of addressing the conditions of poverty and homelessness while affirming the dignity of people experiencing those things. I would learn more about this as the morning progressed. Where it began was with Chik-fil-a. I know too many members of the LGBTQIA+ community who regularly enjoy the holy chicken to not partake myself, but given the social stance of the company, I would be hesitant to serve it at an event. The menu and the fact that I did not see any of my fellow mainline clergy at this breakfast started to make me suspicious of what was going to happen.
After some preliminaries, the featured speaker took to the podium. His credentials were mostly based in the success of a business that he and his father had started 15 years ago. (One is not supposed to judge, but if I were to do so, I might question whether his father was not more of the founder and he the first employee. But that is not how the story got told.) He spoke briefly about that work and, following a disclaimer about his lack of formal theological training, launched into a 25 minute lecture on “the ancient wisdom of Christian virtues.” The talk was pretty much straight up Thomist virtue ethics. The name Thomas Aquinas never seemed to come up.
My first question (not that the speaker was taking questions) was where this was coming from. He had the affect of a nondenominational pastor: slick hair, tight pants, trim physique. Did he not know that Thomism includes casuistry, which protestants since Luther (but not including Anglicans) have long seen as just a fancy word for “moral relativism?” Maybe that is why Aquinas got left out of it? There was another possibility: he could be a Catholic Integralist along the lines of J.D. Vance, hoping to integrate the spiritual authority of the church with the secular authority of the civil government, with the spiritual authority taking precedence in things like reproductive rights. So maybe my Wednesday morning lecture was being delivered by a Catholic Integralist instead of a latter day proponent of the radical reformation.
Either way, it seemed pretty clear that he did not see room for applying the moral virtues in different ways depending on the circumstances. His presentation lent itself more to a kind of spiritual and emotional crossfit, where the object was to suck less and try harder at exemplifying these virtues in the same way regardless of the situation. The end of all of this practice of virtue seemed to be some kind of self-improvement rather than any contribution to a spiritual community or greater good. And, of course, there are materials and merch available to support one’s journey along the virtuous path. These resources are available for a modest fee on the presenter’s website, although to be honest, they seemed too expensive for what they actually are. I’m assume the speaker’s fee is similarly priced for the market.
Now, my analysis of all of this is clearly a bit jaundiced, and I have questioned myself about my view. After all, it couldn’t hurt to spread a bit of virtue ethics around, could it? The idea that we can participate in God’s work of bringing us into greater flourishing is something I can get on board with. I likely feel a certain amount of jealousy for the attention, accolades, and possible profit that this person is receiving. At or near the source of all this judgment is the assumption that the speaker is making a set of considered choices to present himself and these ideas this way. I assume he is intentionally perpetrating a grift using the slick presentation of concepts that he might not fully understand but is willing to co-opt to serve his purposes.
But there is another possibility. He, despite what he sees as a series of choices he has made, might be at the intersection of structuralism and structuralism. My Wednesday friend may honestly think his skinny jeans and faded haircut were expressive of a set of unique choices he had made rather than seeing just how shaped they are by the aesthetic around him. In that same environment, somebody somewhere might have found virtue ethics with out finding Aquinas and structed it in such a way that is acceptable to reformed theology without consciously realizing that was the project. He was just finding a way to get the peanut butter into the chocolate. There is a scenario in which the person standing in front of me might honestly never have heard of the scholastics and their detractors.
He might also not have heard of Bill Hybels, the former pastor of the mother church of nondenominational congregations: Willow Creek. Hybels’ idea was to introduce contemporary marketing and management practices into the establishment and governance of the church. Before being discredited for multiple adulterous relationships, Hybels might have applauded the entrepreneurial spirit of this speaker. The perilously close parallel between setting up a storefront on a website and setting up a stall in the Temple courtyard might be lost on someone who has been formed in faith by those who have been formed in faith by disciples of Bill Hybels. Why shouldn’t capitalism be harnessed as a tool to popularize the ancient wisdom of virtue ethics?
In some ways, it is more frightening to me that a person could not know that they are perpetrating what I perceive as a fairly blatant scheme to plagiarize a fairly significant part of Christian theology and turn it into a grift rather than doing this as an intentional act. What if the structures of this person’s family have intersected with the structures of the larger culture in a way that amplifies a particular, insular message like the algorithm of a social media website? Are he and I both powerless to extract ourselves from this web? Can I have compassion for him, and ask for his compassion, when I know that we are both subject to forces beyond our control?
Or maybe we need to calm down and not take ourselves so seriously. After all, neither of us are materially affected by this condition. Neither of us is homeless, and there is a homelessness problem here. There’s a homelessness problem everywhere. I don’t know that comparisons are useful, but the homelessness problem here does not seem to be any more acute than anywhere else in the country. It is arguably less acute, except that in this area, where it gets very cold for long periods of time, being outdoors can be particularly dangerous. So there is much ado here about the homeless, with what seems a typical division between those who say compassion demands providing warmth and shelter and those who say that homelessness is the consequence of poor choices and softening the consequences will only lead to more poor choices. Perhaps the first group has an impossibly large radius while the second’s is unreasonably small.
The introduction of electoral politics does not, of course, help matters. After one faction forced the closing of a long term interim solution, the mayor (a member of the other faction) opened City Hall to a group of people camping in front of the building. A local pastor brought a formal complaint that the mayor had used these people seeking shelter as pawns in making a political statement. He believed that people who, according to his description, were suffering from addiction, mental illness, and similar issues, were manipulated by the mayor to serve her purposes and that the mayor should therefore be held accountable. I was curious to know more about this local pastor and how his perspective may have been formed.
Turns out that, like my virtue ethics friend, this pastor also has a background in the technology industry and does not include formal theological training as a part of his biography. That I notice this may be a sign of my classism or institutional protectiveness. I also continue to marvel a bit at what seems like pride in not having had such training, as if going to seminary somehow automatically disqualifies one from having an authentic experience of the presence of the divine (or what might also be called a personal relationship with Jesus). The pastor has authority not despite his lack of study, but because of it. Is it that his lack somehow attests to a powerlessness that means the authority he holds has to be divinely appointed?
I don’t think this is the powerlessness that Thomas Keating is drawing our attention to when he says “powerlessness is our greatest treasure,” and I don’t think this is necessarily the powerlessness that my epistolary friend is trying to name and affirm at the intersection of structuralism and structuralism. It seems like what he and Keating are describing is the powerlessness of Jacob at Peniel. It’s a powerlessness that comes from wrestling with God all night long. I don’t know, but I can imagine that my pastor friend might hold to the idea that, having accepted Jesus as a personal savior, one need not — maybe even should not — wrestle anymore. That sounds good to me, and I guess I might be able to do that if people were not freezing on the street at night while I live in a very small but comfortably warm house.
There is a bumper sticker that says “If you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention.” I hope that’s not true. Being mad has almost killed me, and so will ignoring the world around me. But I’m not sure that I can pay enough attention to stay alive and not be bothered, not have to wrestle with things. Sometimes I will wear myself out, and sometimes I will get my hip thrown out of joint. In those periods I might experience the powerlessness that nourishes and an appreciation for the source of all life and power. My pastor friend might say that I simply need to claim that power as mine through Jesus and have the courage to call bullshit on the mayor. Would that I had the strength to grab the transmission line or the certainty to call bullshit. I’d be like Judas Maccabeus, kicking the Greeks out of the temple and lighting the lamp on the altar.
I saw a post on social media recently where one person showed pictures of a wrapped and unwrapped chocolate Maccabee (not something which I knew existed, yet by which I am now charmed). The poster posited that chocolate Maccabees and chocolate Santas were the same thing, only with different wrapping. A commenter replied that they assumed all religions were the same thing, just with different wrapping. I don’t know. They might be right, but I think the wrapping matters. Still, why do we eat the chocolate? There’s nothing about chocolate that has the ability to move us from the intersection of structure and structure, is there?
Arguably, yes there is. My late aunt used to encourage me to eat dark chocolate on long car trips as a way to stay awake and aware. But why in the world would I want to stay present to the awareness of my position at that structural impasse? It seems painful. One of my seminary professors illustrated vocation as a circle with these four quadrants (in clockwise order): the self, God, other people who invoke our calling, and the skills and tools of our calling. The idea being that each quadrant exerts a gravitational pull on the others, putting the quadrant directly opposite into creative tension. The one who is called might ideally sit at the center, and in the Christian story the one who has done this perfectly is Christ. Crucified. Pulled in different directions and expressing his own weakness or powerlessness.
Yet also in that moment and in that weakness, Christ reveals the chocolate under the wrapping, giving flesh to the spirit (or Spirit) that surrounds the whole vocational circle and holds all things together. What I hope I’m working toward is another way of talking about what my newsletter generating friend called the X-Ray of powerlessness. The AA literature refers to it as the “unsuspected inner resource” that makes enduring cravings for alcohol possible when we understand our powerlessness over the alcohol once we have had a drink. The literature also refers to being “rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed.” That, I suspect, is analogous a Kingdom of God, X-Ray kind of reality; one that cuts across all space and time, infusing it with meaning and purpose.
I don’t know if my virtue ethics friend and my pastor friend would agree to the existence of such a dimension, and I feel fairly confident that they would deny our capacity to experience it in this world much less participate in the purposes of that dimension by means of our very existence. Nor do I think that their skepticism is unique or original. In some ways, it is the very same view that led a wave of Christians in the early 20th century to believe that the technologies of transportation and communication which had connected the far reaches of the earth could and should be used to resolve the injustices of the world. Given humanity’s capabilities, we should follow the social teachings of the gospels to build the heaven whose presence has been so long delayed on earth. If only we could agree on whether that heaven should be build three stories high or four stories high.
Or maybe things would change if we did not think of the Kingdom as a building project that has been postponed so much as a reality to be displayed. The X-ray already infuses the dimensions. The chocolate is under the wrapper, simply waiting for us to remember its presence. The purpose and meaning of love yearns to be given expression. This, I believe, is the great revelation of the Freedom Struggles of the mid-20th century. I suspect that John Lewis and James Lawson in particular had come to realize that, by our very presence, we can make the purpose and meaning of love visible, which is to say that the wrapper can be peeled back to reveal the reality underneath. Of course doing that — making the invisible visible by his physical presence — almost cost John Lewis his life on several occasions.
So no wonder we shy away from the fifth dimension, the X-ray, the unsuspected inner resource, because being present to the purpose and meaning of love involves experiencing our powerlessness and weakness. It could mean suffering. Most alcoholics do not recover because the analgesic properties of alcohol offer solace from suffering, if only temporarily. And we turn away from the prophets and the mystics in favor of religious structures marketed in individualized serving sizes of virtue ethics. Or maybe AI can get us out of this one.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor who supported JD Vance’s political ascent, recently offered a series of talks at the Embarcadero in San Francisco on the Antichrist. Neither a transcript nor a recording of the talks is publicly available, so everything that has been reported is secondhand. What I have heard about it comes from a couple of podcasts that critiqued his approach. While Thiel’s scholarship on the subject strikes me as about on the level of my virtue ethics friend, what struck me is how his critics accepted what I perceive as a flawed premise. As I understand it, the premise is this: the world is moving toward the end of times when Jesus will return, but there are some (or one) who try to block that path by working against the progress of humanity, particularly technological progress and specifically work on Artificial Intelligence. That one (or some) who blocks the way is the Antichrist.
For the moment, I do not care to challenge the premise that there is one person (or a handful of people) who inhabit this persona labeled “The Antichrist” rather than there being a conglomeration of powers and behaviors that are anti-Christ, although I do think it is a false premise. What I am more interested in, for the purposes of this conversation, is the notion of progress, how we make progress, and what we mean when we say “the end.” So let’s go in reverse order and start with the end. The shared understanding seems to be that we are talking about an end like a cul-de-sac or a stop sign (or maybe a cliff), which I think is a significant misunderstanding. The end of time is the goal toward which God has been working. The end is a fulfillment, not a destruction. It’s the purpose toward which the long arc is bent. I think maybe time bends the arc, or time is the point around which the arc bends. My point being that time is not the arc.
Yet our experience of time leads us to believe that it is the arc and that we must either move ourselves along it or at least accept the inevitable progression of history. We have a 19th century political philosopher to thank for that. It is interesting to me that, for all of this society’s investment in market capitalism, even a guy like Peter Thiel has an understanding of how history makes progress that is shaped by Karl Marx. It was Marx who introduced the idea of historical materialism which casts all of history in terms of economics. The better the economy — or, to say it another way, the better the material conditions of people’s lives — the more progress. It’s very clear that Thiel accepts this understanding of history given his expectation of continuous technological progress toward a millennium of Artificial Intelligence that will provide for all of our material needs. (Oddly, Thiel, a putative Christian, sees death as the ultimate material challenge to overcome when one might think a Christian would understand death as already having been overcome.) The concept of historical materialism is so culturally ingrained that we don’t even think about it, and it is demonstrably untrue.
Still, what it leads us to believe is that everything must have a utility, a way of contributing to the improvement of our material or physical conditions. Even prayer and meditation are sold on the basis of their health benefits. “Mindfulness” is offered as a technique for higher job performance and lower blood pressure. We engage in these practices because of what they will do, but I think we might consider certain practices because they are part of who we are. Or at least what we are made to be, even if we sometimes forget.
This summer, I picked up a book by the French theologian Henri de Lubac. I may have completed a chapter. It’s one of those books that gives me the sense that my brain folding as I read it, and that is uncomfortable. Before I set it down, however, I did pick up one insight: we are made to worship God. The phrase that is often used to express this is that “God made us for God’s self.” That sounds awfully narcissistic, but the way de Lubac explained it was different. We are most fulfilled, most alive, most flourishing in worship, and this comes out in all sorts of ways. A friend of mine was recently talking about being at Kyle Field in College Station, Texas to see his alma mater, Texas A&M, defeat the University of South Carolina. He described this as a religious experience. It is so not, and yet it is. All the liturgical elements of worship are there. I’d bet the same is true at a Taylor Swift concert. To worship is how we are made, and it is not for something other than itself. We have dignity and integrity within ourselves that is most fully realized when we worship, preferably God. Martin D’Arcy critiques Marxist historiography partially on the basis that is denies this inherent dignity in the current generation of humanity and values the present only as precursor to some future utopia. Theil does that too, just like Marx.
My point is this: we are not tasked with doing something, we are created to be something. When we are more fully that thing — when we live into the dignity with which we were created — we reflect and affirm the inherent dignity of the people around us. That is namaste, and that is love. That is channeling the X-ray and unwrapping the chocolate.
I can’t help but think of a song that I am familiar with through the words of Elvis Presley, but which turns out to be a Bee Gees original:
Smile an everlasting smile
A smile could bring you near to me
Don’t ever let me find you’re gone
Cause that could bring a tear to me
This world has lost its glory
Let’s start a brand new story now, my love
Right now, there’ll be no other time
And I can show you all, my love
Talk and everlasting words
And dedicate them all to me
And I will give you all my life
I’m here if you should call to me
You think that I don’t even mean
A single word I say
It’s only words and words are all I have
To take your heart away
How can we possibly say in words the totality of what is being expressed by two people who are falling in love or by a family commending the life of their beloved matriarch to the never-ceasing flow of a river? And how is it possible that we can fully embody the presence of that love when we cannot adequately express it? I do believe we can, we should, and maybe have to embody that love if we want to know what it is to be fully human. There’s also a paradox in that God is most present to us in the embodied love of Christ, particularly Christ on the cross, so as we become most fully human, we also more fully experience the presence of God through the moment when God choose to be powerless for us.
It’s only words.
Elon Musk has named his AI beast “Grok” after a character in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but Adams adopted this name from an earlier work of science fiction. In Stranger in a Strange Land author Robert A. Heinlein tells the story of a human born on Mars who visits earth and shares the word “grok.” Like a lot of words, grok can mean a lot of things beyond its literal interpretation as “water.” Grok can take on a sense of drinking, imbibing, or taking into one’s self. On a more figurative level, to grok something means to have embodied the idea of it. Not only does this undermine what Musk seems to think of as a disembodied all knowing entity, a deeper comprehension of “grokking” might lead us to the place where we consume and are consumed by the presence of God. In other words, we grok Christ in the Eucharist.
And we grok Christ in the presence of one another, whether it is a moment of great joy (like a first date) or profound sorrow (like a committal of ashes). As a priest, I am powerless to change what is happening in either circumstance, nor am I sure that is what is needed in any case. Of course we want to think that a romantic love will last forever or that a beloved will never die, but we know neither is a real possibility. If nothing else, the second will inevitably catch up with the first. If the singer / songwriter Jason Isbell is right, it is this very fact of living and dying that gives loving its meaning:
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
Laugh at all the lovers with their plans
I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand
If we had all the time in the world, would we lose this moment? If death was a joke, how would we know love? To grok love, we have to drink it in this moment. To grok another, we have to love them in this moment. Of all the virtues, three are gifts of the divine: faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love. Maybe the real and tangible work we are called to do is to love the person in front of us in this moment, John Lewis style, even when we know that they mean us harm. Maybe that has been the work all along. Maybe it always will be.